The Road Home

by Patrick E. Craig

  Jerusha began to pray.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Hideout

  BOBBY AND REUBEN WALKED QUIETLY up the trail through the ravine. Sheriff Gary and his men followed, and Johnny was out front, leading the way. It was dark, and a light snow had been falling intermittently.

  From time to time the snow clouds cleared and allowed the dim light from the moon to light the way. They had flashlights but kept them pointed down at the trail as much as possible. They could see a small creek meandering through a wide, flat area filled with rocks and sand to their left. Beyond the creek, the east wall of the ravine rose steeply up into the darkness. To their right, between the trail and the western side of the ravine, was a flat area filled with brush and trees.

  Reuben was unarmed, but Bobby and the men behind them carried rifles. They had helicoptered in to the field behind Bear Lake, where they met the local police. Now fifteen men were moving up the trail toward the supposed hideout.

  They had been walking twenty minutes when Johnny stopped and motioned for quiet. He slipped back to Bobby’s side and pointed to a small dam that blocked the creek. A flat, concrete path led to the other side across the top of the dam.

  “The trail to the first cabin goes up over there,” Johnny whispered. “It’s steep but fairly easy to get up. I know the way, so I should go up first and check it out. The cabin is about fifty yards from the ravine, so it’ll take me a few minutes to see if anyone’s there.”

  “Okay. Take a flashlight but use it sparingly and cover the lens,” Bobby said. “And be careful. Only go far enough to determine whether they’re there, and then come back.”

  Johnny nodded and slipped away into the darkness. Reuben and Bobby and the rest of the men waited silently. In about ten minutes they heard Johnny coming back down the hill. He came across the dam and whispered to them.

  “This cabin is empty. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for a long time. The road into the place is filled with weeds.”

  “How much farther to the next cabin?” Bobby asked.

  “About five minutes,” Johnny answered. “It’s easier to get to—the original owner built a staircase down the side of the ravine to the creek. It comes up right behind the cabin. The bank widens out on the other side of the creek, so we can cross here and walk up.”

  “Lead on,” Bobby said.

  Once again Johnny took the lead as they crossed the dam and began to walk single file along the eastern side. After about five minutes they came to a place where another gully came down from the left and intersected the ravine. Johnny pointed up the gully.

  “That’s where the stairs come down. The bottom of the stairs has a door that locks from the inside so kids like me couldn’t climb up.” Johnny smiled. “It’s easy to climb over and unlock it from the inside. I used to do it a lot.”

  The men quietly moved into the end of the gully. About twenty feet up they came to a wooden wall that blocked the end of the gully. Set in the wall was a door. Johnny moved to the right side of the wall.

  “Let’s see if that old root is still here,” he said, reaching up into the darkness. “Yes, here it is.”

  Johnny grabbed onto something and put his foot on the side of the gully. With a quick pull and a scramble, he was on top of the wall. He let himself down on the other side, and Bobby and Reuben heard a click. The old door opened, and they could see a flight of stairs zigzagging up into the darkness. Johnny put a finger to his lips and disappeared up the stairs. In a few minutes he came back down.

  “This is it,” Johnny said. “There are lights on in the house and at least two cars in the driveway. One of them is the brown sedan Luis was driving.”

  Bobby and Gary gathered the men around them. “Call the PSP on the walkie-talkie and let them know that it’s the second cabin on Stone Tower Road. How far is it from Tannery, Johnny?”

  “It’s Jonathan,” Reuben said.

  Johnny looked at Reuben with surprise, but he couldn’t read his expression in the dark.

  “How far up, Jonathan?” Sheriff Gary asked.

  “A little over a quarter of a mile. The driveway from Stone Tower Road into the cabin is really just a dirt trail that cars can come down, so they need to watch carefully for it. There should be an old mailbox and a green tube where they put the newspaper out in front. The road into the cabin is on the left of the mailbox.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” Gary asked.

  “I used to hike down to the lake from this side because the fishing’s better on the back side of the lake,” Johnny said. “I would ride my old Schwinn up from Uncle Jim’s cabin. It’s about three miles. I’d stash my bike out on the road and come down the stairs to the ravine. In the spring, the creek is full of brownies, and I’d fish my way up to the top. There’s another ravine back a ways where the creek comes down from the ridge. It splits there—one fork goes to the lake and the other fork comes down the hill, crosses under a bridge, and goes down a deep ravine along Tannery Road all the way to Bear Creek.

  “The old guy who used to live here didn’t like me using his stairs. He had some fruit trees behind his cabin, and I used to sneak up the stairs and steal apples and cherries. It really made him mad. I learned all the trails and roads around here so I could keep out of sight.”

  Sheriff Gary turned to the man with the walkie-talkie. “Okay, give them the directions. Tell them to leave their cars about two hundred yards up Stone Tower and walk up to the mailbox. Then come in quietly and spread out in the trees in front of the cabin. We’ll be out back waiting for them to let us know they’re there. Then we’ll move in. Tell them to remember the girl and to move fast so we can take these guys by surprise.”

  Johnny led the way up the stairs. They followed several switchbacks up the side of the gully and finally came out on top. Johnny pointed silently as Bobby and Reuben and the rest of the men came to the top. They could see an old cabin about a hundred feet ahead of them. A light was on in one window. Bobby and Gary moved to the front of the group. Using hand signals, they spread the men out in a line in the woods behind the cabin. Bobby grabbed Reuben and Johnny and whispered to them.

  “Stay with me and be careful. These guys are dangerous, and they’re armed.”

  The men crept through the woods forming a half-circle behind the cabin. Johnny pointed to the back door to the kitchen and another door on the side of the house. They waited for the PSP to move up from the front.

  As they waited in the woods, Bobby remembered being with Reuben in the jungle on Guadalcanal, hiding from Japanese soldiers and spying out their positions. The clouds opened up again, and the dim moonlight cast an eerie glow over the scene. Bobby glanced over at his friend. Reuben’s face was impassive. Reuben looked back at Bobby. Bobby had seen that look in his eyes before, and he knew it didn’t bode well for the men inside the cabin.

  Just then the walkie-talkie crackled and a loud voice said, “We’re in position.”

  The man with the walkie-talkie looked at Bobby with a stricken face. “I must have bumped the volume button,” he whispered.

  Without hesitating, Bobby signaled the men, and they stood up and ran toward the cabin.

  Bobby ran full tilt into the back door and broke it down. His momentum carried him into the kitchen area, but he kept his feet. Gary and Reuben rushed in behind him, followed by Gary’s men. The assault completely surprised the two men stretched out on couches in front of the fire. One man started to reach for a gun, but when the sheriff’s men leveled their rifles at him, he realized he was outmatched and quietly surrendered. More men came through the doors at each end of the house. Suddenly there was the crash of breaking glass from one of the rooms off the hallway to their left. Then there was shouting from out front.

  “Drop your weapons and raise your hands.”

  There followed low explosions from a heavy-caliber pistol returned instantly by a volley of rifle fire and more crashing sounds. Bobby and Sheriff Gary moved into the hallways and b
egan checking the rooms. Bobby pushed open a door to a small room off the right-hand hallway. Johnny gave a cry, pushed past him, and knelt by the filthy mattress on the floor. He held up a white handkerchief. Reuben was standing behind Bobby and came over to Johnny’s side.

  “That’s Jenny’s,” Reuben said. “But where is she?”

  Sheriff Gary came into the room. “We’ve got everyone that was in the house. One of them got shot when two of them went out through the front window. He’s badly wounded, so we’ll have to get him to a hospital. But we didn’t find the girl.”

  Jorge and Luis were walking through the woods back toward the cabin. They had been searching for Jenny for an hour without success. As they came up the trail, Luis stopped Jorge and pointed to the left. Fresh tracks in the snow led out of the trees and headed straight toward the cabin. Just then they heard a strange crackling sound and a voice. Then in a few seconds they heard a crashing sound from up ahead and some yelling. Suddenly the sound of two gunshots and then an answering volley of rifle shots crashed through the woods. Luis swore and shoved Jorge behind a tree.

  “They found us. That stupid Sal must have got caught and squealed!” he growled under his breath and cursed again. “We have to find that girl. She’s our ticket out of here.”

  The two men ran toward the woods where they had seen the tracks. Just behind the first trees they came to a wooden landing at the top of a set of stairs.

  “Hey,” Luis said, “maybe the girl found these stairs and went down into the ravine. We didn’t see any tracks in the woods up here.”

  Jorge and Luis hurried down the stairs to the door at the bottom.

  “It’s going to be dawn in a little while,” Luis said. “We have to find the girl before it gets light. Take my flashlight and go that way,” he said, pointing left. “I’ll go down here. Look for little tracks. If you don’t see anything in twenty minutes, get back here quick! It won’t be long until they go out searching for the girl.”

  The clouds had cleared away, and there was enough light to see the trail. Jorge ran down the trail to the left, looking for tracks, and Luis ran to the right. In a few minutes Jorge came upon a set of tracks coming up out of the creek bed. The snow had been disturbed, and he could see where someone had lain in the snow. He walked over and looked closer. There were some spots of blood in the snow between two rocks, and something had been pulled up out of the sand.

  It looks like she hurt herself. That means she’s walking slow.

  Jorge ran back to the bank and looked at the tracks. The left foot was dragging in the snow, and there was a strange mark on the left side of the tracks. Jorge could see that Jenny must be using a stick to lean on. He hurried on down the trail following the tracks until he came to a place in the snow where she must have fallen—there was a handprint, and the snow off the trail was disturbed. Jorge had forgotten Luis’ instructions about returning, so he continued on. In about twenty minutes he came to an area where the walls of the ravine closed in. The tracks led on down the trail around a corner. Jorge ran around the corner and stopped in bewilderment. Ahead of him, shrubs and trees overhung the trail, and the snow had not come down here. Jenny’s tracks led up to the edge of the snow and then disappeared on the hard ground under the tree.

  Jenny hobbled down the path leaning on the stick. The nylon line was strong, and it supported the broken pine branch against her still throbbing ankle.

  Suddenly she stepped on a hidden rock, rolled her bad ankle, and pitched forward into the snow. The pain was agonizing. She tried to get up and realized she was going to have a hard time going any farther. She looked around for a place to hide. The light from the sun was slowly illuminating the sky. Ahead of her was a clump of bushes, and it seemed that it was darker behind them. She randomly poked the pine stick into the bushes, and instead of the wall of the ravine, her stick encountered a hole in the side of the hill.

  A cave!

  Jenny knew she had to hide somewhere, but her tracks would give her away. Then she remembered something Uncle Bobby had told her about hiding from the Japanese when he was a scout in the Marines.

  “We would walk out to a place where the ground made our tracks hard to see and then walk backward in our tracks until we came to where we wanted to hide,” he had told her. “Then we would jump off the trail and walk backward using a branch to sweep our tracks away. The enemy often walked right by where we were hiding and lost us. Some of the Indian guys taught us that in training.”

  Up ahead the ravine narrowed, and the snow had not covered the trail because of the brush overhanging it. Jenny broke a branch off a Scotch broom and walked up the trail until there was no more snow. She stepped out onto the hard trail and took a few steps. Then she stepped backward as carefully as she could in her tracks until she came to the bush that hid the mouth of the cave. She gathered her strength and jumped off the trail.

  Again an agonizing pain shot up her leg. She gritted her teeth and began to inch backward into the bush, sweeping her tracks as she went. She pushed through and found the cave. It had a narrow, low entrance, but it looked big enough for her to wriggle through. She knelt down and crawled in.

  Inside, the ceiling rose up into the darkness, and the floor was dry and sandy. She could see a little but not much. The cave seemed to go back a lot farther than she thought. Her ankle was throbbing horribly, and she was exhausted.

  Suddenly she heard a rustling sound up in the roof of the cave, and out of the dark, something black came at her. Bats! Jenny’s heart leaped up and she almost screamed. The bats fluttered all around her, brushing her with their wings in their effort to get out. She heard their tiny squeaks and felt their bodies hitting her head and shoulders, and then she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A Quilt for Jenny

  JERUSHA KNELT BY HER BED and cried out to the Lord on Jenny’s behalf. The Rose of Sharon quilt was spread out before her, restored to its former beauty. Where the corner had been torn and the batting matted, Jerusha had skillfully pieced in new batting and sewn it with such tiny stitches that unless she looked at it very closely, she couldn’t tell it had ever been damaged. All of the ruined red silk rose petals had been replaced, and the mud and water stains had been removed by slow and careful washing. Now it was as she remembered it, the most beautiful quilt she had ever made. Jerusha’s thoughts carried her back to the days when she had labored over the quilt, planning her escape from the Amish life and cursing God for taking Jenna from her. She thought at the time that she was making the quilt for Jenna, a memorial to her precious little girl.

  How You dealt with my heart, Lord. I was so proud and arrogant in those days. I believed You had killed Jenna because You hated me for my skill as a quilter. Now I know that we live in a sin-cursed world where bad things happen. But I also know that You are the one who gave me my skill and that every quilt I make comes from You and not from me.

  She remembered when she had to make the choice between saving the quilt and saving Jenny from the storm. After she made the decision, she realized that the quilt had not been made only for Jenna, her firstborn, but also for Jenny, the little lost girl. And as she surrendered her own plans and the bitterness that was killing her, she found a wonderful blessing in the life of the little girl God gave her.

  It was like the story of Job. Everything he had was gone, but in the end he repented and blessed God, and God restored everything and more.

  Now Jenny was lost, and Reuben and Bobby had gone to find her. But Jerusha wasn’t angry with God. No, this time it was different. She trusted Him with Jenny’s life, and her prayers ascended to heaven on her daughter’s behalf.

  Bobby and Gary and the rest of the men gathered in the front room. Three sullen men were standing against the wall.

  “Two guys are missing,” Johnny said. “Luis and a younger guy. They must have Jenny.” He slumped down in a chair and put his hands over his face. Reuben started to move toward the men, but Bobby put a hand on h
is arm and held him back.

  “I’ll talk to them, Reuben,” Bobby said.

  He stepped in front of one of the men, a fat, beady-eyed, balding guy. “Where’s the girl?” Bobby asked quietly.

  The fat man just glared back at Bobby. Reuben stepped forward and locked eyes with him. The fat man immediately started talking. “Okay, okay, the girl’s gone.”

  Johnny looked up in surprise. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “She got away when we were all out here drinking,” the fat man said. “She unlocked the door of the room somehow and ran out the back door. Jorge and Luis went to look for her. They wanted me to come, but I told them to find her themselves. It was too cold out there.”

  Jerusha sat at the kitchen table as the first rays of dawn came up over the eastern fields. A kiss of frost had formed on the windows, and the beautiful crystalline patterns etched their magic on the glass. She lit a fire to take off the chill. Fall would soon be coming to an end, and it would be time for the Thanksgiving feast, for weddings, and for the friendly fellowship that the Amish shared together during the long winter months.

  Once she would have felt great anticipation, but now her life seemed disconnected from everything but Jenny. It was hard for her to comprehend. She had lived in the simple way, she had been faithful to the ordnung, and she had shunned the world. But the world had crowded in on her life for the second time now, and once again her daughter was at the center of the storm. She thought of the Rose of Sharon and how the quilt had been inextricably bound to the lives of both of her daughters. And then it occurred to her—The quilt is bound to my life too!