Leah wondered if Jude was referring in part to the years he’d spent with Frieda, but it wasn’t her place to ask. Her heart went out to Jude, who stared glumly at the table, scraping a little spot of food with his fingernail.
“I need to talk to them before they really go off the deep end,” he said in a tight voice. He picked up the cell phone, shaking his head. “I should go upstairs right now and—”
Leah sensed Alice and Adeline were in no mood to listen to reason, and that Jude would only be deepening the chasm that seemed to loom between them and their dat. “Maybe in the morning, when we’re all calmer, we’ll have a better idea about what to say to them so they’ll actually listen,” she suggested, tightening her grip on Jude’s arm. “You don’t have a sale tomorrow, so we’ll all be home together and we can hash this out.”
* * *
Come very early in the morning, however, Leah was awakened by loud voices in the kitchen—and she realized that Jude’s side of the bed was cold, as though he hadn’t been beside her for quite some time.
“You don’t own me!” one of the twins yelled.
“You’re not even our dat, so butt out of our lives!” her sister lashed out vehemently.
Fumbling for her robe, Leah hurried from the bedroom.
* * *
Jude had prepared himself for the worst, but he still couldn’t believe his eyes. Around ten-thirty the previous evening, a rumbling truck had wakened him from a fitful sleep and on impulse he’d checked the twins’ room. He’d known as soon as the door didn’t budge that the girls had sneaked out despite his insistence that they stay home. When he’d pushed aside the dresser blocking the door, the open window told him all he needed to know—and the clothing strewn around the room and on the undisturbed beds scared him into remaining awake the rest of the night.
He’d been on the verge of going to fetch Jeremiah—but he’d reasoned that the girls wouldn’t be at the pool hall this time. And when he’d gone to saddle Rusty, and he’d seen that the girls’ rig and their mare were still in the stable, he’d thought better of rousing his brother for a wild-goose chase. If the girls had left with their English boyfriends in that backfiring truck, they had all the advantages on their side.
So he’d wrapped himself in a blanket and waited in the girls’ room, watching for them in the moonlit night. He spent a lot of the time pushing and prodding on the cell phone he’d confiscated, but the screen remained blank—he had no idea how to turn it on. Around four in the morning the girls had dashed in from the road, clambering up the tree like lithe monkeys. He’d stepped into the corner of the room until they were safely inside, slipping the phone into his pocket.
“We’re going downstairs to talk about this right now,” he’d said, hoping not to waken Stevie and Leah.
Alice and Adeline’s shrieks could’ve roused the dead, but somehow he herded them downstairs and into the kitchen. Waves of resentment rolled off them as he lit the lamps—and even in the low glow of the lantern he set on the table, he saw the irrefutable evidence of the trouble they were in. The makeup they were wearing was smudged and their long hair hung rumpled around their shoulders—and when they removed English-style jackets he’d not seen before, telltale bruises on their necks completed a picture he didn’t want to witness.
Despite the fear that curdled Jude’s stomach, his anger got the best of him. “Care to tell me why you defied me by sneaking out in the night?” he demanded.
“You don’t own me!” Adeline blurted out.
“You’re not even our dat, so butt out of our lives!” Alice cried out defiantly.
Memories of the night these girls had been born flashed through Jude’s mind. How could he make them believe that despite their mother’s duplicity, he had loved them—had considered them blameless and innocent and utterly wonderful since the moment he’d first laid eyes on them?
“I’m sorry you see it that way,” Jude whispered. He prayed for a calmer mind-set in which the right words would bring the three of them to resolution—or at least help them speak in more civil tones. “If we can stop placing blame for a moment—if we can acknowledge that no one in this room was responsible for the fact that I’m not your birth father—maybe we can talk about the more serious situation we’re in right now.”
“And if you think you’re old enough to run off with English boys—to marry them and escape your Amish life,” Leah asserted from the doorway, “then you’re old enough to answer our questions truthfully.”
Jude sighed, regretting that the girls’ clamor had awakened Leah—yet he was relieved to see her tying the belt of her robe and approaching her seat at the table with a resolve that bolstered his courage. Even with her pale, tired eyes and her long, loose hair pulled hastily back in a kerchief, she’d never looked stronger or more beautiful to him.
“What do you want to know?” Adeline challenged.
“You won’t like the answers,” Alice warned them archly. “You probably won’t even understand the answers, seeing’s how you know a lot more about ducks and goats than you do about being a wife or a—a mother.”
Leah blanched and Jude grasped her hand. “Let’s also remember that Leah wasn’t around when you were conceived, so you don’t need to include her in your resentful accusations,” Jude insisted. “For starters, why’d you get those tattoos? And why Tinker Bell?”
The twins exchanged secretive glances. “Our English guys think tatts are sexy,” Alice purred.
