by Beverly Bird
Katya stared at him. He was being awful! His voice had taken on a bite, and—and then she saw Deborah straightened in her chair. The woman’s eyes took on a glaze of purpose. Oh my, she thought. Jacob had done that deliberately.
Katya held Sam a little more tightly. At last Deborah nodded.
“Start at the very beginning,” Jake said.
“Yes,” Deborah agreed. “But...there’s not much to tell. I was hanging laundry, putting clothes on the line. I didn’t want to leave her inside by herself so she was right there playing with her dolly while I finished.” Her voice cracked.
“Where?” Jake demanded.
Deborah began to rise to her feet.
“No,” he said quickly. “Show me later. For now, just give me an idea of how many feet she was away from you.”
Deborah scowled. “Ten? Fifteen?”
Close enough that she should have seen something, heard something, Jake thought. Why hadn’t she? “Go on.”
“Well, I reached down for one of my husband’s shirts. Into the basket, you know. I clipped it up and looked around the clothes again, and she was gone.”
Around the clothes. Jake bit back a curse. “Sheets?” he asked. “Big stuff? Were you putting up large items?”
“Yes, of course.”
The kidnapper must have loved that, he thought. Whoever it was had still taken a hell of a chance, but Deborah had helped him—or her—out. “This clothesline was between you and your daughter,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
Deborah nodded. She had begun to cry with remorse and anguish and a guilt so terrible Katya couldn’t even imagine it. She reached instinctively for the other woman’s hand.
“Can you show us where it happened now, Deborah? Exactly where you last saw her?” she asked softly.
Jake glanced at her and shot a brow up. “Getting into this, are you?” he asked wryly.
Katya blushed. “I just...I want to help.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “She’s right, Mrs. Stoltzfus. Can you show us where the clothesline is now?”
Deborah nodded. “But my husband and the others went all over the place. They looked and looked and found nothing. And it’s snowed eighteen inches since then.”
“Actually, that’s good,” Jake told her. And bad, he thought, but there was no need to get into the downside at this point.
“It is?”
“It is?” Katya echoed, surprised.
“Yeah. The snow might have sealed in evidence. There’s less chance that the wind, animals, kids, whatever, could have disturbed it.” He wasn’t wild about the idea of all those men having trooped around through there, though. He stood. “We need to borrow a couple of rakes, too, if you have them.”
We. Katya stared at him, amazed and delighted. We need rakes.
“Will pitchforks do?” Deborah asked. “We’ve got those.”
“That’ll be fine,” Jake answered.
The woman went to the back door and called out. A few moments later, an older boy came in with the pitchforks. He nodded at them solemnly and then went right back out.
They all bundled up again and went out through the front. They made their way to the side of the house. Katya wielded one pitchfork, Sam in her other arm, straddled over her hip. Jake carried the other, though he’d offered to take both. She’d refused. He thought she marched along like a determined soldier.
The snow crunched under their feet. Jake kept his eyes down, watching for anything the cows and horses might have left behind. It had nothing at all to do with the fact that the sight of her urgency touched him.
“Here,” Deborah said after a moment. Her voice grew thick with tears again. “Right here.”
Jake looked around.
The clothesline was between two trees, roughly twenty yards from the house. There was a tree line maybe thirty yards on the other side of it. He wasn’t sure why—maybe it was just instinct—but it all led him to believe that Lizzie had been handpicked ahead of time. She hadn’t been left alone in a crowd. She had ostensibly been protected and under her mother’s eye. He thought her kidnapper must have been watching her, watching this house, this family, waiting for an opportunity to take her.
It chilled him.
Beyond the clothesline were barns and various outbuildings. And beyond those were fields, fallow and hidden deep in snow. Most likely they would have been snow-covered then, too, he thought. If he had his bearings right, and Jake was pretty sure he did, then those fields eventually came up against one of the few paved settlement roads. Other than the woods and the outbuildings, there was really nowhere to hide and wait.
“Where was your husband when this happened?” he asked suddenly.
“He and Jamie—my four-year-old—were working the farm.”
The kidnapper probably hadn’t hidden in the outbuildings, then, Jake decided. Too risky. Simon could have entered any one of them at any time.
“Did the FBI agents go into the woods?” he asked.
Deborah frowned. “I don’t...they must have, wouldn’t you say? I don’t rightly remember.”
They might not have, Jake thought, thinking of his continuing education courses with the federal government. It was entirely possible that they had measured off a precise circumference to search. If they had gone in there, they wouldn’t have gone far.
“Did you notice any footprints in the snow?” he asked.
“No,” Deborah said wretchedly. “There wasn’t much on this side. The sun hits this side, and it melts quicker. And anyway, Lizzie had trampled all through it.”
Okay, Jake thought, scrap that. “And you never heard anything? No voices? She didn’t cry out?”
“Oh, I couldn’t bear it if she did!” Deborah cried irrationally.
She was sobbing again, beyond speaking. Katya took her hand in her free one, resting the pitchfork against her other hip. They had all hashed this over a thousand times, she. thought. She knew the answers as well as Deborah did.
“Deborah peeked over the line, but Lizzie just wasn’t there,” she explained. “There was no car or buggy on the road.”
The woods, Jake reasoned. Had to be the woods, then. “Good. That’s exactly the sort of thing I need to know.”
Katya’s heart swelled again. She thought frantically for other information she might give him. His approval was sweet. She wanted to clutch it close, to hold it. She wanted more. She blushed at her own silliness.
“Okay, Sherlock, let’s go. You can go back inside, Deborah. We can take it from here. I’ll stop in again before we go.”
“Yes.” The woman backed off more quickly than Jake might have expected, almost stumbling in her haste. “I hate coming out here,” she explained. “I haven’t even hung clothes since...since...” Her voice cracked again.
“Go,” Katya urged. “We’ll talk to you later.”
“No, wait,” Jake said suddenly. “Why don’t you take Sam? Free up Katya’s hands so she can help me.”
Deborah stared at him. Katya felt her heart thump. Her first reaction was protest. No, not now. Babies are being stolen. I need to keep him right by me. Then she understood, and her heart thumped harder.
Deborah blamed herself. There was precious little she could do for her, but she could trust her, and maybe in trusting her, she would help to ease some of that terrible guilt.
Jacob had thought of that. Her heart moved with something softer as she looked at him, then back at Deborah. “Yes,” she said softly. “That’s a wonderful idea. Sam, would you like to play here for a little while?”
“Pay,” he said. “Pay, pay.”
Deborah took him with a tremulous smile and turned toward the house. Jake watched her go, Sam’s big brown eyes peering over her shoulder.
Keep him safe, Deborah. Though he tried never to get too involved, never to let himself care too deeply about the kids, the parents, any victim, Jake felt a piece of his heart crack a little.
He shook his head. It was plainly stupid to allow that.
Still, he realized that he wanted to find little Lizzie Stoltzfus as badly as he had ever wanted anything before in his life. He was getting a real bad feeling about this. Something stank here. Something maybe more evil and wrong than even he could bear to think about.
Chapter 9
Jake started toward the trees, his mind working, then he realized that Katya wasn’t with him. He looked back at her.
“Who’s Sherlock?” she asked. “Why did you call me that?”
Jake stared at her. “Holmes?” he prompted after a moment.
“I don’t know him.”
“Are you kidding me?”
He saw her stiffen. Her eyes slid away. “No,” she said in a small voice, then she marched into the trees with her pitchfork.
“He’s a fictional character,” Jake called after her, unaccountably disturbed. “A detective in a book.”
She didn’t look back. He went after her and just barely heard her response.
“We never read make-believe books in school. There were just lessons.” Then she brightened, smiling slowly, her eyes coming back to him. “You were calling me a detective?”
“I was kidding.” He was bemused. His head felt foggy.
“Oh.” The light went out of her eyes again.
“I was—never mind.” How was he supposed to deal with a woman who wore her heart and everything in it on her sleeve this way? A woman who didn’t even know who Sherlock Holmes was?
“This Sherlock man,” she went on after a moment, “is he very entertaining?” She thought how wonderful it would be to sit down after the children were in bed and read a book. She had so few chores now. Adam and Mariah did not have a farm. There just wasn’t as much work for her to do as there once had been when she was living with Frank, even though she looked for things to keep her busy.
As for Frank, he would have hit her for sitting down and indulging herself in a book about a fictional detective. But oh, it sounded delicious.
“Well, it’s a good read in an old-fashioned sort of way,” Jake explained, and thought that might suit her. “It was written a long time ago. I tend to go for more modern stuff myself. True-crime things.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “What must I do to be like him?”
He almost laughed. “You mean to help out here now?”
“Yes, please.”
He gave into it. A bark of laughter escaped him. He couldn’t help it. He rubbed his forehead, feeling that bemused sensation coming on again.
“Well, I’ll show you,” he said finally. “It’s not an optimum technique, but given the weather and what we’ve got to work with, it’ll have to do.” He started walking again.
She followed him eagerly. He felt rather than saw her shiver.
“Cold?” he asked, frowning, wondering if she would hold up through this chore.
She shook her head. He saw a strand of white blond hair come loose and curl under her chin. “I’m excited.”
He made a sound in his throat. “Don’t be. Odds are that we’re going to spend all day out here freezing our butts off and not find a damned thing.”
“But it must be done, right?” she asked hopefully. Her heart was beginning to pound with anticipation. This was more than she had counted on. She’d thought all she’d be able to do was drive the buggy.
He watched her face change. She was too innocent, he thought again. Too sweet. Too willing. “Yeah,” he agreed finally.
“I just...rake?”
“Uh, no.”
She was already standing close enough to him that he didn’t have to close any distance between them. He put his hands on her shoulders. Carefully. He turned her around until her back was against his chest. He felt her shiver again. Then he realized his hands were lingering and he snatched them back.
And he could still feel her shiver.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Uh, like this.” He put his arms around her. Carefully again. He closed his hands over hers on the pitchfork and dragged it toward them through the snow.
“Just keep doing that?”
“What?”
“Just keep moving the fork like that?”
He shook his head as though to clear it. “No. Stop between each swipe. Look and see if you’ve turned up anything. Then move the tines, say...half an inch to the right. Do the same thing there, in neat lines, until you’ve covered all the ground in whatever given area you’ve set for yourself.” He paused. “See anything?”
“Where?”
“In the lines the tines made.”
She leaned forward to peer down. Her bottom nestled comfortably and warmly into his groin. Jake stepped back fast.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “What?”
“What?”
“Is something wrong, Jacob?”
Innocent. Sweet. Somebody’s mother. Somebody’s wife. Worse, a lot of somebodies’ mother.
There were so many reasons for not getting turned on by this woman. Big mistake. Wrong avenue. Too many complications. Tentacles. Ensnarements. Problems. She wasn’t for him. No way. Not at all. Black tights, a longish dress and sensible shoes, he thought desperately.
He tried hard, damned hard, to remember those little red bandannas on the waitresses’ hips at Clyde and Bob’s just a few short days ago. And he kept seeing the way her hair was spilling out from that knot at her nape. One long, thick strand had come free.
His hand came up again and he found himself touching it. It was gossamer. It was silk. It was cool and thick to the touch, and it slid through his fingers like water.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, her eyes growing.
Damned if I know. He jerked his hand back and turned away from her. “Just... rake. Look into the furrows and see if there’s anything in there that shouldn’t be,” he repeated hoarsely. “Anything that doesn’t belong in a forest. Gum wrappers. Cigarette butts. That sort of thing. If there’s nothing, do it all over again and dig the tines deeper, until you get to the ground. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t have to go too far into the trees. He almost had to have waited right near here, so he could see Lizzie, so he would know when to strike.”
“Yes,” she said again.
“I’ll work this side,” he finished.
He began wielding the other pitchfork with a vengeance. He looked back once to see her brow furrowed in concentration. She was doing fine. He looked at his watch. Barely nine-thirty. It was going to be a very long day, he realized.
They worked for a good hour before she called out to him. He propped his fork against a tree and went to look down at the place she pointed to. There was a candy-bar wrapper at the bottom of her most recent furrow. She’d had the good sense not to pick it up herself. He took a plastic bag out of the pocket of Adam’s coat that he’d had the foresight to bring from Mariah’s kitchen. He nudged the scrap of paper inside.
“What does it mean?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Either that our kidnapper likes Snickers candy bars, or that one of the kids has a sweet tooth.”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Not for this sort of thing. Deborah would never buy sweets when she could just as easily make them at home.”
Which meant, Jake thought, that the Amishmen who had trooped through here probably hadn’t been munching on chocolate, either. “So what are the odds that Lizzie—or any of the kids—sneaked some for themselves?” he asked.
“How? Where would they get it?”
And why would any of them come into the woods to munch on it? he asked himself. To hide such a travesty from their mothers? “That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “A store in the village?”
Katya shook her head. “Jacob, for heaven’s sake, Lizzie was—is—barely two.”
“Maybe one of the older kids bought it for her.”
“No, they wouldn’t go into Divinity alone. And what would they buy it with?”
“Allowance money?” Or they shoplifted it, Jake thought, tr
ying to convince himself that kids were the same everywhere. Not really believing it, not from what he’d seen of Katya’s children and Bo.
“What’s that?” she asked, frowning.
“What’s what?”
“Allowance money.”
He stared at her, dumbfounded. “It’s sort of a little salary kids get at the end of the week for doing their chores.”
“Your children get paid for it?”
“Mine don’t,” he snapped, unaccountably irritated. “I’ve always been real careful not to acquire any for myself. I told you that.”
She blushed. “I meant anner Satt Leit children in general.”
Of course she did. He rubbed a frown off his forehead. What was she doing to him? “Then, yeah. They get paid. In most instances. In good homes anyway.” Not that he had had a lot of experience with one of those, but as a kid he’d had a few lucky friends who’d enjoyed perks like spending money.
Let them populate the earth, he thought.
Katya shook her head as if deep in thought. She tucked the strand of hair behind her ear again. He caught the reflex. He felt a vague itch in his fingers, as though they wanted to do it for her. Jake shoved his gloved hands deep into his pockets.
“That’s amazing,” she murmured finally. “And strange.”
“Why strange?”
“That a child would need such incentive to make his family’s farm thrive.”
“Well, for God’s sake, most other kids don’t live on farms!” He didn’t know why he was so angry about this. “I don’t know,” he went on more levelly. “Maybe those who live on farms do work just to make their land prosper. But the majority of anner Satt Leit kids live in towns and cities.”
“Yes, of course,” she said softly.
He went back to his pitchfork. “Get to work. We’ve got a lot to do here in a short period of time,” he said stiffly. Then he added, “That was real good, finding the wrapper.”
He tried belatedly to remember how far down in the drift it had been without going back over to the spot, without standing close beside her again to look. Six inches, maybe. Could have been there since the abduction. Lizzie had been the last child taken, right after New Year’s. Deborah had said eighteen inches of new snow had fallen since then, but that much wouldn’t have accumulated here in the woods. It would have been filtered somewhat by the limbs above, naked though they were at this time of year.