Marrying Jake

by Beverly Bird

  She didn’t answer. He stared at her, at the top of her head, her bonnet long gone now. Her blond hair shimmered in the lamplight. More snow was falling outside. The day had darkened as though in silent mourning for the woman they had found.

  “Hey,” he said finally, sitting beside her. He put his arms around her and drew her toward him.

  Letting himself touch her was easier now, after what had happened in the woods. That was both good and very bad. But at the moment, she needed comforting. Hell, for that matter, so did he.

  “Do you know,” he began quietly, “how very many times I’ve encountered someone dead or dying?” So many times, he thought. Life was ugly and people were unconscionably cruel to each other. “So many times,” he said aloud. “And I’ll let you in on a secret. What just happened to us was one of the worst.”

  She pulled back to look at him. “You’re lying, Jacob,” she said softly. “You’re lying to make me feel better.”

  “No.” And it was true. “No, there was something... spooky about that one. Something weird.” He thought about it, trying to put his finger on the difference, for his own sake as much as hers. “When I’m working and I get a call that there’s trouble, I know what I’m going to find. When I’m looking for a kid—with ChildSearch—I’m always aware that I might not like what I’m going to find when I get to the place where the clues lead. But that—what we came across today—hit us out of the blue. It thrust its way into a really nice moment.”

  Nice. Something shimmered inside her, almost glowing. He thought kissing her was nice? She’d already convinced herself that he regretted it. He’d been so irritable afterward, even before they’d found the body.

  “Neither one of us had any reason to expect what we found,” he went on. “If I hadn’t had to catch you when you fell back into the hole, I probably would have fainted myself.”

  “Now I know you’re lying,” she said tremulously, but he did make her want to smile. “You’d never faint. You’re too...brave.”

  “I did once,” he said awkwardly.

  Katya shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

  He decided to let it go. Actually, he’d been sixteen and he’d been knocked unconscious by his father’s fist when he’d tried to save his little sister from bouncing off her bedroom wall one more time.

  “Oh,” Katya breathed, suddenly grabbing his hand.

  “What?”

  “What’s happened to you? You’re hurt.”

  He looked down at his scratched and gouged palms. This trip was really killing him. “The deadfall happened,” he answered wryly. “With you unconscious, I pretty much had to take it apart limb by limb to get us out of there.”

  She flinched.

  “Damn it.” He caught her chin, made her look at him. “Don’t make me keep saying it, Katie. Your response was normal.”

  She didn’t looked convinced. He leaned close to her, so that their mouths were only a breath apart.

  “Then try this,” he murmured. “I never kiss tough old Amazons who can take a skeleton without reacting.”

  That got to her. Her mouth opened on a silent “Oh.” God, he thought, her responses were delightful.

  Then she paled yet again.

  “Was it... was that... oh, Jacob, please tell me that we didn’t find Lizzie,” she whispered.

  He jolted. “No. God, no, it wasn’t Lizzie. You can put that idea out of your mind. It was a woman.” And he was pretty sure he knew what woman it was.

  The sheriff had already come and gone, as well as the county coroner—a fumbling, overweight man who had set Jake’s teeth on edge. No matter what he’d been told, no matter what he’d learned here, Jake had been startled when the crowd of Amish that had gathered to see what the excitement was about had simply...well, disappeared at that point.

  As soon as they’d found the skeleton, as soon as he’d worked them both out of the hole, he’d collected Deborah and Sam and brought Katya back here in the buggy. He’d taken Adam to the deadfall to show him what they’d found. Deborah had ostensibly been staying with Katya, but somehow the woman had managed to spread the word. Five minutes after Jake and Adam had returned to the deadfall in the woods, a good fifty people had joined them there.

  It had been a nightmare, trying to keep them away from what remained of the hole, trying to keep from destroying evidence. Until the anner Satt Leit authorities had arrived. Until the outsiders’ “law” had trooped into the woods. Then the Amish people had quietly vanished back to their homes. And here, to Adam’s house.

  The coroner had taken the skeleton away with him. Jake had been moderately gratified to hear that the man would call in a special forensics team from the University of Pennsylvania as there was very little left of this woman for him to autopsy.

  Adam had already gone out to one of the pay phones and placed a call to Dallas. His ex-wife’s dental records would be sent up by overnight delivery. They were almost a moot point. Adam had already identified the ring on the woman’s hand. It was one he had given Jannel several years ago.

  This really put a new spin on things. Jake’s gut clenched. He continued to hold Katya, but now he did it absently. His brain was buzzing.

  When Jannel had hidden Bo here in the settlement four years ago, she had dropped the little boy off at Sugar Joe and Sarah Lapp’s door. She had told them that she’d heard the Amish were not likely to go to the police, to get involved with the anner Satt Leit authorities—and she certainly had that right. She had begged Joe to keep her child safe for a little while and told him she would be back for Bo shortly. She had told Joe neither Bo’s name nor his birth date, indicating that they wouldn’t need to know because he wouldn’t be there that long. She really had intended to return.

  But she had never come back. Adam—actually Child-Search—had finally found Bo four long years later through a picture on a milk carton that Mariah had identified.

  Jannel had been a con artist. She and her partner—one Devon Mills—had set Adam up. Adam had been a visible man in those days, very much in the public eye, playing baseball with the Houston Astros in a year when the Astros had made a respectable grab for the pennant. The deal had been that she would marry Adam, relieve him of a few million of his dollars, then she and Devon would take off and live on easy street.

  Conceiving Bo had never been part of the plan, but in the end she had cared enough about her child to try to protect him. Jannel had burned her partner, disappearing with all the money rather than give Mills his share, but she had had the foresight to guess that Mills might go after Bo for revenge. Mills had been briefly in custody last month while Jake and his friends had grilled him to learn what had happened with Jannel. But they hadn’t charged him with anything. Bo had been present and accounted for by then. As for Jannel, she was an adult, and Mills’s story about her double-crossing him had seemed logical.

  They all presumed she had disappeared of her own volition, that she was sunning on a beach in Tahiti by now. That skeleton proved otherwise. Neither a coroner nor a special forensics team needed to tell Jake that the back of the woman’s skull had been shattered. That much he’d seen with his own eyes when they’d started pulling the dead wood away from her.

  “I’ve got to find Mills again,” Jake muttered to himself. Was there a connection between that whole mess and the missing kids? Things like kidnapping and murder did not often happen in this peaceful settlement—in fact, to his knowledge, they had never happened before. That both should occur in a relatively short period of time seemed indicative of some sort of tie-in to Jake’s way of thinking.

  Katya was looking at him. He realized she’d heard him speak.

  “Who is Mills?” she asked.

  He shook his head and let go of her, needing to stand again.

  She caught his hand and stopped him. “You’re angry at me.”

  He looked down at her and scowled. “No, I’m not.”

  “I wanted so badly to be...valuable to you,” she said in a whispe
r. “I wanted to do something. I wanted it desperately. Instead I messed everything up.”

  Something shifted inside him. What was he supposed to do with this woman? He didn’t want to take on responsibility for her feelings.

  “You didn’t mess anything up,” he heard himself say. “What did you mess up?”

  “Well, I did fall on the evidence.”

  “Honey, we fell on the evidence. We messed up anything that was there long before you took a dive back in.”

  She looked at him hopefully. “Really?”

  Don’t look at me that way. “Really.” He pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go.”

  She came too willingly, too trustingly, too eagerly. “Where?”

  “Lancaster.”

  “The city?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Yeah.” He stopped short. “Are you allowed to, or is that verboten?”

  “Of course I’m allowed. It’s just...” She had never been back there, she thought, never once in all these years, not since she had seen that Santa Claus. Suddenly her heart was thrumming as wildly as it had that day. “My children...”

  “I’ll keep Sam,” came a voice out of nowhere. Katya looked to see Deborah Stoltzfus coming out of the crowd. “Please,” the woman went on. “It was nice this morning... distracting...to have a little one around.”

  As before, she found it hard to deny the woman the pleasure, the vote of confidence. And oh, she wanted so badly to go with Jacob.

  “I could keep him until Mariah brings your other children home from school,” Deborah said earnestly. “Then I’ll have one of my older boys bring him home. Simon could do it. Please.”

  “Of course,” Katya whispered, her heart hurtling now. She was going to go.

  “Have Simon do it,” Jake said. “With everything going on... that would be safer.”

  “Of course.” Deborah nodded hard.

  He went outside. Katya rushed after him.

  “I’ve got some clothes waiting for me at the post office,” he explained. “At least, I hope I do. And something tells me I ought to go pick them up today.” Something told him that this whole missing-kid thing was going to blow up in his face at any time, and he wouldn’t get another opportunity to go into Lancaster.

  A skeleton, for God’s sake. They’d fallen down smack-dab on top of what remained of Jannel’s body. It had been very hidden. It should never have been found. It was a miracle—a convoluted set of never-again circumstances—that had allowed them to stumble upon it.

  He didn’t particularly want to think about those circumstances. They made his stomach fill with nerves. Why the hell couldn’t she have been stiff, awkward, prudish, as he’d half expected? He could still hear the way she had hummed deep in her throat with pleasure when he had kissed her.

  Why the hell was he taking her with him? Because he wanted to, he realized. Plain and simple. Because he wanted her company. Because maybe she would smile again. Maybe she would even laugh.

  “Adam!” he barked. His brother had gone outside. He was standing at the front fence, talking to some of the local cops. Jake had already spoken to them about Jannel. He suspected Adam was just shooting the breeze. At least he hoped so. Jannel’s body had been deposited beneath that tree before the tornado three years ago that had created the deadfall, at a time when Adam probably had never even heard of this Amish settlement. But it still might occur to the authorities here to question him.

  Jake was amazed at the sheer number of people who were still gathered outside, as well. The women had brought cakes and casseroles. Some of them hadn’t even made it inside yet. Jake hadn’t a clue what they thought the food would accomplish. They’d brought huge thermoses of coffee and homecanned jars of vegetables, too. They waited for God only knew what, but they kept their distance from the fence and the cops.

  Jake didn’t understand it and he didn’t like the ache it gave him inside, a sense of need for things he would never have, couldn’t have, because of who and what he was.

  Suddenly, an old memory flashed in his mind, of a pet store in Dallas, one he had visited regularly as a kid. He’d been seven, maybe eight years old. He’d passed by it every day after school. And there’d been a beagle in the window for a white—actually a whole litter of them—but one of the pups had been just about the ugliest dog he’d ever seen. And every day, that ugly pup had pressed his nose up to the glass to greet him. Every day, Jake had wanted him. But the sign in the window said he cost fifty-two dollars.

  The litter had dwindled as people had bought the pups. One day there had been only two puppies left—the ugly one and a little female. On that day he’d watched a boy arrive with his father, and the father had bought him that little female puppy. Jake had watched them leave, get back into their car with the boy’s prize...and he had ached just as he did now.

  The next day the pet shop owner had offered him the ugly pup. For free. He was getting too old to be cute, the man said, and even as a kid of eight, Jake had realized that that was a pretty kind way of putting it. The truth was that that pup had never been cute to begin with. The owner said the odds of actually selling the dog were long and that he just wanted the little thing to have a good home.

  Jake had had his hands outstretched to take him, his heart pumping with wonder, when the man’s words had stopped him cold. A good home. He didn’t have that. He couldn’t give the pup a good home. His father would kick the daylights out of the beagle sooner or later, maybe even kill him if he got mad enough. Sooner or later, Edward would get drunk, and if no one else was around, Jake knew his father would take it out on the dog.

  Jake had left without him. He’d never gone back to the pet store. From that day on, he’d taken a detour to get home after school. He couldn’t bear to look in the window anymore. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt like he was on the outside looking in, into a world where fathers bought boys puppies, a world that would never be his own. It wasn’t the last time it had happened. But it was one that stuck in his mind loud and clear.

  “Jacob, what’s wrong?” Katya asked, her voice filled with concern.

  “Hey, come back,” Adam said, waving a hand in front of his brother’s eyes.

  Jake shook his head to clear it. “Uh, yeah. Got any cash on you?” he asked. “I need to call a cab. I need to get into the city, get my clothes, make a few phone calls. I need to start putting a few things together here.”

  Adam pulled thirty-odd dollars out of his pocket and handed it to him, then he scowled at Katya. “You’re going, too?”

  She nodded eagerly.

  Jake started for the street.

  “Katya—” Adam began.

  She never gave him a chance to finish. She ran after Jake, her feet flying.

  Adam let out his breath on a ragged, worried sigh.

  The cab came right to the pay phone to pick them up. It was a good thing because snow had begun falling steadily. They were covered with it. Jake looked so rugged with it crusted on his hair, with the wind chapping his cheeks. She watched him, mesmerized.

  Their first stop in the city was a bank.

  “Stay here,” Jake said, opening the car door on his side. “I’ll be right back.”

  She followed just as soon as she made sure that the driver wouldn’t leave if she got out, as well. She scrambled from the automobile and raced up the stone walkway to the bank building. Or she started to race. Halfway there she had to turn around to look behind her, then she walked more slowly, backward, taking it all in.

  Everything was so alive! No doubt the street would be even busier if the weather wasn’t so bad, she thought, if the low, gunmetal gray sky hadn’t kept spitting small, hard flakes. Still, humanity spilled from the buildings and the stores. Many of the women wore short skirts and thin nylons. She thought their legs must be freezing. A lot of the men wore suits with no topcoats. But she saw jeans and heavy jackets, and longer skirts, as well—knee-length and vibrant with color. There were a million kinds of hairstyles on both the men an
d the women. There were exhaust fumes—the air was unpleasantly thick with them—but she loved it. There was noise—horns and the hum of traffic and the rush of tires through the sloppy wetness of the street.

  And there were so many different kinds of automobiles. Some were big, some shiny, some old with dull paint. An especially fascinating model passed her, a flash of bright blue, low-slung, with an engine that rumbled.

  “Oh, my.” She stared, taking small steps in reverse, until her back came up squarely against the glass of the bank’s entrance. Jake’s hand snaked out and caught her arm, then he dragged her inside.

  “Get in here before you kill yourself,” he said absently. He was staring down at a little piece of paper in his hand.

  “What’s that?” she asked, leaning close.

  “It’s some computerized wizard telling me a lie.”

  Her eyes went huge. “What?”

  “They’re trying to tell me I have ninety dollars less in my checking account than I thought I did.”

  “How do they know? Do you keep your money here?”

  He shook his head, his mind still elsewhere. “No. My bank is in Dallas.”

  “Then these people are probably wrong,” she insisted. “How would they know what someone is doing in Dallas?”

  “It’s an automated teller machine.” He was getting impatient until he looked at her.

  Her color was high. Her eyes were alive with excitement. And she had taken her hair down. She was beautiful.

  “Why did you do that?” he growled.

  “Do what?” She backed up a bit.

  “Your hair.”

  She touched it self-consciously. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. She couldn’t tell him. How could she tell him what it was like to be stared at, to be scorned and pitied and judged, to feel the weight of so many eyes as happened whenever tourists drove through the settlement? A man like him, so physically perfect, would never understand.

  Now, for just this one afternoon, she couldn’t bear it. For one little space in time, she didn’t want to have to. She could not do anything about her plain clothing. She could not do anything with her straight hair to make it pretty, to make herself look like those other women on the street. But she had inadvertently left her bonnet either at Adam and Mariah’s house, or possibly in the deadfall. She didn’t have to accentuate how pale and plain she was by scraping her hair back off her face.