Stranger's Gift by Anna Schmidt Read Free Book Online Page A

Amish?”
    â€œAnd so was Steiner until a few years ago. I think he was shunned or whatever they call it when he’s gotten himself kicked out of the community.”
    â€œBanned,” Hester corrected quietly. “If he cannot go back, then he has been banned or ex-communicated.”
    â€œWhatever. He left, came here, and bought the old Tucker place.” Grady let out a sigh. Both of them knew that he might very well be the first fatality of the storm. “Do your best, okay. Just be careful. I warn you, Hester, from the air the place looked pretty unstable.”
    â€œWe’ve probably seen worse,” Hester assured him.
    But an hour later as she and her father and her father’s newly hired cabinetmaker, Samuel Brubaker, beached the sturdy fishing boat they’d borrowed from Margery and worked their way over uprooted trees and dunes of wet sand that had not existed the day before, Hester was not so sure.
    â€œHow could anyone survive this?” she murmured. In spite of her annoyance that John Steiner was somehow entitled to special attention, her heart went out to the guy. If he was still alive, he had lost everything.

Chapter 4
    I t had taken John most of the morning to claw his way out from under the rubble that had once been his bedroom above the kitchen and the heavy cypress beam that had proved his salvation. Oblivious to the pain that racked his body, he’d just broken through the last barrier into the gray and ominous aftermath of the hurricane when he got his first look at the fury and devastation the storm had wrought. It looked like Hurricane Hester had roared straight through his property on her way to who-knew-where. His once-pristine cluster of faded candy-colored outbuildings that tourists liked to associate with “old” Florida looked more like an oversized game of pick-up sticks.
    The chicken coop was flattened. He hated to think of what he might find beneath the rubble. The cage he’d left behind when the roof blew off the coop was now embedded in the trunk of a palm tree like a spike. The concrete walls of his toolshed had collapsed in on each other, and the corrugated metal roof was missing. He turned toward the old packinghouse and saw that one section of its tin roof now balanced precariously in the branches of the large banyan tree that dominated the yard; one half of that tree was leaning against the house. The second floor of the main house was gone with the exception of the door frame that once had led to his bedroom. On the first floor all of the doors and windows were missing, and one of the four walls had fallen as well. The only recognizable furnishings were the kitchen table, mired in at least a foot of sludge, the stove, and half of the fireplace chimney. He was able to identify his kitchen cabinets and countertops only by the splintered pieces of wood that littered the landscape.
    His life had been spared when he was able to crawl onto a fallen ceiling beam and cling to it until the storm finally abated sometime just before dawn. The angle of the beam had protected him as the second floor of the house collapsed and had kept him from drowning in the waters that filled the first floor as he lapsed in and out of consciousness. He tightened his grip on the Bible he’d managed to rescue from the rubble and thanked God for saving his life. He turned to the old citrus groves and to where he had planted his kitchen garden and additional fruit trees.
    Muck and sand covered the entire property where just the morning before he had walked through the rows of evenly spaced trees. Over there was where he’d planned to add green beans, and over there, pea pods. This larger bed was to house large heads of cabbage and lettuce in alternate rows alongside tomato plants. But now what little he could see of the remains of the carefully plotted garden was buried under several inches of muck and water. He set his Bible on a window ledge, and then walked