Shadows of Lancaster County

by Mindy Starns Clark

  And I had, I thought as I turned onto the main road. I had done just fine here. My job didn’t pay very well, but I loved it anyway, loved the folks I worked with, loved the challenge of being a skip tracer, of tracing down people who were missing.

  Merging into traffic, I headed downtown. I tried dialing Lydia’s number several times as I drove, feeling bad that I’d had to cut her off so abruptly before. She didn’t answer, so when I reached the office I gave up for the time being, found an empty spot in the employee parking lot, and made my way into the building and through a familiar maze of corridors toward our department. In the metropolis that was Kepler-West Finance, the room where Kiki and Norman and I worked was definitely located on the wrong side of the tracks. Far from the shiny front entrance or the sleek administrative wing, our tiny section was tucked away on a lower level in an interior corridor with no windows or natural light. Still, what we lacked in ambiance we made up for in efficiency and effectiveness. Our trio functioned like a well-oiled machine, with Norman at the helm, me doing most of the computer work, and Kiki doing most of the footwork. In the seven years I had worked there, we had traced everything from criminal-level bail jumpers to absconding millionaires—but I never thought I’d be hunting down my own brother.

  Norman was fighting with the coffee machine when I appeared in the doorway, but when he saw my face he seemed to forget all about it and focused on me instead. Obviously, he could tell something was wrong.

  Fortunately, we were there by ourselves and could talk. I told him what had happened, glad at least that this time I was able to get through it without crying. He listened intently, asking questions when necessary, handing me a box of tissues when I was finished.

  “I’m all right,” I said, giving the box back.

  “I’m not,” he said, pulling out a tissue and blowing his nose. “Poor Kiki! She’s over in the hospital right now, when it just as easily could have been the morgue!”

  I let him pace and moan for a bit, grateful he was the kind of person who deeply, truly cared. While he recovered, I fixed the coffeemaker and started a pot going, and then I made a cup just the way he liked it, with lots of cream and two packets of sweetener. I needed to tell him that beyond dealing with the morning’s break-in, there was also the matter of a family emergency I needed to handle. As I gave him his coffee, he offered me the day off, saying he felt sure I needed it after such a traumatic morning. I replied I would appreciate that a lot, especially if I could stay here in the office for a while first and use the computer to handle a personal matter.

  “Whatever you need,” he said, taking a seat at his desk. “Just let me know if you want any help.”

  “Thanks, boss. Actually, I’d like to pick your brain for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  Rolling a chair over to his desk, I told him the rest of the story, about my missing brother and everything Lydia had said. He listened intently, nodding once in a while and jotting down a few notes. He made me go through the attack again as well, but when I got to the part about what the intruder said, he stopped writing and looked up at me.

  “What kind of rubies?” he asked.

  “He pronounced it ‘bor-nays rubies.’ Does that mean anything to you? Have you ever heard that term before?”

  Norman shook his head, contemplating. “If he brought up your family tree like that, though, it must be something that was passed down through the generations.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think he had the right family tree. He got my brother and father right, but then he named people I’ve never heard of. Peter? Jonas? Karl? I don’t know who these men are. He must have me confused with someone else.”

  “How far back have you traced your roots?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ancestry, genealogy, all of that. Do you even know the names of your great-grandparents or your great-great-grandparents?”

  I shook my head, realizing he had a point. How could I be sure these names weren’t connected with me if I didn’t know anything beyond a few generations?

  “Have you spoken to your parents? They might be able to help,” Norman suggested.

  “My parents are on vacation right now. I wouldn’t even know how to reach them.”

  “Don’t they have cell phones?”

  I explained that the phones wouldn’t work where they were right now, that my parents were avid bird-watchers and were currently on a three-week hike across New Zealand, pursuing Yellow-Nosed Mollymawks and Wedge-Tailed Shearwaters.

  “Are they scientists?”

  “No,” I replied, adding that once my dad took early retirement, his favorite hobby of bird-watching had become an obsession. Ever the good sport, my mother indulged him as best she could, though when he announced his plans for this trip, she nearly beaned him with his own binoculars. “His idea won out, but next year he has to go with her to a scrapbooking convention.”

  “Well, then, talk to your eldest living relative, a grandparent maybe,” Norman persisted. “Sometimes people are surprised by the wealth of information that old folks carry around in their head. You could sit and talk with a great-grandmother for example and learn all sorts of things about her great-grandmother—and much of the rest of the family too.”

  I thought about that, slowly shaking my head. On my father’s side, there were no old folks left. My great-grandparents were long dead by the time I was born, my grandmother died of cancer when I was twelve, and my grandfather had passed just a year after that from an aortic aneurism. I told Norman as much, and he suggested I do a little genealogical work of my own anyway. He was convinced that the Beauharnais Rubies were some sort of family heirloom, and if I traced back the family tree I should be able to find the point at which they had probably been handed down to some other branch.

  “What do you want to bet some distant cousin is running around in those rubies right now, while you’re the one getting attacked by mistake?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Or, for all you know, the man who showed up at your house this morning is a distant cousin, one who thinks you got the rubies instead of him! No telling what the whole story is, but I think this would be the best place to start. You might also get a lot more information once the police have had a chance to interrogate the guy.”

  That was true, though I knew it might take a while before he was out of surgery and coherent enough to be interrogated. In the meantime, I decided to focus on finding my brother. Considering the timing, his disappearance and my break-in were likely related somehow.

  I thanked Norman and rolled back to my desk. From there I opened several different applications on my computer and then dialed the number of the phone shanty yet again. Lydia answered this time, apologizing that she hadn’t been able to hear the phone before. I apologized as well for taking so long to get back to her, but for the sake of time I didn’t recount the morning’s trauma in full; I simply gave her an abbreviated version. Mostly, I wanted to know if she’d ever heard of the Beauharnais Rubies, but she sounded as clueless as I was.

  “Any word yet from Bobby?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “No, Anna. Is like he simply disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  “He’s out there somewhere,” I said, “but if I’m going to hunt him down, I need all of your personal account numbers, including his Social Security number.”

  “Yah, I can do that. I still have the box of our important papers.”

  She promised to call me back in a few minutes, so while I waited I began Googling the term “Beauharnais Rubies.” I tried every spelling I could think of—bornays, barnhaze, bernaze, bernais—but no matter what entry I typed in, it came back with nothing even remotely relevant. Whatever that man had wanted, I sure wasn’t going to figure it out easily.

  When Lydia called back with the information, I pulled up my usual skip tracing form, thinking I might as well go about this in my standard, systematic way, even if it was my own brother I was looking for. As always, I began by en
tering “known data.” Of course, the form didn’t ask for the things I did know, such as how Bobby loved the way his son Isaac’s hair reflected a million shades of reddish brown in the sun, or how he much he enjoyed hanging out with his Amish buddy who trained race horses, speeding around the track on horseback at breakneck speed. Instead, the form wanted data I didn’t know so well, such as any current and former mailing addresses, his credit history, his job title. These things I got from Lydia, who read them off from the papers one by one.

  It wasn’t that Bobby and I didn’t keep up with the basics, I thought as I typed in a credit card number. He and I usually spoke on the phone once or twice a month, and I was always bugging him to get a computer at home so we could communicate more often via email. But after the fire and all that happened in its wake, my brother and I had stopped talking about unimportant stuff, such as job titles and life facts, and tended more often to discuss feelings and thoughts.

  When you share a tragedy that way, you find yourself living a different sort of bond.

  Once Lydia had given me every piece of information she could find, I thanked her and told her I would call back in about an hour, hopefully with some good news, though deep inside I feared it may be the opposite. My main concern was that the man who broke into my house this morning had confronted my brother in a similar manner last night—but that Bobby hadn’t managed to escape from him the way I had. With that thought in mind, I started my trace by calling the Lancaster and Chester County, Pennsylvania, hospitals, morgues, and police stations to see if they had encountered anyone matching Bobby’s description, dead or alive. The answer was no across the board, so after I had exhausted every possible avenue of that sort, I turned to the data Lydia had given me and began running credit card checks.

  What I found was both interesting and confusing. Judging by his expenditures, Bobby’s day-to-day life, financially speaking, was so predictable, so simple, it was boring just to read about it. Late last night, however, all sorts of strange activity had suddenly taken place with his accounts. From what I could tell, between the hours of ten and eleven p.m., Bobby had made strange ATM withdrawals, rented a car, bought an airline ticket—to Las Vegas of all places—and changed his name, address, and contact information on various bills and accounts all over the map. Either his identity had been stolen and someone else had done all this, or Bobby had done it himself in an attempt to obscure his path and disappear. In my expert opinion, the types of things that had been done seemed to indicate the latter.

  While this maze of hits and misses left me baffled and confused, it also made me feel hopeful. If these transactions were really conducted by Bobby himself, then at least I could conclude that his disappearance had been self-orchestrated. I still didn’t know why he would have done such a thing, but at least that was better than learning he had been the victim of a crime and was lying somewhere unconscious with no one around to help him.

  “Bobby, what’s going on?” I whispered, trying to put myself into his mind-set, wondering what he would do if he found himself in some kind of trouble. Running possibilities around and around in my mind, I initiated an ISP search so that at least I could find the computer of origin, the place where he had been sitting when he made all of those strange computer maneuvers last night.

  As in any good skip trace, diligence and careful research would win out in the end. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed onward, my fingers flying across the keyboard, my heart inching toward despair.

  SIX

  Some digging was required, but in the end it turned out that Bobby had done all of his online activity from an Internet café in Exton, Pennsylvania, last night between ten and eleven p.m. That at least locked him in to a specific place and time. Just to be sure the person at the keyboard had been him and not someone else, I contacted the café and spoke to the manager, who was very accommodating. She had been on duty last night, and she distinctly remembered a man coming in around ten and staying for about an hour. According to her, the guy was “really good looking,” in his early thirties, with curly brown hair and green eyes. She said he had bought a black coffee with an extra shot of espresso, but he was already so tense she couldn’t imagine why he needed it.

  “I thought about talking him out of it,” she said, “like a bartender refusing to serve a drunk, you know? But I figured it was none of my business.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Far as I could tell. He went outside to use the pay phone a couple times, though.”

  Bobby didn’t own a cell phone, so I felt sure that was how he had called Lydia to tell her that she and Isaac were in danger and that they should go to the farm. But danger from what? From whom? Despite his flurry of subterfuge, what was this all adding up to, anyway? Now that I knew he wasn’t lying on the ground somewhere hurt and alone, I kept glancing at the clock, feeling more and more stupid for wasting several hours on a fruitless hunt for what was likely nothing more than some temporary domestic drama that would soon play itself out with or without my help. It wouldn’t have been in character for him, but maybe my brother had created the whole “danger” thing as a ruse to buy himself time to get away from his wife.

  If that’s what was going on here, it wouldn’t be the first time Bobby decided to drop off the face of the earth. Years ago, the day his parole ended, he had taken off and hitchhiked his way across the country. For a while it felt as though he had simply vanished, but somehow, eventually, he made his way back home, where he learned that Lydia still loved him and had been waiting for him all that time. They were married soon after, and as far as I knew, he had been a steadfast and very-present husband ever since.

  I was about to take a break when the phone rang, startling me. Glancing at the screen, I saw that it was Lydia.

  I hoped she was calling to say that Bobby had finally returned and all was well, but instead, as soon as she started talking, her voice caught in a sob.

  “What’s wrong, Lydia?”

  “I just had a talk with Haley.”

  “Haley Brown?” Haley had been my best friend all through high school and was one of the Dreiheit Five, as was her husband, Doug. Once I moved away and started over, we had lost touch, but I knew I would always consider her a good friend, a member of that small group who shared the common bond of tragedy and its aftermath.

  “Yah. I have been calling all around, to see if any of our friends have seen Bobby. When I called the Browns I got Haley. I think I found out more than I wanted to.” She sobbed again, and I bit my lip, listening intently as she got herself under control and continued. “Haley said yes, that Bobby came to their house last night.”

  “That’s good, actually. What time?”

  “Around eleven thirty. Which means he went over there about an hour and a half after he called me the second time.”

  “Okay, so there’s one piece of the puzzle,” I said, making a note on the time line of my skip tracing form. The timing made sense: He had called Lydia at ten p.m. worked on the computer until eleven p.m., and then made it to Haley’s house by eleven thirty. “Is that unusual for him to go over there that late? Are the four of you still friends? Don’t you get together sometimes?”

  “Sometimes, yah, if Doug wants to show off his new boat or his new motorcycle or his new jet ski, and then Bobby cannot get there soon enough. These men and their fast vehicles, ach. Give me a horse and buggy any day.” Lydia was exaggerating, as I knew she had traded in her horse and buggy for a Volkswagen Beetle the day she left the Amish order to marry Bobby. “Anyway, while it might not be unusual for Bobby to go to the Browns’ house, it was unusual for him to show up in the middle of the night, uninvited.”

  “They still live in Hidden Springs?”

  “Yah, in that big fancy place Haley’s father gave them. Anyway, Haley said that when Bobby got there, he was very agitated. Doug was not home yet, but Bobby did not even ask for him. He just knocked on the door and when Haley answered it, he said he needed to borrow some money, as
much cash as she had on hand.”

  “Did he do that often? Borrow money from your rich friends?”

  “Never,” Lydia said emphatically, and then in a less certain tone she added, “that I know of, anyway.”

  “So what happened? Did she give him some money?”

  “Yah, she told him to wait there and she went back to the bedroom safe and took out eight thousand dollars. Ach, imagine that. She had eight thousand dollars in cash in a box in her room!”

  I didn’t reply, but I knew that probably added up to a year’s apartment rental for Lydia and Bobby. Not exactly pocket change.

  “Anyway, she said he was so agitated she did not ask questions. She just told him to pay it back when he could. He said okay and thanks, and then he left.”

  “So why—”

  “There is more. After he was gone, Haley glanced at the security cameras to watch him drive away—and instead she saw movement in the backyard. She said Bobby must have stolen the keys to Doug’s motorcycle while she was getting the money from the safe, because as she watched on the security monitor, he went into the detached garage and took Doug’s motorcycle. Then he rolled it out of the back gate.”

  “What? Bobby stole Doug’s motorcycle?”

  “Haley said she thought it was odd and just kind of curious, or maybe even funny, like a practical joke. She trusted that Bobby would bring it back eventually.”

  “But he hasn’t brought it back yet?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got an atypical encounter with a friend, a loan of cash, and a stolen motorcycle. Is that it?”

  “No, there’s more,” she said, her voice growing more shaky again. “Haley said that Doug never came home last night. For a while, she thought maybe Bobby had taken the motorcycle for Doug, so that the two of them could sneak off on a late-night joyride. But then Doug did not come home and Bobby did not come back and finally she fell asleep, still waiting. By this morning, he had not shown up at all and she was furious.”