Vanish in Plain Sight

by Marta Perry

  Or maybe it hadn’t. Propped up in bed with her drawing pad on her lap, she ought to be able to dismiss the encounter with William Zook from her mind. But she couldn’t. His frowning face seemed to appear on the blank page in front of her.

  She was being stupid. She’d already known he didn’t want to talk with her. If he wouldn’t respond to Bishop Amos, he certainly wouldn’t to her. But it had been different, hearing that directly from him.

  His words echoed in her mind. Go home, or something bad might happen to you. That had been the message. Like your mother had been unspoken but implied.

  It had been a warning. That didn’t mean it was a threat. But why? What had been the point, when he’d already said he wouldn’t speak with her?

  Maybe because he’d seen her with his sister and perhaps known that she would not be as silent as he on the subject of Barbara. If he couldn’t get his sister to fall in with his opinion, scaring Marisa away would accomplish the same thing.

  She would not let herself fall victim to fear. She’d go to see Elizabeth on Monday. With a little luck, William’s sister would know a bit more about what had been going on with Barbara that fall when she’d vanished. Meanwhile, she’d distract her thoughts with some work.

  She’d barely picked up a drawing pencil before a knock at the bedroom door sent it moving in a jagged line. Nerves, she scolded herself, and swung off the bed. It was probably Rhoda, who seemed convinced Marisa wouldn’t sleep without a nightly mug of hot chocolate. Or wondering if the new room had everything she needed.

  But it wasn’t Rhoda. It was Geneva.

  “Geneva. I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I know.” Geneva’s blue eyes were filled with sympathy. “Link told me you had an upsetting experience with your cousin William.”

  “Really.” And how exactly did Link know that? “I didn’t mention it to him.”

  “I understand Doris Yost said something about it.” Geneva wrinkled her nose. “You have to understand how word gets around in a small place like this.” She nodded toward the room. “May I come in?”

  “Of course.” Marisa stepped back, holding the door wide. She could plead the excuse of work, but she couldn’t shut the door on kindness. Geneva cared. She could stand a little caring about now.

  “Link said I should leave you alone, but I just couldn’t.” Geneva glanced appreciatively around the cozy room and then sat down in the rocking chair. “It never seems to occur to a man that women sometimes need to talk.”

  Marisa sat on the bed again, since that was the only other place to sit. “I shouldn’t let it upset me. I knew already that William didn’t want to see me. I just didn’t expect him to be so vehement about it. He actually warned me that I should leave here.”

  Geneva shook her head, forehead wrinkling in distress. “I just can’t understand that. I don’t know the Zook family well, I confess, but frankly, it seems out of character for an Amish person. Especially when the bishop asked for cooperation. Bishop Amos is universally admired.”

  “It’s odd that William still feels so strongly, isn’t it? I mean, that happened years ago. In a way, I could understand Ezra Weis’s attitude more easily. If he was in love with my mother, he might resent having the whole subject brought up again.”

  “I’ve often noticed that the Amish don’t have the same concept of time that most English do.” Geneva rocked absently. “Our days are crowded with different things, while theirs move at a slower tempo. And anything to do with family has a deep effect, because they’re so close. I suppose William must have felt responsible, in a way, for Ezra’s pain.”

  “Why would he? It was my mother who fell in love with someone else. William was hardly responsible for that.”

  “No, but he and Ezra were best friends in those days. I’d guess William encouraged that relationship and then felt terrible when it turned out badly. But neither of them should blame Barbara for falling in love. The heart doesn’t listen to common sense.” Her smile carried a tinge of sorrow, reminding Marisa that it hadn’t been all that long since Geneva’s husband died.

  “So many people seem to have been hurt in one way or another by my mother’s decision.” She stopped, not sure she wanted to go further.

  “You wonder if she had regrets, don’t you?”

  Geneva saw too much. Marisa nodded. “I suppose I do. I remember…”

  “What do you remember?” Geneva asked gently.

  “Something I heard my mother say once. I don’t know when, or even who she was talking to. Just the words.” She hesitated, but the urge to tell someone was too strong. “‘I don’t belong anywhere.’ That’s what she said. ‘I don’t belong anywhere.’” The weight of unutterable sadness seemed to accompany the words.

  “I’m sorry.” Geneva reached across the space between them to put her hand over Marisa’s. “That’s not something a child should hear.”

  “I didn’t understand, then. I just knew she was unhappy, and it frightened me.”

  “Of course it would. Every child needs to feel that his or her parents are the solid center of their world.”

  She tried to manage a smile. “You and your husband obviously achieved that with your children.”

  “We tried.” Geneva sighed. “But we made other mistakes. Having children is such a reminder of our frailty. If anything will bring a person to their knees, it’s having children. When the boys were small, I used to pray every night for more patience. And God just kept giving me more occasions to learn patience.”

  She smiled, as she was sure Geneva intended. “From what I’ve heard of Link as a boy, I’m sure he gave you plenty of practice.”

  “He went from one scrape to another, always trying to keep up with his brother or do something Trey hadn’t done. No matter what was going on, there would be Link in the thick of it, always popping up grinning, whatever happened.” She paused. “Maybe that’s why it’s been so difficult, seeing him as withdrawn as he’s been since he came home. And he’s past the age at which I can kiss the hurt and make it better.”

  Marisa nodded, not sure what to say. Geneva was showing a bit of her heart. “I’m sorry. It has to be so hard to watch him struggle.” She moved slightly, and the sketch pad slid from the bed, fluttering to the floor next to Geneva’s feet.

  Geneva bent to pick it up, pausing to look at the drawing on the page. Marisa sucked in a breath. That picture revealed too much.

  Geneva gave her a questioning look. “Is this something you saw?”

  “No. I don’t…I don’t think so.” She moved her hand over the image of a woman in Amish dress, walking away toward a misty wood. “It’s just the picture that’s in my mind. Sometimes in my dreams. My mother, going away from me. Not hearing when I call her. Not turning back.”

  “Oh, my dear.” Geneva’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I guess that’s the picture I formed when I was a kid, piecing it together from what I heard about my mother.” Her father hadn’t done her any favors by trying to protect her from the truth, always assuming he had known it. What her imagination had conjured up had been worse.

  “But now you know that—” Geneva stopped, clearly thinking she was about to say the wrong thing.

  “I know that nothing I believed was true, but I still don’t know what is.” Pain gripped her. “Is it better to think that my mother ran away and didn’t take me with her or that she was murdered?”

  She hadn’t said that out loud before, but now she knew that was the question that haunted her. And would continue to haunt her until she knew the truth. “What if I never know?”

  “You mustn’t think that way.” Geneva gripped her hands as if to give her strength. “The truth will come out. Sometimes it happens when you least expect it.”

  “I’d like to believe that.” But she thought Geneva was being overly optimistic.

  “You can.” Geneva hesitated. “I know it’s easy for people to say they understand. But I do. Because it happened to
me.”

  “To you?” She tried not to sound skeptical.

  Geneva leaned back, clasping her hands together as if in prayer. “Thirty-four years. That’s how long Blake and I were married.” She let out a long breath. “He went in for a regular checkup. That was all, just a checkup. And they found the cancer.”

  “I’m so sorry.” That was tragic, but hardly the same.

  “We were coping, I thought. It wasn’t hopeless, according to the doctors. Serious, but there was a chance. But two days later, Blake went out to the hunting cabin. He said he had something to take care of. Trey found him the next day. It looked as if he’d killed himself.”

  Geneva’s pain was so tangible that it seized Marisa’s heart. “Geneva, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “Yes, I do. Because I thought I had to believe that my love wasn’t enough for him. That he’d choose to kill himself rather than fight to stay with us.”

  Marisa’s heart twisted, and she made a murmur of distress.

  “But that wasn’t the end of it. It was nearly a year later that we learned the truth. Blake hadn’t killed himself. He’d been murdered by someone we knew and trusted.” She leaned forward, face intent. “Terrible as that was, it was better to know the truth. I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop grieving for my husband, but I know he didn’t choose to leave us. So you see, I do understand.”

  “I guess you do.” Her voice was husky with tears. Geneva rose and bent to hug her. “I’ll pray for you.”

  With Geneva’s soft cheek pressed against hers, Marisa could almost feel herself in her mother’s arms again, and her heart was too full to speak.

  LINK GRIPPED THE steering wheel a little tighter, trying not to glance across the front seat at Marisa. She’d been cool, to say the least, since he’d picked her up at the bed-and-breakfast for their appointment with Tom Sylvester. She obviously hadn’t yet forgotten their sharp exchange at the auction yesterday.

  Well, what had she expected of him? She could hardly think he’d be happy at the can of worms opened by finding that suitcase.

  Mom hadn’t said what happened between her and Marisa after she got home the previous night, and he’d had to respect her feelings. But she’d looked strained, and he didn’t like that. Mom had been through enough in recent years. She didn’t need any further grief.

  Then this morning Mom had been fussing be cause she hadn’t invited Marisa to attend church and have brunch with them. He’d assured her that Marisa would be more comfortable not being overwhelmed with invitations, and Trey had jumped in to agree with him. Link could tell that Trey was thinking the same thing he was…that if anything unpleasant came out about Uncle Allen, Mom was going to be hurt, and developing a friendship with Marisa would just make that even worse.

  He glanced at Marisa. She stared out the window at the houses they were passing—pleasant newer houses built along a tree-shaded street sometime in the ’50s, probably. Her face was set.

  “I suppose you’d rather be going to talk to Tom Sylvester alone,” he said, more in response to her expression than anything else.

  “Whether I would or not, that’s not going to happen, is it?”

  It took an effort to reply evenly. “If you went alone, you might not get very far. Tom has worked for Morgan Enterprises all his life. He’ll talk more freely if I’m there.”

  “He’s loyal to the Morgan family, in other words. Like a lot of people around here.”

  “Are you accusing us of something?” He ground out the words.

  She turned to him with what seemed honest surprise. “I’m not accusing. I’m stating what seems to be a fact. Going anywhere at all with your mother makes that clear. Everyone knows her. Everyone likes her.”

  “Is that so surprising?” He caught hold of his temper and tried to look at the situation as an outsider would. “Look, Morgans have been here since year one. The old-timers remind me that they knew my grandfather, watched my dad grow up, watched me grow up, too. That’s not exactly an unmixed blessing.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t have the sort of family background you did.”

  And what exactly was she implying? He pulled into the driveway at Tom’s split-level and stopped. “This is it. It might be better if you let me take the lead in this conversation.”

  Her lips tightened. “I realize that.”

  A few minutes later they were following Tom Sylvester onto the patio at the back of the house. Tom, heavyset and jovial as always, ushered them out the sliding glass doors.

  “The wife says this might be the last nice Sunday afternoon this fall, so she wants to cook out. I keep telling her that in a month we’ll be in Florida, able to cook out every day of the year, but she doesn’t hear me.”

  “Don’t let us slow you down. If you’re supposed to be starting the grill, you’d best get on with it.”

  Tom grinned. “Already done. If I tell her I have to watch the fire, I can stay out of her way in the kitchen.” He prodded at the coals with a long fork. “The neighbors all have those fancy gas grills, but as far as I’m concerned, nothing beats the flavor you get with charcoal.”

  “Right.” That was enough chit-chat. “Well, you know why Ms. Angelo and I are here. You’ve probably heard about the suitcase I found in the wall of the addition.”

  “Everybody in the township has heard about that by now. Especially since Ms. Angelo arrived. You know how news travels around here.”

  He nodded. He did, unfortunately.

  “Adam Byler stopped by with some questions, but I couldn’t help much.”

  Link thought he recognized the caution in Tom’s voice. Loyalty. He’d have to defuse that, make it clear that Tom should talk.

  “Now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, I’m hoping you remember more.”

  There was a pause as Tom gave him a long look, probably to see if he meant that. “Well, yeah, I guess I might. I looked through my old files, too, like you asked.”

  “Good. I appreciate it. So, what can you tell us about that project?”

  Tom waved them to a pair of Adirondack chairs, taking a seat facing them. “Wasn’t much that special about the job, except I have to say, Allen wanted stuff done on the cheap. Didn’t make much sense to me, but he was the boss.”

  Link nodded. “That was Allen, all right. Always pinched every penny, unless he was spending on old books.”

  “Yeah, he had plenty of those. So, anyway, I had a crew of maybe four or five on the job most days. The room went up pretty fast.”

  “What about that Friday I asked you about? September 20?” Link could feel the tension in Marisa as he asked the question.

  “Well, remembering one specific day after twenty-some years…” Tom shrugged, as if to indicate the hopelessness of such a task.

  “You had job notes,” Link reminded him.

  “Right. According to my records, we started putting up drywall that week. That Friday morning, I had a call about another job we had going…they’d run into problems, needed help. So I went over there, took part of the crew.” He frowned. “Funny how it comes back to me now that we’re talking about it. I left two guys to work on the drywall. They must’ve knocked off early, because when I got there on Monday, it had been left half done. I chewed them out over that, you can bet.”

  “So a suitcase could have been shoved into the wall that day after they left.”

  Tom shrugged. “Or anytime over the weekend. We wouldn’t have noticed it when we came back on Monday—just slapped the rest of the drywall up. We were behind schedule, and your uncle was always on our backs.”

  “Why was that?” Marisa spoke for the first time.

  “He wanted it done, that’s all.” Tom looked at Marisa as if he’d forgotten she was there. “He complained about the dust, said it would damage his books. Complained about the noise. I remember he said he was hosting some meeting or something one day that week, wanted us to clean up everything we’d been working on. What difference did it make? It was a co
nstruction site, not a tea party.”

  “Was Allen there that Friday?” Link asked. Much as he hated to admit it, Allen was the most likely person, aside from Barbara herself, to have put the suitcase behind that drywall.

  “I don’t know. I was busy, concentrating on a couple different jobs.” Tom rose, poking at the fire again. “He didn’t like the noise, like I said. Didn’t want the guys having a radio on while they worked, even. Sometimes he’d go off. That day…” He shrugged. “I can’t remember.”

  Link glanced at Marisa. This was unsatisfactory, and he didn’t know what to ask that would elicit anything else helpful. He could see the frustration on her face that probably mirrored his own.

  “Do you remember my mother?” Marisa asked suddenly.

  Tom looked startled. “I…well, sure, I’d see her sometimes, when we were there working.”

  “Did you ever talk to her?” Marisa persisted.

  “I don’t know.” His jaw set, as if she’d accused him of something. “I suppose we might have said hello, talked about the weather. That’s all.”

  “Was she there that Friday?”

  “I don’t know.” His face reddened. “Look, I don’t know what you expect me say. I don’t know how that suitcase got inside the wall. Maybe she put it there herself after my guys knocked off work.”

  Pressing him on that was obviously not going to pay off. “Can you give me the names of the two men you left there that Friday?”

  “Sure. One was Len Barnhart… He passed away a couple years ago. Heart attack right on the job. Shame, that was.”

  “I heard that. He was a good man.”

  Tom nodded, pausing a moment as if in tribute to Len. “I had him working with a younger guy…Brad Metzger. Brad wasn’t with us all that long. He got a job at the inn, and he’s still there. Assistant manager now.”

  “I know Brad.” At least he was available. It could well have been someone who’d moved away a long time ago. “What about the people you said were coming for a meeting that week? Did you happen to see them?”