“I suppose you told him every little thing,” Alice accused, glaring at Leah and then at Jude.
“Why should we stay here, when no one respects our right to privacy?” Adeline put in without missing a beat.
“Matter of fact,” Jude jumped in before the twins could continue, “you can stop blaming Leah right now, because your uncle Jeremiah—not to mention Bishop Vernon from Cedar Creek—had already caught wind of your mischief and informed me about their suspicions before Leah did. The Amish grapevine runs swift and spares nobody, girls, so rest assured that your reputations are already toast.”
As one, the girls each raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “That is such a stupid threat that—”
“You can’t tell me that anybody knows where we’ve been, so—”
“Leah found you, didn’t she?” Jude challenged. He rested his hands on the tabletop, leaning low to gaze into Alice’s eyes and then Adeline’s. “You girls are grounded. You’re not to leave home except to go to church unless you’re accompanied by either Leah or me. No arguments.” He held out his hand. “I’ll be taking your cell phone, too, since you somehow latched onto a much fancier model than the bishop or I allowed you to have.”
Their eyes widened as they indignantly sucked in air.
“But you can’t—”
“While we’re in rumspringa, you have no—”
“Like it or not, I’m your father and I’m responsible for you,” Jude interrupted in a rising voice. “Girls who wear sheer blouses that show off their black underthings and Tinker Bell tattoos are already on the highway to hell, so starting now, your rights and privacy are the least of my concerns. You’ll be staying home, so you won’t be needing those tight jeans or dangly earrings—”
“You can’t touch our stuff!”
“If you sneak into our room, so help me—”
When both girls rose indignantly from the table, Jude grasped their shoulders. “I’m serious. You can run off to your room, but not before you hand over your phone,” he insisted. “I suspect it’s in one of your apron pockets.”
Glaring in disbelief, Adeline and Alice appeared ready to bolt from Jude even as he held their gazes and their shoulders. Finally, Adeline reached into her apron pocket and hastily tapped on the screen of the cell phone before pressing hard on a button on top of it. She tossed the phone onto the table.
With red faces and muttered curse words, the girls rushed from the kitchen. Moments later the angry thunder of their sneakers on the wooden steps and along the upstairs hallway filled the house with their resentment. Their voices were muffled, but after their bedroom door slammed, the strident tone of their conversation filtered into the kitchen.
Jude raked his hand through his dark hair. “That didn’t go well,” he muttered in frustration. “I suspect the only way I’ll keep them home is to take the wheels off their buggy—or stable their mare over at Jeremiah’s.”
“I’m sorry,” Leah murmured. “The moment we walked in, they were set on confrontation. No matter what you’d said, you weren’t going to win them to your way of thinking.”
“When did they get so cynical? And so rude?” Jude gazed into Leah’s eyes, appearing totally baffled. “While Mamm was here, I saw nothing but compliant, well-behaved girls, but my mother was obviously as clueless as I’ve been. I can’t believe all this foul talk and indecent clothing—and tattoos!—have come about in the three months we’ve been married.”
Leah shrugged helplessly. “They were gone some, jah, but they were here most of the time—or so I thought. Maybe they’ve had us all fooled.”
“They’re thinkin’ to hitch up with those English guys real soon. They don’t wanna be Amish no more.”
Leah’s heart sank as she turned to see Stevie’s shadowy form in the doorway of the front room. Jude groaned and pulled out a chair so he could sit down and lean his elbows on the table. “What else have they told you, son?” he asked gently. “Do you know these boys’ names?”
Stevie entered the kitchen to take his usual seat beside his dat, so Leah sat down, too, at Jude’s left. “Nope, they don’t tell me nothin’. Sometimes I hear ’em talkin’ in their room, when they’re gettin’ ready to leave and they’re excited. They don’t know I can hear ’em.”
Leah pressed her lips together grimly. She couldn’t imagine being anything but Plain, and she’d never entertained thoughts of leaving the Old Order. Even when she’d been a teenager and some of her friends had whispered about the exotic lives they might live if they found English husbands, she’d never believed those girls would really leave the Amish church. Indeed, those friends had been married to Amish men for years now and had large families....
But this situation with Alice and Adeline sounded a lot more serious. “Do they want to leave because of me, Stevie?” Leah asked cautiously.
The boy shrugged, shaking his head. “I dunno, but I don’t think so,” he replied after he’d thought about it. “They’re girls, and they get wild-hare ideas sometimes, like maybe once they get married their lives’ll be perfect and they won’t have no more problems.”
Leah’s eyebrows rose. Such an observation seemed beyond a five-year-old boy’s comprehension, yet Stevie had obviously thought at length about his sisters’ situation.
“What problems?” Jude asked, exasperated. “They have a comfortable home and—even if they don’t like knowing that I might not be their birth father, they surely can’t hate living here badly enough to go English. They have no idea—”
“Jah, they have no idea what they’d be getting themselves into,” Leah echoed, grasping Jude’s forearm in sympathy. “What they’ve seen of English life in the pool hall—or riding around with boys—is not reality.”
“Thank God,” Jude put in quickly. “It’s one thing for teenage girls to keep secrets from their
