Marrying Jake Read online

  He turned his attention to his tray. He couldn’t lower it. There wasn’t enough room. He scowled and balanced the can and the cup on his thighs.

  Oh, yeah, bro, this better be good. There better be four kids in trouble to justify this.

  Then, unaccountably and out of nowhere, he remembered something his mother used to say a long time ago, before she had started drinking, before she had taken to hiding from her husband behind a bottle. Be careful what you wish for, Jake. You just might get it

  He told himself that he felt edgy because she had then admitted that she’d once wished for his father.

  He made it into Philadelphia without further aggravation and managed to snag a cheap rental car. Given that he was currently taking three weeks off from the Dallas P.D. without pay, Adam—or his company—would have to reimburse his expenses this time.

  Assuming the company had any money left.

  That was something Jake worried about a lot lately. Adam pretty much funded ChildSearch. Jake knew his brother’s pockets were deep, but he also knew that every pit had a bottom. And damn it, he didn’t want ChildSearch to go under.

  It was a national network of mostly unpaid computer buffs he had put together four years ago to find Bo. Along the way, once he and Adam had perfected the network, they had also searched for other missing kids like Bo. There were forty-eight investigators on staff now—Jake was one of them—and they all donated their time. In the four years since the company’s inception, ChildSearch had found roughly twenty percent of the children they had looked for—a pretty good record. But the company hadn’t yet turned a profit because those parents who couldn’t pay staggering sums to find their child were never charged.

  Adam was a bleeding heart, Jake thought. Or maybe it was just those parents’ nightmares had so closely mirrored his brother’s own anguish over losing Bo. Either way, Adam had poured his heart and soul and income into the company for four years rather than force ChildSearch to stand on its own feet. And even with all the volunteer efforts, the setup was expensive to run.

  Most of the company’s queries and searches—both legal and those that fell into a gray area because they involved some hacking—centered on the mind-boggling network of databases a minor child might fall into. That was where the computer hackers came in—a bunch of good-hearted folks who tickled their keyboards for free. The legwork didn’t start until the computer guys got a hit. Then the team of investigators kicked in. Jake had found at least one guy in every major city willing to donate his time. But although they didn’t charge ChildSearch, their travel expenses had to be covered. The pictures that ChildSearch put on mailers and milk cartons had to be paid for. The staff who handled the phones in the home office needed wages. Then there was the overhead on that office, dismal and dilapidated though it was. And their Web site on the Internet cost money, as well.

  Jake swore aloud as he drove west out of Philly. As he had done more times than he could count these past few weeks, he wondered if Adam would be as willing—or even able—to keep funding the whole thing now that he had found his Bo.

  Except Bo was quite possibly gone again.

  That rattled the headache loose that had been lingering just behind Jake’s eyes. It bloomed and sank in with claws. It was one-thirty in the morning. He was bone tired, but it was going to be a long night.

  He drove into the city of Lancaster to drop off the rental car, ever mindful of the fact that ChildSearch’s coffers could be at rock bottom. Adam would have rented a car, he thought. Why keep two? He took a cab back out to Route 30 by eking a few more bucks off his credit card in a cash machine.

  Route 30 was one of three major east-west arteries that ran through Lancaster County. The routes offered what civilization the Amish heartland had to offer: restaurants, hotels, retail outlets, tourist traps. He’d already learned on his last visit here that they didn’t constitute the real Pennsylvania Dutch country.

  He had the cab drop him off at the motor inn Adam had stayed at the last time. He trudged wearily inside to the desk.

  “What do you mean, he’s not here?” he demanded five minutes later.

  “He’s not registered, sir,” the desk clerk replied. “We have no Adam Wallace staying here.”

  “He’s got to be here. Where else would he be?” An inkling came to him in answer to that, but he pushed it away because it seemed impossible. Last time, he had found Adam at Mariah’s house. But Mariah Fisher had been tops on Adam’s blacklist when his brother had left Texas a week ago.

  “Would you like a room?” the clerk asked.

  “Sure,” Jake quipped. “One of your free ones.” His credit card was close to maxed out.

  The man didn’t even crack a smile.

  Jake turned away from the desk and went back outside to make sure he had the right place. He did. Loudspeakers still piped the sound of gulls over the parking lot, as they had the last time. The lobby area was still shaped like a ship landlocked in the Amish heartland, just as it had been three weeks ago when he had been here to help with Adam’s search for Bo.

  The temperature seemed to have plummeted ten degrees since he’d left Philadelphia. There, it had been a balmy twenty above zero. Now the wind cut across the street, all but shrieking at him. It hurt, biting whatever skin it could find—his cheeks, his hands, even the nape of his neck, where it then tunneled down into the collar of his sport jacket.

  Even as he stood there, snow began falling. Again. Like last time.

  “Well, hell,” he muttered aloud. He didn’t have enough cash left for another cab.

  Adam must be at Mariah’s, he realized. Apparently, they had kissed and made up. Jake didn’t know if he felt smug or irritated. He’d given his brother a pretty impressive lecture on that subject while they’d still been in Texas. At that point, Adam hadn’t even been able to speak her name without snarling.

  Irritation finally won out. How the hell was Jake supposed to know to look for him at Mariah’s house under the circumstances?

  He started walking, turning left on the next side street. For a while, civilization tried to cling. There were still telephone poles, electrical lines. The touristy businesses gave way within a couple of blocks to a residential area, but it was not Amish country. These were mostly contemporary homes with automobiles in the driveway.

  Jake’s boots crunched down on the dirty, exhaust-laced snow at the edges of the road. There were no sidewalks to speak of. The fresh flakes began to build in momentum. He tugged his collar up, but his face stung from the wind and the whipping flakes, and his sport jacket had never been meant to ward off the cold. He cursed his brother six ways to Sunday for not mentioning his whereabouts in all those damned phone messages.

  Civilization began to give out Somehow, impossibly, the night got deeper, darker, colder. He was in the village of Divinity now, he realized, looking around. He had stepped over an invisible boundary into a place where time had just... wound down.

  It had nearly enchanted him before, and he wasn’t easy to enchant. Not by things like simplicity and quiet, at any rate. He preferred more raucous, lusty pleasures. But the pure honesty of the people he had met here had touched him a little, and the village tried to work its magic on him again.

  The houses became crowded, sitting close together in pockets—which meant, he remembered, that for the most part their owners were all kin. Some of the homes were buffered from the narrow road by sprawling trees, their limbs naked and gnarled in February. Snow was beginning to clump on the bare limbs—clean snow, almost painfully white in the darkness. He could just make it out in the last glow of the streetlights now behind him.

  No electric lights here, he thought. Most of the residences pressed close to the macadam, their windows all dark. They were mostly white, with an occasional redbrick home threaded in. The front portions of the dwellings were square, two-anda-half stories. On most of the backs, flatter one-story appendages were stuck on.

  Keeping rooms, he remembered. They were the gathering p
laces for weddings, church services and big off-Sunday suppers, because the Amish only had services every other week. Jake hadn’t consciously memorized that, either, but sometime during his other brief stay, someone had told him. Like all unusual tidbits of information, it had lodged in his brain.

  The people who lived in the village were...well, outcasts and elderly. He remembered that, too. Ninety-five percent of the Amish population lived farther out, on the farms. Those dwelling in the village were mostly elderly; their children’s farms would invariably spread out directly behind their grossdawdy—or grandfather—houses. The occasional single man and woman would live in the village, too—young people moving in from another settlement to court someone here, or, like Mariah Fisher, someone who was living under the meidung. the shunning punishment for a major transgression against the Amish way.

  Every once in a while, the moon peeked out from behind the heavy cloud cover and it made ice glimmer on the homes, on mailboxes and hedges. It gave the whole sleeping village a fairy-tale effect. The night was utterly silent. Jake thought he could even hear the snow settling on the ground. He was very much aware of his own heartbeat.

  He stopped a moment, just feeling the quiet. Then he moved again and stepped in something that didn’t crunch. He went very still and closed his eyes, then smelled it before he actually tried to look at his boot heel. Horse manure.

  “Son of a...” He trailed off because there was no one to hear him swear, which robbed some of the enjoyment from it. He hopped out onto the cleared macadam to rake his heel clean on the hard surface. When it didn’t entirely work, he swore again anyway.

  Headlights would have warned him that a vehicle was approaching. As it was, he didn’t register the clop-clop-clopping sound he was hearing until it was almost too late. He was bent over, trying to inspect his boot heel in the cursory moonlight. The snow was getting heavier, obscuring his vision now. He straightened at the last moment, heard a shout and jumped clear. The horse reacted in fright to his sudden movement, skittering sideways. The buggy wheels screeched and rattled as they were dragged over the road in a direction wheels weren’t meant to go.

  “Whoa!” Jake shouted, not knowing what else to do.

  “Whoa!” a young voice echoed. “Easy there, easy...”

  Jake looked at the Amish buggy and tried to see the young driver inside. Tell me this is somebody I met last time. Damn, but he was cold.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, charmingly, he hoped. “Didn’t hear you coming.”

  The young man gave a polite nod, peering at him out the side window. “Yes, sir.”

  “Guess you don’t have horns on these things, huh?” Jake kept stomping his feet, partly to get rid of the last of the unwelcome stuff still stuck to his heel, partly to keep warm.

  “Yes, sir, we do. But I didn’t see you. I didn’t expect any person to be in the middle of the road at this hour.”

  “Yeah, well, I am. Was.” He stepped a little bit aside, but not far enough to really let the boy pass. “Hey, maybe I could catch a ride with you? I’m Jake Wallace. I don’t know if I met you before, but I was up here a few weeks ago...” He trailed off when the young man’s expression didn’t change. “Please,” he said carefully, “I could really use a lift now.”

  “We haven’t met, sir. Where are you going?”

  “Uh...” He dredged his memory, and it served him well again. “Bachmantown Road.”

  “Well, there you go, sir. You’re fine. It’s right there.”

  The boy pointed. In the next moment, the horse sidestepped a little and the buggy moved on.

  “Sir,” Jake echoed distastefully. “For God’s sake, I’m still a pup. Not even forty yet.” He looked after the buggy as it disappeared into the darkness, the clopping of the horse’s hooves fading into the night.

  He started walking—without much hope—toward the side street the boy had pointed to. But the kid had been right. It was Bachmantown Road, where Mariah Fisher lived. A white shingle swung from a post on the corner. He remembered it from the last time he’d been forced to walk this way.

  Her house was the third one down on the right. It was dark. He had expected that. God knew it was late enough. Jake jogged up onto the porch, and rammed a fist against the door, relieved that this night was finally over.

  “Let’s go, bro. Enough already. I need some heat.” He stomped his feet again.

  Nothing happened. No one answered his summons.

  “Damn it, come on.” He moved to the side of the porch to peer in a window there. His jaw dropped, then he shook his head slowly back and forth in denial.

  The furniture was gone.

  Gone?

  There hadn’t been a lot of furniture three weeks ago to begin with. There’d been just a rocker, a wood-burning stove, a sofa, and an armchair for reading. The living room had been tiny, neat and pretty. He remembered some kind of hooked rug on the floor and a lantern hanging on the wall nearest the door. That was all gone now. There wasn’t a stick of furniture inside. No lantern, no pretty rug. Nothing.

  “What the hell?” he said aloud this time.

  “Hey! You there!”

  Jake jumped. He knew the voice. It came from behind him. He dragged on his patience and slowly, carefully, turned around. He held his hands up over his head. It was a cop, and cops carried guns. It generally wasn’t smart to alarm one unnecessarily.

  “It’s me again. Chill out.” He grinned at the officer, though his grin was getting decidedly ragged around the edges by now. “Langston, isn’t it?”

  The man stuck his face close to Jake’s. “That’s right. You’ve got a good memory.”

  Jake lowered his hands. “I’m looking for my brother again.”

  “Won’t find him here.”

  “No kidding,” Jake snapped, his irritation winning out.

  The cop studied him. “Having a bad night, huh?”

  He seemed pleased by that. Jake struggled to remember what he might have said to offend him the last time and came up with nothing. Admittedly, that hadn’t been a real good night, either.

  “Bad enough,” he agreed. “Look, I really need to find my brother.”

  “Down the new spread.”

  Down the new spread “Huh?” Jake stared at him and had a feeling this night was about to get a whole lot worse.

  “Esbenshade Road. About nine miles from here, as the crow flies.”

  “The new spread,” Jake repeated carefully.

  “Yup. Went up two days ago.” The cop turned away.

  “Wait! We’re not talking about the same guy here. I’m looking for Adam Wallace. Big, blond dude, blue eyes. An inch or two shorter than me, but he looks bigger.”

  “Yeah. Married Mariah Fisher. They put his new spread up on Tuesday.”

  The night went blacker.

  For a moment, Jake couldn’t even see the man. The darkness was too complete. He felt light-headed, unsteady, like a toddler who had just learned to walk. “No,” he heard himself say, and he barely recognized his own voice.

  “Thought you was coming in for the wedding and was late.”

  “No.” It seemed the only word he was capable of. At least it was the only word that would get past his throat. There was a whole raging cacophony in his head.

  Adam had left seven messages because he was getting married? But he wouldn’t do that! He wouldn’t even say her name last week. He can’t marry her, can’t do that. He’s all I’ve got.

  It was irrational, it was wild, but his palms started sweating in the biting cold.

  “He wouldn’t get married,” he said aloud, his breath puffing white. No matter that Jake himself often disappeared for days on end, without warning. Adam was predictable. Adam was in a rut.

  Adam was the only small scrap of Wallace kin that remained in the universe as far as Jake knew, and in that moment he hated Mariah Fisher with her soft voice and her serene eyes because, damn her, Jake needed Adam more, even if he would die before he admitted it.

&n
bsp; The feeling passed in a heartbeat, but he realized his hands were still shaking. Cold. It was just the cold.

  “He wouldn’t get married,” he said again.

  “Yeah, well, he did.”

  “To an Amish woman?”

  “Yup.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “Guess so. Justice of the peace will marry anybody. Don’t know about the Amish deacons, though. She was one of those shunned folks, but they let her back in.”

  Mariah Fisher had committed the grievous sin of educating herself, and her settlement had spent several long years treating her as an outcast. So the cop had the right woman. He was definitely talking about Adam’s Mariah.

  Adam had gotten married.

  “Can you...uh...give me a lift?” he asked, eyeing the guy’s cruiser, and his voice was hoarse.

  “Sorry. It’s against regulations.”

  “Bull—” He broke off just in time as the cop’s brows lowered. “Look, I’m a cop in Dallas. It’s no big deal, Langston. I’ll sit in the back, all proper-like.”

  “Guess things are different in Texas. We don’t do that here.”

  All right, Jake thought. Okay. So this guy wasn’t a friend. He could accept that. “How would a non-crow get to this...new spread?” he asked hoarsely. There was real desperation in his tone now. Jake hated it, but the cop answered more kindly.

  “That main road you just came in on is Ronks. Take it south about four miles to Paradise Lane, go east until you get to Cherry Hill, then loop around west again on Esbenshade. It’s just below Sugar Joe Lapp’s place. Used to be his acres.”

  He’d been to Sugar Joe Lapp’s place. “Couldn’t I just cut across a field or something?”

  That pleased look came back to the cop’s face again. “You could, but I reckon Joe’s got his bull out tonight and those buggers get amorous come the full moon. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a cow, if I was you.”