by Gaus, P. L.
Pressed further, Sara said, “It’s two of my friends, Cal. They’ve been gone for a week now, and I just found one of their cars parked in this little barn. It shouldn’t be there. And some of his stuff was buried in the corner.”
“I’m with a friend, Sara. OK if I bring him along?” Cal asked.
“Can’t you just come out here yourself, Cal?”
“It’s someone you can trust, Sara.”
Sara hesitated, thinking she shouldn’t have called.
Cal said, “Professor Michael Branden, Sara. You know who he is. Teaches history at Millersburg College.”
“Is he the one who rescued Jeremiah Miller a few years back?”
“Yes. The Millers know him and his wife Caroline well. They are Amishleiben, Sara.”
“Then I guess he can come. But just the two of you, Cal. I don’t know what’s going on out here. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble with the law, but I’m starting to get a little rattled, and I don’t like it.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on, Sara.”
“When you get here, Cal. I’ll tell you what I know.”
“OK, but are you still going to come in to the church this afternoon? For our regular talk?”
“I don’t know, Cal. Maybe I shouldn’t talk with you anymore. Maybe something’s gone wrong out here. Right now, I just want you to come out and tell me what you think.”
“Can I tell the professor a little bit about what you’ve told me in the past several weeks?”
“Why?”
“I just think it will help if he knows a little of the background. How you kids are getting along. The Rumschpringe.”
“OK, but I’m not sure we’ve even got a Rumschpringe gang anymore. The group has kind of fallen apart.”
“OK, Sara. Tell me how to get there.”
2
Friday, July 23
8:50 A.M.
WHEN Cal Troyer and Michael Branden drove up the lane to the barn Sara had described, they found her standing beside her buggy horse, holding a water bucket up to its nose. She saw them coming, put the bucket down, loosened the reins so the horse could reach it, and stepped forward on the dirt patch in front of the barn to greet them.
Cal offered his hand to Sara. She took it lightly, a little shy about it, and found herself reassured by the touch of his callused palm and firm grip. His arms were thick, and muscled with knotty strength from the work he did as a carpenter. The pastor was dressed in jeans and a blue work shirt. His boots were old and scuffed. He introduced the professor, and Branden came forward and shook her hand, too.
The professor was dressed in jeans, loafers, and a light blue cotton shirt with a button-down collar. His brown hair was cut short and parted, a patch of silver showing at his temples. He seemed strong to Sara, and trim. Confident.
Branden judged Sara to be about eighteen years old. She was dressed in a long, plain, dark plum dress with a white lace apron. Despite the gathering heat, she wore black hose and a pair of soft black leather walking shoes. She carried a small, black cloth purse on a thin black loop. Her black hair was gathered in a neat bun, tucked up under a white head covering, and she wore wire-rimmed spectacles, silver in color, over her large brown eyes. Her complexion was a flawless ivory, her cheeks tinged with rose. If he hadn’t talked with Cal Troyer on the trip out, Branden might have seen nothing in Sara Yoder but the demure serenity of one of the county’s Peaceful Ones. But he now could see that, in spite of her carefully controlled manner, Sara Yoder was more than a little worried.
Sara looked Branden over skeptically and glanced back at Cal. Cal smiled and tilted his head briefly in Branden’s direction. Branden held his peace. He shaded his eyes with his hand in the bright morning sun and kept them on Cal.
Cal, no stranger to Amish reserve, said to Branden, “Sara lives with her parents down by Saltillo.”
Branden said to the girl, “Then you know Panther Hollow pretty well.”
Sara shrugged, rubbed her hands together nervously, and said, “I reckon I’ve been there a few times. It’s a place where kids go.”
Cal said, “Sara has been all over, Mike. Holmes County, anyway. Some of the boys in her gang own cars.”
“Gang?” Branden asked.
“That’s what we call it,” Sara said, flustered. “John Schlabaugh’s gang out of Saltillo. It’s just a band of kids.”
Branden held Sara’s eyes with his steady gaze, and Sara eventually added, “It’s a harmless little group of us. Nine to start with, now just seven, I fear. We kind of run together, is all. It’s our parents who can’t stand the strain.” She shifted self-consciously on her feet, and wandered over to the shade beyond the open barn doors.
Branden followed and said, “Cal tells me you’ve been having some problems. You’ve been talking with him a couple of times a week?”
“I’ve been worried,” Sara whispered, and furrowed her brow.
Cal said, “It’s probably not as bad as you think, Sara.”
“They’re about ready to kick me out of the house,” Sara blurted.
Cal cleared his throat and said, “Maybe it’s not that bad.”
“All the younger kids know it, Cal. I can see it in their eyes.”
“Maybe they’re just worried about you,” Cal said. “We’ve talked about this before.”
“Rachel is only four. She came crying to me yesterday, Cal. Wanted to know if I was going away.”
“She’s your sister?” Branden asked.
“Cousin. It’s a close family, Professor. We all live right next to each other on the farm my granddaddy started.”
“Why would she think you’re going away?” Cal asked.
“Because her parents have talked about me with their kids. Warning them. They are all watching to see which way I’ll swing. Stay Amish or go English. They think I’ll be lost to them. Now they don’t ask me to take care of the little ones anymore.”
“They must think you’ve strayed pretty far,” Branden said. His solicitous tone took the sting from his words.
“You wouldn’t believe half the stuff I could tell you, Professor,” Sara replied. She toed the dirt between the barn doors and seemed troubled to be talking so freely.
“What has happened, Sara?” Cal said.
“The bishop is getting nervous, Cal,” Sara said. “I’ve got maybe a month. He’s already been to see Henry Erb’s parents about this. But it’s John Schlabaugh and Abe Yoder that I’m worried about. John’s Firebird is parked in this barn, and it shouldn’t be.”
Cal held her gaze, thinking there must be more that she wanted to say. She seemed unnerved in a way that he had never seen. In their talks, Sara Yoder had been open and forthright to a surprising degree about her youthful lifestyle. And Cal knew that Sara Yoder was racing up to a crisis point in her life over her Amish heritage. Over the crucial life decisions she would soon be forced to make. So Cal had heard it all in their afternoon talks. Still, in the shade this morning, Sara Yoder seemed more unraveled than he had thought she could be. He smiled, shrugged, and said, “Sara, is there more?”
Sara was silent for a long time, eyes closed to slits, thinking. All the troubles she could bear seemed folded together in her brow. Eventually, she backed up a bit, blew a little air out through her lips to ease her anxiety, and sighed, “This is a mistake. I’m sorry, Cal, Professor Branden. I shouldn’t have bothered you. There’s nothing you can help me with.”
Branden read her uncertainty and said, “I’d like to be of some help to you, Sara.”
Sara said, “I don’t think anyone can help us now.”
“Give us a chance, Sara,” said Cal. “At least tell us what you’ve found.”
Sara raised her arms and let them flop at her sides. She stepped over to her buggy, took a folded scrap of newsprint off the seat, and handed the clipping to the professor. She waited for him to read the short lines of type. “That clipping is from Wednesday’s Sugarcreek Budget,” she said.
&
nbsp; Branden read the type a second time and said, “Do you know what it means? Those are coordinates. You know the GPS system?”
“Yes. We’ve got those GPS units,” Sara said. She pulled a receiver out of her purse, waved it briefly, and said, “John Schlabaugh got these GPS receivers for all of us, and matching cell phones for everyone in our group.” Embarrassed, she explained, “So we could arrange our little parties.”
Branden glanced at Cal, who said, “This group of kids has gone a tad modern, Mike.”
Branden nodded and said, “Tell us about those coordinates, Sara.”
Sara held her eyes closed a moment, then looked up at Branden and seemed to take his measure. Eventually her eyelids puddled over and she took back the newspaper clipping, folded it several times into a tight square, and slowly put it back in her purse. She studied the professor a moment longer, and then Cal. With a halfhearted smile, she said, “Those coordinates are for this spot here at the barn. Our usual meeting place.”
Branden thought about the incongruities in a little band of Amish kids tracking each other with cell phones and GPS receivers. He waited a beat. “Modern can be a rough way to go, Sara, if you’re not prepared for it,” he said.
Sara stared at her hands. “Modern looks pretty good when you’ve grown up backward. At least it does at first.”
“I think it’ll help if you tell me a little about it,” Branden said. “For instance, I suppose there’s some drinking at your parties.”
“I wish that was all there was,” Sara answered.
“How many kids in your group?”
“Like I said, it used to be nine. Big John Schlabaugh’s gang out of Saltillo. Now it’s only seven. Two girls and five boys.”
“Should I have been talking with any of them?” Cal asked.
“None of those boys is going to own up to any of it,” Sara said. “The other girl? I don’t know for sure what she’d tell you.”
“Maybe if you asked them to talk with me or the professor?”
“I’m not going to stick around, Cal,” Sara said forcefully. “It’s not safe.” Her eyes flooded with tears, and she softened quickly. “It’s the other kids,” she said. “I want you and Cal to help the other kids. Even if they won’t talk to you. They just don’t understand the danger they’re in.”
Sara pulled a tissue out of her purse and wiped her eyes. More tears came, and she dried those away, sniffed, and blew her nose. In a voice as soft as a flute she asked, “Why does it all have to be so hard? God’s will? I wouldn’t know that if it bit me on the ... Sorry. If it bit me.”
“Have you talked with your parents about any of this?” Branden asked.
“Parents these days don’t understand anything. I can’t believe they ever did.”
Branden smiled and waited for Sara to look at him. When she did, he said, “We’ll do what we can, Sara. Tell us what you need.”
She nodded, dropped her gaze to her hands, and let her shoulders slump with the weight of her burdens. After a spell, she began talking quietly.
“There sits John Schlabaugh’s car, and nobody has heard from him in over a week. Abe Yoder, too. Everybody thought John Schlabaugh was such a great leader. So charismatic. He was going to show us all the world. Cars, cities, everything. We were all really going to have a run at it. A lifetime of fun in the span of a couple of years. Live the fast life, the Rumschpringe, before we settle down.
“But John’s just not cut out for the important things. He’s just a drifter, plain and simple. He’s a child, really. He just drifts on the wind.
“And we’ve gone along with just about everything he could think up. Like there was no tomorrow. Now we’re all in trouble, and there’s no way out. And it’s really big trouble, too. It’s got to be why John and Abe are missing. Why John’s car is here. He’d never give up his car.
“This isn’t the penny-ante stuff Amish kids normally get mixed up in. It’s not throwing tomatoes at cars or knocking over mailboxes. It’s way bigger than that now, and one of us is going to end up hurt.”
Branden watched her intently. He struggled to reconcile the seemingly plain and simple Amish girl he saw before him with the remarkable things she had said. No doubt she would have admitted to none of it if she had not known Cal Troyer so well. As a gentle lead into weightier matters, Branden said, “Let’s start with something simple, Sara. Tell me more about those coordinates. Why were they published in the Budget?”
Sara fished the paper out of her purse, unfolded it, and handed it back to Branden. “That last number?” she said, apparently relieved to be talking about something practical. “That’s Abe Yoder’s code. He’s 2. I’m the leading 3. We each have a number to sign a message with.”
“What is John Schlabaugh’s number?” Branden asked.
“He’s 1,” Sara said.
“Why do you need numbers?” Cal asked. “Doesn’t your phone display the name of the person calling you?”
“It’s John Schlabaugh again. He likes secret things. He says it’s all numbers in the modern world. Phone numbers, house numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers. So he made me 3. He is 1. Messages are very short. But mostly I think he likes the secrecy. Sometimes he calls from a prepaid cell phone he gets from a guy up in Wooster. He says it’s untraceable. So, I get a 1 on my text messages, that’s him, and his new cell number is the only text in the message. He sends us all his new phone number each month, when he buys a new phone. Anonymous, prepaid cell phones, because he says the government can’t trace them.”
Cal asked, “What?”
“John says the government can listen in on the airwaves that cell phones use. So he doesn’t want too many people knowing who he is. He’s just the number 1.”
“What do you think this message means?” Branden asked, drawing her attention back to the newspaper clipping.
“If it came on my phone, it’d mean Abe wants me to meet him at a certain place. Here, at those coordinates. So there’s the leading 3, and that stands for me. Then the coordinates, followed by Abe Yoder’s 2. Sara Yoder to meet Abe Yoder at those coordinates. John and Abe really go in for that secret message stuff. Trouble is, no one has heard from John for a week. Haven’t heard from Abe Yoder, either. They haven’t answered their phones, and they haven’t replied to our messages. We must have sent a hundred by now.”
“Are Abe and John in the habit of making trips out of town, or of not answering their phones?” Branden asked.
Sara shook her head, hesitated, and said, “They run together pretty much all of the time, Abe and John. Mostly they’re all over our little valley. Up and down the Doughty Valley, too. Millersburg, Becks Mills, and Charm. They think they own the place because they have cars and a tractor.
“And then there’s the fights lately. John’s a mean drunk. And Abe’s too proud to back down. One of these days they’re really going to hurt each other. There’s blood on the front seat of the Firebird in there, so they’ve been fighting again. But they’ve gotten too big for their britches, I’ll tell you that much. Making those secret runs down to Columbus. Like the bishop wasn’t going to find out about that.”
Branden read the expression on her face and said, “I gather you don’t approve of those Columbus runs.” He glanced quickly to Cal to see if the pastor had caught special meaning in that. Cal tipped his chin in the smallest nod.
Sara shook her head. “Anyway, I came out here to our meeting place after I read that note in the Sugarcreek Budget. Because that message should have been sent by Abe Yoder to my phone instead of to the correspondence section of the Budget.”
“You think the message is for you?” Branden said.
“Me or someone in our outfit,” Sara said. “We’re the only ones who could know what it means.”
Branden held silence, and looked questioningly to Cal and back steadily at Sara.
Sara shrugged her shoulders and said, “Like I said, John and Abe are missing. And, now, I’ve found this buried here in the ba
rn.”
She reached into her buggy and lifted the plastic bag off the floorboards. She held it up in the sun, and Cal and Branden came forward to inspect the contents. Cal took the bag, fished out each of the items inside, and handed them one at a time to the professor.
Her eyes open wide with alarm, Sara said, “I really didn’t know what I’d find out here. A raccoon had dug this bag up from the corner of the barn. And the dirt was all loose in that spot. Not like the packed dirt in the rest of the barn.” She glanced at the collection of items Branden held and said, “Those are mostly John Schlabaugh’s things, but I don’t know about the phone. John doesn’t use that kind of phone. But that’s his wallet.”
Cal took the wallet and pulled out an odd collection of business cards and receipts. Sara said, “John doesn’t have a driver’s license, if that’s what you’re looking for. But there ought to be some money. John always had a lot of cash. It’s just not right. Something bad has happened.”
Cal shook his head and handed the wallet to the professor.
Branden stuck the wallet in his front jeans pocket, flipped open the cell phone, and found the battery dead. To Sara he said, “Where can we charge the phone?”
“In the car, I think,” Sara said, and reached out for the keys. She stepped into the barn, opened the door of the red Firebird, sat behind the wheel, and started the engine. Branden handed the phone to her, and she retrieved a car charger from the glove compartment. Efficiently, as if she were glad for the distraction, she plugged the phone into the cigarette lighter and got out, saying, “Those chargers work really fast. We’ve all got the same models.”
Branden said, “I’m going to pull this outside,” and got in behind the wheel. He rolled the car out through the sliding doors into the sunlight, and parked it with its nose pointed back down the lane. Sara followed the car out and stood beside the driver’s window while Branden opened the phone. After punching a few keys, Branden stretched the charger cord to hold the phone out the window for Sara to see, and asked, “Recognize this number?”