Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  And yet...she did nothing. She planned to call those people, she really did, but she simply couldn’t find the energy. She muddled through—until Katya didn’t peek out of her barn on Friday morning.

  For a long time Mariah only stood in the snow, confused. More had fallen, and bitter flurries were beginning to sting her cheeks again. She dragged her shawl closer about her shoulders and wondered if she was early. Or late. She honestly didn’t know, and had no clue what to do now. For two years she had been checking on Katya nearly every weekday morning, for fear that her friend wouldn’t be able to show up. Now that it had happened, she was lost.

  Then an angry male voice cracked into the quiet morning. “You there! You! Get out of here!” She pivoted a little in place. She saw Frank Essler coming at her from across the nearest paddock. “You’ve caused my family enough trouble! Now go!”

  “I have?” Mariah stared at him. Of all the people she had caused hurt to, she did not think Katya or her children had been among them.

  Frank didn’t answer. He picked up a muddy bullwhip as he came across the paddock. He had never been especially neat or orderly with his equipment, she thought absently. It was one of the things people didn’t care for about him. He bore down on her, lifting the thing high, as though to strike her with it.

  And she still couldn’t move.

  “What are you, dense or deaf? I told you! Go! You’re trespassing!”

  It was true. She was. “Where’s Katya? What have you done to her?”

  The bullwhip came down hard and fast, slicing the air just inches from her right shoulder. A warning. Mariah couldn’t find the will to wince, even reflexively. She barely heard its crack.

  Then, suddenly, the muddy curtain lifted. Rage filled her.

  This man could not hurt her. He could do nothing to her that would inflict more pain than she had already perpetrated upon herself. She pushed brazenly past him. For a moment he was so stunned he didn’t follow her.

  It didn’t last. She heard his footsteps and began running. “If you’ve killed her, Frank, I’ll call the police!” she called back to him. “What will the deacons do? Shun me?” She laughed hysterically with the rush of new emotion, emotion that had been gone for so many days now. She reached the back door of the house just ahead of him and dragged it open, rushing inside.

  Katya’s children were still seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. Rachel had a swollen red cheek. The bruise was going purple-yellow around the edges. Mariah gasped.

  “You?” she cried. “You too, how?” Her head swam with the horror of it.

  Rachel’s eyes slid away.

  “Where is she?” Mariah pleaded. “One of you, please—” But then Frank came in behind her and she fled again.

  She hit the entryway, skidding, and grabbed the banister to stop her momentum. Then she raced up the stairs. She had no clue which was Katya’s bedroom—she had never been permitted to enter this house. It didn’t matter. She glanced in each door she passed until she found her friend.

  Katya was in bed. Her left eye was swollen shut.

  “Oh, dear God,” Mariah whispered.

  “What are you doing here?” Katya struggled to sit up, stunned.

  By way of an answer, Mariah slammed the door closed and shoved a shoulder against a dresser to push it in front of it.

  “Are you crazy?” Katya demanded. “He’ll kill both of us!”

  Mariah leaned back against the dresser, out of breath. Then the confusion began settling on her again. “You’ve alive. Why didn’t you come to the barn?”

  She began crying harder. “I think I broke my leg. I went down and made breakfast, but then I just needed...I had to rest it.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Mariah said again, moving to the bed. Frank’s fists began pummeling the door. That was when she realized what she had done. They were trapped in here. If Katya’s leg was broken, they couldn’t even climb out the window. She could, but she would have to leave Katya behind to face her husband’s wrath.

  That was something she would not do.

  She bit her lip hard. She had wreaked havoc on so many lives lately, and what she had done to Adam—making him wait to find Bo, deluding him as to her motives—was the most bitter pill to swallow of all. Now she had brought the fury of Frank Essler down on Katya’s head all over again. But this time, God help her, this time she wouldn’t cower, wouldn’t quit halfway.

  “You didn’t break your leg!” she snapped.

  Katya looked away. “No. He pushed me down the stairs. He was angry because Sugar Joe Lapp visited. Sugar Joe has been trying to organize the Gemeide into going up against the deacons to find those children.”

  Mariah’s heart leaped. Thank you, Joe Lapp. She had never expected anyone to help her on that issue, and was not in the least surprised that that particular man had.

  Frank started pounding on the door again. Mariah spun that way to shout at him. “Stop it, Frank! Stop it! I’m not going to let you get away with this anymore!”

  Katya gaped at her. “You’ve lost your mind.”

  “What can they do to me?” Mariah asked with a smile that was only bitter around the edges.

  “They can do a lot to me,” Katya answered simply. “Frank can.”

  The truth of that overwhelmed her, if only for a moment. Then Mariah recovered and rushed to the window. It was one of those that faced the road. That was good. She turned back to the bed and began ripping off the blankets.

  “He won’t kill you. He won’t hurt you again. I won’t let him. Anyway, what does this have to do with Sugar Joe?”

  “Rachel slipped,” Katya explained absently, watching her friend, little furrows deepening between her eyes. “She blurted out that she thought you were going to do something about finding those children. Which would have been fine—everyone has thought that since Adam came here and I told them about his company. But Rachel said something about hearing you say so in the barn.”

  Mariah closed her eyes briefly. “I’m so sorry.”

  Katya smiled thinly. “It’s not your fault. You never dragged me out there to meet you. I did it because it’s the only sanity, the only respite I have.” She eyed the blankets and sheets Mariah was knotting together. “I can do this,” she decided suddenly, her eyes widening, then narrowing with determination. “I have one good leg.”

  “Yes,” Mariah agreed. “You do. And we’ll manage.”

  Color was coming to Katya’s cheeks now, healthy color this time, but then it faded abruptly.

  “What?” Mariah demanded, tying furiously now, dumping the linked portions out the window as Frank pounded harder. “Don’t you come in here, Frank!” she screamed, hoping to keep him at the door so he wouldn’t realize what they were up to on the other side of the house. “I’ll...I’ll shoot you! I’ll do it with your own hunting rifle!”

  “It’s not loaded!” He threw his shoulder into the effort.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, help me,” Katya whispered, then she rallied again. “I know where your ammo is, Frank! Stay out!” She slid off the bed in her nightgown and hopped toward Mariah on her good leg. The bad one was a mottled purple color at her ankle.

  “If nothing else, we’ve got to get you to a doctor,” Mariah muttered grimly.

  “But—”

  “You’ll go to my house,” she decided. “He’d never be caught dead going in there because of my Meidung. When the kids come to school—he’ll have to let them attend because you know how the deacons get about that—I’ll bring them home with me after class.”

  “Yes.” Katya’s voice was breath, terrified. But Frank would have to let the children go to school. The government watched the Amish education system closely, just waiting for them to make a mistake. The settlement’s agreement stipulated that if the youngsters missed school to work in the fields, then the community would lose the right to educate them themselves. The deacons got upset when children skipped for anything other than genuine illness.

  If Frank kept the
m all home today, then the deacons would certainly know why, and he wouldn’t invite their inspection of his life. And yet...

  “This is worse than what you did!” Katya blurted.

  Mariah shot her a quick look as she worked their ladder to the ground. “Yes.”

  “The church won’t let me leave him!” She was overwhelmed with committing a sin of such magnitude. The ban against divorce and separation was so carved in granite it wasn’t even mentioned in the Ordnung. It went without saying.

  “And if you stay, you’ll die. Or worse, your children will,” Mariah bit out ruthlessly. “He hit Rachel, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Katya whispered miserably.

  “Oh, Katya, I told you! I told you it was just going to get worse and worse, the longer it went on without him getting caught!” -

  “He wasn’t even drunk last night,” Katya said helplessly. “He just...went off. It only ever happened before when he was drinking, but last night he just snapped. But what can I do about it?” she wailed.

  “You can stay with me. I have some money saved. I can support us for a while.”

  “They’ll shun me! I don’t think I can...I couldn’t bear living the way they’ve made you live.” She began weeping.

  “You won’t have to, Katya,” Mariah said quietly. “You’ll have me. I’ve had no one.” There was a particularly terrifying cracking sound as the door began to give. “We’ve got to go now,” she warned in an undertone. “The - wood is going to crack.”

  Katya took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do it.” She looked down at herself, at her nightgown, then up at Mariah again. “Oh, gosh. I’ve got to change first!”

  “No.” Mariah managed to crack a smile. “Look at it this way—no sane woman would run from her house in her nightgown unless she left some unspeakable horror behind. Even if the deacons won’t believe you about Frank, the Gemeide women will have to after you do this.”

  Katya managed a trembling smile of her own. She scrubbed her hands over her cheeks. She peered out at the ground through the open window. It looked like an awfully long way to the ground.

  “Geronimo.” she said weakly.

  Chapter 21

  “Your first tactical error was the two-week bit.” Jake took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, popped the top and aimed it for the trash can with a quick overhand flick of his wrist. Then he pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, turned it around and straddled it backward.

  Adam didn’t answer. He continued to glare at the kitchen table as if it somehow offended him.

  Actually, it did. He’d opened the Dallas house, but while some of the furniture had still been in place, he’d sold and given away a lot of pieces over the years. So he’d bought a new kitchen table and a few other assorted pieces, but the table was the pièce de résistance. It was a big, slamming butcher-block thing with faux marble inserts on the top. The salesman had said it would seat fourteen easily. Adam knew that so many people would never sit at it, not in this lifetime, but he’d hoped it would at least look right to Bo, like the kind of table he was used to.

  Another tactical error, he thought grimly. They’d felt small and lost sitting there, like specks in a vacuum. They’d both been overwhelmed by the empty enormity of the thing, even on the many occasions when Jake had joined them for meals.

  “I mean, I’ve caught him forgetting to act mad and grumpy more than once these last couple days,” Jake went on. “If you only had a couple more weeks—”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t,” Adam snapped. Tomorrow was Tuesday. The two weeks were up. And though he hadn’t actually asked Bo yet, he knew as well as he knew his own name that his son didn’t want to hang around in Texas any longer.

  Their time here hadn’t been all bad. Jake was right—sometimes, especially in the past week, some boyish wonder at this surprise or that burst through Bo’s gloom. Sometimes he relaxed. The first couple of nights he’d had nightmares, but Adam had figured out easily enough that he was just scared sleeping in his big double bed all by himself, so he’d brought him into his own room.

  Things were coming along. It was happening slowly and painstakingly, but it was happening. With another couple of weeks at his disposal, Adam might even have been able to shake Bo loose from some of the tentacles of that settlement.

  “They’re like some kind of cult!” he exploded suddenly, angrily.

  Jake shrugged one shoulder. “They are a cult, bro, in the purest sense of the word. Hell, they were a ‘cult’ before anyone else ever heard of one, before the things started getting nasty and twisted connotations.”

  “They tell kids they have a choice,” Adam ranted on, “but do they? They don’t make them get baptized or whatever until they’re ready to get married, but by that point they don’t know anything else! They say they wait until the kids are old enough to make an educated decision about committing themselves, but they can’t make an educated decision if they don’t know what the hell else is out there, if they’ve been brainwashed from the cradle to believe it’s all wicked and evil! Jake, that boy won’t even watch TV!”

  “Yeah, actually he did,” Jake answered mildly. “I caught him at it yesterday when you were at the office. Those superhero dudes. His jaw was hanging open enough that I could have driven my car through it.”

  “And I bet as soon as you went in the room, he snapped it off, right?”

  Jake swigged from his beer. “Yeah, sure. But, hey, at least he turned it on in the first place.”

  Adam got up to get his own bottle. “God forbid he should turn on the Nintendo. He used to love that thing, remember? He could do that helicopter game when he was two, like some kind of genius. Up, down, pick up fuel, blow the hell out of the bad guy.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “I remember. I bought him that one.”

  “Now he won’t even look at it. He won’t let me cut his hair and he looks like a scarecrow.”

  “Hey,” Jake said. “Watch it there.” His own dark locks went a fair bit beyond his collar.

  “Yours is long because you like it that way. Or because you’re too lazy to get it cut. I never could figure out which.”

  “A little of both.” Jake admitted, drinking again. “Anyway, that ain’t no crew cut you’re sporting there, bro.”

  “The point is,” Adam growled. “he’s clinging to that hair for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Wrong to you,” Jake pointed out.

  “Wrong to Dallas! Wrong to the United damned States of America!”

  “Chill out. You’re going to wake him up.”

  But Adam was on a roll. For the first time in two weeks, he was venting. And damn it, it felt good. Up until now, this very moment, everything had been tangled inside, like some fishing wire they’d found wrapped around a duck once when they were kids.

  Sometimes he couldn’t even breathe for the tightness of it. Sometimes thoughts and memories snapped in his head like rubber bands. Mariah. Lizzie Stoltzfus. Sugar Joe Lapp. Can’t eat out in a restaurant because it disrupts family. And then always, always, Mariah again.

  “And that’s another thing,” he ranted on, pulling his mind off her again. “When we went to McDonald’s, I thought he was going to have a nervous breakdown.”

  “He probably was.” Jake answered. “But I got him to go outside onto that sliding board, didn’t I?”

  They hell of it was, Adam thought, the mind-boggling part of it was, that Jake was dealing with this mess better than he was. Jake...who had once fed Bo cheese when he was baby-sitting him, hoping to constipate him so he wouldn’t have to change a diaper.

  But Jake wasn’t quite as personally involved. Jake wasn’t wrapped up with fishing wire.

  “So what are you going to do?” Jake asked.

  Adam sat again, the air going out of him. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you better come up with something before about six o‘clock tomorrow morning, ’cause I can almost guarantee you that that’s going to be the first question out of his mou
th when he wakes up. Are we going home today?”

  Adam stiffened. “This is home.”

  Jake grunted noncommittally.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Adam said yet again.

  “Shouldn’t be too hard. You’ve only got two choices. Take him yourself, or wait until I get back next Friday. Then, I’ll take him.” Jake was heading out to Virginia on a morning flight. Periodically—every six months to a year—he went back to the FBI academy at Quantico for continuing-education courses. Like the first time he had enrolled there, sixteen years ago after college, nothing would come of it. They’d offer him a position. Jake Wallace would say thanks but no thanks, and he would come back to working long hours for relatively lousy pay with the Dallas PD.

  Never ever get too caught up in anything that makes you too happy, Adam thought bitterly. That was Jake’s motto. And maybe it was sane.

  “I promised him tomorrow,” Adam muttered.

  “Yours won’t be the first promise broken, bro.”

  “There’s a point.” But it wasn’t comforting. In fact, it made his gut roll with something thick and cold.

  “You know, at the risk of having my head taken off, I fail to see what the big deal is here,” Jake went on. “Go back. Hang around a week. Start all over again and this time talk him into staying here for a month.”

  The big deal is Mariah Fisher. Adam didn’t say it, because this time he was grappling with his own fair bit of guilt. He just didn’t want to get into that whole mess with Jake. Mostly because she was the biggest cause of the fishing wire, but also because he’d told his brother only that she had had that milk carton for five weeks. He had not filled him in on the other missing children. Not Jake the bloodhound. It would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Next thing Adam knew, the three of them would be back in the settlement while Jake grilled everyone and everything on two feet and four.