The horses dozed, the dogs slept, and we threw out ideas. Mullins and Max had their rifles out, keeping watch. We wondered who Gerard had with him, mentioning again the two mattress pads in the bedrooms and the two petite sets of tracks Rodgers found. I reassured myself that Delilah, the most recently kidnapped, was probably one of the girls, but who was the other? Could it be Jayme Coombs?
As we talked, I took deep breaths, in, out, in again. Calm. Be calm. I felt sure that Gerard had Delilah somewhere on the mountain, not terribly far away. Yet I could do nothing to save her. Although unavoidable, I resented the delay, and I felt helpless.
“Gerard doesn’t seem to be moving all that fast. I think our assumption is right and the hostages are slowing him down,” Max said, giving some comfort that all wasn’t lost. “We’re getting fairly high, and the trees will start thinning soon. It’ll make it harder for him to find cover. My guess is that wherever he’s hiding isn’t much farther up than we are now.”
“Most likely that cave,” I mused. “If we only knew where it was.”
We talked it through. As we got closer, I worried about the dogs tipping Gerard off by barking. Mullins suggested that once we found the spot where Gerard and the girls left the trail, we let Rodgers take over the tracking. The decision made, we agreed that from that point on we’d leave the dogs back with their trainers on the trail and forge on without them. If we needed them, we could radio and have them rejoin us.
“The choppers make a lot of noise, too. Could make it tough to take the chief by surprise, right?” A rhetorical question; none of us responded to Conroy. “Maybe we shouldn’t use them?”
“What do you think?” Max glanced over at me and asked.
“Yeah, they’re noisy. But do we have another option?” I asked. The men shrugged, and offered no opinions. “I think we’re stuck with the helicopters. We need the thermal imaging to find Gerard. What else can we use?”
“Even the choppers won’t help us if Gerard has the girls hidden in a cave,” Max pointed out. “If they’re inside layers of rock, the equipment is useless.”
No one said anything, but we all knew Max was right. From here on out, the choppers could hurt more than help. But I still didn’t see that we had a choice.
“What about the horses? They’re pretty noisy, too,” Conroy mentioned. A brief discussion and we agreed to hike the final trek up the mountain.
Our plan set, all we could do was wait for morning. I knew I’d never sleep so I took over the watch. The others napped but with my mind on Delilah, I couldn’t quiet it enough for even a moment’s peace. It was then that I remembered Sadie’s diary in the saddlebag on my horse.
“These mountains that surround us confine us,” my sister wrote in a precise hand. “They keep out those who disagree with the way we live, but they keep us locked in, too. I wish I could fly over the mountains, or down the highway and escape. Somewhere there is another world.”
It turned out that Sadie was a chronicler, and something of an artist. Unhappy with her regimented life, journaling apparently gave her an outlet to reveal her feelings and thoughts. I wondered if there were other such books hidden in the trailer, for this volume covered only her final two years. In the margins she’d drawn playful caricatures of our family. My tension eased enough that I chuckled at one of my mother. It bore a striking resemblance to the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.
On other pages, Sadie sketched her mother’s beehives, the boxes surrounded by buzzing bees, the drawers filled with intricate building blocks of honeycomb. She excelled at drawing their small occupants, honeybees colored in with black and yellow markers. Her bees had whimsical faces and playfully positioned antennae, drooping in sadness, straight up in anger, and stretched out sideways in surprise. She fashioned detailed drawings of cardinals and bluebirds, vultures, warblers, swifts and sparrows. On one page, she drew an eagle. I pushed up my sleeve and compared it to my tattoo. They could have been siblings, as we were.
“When I stand alone outside the bee shack, I see the birds on high branches, preening their feathers and watching me,” Sadie wrote. “What do they think of a girl who dreams of escape?”
Two dozen pages in, I noticed my name. “Could I find Clara? Does she remember me? Would she help me if I ran away?”
“Yes, I would have,” I whispered, a tear forming in my eye. “Oh, dear Sadie, if you had only come to me.”
What did our mothers think when they read Sadie’s words? On page after page she expressed disdain for our family’s way of life, especially the church hierarchy, who assigned women as property. “I’ll never marry an old man with a harem, to live my life only for his pleasure,” she swore. “Whatever I have to do, I will find a way to avoid such an existence.”
I skimmed through the book, looking for anything that might help. In an entry dated a few months before Sadie disappeared, she wrote that a man drove up to the bee shack in a pickup truck. As Sariah had said, the description offered few clues. “He’s tall and big. Why would he seek out me? His family has money and influence. At first, I worried. I didn’t understand why he’d come. What he intended. But he brought me presents, flowers and perfume, and he stayed and talked.”
I understood why my mothers saw no hints to the man’s identity when they read the diary, but
