As they set off toward the pine forest and the mountains, Delilah glanced back at the house. It was as she’d pictured it, a ramshackle old place. Everything looked in need of repair, from the roof tiles the wind had blown askew to sections of the log fence that had fallen. As much as she hated the room inside the house, the prison she’d been locked in for four days, she feared what waited for them on the mountain even more.
Forty-One
“Sadie left almost a year ago, soon after Father died,” Naomi said. Mother held her hand, and Lily had her arms around Sariah. All four had tears spilling from their eyes, none bothering to wipe them away. I did as well. I didn’t care. For this moment, I wasn’t a big-city cop. I was a woman with one sister missing and one sister murdered.
Strangled, Doc had said. My sister Sadie had been strangled.
Naomi’s oldest, Sadie celebrated her nineteenth birthday just days before she disappeared. When I left Alber, she was a nine-year-old with long dark brown hair, who collected insects in jars. She came by the hobby naturally. Like Mother’s career as an herbalist, Naomi had a home business. She raised bees in hives she kept on a field outside of town and sold their honey to neighbors. A beekeeper since before she joined the family, she’d inherited the hives from her grandmother.
“Explain what you mean by ‘Sadie left,’” I said.
“Well…” Sariah said, “it wasn’t like Delilah. Sadie didn’t disappear. She’d been seeing someone. We all picked up on the signs. She would be gone in the afternoons, come back for dinner. Aaron tried to follow her once, but she lost him. Sadie was always a tomboy, but then she changed. She started wearing perfume.”
“I found a small bottle in the bathroom cabinet taped behind the extra rolls of toilet paper after she left,” Naomi said. “Ardeth was the one who found—”
“Sadie’s diary, where she talked about some man,” Mother explained. “Sadie described him as older than she was. She said his family had money. He lived somewhere outside of town.”
“She didn’t name him?” I asked.
“No, and that description could fit many men in Alber,” Naomi said. “After she left, we held a family meeting and questioned the children. All of them denied knowing anything about the man or Sadie’s plans.”
“So she didn’t tell anyone who…” I looked over at Lily, who stared at the photos on the table with a look of incredible sadness, but something else too—regret.
“Lily, did you know anything about the man?” She shook her head, but I pushed. “If you do, now is the time to tell me.”
Lily squeezed out an uncomfortable half-smile and shrugged, like she’d been caught. “I didn’t know his name. But Sadie told me what they planned. Like that he said he’d remodel the house he lived in for her, and that she’d be his only wife. Sadie didn’t want…” At that, Lily stopped and looked at our mothers.
“Go ahead, girl,” Mother said. “Your mothers have read Sadie’s diary. We know she turned her back on the Divine Principle.”
Despite Mother’s assurances, Lily turned her back on our mothers and spoke as if only to me. “Sadie didn’t want to share a husband, Clara. She said it shouldn’t be that way, to have one man with so many wives and children. Sadie said, ‘Lily, the man I marry will love only me and our children.’”
I thought about that. “So this was a man who didn’t have any wives? He wasn’t already married?”
“I guess not,” Lily said.
Mother looked up at me. “It couldn’t be Evan Barstow then, Clara. He has wives.”
“Maybe Sadie didn’t know he was married,” I pointed out. “Evan lives far enough outside of Alber that Sadie might not have known about his wives.”
Mother didn’t voice any agreement, but she didn’t contradict me either.
“And Sadie said this man came from a family with money?” I questioned them. “As Evan does?”
“Yes, a wealthy or powerful family. Something like that,” Mother said. It hurt to see the incredible pain etched on her thin face. I wondered if she considered the possibility that her actions contributed to Sadie’s death. The house enforcer, Mother would have been the one Sadie feared most, the main reason she hid her relationship. Mother glanced at me, her voice laced with sadness and resignation. “Clara, it’s been a while since we read Sadie’s diary. There may be more in there that we’ve forgotten. We could get it for you, if it would help.”
“Call Aaron and ask him to bring it,” I suggested. Sariah stood up and slipped a cell phone out of her dress pocket. She turned her back to us and walked a short distance away to talk. Hoping for more information, I asked the others, “Did Sadie give any physical description of this man?”
“Only that he was a big man,” Naomi said. “Oh, and Sadie wrote that when they left, they planned to hike up the mountain to look down on Alber.”
At that, I thought of Christina Bradshaw, who’d disappeared nine years earlier. The way Sadie disappeared, on the pretense of running away with a lover, seemed eerily similar. I thought of the letter Christina’s family said they received from Chicago. “Did you ever hear from Sadie?”
“Just once,” Mother said. My heart sank when she said, “A card that was postmarked Seattle. Sadie wrote she’d fallen in love and married. She told us not to look for her.”
Two women allegedly ran away with lovers, and both sent letters home from faraway places. Now one was dead. Murdered.
“But that must not have been true,” Lily said, looking from one of us to the next. The girl was smart. She’d thought the clues through in an instant. “Sadie never left the area, or she wouldn’t have been buried behind the cornfield, right?”
“Maybe not,” Naomi
