They thought they would lose Bo entirely when his father finally found him this past January. But then Adam had married an Amish woman, Mariah Fisher, and rather than take the boy back to his native Texas, the Wallaces had stayed on.
Jacob, Adam’s brother, had descended upon them the following month. One of the same people who had been responsible for Adam’s son ending up in Divinity had seen the ripe pickings the settlement’s children provided to the anner Satt Leit world. That man had begun kidnapping them, selling them to childless anner Satt Leit couples who had given up on the idea of legitimate adoption. After all, the Amish way was one of nonresistance. The Amish steadfastly refused to have anything to do with American law. There was no one to stop the man from stealing their children. The old deacons considered it God’s will that the little ones had vanished—so Joe himself had led an uprising and had formed this new gemeide with more lenient rules. Then Adam had called his brother to come look for the kids, and Detective Jake Wallace had swaggered into town with his figurative guns drawn. Both the kidnapper and Katya Essler, a young Amish woman, had succumbed to him.
Jake and Katya had not remained in the settlement. Since she was already considered married in the Amish faith and divorce was against the ordnung, Katya could not divorce and marry Jake. They settled in Texas, but they came back fairly frequently.
Joe watched Jake stop short of the woman from the car. He rubbed a hand over his short beard and considered the situation.
“You know what I reckon?” he said to his son.
“What’s that?”
“I think we might have ourselves another Wallace to contend with.”
Nathaniel looked startled. “There’s another one?”
Joe nodded. “Seems to me I remember Jake and Adam mentioning something about a sister. Now look at this.”
The woman in the jeans hurled herself at Jake. He caught her and they stood for a moment in an emotional embrace. There was just enough light left in the day for Joe to tell that Jake’s hair was exactly the same shade as the woman’s. Both were caught somewhere between rich chocolate brown and pure black. Their noses were identical—long and straight. On the woman, it looked haughty. Her hair fell in utter disarray to a point past her shoulders.
Interesting, Joe thought. Not only was he unaccustomed to women in blue jeans, he had not seen a woman with her hair down since Sarah had died. Amish women always wore theirs bound up in public. And even though Katya had left the Amish faith, she had respectfully taken to wearing dresses and tucking her hair up again when she and Jake came back to offer him their help in his bereavement.
Joe thought briefly of touching this woman’s hair, because it looked so incredibly thick and rich and he wondered if it would feel that way, too. He was appalled when he realized what he was considering. Something thorny rolled over in his gut. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his black, broadfall trousers and cleared his throat.
Jake and the woman came apart. She looked Joe’s way. He had been right. She was a beauty. And there was something else. He saw a hunted-animal kind of pain in her eyes, the kind there was no escaping from, the kind he recognized intimately.
He’d had every intention of introducing himself. It was, after all, his home she had come to. Joe Lapp opened his mouth. Something guttural came out.
“You okay, Joe?” Jake asked. “What’s wrong?”
Joe wrestled one hand free of his pocket. He held it out to the woman. He wondered if it was shaking, or worse, sweating. “Hello,” he managed to say finally. “I’m Loe Japp.”
Chapter 3
Kim stared at the man, too rattled to respond. Jake was still staring at her, and though she wouldn’t look at him again, she felt it. Waves of emotion seemed to be rolling off him. True, she had thrown herself at him first, out of relief and her own indescribable emotion at coming to the end of this trail. But she had quickly collected herself, as she always did. Jake, on the other hand, had hugged her hard enough to hurt her ribs.
At last her brain assimilated what this other man had said. Loe Japp? She wondered with not a little panic if these Amish people spoke English.
She finally took his outstretched hand. It was callused and it dwarfed her own. And something happened when she touched him, something that rattled her even more than she already was. She had the most startling, instinctive, unwarranted thought: Everything is going to be okay now.
She found her voice with difficulty. “Hi. I’m Kimberley Mancuso.”
“You changed your name,” Jake said sharply.
Kim looked at her brother again quickly. Odd, she thought. One minute she had been excruciatingly aware of his extreme emotion, then she had somehow forgotten about him. “Uh...yes,” she answered. “Sort of.”
Jake seemed to think about that, then he nodded. “That’s why I couldn’t find you.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “You were looking for me?”
Once more, a million emotions played across Jake’s face. “We...I...have this company called ChildSearch. We look for missing persons, children mostly.” His voice changed, going suddenly hoarse. “Did someone tell you we were looking for you? Is that why you came?”
Kim shook her head. “I...no. I didn’t know. I came on my own. I found out in Dallas that you’d come here, so I followed you.”
Jake looked troubled by that, she thought, then just confused.
“We should go in,” Joe interrupted.
Jake’s expression became alarmed. “Uh, not a good idea,” he said. “They’re all in the kitchen. There are eight of them now.”
“Eight?” Joe echoed, then he groaned. “Dear Lord.”
“They’ve been arriving through the back door.”
“Pa, you got to make them go,” Nathaniel pleaded.
Joe latched on to the excuse. It was something logical he could do to gain a few more moments in which to collect himself. He hurried inside.
Kim cleared her throat. “Who’s in there?” she asked.
“A whole lot of women,” Nathaniel answered. He thrust his hand at her. “I’m Nathaniel Lapp, Joe’s son.”
“Joe? Lapp?” She was so shaken up she wasn’t even hearing straight! She groaned and shook the young man’s hand.
The car door opened with a rusty squeak. Susannah stuck her head out from the passenger side. She’d been sleeping when they’d arrived.
“Mom?”
“Right here, baby,” Kim called back. “Come and join us.”
“Mom?” Jake said, then he looked at Susannah more closely. “Were you pregnant? Is that why you left? Did Dad beat you up when you were pregnant?”
“No harm done,” she said flatly, but her heart did an odd jump.
“I didn’t do a damned thing about it.”
Kim looked at him, startled. “There was nothing you could do.” Still, she gripped Susannah’s hand a little too hard when the girl reached them, because the memories would always hurt.
A whole flock of women burst from the house then. Kim stepped back quickly, pulling Susannah with her so the women could pass without trampling them.
“That ought to do it,” Joe Lapp announced, coming back to stand on the porch. “Of course, they probably won’t speak to me until the next Church Sunday. If I’m lucky.”
Both Nathaniel and Jake laughed at that, surprising Kim. Oh, she thought, there was a lot about these people she didn’t understand. She was astounded to find that she was even curious. She didn’t intend to hang around long enough for all these little undercurrents to matter.
“Come in,” Joe said. “Please. There’s coffee on. And there are easily twelve casseroles in the refrigerator. Another two in the woodstove.”
“I need to find Adam,” Jake said suddenly.
“I’ll do it,” said a soft voice from the porch.
A woman had come outside to stand beside Joe. Kim looked her way. She was extremely pregnant, and no less beautiful for it. Not even her strange clothing detracted from that. She wo
re an azure blue dress beneath a black apron, plus sensible shoes and dark stockings, and her hair was severely pulled back beneath a small white bonnet. The strings dangled down to her shoulders. From what Kim could see of her hair, it was a rich, deep black. Her hands were clasped together demurely over the swell of her unborn child.
The woman stepped down off the porch. “I’m Mariah,” she said. “I married your brother. Adam,” she explained.
Kim felt her heart slam. She stared at the woman’s misshapen waistline again. Four possibilities. Four now. Adam had another son or daughter on the way.
Shame heightened Kim’s color and she looked away from the woman quickly. She felt almost mercenary for thinking only of what might be in all this for Susannah. Then she got angry. She had not seen her family in eleven years. Susannah was what mattered. Susannah was her family, her everything. And Susannah was dying. Remembering that, Kim felt her knees go weak. The pregnant woman’s image seemed to swim out of focus for a moment.
Oh, my God, Kim thought, I’m actually going to cry. No, she wasn’t. Damned if she was. She sniffed hard.
“I’ll go get your brother,” Mariah said. “He’ll want to be here.”
Joe backed off suddenly. Kim watched him return to the house, frowning.
“He lost his wife last July,” Mariah explained quietly. “Of childbirth complications. I don’t usually come over here these days because... well, I know my condition must surely remind him.” Then she smiled. “What a happy coincidence that I did so today.”
She headed off toward a buggy waiting on the other side of the road. Jake went inside, waving back at Kim and Susannah to come in, also. The boy—Nathaniel, Kim remembered—headed for the house, as well.
Joe was waiting at the inner door. Kim started that way, her eyes determinedly on her toes. She recalled the odd feeling she’d had when she shook his hand. She didn’t want a repeat of that silliness. But when she reached the porch, there seemed nothing else she could do but look up as he held the door for them.
“I’m...uh, sorry for intruding this way,” she murmured.
“It must be necessary.”
She was startled. She met his eyes. They were a very dark brown, depthless somehow. She had the absurd impression that all the wisdom of the universe was in them for the taking. Yet they were haunted.
Of course they were haunted, she chided herself. His wife had died recently.
“Yes,” she answered. “It is.”
She left him and went inside, into a square central hall. Susannah was hanging back a little, dragging on her hand.
“Mom, they seem okay,” she whispered.
“Well, only one of them is actually family so far,” she said. “Hedge your bets for a while.”
“But—”
“Let’s just get through this, Susannah. Please. Just let me do this.”
Susannah stopped walking. “You’re not just going to ask them to give me their insides and go again, are you?” she accused.
Put that way, it did sound horrible, Kim realized. Cold and ungiving, just as Mark had so often accused her of being. But she supposed it was no more horrible than seeing Adam’s unborn child as a potential donor.
Suddenly, it was all too much. Her emotions had been running raw and wild for weeks now. The events of the past few days had just piled on. She’d driven thousands of miles inside of less than a week. Before she knew it was going to happen, the room tilted. Kim heard Susannah cry out, more in surprise than alarm. Then she hit the floor of Joe Lapp’s foyer.
Joe watched her come around. He’d carried her to the sofa in the living room, and now he hunkered down beside it. Her daughter was roaming the keeping room, where church services were held when it was Joe’s turn to host them. Every once in a while the girl would call out a question about the German Bible or the woodstove in there. Mariah was with her, telling Susannah everything she wanted to know.
Joe just watched Kimberley. Her skin was far too pale, he thought. Now he realized that she had the Wallace high cheekbones, as well. She really was beautiful, and he felt embarrassment rush hotly inside him all over again. There’d be no easy way to tell her what his name really was without mortifying himself, he realized. Historically, he had not had much savoir faire when women poleaxed him. Frighteningly, he’d been poleaxed only once before. He had made a fool of himself when he’d met Sarah for the first time, too, but at least then he had been barely nineteen years old. This time he was a grown man in the throes of loss.
He knew somehow before this woman even opened her eyes that she was going to be embarrassed because she had fainted. He had watched her outside, and she seemed to have her own share of stiff pride. It made him feel somewhat better about getting so flummoxed he hadn’t even known his own name. He was still thinking about that when Kimberley’s eyelids flickered once. That was all the warning he got. Then she gasped and came up off the sofa like a shot.
“Where’s Suze?”
She asked clearly, as though she had not been unconscious a moment before. Then she looked around the room like a cornered animal judging its obstacles, he thought.
“Sit,” he said soothingly, catching her hand, trying to pull her back to the sofa again. “She’s fine.”
She snatched her hand away. “Where’s my daughter?”
“With Mariah.”
“The pregnant one?”
Joe winced. Kim remembered a moment too late what Mariah had said about his recent loss.
“Your daughter is very curious about us,” he noted in an emotionless tone. “Mariah is showing her about.”
Kim finally sat again. She did it fast and hard. She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God. I can’t believe I did that.”
She cracked her fingers to look at him. She was a little amazed by this man. A strange woman had just collapsed on his floor, and he was watching her as though he had known her from the day she was born and he wouldn’t have expected anything else under the circumstances.
Everything is going to be okay now. She shivered and actually shook her head this time, as though to drive the crazy, irrational impression away.
She dropped her hands. “I’m not the swooning type,” she said tightly. “The only other time I’ve even come close was when I was pregnant and worked two eight-hour shifts without a break.” Too late she realized she had just committed the same faux pas all over. She wasn’t good at tiptoeing around people’s feelings, she thought helplessly. “I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly.
Joe shrugged, and to Kim the gesture seemed too deliberate.
“Someone has told you about my Sarah.”
Even the way he said it—my Sarah—made Kim feel his pain. It made her uncomfortable. It felt too... intimate. “Mariah,” she explained. “Mariah told me.”
“She would,” Joe answered.
He had taken his hat off, she realized. His hair was the same rich brown as his eyes, brushed back from his forehead. It stopped just shy of his collar in the back. He wore a short, neat beard that just coasted around his jawline. Above it, his face was a little too craggy and hard and weathered to be arresting, she reflected, but it came close. It was inarguably appealing. There was strength there, she realized, and a great deal of pride.
“Pardon me?” She realized he had been speaking to her, and flushed.
“I asked what it is that you need from them,” he said. “From your brothers.”
“I need one of them to save my daughter’s life.”
Kim had said it without thinking. She’d opened her mouth and the words had simply found their way out. Panic instantly built in her at how easily it had happened. Maybe it was the pain that haunted his eyes, she thought. Maybe she sensed that he would understand hers better than most.
But that was pure foolishness, craziness. Worse, it was dangerous. She didn’t even know him. She needed to keep her reasons for this reunion under her control, so she could p
lead her case well, so nothing could go wrong. She shot to her feet again and began pacing.
“Then they’ll do it,” Joe said.
“You don’t even know us or what we need!”
“It wouldn’t matter,” he answered, and pushed to his feet, as well.
Kim gazed at him disbelievingly. Then a shadow darkened the door to the foyer. She looked that way slowly, feeling her heart hitch just a little.
Adam was shorter than Jake, but somehow, he had always seemed bigger. Jake was almost lanky. Adam was strong, broad in the shoulders, just a bit heavier. He was blond to the darkness that Kim shared with her other brother. Adam stepped into the room, his arms held out to her as though it had never occurred to him that she might not go into them.
And she did, though she felt awkward about it.
“Ah, Kimmie,” Adam said, his voice raw as he hugged her. “You don’t know how happy this makes me.”
Chapter 4
An hour later, they were all gathered around a kitchen table, more people than Kim had ever seen at a table before in her life. In fact, an additional picnic-bench-type thing had been pulled in from what they called the “keeping room” to help accommodate everyone. Kim looked around at all their faces.
No one seemed to think this incredible sum of humanity was odd. In fact, Susannah seemed enthralled by it all, she realized. Outside of those few months they had spent with Mark, there had never been more than the two of them at any given meal.
Now there was Adam and Mariah and his son, Bo. There was Jake and his new wife, Katya, and her four children. There was Joe Lapp’s brood—five of them, counting the infant napping against Katya’s shoulder. Kim had gathered from what Mariah had said that the baby had died with her mother, but apparently that wasn’t so.
There was Joe, keeping to himself in one corner of the kitchen, and enough food to feed an army.
Most of it appeared bland and unappetizing, to Kim’s way of thinking. She eyed it as Mariah brought it to the table. She’d always had a strong preference for Tex-Mex herself. Voices rose to the ceiling, and there were bursts of laughter. Bedlam, Kim thought. Pure, happy bedlam. It made her feel confused. She would never have pictured her brothers in an environment such as this.