by Jane Jensen
I knew she was right—that was never going to happen, though not for the reason she thought. I pulled the senior picture of Jessica from my pocket. “Do you recognize this girl?”
I handed it to Hannah, forcing her to put down her sewing and take it. She didn’t study it long. “She was a friend of Katie’s.” Hannah handed it to Isaac and went back to her work.
“Ja. Katie worked at the farmers’ market in Paradise last year. Met this one there. She would come by the house to pick Katie up. We asked Katie not to see the girl, then forbade it. But Katie snuck around and done it anyway. People would tell us they seen Katie in Jessica’s car.” Isaac held the photo out to me like he wanted nothing to do with it.
I took the photo back. “You didn’t like Katie associating with a non-Amish?”
“‘Keep yourself separate.’ That’s the law. And that girl was wild. Katie’d come home smelling of smoke and liquor and filled with a rebellious spirit. I’m not sayin’ Katie weren’t troubled before that. But this English friend made Katie all the worse.”
“Did you shun Katie? Is that why she left?” I pushed. Grady shifted uncomfortably beside me. I knew my tone was a bit hard, but there was something here, and I felt the need to dig past the platitudes and the walls they put up to find it.
“She weren’t shunned,” Isaac said firmly, now looking somewhere between me and Grady. “She was in rumspringa. Means she had more freedom for a few years, till she could decide if she would join the church or leave. We didn’t like what she was doin’, but we hoped and prayed she’d come around. I talked to the deacon. We was gonna give her till her next birthday. She’ll be nineteen already. If she didn’t straighten out by then, she’d be shunned. And Katie knew it so.”
“She always said she would leave,” Hannah said, her mouth twisting with what looked like regret and sadness. “She’d tell me right so to my face.”
I sat silently for a moment, trying to digest what they were telling me. “The day that Katie vanished, that Thursday in October, do you remember the exact date?”
“’Twas the second Thursday in October,” Isaac said firmly.
“Okay. And did she give you any warning? Did she tell you she was leaving that particular day?”
“Ja. She told my cousin Miriam she was going, and to say good-bye.” Hannah nodded, putting her work down in her lap.
“Did she say who she was going with? Or how she was leaving?”
“No.”
“Do you have any idea who she might have left with? Was there someone she knew with a car? Or perhaps an ex-Amish she was in contact with?”
Hannah frowned and looked over at her husband, troubled.
“The only one we knew of was that Jessica. But Katie didn’t go with her,” Isaac said.
“No,” I agreed. “Jessica seems very adamant in this report that Katie wouldn’t have taken off without her. She says they were planning on leaving together, after they’d saved more money. Do you know anything about that? Did Katie tell you about those plans?”
Hannah shook her head.
“No,” said Isaac. “She never said it so.”
“That Jessica, she come by here a few weeks after Katie left,” said Hannah with a frown. “I told her Katie was gone but don’t think she believed me. Then she went to the police and they come by, but we told them the same. And that was the end of it.”
Hannah was right. The officer who’d followed up on the missing persons report had taken the Yoders’ word that Katie had left the area. After one visit with them, he’d closed the file.
“Jessica says in the report that Katie had borrowed her cell phone, and that there’s no way Katie would have left without returning it. Did you see Katie with a cell phone? Maybe one with a pink cover?”
Isaac leaned back, his jaw set firmly. “We see her with a phone like that sometimes. It’s not forbidden during rumspringa. But I wouldn’t let her use this in the house.”
“Have you seen the phone since Katie left?”
They both agreed that they hadn’t.
“And the day Katie left, did she pack a bag? Were any of her things missing?”
“No. But Katie, she wouldn’t’ve taken her Amish clothes. She had no use for ’em,” Hannah explained patiently.
“What about personal belongings? A brush?” I struggled to think what else an Amish girl might have owned. “Books? Letters?”
“She walked out on her two feet and all else. That’s the way of it when people leave,” Isaac insisted.
That didn’t sound encouraging. No wonder so few Amish youth left. Talk about being kicked out of the nest with a big boot.
“Why would Katie tell your cousin she was leaving and not you directly? She didn’t say good-bye to any of her siblings either?”
“That’s the way of it too,” said Isaac. “If she’d told us, we’d’ve been obliged to try and stop her.”
“She had no more patience for our prayers and lectures,” Hannah said with a resigned sigh and a shake of her head. She pricked her finger with a needle, like something out of a fairy tale. A red dot blossomed on the white fabric. She stuck her fingertip in her mouth.
Grady and I exchanged a silent message. Maybe that was the way of it when an Amish teen left, to just walk out to the road with the clothes on their back and not say good-bye. But there were other, darker explanations. And Jessica turning up dead lent a dire weight to her written statement, her insistence that Katie was missing. Grady gave a slight nod to me with his chin. I turned back to the Yoders.
“Jessica Travis was found dead last week. She was murdered and her body was placed in the barn of Amos Miller on Grimlace Lane.”
Hannah’s face went a putrid color, like that of moldy cheese. She dropped her sewing and put both hands over her mouth. Isaac looked shocked but he wore it better. He put a hand on the back of his wife’s chair—whether to comfort her or steady himself wasn’t clear.
“We heard about that dead girl that was found. That was Katie’s friend Jessica?” he asked with disbelief, looking at Grady for confirmation.
“It was,” Grady said.
Hannah and her husband exchanged a look that was part fear, part confusion.
“May the Lord have mercy on her soul,” Isaac muttered.
“Did Katie have any particular dealings with any of the families on Grimlace Lane?”
“Not particular,” Isaac said.
“She never dated any of the boys? The Millers? Fishers? Kings?” I swallowed and added reluctantly, “Ezra Beiler?”
“No,” Isaac said firmly.
I felt relieved. “Right. Well I guess you can understand why this makes us interested in Katie’s whereabouts.”
They said nothing but they looked genuinely worried for the first time since we’d arrived. I didn’t understand how parents could let their daughter go without any expectation of her return or even news on how she was doing. True, I’d seen plenty of families with troubled youths, families that were better off when the black sheep in question—usually a kid badly hooked on meth or alcohol—simply stayed away. But surely Katie, an Amish teenage girl, couldn’t have been that much trouble. If liking boys were a crime, I’d have been sentenced to Siberia by age thirteen.
“Do you have any pictures of Katie?” Grady asked. “We’ll need to check the hospitals and morgues in the area. Hopefully, we won’t find anything, but we have to look.”
Isaac wiped his face as though he were sweating. He looked shaken. “No. We don’t hold to such like. No photos.”
“Katie didn’t have any photos of her own that she left behind, from when she was in rumspringa?” I asked.
“No.”
“I cleaned out her drawers already,” Hannah said with certainty. “Ruth and Waneta are in Katie’s old room now. Didn’t find no photos.”
“We can call in a
sketch artist,” Grady said. “Would you be willing to help us draw a picture of Katie?”
They exchanged a look and Isaac nodded. “I s’pose that would be aright.”
“Did she have any distinguishing marks?” I asked.
Hannah shook her head. “Not that I can say.”
“Here.” Isaac gestured to his left front thigh. “A good-sized mole. Shaped like a butterfly.”
Hannah looked at him in surprise. “That’s right. I forgot about that already.”
I stared flatly at Isaac. He grew uncomfortable, his face reddening. “I . . . I remember it from when she was a baby.”
I said nothing.
Grady cleared his throat. “Can you show Detective Harris Katie’s old room, please?”
—
Grady called for the sketch artist and to get a search started on any bodies matching Katie’s age and gender that had been found since October of last year. Meanwhile, Hannah took me up to Katie’s room.
“As I said, her clothes and such like were already handed down. Not much to see,” she said as she opened the door.
Two girls followed us into the room and stood with their hands behind their backs, regarding me with interest.
“Who’s this?” I asked, giving the girls a smile.
“Ruth and Waneta.” Hannah pointed them out. Ruth was the older, maybe just on the cusp of puberty. Waneta looked to be seven or eight. They were both quite pretty, petite like their mother, and dark-haired. I wondered if they took after Katie.
“Wanna see some of Katie’s clothes?” Ruth volunteered eagerly. She opened the closet and pulled out a typical blue, long-sleeved Amish dress. She held it up to her chest and primped a bit. “This was Katie’s. It’s mine now, or will be when I grow big enow.”
“It’s a beautiful color,” I said, lightly fingering the soft cotton with a smile. Ruth was certainly not shy. I wondered if that too was a family trait.
“The lady is a policeman. I don’t think that’s of much help to her now,” Hannah said patiently.
“It’s all right,” I said as warmly as I dared. “Did Katie have this room to herself when she lived at home?”
“Nah, she shared it with Miriam till she got married, then Ruth,” said Hannah.
“That’s me!” Ruth added in case I was absentminded.
“Hush now,” Hannah scolded lightly.
“Actually, if it’s all right with you I’d like to ask Ruth some questions, since she roomed with Katie.”
Hannah considered the request. “Can I be with her?”
“Of course! I can do it right here.”
“Ja, it’s fine. Go ahead now.”
I turned to Ruth. “Did Katie do or say anything that made you think she was going to leave when she did?”
“She said I’d have the room to myself right soon enow.”
I nodded. “But the day she left, did you know she was going to leave that very day?”
Ruth shook her head.
“We already asked the children that,” Hannah said. “Katie didn’t say good-bye to any of them.”
“And when Katie was here, did she ever talk to anyone at night, maybe on a phone? She had a phone, didn’t she?”
“Vater said she was not to use it in the house.” Ruth sounded very firm about that.
“Well, sometimes girls Katie’s age don’t always do as they’re told. Do they?” I smiled.
Ruth looked at me with big eyes. “Vater said not to, and I woulda told.”
Well. That explained why Katie didn’t confide in Ruth.
“Did Katie ever talk to you about her friend Jessica?”
Ruth shook her head.
“What about a boy she liked? Was she seeing anyone special?”
Ruth shook her head again. I felt a pang of disappointment. Katie must have kept things very close to the chest.
“Was there anything that she was very fond of? Maybe a book or a picture from a magazine, anything you would have thought she’d take with her when she left?”
Ruth shrugged. “I dunno. She liked cats.”
“Katie had a small collection of cats. People gave ’em to her for birthdays and whatnot,” Hannah clarified.
Ruth ran over to a little wooden hutch on the wall. It was rough, like a birdhouse, with a latched door on the front. She opened it. Inside were four shelves and ten little ceramic cats in different colors and designs. They were the cheap kind you can buy at a roadside stand for a few dollars.
I looked them over, feeling unaccountably hollow. This was the sole treasure of an eighteen-year-old girl?
—
Hannah led the way down the narrow stairs. I started to follow when I felt a tug on the back of my coat. I turned to see an adorable creature—a little girl around five years old. Her fuzzy brown hair burst out from under her cap and her round face still looked a bit tan from the long-lost summer sun. She was a beaut.
“Hey there,” I said, bending down a little.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “That’s not where Katie kept it.”
I blinked at her. “Kept what?”
“Her bestest things.”
I felt a spark of interest, but I kept my smile calm. “What’s your name?”
“Sadie.”
“Were you special friends with Katie, Sadie?”
The little girl nodded solemnly.
“Will you show me where she kept her bestest things?”
Sadie shook her head just as seriously. “’Tis secret.” Then turned and ran up the stairs.
—
It took a conversation with Grady, another with Hannah and Isaac Yoder, and then a frontal assault on little Sadie’s code of honor—which was considerable for a five-year-old, and put her sister Ruth to shame—but eventually Sadie broke. She led us all into the barn, her lip trembling.
“I promise, we’re trying to help Katie,” I reassured her.
Sadie wasn’t buying it and didn’t seem much comforted as she reluctantly led us to the back of the old bank barn. There, a small hidden door that looked like part of the wall pushed inward into a crawl space, maybe four by ten. It appeared long abandoned, maybe part of an original barn that had been built onto over the years.
I stepped into the space while Grady held the door open and Hannah and Isaac stood and watched. The area was dusty, surrounded on three sides by old stone walls and on the fourth by the wooden barn wall. The dirt floor had been wet and re-dried so many times over the decades it had taken on a cracked pattern like a ceramic glaze. The bones of a large bird lay on the ground next to the head of what might have been a rat.
Up against the inside wall was a black plastic garbage bag. The bag was dusty and twist-tied shut. I pulled it up and handed it over the wall to Grady.
“What is it?” Isaac asked as I climbed back over to join them.
“Would you open it, please?” Grady asked Isaac. He sat the bag on a cement ledge.
Isaac undid the twist tie and pulled it open. Grady carefully lifted each item out and placed it on the ledge in turn so that we could all see.
There were neatly stacked clothes—gauzy tank tops, a light sweater, and two short skirts in bright pink and turquoise. There was a chunky silver-colored necklace and clip-on earrings, and a pair of tan high-heeled pumps, cheap and slightly scuffed. Next came a small bag of makeup. Grady unzipped it. Inside was lipstick, mascara, blush, eye shadow, and two foil packets of condoms. At the bottom of the plastic bag was a leather zip wallet. The wallet contained what looked like a few thousand dollars in twenties and fifties and a folded-up piece of newsprint. Grady unfolded the newspaper and we looked at both sides. One side held the small print of staff credits and copyrights and the other side an ad for diet pills. I hadn’t gotten the impression that Katie had been overweight, but teenage girls were never happy w
ith their bodies. There was no cell phone in the bag.
Grady met my eyes. The foreboding look on his face matched my own sickening response. Maybe Katie wouldn’t have taken her ceramic cats or her Amish clothes, but all this money . . . She never would have left without this.
Grady nodded and I took out my cell phone and started photographing Katie’s abandoned belongings.
“Mr. and Mrs. Yoder, is it all right with you if we remove these items to the station to examine them more carefully?” Grady asked. “You’ll get everything back. We can count the money together before we take it.”
Hannah apparently reached the same conclusion we had, because she let out a sob and turned her back to us, turning into her husband for support though not quite touching him. His eyes too were red and he trembled ever so slightly. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Take it,” he said in a gruff voice. “And may God’s will be done.”
CHAPTER 7
The Girl in the River
I was driving down Route 30 the next morning toward the police station when I passed Henry’s Fruit Market. The name was misleading. It actually carried a full range of groceries as well as locally grown fruit. It was an old-fashioned place of the type Lancaster County excelled in, with a huge ’50s retro vintage sign out front complete with painted fruit and lettering.
And Jessica’s car had been abandoned here the day she died.
I’d seen the fruit market before, but I’d never shopped there. I did my grocery shopping at odd hours, and frequented the twenty-four-hour, one-stop-shopping gigantic chain stores. Hernandez had done the legwork on the market. He said it had a history running back over a hundred years. It’d been a wooden Amish fruit stand back then. It still employed a lot of Amish workers.
Forensics was examining the car, but our first look confirmed what LeeAnn Travis had said—there was no blood and no signs of a struggle. It was just a teenage girl’s fairly filthy car. It was a 1986 Toyota Corolla that had over two hundred thousand miles and looked like a fender bender would cause the whole thing to fall apart, like in some slapstick cartoon. Whatever had happened to Jessica, it hadn’t happened in her car. But where it had been left—that was extremely interesting. Henry’s Fruit Market was in the heart of the town of Paradise, which meant it wasn’t far from Grimlace Lane or any number of other Amish homes. Manheim, where Jessica had lived and gone to school, was twenty miles away, and she hadn’t been working at the farmers’ market over the winter. So what was she doing in Paradise that day?
