Under the Cajun Moon

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “What am I, a game show?”

  “You know what I mean. How come every one of your relationships ends this way, with you breaking it off just when the guy wants to get more serious? How can you be so sure one of these fellows isn’t The One?”

  I shrugged, wondering how I could explain. I kept dating because I hoped someday to find the man who would make me forget all about Reed Thornton. He had been The One, as far as I was concerned, but I had lost him eleven years ago when the fire that burned in my nightmares had also extinguished my dreams with him. Even though I hadn’t seen or spoken to Reed since, I still thought of him often, no matter how hard I tried not to. Somehow, I had yet to meet the man who could even begin to compare.

  “I’m not waiting for the perfect guy. I just want a guy who’s perfect for me. If I can’t find that, I’d rather be alone.”

  With a loud groan, Kiki finally collapsed, breathing heavily as she lay sprawled on the floor. I glanced at my watch. I needed to get moving soon if I wanted to get in a full run before we needed to leave for work. Still, as Kiki recovered from her efforts, I could tell she had more to say.

  “Go ahead, Kiki. Don’t hold back now.”

  With a chuckle, she rolled on her side and propped up on one elbow.

  “Fine. You’re a very private person, Anna, and I know you have trouble letting people in. But if you want to find someone, stop giving up so soon. True love starts when you open yourself to chances.”

  Chances? It had been a long time since I’d allowed myself the luxury of chances. Once I broke with my past seven years ago and created my new self, my new identity, my whole life had become one big chance. Back then, finding Mr. Right was the least of my worries—especially because my heart was broken from all that had happened with Reed. As time went on and I finally escaped from my past and found peace in my new life here in California, the daily risk factor had greatly lessened. Maybe it was time to take a few chances in life.

  “Thanks, Kiki, I’ll think on it,” I said as I stood and moved toward the steps in my bare feet. “Gotta run for now though, or we’ll be late for work.”

  Careful to avoid more rotten boards, I made my way down one side of the steps to the sandy beach.

  “Without shoes?” Kiki asked, moving into position for another exercise.

  “Yep, and no sunscreen either,” I said, grinning. “See? I can take chances.”

  I turned, my bare feet digging down into the sand, and took off. My movements were awkward until I reached the damp packed sand near the water. There it was easier to run, easier to find traction in the gritty ground. I tucked in my elbows and sprinted along the water’s edge until I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my chest. I slowed to a jog and ran farther than I had intended, which was not a wise choice given my bare feet. I would pay for this later, but for now it just felt good. It was calming. Sometimes I thought God used the sand and water and my quiet morning runs as a special gift for me, just to keep me sane.

  At the jetty I turned around, picked up the pace, and headed home. As I jogged, I thought about Reed and how loving him had spoiled me for any other man. In the years since I last saw him, I had probably built him up in my mind to be far more special than he actually was. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to remember that he wasn’t perfect, that in fact he had at least one very serious flaw I knew about—and probably tons more I had never had the opportunity to discover. Maybe I really did need to take a chance or two. Maybe I should stop cutting off every single relationship the moment it began to get serious. Here I was waiting for someone to come along who instantly lit that spark inside of me the way Reed had, someone who made me feel as though the world ceased to exist beyond the intensity of his gaze. But maybe I wouldn’t ever find that again. Maybe I should learn to settle for less—either that, or decide to stop looking and find contentment in being single the way Kiki had after her husband died.

  As I neared her ramshackle beachfront house, I slowed my run to a walk, fingers to my wrist as I studied the second hand on my watch. Pulse rate was good, lungs open and clear, leg muscles burning nicely. Too bad the soles of my feet were throbbing.

  I climbed up the side of the steps, grabbed the empty glass Kiki had left on the porch, and carried it through the open back door to the kitchen. I decided to stop thinking about my love life for now and focus on getting ready for work. I hoped Kiki had finished showering and I could take my turn right away. I wouldn’t have time to blow-dry my hair, but at least I could put on some makeup in the car.

  “Hey, Kik, you out of the shower yet?” I yelled.

  “One more minute and then it’s all yours,” she called back, her voice echoing from the bathroom directly above the kitchen.

  My stomach growling, I grabbed an energy bar from the pantry and another bottle of cold water from the fridge before leaving the kitchen. I had just unwrapped the bar and taken my first bite when the phone started ringing. I hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, listening as it went to the machine, knowing I didn’t have much time to spare.

  “We’re not here, leave a message!” Kiki’s recorded voice said cheerily from the box on the kitchen counter. That was followed by a beep and a long silence.

  “Annalise?” a woman’s voice finally uttered, sounding very far away. “Is this the number of Annalise Jensen?”

  Annalise Jensen? I hadn’t heard that name for years, not since I left Pennsylvania behind, moved west, and became Anna Bailey. Quickly, I dashed to the machine, heart pounding and praying that Kiki hadn’t overheard.

  “I hope this is the right number,” the voice continued in a lilting accent. “I guess I leave a message and wait and see.”

  One glance at Caller ID confirmed that the woman was calling from Dreiheit, Pennsylvania. I didn’t recognize the number, but I recognized the voice and its familiar Pennsylvania Dutch lilt. I steeled myself and answered, closing my eyes as the past came rushing toward me through three thousand miles of telephone line.

  “Don’t hang up,” I said, turning off the machine. “It’s me. I’m here.”

  “Annalise? Is Lydia. Lydia Jensen.” My sister-in-law.

  “Lydia? How did you get my number?”

  I had given this number to my brother in confidence and told him to keep it somewhere private, never share it with anyone—not even his wife—and never use it himself except in an extreme emergency.

  “Bobby gave it to me last night. He said to call you if anything went wrong. Otherwise I would never…”

  I struggled to listen as Kiki started making clunking noises overhead. What was she doing up there, a tap dance?

  “What was that last thing you said?” I asked.

  “So sorry. You cannot hear me gut? I am calling from my sister’s farm, out behind the milk house.”

  I held a hand over my other ear, closed my eyes, and tried to focus, picturing my sister-in-law standing in one of those Amish phone shanties that looked more like an outhouse than a telephone booth.

  “It’s okay. What is it, Lydia? What’s wrong?”

  She exhaled slowly, and as I waited for her to explain, I tried to calm my pounding heart and push away a feeling of impending doom.

  “I am calling about Bobby. He…he is verschwunden. Missing. He has gone missing, Annalise. I am so frightened for him. I do not know what to do.”

  I cleared my throat, genuinely surprised to hear that my brother had abandoned his wife and child. He had always seemed so happily married, but maybe there was trouble in paradise.

  “Um, it’s Anna now, not Annalise,” I corrected, leaning over to reset the tape on the answering machine, erasing the part of her message that had been recorded before I picked up. “Anyway, so he left you? Like, moved out?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Is complicated to explain.”

  “Go on,” I said, stretching the cord as far as I could to get to the fridge. At least I could make lunches as we talked.

  “Well, it started last night. Bobby was working late at
the lab, and little Isaac and I had choir practice. When we got home from church, there was something wrong with the apartment. The lock on the door was broken, and it looked like someone had been inside, going through our things.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, setting a pack of sliced ham and some condiments on the counter.

  “Closets and drawers were half open. Items were emptied out of baskets. Our belongings were intact, but they were ferroontzled—uh, like messy, out of order. Like someone had been here looking for something.”

  “Were you robbed?” I asked, wondering what that had to do with Bobby’s decision to leave. I grabbed a loaf of whole wheat from the bread box and began assembling our sandwiches.

  “I did not think so. I could not find anything that was missing. Still, I was about to call the police when the phone rang. It was Bobby. Before I could even tell him about the apartment, he said for me to take Isaac and get out of there, that we were in danger. He said for us to go to my sister’s farm and to wait there until he contacted us. When I told him about the broken lock and the ferroontzled apartment and everything, he was even more upset. I told him I was about to call the police, but he said, ‘Don’t call the police, Lydia. Just go right now. Go.’ ”

  “Did you?”

  “Yah, he was so insistent, we left right away. Bobby had already talked to my brother Caleb and told him to watch for us, and for him and my brother-in-law Nathaniel to protect us from harm once we arrived.”

  “Protect you from harm? Why?”

  “I have no idea. I do not understand any of this. I was just glad that Caleb has a cell phone so that Bobby could call us back once we got there—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “You’re telling me an Amish boy has a cell phone? Since when is that allowed?” I had only been gone from Pennsylvania for seven years, but I couldn’t imagine that in that time the Amish community had gone from having no phones in homes to letting their kids run around with cell phones in their pockets.

  Lydia hesitated and then explained.

  “Caleb is nineteen, not such a boy anymore. He is on rumspringa right now, so the rules for him are bent a bit. He is not allowed to use the cell phone in the house, but in this case an exception was made so Bobby could call back.”

  Rumspringa, I knew only too well, was that time in every Amish teen’s life when they were allowed extra freedom and more access to the outside world. The whole point was to let them see what was “out there,” what they would be giving up—and what they would be gaining—if they chose to join the Amish church and commit to a lifetime of living by Amish rules. Bobby and Lydia’s romance had begun during her rumspringa, and in the end she had chosen to forgo Amish baptism, leave the faith for a less restrictive denomination, and marry a man the Amish considered an outsider, an “Englisher.” At least she had made her radical decision prior to baptism. Had she been baptized Amish first and then left the faith, she would have been punished through shunning. As it was, though no one in the Amish community had been happy about her decision, at least they were allowed to have contact with her and her husband and children and could remain somewhat involved in their lives.

  “So did he?” I asked, trying to get back to the point. “Did Bobby call you again?”

  “Yah, soon after we arrive at the farm, Bobby called on Caleb’s phone to make sure we had arrived safely. I asked him what was going on, but he said it was a long story and that he would explain everything as soon as he got to us in just a few hours.”

  “And?”

  “And those few hours came and went, but Bobby never showed up. Now it is almost ten fifteen in the morning and we still have not seen or heard from him since that phone call last night.”

  “So he’s a few hours late—”

  “Nine hours, Anna. Almost nine hours since he should have gotten here, twelve hours since his phone call!”

  “Maybe he fell asleep at his desk. Maybe he was really tired and went to the wrong farm by mistake.” I didn’t add that it would be an easy error. All the Amish farms in Lancaster County had always looked the same to me.

  “No, it is not like that. Something has happened to him. Something terrible. I know this.”

  Putting the sandwich fixings back into the fridge, I took a deep breath and held it for a moment. I felt bad for her, but I didn’t know what she expected me to do. Though my brother and I emailed occasionally, I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks—maybe a month, even. He and I had always shared a special bond, especially since the fire and its aftermath, but that didn’t mean we stayed in constant touch.

  “Lydia, I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I have no idea, Anna. I just know I need your help—and Bobby specifically said for me to call you if something went wrong.”

  “But how can I help from way out here? I don’t have any way of knowing where he might be.”

  “This is what you do, yah? You find people who have gone missing?”

  “Yes, I’m a skip tracer. But—”

  “Your brother has gone missing. Please, Anna. Please, help me find him before it is too late.”

  THREE

  Turning around, I leaned against the counter and looked through the kitchen window at the glistening sand and the blue-gray expanse of the Pacific Ocean beyond. I thought how very far I was—both literally and figuratively—from the gentle plains and rolling hills of Amish country back home.

  “That is not all,” Lydia added before I could form my response, and from the tone of her voice, I could tell the situation was about to get more complicated.

  “Okay, then wait a second,” I said, once again almost unable to hear thanks to the clunking noises Kiki was making upstairs. I couldn’t fathom what she was doing, though from the bumps and scrapes, it sounded as though she was rearranging the furniture. If so, that was a good thing as it meant I’d still have a chance at carpooling. I asked Lydia to give me the number she had called from, explaining that I needed to switch our conversation over to my cell phone. We hung up, and immediately I retrieved my cell from the charger, turned it on, and called her back.

  “Sorry about that. Go ahead with what you were telling me. There’s more?”

  “Yes. All night, I have been thinking about the apartment, about the mess that had been made, about our things. I worried that whoever had been there did take something.” She hesitated, and as I waited for her to go on, I assembled our lunches into brown paper bags and set them near the door along with my purse, keys, and sunglasses. “Bobby has a metal box filled with all of our important papers: birth certificates, marriage license, things like that. Early this morning I started thinking about that box, that maybe they took our papers, our information. A woman at the bridal shop where I do alterations had identity theft once, and I worry that we might have that too. So when Caleb went over to the apartment a while ago to fix the lock, I asked him to bring back that box. I knew it had been gone through, because last night it was open on the floor in front of the cabinet.”

  “And?” I prodded, leaving the kitchen and moving through the living room toward the stairs.

  “And Caleb brought me the box and everything was there, even our Social Security cards. Even the credit card we keep for emergencies. Only one thing was gone. I am so sorry, Anna.”

  I paused halfway up the stairs as her words sunk in. Why was she sorry?

  “It was a sealed envelope. Inside was your new name, your address, your phone numbers. When Bobby put it in there years ago, he told me what it was but said I was never to open it unless something happened to him and I needed to contact you. That envelope…it is gone, Anna. Someone took your information. If he had not given me this number last night over the phone, I would have had no way to reach you.”

  “Lydia, hold on a minute,” I managed to say.

  “Yah, sure.”

  As she waited, silent, at the other end of the line, I walked slowly up the rest of the stairs, trying to understand the implications of what had happened—an
d what I could do about it now. I needed to think.

  When I reached the top, I took a deep breath and knocked on Kiki’s door, intending to tell her I was running late and she would have to go to work without me. Getting no response, I crossed the hall to my own room and reached for the knob. It twisted, but the door wouldn’t swing open.

  “I’m sorry, Lydia. Keep holding,” I said into the receiver. Then I tucked the open phone in my shorts pocket so I could use both hands and a hip to work open the door that was always getting stuck. More than anything, I needed to sit in the privacy of my room, finish this call, clear my head, and think.

  “Come on,” I whispered, jiggling and pushing until the door finally broke free.

  As it swung open, I stepped inside, startled when my foot caught on something—something big and warm and lying on the floor. Before I could stop myself, I was falling. My knees and hands hit the ground as the phone shot from my pocket and skittered across the room. I turned to see what had tripped me and gasped. It was Kiki, lying on the floor, her eyes closed, her face covered with blood.

  Trying not to scream, I turned back around, and that’s when I saw him, a man standing across the room dressed in black and wearing a ski mask. At his feet was my open cell phone.

  Without a word, he reached down with a gloved hand and gave the phone a push so that it slid back across the room to me.

  “Finish your conversation and hang up,” he said softly, his voice menacing and unfamiliar. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  I swallowed hard, trying to find my voice. Slowly, I picked up the phone, weighing my options.

  “Anna?” Lydia’s voice was saying over the phone line. “Anna, are you still there? Please do not be too upset. I do not know why anyone would go to such desperate measures to find you after all these years. I just wanted you to know that someone might call you.”