by Beverly Bird
“What’s happened?” Katya asked Adam. “What do you know?”
Adam’s eyes seemed to skim over her without settling. She thought he seemed uncomfortable looking at her.
“Jake sent me back here,” he said finally. “He’s busy, but he thought you’d want to be filled in. First of all, the guy left some evidence this time.”
There was a collective gasping sound as the women drew in their breaths. Katya felt herself sway a little. She knew her first hope in hours. It was like the sputtering flame on a candle, just lighting. If there was evidence this time, Jacob would do something with it. Surely he would.
“What?” she demanded.
“Footprints. And Bo and Levi saw him. Bo recognized the kind of car the kidnapper drove—at least to some extent. Jake’s working on it.”
She gripped the banister for support. Her knees almost gave out. There was not a single doubt in her mind that Jacob would find this man, this vile man who was stealing their children, if he had this much to go on.
“Anyway, he thinks it might be prudent to get the other children out of the settlement as soon as possible, until this whole thing is settled. Our precautions haven’t worked. Kids will be kids. They’ll slip away by themselves as Bo and Levi and Sam have proved. So they need to go somewhere else until this guy is caught. We need to make absolutely sure this can’t happen again. I just came from the pay phone. I’ve made arrangements to lease a bus.”
“No!” Katya cried instinctively. The word was torn from her heart. Delilah and Rachel and Levi were all she had left.
She shook her head frantically. Her hair tickled her neck, her cheek. No wonder everyone was still looking at her as though she had gone heathen, she realized. She was standing here with her hair spilling to her waist, when God intended that only a woman’s husband should see such a thing.
“No,” she said again, more quietly. “Please don’t ask me to do that.”
“Look,” Adam said carefully. “Jake’s been in touch with the sheriff. He’s learned that there have been no kidnappings of anner Satt Leit children in this county in over three years. And if it was happening in other settlements, in other counties, we would have heard.”
Katya nodded halfheartedly. Everyone had kin in other settlements, she thought. Yes, they would have heard.
“This is only happening here,” Adam finished. “So we’ve got to get the kids away from here.”
Slowly, carefully, Katya let her breath out. He was right.
“But where?” someone else asked.
“Sugar Joe Lapp has friends in Berks County,” Mariah said suddenly. She looked for Sarah Lapp in the crowd. The woman’s face was inordinately pale. She seemed to be taking this worse than anyone, for some reason Mariah could not fathom. Or maybe something else was bothering her. With Jake descending into their lives, Mariah hadn’t had much of a chance to talk to her friend lately.
Sarah finally nodded. “Yes,” she said faintly.
Adam nodded. “I think he’s still at the pond. I’ll go talk to him.” He looked at the women again. “Why don’t you all go home and get your families together, then bring the kids back here? The bus will be here in an hour.”
Katya turned back for the stairs. She knew all she needed to know now. Sam hadn’t been found yet, and Jake was working on it. She would have to send Rachel and Delilah and Levi away.
When everyone was gone, Mariah went to her husband. He hadn’t moved as the women began swarming past him out the door, collecting coats and shawls as they went.
“How’s Katya holding up?” he asked, his voice raspy. It got that way when he was very emotional.
Mariah thought about it. “She’s very shaky, of course,” she said quietly. “And there’s nothing I can do for her. Only Jacob can restore her faith, I think, by finding the baby.” One of the other things Adam had said about his brother was that he had one of the most impressive, deductive minds he had ever encountered. She prayed that in this instance, Adam was right.
His face twisted. “Did he—” He broke off. “Do you think he—they—you know. Did he touch her?”
Mariah’s brows popped up. “It’s none of our business.”
That, he thought, was pretty much what Jake had said.
Adam left because there was no sense in arguing with her. He knew how futile it was when his wife got that expression on her face. Nothing he could say or do would sway her. When she looked at him like that, he always found himself going along with her blindly and without question.
But he was upset. And he was worried. Not just about Sam Essler, but about Jake. Each time he’d encountered his brother in the past hour, it seemed to him that the man was literally vibrating with tension. Something was boiling in there. Something was going to explode.
He’d thought the settlement would save his brother. He’d been shortsighted. Now he was very much afraid that his brother might rock the settlement off its foundations. And that Katya Essler was going to blow sky-high with the rest of the debris Jake left behind.
Most of the men had left the pond by the time Jake returned from the phone booth. He had hit upon the idea of sending the kids away as much to get the fathers out of here as to protect the little ones. Then he noticed that Bo and Levi were still sitting on a fallen log near the edge of the frozen water.
“Uncle Jake?” Bo said.
Jake groaned aloud. They had been told to stay there and be still, and they were doing just that. But in all the commotion, the men had forgotten about Sam’s accomplices. Jake went to kneel in the snow in front of them. “Hey, boys. You about ready to clear out, too?” He looked at Bo. “Your dad got a bus.”
“Yeah,” Bo answered sullenly. “He said.”
Jake looked at Levi. The boy’s chin trembled in the moonlight. Jake’s head swam all over again. He wasn’t equipped to deal with this kind of trauma. He didn’t want to deal with it. He wanted to go on doing what he did best—looking for the bad guy. Unfortunately, he had done all he could do for the time being, and here was Levi, needing something, someone, to hold on to.
“My ma’s going to tan my hide for this, ain’t she?” the boy finally asked in a small voice.
Jake thought about it. He thought about it hard.
“Has she ever done that?” he asked finally. Frankly, he couldn’t imagine Katya ever raising her hand to any of her kids. No, he thought, there was always that sweet, steady gentleness about her. She would never hit her kids.
Levi shook his head, just as Jake had expected. “But I never did something this bad before, either,” he admitted.
Jake let out his breath. “Well, this was pretty bad. Or, at least, it was foolish.”
“Glad my dad didn’t come to help look,” Levi muttered, rubbing his toe in the snow. “My dad would have pounded me one for sure.”
Jake flinched.
“We thought we could watch out for each other,” Bo said suddenly, his chin jutting. There it was again, Jake thought—that stubborn Wallace gene.
“Yeah? Against some man?” Jake countered. “You thought the three of you were a match for him, with Sam not even two years old yet?”
“We coulda got him,” Bo insisted. “Levi and me. If we’d been there, you know, close enough to Sam.”
“Sure, that was your first mistake. You should have stayed together. Then...” In one motion, he came to his feet again. He caught Bo—he was lighter—in the crook of his left arm, lifting him clear off the log. He tossed him over his shoulder before Levi could react. He used his right hand to shove Levi backward. The kid fell flat in the snow on the other side of the log with a startled little grunt. Jake stepped over it fast and straddled the boy, pinning him with his thighs, while Bo wriggled on his shoulder. He gave Bo a quick, light smack on his bottom. “Quit that before I drop you headfirst on the log,” he warned.
Bo went still.
“So is this how you were going to bring this guy down?”
“Guess not,” came Bo’s voice from ov
er his shoulder.
“You just surprised me,” Levi complained. “If I wasn’t surprised—”
“Point is, you were,” Jake interrupted. He stood and let the boy up. He set Bo back on his feet.
Off in the distance, a helicopter was landing.
“Tell you what,” Jake said. “Why don’t you two wait until you’re sixteen or so before you try something like this again?”
They were looking up at him with expressions he didn’t like at all. Levi’s reminded him a little of Katya. It was almost... adoring. In fact, in that moment, the boy looked a great deal like his mother all the way around.
“Come on,” he said uncomfortably. “You guys have a bus to catch. Let’s step on it. I’ll race you back.”
He let them get a good head start and jogged behind them, never quite catching up. He figured their pride had taken it in the teeth enough for one night.
Adam’s bus wasn’t at the house yet, but the whole settlement seemed to be. Jake stopped well short of the place. Bo went on without him, but Levi hesitated and turned back.
“What?” Jake scowled down at him.
The boy hugged him hard, fast, around the waist. Ah, hell.
“Go inside,” he managed hoarsely. “I’ve got to go and meet that helicopter.”
“Who’s in it?”
“The FBI.”
“Wow. I used to pretend I could be a spy if I could go to school,” Levi said wistfully.
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about spies?”
“Matt Lapp’s pa is from Berks. He’s got kin over there. They go to big schools. Real schools. He told me ‘bout spies. ’Course, you got to go to high school to be one. Probably even college, too. So I can’t never be one.”
“Can’t ever,” Jake corrected absently. The kid’s words hit him hard.
Don’t get sucked in here, he thought. Don’t do it. But it was too late, and he knew it might have been for a while. Out of the blue, he heard Katya’s voice again. Now I’m in and they’ve closed all the doors. Sometimes I just want to dream. A throbbing sensation began to develop at the back of his head. Free choice like hell, he thought. You could give people all the choices in the world, but if they were only familiar with one avenue, they would take that safe route time and again.
He wanted to save her. He wanted to save Levi and give him his dreams. And he was a man who had failed too miserably before to believe he could do so.
Jake abruptly turned away from Levi and went to the helicopter.
Katya watched from the upstairs window as Jacob brought the boys back. He stopped well short of the property, out on the road. She swallowed carefully against a lump in her throat. After everything else tonight, this was small, inconsequential. It shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did.
He wasn’t going to come inside. He was avoiding her.
She closed her eyes and hugged herself, leaning shakily against the glass. She’d intended to accept it with good grace, just as she had told Mariah. But it wasn’t happening for the right reasons. She could have accepted it if Jacob had just moved on, but she thought he was probably steering clear of her now because of guilt, and that wasn’t right at all.
He thought this was his fault, she realized, because he had taken her to Lancaster, had kept her from accompanying Sam to the pond. She knew it as certainly as if he had spoken it aloud. And, unless she badly missed her guess, Adam thought it was Jacob’s fault, too. That was what she’d seen in his eyes downstairs, what she hadn’t initially been able to identify.
She straightened abruptly. She had to talk to him, to both of them. Since Jacob was here, and Adam wasn’t, she would tackle him first. But when she looked down at the road again, Levi was racing into the house and Jacob was gone. He had disappeared into the night like an animal of the darkness who couldn’t bear the light.
“Looks like about a size ten Nike,” Agent Ted Rizzel said, straightening away from the molded shoe print. “There’s the brand right there, stamped into the sole. I guess you couldn’t see it clearly before we molded it.”
Jake let out a breath of relief. Not one of the fathers’ prints, then. There had been the lingering, worrisome possibility that he might have made a mistake about that.
An Amishman in Nike shoes. He imagined they were black, so as not to stand out too incongruously. He guessed the kidnapper had chosen to wear them rather than real Amish boots, in case anything went wrong and he needed to run.
Jake eased to his feet, as well. He let out a ragged breath as he looked around. As far as physical evidence was concerned, the Feds had sewn things up here. They’d covered the entire area—or at least the one within their prescribed perimeter—and hadn’t found anything else. And this time Jake considered that their perimeter included everything that needed to be included.
Snow began falling again. Soft, wet flakes this time. Big ones. They’d stay. Didn’t matter, he thought. They’d gotten the prints and the evidence up.
He was all out of things to do. He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was time to go back to Adam’s house. He started walking like a man going to meet his Maker.
Chapter 14
He had every intention of going straight to the sofa and staying there. He’d catch a little sleep. It was well past midnight, and he wanted to be back at the pay phone by no later than five.
He didn’t want to see Katya. Couldn’t bear to. He’d let her down. He couldn’t bring her baby to her, and he couldn’t approach her without him. And yet, somehow, he found himself standing at the foot of the stairs.
He looked up into the thick darkness on the second floor. The house was dead quiet. There was a stillness to the night, a waiting. But more than that, there was an absence of life, as though everyone had gone.
The children had left. Bo, with his stubborn Wallace chin, and Levi, with the weight of the world on his little shoulders. Delilah, who was scared of her own shadow, and Rachel, who’d lived much more than she should have in...what, ten years?
And baby Sam was still gone.
Katya would be up there alone. He knew better than to believe she was sleeping. He took the stairs one at a time, pausing on every step. There was nothing up here he wanted to get involved in, but he found himself at her door.
“Katie.” He didn’t knock, though that sound would have been no more intrusive in the quiet than his voice. He flinched at its echo in the upstairs hall.
She didn’t answer.
Maybe she was sleeping after all. It was what he wanted for her, a brief respite from all this fear and helplessness and waiting. But he still didn’t believe she’d be able to do it. He put his hand on the knob and eased the door open.
She was standing by the window, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders. It took him a moment to find her in the relative darkness. Something about her posture told him that she had been there for a very long time.
She heard the door open and spoke without turning around. “The children have left.”
Jake cleared his throat. “Yeah. I figured that.”
“I miss them already. I need them now, so badly.”
I’m sorry. But that would be a stupid thing to say. Of course he was sorry. What comfort was that?
He needed desperately to be able to do something for her, and the one thing she had asked of him—the only thing she had ever asked of him and the thing he had promised to do—remained just out of his grasp.
“They’re safer this way,” he said finally. As far as comfort went, that was lame, too, but he didn’t know what else to say.
Katya turned to look at him. “It was very kind of Adam to pay for the bus.”
She wasn’t going to ask him, he realized. He felt like a coward for the incredible relief that swept through him. She wasn’t going to ask him about Sam. No doubt she knew that if there was anything, anything at all, he would have told her right away.
“I didn’t want to come back until I could bring him with me,” he heard himself say. The words ca
me all the way up from his soul and they tumbled out of him fast. No one was more surprised by them than he was. “I kept doing the same things over and over, until there was nothing left to do. I kept doing busy work so I wouldn’t have to come back here without him. So I wouldn’t have to tell you that I hadn’t found him yet. I would have done anything to have brought him home with me, Katie.”
“I know,” she said simply.
There was a fire banked low in the hearth. The last glow from its embers was just enough to make her face shine. She’d been crying, he realized. He felt a hot fist clench around his heart and tear it right out of his chest.
“God, you should hate me!” he burst out suddenly.
Her eyes cleared into genuine surprise. “For what? For not bringing him back yet? You’ll find him. We’ve just got to be patient. We must give it some time.”
“Don’t do that!” he shouted. He stepped quickly into the room, closing the door behind him for privacy. “For God’s sake, Katie! You don’t know that! Odds are, if things run true to form, I won’t find him. No matter what I’ve figured out so far, something will go wrong, something will get screwed up, and he’ll slide right through my fingers like sand!”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Well, you damned well better believe it so you can brace yourself for it!”
She only watched him, steadily and without censure. He felt himself grinding his teeth together, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid.
There wasn’t anything more he could say. He turned for the door.
“Do you think that if you hadn’t taken me to the city, none of this would have happened?” she asked. “Jacob, that’s purely ridiculous.”
He stopped and turned to stare at her.
“If you hadn’t taken me to the city, then I would have taken Sam to the pond,” she agreed. “And then what do you suppose would have happened? Look at me, Jacob. Look at me. Do you think for even one moment that I could have stopped that man from snatching my child?”