by Beverly Bird
Adam shook his hand, nodded, and moved to the door. He felt as if he were caught in a bad dream. He wanted to dislike these people for their naive and stubborn faith, for their cruel laws, but they were here. They had come.
Buggy after buggy streamed into the small paddock across the road. It was already too full to accommodate any more. People began parking on the drive, on the macadam, pulling in behind the barnyard.
If any of them was angry about his ultimatum to help, it didn’t show. He wondered if any of them, or which of them, were the exalted deacons. He thought Sugar Joe had probably been too polite to repeat his threat verbatim.
Mariah got out of one of the buggies and rushed toward the house. He turned his back hard and fast.
“All right,” he said to the men who’d begun gathering in the entry and the kitchen door. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Matt went out the back way, through his window.”
Nathaniel rushed in the back door. “I’ve been back there,” he interrupted. “There’s still a lot of snow over on the other side of the creek, where the sun doesn’t hit it because of that shade tree. His footprints go straight through there.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Some sneak he is.” Then his voice cracked. “Anyway, from there he turned south.”
“All right,” Adam said, hope swelling hard inside him for the first time since Mariah had come to his motel-room door. She had squeezed her way through the crowd and was standing at the back of the kitchen now. There was a little circle of space around her as people gave her a wide berth and pretended she wasn’t there.
Adam ignored her, as well, even as she tried to catch his eye.
“All right,” he said again. “We’ll split into four groups and we’ll fan out from the creek like spokes from a wheel.” He wished to God for handguns or flares. “Anybody know how to do a catcall?” he asked. They needed a distinct and out-of-place sound for an alarm.
One of the teenagers in the back of the room whistled, then flushed. A few other boys laughed. A couple of the fathers shook their heads.
“That’s it,” Adam said, unable to grin. “If anyone sees anything—anything at all—that might tell us where they’ve gone, make that whistle. Joe—Sugar Joe, I mean,” he corrected himself, glancing at Chicken Joe. “Sugar Joe and Nathaniel and I will bring up the rear, and whenever we hear that sound we’ll come running to see what you’ve found. Then we’ll all meet at that point and use it as a home base to fan out again.” He looked around. “Okay?”
There were nods everywhere.
“You think it’s just some tomfoolery on their part?” one man asked, and the fear in his voice made a lot of faces blanche. “That it’s not like the others?”
“I don’t know enough about the others to say for sure.” He couldn’t help himself. He shot a hard, angry look at Mariah. “Let’s just pray that their disappearance is exactly what it looks like—two boys with a boy-type idea that got them into a sticky mess. All right, then. Are we all set?”
“Soon’s Sugar Joe comes back,” someone pointed out.
“I’m here.” Joe came in through the front door. “What are we doing?”
Adam told him as everyone began spilling out the back way. Then Mariah’s voice sneaked up on him. “I’ll come, too.”
“No,” he snapped. “Stay here with the women. The kids’ll be cold, maybe wet, probably hungry when we find them.”
Sarah gave an irritated little sigh and a watery smile. “Probably not hungry. Noah had both Matt’s lunch and his own, and Matt ate most of tonight’s sauerkraut and rolls. I’m going to strangle those boys when I get my hands on them.” She paused, then her legs seemed to give out on her and she stumbled back to the table to sit down again.
Mariah went to her to offer what comfort she could, but her eyes followed Adam. He knew about the others now. And he was angry.
No, she thought helplessly, what had been on his face had gone deeper than that. He felt...betrayed.
It wasn’t anything she hadn’t expected, but it had happened too soon, before she could brace herself. And it had happened too late, after she’d gotten in so deeply she couldn’t bear it.
Chapter 18
They walked for half an hour without finding anything. The silence of the four search groups grew until it was deafening. Adam could no longer even see them as they disappeared behind hillocks, around the curves of creek beds and into night-blackened fields. At first the steady murmur of their disjointed conversations was comforting, but then he lost even that.
A solid tree line was looming in front of them now. It seemed to rise straight up on a hill that rolled all the way into the sky. And for the first time in his life Adam found himself praying, really praying. Not bitter accusations but a plea.
Don’t let him have gone in there. Not into the woods. We’ll never find him in there in all this darkness.
God didn’t answer him, but Joe Lapp did.
“Best thing that could happen is that they went in there,” he said, his breath almost crystallizing in the icy air.
Adam looked at him sharply, a little shaken that the man had so easily read his mind.
“It’s true,” Nathaniel agreed. “It’s not as thick as it looks.”
Crunch, trudge. Their footsteps put up an almost sweet sort of background music. The sound meant that they were going somewhere, doing something, no matter how helplessly dismal it was beginning to look to Adam.
“There’s about a hundred yards of forest,” Joe said, speaking over the sound. “Then there’s a big break. Several more farms. The Bylers’ place and Simon Stoltzfus’s farm, among others. The tree line is deceiving, because the land rises again right on the other side of those spreads. The naked eye really can’t see the break in the woods, but it’s there.”
“A hundred yards,” Adam repeated. Not comforting, he thought, feeling a little sick. He’d hit home runs little farther than that, and it had taken a sweet angle on the ball and all the strength he possessed. It was a long way across a baseball diamond. He couldn’t even comprehend it filled with trees and undergrowth.
He swore again.
“The good part is that if they went through, the Bylers’ farm and the Stoltzfus place are both tucked against the shady side of the hill. There’s still a whole lot of snow over there,” Nathaniel pointed out.
That Adam understood. “Footprints,” he said.
“Footprints,” Joe repeated. “And if they didn’t go through, there’s only so many places they can hide in the woods.”
Adam felt faint, thready hope stir in his blood again.
They walked on in silence. And in spite of himself, Adam thought of lies. Jannel had been a scam artist and Mariah Fisher wasn’t an angel. He’d had enough of women springing secret identities on him today to last a lifetime, he thought, rage rising in his blood again. But that fury was aimed mostly at himself, for believing again, for being a world-class chump.
Twenty minutes later, they reached the tree line. Adam stopped and stared grimly into the trees, not quite convinced by Nathaniel and Joe’s assurances. Sugar Joe took over without question, letting out a long, undulating catcall. His son blinked at him in surprise, then grinned slowly. But Nathaniel’s smile faded as the other groups converged on them.
“What is it?” someone shouted.
“What’d you find?”
“Nothing,” Adam bit out.
“We’re going to have to change the plan here,” Joe shouted. “Everyone listening? Is everyone here?” There were murmurs and nods. “Okay, from here on in we need to stretch out in one long line and enter the trees that way. Each man is responsible for the area directly ahead of him and a foot or so on either side.”
“It’s going to be dark as pitch in there,” someone complained. And only a few of the men had had the foresight to bring lanterns.
“Once we get through, we can gather more lights from Simon’s and Gabe’s places,” Joe answered. “If we don’t see any footprints over there, we�
�ll know they’re probably still in the woods, so we’ll turn around and go right back in.”
“I’ll set the gol-darned barn on fire if I have to,” a voice shouted angrily. “Then we’ll see everything there is to find.”
Adam felt a surge of gratitude for the unseen man who had spoken, then the search party began to form into a line.
“That was Simon Stoltzfus,” Joe said as they trudged on again. “He has the farm directly across the woods from here. His little girl—Lizzie—disappeared a couple of months ago.”
Don’t say it, I don’t want to know. The protest was instinctive. But even as it reared up inside Adam, he knew it was too late. Until that point, Mariah’s betrayal had been a personal thing, something just between the two of them. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of anything more than that. It was selfish, it was ugly, but Bo’s disappearance was all he could deal with at the moment. The other children Sarah and Joe had spoken of had been faceless, anonymous.
Now one of them had a name. One of them had a father. And that man was helping him find Bo.
“Goddammit,” he growled aloud.
Joe glanced at him appraisingly. “For now,” he went on, “let’s just find our boys, before we get too fired up about the others. One thing at a time. Mostly that’s all God expects us to handle. We just have to have the wisdom to acknowledge it.”
Adam didn’t believe him. He walked on in silence.
It happened almost too easily. So easily, in fact, that when Adam heard the sneeze he simply kept walking. He thought it was one of the younger men to the right of him in the line. But, then, other furtive sounds followed—“Shh!”, then a grunt, then soft thuds.
Small fists. Pummeling. Adam’s heart stopped.
Sugar Joe reached out to grab his arm, to hold him back. He inclined his head to his right and waved his son on ahead, then he laid a finger to his lips. Adam broke off from the line and followed him as the others trooped onward. Nathaniel would tell them what had happened once they all got out of the woods.
The thudding, rustling noises stopped and silence fell again.
Briefly, too suddenly to be believed, the clouds over their heads shifted. And for a moment that left Adam’s skin pebbled with gooseflesh, the moon beamed down. It shot light through a gap in the tree cover, and for a crazy, impossible moment it seemed to Adam that the deadfall in front of them was illuminated by a ghostly, heavenly glow. Two pairs of eyes peered out from beneath the chaotic pile of wood and branches. Then, as quickly as it had happened, the moonlight was gone again. They were left in darkness.
“Hope we can find them before too long,” Joe said loudly. “What with it going down below zero tonight.”
Adam caught on. “I’m not so worried about the temperature as I am about that...” He thought fast. “That bear.”
“The grizzly, you mean? Well, I do believe he’s way up on the other side of the Stoltzfus place. That was where he was last spotted.”
“Yeah, but those suckers are big, Joe. They can cover a lot of ground real fast I’ve heard they can run as fast as any train.”
They were rewarded with a muffled squeak.
“As long as it’s not too hungry, I think the boys’ll be all right,” Sugar Joe answered.
“Yeah, probably,” Adam agreed. “But...”
“But what?” Joe forced a good shot of feigned alarm into his voice.
“Well, you just said it’s supposed to go down below zero tonight, right?”
“So?”
“So bears need a lot of food when it gets cold like that, to keep their body heat up. I read that somewhere. Seems to me that the lower it gets below freezing, the hungrier they get. I’ve heard they’ll eat anything, then.”
There was another faint squeal, then a thump. Joe went in for the kill.
“I never thought about that. Poor Sarah. She hasn’t stopped crying since Noah didn’t come home from school. Just think how she’s going to feel if all we find is, say, a scrap of Matt’s coat.”
“Or maybe just one of Noah’s fingers. I’ve heard grizzlies don’t eat fingers.”
“Nah, too bony, no meat on ’em. They spit them out.”
“Then all we might find is a pile of fingers.”
“Well, toes, too, I’d think.”
The men waited. Nothing. Then there was a harsh sniff.
“Hey, Joe, did you just hear something?”
“Like this, you mean?” Sugar Joe drew breath in through his nose.
“Just like that.”
“Could be the bear.”
“No,” came a small voice. “It ain’t the bear.”
Adam’s heart dropped down to his toes, then it bounced up again and filled his throat. “Who is it, then?”
“Me.” It was Matt’s voice. Bo was silent.
“Come on out, son,” Joe said. “Game’s over.”
“I can’t” Another long silence. “I broke the drainpipe.”
“I saw that.” Joe paused. “One way or the other, you’re going to be up late and cold as the dickens tonight. Either you’ll stay out here or you’ll be home fixing that pipe. Guess if I were you, I’d rather be working at the house. That bear won’t be as likely to come there, and your ma will have some hot cider waiting for you when you’re done.”
Matt scrambled out from beneath the deadfall. Adam scowled. There was barely enough room in there for two bodies. Bo remained silent. Was he in there?
Yeah, he thought, yeah. He had distinctly seen two pair of eyes.
“Noah?” he called.
“I ain’t coming. I’ll take my chances with the bear. Heard they sleep all winter, anyway. I think you’re wrong.”
Adam felt a choked laugh catch in his throat and something hot touch his eyes. Pride swelled. Smart kid. He took a deep, careful breath. He looked at Joe, ready to motion him to go on. He needed to talk to his kid. Then he realized that Sugar Joe and Matt had already left.
He looked at the deadfall. “So you’re that scared, huh?”
“I ain’t scared.”
“Maybe not.” But Adam was reasonably sure the teddy bear was beneath that pile of wood with him. “Maybe you just really, really don’t want to go back to Texas with me. I mean, if you’d rather freeze to death or get eaten by a bear, I guess you think Texas will be really bad.”
The quiet was broken by a hiccup this time. Adam’s heart clenched. Oh, God, was he crying?
“Texas?” the boy muttered finally. “You never said nothing about Texas.”
“Well, that’s where I came here from.”
“Miz Fisher told us about that place.”
Adam’s heart should have been all for Bo at the moment, but it spasmed at the mention of her name. “Yeah?” he prompted, and his voice changed.
“Are there still Indians there?”
“Uh, no. I mean, not wild ones. Not anymore.”
“Shoot.”
Adam’s face hurt from the biting cold, from the need to grin and frown all at once.
“Anyway, I don’t care about Texas,” Bo said finally. “I don’t care if there’s a million Indians there. I don’t want a new pa. The one I got is fine.”
One minute Adam was breathing reasonably fine, simply grappling with a few wayward emotions, and then there was nothing in his lungs at all. It hurt. God help him, it hurt badly. Who had told him he was his father?
“You still out there?” Bo asked when he didn’t answer.
“Yeah,” Adam managed. “Who told you anything about having a new pa?”
“Matt. He heard you. Yesterday.”
What the hell had he said? Adam couldn’t remember exactly, but he couldn’t believe it had been anything all that threatening. He’d said he’d stay here until Bo was ready for the change. He’d said he’d wait. Hadn’t he?
“Matt said you lied again,” Bo charged. “That you weren’t no stranger just come from the place I used to live. He said that you were my pa.”
“Well, I am,” Adam said
hoarsely. “But I’m not...new. I mean, I was your dad a long time ago, when you were little, before Sugar Joe. You know, when Matt didn’t remember you being around.”
“That’s what he said.” Bo’s voice trembled. It broke Adam’s heart.
“I’m not so bad.”
“You shoulda told me yesterday. When I was asking you questions.”
Adam started to agree with him. He opened his mouth, and heard himself say the exact opposite. “No.”
“No? How come?” Bo demanded.
And God help him, but Mariah’s voice, her words came back to him when he needed them most. “Sometimes a father can’t be entirely honest. Sometimes he wants to tell you more than anything in the world who you are, who he is, and he can’t; he’s got to hold back, because he loves you and he knows it’ll hurt you. Sometimes he wants to rush in because rushing is his style. And sometimes he holds back, because other things are more important.”
This time the silence was longer. Then there was a rustling sound stitched with cracks and snaps. Bo crawled out of the deadfall.
For a moment Adam thought his legs might fold in utter relief. But while Bo had come out, it quickly became clear that he wasn’t easily going to give another inch. He’s such a tough kid, Adam thought. I love him so. The years hadn’t changed that, would never even make a dent in it.
“So did you lie about the other, too?” Bo demanded, crossing his arms over his chest in a challenge.
“About what?” Adam felt his heart skid, because somehow he knew what was coming.
“About if I didn’t want to go with you. You said you’d hang around and wait ’til I did want to go.”
Unbidden, unwelcome, an image of Mariah’s face hung before his mind’s eye. He blinked hard and scrubbed a hand over his eyes to banish it. “I didn’t lie,” he managed. “I meant it. Then.”
“Oh, man! Figures.” Bo looked like he was going to cry. “I knew it.”
That was it for his legs. Adam sat hard on one of the fallen trees. “Well, you’re a true Wallace, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Bo asked suspiciously.
“You don’t trust the ground you’re standing on.” And maybe that was good, he thought. At least he wouldn’t fall blindly for a Mariah Fisher.