Marrying Jake

by Beverly Bird

  “I’ll go now,” she gasped and began circling the bed, giving him a wide berth. He caught her arm anyway, just above the elbow. She cried out. And once more, she could feel the heat of his grip clear through to her soul.

  He dropped his hand after he had stopped her. She gingerly rubbed the spot he had touched.

  “Where’s Adam?” he asked roughly.

  “Adam?”

  “My brother.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. He’s helping the men put up another new school,” she blurted. “He should be back right after sundown.” He hadn’t asked where Mariah was, but she rushed on, telling him anyway. “Mariah is teaching, and she should be home any time now. My children also.”

  “That whole brood was yours?” He looked appalled.

  “Oh, no. Bo is Adam’s.” She flushed and closed her eyes, mortified all over again. Of course he knew who Bo was! She was so stupid, just as Frank had always said.

  “And Matt is a Lapp,” she went on tremulously, unable to look at him now. “He belongs to Sarah and Sugar Joe. He was just sleeping over.”

  He wasn’t sure what he’d thought all those kids were doing here. He’d been too tired to make sense of it. “Dear God.” He looked away from her, then back, still frowning. “Four of them? You have four?”

  She nodded. “I’ll take you to Adam, if you like.”

  “No,” he said too quickly, too instinctively, for comfort.

  He wanted to say, Keep your distance. Just stay right there. It was on the tip of his tongue. And he had no inkling why it seemed so important. Women were a dime a dozen—soft ones, hard ones, thin ones, round ones, all with their own unique virtues. He could enjoy them fully and walk away just as easily. They could come close or they could stay away. Neither reaction bothered him particularly.

  But this one really had him rattled. He needed to keep far afield of her. That instinctive necessity made his skin feel too tight for his body. Maybe it was her blushes. Maybe it was her innocence. Four kids or not, he could scarcely believe how innocent she seemed. If she had stood there and told him that she had found them all in cabbage patches, he’d probably believe her.

  “You don’t want to hang around with me too much,” he finally said hoarsely, and he felt like a fool again.

  She brought her chin up a notch. “No, sir. I don’t. But I...owe you.”

  “Don’t call me sir!”

  She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, that just really sets me off.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I’m not that damned old.”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t owe me anything, for God’s sake. Are we back to that knock on the head again?”

  “Yes.” She gave a small nod in the direction of her toes.

  He had already learned that these people were long on virtue. This woman had a palpable goodness to her that was the first thing a man noticed about her. He’d thought she was an angel.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll tell you what. Just point me in the right direction to find Adam, and we’ll call ourselves even.”

  She hesitated, then finally looked up again. “That would be fine.”

  “Okay.” He waited. She didn’t move. “Katya.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to drop this blanket now so I can shower and get dressed.”

  “Oh!” She bolted for the door.

  “Wait!” he called out as something else occurred to him. No electricity, he recalled. No phones. No running water? “There is a shower, right?”

  She had stopped cold in the hall and looked back at him. “Of course. We’re not heathens.”

  “I never thought that.”

  She hesitated, then gave a little nod. “The men dug a well late last night. Everything’s working fine.”

  Thank God. Splashing around in the horse trough would have been a little bit more than he could stand.

  “Okay,” he muttered. Still, she hovered. “Go on—get out.” He waved a hand at her. This time she vanished like smoke.

  He stared at the door where she had been, feeling a little bemused, which was not an emotion he’d ever experienced before in his life. It was almost impossible to believe that less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d been in a country-western bar in Washington, in a really good mood and enjoying the hell out of himself.

  Chapter 5

  Jake found Adam with a minimum of fuss. Katya’s directions were excellent. Unfortunately, he had to walk. Several more tours of his brother’s property had not turned up a rental car anywhere. That worried him as much as anything had yet.

  The sun was starting to set and the crew was just finishing up when he strolled into the new school yard. Six men hammered and nailed away, and Jake stood back, unobserved for a couple of minutes. He gathered from their conversation that they’d been rotating all day so that no one man would have to remove himself from his farm for more than two hours. That would have slowed them down. Adam, apparently, had been here since morning. Adam didn’t have a farm, and Jake devoutly hoped he never took it into his head to get one.

  “We didn’t arrange for anyone to be here in the morning,” one man called out as he scrambled down from the roof.

  “Thought for sure we’d get done today,” someone else remarked.

  “Fresh snowfall bollixed us up.”

  “I can finish up by myself tomorrow,” Adam offered.

  “Shouldn’t be necessary,” Jake said.

  They all turned to look at him. Jake was hard-pressed to tell them apart. They all wore beards ranging from black to blond to gray. They all wore broad-brimmed hats. There were six pairs of black broadfall pants, black boots, colored shirts—mostly blue—and black suspenders.

  All except Adam. But suddenly Jake realized that it didn’t look as though Adam had shaved in several days, either. Something else he needed to worry about.

  “You can finish in half an hour,” he observed. “Give or take. Why quit now?”

  “Supper’s on. Cows need to come in and get hayed. Horses need to be settled down for the night. And it’s getting too dark to see,” someone responded. “We didn’t bring lanterns.”

  “And there’s a whole section of shingles to put on up there,” another guy said, pointing to the roof.

  “Give me that hammer,” Jake returned.

  A man dutifully turned it over.

  “Come with me, bro. You guys start handing the shingles up. Who’s got the tar? Okay, we need to rig that bucket with a pulley, then the rest of you can go. We can take it from here.”

  He worked because it was easier than what he had to discuss with his brother. He worked because three years ago, he’d been temporarily suspended from the D.P.D. when a female witness had charged him with sexual misconduct. He had never touched her and had never even implied that he’d like to. Work was work, and pleasure was pleasure. He always drew the line. Still, it had taken Internal Affairs a few months to reach that conclusion.

  In the meantime, Jake had hired on with a construction crew. He enjoyed it, baking in the Texas sun, straining muscles that had gone softer than he would have liked since he’d left the police academy. It wasn’t quite as good as playing cowboy, but it had felt just fine. He’d learned his share of nifty shortcuts, a few of which wouldn’t put the quality of the building at risk. Like everything else, those shortcuts had nestled in the back of his brain, waiting for a time when they were needed.

  Like now.

  They were finished with the roof within twenty minutes, although he realized that the chimney bricks still needed to be laid in. Jake climbed down from the roof again, his bare hands nearly frozen. Most of the men had stayed anyway. One of them tossed him a pair of gloves. Jake caught them in the air, frowning.

  “I’m going home to supper,” the man said. “I won’t need them. You’re going to hang around and finish up. Am I right?”

  Jake looked at the chimney again. More than it needed him,
he needed it. He wasn’t sure why he felt this compulsion to keep moving, but it was there. He thought of Katya’s innocence again. Of her terror. Presumably she was still back there at Adam’s house. “Might as well,” he answered.

  He pulled the gloves on. The last of the men drifted off to various buggies, hitching the horses up to the vehicles again. It took a surprisingly short amount of time, but then Jake figured they had been doing the task all their lives and could probably accomplish it with their eyes closed by now.

  Adam shoved his own gloved hands into his coat pockets and watched him climb back onto the roof. “So?” Adam prompted finally.

  “You have any mortar mixed?” Jake asked.

  “‘Round the corner here. I’ll get it.”

  He was going to stay, Adam realized. He let himself grin once, briefly. Mostly he was relieved for the sake of the missing babies, but a part of his heart was solely centered on Jake. Although his brother didn’t know it, he needed this settlement, Adam thought. It was a good place to unwind, to calm down and take stock.

  “How long?” Adam called up to him. “How long will you stay?”

  “Start shoving those bricks up here,” Jake answered.

  Adam loaded half of them into a new basket and used the pulley to send them up. He climbed the ladder himself and perched at the edge of the roof, smearing them with the mortar, handing them over to Jake.

  “I need to get to a phone tonight,” Jake said after a while. “I’ve got to call into the department and make sure they don’t need me.”

  “There’s one at the end of the lane.”

  Jake looked in that direction, surprised.

  “Another slight change with this new gemeide.” Adam explained. “The people have always been permitted to borrow anner Satt Leit phones in the event of an emergency. So Sugar Joe Lapp and the new deacons have had three public phones installed in those areas closest to the village, where the service lines still reach. See that little wooden thing way down there?” He pointed.

  Jake looked into the gathering darkness. He could just make it out now, but he had noticed it before. “Yeah. I thought it was an outhouse.”

  “Phone booth.”

  “Good thing I didn’t try to use it.”

  “Yeah.” Adam chuckled. “The Amish aren’t against civilization. They’re against civilization breaking up the strength and solidarity of their families. As long as the phones aren’t actually in their homes, disrupting family time, they’re okay. And these are pay phones. The deacons collect the money and use their share for people suffering hard times.”

  Jake gave him a strange look. “You sound like a damned travel brochure.”

  Adam shrugged. “Sorry. You just always liked to know the why of things, so I thought I’d tell you.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said grumpily, working again. He was quiet for a long time. “If the department will spare me, I’ll hang around for a week,” he said finally. “I’ll see what I can get started. I should be able to learn enough in that time to finish things off out of the ChildSearch office back home.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Adam said mildly.

  “Okay, then,” Jake said.

  “Okay,” Adam agreed.

  “You’ve got no room for me in that house, do you?” And inside Jake’s head, a voice pleaded. Tell me no, tell me you’ll put me up in a motel. A motel where innocent women with wide blue eyes wouldn’t creep up to his bedside.

  “We’ll make room,” Adam answered.

  “Great,” Jake bit out.

  “Give her a chance, Jake,” his brother said quietly. “Please.”

  Jake looked at him sharply, something thumping him squarely in the breastbone. “This morning you were telling me she wasn’t for me!” he snapped.

  Adam scowled. “I was talking about Mariah.”

  Jake’s breath shot out of him. “Oh. Sure.”

  Adam began making his way down the ladder again. Jake followed him and they packed up the remaining bits and pieces of the construction site. That was when Jake noticed there was still one buggy left and one horse grazing. And damned if it didn’t look like the one he’d made intimate acquaintance with early this morning.

  “No way,” Jake muttered. “Uh-uh. I’ll walk.”

  “It’s got to be five miles back to the house.”

  “I made it here on foot, didn’t I?”

  Adam looked at him oddly. “What’s the point here? You’ve ridden before, cowboy.”

  “On them. Not behind them, and it’s been a real long time regardless.”

  Adam waited.

  “Look, I just don’t want to get all sucked up in this quaint way of life, okay?” Jake said finally, defensively. And he wondered why he felt such a strong, instinctive aversion toward it. Sort of like the strong, instinctive need he felt to steer clear of Katya Essler.

  Adam shrugged, knowing better than to push him. “Whatever. Catch you back at the house.”

  Jake only stood staring at the buggy. He thought of piles of horse manure invisible in the darkness. He thought of marauding buggies without horns. And the damned ever-present cold that was seeping back into his bones now that he wasn’t working, moving, staving it off. “Damn it,” he snapped.

  Adam was waiting for him. He’d gotten the horse hitched up with a lot more difficulty than the other guys had had. Jake walked around to the front of it and looked the horse in the eye.

  “Not a word,” he warned in an undertone. “I’ll be holding the whip.” Then he went around to the passenger side and levered himself up onto the seat. “We don’t belong here, you know,” he said at last. “We can’t step back in time and be like them.”

  Adam said nothing. They clop-clopped onto the road in silence. Then, finally, he shrugged. “Probably not. But I want to.”

  Jake decided to ignore that. It made his heart kick with something too much like real fear. “So what’s her story?” he asked after a moment.

  Adam felt a wary feeling roll over in his gut. He knew whom his brother was talking about this time, and it wasn’t Mariah.

  “Leave her alone, Jake.”

  “There’s more to it than a hard time,” Jake went on as though his brother hadn’t spoken. “That woman didn’t just come off a hard time. She’s like a rabbit caught in headlights. She’s terrified. She jumps if someone says boo.”

  “Yeah.” Adam scowled. He didn’t want to tell him.

  Adam knew there were two things in the whole world that consistently lit a fire under Jake Wallace. He’d tell anyone who cared to listen that he didn’t like kids. But let someone, anyone, snatch a kid away against his will, hurt him, threaten him, and Jake was right there, ready to set things straight.

  He was the same way with battered women. They’d both watched their own mother get smacked more times than they could count. Their little sister, too. Their mother, Emma, had let it happen to all of them. And if Jake was right there when a child needed him, well, then... Adam had once seen him nearly kill a man who’d had the unfortunate timing of swatting his girlfriend on the same street Jake was traveling. Jake had jumped out of his car in the middle of traffic to do it, causing gridlock for two blocks in each direction.

  If he told Jake about Katya Essier, Adam knew that one of two things would happen. Frank Essler would be in danger of becoming a dead man. Or Jake would use that rakish charm to endear himself to Katya, to get close to her and watch over her, to keep her safe. Then he would leave again, and Katya’s heart would be broken once more. No, she definitely didn’t need Jake Wallace in her life.

  “He smacked her around,” Jake said, and it wasn’t a question. “Her husband smacked her around, right? Does he drink?”

  Adam let out a breath as he drove the horse onward. “Yeah,” he said finally. It was pointless to argue.

  “What about all those kids?” Jake demanded. “Did he hurt the kids, too?”

  “It’s past, Jake. You can’t do anything about it now.”

  “I
’m just asking a question,” he said angrily.

  Adam sighed. “Only the oldest. He slugged the oldest girl. And only once. The night before Mariah...helped her get away.” It still bothered Adam to think about the danger she’d put herself in. “She used to check in on Katya every morning—they’d meet in the barn. One day after I’d left for Texas, Katya didn’t show up. Mariah barged into the house and boarded them up in Katya’s bedroom. She tied the sheets together and they used them to work their way down from the second-floor window.” And if Frank had caught them at it, Adam knew the man would have killed both of them. Adam’s heart spasmed, though the incident was nearly a month behind them now.

  Jake whistled tunelessly. “Good for her.” He felt a surge of respect for Adam’s wife. “So what’s Mrs. Essler going to do now?” Emphasis on the Mrs., he thought.

  “I don’t know,” Adam answered. “She needs to figure out a way to support herself, then I guess we’ll all build her a little house close to ours. Until then, she can stay with us.”

  Jake nodded. “What are the odds that she’s one of those who’ll go back for more?”

  “Given what she did to you this morning, I’d say nil. She fought back, and that’s against her religion.”

  “If she leaves your place, this guy can get to her. If she’s living alone, she has virtually no protection. Guys like this don’t give up, bro, no matter what the woman wants or how hard she tries to stay clear. They just follow.”

  “Yeah,” Adam agreed unhappily. “I know.”

  “Well, hell. Guess this sort of thing happens all over the place, huh? Even here in God’s little Divinity.”

  “I guess it does.” But here it was harder—almost impossible—for a victim to escape, he thought.

  They had stopped in front of Adam’s house. Adam got out, but Jake only sat, staring at the place. Houses looked different at night without electricity, he realized. Homier. Warmer. Light didn’t glare out the windows; it glowed. Softly. It had almost a golden hue.

  “Go on in,” he told Adam. “I’ll take care of the beast.”

  Adam raised a brow. “Do you know how?”