Long Way Home Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  LYNN AUSTIN

  “[A] lovely stand-alone Christmas tale. . . . While fans of If I Were You will be eager to read the next chapter of Audrey’s and Eve’s lives, this charming book will also be a delight for inspirational readers looking for a feel-good Christmas story.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review of The Wish Book Christmas

  “Austin’s latest novel has endearing characters with flaws that allow growth. . . . There’s no putting down this nostalgic, appealing read.”

  LIBRARY JOURNAL on The Wish Book Christmas

  “Austin shines in this excellent tale of three women who struggle to survive WWII in the Netherlands. . . . This is a must-read for fans of WWII inspirationals.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on Chasing Shadows

  “Austin has written a powerful tale of domestic heroism and faith, with all three women questioning and then turning to God for strength.”

  BOOKLIST on Chasing Shadows

  “As always, Austin has penned a moving, intricate, and lovely work of Christian fiction that is excellently researched with an underlying message of hope. Highly recommended.”

  HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY on Chasing Shadows

  “If you enjoy historical novels set during World War II, you will not want to miss the very moving portrayal of this time period, Chasing Shadows by Lynn Austin. . . . It shows the importance of faith during difficult times. It also emphasizes the importance of doing the right things, even when those things are not easy to do.”

  FRESH FICTION

  “Austin transports readers into the lives of her characters, plunking them in the middle of a brutal war and giving them a unique take on the traditional World War II tale. Readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough to find out how Eve and Audrey met and what could have gone so terribly wrong.”

  LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review of If I Were You

  “[A] tantalizing domestic drama. . . . Its message familiar and its world nostalgic and fragile, If I Were You looks for answers in changing identities and finds that it’s priceless to remain true to oneself.”

  FOREWORD REVIEWS

  “Lynn is a masterful storyteller. The characters become people you feel like you know and you truly care about. The plot has unexpected turns and keeps you riveted.”

  ECLA LIBRARIES on If I Were You

  “Lynn Austin is a master at exploring the depths of human relationships. Set against the backdrop of war and its aftermath, If I Were You is a beautifully woven page-turner.”

  SUSAN MEISSNER, bestselling author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and The Last Year of the War

  “I have long enjoyed Lynn Austin’s novels, but If I Were You resonates above all others. Austin weaves the plot and characters together with sheer perfection, and the ending—oh, pure delight to a reader’s heart!”

  TAMERA ALEXANDER, bestselling author of With This Pledge and A Note Yet Unsung

  “If I Were You is a page-turning, nail-biting, heart-stopping gem of a story. Once again, Lynn Austin has done her homework. Each detail rings true, pulling us into Audrey’s and Eve’s differing worlds of privilege and poverty, while we watch their friendship and their faith in God struggle to survive. I loved traveling along on their journey, with all its unexpected twists and turns, and sighed with satisfaction when I reached the final page. So good.”

  LIZ CURTIS HIGGS, New York Times bestselling author of Mine Is the Night

  “Lynn Austin has long been one of my favorite authors. With an intriguing premise and excellent writing, If I Were You is sure to garner accolades and appeal to fans of novels like The Alice Network and The Nightingale.”

  JULIE KLASSEN, author of The Bridge to Belle Island

  “With her signature attention to detail and unvarnished portrayal of the human heart, Lynn Austin weaves a tale of redemption that bears witness to Christ’s power to make all things new.”

  SHARON GARLOUGH BROWN, author of the Sensible Shoes series and Shades of Light, on If I Were You

  “Lynn Austin’s tradition of masterful historical fiction continues in If I Were You, an impeccably researched look into the lives of two remarkable women. Her unparalleled skill at evoking the past . . . will appeal to fans of Ariel Lawhon and Lisa Wingate. While longtime fans will appreciate this introspective tale from a writer who deeply feels the nuances of human nature, those uninitiated will immediately recognize why her talented pen has led her to near-legendary status in the realm of inspirational fiction. An unforgettable read.”

  RACHEL MCMILLAN, author of The London Restoration

  “Lynn Austin knows how to create conflict with her characters. Par excellence. Her latest novel is no exception. If I Were You tells the story of a Downton Abbey–like friendship between Audrey, from the nobility, and Eve, a servant at Audrey’s manor house. . . . Bold and brilliant and clever, If I Were You will delight Lynn’s multitude of fans and garner many new ones.”

  ELIZABETH MUSSER, author of When I Close My Eyes

  ALSO BY

  LYNN AUSTIN

  The Wish Book Christmas

  Chasing Shadows

  If I Were You

  Sightings: Discovering God’s Presence in Our Everyday Moments

  Legacy of Mercy

  Where We Belong

  Waves of Mercy

  On This Foundation

  Keepers of the Covenant

  Return to Me

  Pilgrimage: My Journey to a Deeper Faith in the Land Where Jesus Walked

  All Things New

  Wonderland Creek

  While We’re Far Apart

  Though Waters Roar

  Until We Reach Home

  A Proper Pursuit

  A Woman’s Place

  All She Ever Wanted

  Among the Gods

  Faith of My Fathers

  The Strength of His Hand

  Song of Redemption

  Gods and Kings

  Candle in the Darkness

  A Light to My Path

  Fire by Night

  Hidden Places

  Wings of Refuge

  Eve’s Daughters

  Fly Away

  Visit Tyndale online at tyndale.com.

  Visit Lynn Austin’s website at lynnaustin.org.

  Tyndale and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Ministries.

  Long Way Home

  Copyright © 2022 by Lynn Austin. All rights reserved.

  Unless otherwise noted, cover images are the property of their respective copyright holders from Shutterstock, and all rights are reserved. Woman © Richard Jenkins Photography; letters © Preto Perola; stained paper © donatas1205; brown paper © Krasovski Dmitri; officer’s cap © Danny Smythe.

  Author photograph taken by Laura Veldhof, copyright © 2016. All rights reserved.

  Cover designed by Faceout Studios, Amanda Hudson

  Interior designed by Dean H. Renninger

  Edited by Kathryn S. Olson

  Published in association with the literary agency of Natasha Kern Literary Agency, Inc., P.O. Box 1069, White Salmon, WA 98672.

  Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

  Psalm 22:1 in chapter 1 and Matthew 6:9-13 in chapters 14 and 16 are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.

  Long Way Home is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, ple
ase contact Tyndale House Publishers at [email protected], or call 1-855-277-9400.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4964-3739-6 (HC)

  ISBN 978-1-4964-3740-2 (SC)

  Build: 2022-05-31 15:08:12 EPUB 3.0

  For Ken, always

  And for our children:

  Joshua, Sara, Benjamin, Maya, and Snir

  And for our grandchildren:

  Aiden, Lyla, and Ayla

  With love and gratitude

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Preview of Lynn Austin’s Next Book

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  1

  Peggy

  HUDSON VALLEY, NEW YORK

  JUNE 1946

  “I know it looks hopeless,” I told Jimmy Barnett’s father. “But we can’t give up until Jimmy is better. Until he’s home again.” We stood side by side on Blue Fence Farms that summer afternoon, watching one of their brand-new thoroughbred colts get the feel of his legs. Mr. Barnett and I were comfortable with each other and never needed to say much when we were together. He looked at me and nodded, and the sadness I saw in his eyes made me feel like someone had stuck a knife in my chest. Mr. B. took me on his veterinary rounds sometimes, even though I was just the gal who lived across the road from his clinic in the apartment above the auto-repair garage. He said I had a way with animals and they calmed right down when they were around me. But Jimmy was the one who should have been helping his father now that the war was finally over. They should have been driving around the countryside together to all the dairy farms and horse breeders, treating cows with mastitis and horses with colic. Jimmy had been studying to be a veterinarian like his dad before that awful December day when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

  “We can’t let Jimmy give up on living,” I said.

  Mr. Barnett didn’t reply right away. The new foal pranced around on the other side of the fence, his long, racehorse legs as thin as matchsticks. It made me smile to watch him. But Mr. B. wasn’t looking at the colt. He was gazing into the distance, where the sun lit up the mountain’s chalky cliffs. I thought of the psalm that says, “I look up to the mountains—does my help come from there? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth!” and I silently begged God to help us.

  Mr. B. finally spoke. “Jim has to want our help, Peg. But he doesn’t.” He squinted his eyes as if the sun was shining in them, then added, “He doesn’t even want to live.” He turned and started walking back to his truck. His shoulders sagged, and I thought for the first time that he looked like an old man. He had always seemed so sturdy and strong to me, with a broad chest and arms that were brawny enough to wrestle a horse into a stall or hoist a baby calf into its pen. Yet he had a gentle smile and an easy laugh that made all of the lines in his face smile, too. How it must hurt Mr. and Mrs. Barnett to know that their only child tried to kill himself. Jimmy arrived home from the war more than a month ago, and in all that time he barely spoke to them. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. He just sat in his room and stared at nothing, like he was sleeping with his eyes open. When I visited him, he looked right through me without seeing me. I ran home in tears because for as long as I had known him, Jimmy was one of the very few people who really saw me.

  Mr. B. climbed into his truck, an old 1938 Ford that he’d been driving around on all sorts of back roads and across cow pastures since before the war. Nobody was making new trucks during the war, but he’d planned to go down to the Ford dealership with Jimmy and buy a new one as soon as he arrived home from the Army. Jimmy came home but he wouldn’t go with his father. He wouldn’t leave his room, not even to buy a brand-new truck.

  I yanked open the door on the passenger side and climbed in. It closed with a rusty-sounding creak. We were supposed to head back to the veterinary clinic, but Mr. B. just sat there with his door open and one leg still hanging out. He was gazing at the mountains again, where cloud shadows moved across the slope below the cliffs.

  “Mr. B.?” I said. “I’m sure Jimmy will get better again. He just needs more time.”

  “I hope so,” he said with a sigh.

  “He must have seen some horrible things during the war, and it will probably take him a while to get over them. But you fought in the first war, right? And you were okay afterwards.” There was a picture of a much-younger Mr. Barnett on the mantel in their living room, wearing an Army uniform. They put Jimmy’s picture beside it after he enlisted. Mr. Barnett had been a veterinarian in the Great War, back when they still used horses in the cavalry. Jimmy was a medic in this war and took care of soldiers, not horses. But I guessed he and his father witnessed many of the same things.

  “Yes, some of the men I knew suffered from shell shock,” Mr. B. said. “They call it battle fatigue now. We were all told to go home and put the war behind us.”

  “And you did that, right?”

  “Jimmy and I are very different. He always did have a tender heart. Remember how he was with that dog of yours?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” The bedraggled stray showed up out of nowhere nine years ago when I was eleven, barely a week after Mama’s funeral. It kept hanging around Pop’s auto-repair garage, rummaging through our garbage every night. Pop waved a tire iron at him and shouted, “Hey! Get out of there, buster!” So I started calling him Buster. If you could have seen that dog back then, you wouldn’t wonder why everyone in town chased away his mangy hide. But I cleaned him up, took care of him, and fed him, and he turned out to be a real nice dog, with short beige fur, oversize pointy ears that stick up, and a long tail that wagged with happiness whenever he saw me. Buster and I became best friends. He was all I had, really, in the way of friends. I liked to think Mama was looking down at me from heaven and that she sent Buster to me.

  One terrible day, Buster chased after a rabbit and ran right out into the middle of the road. Mrs. Franklin couldn’t stop her car in time and hit him. I saw it all happen, and I raced into the road where Buster was yelping and whining and trying to drag himself out of the way. I scooped him up, blood and crushed bones and all, and just kept running with him, straight across the street to the veterinary clinic. There were people in the waiting room with their pedigreed dogs and fancy cats, but I ran in, covered with Buster’s blood, crying and hollering, “Help! Help! Somebody help my dog! Please!”

  It was summertime, and Jimmy was working at the clinic, and it’s a good thing he was, too, because Mr. B. took one look at Buster and said, “He’ll need to be put down.” At first I thought he meant I should put him down on the floor, but Mr. B. shook his head and said, “The dog won’t live. He’s suffering.”

  “No, no, please! Can’t you do something? Can’t you operate on him?”

  “I don’t think there’s much I can do. I’m sorry.”

  “You have to try! Buster is my best friend!”

  “Even if I did work on him, there’s not much chance your dog will survive the surgery. He may have internal injuries.”

  I heard what he said but I couldn’t stop crying and begging. The
n Jimmy spoke up. “Can’t we give it a try, Dad? I’ve seen how that dog follows her everywhere.”

  “The leg can’t be saved. It’s too badly mangled.”

  “Then he’ll hobble around on three legs,” Jimmy said. “It’ll be good experience for me to see you do surgery like that.” I saw Mr. B. shake his head as if he didn’t want to do it, and I started losing hope. But Jimmy leaned close to him and said, “The girl just lost her mother, remember?” I held my breath, waiting to see what would happen. Jimmy took Buster from my arms. “What’s his name?”

  “Buster.”

  “And what’s your name?”

  “Peggy. Peggy Ann Serrano. Please try to save him! Please!”

  “Okay, Peggety. Now I can’t promise you that Buster will live through the operation, but I can promise that we’ll try to save him. I won’t give up on Buster until we’ve done everything we can possibly do.” I still remembered Jimmy’s words and how he said he wasn’t going to give up. He always saw hope in places where there wasn’t any.

  I was over at the clinic every spare minute, taking care of Buster until we knew that he was going to live. Of course, I couldn’t pay for an operation like that, so I told Mr. B. that I would clean the dog pens and the horse stalls for him—whatever he needed me to do. Jimmy became my hero for saving my dog. He nicknamed me Peggety that day and has called me that ever since.

  “You operated on Buster nine years ago,” I told Mr. B. now, “and he’s running around on three legs just as good as you please.”

  “So he is.” He gave me a small, sad smile and swung his leg inside the cab and slammed the door. A deep, wearying grief had settled over him ever since Decoration Day—the day that Jimmy tried to kill himself. I remembered the day because the village officials held a memorial service in the cemetery behind the church for all the fallen soldiers. I looked at Mr. Barnett’s ashen face now and it seemed as if all hope had bled right out of him. I feared the sadness would be the death of him if Jimmy didn’t get better. That was another reason why I couldn’t give up—for Mr. Barnett’s sake as much as for Jimmy’s.

  “Maybe the doctors will be able to figure out why he’s so depressed,” I said, “and they’ll coax him into talking again. Maybe his battle fatigue will be better after he rests in the hospital for a while.”