Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  He took his foot off the brake and coasted forward again. When he was abreast of her this time, he called out to her. She paused and looked at him.

  “Can I help you?” Her voice was polite, neither warm nor cold. She was startlingly pretty. He noticed flyaway strands of golden hair; the cruel, relentless wind had dragged them free from the white bonnet she wore beneath the shawl.

  “I need help,” Adam said simply, as he always did. “I’m trying to find my son.”

  The woman’s reaction was the same as he had gotten the world over. Mention a missing child, he thought, and nearly every human being softened to some extent. This woman’s eyes widened and she took a half step closer to the car.

  “Has he run away?” She looked out over the fields as though she thought to spot him there. “He’d be cold if he hasn’t found shelter. Why did he come out this way?”

  “No. That’s not it. He’s been kidnapped.”

  That had her retreating again, fast Her expression closed down. “I doubt if you’ll find him here, then.”

  “I have reason to believe he is here. Can I show you a picture?”

  Her gaze veered away. “We don’t steal children, mister. We have plenty of our own.”

  “My wife stole him.”

  It was the part that usually brought a flare of understanding to most people’s eyes. This woman looked back at him, horrified, then frightened, then unsurprised.

  “It’s a cruel world you live in.”

  She came forward again. “The picture?”

  He gave her both of them. the composite and the one as Bo had been four years ago. Unlike many people, this woman studied them thoroughly. Then she frowned as though worried or concerned.

  Hope flared.

  “Is he Amish, then?” she asked finally.

  The hope ebbed, leaving his voice sharp. “No. I told you. He’s my son.”

  “Katya!” came a masculine voice from the house.

  The woman jumped visibly. For a brief moment, her eyes reminded him of a doe caught in headlights, panicked, trapped, believing deep in her heart that it was useless to try to move or run.

  She thrust the pictures back at Adam. “I must go.”

  “Wait! Why did you ask me if he was Amish?”

  She looked at him helplessly, torn between answering his question and responding to the bearded man who was still shouting from the porch. “You should ask the woman at the school.” she blurted and turned away.

  “A teacher? What school?” She was already walking away. Adam bit back on a curse. “What’s her name?” he called out.

  She looked back at him fast and kept walking. “She hasn’t one.”

  “She doesn’t have a name?”

  “We don’t recognize her.” she called back.

  “Katya, I want you in here now!” the man roared. Adam fought the urge to get out of the car and plant a fist in the guy’s jaw.

  “Give me a minute here, would you?” he shouted to him, then he remembered his brother’s warning. With an effort, he added, “Please.”

  It didn’t help. The man started down the porch, and Adam thought he heard the woman gasp in alarm.

  “Look, I need something more to go on here...uh, Katya,” he tried desperately. Please, don’t let her slip away. But his thoughts were already rolling on ahead. He would remember this farm. He could come back. ask more questions, when the man wasn’t around.

  Katya looked back at him frantically, as though reading his mind. “I can’t help you. Please don’t return. You’ll cause me trouble. Just ask the woman at the school!”

  She began to run up the drive. Adam watched her. The man caught her elbow when she reached him and propelled her the rest of the way to the house. Something old and nearly forgotten twisted Adam’s heart momentarily, then he put the scene out of his mind again.

  He headed back to the motel. He’d call Berry, he decided, and have him dig into the school records in Lancaster County. But Katya’s voice kept coming back to him and he realized Berry probably wasn’t going to find anything. Not only because it was damned hard to do so through educational databases—it was a sure bet that Jannel had changed Bo’s name and there were millions of seven-year-olds out there with blond hair and blue eyes. But because of the question the woman had asked him.

  Is he Amish, then?

  A staggering thought hit Adam. It carried enough impact to make him pull off the road again. Was that how Jannel had been hiding them? Was she pretending to be Amish?

  No. Impossible. He simply couldn’t believe that she had been so unhappy with him that she would hide from him in plain black stockings and serviceable shoes. Not Jannel. Not a woman with a cocaine habit, a woman who, fairly kept her hairdresser on retainer.

  You should ask the woman at the school. We don’t recognize her.

  Okay, he thought, driving again. Okay. There was a reason Katya had looked at Bo’s pictures and had made that suggestion. His pulse quickened as he sorted through it. Did the Amish send their children to public schools? Maybe they didn’t, and that was why Katya hadn’t known what to call the teacher, because her own child or children did not go there. But, then, why suggest that he talk to her?

  What’s her name? She hasn’t one. It was an odd way of putting it, but he thought it might equate.

  He got back to the motel and stopped at the front desk. “Question,” he said to the girl there. She was the same one who had taken care of him when he’d checked in the night before. She’d been irritatingly eager and friendly then, wanting to waste his time with chitchat, and she was no different now.

  “Sure.” She grinned, leaning over the counter toward him. “What can I help you with?”

  He thought sourly that if she leaned any farther with that cleavage she was going to have an accident. Something about her eyes told him she probably wanted to.

  “Do the Amish send their kids to public schools?”

  “Oh, no. In fact, the Supreme Court exempted them from mandatory attendance beyond the eighth grade back in ’72.”

  “So where do they go until the eighth grade?”

  “They have their own little schoolhouses.”

  “Where?”

  When her frown deepened, he realized he was shooting questions at her quickly and harshly. He didn’t care.

  “Well, they’re all around,” she answered finally. “On the farms.”

  “The farms?”

  “That’s right. The parents donate the land. You can usually tell them because they sit all by themselves, you know, without a lot of barns and other stuff around them. They’re usually at the far end of some field. Sometimes there are baseball diamonds or a swing set or some such thing. And they’re small. I mean, eight grades are all squeezed into one room. Can you believe it?”

  He was startled. “In the nineties?”

  “Well, they’re not, like, in the nineties, you know.”

  He thought again that it wasn’t a place for Jannel. And maybe that was why it was the perfect place to hide. He turned away.

  Berry could check the public-school records, Adam decided. He’d get up in the morning and drive the back roads, looking for little buildings sitting by themselves at the edges of fields.

  Chapter 2

  Mariah knew who he was as soon as he stepped out of the automobile he parked in front of the school.

  It was late and her students were gone. She’d spent an hour grading the papers her older children had turned in that morning, and she was just straightening the desks and sweeping the floor when she noticed the dark red car beyond the window. She put the broom aside with exquisite care and went to the glass to watch.

  So, she thought, he had found her. That was a good sign, that he was astute enough to have gotten this far. It also made her heart skip a beat.

  His appearance startled and intimidated her. She hadn’t expected someone so...well, formidable. She hadn’t anticipated that his face would be so hard. Then she understood her reaction. He was w
ell into his thirties. The shaven faces she saw most often were all much younger than Adam Wallace’s. It was the people’s way for a man to grow a beard as soon as he was baptized and married, and most Amish men married by the age of twenty-five.

  Not that she couldn’t have encountered many clean-shaven faces of some age, if she had simply strolled through one of the villages or the city of Lancaster. But she didn’t do that often. It was difficult enough to remain here, in the heart of the settlement. In either place, she was different, set apart, painfully alone, but here, at least, she was alone among the dear and the familiar.

  She scowled as Adam Wallace approached. He was aggressive, she decided. And very determined. It was in the way he moved. He had an athletic stride, a sort of unconscious confidence about him. He had golden hair and it was a tad long—not by Amish standards, of course, but by those of the anner Satt Leit, the other sort of people who lived in the villages and the city. It was windblown and unkempt, and he kept tunneling his fingers through it as though to tame it, when what he really needed to do was harness the wind that tussled with it.

  As a boy he would have been almost pretty, she realized. He was very attractive, and the dimple on his chin made something squirm briefly inside her. But age and time and care had etched his features, bracketing his mouth with small furrows. His eyes were pale, and he wasn’t really dressed for the cold.

  Adam felt someone watching him, but he couldn’t be sure where the gaze was coming from. He glanced around and saw no one. There was a barren field behind the school building. It had been plowed recently for some reason. Brown showed in neat rows through the snow. A white three-board fence separated it from the building—also white, with a gray shingled roof. He could tell because the warmth of the smoke had melted the snow near the chimney.

  It looked like a plain but cozy house. A long eaves trough hung out over the front porch, shielding it from the elements, so that, too, was clear of snow. White posts supported the eaves. There were two windows, and a paper cutout of a snowman taped to the glass of the door.

  He stepped up onto the porch, stomped the snow off his boots and knocked. Though he was cold and disgruntled and feeling a hell of a lot more pessimistic than he had two and a half days earlier, suddenly, out of nowhere, his heart began to pound.

  This was it, came an unbidden thought, though he had no particular reason to believe it.

  It had taken him a long time to work his way down to this particular schoolhouse. If things didn’t work out here, he was back to square one. There were a whole lot of schools sprinkled over the Amish countryside, a circumstance he’d understood once he’d begun looking into them. The Amish were thriving. Through a healthy birthrate and a tendency to fiercely protect their way of life and keep people within the fold, they numbered over one hundred and thirty thousand strong. It was not uncommon for a family to have as many as ten children. Less than six was a rarity.

  Lots of children, he thought. And one-room schoolhouses in which to teach them all from first through eighth grade. With families sending so many kids to a single school, it made sense that each one could serve only a dozen or so households.

  Lots of children, his mind insisted again. And he had searched through every one of them for a single small boy, because Berry had come up with nothing on the computers. It was still possible that Bo was enrolled in one of the public schools, and Adam would turn his efforts to visiting them personally if and when he found nothing here.

  He knocked again. “Hello!” he called, moving to peer in one of the windows. The door finally opened, even as he took a step.

  “Yes, hello,” came a soft, breathless voice. “Can I help you?”

  Adam looked back over his shoulder. And stared.

  He had learned about more than just the Amish school system in the past couple of days. He’d been told, too, that the reason the people all dressed alike, in plain clothing, was so that no one individual should stand out. The sin of arrogance and pride, he thought, and he knew immediately that this woman would stand out anywhere, no matter what she wore, even if it were sackcloth.

  Her clothing was nearly identical to Katya’s. Black tights, black shoes, a dress of deep purple beneath a black bibbed apron. Her hair was very dark and pulled back, parted severely in the middle. She wore a white bonnet and not a breath of makeup. Altogether, it should have made her look homely and plain, but it didn’t even come close.

  It was her eyes, he reflected. They were the most vivid shade of violet he had ever seen.

  No, it was her face. Every feature fit perfectly and smoothly with the next.

  Maybe it was just everything all together, he thought, that rich, dark hair and the exotic eyes and a porcelain complexion. She was trim and reasonably tall. Or maybe, he realized, maybe it wasn’t anything physical about her at all.

  Maybe it was her...peace.

  He frowned when that struck him. She watched him steadily, without impatience, her hands clasped together in front of her, and he got the feeling that she would do it all day if need be.

  “You’re staring at me,” she said finally, softly.

  Adam jolted. For the first time in his life, he actually blushed. “I’m...uh, sorry.”

  “Was there something in particular you wanted here?”

  “Yeah.” He was rattled, he realized, and that alone was amazing. He began digging in his jacket pockets for Bo’s pictures before he remembered that he had last slipped them into the back pocket of his jeans. He felt himself flush again and hardened his jaw.

  “I’m looking for a boy.”

  “Then you’ve certainly come to the right place. I have many here to choose from.”

  He looked at her sharply, wondering if she was being sarcastic. But of course she wasn’t. He doubted if she had the capacity for caustic wit. Something about her was just too...gentle. Too serene.

  “My son,” he clarified, finding his voice.

  “I see.” Her brows went up prettily. “And you think you’ll find him in an Amish schoolhouse?”

  “I have reason to think so, yes.” He thrust the pictures at her.

  Mariah took them, but she didn’t look at them. She didn’t have to.

  Her eyes stayed on his face. Adam had the uncanny feeling that she was searching for something.

  “Come inside,” she said finally. “It’s cold. You’re shivering.”

  She stepped back and disappeared through the door again. Adam followed her. It was true that he was cold. He’d been cold since he’d stepped off the plane on Sunday. What shook him now was that the woman had not appeared to be uncomfortable in the wind at all, and she had been standing on the porch without the benefit of coat or shawl.

  His heart thudded oddly. There was something almost otherworldly about her, and that was yet another whimsical and thoroughly uncharacteristic thought.

  “Tell me about your boy,” she prompted, perching neatly on the edge of a desk. She still hadn’t looked at the pictures, he noticed.

  “My wife...my ex-wife took him.” He had learned not to use the word “‘stole’” around these people. They were simply too shocked by such a concept. “Four years ago, when he was three. He’s seven now.”

  “That makes sense.”

  He felt another jolt. She was being sarcastic, he realized. But somehow she pulled it off with such mild gentleness that it didn’t sting.

  “I haven’t seen him in a while,” he went on. “I...don’t know what he’s like now. What he enjoys. What he hates. I just don’t know anymore.”

  The pain in his eyes almost decided Mariah right then and there, and she wasn’t a woman given to haste. She had to steel herself against it. She had to be sure.

  “I see,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  “I can tell you that he tried to climb an apple tree when he wasn’t quite three. He fell out and landed on the fence underneath, and he’s got a little scar right about here.” He touched his chin.

  Mariah swallowed careful
ly. She had been right, then. This man was the boy’s father.

  “He’s seven,” Adam said again, “and he’s blond and he’s got eyes like mine. I know there are a million kids out there like that, but this one has a scar right below his lip and he used to have this sly, kind of mischievous way of moving his eyes to the side and—”

  He broke off abruptly, looking almost lost. Mariah watched him and her heart hurt for him all over again.

  She finally looked down at the pictures. “Why are you looking for him here?” she asked, stalling.

  “Someone called my company—we search for lost children—and said they saw a boy matching his description in a farmers’ market in Bird-in-Hand. I checked there, but nobody recognized the pictures.”

  “And?”

  “So I started asking anyone I saw. People on the roads. And a woman named Katya told me to ask a woman at a school.”

  “Katya Essler.”

  His pale eyes narrowed. “She lives up the road a way.” He motioned with his thumb. “She has an impatient brute of a husband.”

  “Yes. Frank. That’s the one.” She smiled briefly, but it was not a happy look. She sighed. “They’re not the norm. Please don’t let them color your perceptions.”

  Adam frowned, wondering why his perceptions should matter.

  Mariah handed the pictures back to him. “I’ll keep my eyes open for him. I’ll look around.”

  Adam made an ugly sound. “Don’t bother. If he’s not your student, then he’s not here. He’s not in an Amish school. I’ve been to all the others.” He started to turn away, then he looked back at her sharply. “Do you have a name?” he demanded suddenly.

  “Yes.”

  Adam scowled. He thought she’d hesitated for the briefest of moments. He thought he’d seen pain—something deep and profound—in those violet eyes.

  He finally shook his head. He wasn’t even sure exactly what he was asking.

  “You’re not the one, then,” he muttered. “You’re not the teacher Katya didn’t know. The one without a name. She told me specifically to ask that one about my Bo.” He raked his fingers through his hair again. “Hell, maybe she did mean a public school.” To go through them, he would need Jake, but he’d start first thing in the morning without him, working on his own until his brother could get here.