Kingdom Come

by Jane Jensen

  “It would be best if we could talk alone,” I suggested to Hannah.

  “Oh.” She stopped dead in her work, as if the reality of the situation had just occurred to her—no doubt for the hundredth time. “Ruth, Waneta, go and strip the beds for the washin’. Sadie, help your sisters now.”

  Ruth had been struggling to get a heavy iron skillet out from a bottom cupboard, and Hannah took over, lifting the thing with one hand and placing it gently on the stove. She was stronger than she looked.

  The girls left and Hannah, probably for something to do except look at me, scooped some butter from a crock into the skillet, stirring it around with a large wooden spoon as it melted.

  “Mrs. Yoder, we’ve found out that Katie and Jessica were arranging to meet men through an Internet service.” I hesitated. I didn’t relish giving up Katie’s secrets to her mother, especially not when Katie was dead, but I had no choice. “We believe they were having sex for money.”

  Hannah’s face didn’t change, but she flipped off the burner with a twist of her wrist and came to the table. She sank into a chair as if too weak to stand, and put her face in her hands.

  I waited.

  “And one of these men killed her?” she asked, taking her hands down to look at me. Her face was pale and her eyes puffy and red. She’d probably been crying on and off since we found Katie, maybe even since we found the money pouch. Her eyes were wet again now.

  “It’s very possible.”

  She shut her eyes as a wave of pain crossed her features. “If you lay down with serpents, you get bit.”

  She sounded mournful rather than harsh, and, well, she wasn’t exactly wrong.

  “Can you think of a reason why Katie would have needed money that badly?”

  She wiped her face and shook her head in resignation. “She wanted to leave. I had the idea she was savin’ for it. She never spent, you know? On candy and such like. Even though she worked hard, always.”

  “Why did she want to leave so badly?” I asked gently. “Was there something troubling her? Maybe she wanted to get away from a boy she had an unrequited crush on? Or she was having difficulties with you and her father or maybe a friend? Was anyone cruel to her? Other girls?”

  Hannah stared off at the wall, her face tense with thought. Finally she spoke haltingly. “She had friends when she was younger, but then more ’n’ more the Amish boys and girls her age stopped bein’ friendly. There was something . . . off with Katie. From a young age. She’d act inappropriate. Like she wanted to make men . . . lust after her. Older men. It didn’t matter who. She craved attention, I guess. Maybe she was one who couldn’t thrive in a big family. We don’t have time for coddles and such like. Or maybe she liked bein’ able to bend men to her will. I don’t know, but it was plain as day and . . . shameful.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. It seemed so unlikely, here in this home, and seeing Katie’s sisters, to imagine a girl raised in this environment just deciding to act wantonly. Was Hannah right? Had Katie been born that way? Was she a nymphomaniac? Or just a girl easily infatuated? Had she craved affection? Or was she rebelling against such a structured life in the one way she knew would drive her parents batty?

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong, there was much to love about Katie.” Hannah gave me a troubled glance. “She could light the sky with her smile. She was a hard and willin’ worker. Affectionate. She was the perfect child when she was younger.”

  “I’m sure she was.” I smiled.

  “That made it all the worse for us. We prayed with her night after night.”

  I shifted in my seat. That didn’t sound like much fun, especially for a teenage girl. “So you’re not surprised to hear that Katie was meeting men for money? Did Isaac know?”

  Hannah got a wistful look. “Course we didn’t know. I was always taken by surprise by her ways.” She paused, then looked down. “One time, she was only twelve years old, I come into the room where one of the good church brethren had come to visit, and Katie was reaching out to touch him there.” She blushed, looking extremely uncomfortable. “The poor man was embarrassed near to death, and so was I.” She looked up at me. “I only tell you this story just so’s you understand—Katie was driven to these things from a young age. It’s as if she had some devil in her. We prayed for God to free her from it, and many a time I saw her repent, truly repent. But she always backslid. And it led her to death, my poor, poor girl.”

  The tears came copiously then. I waited, fairly certain she didn’t want comforting. Even though she’d been honest with me, there was still this sense that she could never understand me, a female who wore suits and carried a gun, and she didn’t want to. I was an outsider. At last she cleaned herself up with a handkerchief from her apron pocket and stood. “Was that all you come to tell me?”

  I stood too. “Yes. Is there anything else you can tell me? Any man or boy Katie was seeing that you knew about? Or someone who maybe liked Katie and could have been jealous over what she was doing?”

  Her face drew tight. “I told you, Katie didn’t take to the Amish boys, nor they to her. We knew she was seein’ men outside, English men, but she never told me about it. I can’t help you.”

  “All right.”

  “Please—” She stopped herself, as if she knew she shouldn’t say what she wanted to say, then bit her lip and continued. “Just let Katie rest in peace now. It was God’s will and it’s done.”

  Anger rose in my throat like bile. But I smiled at her tightly. “Oh no, Mrs. Yoder. It is not done. I will find out what happened to Katie and Jessica. You can be sure of that.”

  —

  When I got in on Monday morning, Grady was waiting for me. “I talked to Sharon about Katie.”

  “Oh yeah? Did your wife solve the case for us?” I teased.

  He snorted. “Yeah, so take the day off. Have a massage and a manicure.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “No, Sharon didn’t solve the case, smart ass, but she did make a good point.”

  “Thank God. We need one of those.” I flopped into my desk chair.

  “She thought we should talk to a psychiatrist, someone used to dealing with youth and sexual issues. What Mrs. Yoder told you about Katie, it didn’t seem right.”

  “It sure as hell didn’t. So you’re not on board with the ‘possessed by a devil’ theory?”

  Grady tossed a paper clip at me. “Seeing as you’re feeling your oats today, E, maybe you should stay here while I go talk to the nice psychiatrist in Harrisburg. You can help Hernandez follow up on IP addresses.”

  “You’ve got an appointment?” I was excited.

  “Yup. With a woman psychiatrist Sharon’s met a few times in her work for the LGBT center. The appointment’s for nine.”

  “I’m going. I think it’s a great idea. Tell Sharon I owe her lunch.”

  “Yeah, that’s the last thing I need. You and Sharon trading stories about me.”

  I waggled my eyebrows as if to say, “We already have.” He snorted, but behind the bluff he looked ever so slightly afraid.

  —

  Dr. Emma Foster worked with the state interviewing and treating victims of sex offenders. She was in her early forties, slender, and wore a navy suit that was so thick and practical, it looked like it could survive a nuclear holocaust. She was scary bright and would have fit in well in New York. She even had a slight Jersey accent.

  Grady and I sat in her office and filled Dr. Foster in on our case—Katie’s death, the girls’ soliciting, and my interview with Katie’s mother. Dr. Foster took a few notes and when we were done she nodded. “Okay. Well, when I hear something like that, about Katie being so precocious sexually and particularly the incident where she touched a grown man’s genitals at the age of twelve, I have one question.”

  “What’
s that?” Grady asked.

  “Who was her abuser?” She looked at us with a tight, angry frown. “You’re talking about an Amish girl. She didn’t learn that behavior at home or at school. I doubt very much that her parents displayed any sexuality around their kids.”

  “No,” I agreed. I’d been around Hannah and Isaac Yoder enough to know they weren’t the type for PDAs of any sort.

  “So? She learned it somewhere. And if she was bold enough to try to touch a grown man’s penis, she hadn’t just heard it talked about, she’d done it before. Someone, some male, was having sex with Katie by then, and maybe had been since she was much younger.”

  Grady and I looked at each other. I felt sick. It wasn’t as though the idea had never crossed my mind, but I hadn’t taken it very seriously. Everyone had put the blame on Katie. She was a wanton, a temptress. She liked to wield her power over men. She was overly affectionate. She was soliciting for money. But Dr. Foster was so sure about it. And she was right, of course. Someone had sexualized Katie when she was young, far too young to have given reasonable consent. But who?

  “It’s likely someone in the family, right?” I asked, making an effort to remain calm and professional.

  Dr. Foster nodded and leaned forward. “Listen. I’m working with the state right now to open up an abuse program specifically for Amish and Mennonite. There are already programs they can use, but getting the word out there is challenging. We want to put posters up in their stores and along Route 30. I want these women and girls to know there’s someplace they can turn.” This was clearly a cause of passion for Dr. Foster.

  “Is that really . . .” Grady began doubtfully.

  “Necessary? Absolutely. This is a patriarchal culture in which kids are taught from a young age not to trust outsiders. You obey your parents without question. You accept bad things that happen as God’s will. So if they’re abused, who are they going to tell? Does a girl that age even know what’s going on? There’s certainly no sex education in their schoolrooms, so it’s up to the mother what she tells her girls. And she was raised in the same sheltered way.”

  Grady got red in the face. He was not amused. “I know a lot of Amish, Dr. Foster. It’s hard for me to believe there’s much of that going on in their communities. They’re good, moral people.”

  Dr. Foster had clearly run up against this sentiment before. She dug in her heels. “Of course, Detective Grady. I’m not saying it’s in every home. In fact, it may well occur in a lower percentage than it does in the general population. But it does happen.

  “A woman named Saloma Furlong wrote an autobiography called Why I Left the Amish, in which she writes about the sexual abuse she faced as a child at her brother’s hands. And there was a court case four years ago in which a young Amish woman went to the police about her two brothers, who’d been sexually abusing her several times a day from the time she was eight years old.”

  Grady shook his head, his brow furrowed.

  “Detective, this is a repressive, isolated culture where sex is forbidden outside of marriage, submission and forbearing are the highest virtues, and men have absolute authority. It happens. And the worst of it is, when it does, they don’t alert outside authorities. If a man beats his wife or has sex with his daughters and repents, the church leaders forgive him. His slate is ‘wiped clean.’ That’s admirable, but it also means he’s still at large and is free to reoffend.”

  “I believe you that it happens in extreme cases,” Grady admitted reluctantly. “Hell, we’re seeing more trouble these days from Amish kids in rumspringa—drinking, drugs. But I just can’t imagine it with most of the Amish I know, and not with this family. Harris, you’ve met the Yoders.”

  “They didn’t seem to be hiding something like that,” I admitted. “But you know as well as I do that you can’t always tell. And Isaac Yoder did know about Katie’s birthmark.”

  “Any father would know that.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, we haven’t met all the family yet. Two of her older brothers married and moved out. It might have been one of them when they still lived at home, or a cousin, or even someone in the church. Maybe they even know they have a pedophile in their midst but he repented, as Dr. Foster said, and they’re keeping it quiet.”

  I was fixed on that idea. Any Amish man in the area could know that part of Rockvale Creek well. Of course, Katie’s sex offender wasn’t necessarily her and Jessica’s murderer, but I wanted to find him regardless. It was an important piece of the puzzle.

  Dr. Foster nodded. “That’s correct. It doesn’t have to be someone in the home, just someone who had the opportunity to get Katie alone now and then. Look, you wanted to hear my expert opinion, and that’s what I’ve got. Katie may well have been promiscuous. Coming from a large family, with a stoic father, some girls will do anything to be held and appreciated, and they consider sex a fair trade. But if she was acting out sexually that young, she was abused by someone in her life. That’s my opinion.”

  Some girls will do anything to be held and appreciated. I knew whereof she spoke. My own upbringing had been so devoid of physical affection that I’d gotten into sex young. I’d lost my virginity to a boy my own age when I was fourteen. I’d even been the aggressor—I was curious. But after two weeks of panicking over whether I might be pregnant, I swore off sex until I was much older. I didn’t want anything to trap me in my parents’ lives. I wanted the attention all right—I just wanted other things more.

  Still, I thought I understood girls like Jessica and Katie, what drove them to seek out boys, sex. But then, I’d never been sexually abused. That was a whole other level of pain and need and plain fucked-upness. So maybe I didn’t understand at all.

  “Thank you, doctor,” Grady said with a reluctant smile.

  —

  Grady was quiet on our drive back to Lancaster.

  “It really bothers you to suspect the Amish of something like this, doesn’t it?” I probed.

  He grunted. “Look, I know they’re just regular people. And Sharon has had to deal with more than a few Amish youth that have been put out of their homes. I just . . . I don’t want to see this turn into a witch hunt.”

  “I agree.”

  He huffed.

  “No, I get it. We want to believe in a perfect world, don’t we?” I mused, looking out at the farmland we were driving through. “Even if we know damned well we can never achieve it ourselves, even if we don’t want to. This picture-perfect scene. We want to believe it’s the way it was with our grandparents and that it was all so much more pure and good than the way things are now. It’s like a treasured fantasy.”

  “Fuck you,” Grady sighed. “I’m not romantic about the Amish.”

  “I’m talking about myself,” I said firmly. “And all the tourists who flock here. It’s like we want to believe in them.”

  “Well, I grew up here and I’ve worked in this community ever since, and I don’t have those illusions. The Amish have their issues and they don’t have things easy. Living in the nineteenth century isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They work their asses off and they’re at the mercy of bad weather, bugs. No matter how sick you are, the cows have to be milked. No thank you. I’ll take my microbrewed beer and my Sunday football on TV, and you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think any of us could really give up our comforts. I sure as hell couldn’t. Forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying.” Grady shot me a look. “And you’re right. People do want to believe, and it would be bad as anything for the local tourist trade if we find out we have an Amish murderer. And yeah, you’ve convinced me it’s possible. Happy? I just hope to God that isn’t the way it turns out.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  But honestly? At this point I was like a hound on the scent. All I really cared about was finding Katie and Jessic
a’s killer. And if he was Amish, then I wanted to rip off the mask and expose him with a vicious repugnance that was, maybe, not entirely professional.

  Did the killer put on a righteous face? Was that why Katie, and then Jessica, had not struggled, but had turned their backs on him and been struck down? Was he the same man who’d abused Katie since she was Ruth’s age? Or Waneta’s? Or, God forbid, even little Sadie’s? Was he someone who could go after one of them?

  I wanted to find that man with everything inside me.

  —

  Instead of going back to the station, we drove over to Deacon Aaron Lapp’s farm. I’d only had the chance to speak to the man once, the day after Jessica’s death. He came across as a hard man, foreboding as a brick wall. He wasn’t old—maybe late thirties—but his demeanor gave him a much older vibe. I still remembered vividly the look he’d given Ezra and me when we’d driven past him in the buggy. It didn’t dispose me to like the man. He had dark hair, almost black, including a long, untrimmed beard. His eyes were piercingly blue, and he looked strong and capable.

  The Lapps owned twenty acres on Grimlace Lane and they had two dairy cows and a few horses. They also had a baked-good stand on the premises in the summer—supplied by Miriam Lapp and run by their kids, I assumed. And they farmed on about fifteen acres. What else they did for money, or if the church paid their deacons, I didn’t know.

  Part of me wasn’t looking forward to this interview and part of me—the argumentative part—really was.

  Miriam Lapp opened the door. She was in her thirties, a plain-faced woman, my height and big boned, with a large nose and heavy chin. She’d been nearly silent during our first interview with the Lapps after Jessica’s death, letting her husband, Aaron, do the talking. She seemed shy of strangers like many Amish women. Today she took one look at us, told us politely to wait, and closed the door again.