A Prayer for the Night (15 page)

“Yes. He’s the one who’s been killed.”

“And young Abe Yoder?”

“He’s been hurt, too.”

“Jeremiah says he keeps his car in a barn, beside Johnny Schlabaugh’s trailer. You could try looking there.”

“I was out there, earlier.”

“When Jeremiah is away from home this long, it always means he is out in his car.”

Branden rose to his feet and said, “I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Tell him to come home, Professor.”

“I will.”

“Tell him to come home, and stay.”

“I will try.”

Gertie Miller struggled out of her chair to stand bent over in front of Branden. “He has a good future, here,” she said.

She fumbled with her stiff fingers, withdrew her hankie from her apron pocket, and dried her eyes and nose. “His uncles have cut out a tract of land for him. If he marries and settles down, he’ll have a good life. Like Eli and me. Tell him it’s no good, Professor, chasing all around town. Remind him what happened to his father.”

As he left, the professor took a call from Bruce Robertson. “Everything has changed, Mike,” Robertson said. “Abe Yoder ran off from the hospital.”

Friday, July 23
10:15 P.M.

 

 

“I DON’T like it, Michael,” Caroline said. “Not one bit.”

She was seated at her bureau, dressed for bed, brushing out her long, auburn hair. The professor was in bed, propped up on pillows, in his blue pajamas.

“Nobody knows me down there,” he said. “It’ll just be a quick ‘in and out.’”

She got up from the bureau, stretched out beside him on the bed, and said, “You don’t even know that this Red Dog White is the one who has her.”

“It’s just a guess. But a good one.”

“You ought to let this Arnetto work out a plan to catch everyone all at once.”

“It’ll take too long. We may have to do it that way in the end. Wait for Arnetto, if we have to. But we can still try for Sara tomorrow. Work the one good lead we do have.”

“What lead is that, Michael? A video of some unknown bar?”

“It’s the right place. Arnetto confirmed it. You need to stop worrying.”

“I need to wring Bruce Robertson’s neck, is what I need to do.”

Branden laughed softly and pulled her to him. “Cal’s out at Bishop Raber’s. If either Abe Yoder or Jeremiah Miller turns up, he’ll know it right away. Then they might be able to give us a better lead.”

“Do you really think Abe Yoder is going to wander back home now?”

“I was just saying.”

“Are you going to carry a gun?”

“Ankle holster, probably.”

“So you do actually think that it is dangerous.”

“Country bars can be dangerous any day of the week. I’m just going to sit and have a drink.”

Caroline pushed herself away from him, plumped her pillow against the headboard, and sat up. “Tell me again about this Red Dog,” she said.

The professor told her everything he knew. The base house in Gahanna that Arnetto had described. The bar where John Schlabaugh had taken possession of a briefcase. The cabin where he had found Abe Yoder. The disappearance of Abe Yoder from the hospital. The apparent kidnapping of Sara Yoder at the Salem Cemetery. The grave site of John Schlabaugh. The cell phones with messages in code and GPS coordinates. The forlorn look in Sara Yoder’s eyes when she had seen the body in the grave.

After he had fallen asleep, Caroline eased out of bed and sat at her bureau, brushing out her hair in the dark, her mind wandering the landscape of the case he had painted for her. He was right. It would be enough, at this point, simply to rescue Sara Yoder. But Abe Yoder was missing, too. And why hadn’t Jeremiah Miller made it to the jail interviews that afternoon? Why would Abe Yoder hide away in an old cabin for the better part of a week, not seeking treatment for his wound? What did Spits Wallace have to do with any of this?

On the surface, it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Under the surface, there were too many questions. What did Abe Yoder hope now to accomplish? Was he simply running scared? Hiding from the people who had shot him? Or had he been involved in Schlabaugh’s murder himself? Or had Jeremiah? Once partners and friends, then divided against each other over the money or the drugs? That seemed plausible. Then again, it didn’t. Not for Amish.

Then, what of Sara? How much truth and how much evasion had there been in the few things she had told Cal Troyer and her husband? What had she really known when she had led them to the grave? Giving her the benefit of the doubt, even if Sara Yoder were brought back home safely, would she stay? Stay Amish after so great an ordeal? Or go English? Her choice, to make, if she could only be given the chance.

Or had her story been all an act? What they knew of her was, essentially, only what she had told them. And what had she told them?

That a gang of Amish kids was in way over their heads with a Rumschpringe gone bad. That there was a grave in a red barn in the country. That John Schlabaugh had been a drifter. The worst kind of drifter, if she were right. That John Schlabaugh and Abe Yoder had gotten them all in enough trouble to last a lifetime.

Saturday, July 24
6:15 A.M.

 

 

PROFESSOR Branden drove up the Doughty Valley to the Schlabaugh trailer and found a buggy pushed back under the hickory trees next to the barn. In a pasture behind the barn, a Standardbred horse munched on a tall mound of hay in a corner of the fence. When Branden inspected the buggy, he found a bloody hospital dressing on the floorboards, and bloodstains on the right side of the seat. In the barn, the tractor and farm implements stood alone in the center avenue. The two cars were gone.

Branden tried the door to the trailer and found it locked. He climbed back into his truck and drove down County 19 to Township 110, then looped back into the valley where the Yoders and Rabers lived. At Bishop Raber’s brick house, he found Cal’s truck parked amid several buggies. Cal and the bishop were seated in lawn chairs on the back porch with several solemn men, plates of bacon, eggs, and corn bread in their laps. Cal motioned with his fork for Branden to take a seat on a wooden chair next to him, and as Branden sat down, a lady in a long, green dress and flowered kitchen apron came out onto the porch and asked the bishop if their visitor would be having breakfast too. Raber looked at Branden, and Branden nodded and thanked her. She went back inside, letting the screened door slap shut, returning with a heaping plate for the professor and a cup of coffee that she put on the porch boards beside his chair. After he had taken several bites and drunk some coffee, Branden said, “I think Jeremiah Miller picked Abe Yoder up at the hospital,” and explained what he had discovered at John Schlabaugh’s barn.

Raber asked, “Was there a lot of blood?”

Branden shrugged. “Enough. He’s got to be hurting. I’m not surprised that Abe left the hospital. I’m not even surprised that Jeremiah helped him do it. Abe could have called Jeremiah, or Jeremiah could have just showed up. Nobody would notice two Amish kids in a buggy. If Jeremiah had taken his car, that would be different, so they obviously thought this through together. What I wonder, though, is where they have gone. What they plan to do.”

Cal said, around a mouthful of corn bread, “Jeremiah will know that Sara was taken. Maybe they think they can do something about that.”

“I’m surprised he can travel,” Branden said. “Abe, I mean.”

Raber asked, “Both cars were gone at John Schlabaugh’s place?”

Branden nodded, ate a bite. “One was Jeremiah’s, as I remember. Who owns the other one? Remind me.”

“John Miller,” Raber said. “He lives out by Gypsy Springs School, on the other side of Saltillo.”

Branden laid his plate on the porch boards and took up his coffee. He stared at the cup a while, took a sip, and said, “Cal, I’d like to borrow your truck.”

“Sure. Why?” Cal said.

“Bruce Robertson and I have a little something cooked up for later this afternoon, and it’d look better if I showed up in a carpenter’s truck. Working man. That sort of thing.”

Cal fished out his keys, saying, “You’ll need to get some gas.”

Branden traded keys and said, “If things work out, we may be able to locate Sara Yoder. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth the gamble.”

Raber said, “I’m going to visit families this afternoon with the preachers. Is there anything you want us to do?”

With level conviction, Branden said, “Yes. I want you to pray.”

Saturday, July 24
1:15 P.M.

 

 

DRESSED for the afternoon in a red work shirt and black jeans, Branden pushed through the rusty bar door. His leather belt sported the Smith & Wesson logo. He wore an old pair of work boots, and the cuffs of his jeans came down over both the boot tops and a small ankle holster carrying a stainless AMT Backup pistol in the diminutive caliber .380.

Inside the door, on the left, a jukebox played a fast-paced country song, and on a small dance floor covered with sawdust, a middle-aged couple was doing a vigorous two-step.

Beyond the dance floor, further to the left, a row of wooden booths ended in a metal door marked Office. One young couple sat in the last booth, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in the dim light.

Branden stepped back to the bar, got a draft beer, and took it to a front corner booth, to the right of the entrance, where he’d be out of the line of sight of anyone coming into the bar. As he sat down, he spoke quietly into his microphone, “Seven cars out front, five people in view, counting the bartender.”

Three fans spaced evenly in the ceiling made slow, quiet turns in the air. The only windows were glass blocks set high in the walls, admitting a small fraction of the bright afternoon light. The wood floor was old and irregular. In the center of the bar there were rustic pine tables and chairs, all empty, and on Branden’s right there was another row of booths lining the wall. The bar itself ran the length of the back wall, with a dozen empty barstools standing in front of it. It had a black Naugahyde bumper, and on the left stood several tall levers marked colorfully with the logos of the beers available on tap. Behind the bar, the liquor bottles were lined up on a long shelf in front of a wall-length mirror.

Robertson was down the road a mile or so, in a high school parking lot, listening in his blue sedan, receiver on the dash, an earplug in his ear. Behind the school, Ricky Niell was parked in a Holmes County cruiser with one other deputy.

While Branden waited, three older men came in and took a booth on the right, two down from Branden and closer to the bar. Two were in blue service uniforms, and the third wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a red ball cap. Red Cap went to the bar and spoke to the bartender, and then sat down with the other two men.

The jukebox switched to a country waltz, and the dancing couple sat down in one of the booths along the left wall. The bartender, a large, florid man in a white shirt, jeans, and black leather vest, came out to the booth with the three men. He leaned over the table, took some folding money from Red Cap, and slipped it into the left front pocket of his jeans, under his waist apron. Then he passed a small plastic bag from his right jeans pocket to the man. The three men sat for a minute and then left quietly.

Nursing his beer, Branden sat for half an hour and described the comings and goings inside the bar. Five people came in, transacted quietly with the bartender, and left without having a drink. The dancing couple fed quarters into the jukebox, took another turn with a two-step, and left after paying their tab.

The young couple on the left moved to the bar and sat to talk quietly with the bartender. He listened, leaning forward on the bar, then shook his head and stepped back. The young man waved him closer and put several bills on the bar, and the bartender scooped them up, seeming annoyed.

He went through the door marked Office and came out with a middle-aged man in a well-tailored gray suit. Gray Suit spoke with the young couple and went back into the office, having instructed the bartender to wait. When he came out, Gray Suit walked up to the young man on the barstool, pushed the folding money roughly into the boy’s shirt pocket, shoved him off the stool, and ordered the boy and girl out of the bar. Before he went back through the office door, Gray Suit spoke angrily to the bartender, who backed up, slipped in behind the bar, and started washing out glasses in the sink under the bar. In the mirror behind the bar, Branden saw Abe Yoder and Jeremiah Miller coming through the front door, dressed English from head to toe.

Jeremiah was in blue Wranglers with no belt. The pocket of his light blue sport shirt held a pack of cigarettes. His black track shoes had the Nike swoosh. Abe Yoder was wearing black designer jeans with a wide leather belt. He had pulled up his pink-and-gray-striped, button-down shirt so that it hung loose on the left side. He was in white running shoes with elaborate, angled soles.

Jeremiah walked straight back to the bar, stopping once to turn and measure Abe Yoder’s progress behind him. Abe followed slowly, his left arm stiff against his side, favoring his left leg as he maneuvered between the tables.

Branden whispered into his microphone, “Abe Yoder and Jeremiah Miller just walked in,” and held his hands, fingers locked, in front of his mouth, elbows propped on the table for cover.

When Yoder made it up to the bar, the bartender had already started arguing loudly with Jeremiah Miller. Yoder joined in the argument, and Branden heard the bartender shout, “Get out!”

When neither Yoder nor Miller gave any indication that they intended to leave, the bartender came out around the end of the bar, his face flushed with anger. Yoder backed up as the man advanced, and bumped his left hip against one of the barstools. He doubled over, holding his left side with both hands. The bartender, ignoring Yoder, took Jeremiah roughly by the arm and started marching him toward the door. Abe got a grip on an ashtray with his right hand and threw it hard against the mirror behind the bar, shattering it and a half dozen bottles on the liquor shelf.