Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  The room was strangely dark when he woke again. Something—somewhere—was pounding. He sat up, feeling disoriented. He glanced at the bedside clock. It was five-fifteen. He’d slept all day? The gloominess of the room, the fall of daylight, left no doubt about it.

  He stood without any idea of where he meant to go. Then the pounding began again, more frantic this time.

  “Adam! Please, if you’re in there, open the door!”

  Mariah? He didn’t think he had ever told her exactly where he was staying. But she could have found out, of course, in an emergency. She could have used a pay phone and called all the motels within a reasonable distance of the village.

  In an emergency.

  He stumbled to the door and wrenched it open. Mariah was on the other side, looking wild enough that if he had not loved her last night, if he had not only recently seen her in this state of disarray for thoroughly different reasons, it would have taken him a moment to recognize her. Her hair was windblown, tangles of it pulling free from her bonnet. Her face was flushed and her breasts rose and fell with exertion. She’d been running. Had she run all this way?

  His heart stalled. “What? What is it?” he demanded, his voice still raspy from sleep.

  “It’s Bo,” she gasped. She was shaking her head hard, then harder, as though in frantic denial. “He didn’t come to school today. I thought he was still pretending to be sick, that Sarah was humoring him. But then she came to the school to find out why he hadn’t come home.” She struggled for breath and her tears spilled over. “Adam, Bo’s gone!”

  Chapter 17

  Her words hit him like sledgehammers. Shock flew through him. Not again. Something hard and cold rushed up from the pit of his stomach, to each of his nerve endings, freezing them. He stared at her blankly.

  “Did you hear me?” she cried. “Bo’s gone!”

  “No,” he managed, strangled. Then the ice cracked. It shattered down inside him and rage came, blinding, killing, staining his vision red. “No!” he roared this time, then he veered for the phone.

  Jake. He had to get Jake to come back here now. Because this time the trail wasn’t three days’ worth of cold. This time they knew who and what they were up against. This time—

  And even as he gripped the phone, he realized dazedly that this nightmare was the same, but different. The odds of this having anything to do with Jannel and a scam artist named Devon Mills were simply too remote.

  No, he thought. No. This time it had nothing to do with Jannel, and everything to do with him.

  “Adam—”

  He jerked around to find Mariah again. “I scared him,” he realized aloud. “He ran.” He had to wrestle the words to get them out, they were that bitter, that rancid. “He ran and hid so he wouldn’t have to go away with me.”

  Mariah shook her head frantically. “We don’t know that! Other children—”

  “Let’s go,” he interrupted, grabbing his jacket from the desk chair.

  “Where?” she gasped. “What do you want to do?”

  “Look for him,” he snarled. “What else?” And blessedly, some of the knowledge he had managed to glean from Jake over the years began settling, clicking into place in his brain. “The Lapps. We’ll go to the Lapps first. We’ll start there.”

  He pushed past her out the door. Mariah turned to watch him helplessly. Please, God, let him be right, please don’t let anyone have taken Bo, not this child! Not this one. Adam only just found him again. If someone took him with Lizzie and the others, I can’t believe in you anymore, because that’s just too cruel. She pulled the door closed behind her and ran for him, scrambling into the passenger seat.

  He drove like a madman, even more erratically, even faster than he had that first day when they had gone to the pond. And he talked to himself, scaring her, muttering helpless protests aloud again and again. Her heart bled for him, and she had to dash tears from her eyes with trembling hands. God, don’t do this to him, please, she prayed again. Tell the deacons I’ll slink off into the sunset and they’ll never hear another word from me again. Just please don’t take this man’s child.

  Her neck snapped a little when he braked hard in the Lapps’ drive. He got out without waiting for her and ran across the road to the house without looking back.

  He didn’t knock. He didn’t have to. Sarah and Sugar Joe were already on the porch. Joe was pale and his eyes looked too large and dark. Sarah’s face was mottled and swollen from crying.

  Mariah hurried to catch up with them all. “He probably ran away from all the changes that are happening,” she volunteered, trying immediately to calm everyone—as if it were possible. “Come on, let’s go inside where it’s warm.”

  Sugar Joe seemed to nod. “Of course. We have to assume that first before we...before we consider other things.”

  “Where’s Matt?” Mariah asked as they all stumbled dazedly inside. She took Sarah’s hand, and the Meidung could be damned, she thought angrily. “If Bo was planning to run away, then Matt would almost certainly have known about it.”

  “But you said Matt was in school!” Sarah cried.

  “He was. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  “Upstairs,” Joe barked. “I sent all the kids to their rooms until we could make some sense of this. Gracie was...” He trailed off.

  “They’re all very upset,” Sarah whispered. “Crying. We just couldn’t... I couldn’t deal with anything, with all the crying. We asked them to wait.” Her eyes said she didn’t know exactly what they were waiting for. Mariah thought sickly that if this was like the other children, there would be no quick resolution. She knew Sarah was thinking the same thing.

  She took a deep breath and flashed a look at Adam. “I’ll be right back. Matt might be more likely to talk to me. He might fear Sarah and Joe’s anger, if he did have anything to do with this.”

  Adam was staring at her strangely, as if he didn’t really see her. She turned away from him and hurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Sarah turned into Joe’s arms. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s all this is,” she moaned.

  Adam finally snapped himself out of it. “It is. It’s got to be. It can’t be Jannel. Even if she finally came back to get him, she wouldn’t just steal him, for God’s sake.” Unless she knew he was here, too. “Bo wouldn’t have known her, either!” But maybe he would have.

  He was going to throw up.

  He turned away, his throat working, and raked a hand through his hair. He went on almost without taking a breath. “We need to get a search party together. He’s around here somewhere. He’s got to be. He couldn’t have gone far.” Jesus, he thought, looking out the back door. Full dark had fallen now. Bo was seven years old and he was out there in the dark somewhere alone, and if Adam had learned anything in the time he’d been here, it was that when it got dark in Lancaster County, it got damned cold, too.

  He rounded on Sarah. “Call those deacons, or the church, or whoever.”

  She looked at him blankly. “We don’t have a phone. The Ordnung—”

  “Screw the Ordnung!” he roared. “My kid is gone!”

  Sarah blanched. Joe squeezed her shoulder. “What do you want them to do?” he asked Adam. “I’ll find a way to get word to all of them. I’ll send the other kids out to find them.”

  “No!” Sarah cried irrationally. “Not the children! Please, Joe, don’t send the children. If they’ve taken Noah, then who knows who’s next? Maybe they were watching our house. Maybe—”

  “Sarah,” Joe interrupted. “Mariah and Adam are probably right. He probably just got scared about all this and ran off.”

  “They?” Adam echoed Sarah, his voice grating. He was missing something here. “Who the hell is they?”

  “Whoever took the other children,” Joe answered absently.

  “What other children?”

  “Lizzie Stoltzfus. Michael Miller. The little ones. There are four of them missing now.”
He refused to count Noah.

  Adam sensed that he was on the brink of something again, and this time he wasn’t going to like it. “Missing?” he repeated, enunciating too carefully.

  Sarah looked confused. “Everyone is saying that that was why Mariah finally contacted you about your Bo,” she blurted. “The rumor going around is that she brought you here so that you would look for the others. That’s what Katya Essler told me. Mariah’s the only one who could really do it. She’s already been shunned. And she’s one of the few of us who would ever have seen that milk carton that Katya said she found.”

  His heart was beating slow and with a booming resonance against his chest. Finally. She brought you here so you would look for the others. He shook his head, but that one nasty phrase kept coming back. Mariah finally contacted you.

  He opened his mouth to respond, and something unintelligible came out.

  “It’s been going on for, oh, five months now,” Joe explained, “and it’s tearing the settlement apart. They were all just babies. Their mothers looked away for a moment—and they just vanished,” Joe explained. “The church ruled that—”

  He broke off as Mariah’s footsteps rushed down the stairs again. Then there were more, tumbling behind her, as the other children crowded down with her. She gripped the banister and Adam watched almost dispassionately as her knuckles turned white.

  “Matthew’s gone, too,” she blurted.

  Sarah cried out and swayed. Joe caught her.

  “We looked everywhere for him,” Gracie sobbed. “In the closets, everywhere.”

  “We thought maybe he was hiding,” Nathaniel explained, in an almost calm voice of reason. “That maybe this was all just some stupid game. But the window in his room is open.”

  “He’s gone,” Dinah repeated, gnawing on a trembling lip.

  Joe cradled Sarah against his chest and looked for Adam’s eyes. “Maybe he’s gone to Bo.”

  “Yeah,” Adam managed. Mariah finally contacted you. He shook the words out of his head. “We need to get together a search party,” he repeated. “Get the deacons to organize the men as quickly as possible.”

  “They won’t do it,” Sarah wept.

  Adam’s eyes slashed to her. “Why not?”

  “It’s what Joe was just saying. They won’t look for the others, either. They say we shouldn’t resist what’s happening, because it’s God’s will. It’s God’s wish that the children are gone.”

  Adam was stupefied. Then rage swallowed him. It was an immense pressure against his chest. He stared at Sarah for a long time before words would come to him, then he ground them out. “The...hell...it...is.”

  Mariah gasped, feeling his rage and disbelief like a palpable thing. Adam shot a furious look at Joe.

  “Don’t ask them, then. Tell them. Because if they refuse to help, I’ll bring every court in the land down upon their pious, pompous heads. Children are missing. And the last I heard, they generally can’t take care of themselves, no matter how religious they are.”

  Dinah gasped. Joe’s face twisted, but he nodded. “I’ll go talk to people myself. Nathaniel, come with me. Dinah, take care of your mother.”

  Adam headed for the back door.

  “Where are you going?” Mariah called after him.

  Something about his face was frightening her now. It was different from the rage and pain that had been there when she had gone upstairs. Something had changed. He turned to look at her and his face was closed.

  Mariah finally contacted you... Finally...finally...finally...

  He turned away without answering her. He couldn’t deal with her now. He needed to find Bo.

  Adam circled the house, trying to think. He had to calm down, had to function. Bo’s life could very possibly depend on it.

  Damn, it was getting cold.

  He pulled his gloves out of his jacket pockets and looked up at the windows on the second floor, wondering if anyone had closed the one Matt had escaped through. He hoped they hadn’t, because then he would have to go back inside to pinpoint exactly which window was his. He could guess from having been in the room yesterday, but he didn’t want to guess. He had to be sure.

  And he didn’t want to go inside. He didn’t want to see her face, her lying-angel eyes.

  Pain bloomed. Emotion rolled. He pushed down on it, down, then ignored it when it fought back. But he couldn’t ignore the taunting voice in his head, the one that insisted that he’d known something was off about all this. He had just never guessed, had never believed, that that something involved her.

  He should have guessed, known, suspected, not because it was all too easy but because she had just seemed too...good.

  Truth and honesty, he thought bitterly. The first things he’d sensed about her. But again, all over again, his perceptions had only gone as far as his own mind. He was a damned fool and he’d never learned. That sweet, generous kindness was all a sham.

  He’d thought of the way she’d weighed his motives in the beginning. Of the way, once her internal decisions were made, she’d taken him directly to Bo. And she’d told him in a roundabout way. When they all really turn their backs on me, as they surely will any time now...

  Somewhere in his heart he had suspected strings left dangling, something unfinished. But he had pushed for answers in the wrong direction, had gone after the man who had followed Jannel, because the truth was simply too disappointing, too crushing to tolerate.

  Don’t think about her. She doesn’t matter. Bo matters.

  He forced his attention back to the house and saw that the window was still open. It was easy enough to see how Matthew had made his escape. The drainpipe restraints were broken so that the upper half of it swung wide. He was going to catch hell, Adam thought, when they found him. He crossed to the ground beneath it and realized that the little hellion had fallen. One side of a bush there was almost flattened, its limbs spreading out unnaturally. A few were broken. The ground was churned up, snow and rich, dark loam.

  But Matt was all right, Adam thought, realizing he cared strongly about that boy’s welfare, as well. He had scrambled to his feet and had taken off again. He was unhurt enough to have run.

  Adam hunkered down to look at the ground, trying to think like Jake, wondering what his brother would look for. Then he saw the cookie. He picked it up and broke it absently in half. Oatmeal, he thought inanely. Matthew had taken a stash of food to his brother, a determined, misguided accomplice. Adam’s mouth widened into a grim parody of a smile. He pushed to his feet again and went back inside.

  Sarah was in the kitchen now. Dinah had made her tea. Gracie was pressing against her shoulder, needing to be held, but Sarah was beyond giving solace. She sat with her shoulders hunched and shaking, her face in her hands.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Adam heard himself say, holding out the cookie.

  “What is it?” Dinah asked, coming to look. “Oh, gosh.”

  “What?” Sarah cried, dropping her hands and coming to her feet.

  Dinah took the cookie and showed it to her. Sarah looked at it blankly, then she choked back a cry. “I made them yesterday. For company dinner. Before...”

  She trailed off. A less kind woman would have looked at him accusingly, Adam thought. A less kind woman would have said before you came and talked to my Noah and my family fell apart.

  “Yeah, well, I think Matt raided the cookie jar,” he managed.

  Sarah went to it like a woman sleepwalking. She lifted the lid and peered inside. “No,” she said finally. “I think he saved the ones from his school lunch.” Her eyes widened. “I think he saved his whole lunch. As soon as he got home from school, he came to the refrigerator and wolfed down half of what I’d started getting together for supper. I never thought...I didn’t...”

  Adam thought she was going to cry again. Dinah hugged her. “It’s all right, Ma. Don’t you see? It’s just Matt and Noah being up to something again. We’ll find them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ada
m heard himself say. God, but he used those words a lot lately. “I’m sorry for what I said...earlier. Your beliefs are your own. I was wrong to criticize them just because I don’t share them.”

  Sarah finally met his eyes. “You’re entitled to your opinions, Mr. Wallace.”

  “Yeah, I am. And so are you. It doesn’t mean that I have the right to rip yours.” He looked around, finally wondering where Mariah had gone. Finally allowing himself to wonder.

  “She went to get people to look, too,” Dinah said as though reading his mind.

  “They don’t see her. How can she ask them to help?”

  “I don’t think she cares right now,” Sarah said softly. “I think she’ll just rush into their kitchens and say her piece. What are they going to do? Hold their hands over their ears? Ignore her? They have to hear her because they can’t physically help it. And maybe her words will reach them. Many of them are unhappy about the church’s stand on this...this issue. But no one has dared do anything, no one but her.”

  This issue. Those other kids. Adam started to answer, when they heard the front door burst open.

  He went back to the entry. A man he didn’t know came in, his jaw set under his dark beard, the ever-present hat throwing his eyes into shadow.

  “Nathaniel said you needed help over here,” he said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, we do. Matt and...and Noah have taken off.”

  “Well, point me in the right direction. I know this land as well as anyone.” He thrust a hand at Adam. “I’m Chicken Joe Lapp from up the road a ways.”

  Adam shook his hand bemusedly. “Right.” The door banged again. Another man came in, trailed by a teenage boy. The boy was grumbling.

  “I don’t care what they say, Pa. It’s time we did something about this.”

  “I ain’t been all that comfortable with the situation, either,” his father agreed, “but the church fathers—” Then he saw Adam. He, too, held out a hand. “Isaiah Miller. This here’s my boy Dan. We came to help. Can’t see that there’s any harm in looking about a bit, no matter what they say.”