Colton Destiny

by Justine Davis

  Unless you make it one, she thought with a wry quirk of her mouth.

  He had a perfectly good reason to be here. A couple, in fact. Not only was this where his sister had been last seen alive and well, he’d been one of the lead builders on this project. This was a position, she’d been told, that was usually held by older members of the community, with more experience, but no one had more skill as a carpenter than Caleb Troyer.

  But he hadn’t been working. He’d been simply standing, his head tilted back, as if studying the huge rafters.

  Or looking for answers, she thought as she came to a halt, again at the same moment he did, when they were a bare couple of feet apart.

  She suddenly felt as if they were totally alone in the world. The barn felt even more hollow and cavernous than it was. He was watching her, steadily, not in a leering way, but as if she were a piece of lumber and he had to assess her value and use for his work. It was a bit unsettling, and she grimaced inwardly at her own inconsistency. Wasn’t she always focused on making people judge her by her work, her usefulness, and not her gender and looks? And now here was a man who seemed to be doing just that, and she was reacting like...

  She wasn’t sure what she was reacting like. She had no basis for comparison. Nothing in her experience to liken it to, because no one had ever caused this kind of reaction in her. It took every bit of determination she had in her to hold his gaze, to not look away hastily, like some infatuated child caught staring at the object of her adoration.

  Something in his gaze changed, shifted; even in the dimmer light inside the barn she could see it.

  “Emma.”

  He’d said her name before, since they’d agreed to the first-name basis, but not like this. Never like this, as if he’d fought every letter of it, as if he’d lost the battle not to say it at all.

  As if he were as tangled up as she seemed to be, every time she was around him.

  “Caleb,” she said. But for her it was a battle to make herself say it, to get the name out in anything close to a normal voice.

  She didn’t succeed very well. In her own ears, all she could hear was an open note of husky longing, and she wished she’d not said it at all. For the sound of her own voice seemed to make real, to acknowledge, the attraction she’d been fighting since the first moment she’d laid eyes on this man.

  His right hand lifted, toward her face. She held her breath, not daring to move. For the barest instant, his fingers brushed over her cheek.

  He yanked his hand back as if she’d burned him. He stared at the fingertips that had touched her skin, as if they no longer belonged to him. His expression was one of such shock she couldn’t help but wonder if he truly hadn’t been aware of what he’d been doing.

  Or if perhaps his fingers were simply burning, as was the cheek he’d touched.

  “It’s a beautiful barn,” she said, wondering as soon as the words were out if she could have picked anything more inane to say.

  For a long moment he just stared at her. Emma had the unsettling feeling he could hear her heart pounding, that it was echoing in the cavernous space. And she wished that she’d left it to him to speak first, just to see what he would have said after that brief but electrifying touch.

  “It will stand.”

  And that, she thought, was the quintessential Amish compliment. The beauty of something was never the goal; the functionality and sturdiness was what mattered.

  “Your furniture is beautiful.”

  He blinked at the seeming non sequitur. Then, slowly, almost warily, he nodded.

  “You can admit that, but not that this barn is?”

  She was genuinely puzzled and spoke that way.

  His expression cleared. “My work must appeal to outsiders.”

  She considered that. Then nodded. “Okay. I get that.” She glanced around at the huge space. “Then it’s a very...large barn.”

  For a moment she thought he was going to smile. “A fact,” he said.

  “And red,” she added, barely able to stop from smiling herself. Was she imagining that he was still fighting an answering smile?

  “Another fact.”

  “And therefore acceptable.”

  “I believe you have it now.”

  The smile broke through then. A smile that made her grin back at him in a kind of delight she hadn’t felt in far too long.

  And then he laughed.

  It was short, barely more than a chuckle, but real and all the more precious because he’d fought it. And the sound sent her pulse racing as quickly as that brief brush of his fingers had, a fact that rattled her.

  She doubted he’d laughed since Hannah and her friends had disappeared. She wondered if he’d laughed since his wife had died.

  Unfortunately—or perhaps not—the moment didn’t last.

  “Why are you here again?” he asked.

  “When in doubt, go back to the scene,” she said.

  “Doubt?”

  She sighed. “The delivery driver was no help. He might be, eventually, if we turn up something specific to ask him about, but nobody seems to have seen anything out of the ordinary that day.”

  Caleb glanced around at the barn. “Hannah was here, the day we built it. She made her pies the day before, so that she could watch. She always liked to see how the pieces came together,” he said. “She said it was like sewing a dress—none of the pieces make sense until they start to come together.”

  Emma smiled. And then, softly, determinedly, she said, “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  He went very still. Then he turned to her, understanding and thanks in his eyes as acknowledgment of her careful, resolute phrasing.

  “You will like her, I think.” His own words were an acceptance of hers. “And she will like you.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and she wondered if the habit was a subconscious awareness of the missing beard. “Too much, perhaps.”

  Emma winced. But then she reined in her reaction born of emotions she shouldn’t be allowing anyway. She made herself think, then ask quietly, without hurt or rancor, “Too much?”

  “We always worried about Hannah. She is a restless spirit, and it is those we most often lose to...the outside.”

  “To my world,” she said, guessing that was what he’d originally intended to say.

  “Yes,” he had the grace to admit.

  “And yet,” she said, the investigator coming to the fore now, “you insist she hasn’t just gone to join that world.”

  He immediately picked up on the change in her. “I do not say that she would not, in the end, leave us. What I do say, what I know to my bones, is that she would not do it this way, without a word, simply disappearing without even a goodbye.”

  Which means she didn’t leave of her own volition, Emma thought. But she didn’t say it, knew Caleb knew perfectly well what the subtext was here.

  “Especially to the girls,” he added, and for the first time pain echoed in his voice. “She adores them.”

  So his own emotions were kept strictly in check. But cause pain to his children, and he was not so stoic. That told her a lot about him, she thought.

  “Where are the girls?”

  “Grace is still with Mrs. Stoltzfus. Katie and Ruthie are at a youth group gathering at the Yoders’.” He glanced toward one of the barn windows that faced west, seemed to realize the time. “I must go. They will be home soon.”

  “It’s getting dark quickly,” she said. “May I give you a ride home? I have to go past your place anyway. And we can stop for Grace on the way.”

  He hesitated, but another glance at the sharply slanted light coming through the window seemed to decide him. “I would be thankful,” he said.

  “Just don’t offer to pay me like Esther Stoltzfus did, please. Let a person do a favor.”

  He seemed startled, and she wondered if perhaps he had been going to do just that, offer to pay her as if she were one of the many locals who served as a sort of Amish taxi service.

  “I w
as only going to invite you to join us for dinner,”

  he said.

  She blinked. “You were?”

  “Katie is preparing the meal this evening. Her meat loaf. She would be honored to have a guest share it.”

  “I... Thank you. I would enjoy that.”

  She saw something flash in his eyes, something that looked akin to what she was feeling. Which was silly, given that what she was feeling was such a tangled mess of anticipation, excitement and wishing she hadn’t agreed that she couldn’t begin to sort them out.

  Chapter 14

  Emma should have felt much guiltier about this. Socializing with adjuncts to an investigation wasn’t exactly forbidden, especially if it could forward the investigation, but it was likely to be looked at intently.

  And somehow she doubted playing a surprisingly raucous form of Scrabble—something the girls called “speed Scrabble”—would ever be considered as furthering the investigation.

  But at the moment, she didn’t care. Once she’d accepted the invitation, she decided to shed her misgivings, for Katie’s sake if nothing else. And Caleb had apparently decided to at least conceal his, as well. As a result the meal, after a solemn prayer, had been lively with chatter, the girls as interested in her life as she was in theirs.

  Caleb seemed mostly to listen and watch the three females with an almost bemused expression. Grace had also watched, wide-eyed, in a special, taller chair that let her sit at the table with them. Emma couldn’t help noticing how gentle Caleb was with the toddler, tidying up as the excited child would inadvertently knock something over or drop food or a utensil.

  Many men would have taken their grief and anger out on the child who had cost her mother her life. Would have resented her for being here when his beloved wife was gone. Or perhaps that was only men in her world. Here it would likely be seen as the will of God and accepted, however cruel it might seem.

  Over the meal Katie explained in great detail how she had prepared the food without many of the modern conveniences Emma was used to. Ruthie, who apparently was not a fan of kitchen work, still had to pipe in now and then with the little bits she’d done to help.

  After the meal, Emma had insisted on helping Katie clean up, and the three females had quickly worked out an efficient system of washing, drying, putting away and dodging Grace’s efforts to help. Finally Caleb bade the little girl say good-night and took her to bed, over a quiet protest that would have been a howl in her world.

  And then Ruthie had suggested the fast-paced version of the familiar game.

  “I should warn you,” Caleb had said mildly, “she’s quite the expert.”

  “A Scrabble shark, is she?”

  “A what?” Ruthie asked.

  “A card shark is what you call someone who lures innocent bystanders into a card came by pretending ignorance of the game and then proceeds to trounce them soundly.”

  Ruthie giggled.

  “Is that dishonest?” Katie asked solemnly.

  “I suppose that depends on who you ask,” Emma said, with a glance at Caleb. She was treading on parental ground here. “Some would say it’s the mark—that’s the person who gets tricked—that it’s his own fault because he should have known better. Others would say the card shark was dishonest, yes.”

  “What would you say?” Ruthie demanded.

  Again she glanced at Caleb and had the strangest feeling he was waiting to see what she would say as much as the girls.

  “If it was a game for fun, it’s a lesson learned. If it was for money, then I’d be looking at it a lot closer.”

  The girls seemed to accept that, and the game had begun. Once it had, there was little time for discussion. This wasn’t called speed Scrabble for nothing.

  Ruthie was indeed a shark. She might not always go for the longest words, but she was quick and kept them all hopping. Although Caleb twice called a challenge on words that seemed to have sprung from Ruthie’s fertile imagination. Once she had gone to the big dictionary on the bookshelf and seemed surprised not to find her word there. The second time, she merely grinned and shrugged, conceding the challenge.

  So there was no coddling here, no allowing the child to win under false pretenses, Emma thought as the game pieces were finally picked up and carefully stored away. She liked that. Being prepared for reality was one of the best ways to deal with it, her father had always said.

  She felt an old pang she’d not felt in a while, remembering similar nights with her parents, nights spent playing games or just having roundhouse family discussions that sometimes became a free-for-all of teasing, pillow-tossing, but overflowing with the kind of love she could easily have never known had Donovan and Charlotte Colton not been the people they were.

  “You seem sad,” Caleb said after he’d sent the older girls off to prepare for bed.

  Emma didn’t dissemble. “Just nostalgic. And missing my folks.”

  Caleb smiled and gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “It is good that you don’t forget them.”

  “I could never forget them. They were the most remarkable people I’ve ever known. If not for them, who knows where all six of us would have ended up.”

  “You were all adopted?”

  Emma nodded and gave him the brief history of the Colton tradition of building families with kids who had nowhere else to go. She also told him about Butterfly Hearts, the organization her parents had built to help inner-city kids, because “they couldn’t adopt everybody.”

  “They sound like remarkable people.”

  “They were.” She made no effort to conceal the love that rang in her voice. “And my siblings and I are determined to make sure their legacy continues.”

  “Admirable.”

  He sounded so sincere she gave him a quizzical look. “So there are things in the outside world you...approve of?”

  His mouth quirked. “I am not the judge of such things. But I do believe the ways of that world are what makes things like your parents’ work necessary.”

  She grimaced. “I can’t argue with that.”

  “And,” he added, almost musingly, as if he were thinking out loud, “in your own way, in your work, I suppose you try to deal with those negative ways, to limit them, or their effects.”

  “That’s exactly how I look at it.”

  She was beyond startled. Once again she had underestimated his perceptiveness. Was she so blinded by the fact that he was Amish that she had expected not only ignorance of her world, but that he’d never even thought about it?

  And then she realized he’d probably been thinking about little else but her world since Hannah had been taken.

  “How do you do it?” he asked. His voice was oddly soft now, and she felt as if he had put a gentle, reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  “It must be done.”

  “At what cost?”

  “Does that matter, if I find Hannah safe?”

  “It must matter to you, the price you pay.”

  She fought down the memories that threatened to surge every time she thought of what Hannah and her friends could be going through. She focused instead on the deep, echoing strength of his voice. She found an odd sort of support in it and was able to speak almost evenly.

  “If not me, who?”

  “Someone who perhaps does not feel so deeply.”

  That was so pointed that for an instant she wondered who he’d been talking to. A possibility occurred to her.

  “Been to the local doctor lately?”

  Caleb blinked. One corner of his mouth twitched. And she knew her stab in the dark had struck home.

  “So, my brother’s been talking about me?”

  “He merely mentioned in passing that he was worried about you.”

  “He does that. Worry, I mean.”

  “He is a very good doctor.”

  She found it explanation rather than non sequitur. And then she realized they had been talking easily, if not comfortably, for some time now. The house was quiet, the girls asleep
, and the golden glow from the gas lamps was somehow comforting, soothing.

  “The girls enjoyed having you here this evening. This is the first time since Hannah...was taken that they have truly laughed.”

  “I enjoyed them,” she said. “I used to spend time playing games with my little sister and brother, and this took me back.”

  “I am glad you came.”

  She opened her mouth for the expected thanks for being invited, but the words wouldn’t come. Because he was looking at her in a way that made it impossible to speak. If he was a man of her world, she would have thought... But he wasn’t.

  And she wasn’t a woman of his.

  For a moment the comfort of this quiet home, the warmth, the simplicity, pulled at her with a strength unlike anything she’d ever felt before. There was more to this life than just a quaint eccentricity. She’d spent an entire evening with her phone set on vibrate only, without television or radio, or earphones on, and she hadn’t missed any of it. In fact, it had been a relief, if how relaxed she felt now was any indication.

  Or at least, how relaxed she’d felt until Caleb had looked at her that way.

  “Your girls,” she said. “You’re doing amazingly well with them.”

  “I have much help from the community.”

  She’d grown used to the occasional difference in cadence and sentences from him and the rest of the village, who all grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, a German dialect, and only learned English when they started school, or from older siblings. She found it part of the charm and knew enough German to manage a few useful phrases herself.

  She almost commented on the ulterior motives of the women in the community who were so helpful with his children but decided to stay quiet on that front. Not only because it seemed catty, but because she felt oddly reluctant to acknowledge that in the community, Caleb was quite a catch. There were women lined up for a chance at him.

  “They’re delightful girls,” she said instead, keeping the focus on a safer topic. “Each so different.”

  He nodded. “Katie will be fine,” he said. “She is gentle and kind, like her mother. Grace is too young to be certain yet, but she is also much like her mother.”