by Gaus, P. L.
“You’ll need to talk with my husband,” she said cautiously.
“I’d also like to talk with the children,” Niell said and took out a pocket notebook and one of his gold pens. “And I’d like to write down some names, so I know more about your family.”
Sara’s aunt hesitated and looked to Cal for reassurance.
Cal said, “We don’t think she’s in any trouble with the law. She may be in some danger, though, so you should know that, Miriam. We’d like to ask her some questions about John Schlabaugh. The way we understand it, she parked that Pontiac over by the cemetery.”
Miriam Yoder stiffened and glanced nervously at the children standing nearby. In dialect, she spoke several words, and the younger children scurried away toward the house. Three older boys took up positions behind her.
“My husband’s name is Albert Yoder. That’s Albert P. Yoder. He’s got a cousin Albert O. Yoder. I am Miriam Yoder. These boys here saw Sara leave the car over by the cemetery.”
Mrs. Yoder turned and spoke Dutch at some length to one of the three boys. He gave a long answer, also in dialect. Turning back to Niell and Troyer, she answered, simply, “She left in a car with two English.”
Cal gave Ricky a look of alarm, moved off twenty feet, and made a hushed call on his cell phone.
Niell studied the faces of the three lads behind Mrs. Yoder and concluded that they had been less than forthright. Or perhaps that Mrs. Yoder had not provided a complete translation of everything the lad had said.
An Amish gentleman joined the group from around the corner of the barn. He was soon joined by two other men who came down the gravel lane from the direction of the other houses. Miriam Yoder backed up a yard or so to allow the men to come forward on the gravel pad in front of the barn.
The first man, an older gentleman with a bushy gray beard and thinning gray hair, said, “I am Albert Yoder, Officer.” His eyes, too, were red.
Cal returned to Niell’s side, and Albert Yoder greeted him, “Pastor.”
“Albert,” replied Cal, and put his cell phone away.
“I’m at a little disadvantage, Mr. Yoder,” Niell said. “You all seem to know Pastor Troyer, here.”
Mr. Yoder nodded gravely and said, “We’ve not been hospitable, Sergeant.” He turned and spoke soft Dutch to Miriam, and she went back to the house.
Albert said, “Please join us on the porch. I’ll make introductions.”
Niell glanced at Cal for guidance, and Cal nodded agreement, following Yoder toward the house.
In the yard between the barn and the two-story house, a volleyball net was stretched above a level patch of grass. A concrete path lined with petunias and edged with red bricks passed behind the volleyball court and circumnavigated a large round trampoline with thick plastic padding around its edges. A wooden swing set and two tall wooden poles holding white purple martin houses stood against the azure sky. The children followed the men in a tight group, staying down at lawn level when the men went up the steps of the porch.
On the porch, there were three long deacon’s benches, and the Amish men took seats on one of them. Albert Yoder indicated large, deep wicker chairs for Niell and Troyer. When they were all seated, Ricky and Cal found themselves looking slightly up at the stern Amish men.
Miriam Yoder came out the screened door with a tray of paper cups and a pitcher of lemonade. She set the tray on a round, glass-topped table in front of Albert Yoder’s knees and then poured five cups of lemonade before going back into the house.
Albert Yoder handed lemonade to each of the men, Troyer and Niell first. The Amish men sipped quietly at their drinks. Cal took one sip to be polite and held the cup in his lap. Niell drank it all down straight and put the empty cup back on the tray, agonizing over the crawling pace of the conversation.
“Thanks,” Niell said. “And thank your wife, would you?”
Yoder said, “Now, Sergeant Niell, introductions. As I said, I am Albert P. Yoder. Here is also Willis Stutzman and one of my cousins, Albert O. Yoder. Albert O. is father to Sara Yoder, and I am father to Abe Yoder. Abe and Sara run with the Schlabaugh gang. Willis Stutzman is father to one of the boys who also runs with John Schlabaugh. He is a close neighbor.”
Niell thanked Yoder for the introductions and said, “I presume you all know about John Schlabaugh?”
Albert said, “The bishop was just here. We need to be getting over to the Schlabaughs’ house pretty soon. They are all tucked in at home, waiting for us to help.”
“I won’t keep you long,” Niell said, taking a small notebook out of his breast pocket.
Cal touched Niell’s arm, eyeing the notebook. Niell shrugged and put the notebook back into his uniform shirt pocket, trusting that Cal Troyer would know best how to proceed.
Niell said, “I need your help. If you know where Sara Yoder is, I need you to tell us.”
Albert P. Yoder said, “I’ll tell you what we know, Sergeant. Sara Yoder drove off with some men about an hour ago. She left John Schlabaugh’s car out on the road, and a deputy came by later to have it towed. It is good riddance as far as I am concerned. Now we do not know where Sara went, and we haven’t seen anything of Abe, my son, for over a month.”
“Are you not speaking with your son, Mr. Yoder?” Niell asked.
Yoder turned pensive and tangled his fingers in his chin whiskers. To the boys on the lawn he said, “You youngsters run along, now. You have chores.”
The boys left, obviously disappointed.
Yoder gave a quick glance to the men sitting with him on the bench and evidently saw enough encouragement in their expressions that he decided to talk. “Abe quit on my 14/7,” he said. “I reckon he knows not to come back until he’s made a few changes.”
“14/7?” asked Niell.
“It’s the financial arrangement I use to let him stay with us even though he’s of an age to marry.”
Cal asked, “Albert, do you know what kind of thing Abe and John had gotten mixed up in while they’ve been running together?”
“The usual running around wild, I suppose,” Yoder said.
Willis Stutzman coughed pointedly, and Albert said, “OK, well, maybe more than the usual wild behavior. Willis can tell you better.”
Willis Stutzman appeared to Niell to be about ten years younger than Albert P. Yoder. He was dressed in blue denim trousers and a pink short-sleeved shirt under black braces. He eased forward on the deacon’s bench and leaned over, elbows on knees, to light his pipe. When he had it going he said, “My oldest boy, Andy, wants to marry Sara Yoder, but she’s not of a mind.”
He glanced sideways through the smoke at Albert O. Yoder, Sara’s father, and the man shrugged apologetically, as if Stutzman had spoken a well-known fact.
Stutzman continued. “It often develops that a man, gone courting, has to wait for the girl to make up her mind. But, when this Rumschpringe started up, quite a few of the kids took it too far. We Amish allow the Rumschpringe so that the children can learn what the English world is really like. So they can see what they are turning away from, if they choose to be Amish like us. That’s the only way they can be certain of their choice. If they didn’t burn it out of their systems, they would wonder all their lives what they had missed in the world. So, Amish allow the Rumschpringe, and have allowed it for many generations. But that doesn’t mean we approve of wild behavior. The children live with us, work with us, eat with us, and then sometimes, usually on a weekend, they just go away for a spell. Change their clothes to English and then go to town. We don’t follow them around, so we’re not ever really sure where they go, or what they do.
“We allow this because it is all necessary for a true, informed, adult decision to join the church. It’s the best way for them and us to know that they are taking their vows seriously.”
That said, Stutzman sat up straight and drew several puffs on his pipe, as if he thought he had said everything a soul could ever want to know on the matter.
Sara’s father, Albe
rt O. Yoder, said, “If she comes back, everything will be forgiven. Tell her that, Sergeant Niell.”
Niell tapped a thumb on his knee and considered what had been said. He shifted to a more upright posture and said, “Are you telling me you don’t even know where Sara might be?”
“Yes,” answered her father.
“Or that you can’t tell us where she typically goes on the weekends?”
An affirmative nod of Yoder’s head.
“Who she hangs with in the English world?”
Unhappy shrugs from all three of the men.
Albert P. Yoder cleared his throat and stood up. Bishop Irvin Raber climbed the steps to the porch, and the men stood up briefly and then sat down when the bishop sat. Albert P. Yoder introduced Niell to the bishop, and Niell stood to shake his hand.
When both men were seated again, the bishop said, “We’ll hold the services for John Schlabaugh as soon as we can. The Schlabaughs are on hard times, as you know, from their daughter’s medical bills, so they’re going to need help with the food for the day.” When he had handed each Amish man a slip of paper with figures written out for their family’s contributions, he finished by asking Niell, “Will we be able to have the body soon, Sergeant?”
“I can’t say, Mr. Raber,” Niell said. “The coroner will make that decision.”
Willis Stutzman and Albert O. bent to each other’s ears and whispered in dialect.
The bishop said, “We shouldn’t be rude.” To Niell he explained, “The men were commenting that the coroner is a woman.”
Niell nodded, and said enthusiastically, “She is. She’s Sheriff Robertson’s wife. And she’s the best coroner in any county around here. The body will be released just as soon as she says it’s OK.”
“Then we may have to go forward with the memorial services without a body,” the bishop replied. “We need to do this so that the Schlabaughs can come to grips with John’s death. To give them some closure. A period to grieve.”
Niell nodded and pursed his lips. “I’ll find out what I can and let you know. What’s the best way to reach you?”
Bishop Irvin Raber cast an amused glance at each of the three Amish men. He said, “Each of these men has a cell phone. I suppose it’d do to call one of them, if they’ll be forthcoming enough to give you their numbers.”
While Ricky Niell wrote down phone numbers for the cell phones, Bishop Raber drew Cal aside on the lawn in front of the porch and offered to drive the pastor back into town in his buggy. Understanding the meaning of the bishop’s offer, Cal accepted and suggested that Niell go back to town ahead of him.
As Ricky was getting behind the wheel of his cruiser out on the lane, Cal ducked down and whispered urgently, “Ricky, you didn’t get the whole truth back there. It’s typical Amish caution, wanting to avoid entanglement with the law. But, Sara Yoder didn’t just get in a car with two English men the way Miriam said. That’s not what the boy told her. The boy told her that the two English men pulled Sara out of that Firebird and forced her into their car. A big white SUV.”
“She’s been kidnapped?” Ricky said incredulously.
“That’s the phone call I made while you were talking to Miriam. To tell Robertson that she has been abducted.”
Ricky shook his head, angry at the backwardness that had caused the bishop to withhold crucial information. “When are they ever going to trust us, Cal?”
“I’m gonna work on that right now,” Cal said. “Try to coax Raber into a better posture toward law enforcement. But I can’t predict how he’ll respond. I know these people out here. They’re not at all big on government authority.”
Ricky tapped the steering wheel with both of this thumbs. “How long’s it been, Cal? An hour and a half since you saw her?”
“About that.”
Ricky shook his head again.
Cal said, “It’s slow with the Amish, Ricky.”
“Do they all understand, you think, that she was abducted?”
“I’m sure they do.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“They don’t easily trust English, and they don’t trust law enforcement at all, Ricky. They have long memories of their martyr history in Europe before their ancestors came to America.”
“I’m still going to knock on some doors out here, Cal. See what I can learn.”
“OK, Ricky. I’ll have Raber drop me off at the jailhouse when we get back to town. But, take it slow with these people. You’ve got two strikes against you just by wearing your uniform.”
7
Friday, July 23
11:30 A.M.
SLOWLY, Troyer and Raber paced down the gravel lane to its intersection with County Road 68, near the little iron bridge where the creek crossed the valley. There the bishop had his house and a small furniture shop. His buggy was a simple open hack, and it took little more than a minute to harness a chestnut Standardbred to the rig. Riding high on the buckboard, the two men headed back toward Salem Cemetery on Mechanic Township Lane T-110, the bishop letting the horse set an ambling pace.
As they rode, Bishop Raber and Cal talked about the twenty-three families in the bishop’s small church, many of whom Cal knew well. The mothers and fathers and grandparents. Courtships, children, troubles with health, genetic concerns, and infractions of a slight and a sometimes serious nature. Raber told how the church had been supporting one family whose father had lost an arm in a sawmill accident. How the man was expected to find suitable work once he had mended. How the older boys would have to take up the slack until that happened.
He told of the precocious young girl with the withered leg who probably never would be able to marry, not so much because of her physical infirmity, but because of her fatalistic outlook on life. He spoke of the prevalence of certain hereditary traits in the small community. There were three dwarfs in the church. There were also exotic genetic disorders that researchers from Ohio State University wanted his permission to study. And Raber spoke poignantly of the heartache several families were enduring, a heartache made infinitely worse by the day’s events, as their children stretched their Rumschpringes to lengths that were not believed to be reversible.
He came eventually to the subject of John Schlabaugh, not because of John’s open rebellion, but, surprisingly, because of the abundant crops John was able to bring in for the farmers in the church, using the tractor he had bought after selling his land.
Cal asked about that, and Raber explained. Young Schlabaugh had inherited a patch of arable land in the prosperous Doughty Valley, to the south of the high ground at Saltillo. He kept the barn and a single-wide trailer on two acres and sold the rest of the land for a handsome price. And that, Raber explained, was the problem. The very root of it, as far as he was concerned. A young man with nothing to do and too much money on his hands.
Cal listened and gradually came to appreciate the true nature of the dilemma the bishop faced. Before today, John Schlabaugh’s fate could have swung one way or another, and it would have signified nothing more than the good or bad standing in the church of a single boy. They had lost others to the world before, and knew that heartache well. They had learned how to go on. But if Raber, as bishop, were ever to have ruled against Schlabaugh’s tractor, the men of the whole church would have lost the advantage at harvest that the tractor, hired out to each family in rotation, had provided. That would have put a stop to the extra cash crops the men were able to plant each year. And without the money from those crops, the families who needed cash in emergency rooms could not be helped. The doctor bills for a girl with a withered leg could not be paid. The families would not have the ready cash the bishop would need for the farmer whose barn burned down after a lightning strike. Or for funerals. The social fabric of his district would start to unravel at the economic seams. To rule against the tractor had never been practical.
Still, young Schlabaugh had proved himself a ne’er-do-well, and the allure of his rebellious fife had piped too many children into re
bellion. All this Cal surmised, and more.
At a pause, Cal asked, “Maybe the tractor could be sold to a cooperative English family?”
Bishop Raber tightened the reins and brought the buggy to a halt at the intersection of T-110 and County 19, just west of Becks Mills. Here was the center of the long Doughty Valley, where the barns were, for the most part, tall and new. Bright red in the summer sun. Fields planted luxuriantly in all directions. A lazy, sandy stream cutting a meandering channel through the fields. A lone hawk, circling in the blue overhead. Cars as rare here as buggies were in town.
Beside the bishop’s buggy, a white board fence framed a pasture where three Belgian draft horses nibbled the grass, tails swishing. A lad on a flatbed wagon, pulled by a Halflinger, turned into the lane with sacks of dogfood and grass seed stacked behind him on the rough boards. Two Amish kids rode by on expensive bicycles, new and shiny. Bishop Raber took in the surrounding countryside and said, “My district stops here, Cal, at County 19. John Schlabaugh’s place is up the way, left a quarter mile, on the left side of the road. At least that’s where he’s been living since he left home.
“The Schlabaughs are good people. There are six boys and four girls so far, and every one of them toes the line. Everyone except John.”
With that, the bishop fell silent and started the horse again. Taking 19 west, he came to the intersection where County 58 dumped out into the Doughty Valley, west of Panther Hollow. The bishop stopped the buggy again, on the flat bridge over Mullet Run. He looked up at the blue sky overhead, and then let his eyes drift down to the stream coursing under the bridge.
Cal asked, “Who will get John’s property, now that he’s gone?”
Raber answered, “Who would expect an eighteen-year-old boy to have written out a will?”
“Would his father try to keep the tractor?”
Raber shook his head and said, “I have decided to rule out tractors. Whatever the hardship, we have got to go back to the land. To tend the land as our fathers did. No, tractors are out. When harvest comes, we’ll help each other bring in what crops we can, and then the English can take the rest for a price. Next year, we’ll plant only what we need.”