Colton Destiny Read online

  The omission was obvious. Emma understood. “Ruthie will be fine, too.”

  “She is...unsettled.”

  “And unsettling?”

  His mouth quirked. “That, as well.”

  She smiled at him. “She will be different, and she will likely make you want to tear your hair out on occasion, but she will be fine.”

  He gave her a look that made her wonder what he was thinking, made her suspect he was picturing another unsettling young girl.

  “You speak from experience?”

  “Let’s just say my parents would empathize with you about Ruthie.”

  He laughed again. Better than the first time, more solid, real, not quite so rusty. The smile he gave her then took her breath away.

  “I feel I would have liked your parents.”

  “And they,” she said, “would have liked you.”

  Silence spun out between them. On it went, like the fiber she’d seen an Amish woman spinning yesterday, growing tighter with each moment. She couldn’t seem to look away, and he gave her no help, studying her as if she were some fascinating oddity dropped into his world.

  She stood up abruptly. Looking surprised, he also stood. Emma’s need to escape was strong, and only the little voice in her mind that accused her of running stopped her from bolting out the front door. The rudeness of that sparked a need to be gracious, as if to cover the impulse.

  “Thank you. I had a wonderful evening.”

  Lord, she sounded like a woman after an awkward date. And that opened up her mind for images that she knew had to be quashed, instantly.

  “I know the girls did, too,” he said.

  And you?

  She clamped her teeth together to prevent the treacherous words from escaping. Had he purposely avoided including himself? She searched for something else, anything else to say. Something that would bring her stupidly rebellious mind back in line, slow her pulse back to normal.

  What I need is a bucket of cold water, she thought.

  And then she found it.

  “I will find her,” she said, bringing the reality of the reason she was here back to the fore with warmth-dispelling abruptness.

  Caleb’s face changed as if she had literally hit him with that cold splash. As if he, too, at least for a moment, had forgotten this wasn’t just an ordinary social evening, that she wasn’t just an invited guest in his home.

  “I know that you will try to the fullest extent,” he said, sounding as stiff as she felt.

  She mumbled something else as she made her escape into the night. And it wasn’t until she was clear of Paradise Ridge that her pulse returned to normal.

  Her mind, however, seemed to have no such inclination.

  Chapter 15

  “Is Emma coming tonight?”

  Caleb looked down at his middle daughter. Ruthie had put the question to him last night as well, as if Emma’s presence were supposed to be a regular occurrence instead of a single event two nights ago.

  A single, memorable event.

  He tried to look at it rationally. He had greatly enjoyed seeing his daughters laughing and happy. Even little Grace had seemed fascinated by their guest, staring at her wide-eyed, one finger in her tiny mouth.

  And Emma had been their guest. He appreciated that she had spent as much time playing with the girls, keeping up her end of the Scrabble game, as she had with him.

  Once it had been them alone, she hadn’t stayed long. He didn’t know if it had been out of respect for proprieties, or if she simply wanted away from him. But he’d been both grateful and disappointed, and it was the latter that had him so unsettled now.

  Because his daughter’s eager question had brought him face-to-face with a fact he’d been trying to ignore. He had enjoyed that evening as much as the girls had. He had enjoyed watching the sharp, professional woman unbend and laugh, even giggle with them, watching her take on the challenge of the familiar game and the unfamiliar way of playing it, hearing her talk to the children with respect, not asking any of the questions so many outsiders did, about their lives and how they lived without the things that ruled her own world.

  “Is she, Father?”

  Jerked back to the present, Caleb focused on the girl. “No, Ruthie. I have not seen her since she was here.”

  “If I see her, may I ask her to come?”

  He hesitated, but then Katie chimed in. “Yes, please,

  Father, may we?”

  This child, who was the living image of her mother, so rarely asked for anything that it wasn’t in him to refuse her. Besides, what were the chances they would see the agent anyway?

  “You may,” he said, feeling fairly safe about it. Ruthie scampered off to finish preparing for school.

  Emma had been busy, he knew that. Everyone in the village spoke of how she was relentless, coming back two, three times or even more to dig into their memories, trying to find one thing that might open up another lead. He assumed she had found nothing, or he would know by now. She had promised to keep him apprised of any developments.

  Of course, that was likely what she always said; perhaps it had slipped her mind that she was not in a place where she could simply call to update him. He wondered briefly if a phone call from him to her, made at the community booth, would be permitted. He should have asked Deacon Stoltzfus the last time he was here to chastise him about his clean-shaven face.

  Except the last time the Deacon was here, Hannah had been safe.

  A memory shot through his mind, of the day Hannah was born. “You must always look out for your little sister, Caleb,” his mother had said. True, she was an adult now, even in the eyes of the English, but to him, always meant always. And he hadn’t done his job.

  The wrenching worry he’d been living with threatened to break free. Hannah, lively, spirited Hannah, in the hands of evil. Who knew what might be happening to her at this very moment. He tamped it down yet again, although it was getting more difficult with every hour that passed with no news.

  He shook his head, feeling as if it were filling with the fluffy fleece of the Yoders’ sheep. He was not a man to sit and ponder while others did, and despite the common sense that told him Emma was trained for this, he felt strongly that he should be doing...something. And yet he knew Emma was right, that his place lay here, taking care of his girls. She would say so again, were she here.

  For an instant he felt a tug so strong it shocked him, a need for just that, for the brusque, businesslike woman, who still could play with hurting children not even her own, to be here now. He told himself he needed to hear her telling him again it would be all right, she would bring his little sister home. And he couldn’t deny he needed the reassurance.

  But he also couldn’t deny, were he to be truthful as a man should, that he wanted her here for other reasons. He wanted to feel again the pleasure of watching her smile, hearing her laugh, knowing she had allowed herself those feelings here. For he sensed that she rarely did, supposed that her world and her work didn’t allow for that very often.

  He wanted to watch the grace with which she carried herself, the way her slender hands frequently moved to emphasize a point when she spoke. He even liked watching the bounce of her hair when she walked and had it in a ponytail.

  Hair that, in his world, would have been bound up and covered, kept only for her husband’s eyes.

  A sensation of heat and aching hollowness burst through him, and he thought for an instant that he actually swayed on his feet.

  “Father?”

  Katie’s soft voice pulled him out of the morass of tangled feelings he seemed to be mired in. He looked at her, at this child who so resembled her mother, and regained his steadiness.

  “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously.

  “I am fine.”

  “You looked...so pained, just now.”

  “I am fine,” he said, not denying what had likely been obvious on his face. “Are you ready for school?”

  “Yes. And Grace is dre
ssed for Mrs. Stoltzfus.”

  Caleb smiled at his oldest daughter. Even though she had been only eight, the girl had taken it upon herself to carry much of the load of caring for the baby after Annie had died. He had feared he would have to deal with childish anger at the innocent babe whose arrival into the world had taken her mother’s life. But Katie had instead embraced the helpless child, saying only that it would be her mother’s wish, and that Grace must have been her mother’s last task here on earth, and therefore very important.

  Caleb had been humbled by her simple faith. He wondered if there were many men in the world who felt they should strive to be more like their own child.

  “She is a better Christian than I,” he had once said to Jacob Yoder, his closest friend in the village.

  “Children often are,” his wise friend had said. “It is so clear to them.”

  “While adults struggle?”

  “I think the weight of growing up sometimes holds us down in the mire, where things aren’t as clear.”

  For a farmer, Jacob was of a decidedly philosophical bent at times.

  He should go visit his old friend, Caleb thought as he walked the girls to school after dropping Grace at Mrs. Stoltzfus’s. The toddler had been in a chattering mood this morning, and the subject of the pretty woman she called “Gen Emma” in her effort to copy her sisters’ “Agent Emma” had seemed to Caleb nearly constant. And it had struck him that he was holding in his arms the answer to the question of how the news of her evening spent at his home had spread so quickly.

  Not that there was anything wrong about her visit. The people of Paradise Ridge often had English visitors. They had good relations, both business and personal, with their neighbors of Eden Falls, and they fostered them. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Amish community, sometimes to their own discomfort, drew large numbers of tourists to the area, and the spillover benefited the merchants and other businesses of Eden Falls. In turn, the close proximity of the English town, with all the modern devices those tourists could not live without, kept most of them staying there during their visit.

  Emma, he had noticed, had changed a setting on her cell phone the moment she had set foot in the house. It had remained silent all evening, although he’d noticed her glancing at it discreetly a couple of times. He supposed she had to be always in touch, and had thought it a very polite gesture that she silenced the ringing and didn’t actually speak on it while she was in his home.

  He could have told her that since she was English their rules didn’t apply to her, but he appreciated the gesture too much to tell her it didn’t matter.

  And just like that he was back to the nagging, persistent thoughts of the woman who seemed determined to plague him without even trying.

  With an effort he was not used to having to make, he forced his thoughts to the day ahead. He walked at an accelerated pace to his shop. Today he would put the final finish on the commissioned desk, a large piece topped with the last of the wonderfully grained wood he’d used on the display piece in the window. The seven drawers were finally done, the dovetail joints tight and solid, the slides perfectly smoothed. He would go over it once more, from all angles, slanting a light over it to reveal any imperfections, and then the finishing work would begin.

  And it would, thankfully, require his full and concentrated attention. There would be no room in his head for unwanted, improper and verboten thoughts of a certain FBI agent.

  Chapter 16

  Emma let her head fall back on the headrest. She was tired. She could no longer deny it. She was nearly exhausted, not so much because her days had been long, although they had, but because they had been fruitless. She’d never run into so many dead ends, so many leads that went nowhere, such a lack of real clues or evidence.

  And of course the dreams weren’t helping. Her nights had been a tangled cacophony of good and evil, horrible memories of her own entwined with images from that evening at Caleb’s. It was as if her brain was weary of dealing with the two extremes and threw them all into the bubbling brew of her subconscious, to escape and torment her when she finally gave in to sleep.

  She told herself it was just her frustration that made this case seem so much more important than any other. The case she was on at the moment was always the most important at the time, but this one seemed to have assumed huge proportions in her mind. It had to do only with the lack of headway, she assured herself.

  And nothing to do with Caleb and his charming, lovable family.

  She never should have gone there the other night. It had been too nice. Too enjoyable.

  Too personal.

  Somewhere during that evening she’d crossed a line. Not overtly—she’d done or said nothing wrong—but in her mind, she knew she had stepped into an ethical and inward morass. Because in Caleb’s house she had found what she had missed the most since striking out on her own and leaving the

  Double C. While she had missed the ranch, the space, the horses, the very land of her home, she missed the people the most, and the sense of family. Not that it wasn’t still her home anytime she wanted, but it wasn’t the same, even with Piper and Sawyer still there. It wasn’t like it had been with Caleb and his girls that night.

  And that, she told herself sternly, was the very reason she could not go back. She would keep him up-to-date, in a professional manner, but no more warm, cozy evenings. Of course, there was that cell-phone thing, which meant in order to keep him apprised she would have to see him face-to-face, but she would do it at his shop or somewhere else. The image of that quiet, solid house, full of golden light and family bonds, threatened to burrow into a heart she only now, after all this time, admitted was homesick for that feeling.

  “So much for being an independent, career-minded woman,” she muttered to herself. The fact that she was supposedly a tough, trained federal agent was something she didn’t want to acknowledge just now.

  She allowed herself a moment of rest, her eyes closed, justifying it by forcing herself to go through it all again, every bit of knowledge she’d gleaned since she’d been here. It wouldn’t take long, she thought ruefully, because there was so little. But she ran through it anyway.

  Hannah, Rebecca and Miriam had helped plan the very party they’d disappeared from. Rebecca’s family’s barn had been chosen because it was large enough to contain everyone. The cooking and preparing had gone on for days beforehand. Among the girls anyway. The boys seemed only to have to show up, except for Rebecca’s brothers and a couple of friends who built makeshift tables for the gathering. Eli, the oldest of these, had said he’d been so focused on spending an evening with Rachel Miller that he had paid scant attention to his sister and her friends. And his story was echoed by many others; some things, Emma thought, apparently including the single-mindedness of hormone-driven teenagers, crossed cultures.

  But even the few adults around, the ones who had stayed near the house to let the youngsters have their day, hadn’t seen anything different or unusual. No one had seen a stranger or strangers hanging around. She’d talked to everyone in Paradise Ridge old enough to communicate. Many she’d spoken to at the community meeting, but few had had anything useful to say; she spent most of her time reassuring them. Some she’d recontacted later, particularly those who had been near the party or who lived close by.

  Over the past couple of days, she’d expanded to people who were known but not part of the community, people they had contact with on at least a semiregular basis. And still nothing. No mysterious activity, no strangers about, no unknown vehicles, nothing.

  She was missing something. She had to be.

  She believed Caleb when he’d said Hannah would not leave of her own volition without saying goodbye to the girls. The family was too close-knit, and from everything the girls had told her, Hannah was too loving a soul to be that cold and unthinking.

  She hadn’t really thought it was that anyway. Her every instinct told her this was an abduction, not a runaway. If for no other
reason than why would they run away during this time when they were allowed to explore outside the community without censure? Simply put, she thought, they didn’t have to run away to the outside world; they could just go, so why would they?

  She let out a long, weary breath. Yes, she was definitely missing something. An abduction, but no strangers around, no strange vehicles—for there almost had to be one involved, given how completely and quickly the three girls had vanished—noticed, nothing. And those same instincts told her no one from within the community was involved, and nothing she’d seen or heard in her interviews had changed that feeling.

  An abduction.

  No strangers.

  No one on the inside.

  Emma went very still. She kept her eyes closed, not wanting to disrupt the turn her thoughts had taken.

  Turn it around, she said to herself.

  Not a stranger, but someone known to them.

  But yet, not on the inside.

  A tap on the truck’s window jolted her upright. If this were Cleveland, Tate’s Philly or any other big city, she could have been dead, zoning out like that. Angry with herself, she turned her head. And saw the top of a slightly askew Amish cap.

  She rolled down the window, and the cap tilted back.

  “Ruthie!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here and not in school?”

  The girl’s nose wrinkled. “It’s Saturday, Agent Emma. I’m taking my father his lunch.”

  She lifted a cloth sack. Emma stared at it, trying to process the fact that she had completely lost track of what day it was. Derek would say she was working too hard. To Caleb and the others in this community, she wasn’t sure there was such a thing as working too hard. The Amish work ethic was legend, but until now, when she’d spent so much time here at a stretch, she hadn’t realized how very true it was. The farmers among them kept the same long hours that had been their way, by necessity, since they’d first established their little community.

  Caleb’s days were a little more reasonable, or at least he had made them that way so he could see the girls off in the mornings. She liked that he’d made that adjustment for them.