Authors: Laura Bickle
“I know.” Seth and Joseph were pacifists, like the rest of the Plain folk. I knew that they wouldn’t be caught up in perpetrating a random spree of violence.
But it didn’t mean that they couldn’t fall victim to one.
We climbed back into the buggy and drove into town without another word passing between us. When we reached a sign that reduced the speed limit from fifty-five miles per hour to thirty-five, I knew that we had arrived in Torch. I said a prayer under my breath that we would find Seth and Joseph in short order and return home before our parents even realized that we were gone.
But my heart dropped as the buggy jingled down the road.
Torch had never been a large town. It contained less than five hundred full-time residents. During the weekends, it often appeared that there were more, since Torch catered to the tourist trade in this rural part of the state. The Olde Deutsche Restaurant served hearty Amish fare; as we passed, we noted that there were no cars in the parking lot, and the windows were dark.
We passed English houses, which seemed normal enough, with cars parked in the driveways. But more than one still had the porch lights shining in the day. And I noticed that the mailboxes perched by the side of the road were full of yesterday’s mail.
Schmidt’s General Store and gas station was positioned at a crossroads where the highway intersected the main street in Torch. Lights shone within, including a neon sign advertising beer. A car was parked in the fire lane in front, but there were none at the gas pumps.
We parked the buggy behind the store and hitched Star to a telephone pole that many Amish used for that purpose. The owner, Schmidt, sold anything his store carried to Amish youth with a wink and a nod. We often thought that he kept the alley behind the store clear specifically so that young men and women would have a place to smoke out of sight. I half
expected to see Seth and Joseph loitering in the back, eating potato chips, but no one was there. Not even pigeons.
The back door to Schmidt’s was always open. We stepped around the ashtray on the back stoop and into the bright light of the store.
Music played overhead, something wordless and inoffensive. The English called it “elevator music,” but I was never quite certain where the term came from. I’d been on a handful of elevators, and none of them was ever musical.
The cases containing dairy products, pop, and beer were all lit and humming. Everything from the buzzing fluorescent lights to the drip of a toilet running in the bathroom seemed to intrude on my thoughts. The English probably considered noises like this to be part of the background, but I found them distracting. Mrs. Parsall even told me that she sometimes fell asleep to the flickering television, which I couldn’t imagine.
We wandered down the aisles. I paused beside the racks of comic books. I’d read many of the Miller boys’ comic books over the years. Joseph had a preference for
Superman.
But I had a different favorite. I squatted down at the bottom of the rack, my fingers flipping through the curling pages. I plucked up an issue of
Wonder Woman.
The cover showed a magnificent woman with curly hair soaring through the sky, wearing only the skimpiest of clothes.
I had followed the Princess of Themyscira’s adventures since I was a little girl. I was amazed at how she was unconscious of her near-nudity and beauty, fascinated that she was stronger than the men. I also felt some pang of kinship with her, knowing that she came from a society closed off from the rest of the world. Paradise Island was, in its own way, frozen centuries behind in time. And it was even more cut off from Man’s World than we were.
But most of all, I was intrigued by the idea of her purity. Wonder Woman was certainly not Plain, and not even any stripe of Christian. She followed the ancient Greek gods, who occasionally appeared in the stories.
But she retained her virtue. To my knowledge, Diana remained virginally pure. Despite her seemingly overt sexuality, there was a certain innocence about her. Power and innocence. It flummoxed me.
I was also easily stymied by the threats she faced: crime, hatred, war. In my peaceful life, I had never known any of these things.
But comic books were considered children’s things. Though Elijah shared in my teenage rebellions now, I wondered if he would feel the same way if I was married to him. Would he still turn a blind eye to me when I picked up a comic or paged uncomprehendingly through
Cosmopolitan
? Would he hold me to a different standard, once we were adults?
“Katie,
come on,
” Elijah called from the next aisle over.
“
Ja.
Coming.” I tucked the comic under my arm and followed him.
He glanced back at me. “What?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing.” I was embarrassed to admit I was searching for comics when we should be looking for the boys.
“It’s something,” he said. “You only get that look in your eyes when you’re thinking.”
I blew out my breath. He knew me well. Better than I wanted to admit.
“I . . . wondered what would happen when we do as the Bible says. When we leave childish things behind.” I looked down at the comic.
Elijah shrugged. “That’s on the other side.”
“The other side of what?”
“
Rumspringa.
I figured everything would sort itself out then.”
I clutched
Wonder Woman
to my chest, refusing to give her up. I paused before the case of pop, opened it, and reached in for a Coca-Cola. I had a weakness for Coca-Cola—the bite and the sweetness were unlike anything at home. Maybe
Rumspringa
would dim that desire out of me. But not yet.
I walked up to the cash register, reaching for money in my apron pocket.
But Mr. Schmidt wasn't there. I peered over the counter, festooned in ribbons of lottery tickets. The clerk’s stool stood empty, and the cash register was closed. Fear prickled along the back of my neck.
Elijah’s arm reached around me to ring the bell on the counter. “Maybe he’s in the bathroom.”
I gestured with my chin at the open lavatory door. “No.”
“But his car’s out there,” Elijah insisted. It was as if he was refusing to believe what we saw.
“He’s not here,” I said. “And neither are Seth or Joseph.”
Elijah rang the bell again, out of frustration, before he walked to the back exit of the store to fetch the buggy.
I looked down at the pop and comic book in my hands. For an instant, I considered walking out with them. The thought gave me a rush that crept up to my cheeks in a flush of power.
But I put my money down on the counter, calculating the exact sales tax in my head and counting out the change to the penny. I left it in a neat pile beside the cash register before I walked out.
I might have been rebellious. Maybe a bit sinful. Maybe a lot sinful.
But I wasn’t a thief.
The furniture store was a two-story building built to resemble a barn, the front porch crowded with rocking chairs. Connected to the store was a sheet-metal warehouse where furniture was constructed and finished by Amish men. Elijah guided the buggy down the gravel drive and stopped to tie up Star on a hitching post beside the building.
We climbed two short steps to the porch and wove around the rocking chairs for sale. I paused before the front window. The store usually displayed hope chests, china cupboards, and bedsteads in the large window. These things were still here, but the glass was broken out. A few shards were on the porch, but it seemed as if most of the damage reached within the display window. Glass sparkled like ice on a bedstead with a red-and-white quilt spread on it.
“Stay with the buggy,” Elijah whispered.
I shook my head and followed him across the porch. The floorboards creaked under our shoes as we reached the front door, which still had its Closed sign turned out. It dangled slightly askew. Above the door frame, a carved wooden placard bade visitors “Welcome.”
Elijah grabbed the door handle and pulled. It opened, and the bell jangled.
“Seth? Joseph?” he called into the darkness.
Only the echo of the bell answered him.
My fingers gripped the sleeve of Elijah’s shirt as we crossed the threshold. The air felt cooler inside, as if the shadow of the building still held some of the darkness of night that it was unwilling to release into the day. Elijah turned on the light switch beside the entrance.
The fluorescent overhead lights flickered to life, casting harsh blue light into the show room. If there were shadows in my imagination, they scuttled away under that blisteringly clear light.
“Joseph!” Elijah yelled.
I pursed my mouth. If Herr Miller and Mrs. Parsall hadn’t found the boys, then they weren’t here. But I understood Elijah’s need to see what had driven them straight to the Elders.
Glass from the store window crunched underfoot as we wove our way through the displays that smelled like cedar and sawdust. I’d never seen the store empty before. There were usually at least a half-dozen English stroking the grain of the wood or filling out custom orders for kitchen cabinets. It was a lucrative business. But not today.
Today a chest of drawers was upturned on the floor, drawers spilled out. As a credit to the workmanship, none of the wood had split.
Elijah’s face paled.
“They might not have been here when this happened,” I said. “They may have been robbed, run away . . .”
“They were here.” He walked to a pair of bedsteads pressed up against the wall. The Amish quilts spread over mattresses for decoration, to help shoppers envision the pieces in their homes, were rumpled. Rumpled as if someone had slept in them.
I swallowed, said nothing. What I’d said still held true. Maybe.
Elijah walked back through the store. I paused before the cash register. It was one of the old-fashioned ones that didn’t run on electricity, so that Amish employees could use it. The drawer was still neatly tucked beneath it, undisturbed, so it seemed they hadn’t been robbed.
Elijah reached behind the counter for the telephone. He punched “911” on the buttons and waited. After a few moments, he shook his head. “No answer. Just a recording.”
“What does it say?”
He stood close beside me so that we could both listen to the receiver. A female voice said:
“County Sheriff’s Office. Due to an emergency, all personnel are temporarily unavailable. For motorist assistance, call the State Highway Patrol at .
.
.”
Elijah put the phone down. “An emergency,” he repeated, shaking his head. His breath disturbed a tendril of hair that had escaped my bonnet.
The knowledge seemed to race through him. I watched as his jaw hardened. He turned around, headed for the back door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To find out what happened to my brothers.”
Elijah and I searched the back storeroom, stacked high with finished chairs and special orders with yellow tickets taped to them. We made our way through a maze of furniture to the workshop in the back. The door to the workshop was ajar and pushed open easily.
One could tell that Plain folk worked here. All the tools were hand tools, not powered by electricity. Hammers and saws were hung neatly on pegs, nails and screws captured tidily in Mason jars. Half-finished skeletons of furniture perched on tables, waiting for turned legs or handles. The sawdust made me stifle a sneeze.
“Elijah,” I croaked. I pointed at the floor.
A narrow keyhole saw lay there. It wasn’t quite as long as my forearm and covered in serrated teeth with a grip like a pistol. The fact that the saw was on the floor and not put away was remarkable in and of itself. But the blade was covered in stale red blood.
The blood spattered along the floor and terminated along a freshly sanded cabinet.
Elijah’s callused hands knotted into fists. They didn’t even unravel when I tried to slip my fingers between his.
It was as if all the people had been mysteriously taken up in the sky.
We rode in silence through town, staring at the empty homes and businesses, until I spoke. I was always the first one to break our silences.
“Do you think that . . . I mean . . .” I fumbled to find the right words. “The English occasionally talk about that Rapture thing.” Plain people were more concerned with our works on earth and tended to think that the afterlife sorted itself out.
Elijah looked sidelong at me. “No. Not possible,” he said, flatly.
“Why not?”
“It’s just not. We weren’t taken.”
I opened my mouth, closed it. “But if the Elders were wrong . . . what if we are wrong? About God? About everything?” I opened my hand and gestured to the countryside and the larger world beyond it.
“Not possible.” He shook his head, vehemently. “Seth and Joseph are gone too. If God favored the English, he wouldn’t take all the English and just Seth and Joseph.”
I considered it. He had a point. But I didn’t remind him of the bloody saw on the warehouse floor.
Star’s ears twitched at a distant wail.
“Sirens.” Elijah pulled the buggy over to the side of the road as far as he could. “Not everyone was sucked up in your Rapture,” he said pointedly.
I turned around behind us, where the sound of the sirens grew louder. I stood and lifted my arms to flag down the policemen. The breeze whipped my sleeves and skirts like pennants, and my heart lifted at the thought of finally getting some help for Seth and Joseph. Some answers.
I shouted as the patrol car came over the rise in the road, but my shout was obliterated by the blare of the siren. And it wasn’t just one patrol car . . .
There was a caravan of them, roaring down the highway at breakneck speed. The first one rushed past us in a roiling howl of wind and sound. I counted four more before I realized that they weren’t stopping.
The cacophony spooked Star. The buggy lurched beneath me, and I lost my footing, falling forward. The metal rail at the front of the buggy drove the wind from my chest. Star lunged ahead, and I saw Elijah struggling with the reins from the corner of my eye.