A Plain Disappearance (16 page)

“Are my boots impractical? Yes. Worth a month of a teacher’s salary? Absolutely.” She sighed when she stepped into another snow drift. “I didn’t see Becky this morning. Where was she?”

“She works at Young’s Family Kitchen, the local Amish restaurant. It’s about two miles from our place. She was filling in at the bakery this morning so she had to leave early to bake pies.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who can bake a pie.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“You’re right, but you don’t see Mom trying to bake a pie, do you?”

“That would be a disaster.” Tanisha’s mother was as gifted in the kitchen as Tee and I were. Her lack of cooking prowess led to us not being able to boil water either. But we could dial a phone really well for takeout.

“We’ll swing by Young’s later. Timothy will be there too. He’s the contractor on a job there.” I walked on. “You will love it, and Ellie—she’s the owner—will kill me if I let you leave Knox County without trying a piece of her pie.”

Tanisha caught up with me. “Speaking of killing people, tell me why we are tramping cross-country like a couple of fur traders. Seriously, I feel like it is 1800. If Davy Crockett came out of the woods wearing his coonskin cap, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“Davy Crockett was never in Knox County, but you might have seen Johnny Appleseed planting trees around here back then.”

“You said that this had something to do with the murder.”

“It does. We are walking to the barn where Timothy and I found Katie.”

“Katie is the dead girl?”

“Yes.” I looked at the unspoiled snow-covered ground. We passed through the stand of pine trees and found pastel-colored sunlight washing over the weathered barn.

Tanisha whistled. “What did they keep in there? Dinosaurs?”

“Horses, I think. The Gundy family that lived here moved to Colorado years ago. Timothy said they still own the land though.”

Tanisha stuck her hands deep into her coat pocket. “Why don’t they sell it? They could make a fortune.”

I shrugged.

Tanisha picked up her pace. Although we could see the barn, it was still a half mile away. She glanced over her shoulder. “What’s taking you so long? Giddyup!”

“I think you’ve been watching too many Westerns in Italy.”

“Hey, I’m starved for English-speaking TV over there. If you’re up late at night they show American Westerns or
Seinfeld
. I’ve told my students to watch them because listening to English is the best way to learn. But I have noticed that lots of them are getting a Western twang. You should hear it with an Italian accent. It’s hilarious.”

“I hope you like cooking shows because if not, you and Becky will be spending tonight fighting over the remote.”

“As long as they are in English, I’m good.”

The closer we came to the barn, the more nervous I became. Had someone been watching Ruth and me at the Troyer farm yesterday? Was it related to Katie’s death? Would that person come here? I glanced at Tanisha. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her here. What if something happened? “Tee, maybe we should go back.”

She stopped shaking snow from her boot. “Back? Why?”

“I didn’t think this through . . .”

“Chloe, don’t be such a worrywart. Where did you find her?” Tanisha asked. Her voice had a hushed quality and lost its joking tone.

“On the other side.” We walked around the outside of the barn. I stopped and stared down at the place Timothy and I found Katie. With the freshly fallen snow, our tracks and the impression Katie made in the snow had vanished. It was like she had never even been there.

“Are you okay?” Tee asked.

“I think so. It seems so strange there’s no sign that she was ever here.”

“What was she doing here?” Tee asked the logical question that I had asked myself dozens of times in the last three days.

“I don’t know. I think if we learn the answer to that question, we will learn what really happened. One thing we know for certain was she wasn’t here alone. Someone else was here and strangled her.”

Tanisha’s hand flew to her throat. “How gruesome.”

“I hoped that I would find some kind of clue as to what happened to Katie, but the whole scene is covered by snow.”

“What’s inside of the barn?”

“That’s where it becomes really strange.” As we walked around the side of the barn I filled her in on Billy—who he was and how he was involved in the case.

She stopped and held up a hand. “So you are telling me that this guy who fixes everything with duct tape—and I mean
everything
—is an escaped convict and has been hiding in Amish country for nearly twelve years.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

She raised both palms toward the sky. “See, Mom doesn’t want me to go back to Milan because she’s afraid it’s not safe for a girl on her own, and look at you—exactly how many people have been killed since you moved here?”

“Please don’t tell your parents. The last thing I want them to do is to come down here and get me.”

Tanisha played with the zipper on the parka she borrowed from Beck. “Does your dad know any of this?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Why would he?”

She held up her hands in surrender. “I know the ‘dad’ talk is off-limits.”

“That’s another thing that hasn’t changed in my life.”

Tanisha opened her mouth as if she was about to say something else, but then she snapped her mouth closed again. Fine with me. If it was about my father, I didn’t want to hear it.

We slipped through the broken barn door, and a scraping sound like a piece of metal moving across stone filled the air. Tanisha tugged on my sleeve and opened her mouth. I held a finger to my lips and moved farther into the barn.

The scraping came from the far end of the barn close to where Billy had stashed his extra car parts and became more pronounced as we crept in that direction. A large pen stood between us and the auto graveyard. We stopped. Inside the stall, a thin man bent over and then straightened. Then he did it again. I craned my neck and could just make out the handle of a shovel in his hands.

“He’s digging something,” Tanisha whispered in my ear.

I held my forefinger to my lips again, urging her to stay quiet. Then I felt for my cell phone in the pocket of my winter coat but didn’t remove it. It would take Chief Rose the better part of an hour to reach the Gundy barn, more than that if she was outside of Appleseed Creek. I couldn’t turn and leave. The man in the stall could be the killer. Chief Rose would never forgive me it I let him escape without catching a glimpse of his face.

I cupped my hand over Tanisha’s ear and whispered, “Go wait outside the door and stop him if runs out.”

“What if he tries to hurt you?” she hissed.

“I’ll scream and you come running.”

Her eyes grew wide, her voice hoarse. “I don’t think this a good idea.”

“I have to see who it is.”

She grimaced, but nodded and carefully walked back to the door. When I saw that she had stepped outside, I tiptoed closer to the man with the shovel, stopping to pick up a tire iron from the stack of Billy’s car parts, its heft reassuring in my hand.

Through the six-inch wide slats that surrounded the stall, I had a clear view of the man. Puffs of his breath were visible as he threw shovelfuls of near-frozen earth into a wheelbarrow. I shivered in my thick coat. The hole he dug was at least two feet deep. I saw the sheen of metal as his exertion revealed the top of whatever had been hidden in that spot. He ran the back of the shovel across the top of the metal object, making that scraping sound again that Tanisha and I first heard when we stepped inside the barn.

He straightened up suddenly, as if sensing my presence. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded.

I held the tire iron in front of me. “I think you’re the one who should answer that.”

“I’m not the one sneaking up on people.”

“I’m not the one digging a hole in a barn I don’t own.”

He paused, eyeing me. “How do you know this isn’t my barn?”

“Because it belongs to the Gundy’s, and they’re Amish. You’re not.”

He didn’t have a response for that. He stepped into the light for a better look at me. In turn, I was able to get a good look at him. He was a gawky teen, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old with glasses and braces. He wore his sandy-brown hair long and it flopped into his eyes and curled around his ears.

His eyes glowed with recognition when he saw me, but I didn’t recognize him. Could he have seen me in town and remembered me even when I hadn’t noticed him? There weren’t too many redheads in Appleseed Creek, so I tended to stick out in most places around town.

He focused on the tire iron and then looked down at his shovel. “Who are you?”

“My name is Chloe. Now, it’s your turn.”

“Forget it. I’m not telling you anything.” He turned the shovel around in his hand so that the blade end pointed to the sky.

My fingers began to cramp from holding the tire iron so tightly. “You won’t tell me what you’re doing here, or what it has to do with Katie Lambright’s death?”

He gripped the handle of the shovel like a sword. “I didn’t have anything to do with Katie’s death,” he shouted. “I would never hurt anyone, especially her.”

I stepped back. “If that’s true, why don’t you drop the shovel?”

He looked at the shovel as if seeing it for the first time, his eyes suddenly wide. He lowered it and drove the spade into the dirt ground of the stall until it stuck there.

“What are you digging?”

“It’s none of your business, and you’d better leave. Now.”

I shrugged as if what he said didn’t bother me, but inside my entire body trembled. Thankfully, about thirty feet and the wall of the stall stood between us. I could run out the door before he reached me. I removed my cell phone from my pocket. “Maybe you would like to tell Chief Rose and the police, then?”

His chin jerked upward, then he ran out through the back of the stall. The kid must have been a track and field sprinter because he was on the other side of the barn before I found my footing. I dropped the tire iron and gave chase, but no way would I be able to catch him.

But Tanisha could. She dove at the teen’s feet like she was back on her college volleyball team and he was the ball. Instead of bumping him over the other side of the net, however, she grabbed him around the ankles. He went down like a felled tree. On landing, he pinned his own arms under himself.

Before he could roll over, Tanisha sat on the boy’s back. “My old volleyball coach would be proud of me if he had seen that dig. I jumped three feet.”

“It was impressive,” I said, bending down to examine the kid’s face. “Did you hurt him?”

“How could I have hurt him? He landed on snow.”

I stepped around the prostrate teenager. He was trying to hold his face up out of the snow, but with little success. “What’s your name?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Tanisha bounced on his back. “Come on, kid. Spit it out.”

The boy winced and groaned. “Will you tell her to climb off of me?”

I crossed my arms. “No, not until you tell us your name.”

“So you can tell the police?”

“That is the idea.”

He squirmed back and forth. “Then forget it.”

Tanisha dug her knee into his back and reached into the pocket of the kid’s jeans and removed his wallet. She waved it at me. “I say we check his ID.”

He kicked at her with his long legs, bending them back and trying to smack her with his heels.

She slapped at one of his boots. “That’s not very nice. You cut that out.”

I took the wallet from Tanisha’s hand and opened it. The picture ID inside read
Jason Catcher
.

Jason
. I knew that name. Was he the English boy Katie had called a friend?

Jason began to thrash back and forth. “I can report you both for assault.”

Tanisha snorted. “What are you going to tell the police—that a girl sat on you? Please.”

I rifled through his wallet some more. Behind the driver’s license was a Harshberger College ID. That’s why he recognized me. I held it up for him to see. “You go to Harshberger, then.”

“So what if I do.”

I shrugged. “I just find it interesting since I work there.” I peered at the card. “It says you’re a freshman.”

“So. Is that a crime?”

I tucked his IDs back into the wallet. “No, but vandalizing property is.”

He twisted his neck. “Vandalizing what? I didn’t do that.”

“What do you call the great big hole you were digging in the barn?”

“That’s not vandalism. No one cares about that barn anyway.”

“That’s something you will have to talk to the chief about. She may not agree.”

Tanisha smacked at his foot as he tried to kick her again. “Now, why were you digging a hole in the barn?”

“Get her off of me. I can’t breathe. She’s crushing me.” His squirming became more violent.

Tanisha’s brow shot way up. “Did he just call me
fat
? Because I think he just called me fat.” She bounced on his back.

Jason gave up the fight. “Ooph.”

Tanisha was far from fat, but as a tall, muscular athlete she wasn’t a lightweight either. I held out a hand to my friend. “Climb off of him. He’s no good to us if he can’t breathe.”

“I’m freezing, too, lying on the snow like this.”

“Poor baby,” Tanisha muttered.

“Tee.”

She took my hand, allowing me to hoist her up. “Fine.”

Jason grunted as he struggled to his feet. “Give me my wallet.”

Tanisha turned to me. “I think you should hold onto it,” she said.

The kid scowled. “If I’m pulled over while driving home, and I don’t have my license, I will be in deep trouble.”

Tanisha brushed off the snow Jason had kicked onto her. “That sounds great to me.”

I gripped the wallet. “I’ll give it back to you when you tell me why you were digging in the barn.”

“Because I was told to.” He held out his hand. “Can I have it back now?”

“
Who
told you to?”

He dug a fist into his side. “That wasn’t a condition. You keep cheating.”

Tanisha snorted. “This kid has a lot of nerve.” She scanned him up and down. “That will work for you in prison, buddy.”