He brushed the back of his hand across her cheek and moved away from her. “I can take some time away from my work,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Her eyes brightened, the puddles cleared. “Yes, I would like that.”
He heard the faint rattle of a buggy turning down their lane, and his mind rapidly indexed who it might be. The horse’s steps were solid, the trot steady. The axle of the buggy creaked. Ike Stutzman almost had not bought the buggy because of that creak.
When the front door opened, Annalise stood up. Rufus rose and turned to see Beth come through the door.
“Oh, good,” Beth said, “you’re not busy. Daed asked me to come fetch you. He wants your advice about some cabinets in the new house. He wonders if you might be able to repair them.”
“Perhaps I could come by later in the afternoon.”
Annalise moved out of his peripheral vision, but Rufus forced himself not to glance at her in Beth’s presence.
“He was hoping you could come now. If you don’t think you can fix them, then he’ll tear them out today. He doesn’t want any more delay in making the house ready for us to move in.”
“Ya, I suppose every day matters. You go on, though. I’ll get my tools and bring my own buggy.”
“I would be happy to take you.” Beth took a step toward him and smiled. “I’d love the company.”
“I may need my buggy to go on to a job site anyway.” Rufus stepped back. “Let your daed know I’m coming and I’ll be right there.”
“If you insist.”
He let out a sigh when she retreated through the door. When he turned, though, Annalise was not in the room.
Rufus went through the house to the kitchen, where Annalise was washing the tumbler he had carried in.
“I’ll come right back,” he said. “We’ll take that walk.”
She shook her head. “I’ll just walk back to town. I have some thinking to do.” She set the glass in the dish rack.
Rufus regretted not kissing her when he had the chance.
Eighteen
If he had just kissed her, she would feel better. Annie had not expected Rufus to kiss her, though, because he hardly ever did. Still, if only he had.
Annie hit the button on the cash register and the change drawer kicked open, nudging her just below the ribs. She counted back change to a customer who left happily with a small silver-framed mirror Annie had priced and set out only two hours ago. When Mrs. Weichert returned, she would be pleased to hear of several sales that made the day profitable. Two other couples still lingered in the shop, unusual for a Thursday afternoon. Annie picked up a rag to wipe down an empty shelf before she began bringing knickknacks from the back room to fill it.
Of course Rufus was not interested in Beth. Annie knew that, even if Beth did not. But the undefined nature of her own relationship with Rufus left her feeling uncomfortably exposed. She did not have to be Amish to see that the community would love to see him married—to an Amish woman. Beth Stutzman would be a better Amish wife than Annie could ever hope to be.
Annie blew out her breath and rattled her lips. A buzzing sound escaped. Oops.
“Pardon me,” she said to a startled customer who was approaching the counter. “May I help you?”
The customer led her to the back of the shop where yellowpaged tomes stood in formation in trim uniforms on neat shelves. The books the shop carried did not qualify as rare, but they were anywhere from forty to eighty years old. Novels, biographies, histories, and genealogies beckoned from decades past. Annie sometimes got distracted with them herself, pausing to read when she was supposed to be organizing. Certainly they were more noteworthy than the unsorted hardbacks in the several thrift stores in town. The customer already had three books in his hands. Annie focused on helping him find the final volume he sought then returned to the front of the store to ring up yet another sale.
She needed to stop thinking about Rufus. That was all there was to it. She had work to do.
The bell on the door jangled as the remaining customers left the shop without purchasing anything. Annie pulled a clipboard from a shelf below the cash register and traced a finger down the task list Mrs. Weichert had created for the week. Alone in the shop, Annie could not disappear to the back room longer than it took to bring items to the front. She went back and forth a few times, wiping down each item as she put it on a shelf, always listening for the bell.
And she was not thinking about Rufus. Not much, anyway. But he still owed her a walk, and she intended to collect.
When the door opened next, a medley of tenor and bass voices drowned the bell. Annie looked up. A mass of gangly teenage appendages stampeded as a herd through the door. Out of the center of the creature they had become, three crates emerged and hit the floor in thuds.
“Hello, Annalise.”
Joel Beiler came into focus. Mark and Luke Stutzman stood on either side of him, and behind them were Carter Reynolds and Duncan Spangler. Somebody thumped fingers rhythmically against a denim-leg drum, but Annie could not see who. It had to be one of the English. At the random thought that Amish cloth did not make that sound, Annie blinked twice.
She tossed her dust rag on the front counter. “Hello, boys.” She glanced at each one in turn. “What do we have here?”
“Amish stuff.” Carter Reynolds peered at his phone and moved his thumbs into action on its buttons.
“Mrs. Weichert said Mrs. Stutzman could sell things on commission.” Joel pointed a foot toward a crate. “Carved boxes, small wooden buggies. Some quilting.”
“I see.” Annie bent and lifted a lap quilt off the top of one crate. Rich colors in a complex pattern with small pieces, exquisite stitching. “It’s beautiful.”
“My sister Beth made that one,” Mark Stutzman said.
Of course she did. Annie dropped the quilt, unfolded, back onto the crate. “We’ll have to go through and price everything individually.”
Mark produced a sheet of paper folded down to a square. “Mamm put on here what she would like to sell them for.”
“I see.” Annie unfolded and inspected the page. Mrs. Weichert would likely add another 20 percent, but the items would still be priced attractively. The word Amish on the labels would raise the curiosity factor. Amish items tended to move quickly on the weekends.
Carter elbowed his way past the Amish boys. “I’ll help you carry them to the back.” He set his phone on the counter and bent down.
“Thank you, Carter.” Annie squatted, briefly riffling through the contents of a crate before grasping its sides. She felt her own cell phone escape her back pocket just as she stood again. It hit the floor. “Can someone grab that? Just set it on the counter.”
She followed Carter into the back room, and Joel trailed with the last of the crates. Annie wondered about the motley assortment of boys who had arrived together. Joel was slightly older than the others, with responsibilities of his own. How did he come to have a free afternoon to spend with English boys? Carter’s father often provided taxi service for Amish families. From what Annie observed a few days ago, though, she did not think Joel was interested in befriending the Stutzman brothers. Yet here they were, all together. Joel’s face was as blank as a whiteboard. She could discern nothing from watching him. And Duncan? The Spanglers were neighbors not too far from her house off Main Street, but she knew little about them. Annie supposed Duncan and Carter went to school together.
“Did you bring a buggy into town?” Annie picked up a carved wooden buggy.
“We came in the back of my dad’s truck,” Carter offered.
“How will you get home, then?” Her eyes turned to Joel.
Joel glanced out the shop’s window. “Tom said he might have to run back our way later. Or we can walk.”
Annie nodded. It was not as if she could offer them a ride, by car or by buggy.
“Let’s go,” Mark called from the front room.
Annie wondered what they could be in such a hurry about
, but the boys, once again silhouetted by the afternoon sunlight, morphed into one creature with entangled legs that managed to amble out of the shop. She watched them for a moment through the display window as they traversed Main Street in a black huddle. They did not pause to examine any windows but rather moved purposefully, leaving Annie pondering again what united the five of them.
Ten minutes passed before Annie encountered the cell phone on the counter. She knew immediately it was not hers—the scratches on the front cover were not right. It had to be Carter’s.
She flipped the phone open just to be sure. It lit immediately with a hideous screen saver no doubt hacked from a video game Carter was not technically old enough to purchase.
With the phone in her hand, Annie stepped out to the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. The boys could be anywhere by now. Surely Carter would try to use his phone and realize the mistake. She needed to close the shop in twenty minutes. Would they come back by then? Even if she could justify the situation as an emergency—which it was not—calling her phone to alert Carter was pointless. Her phone was not turned on.
Annie went back inside the shop and sat on the stool behind the counter. The phone buzzed with a text message. Out of long instinct she flipped it open again. Mom says be home for dinner. The message must be from one of Carter’s sisters.
Sometimes Annie thought giving up her cell phone was harder than surrendering her computer. Her iPhone had been such an easy connection to any information she wanted. The phone she had now, identical to Carter’s, was capable of connecting to the Internet but she did not carry the service. Did Carter’s parents let him have an Internet package on his phone? she wondered. Pressing her thumb in a quick sequence answered her question.
His Internet history twisted her gut. She was being nosy, she knew. Not an admirable quality in an Amish woman. But she saw what she saw, and now she would not be able to ignore it. Why was a fifteen-year-old boy from a small town looking for that kind of information?
Annie cleared her throat. She powered the phone off, slapped it closed, and jammed it in a back pocket. Her lips worked in and out six times.
She had faced temptation and lost—again. Just for a moment she remembered running her life from her phone.
Temptation led to knowledge, though.
To seek help for the boy, she would have to admit she poked around in Carter’s private business.
Maybe it was nothing. She had searched for stranger topics herself, just out of curiosity.
But maybe it was something.
Nosy or not, and almost Amish or not, Annie was going to find out what those boys were up to.
The hands on the clock ticked slowly toward four thirty, when Annie could close the shop. The boys would have almost thirty minutes’ head start. She would sprint the four blocks home, grab her bicycle, and start asking questions around town. Five teenage boys on foot could not disappear without leaving a trail.
One thought made Annie press her fingers against closed eyes. If Joel was involved in this, Franey would tremble to her core.
Nineteen
Rufus hitched up the lightweight open cart to Dolly, his favorite horse among the three the Beilers kept. Under the cart’s seat, as always, a basket held apples. Rufus grabbed one and pressed it against Dolly’s lips, smiling as she snatched it with her teeth and crunched. He swung up into the driver’s seat and took the reins in his hands.
The front screen door thwacked closed. Joel was supposed to fix the broken spring three days ago. Someone was sure to get hurt if it went unattended much longer. Before turning his head toward the porch, Rufus knew the footsteps crossing it were his mother’s.
“I’m looking for Joel.” Franey stood at the base of the steps, one hand on a hip and the other shading her eyes. “He should have been in from the fields by now. They’ve only just planted the alfalfa. How much weeding could there be to do? If he’d said he was irrigating I might believe he is still out there.”
“Would you like me to ride out to the field to find him?” Rufus’s stomach sank at the thought of chasing after his wayward brother rather than accomplishing his errand.
“No. You have things to do. I think I should ask your daed to speak to Joel. But if you see your brother, bring him home with you.”
“Yes, Mamm. I will see you for supper with or without Joel.” Rufus nudged the horse forward.
Dolly found her trotting rhythm as soon as he turned out onto the highway. Time was tight. Rufus clicked his tongue to see if Dolly had any canter in her.
When he pulled up in front of the construction trailer that served as the office of Kramer Construction, Rufus tied Dolly securely to the closest tree, climbed the three narrow makeshift steps up to the trailer, and opened the door. Just inside, a young woman lifted her eyes without moving her head. Her fingers held their place above the keyboard.
“I would like to see Mr. Kramer, please.” Rufus looked her in the eyes. Her frown made clear she knew who he was. And she knew how the man who signed her paycheck felt about him.
“He’s on the phone.” The woman’s fingers resumed their patter.
“I’ll wait.”
There was no place to sit. File cabinets and stacks of blueprints cluttered the space. Rufus spread his feet apart slightly and crossed his hands in front of him. The thin walls of the trailer did little to disguise the animation in Karl Kramer’s voice behind a closed door. Whatever the deal was, Karl intended to have his way. His price. His schedule. His crew. Rufus focused his eyes on the back of the woman’s computer monitor and tried to hear more of her soft keys clacking than the voice in the other room.
When the voice fell silent, he thought she might look up. Because she did not, he cleared his throat.
“Just a moment.” She leaned toward The monitor, squinted, and made two quick corrections. “I’ll ask Mr. Kramer if he is available to see you.”
Not, I’ll tell Mr. Kramer you’re here. The difference was not lost on Rufus as she slipped through the office door and closed it behind her. On the other side the voices were low, indistinct.
She returned perhaps ten seconds later. “Mr. Kramer is unavailable. He has a number of matters to attend to before the town meeting tonight. Perhaps another time.”
Rufus was not surprised in the least, though he was fairly certain that these were not the same words Karl Kramer used to express his decision. “My business is about the meeting tonight,” Rufus said. “It is important that I see him.”
Her smile was vacant. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” She took her chair again. “Can I help you with anything else?”
“No. Nothing else, thank you. Only this one thing.” Rufus did not move.
“Perhaps if you were to make an appointment for some time next week.”
He shifted his weight to one leg. “The afternoon is nearly over. I will just wait and have a word with him on his way out.”
“I’m afraid he was quite specific that he did not want to see you, Mr. Beiler.” She turned over a stack of papers and moved her fingers back to the keyboard.
Rufus counted to ten.
Then he counted back from ten.
Then he turned, took two steps, rapped three times, and opened Karl Kramer’s office door himself.
At home, Annie changed into a sturdy pair of tennis shoes and made sure she wore a sweatshirt with a hood. April afternoons could turn chilly without notice. She zipped up, rolled the bike forward, and jumped on. The boys had headed east on Main Street, which meant they could have crossed the vague line between Westcliffe and Silver Cliff.
It was probably nothing. She hoped it was nothing. Just a teenage boy curious about a question in the news. But even what she scanned before shutting down the phone seemed like more than idle curiosity to Annie, and she wanted to be sure. After all, it could be dangerous. She pedaled down Main Street, stopping at a few of the shops to duck her head in and ask if anyone had seen the boys. One of the perks of living in a small town w
as that people were likely to know the boys and whether they had been around. Sometimes it seemed to Annie that the town had allseeing eyes.
She traced them for most of a mile before information petered out. Her last stop was a gas station.
“Hello, Hank.” Annie pulled up to the air pump alongside a service bay and fiddled with it. She pushed a couple of squirts of air into her rear tire. “I wonder if you’ve seen some boys. Kind of a strange bunch. Amish and English together.”
Hank laughed. “Dressed in black?”
“Last time I looked.”
“They were here.” Hank wiped oil off his hands onto a cloth. “They were hanging around the diesel pumps.”
Annie’s stomach tightened. Diesel fuel?
“The only one who looked old enough to drive was Amish,” Hank said. “If they had bothered to bring a can, I might believe somebody needed gas for a tractor. But it wouldn’t take five guys to carry a can. They’re getting nothing from me. I shooed them off.”
Annie swallowed. “Did you happen to see which way they went?”
Hank waved his rag down a side street. Annie hopped back on her bike.
Even though they had a half hour’s jump, they were still on foot when they left the gas station.
Annie pedaled into the wind, scanning the flat acres of the valley between the Wet Mountains and the Sangre de Cristos as she moved from town streets, around aging buildings at the edge of town, to broken asphalt and gravel stretches. Every now and then, someone stepped outside to check a mailbox or fill a garbage can or rake a flower bed.
Across a field, she spotted a mass of black that seemed to shapeshift, first a stretched line, then a compact ball, then a straggling string. She pedaled harder. They were cutting across open field—easier on foot than on a bike. Twice Annie lost her balance when she hit a stubborn rise of earth with insufficient momentum, her ankle taking the impact of catching herself on one foot. Annie debated abandoning her bicycle to move more quickly on foot, but she dreaded the thought of having to find her way back to retrieve it from under a random scrub oak. Annie rode when she could and walked beside the bike when she could not pedal safely. Keeping the boys in view while lugging the bike pushed her heart rate up higher than it had been in a long time.
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