He stepped back to her side, but with a whine. She saw immediately why — two cats sat at saucers with milk in them. When they saw Max, one hissed, but the other continued lapping at the milk.
“Let him go. Don’t expect he’d catch anything more than a swipe on the end of his nose.”
Callie pivoted around and saw Ira Bontrager standing in the door’s shadow, holding the handles of a wheelbarrow. She had to stifle a giggle, he looked so much like a figure out of a history book. Tall, thin, with his white beard reaching nearly to the waist of his pants and his suspenders pulled up over his dark blue work shirt. Today he also wore a wool stocking cap.
“Hello, Mr. Bontrager. Max and I thought we’d stop by for a visit.”
“You can call me Ira. Visit a man while he’s mucking out a stall, you ought to call him by his first name.”
“Do they make you work for your room around here?” Callie smiled, unsure whether she should offer to shake his hand or give him a hug.
“Nah. They think it’s good therapy, as if I didn’t do enough of this when I had my own farm. Now I get to do it on someone else’s place.” Ira motioned her toward a stall. “Truthfully I don’t mind though. Beats sitting inside where all those women are knitting.”
“We met Erin when we arrived.” Callie and Max followed Ira into the enclosed area. It was small but warmer, with the sun shining through the high windows that ran the length of the barn. The smells were earthy and strong.
“Ya. She’s one of the better ones. Some are real hens.” Ira proceeded to stick a long-handled tool into a pile of wood shavings.
“Is that a pitch fork?”
He shook his head but didn’t bother to look at her. “I thought I read you were from Texas. Don’t you have a lot of horses in Texas?”
“Yes. We do.” Callie moved to the corner of the stall, looped Max’s leash under the corner of an upended wooden crate and sat on the ground beside it. Max stretched the length of his leash, investigating. “Can’t say I’ve been around them much. I lived in the city mostly, since I’ve been grown.”
She looked around the stall and added, “When I was a child, we lived on military bases. They had mounted divisions, cavalry, and I remember watching them practice with the horses. Don’t know that I ever saw anyone clean out a stall.”
“This is an apple picker.” Ira waved it at her with a gleam in his eyes. “And these are wood shavings. Guess you can see it’s not hay. An apple picker works best for separating out the horse’s droppings and removing the soiled shavings.”
He plunged it into the pile of shavings, releasing more of the pungent odor, and shook it a tad so that the clean shavings fell to the stall’s floor. What remained on top he dropped into the wheelbarrow. “Wanna try?”
“Umm. Maybe I should watch this time.” At the rate he was moving, Callie figured it would be lunch before he finished with this one stall. She hoped no horse needed back in there soon.
“Guess you received my letter.”
“I did.”
“So you’ll help me?” He didn’t look at her, kept working the apple picker into the wood shavings.
“I won’t lie to you, Ira. Can’t really see what I can do to find a girl that went missing so many years ago — “
“It was 1965. I know it was 1965.” He jabbed the apple picker in more forcefully and lifted it, though his arms were trembling. When he turned to look at her, his gaze never wavered. “Suppose I know how many years ago it was. Might forget where I am sometimes, but I don’t forget the year those funnels from hell came tearing out of the sky, the year my dochder went missing.”
Callie had thought she could come and pay a visit to an old man, maybe brighten his day a little. She thought she might be able to ease his pain a bit. Would dragging his memories back to something that had happened so long ago help? Was there any chance at all that this woman could still be alive?
This was a fool’s errand, and Callie was a sucker to think she might do any good.
“Thirty-nine twisters. That’s what those newspaper men said when it was all over.” His work took on a slow, methodical rhythm as his voice recited the facts. “Across the central plains they came — Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and of course here in Indiana, leaving two hundred and sixty people dead.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his brow. Callie couldn’t tell if it was from the labor or from the remembering.
“Would you like me to get you a glass of water, Ira?”
He waved the request away, resumed cleaning the stall. “Palm Sunday. Terrible day for such a thing to happen. Day of the Lord’s triumphal entry. Hmph.”
He shook his head, was silent for several minutes. Finally he stopped working and leaned on his apple picker. Max padded over to him and licked his fingers. When he did, Ira reached down and ran his hand gently over the top of the dog’s head. Then he leaned the picker up against the side of the stall and sat down on the crate beside Callie.
“Haven’t spoken of that day all these many years. A thing that terrible. You try to move past it. You tell yourself it’s best forgotten and maybe it was. Maybe it was.”
“How old was your daughter?”
He didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice sounded distant and wavered like the trees in the wind.
“She is three, just a wee thing. She is but three years old.” Tears began to travel down the grooves and crannies of his cheeks made by the many years and dozens of wrinkles. “Rainbows. So many rainbows around the lake.”
Callie thought not to ask him. She started, then stopped herself, then started again. The problem was that at some point since entering the stall, she had started believing his story. And if she believed his story, than she had to ask. If she was going to help — and it still seemed a harebrained thing to believe she could — then there were two things she had to ask.
“Why do you think she’s still alive?”
“Never found a body. All the others, eventually a body showed up — under the rubble, or sometimes miles away, but it did appear.
Might be days later, but they found something.” He rubbed at the tears on his face. “Sharon, she kept saying to wait one more day. That maybe Bethany would show up. Maybe she’d wandered off with the wrong family and they’d bring her back. We’d had a late meal at church that day, and there was a lot of confusion.”
He pulled in a deep breath, rubbed Max’s ears when the dog leaned against him. “But days stretched into weeks, and finally I accepted no one was going to be bringing Beth home.”
“And you never had a funeral?”
He shook his head. “Sharon won’t hear of it. She can’t bear to hear Bethany’s name spoken, but she keeps a little box of things for her, just in case. I know it’s not right — that something in my wife was broken by those storms, but I don’t know what to do. So I keep farming best I can. Helps to have my son, Caleb, around the place. Have you met my son, Caleb?”
“Yes. I met him the other day.”
Ira stood, shuffled over to the wheelbarrow and pushed it out of the stall.
Callie gathered Max and his leash and hurried to catch up with Ira.
“But after all these years, what makes you think Bethany’s still alive, and that I can find her? Any number of things could have happened to her since then. Why look for her now after all this time?”
Ira’s constant drift between the past and the present wasn’t lost on Callie. She understood he was struggling with dementia and knew that condition was influencing what he remembered as well as how he perceived things.
When he turned to answer her though, his eyes were as clear and cognizant as Shane’s — though why Callie thought of him at that moment she had no idea.
“Why you?” Ira drew himself up straight. “Because you’re the only one who will listen to an old man’s ramblings. Why now? Because my heart tells me now is the time. Because I have a pain that won’t stop hurting, won’t stop until I see her again.�
��
As he turned and walked out of the barn, Callie realized whether she wanted to or not, she was about to start searching for one Bethany Bontrager, lost since 1965.
Chapter 22
REUBEN HAD HEARD THAT PRISON was immensely tedious, that the hours stretched endlessly on, and that men cracked and spilled their secrets for no other reason than to be relieved of the boredom.
So far he’d yet to have an uninterrupted day.
“Lawyer’s here to see you, Mr. Fisher.” The pip-squeak of a girl who announced this did not look like she could be old enough to be out of the Englisch school system.
Reuben thought about arguing with her, then decided it wasn’t worth his effort. Easier to see Adalyn Landt then send her on her way. Probably quicker too. He rose from his bunk, allowed the young officer to cuff his hands, and walked down to the room set aside for attorney-prisoner meetings.
This was a different place than where he’d met Tobias. Smaller — nearly the size of Reuben’s cell, it was also quieter, and no one else was in the room with them.
Reuben looked up at the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling as he walked through the doorway.
“They’ll record our images, but they can’t listen to what we say.”
Reuben shifted his feet uncomfortably.
“I understand you don’t like being photographed, Reuben, but by now you know that you’re being monitored constantly. It’s one of those rights you lost when you became a resident of Shipshewana Municipal Jail, and it will be worse when they transfer you to the county jail next Monday.”
“Is that what I’m paying you for now? To bring me gut news?”
“Your family is paying me to craft a defense.” Adalyn placed a large leather bag on the table between them. This one was a light tan color, and Reuben found himself wondering how many bags Adalyn owned. “Something we need to start working on today.”
Reuben sat in the chair across from her as she took out a tablet and pen.
She looked up to find him staring at her bag.
“Twelve hundred dollars. That’s what this one cost. Is that what you were wondering?”
“That’s a disgusting display of materialism, even for an Englischer.”
“Do you think so, Reuben?” Adalyn sat heavily on the chair, and the look that crossed her face reminded him again of his mother. It occurred to him that he should be careful angering this one. She looked as if she’d fought her share of battles.
“It’s not your place to be judging me though. Is it?” She twirled the pen once, twice, then three times. “I don’t usually justify my purchases to my clients, but in this case perhaps it will help us to move forward. The reason that I buy Louis Vuitton …” She tapped the LV monogram on the front of the bag. “The reason is because I appreciate the highest quality in craftsmanship. Louis lived in France in the eighteen hundreds. He became an apprentice to a layetier. Are you familiar with that word?”
“Ya. It means one who makes luggage or trunks.”
“By hand. Louis Vuitton crafted his merchandise by hand and sold it in small boutiques, and Louis Vuitton merchandise is still made by hand today. That quality makes this brand one of the most valuable in the world.”
Adalyn again set her pen into a spin. She watched it as silence filled the room, then her hand came down and stopped it midspin. “In my job sometimes I have to go lower than I’d like, get a bit dirtier than I’d prefer. Sometimes I have to hear things I’d rather not hear and look at things that I’d rather not see …” Her hand went to the bag, brushed the logo. “It helps to know that quality does matter, and that hard work is rewarded. Though of course this is just a bag, and you’re correct — twelve hundred dollars is a ridiculous price.”
She smiled and picked up her pen.
Reuben realized with a rush of emotion that he and this middle-aged, overweight, commercially minded Englisch woman had something in common after all. Though looking at them you couldn’t find two more different individuals, they both appreciated doing things right.
And isn’t that what had landed him here? His thoughts went again to the letter he’d received from Emma, to the promise he’d made her, and how it had somehow led him to be in this place. How many from the community would even remember Emma? Yet it seemed God had brought her back into his life for a reason.
“The one thing I wanted was to be a gut farmer. Not just gut, but one of the best.”
Reuben stared down at his hands, hands that he now knew were capable of both good and bad. “I suppose you’d think it was for the profit it would bring, but money is only useful to a point. The land was a burden to my parents. They’d grown too old to farm it. Folks like to think Amish people work until they step into their graves, but it isn’t true. No, they step aside and hand it to the next generation. My folks moved in with my schweschder and the place that had been farmed by my grossdaddi passed to me — to me and Tobias.”
Adalyn had taken a few notes. She stopped now and looked him in the eye. “When was the last time you saw the girl?”
Reuben shook his head, stared down at his hands.
“Why was she staying in the house?”
He clenched his teeth together.
“How long had you known her? Who made the tracks in the woods?” She waited, then added, “They know it wasn’t you. The shoe size is different. Black is going to claim you had an accomplice.”
When Reuben didn’t answer, Adalyn set the pen down, perpendicular to the pad. “Reuben, the judge will require you to answer these questions. Not Monday. Monday is when the prosecution will prove the murder charges are valid. They’ll present what evidence they have and possibly call witnesses.”
Reuben looked up then.
“From what Tobias and Esther have told me, I suspect they’ll call Gavin. He seems to be the one person to have seen you in the girl’s company. But it’s possible that someone else saw you as well. I am not allowed to call witnesses. The reason I’m asking you these questions is that I’d like to start building our argument to those charges.”
Reuben shook his head, finally cleared his throat, and said, “I can’t tell you anything about that girl.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Adalyn waited one, then two minutes.
When he didn’t answer, she cleared her throat, pulled out a picture, and set it on the table. It was of Katie’s duffel bag. He had been wondering what had happened to it. Why take a dead girl’s clothes? When he’d gone back into the house, all he’d found was the cell phone.
“Someone brought it into the police station in Middlebury. How did this bag end up in Middlebury? They know it belonged to the girl. It has her prints on it. I suspect it has your prints on it too. But you didn’t take it to Middlebury, since you were already incarcerated. So the person you’re covering for took it there. Why would he do that? And when did you handle the girl’s things?”
Had he picked it up? Maybe. Maybe when he’d helped them carry their things into the house.
If she thought she could make him uncomfortable by waiting him out, she’d never been to an Amish church service. He wondered how she’d respond to three hours of sitting on backless wooden benches.
There was a light tap on the door behind him. Adalyn motioned for one more minute.
“I need to tell you something else. I don’t want to, because I think the prosecution is grandstanding, but as your attorney, I believe it’s my job to make you aware of any developments in your case. The police department and the county detectives went out to your farm again this morning.”
Reuben had been staring at a yellow stain in the linoleum, but something in Adalyn’s voice caused him to glance up at her.
“They’re looking for another girl.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A girl from the Cedar Bend area has gone missing. At first they thought she’d run away, but then the boyfriend showed up. Turned out he’d been on a camping trip with his family — he has plenty of witnesses. They i
ssued an alert immediately. A judge granted a release of her cell phone records and the police were able to trace her final calls. They were made here in Shipshewana.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Her last call was placed two days before the girl’s body showed up at your place.”
All of the blood flowed out from Reuben’s head, like the time he’d been hit with a baseball as a boy, the moment before he’d passed out. He could still hear Adalyn’s voice, but it was as if it were coming from a great distance.
“In my opinion, there’s absolutely no proof connecting this girl’s disappearance to you, but the judge allowed a search warrant on circumstantial evidence and the slim chance that the girl might still be hidden on your place.”
The door behind him opened, and Reuben didn’t have to turn around. He knew who had walked in, could smell the leather jacket Shane Black wore before he walked up beside the table.
Black dropped the picture of a young girl onto the table. She looked to be a bit younger than Katie and had long red hair. A smattering of freckles lined the tops of her cheeks, and her smile revealed the metal braces so many of the Englisch teenagers wore.
“What about it Reuben? Want to tell us where she is?” Shane’s voice was low and rumbling like a coming storm.
Esther couldn’t believe Deborah had talked her into going to the quilting circle.
“What else are you going to do? Stay there and stare a hole through the police officers?” Deborah glanced back at Joshua and Leah. “Can you wipe his nose? I’m sure it isn’t catching. I know you don’t need a sick dochder.”
“Probably allergies from being in that dusty house.” Esther reached over the buggy seat and swiped at Joshua’s nose with her handkerchief, though Joshua did his best to avoid her. “If I had stayed at the house perhaps I could have watched over Tobias. You were standing right there. Did you not notice how he went after Shane?” She turned around and clutched the half-finished quilt in her lap.
“What does went after mean, Mamm?” Leah continued playing with her doll as she waited for her answer.
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