skeletons of furniture perched on tables, waiting for turned legs or handles. The sawdust made me stifle a sneeze.
“Elijah,” I croaked. I pointed at the floor.
A narrow keyhole saw lay there. It wasn’t quite as long as my forearm and covered in serrated teeth with a grip like a pistol. The fact that the saw was on the floor and not put away was remarkable in and of itself. But the blade was covered in stale red blood.
The blood spattered along the floor and terminated along a freshly sanded cabinet.
Elijah’s callused hands knotted into fists. They didn’t even unravel when I tried to slip my fingers between his.
Chapter Four
It was as if all the people had been mysteriously taken up in the sky.
We rode in silence through town, staring at the empty homes and businesses, until I spoke. I was always the first one to break our silences.
“Do you think that . . . I mean . . .” I fumbled to find the right words. “The English occasionally talk about that Rapture thing.” Plain people were more concerned with our works on earth and tended to think that the afterlife sorted itself out.
Elijah looked sidelong at me. “No. Not possible,” he said, flatly.
“Why not?”
“It’s just not. We weren’t taken.”
I opened my mouth, closed it. “But if the Elders were wrong . . . what if we are wrong? About God? About everything?” I opened my hand and gestured to the countryside and the larger world beyond it.
“Not possible.” He shook his head, vehemently. “Seth and Joseph are gone too. If God favored the English, he wouldn’t take all the English and just Seth and Joseph.”
I considered it. He had a point. But I didn’t remind him of the bloody saw on the warehouse floor.
Star’s ears twitched at a distant wail.
“Sirens.” Elijah pulled the buggy over to the side of the road as far as he could. “Not everyone was sucked up in your Rapture,” he said pointedly.
I turned around behind us, where the sound of the sirens grew louder. I stood and lifted my arms to flag down the policemen. The breeze whipped my sleeves and skirts like pennants, and my heart lifted at the thought of finally getting some help for Seth and Joseph. Some answers.
I shouted as the patrol car came over the rise in the road, but my shout was obliterated by the blare of the siren. And it wasn’t just one patrol car . . .
There was a caravan of them, roaring down the highway at breakneck speed. The first one rushed past us in a roiling howl of wind and sound. I counted four more before I realized that they weren’t stopping.
The cacophony spooked Star. The buggy lurched beneath me, and I lost my footing, falling forward. The metal rail at the front of the buggy drove the wind from my chest. Star lunged ahead, and I saw Elijah struggling with the reins from the corner of my eye.
A wheel caught in the ditch and shrieked as the buggy pitched right. I clutched the rail as the buggy tipped and lurched. It landed on its right side in the ditch with a crash. I tasted dirt and blood and grass.
I’d been thrown. I could feel the impact in my ribs and spine. I pulled myself up on my palms in the grass, drew an aching breath to shout: “Elijah!”
With the buggy caught in the ditch, Star stopped dragging it, rearing with a scream of fear. I saw Elijah’s white shirt behind a wheel, saw him stumble from the wreck, and breathed a sigh of relief.
I looked beyond him at the road. The caravan of police cars kept charging on as if the Devil himself were after them.
“Are you hurt?”
Elijah picked me off the ground. A cut glimmered red above his eye, and his hat was missing. I touched his brow, and he winced.
“Nothing broken,” I said as my fingers felt my ribs under my dress. “You?”
“I’m all right.” But I could see that he was putting no weight on his left foot. “I’ve got to get this shoe off before my foot swells into it, and it has to be cut off.”
“Sit down,” I ordered. Elijah obligingly sat on the grassy embankment over the ditch while I stripped off his shoe. He was right: his ankle was hot and swelling already under his sock. He flinched when I touched it.
“Do you think it’s broken?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
I attempted to feel his bones through the swelling. Though I couldn’t feel anything jutting out, it didn’t mean that there wasn’t a fracture in there somewhere. I took off my apron, rolled it lengthwise to form a bandage, and wrapped it around the ankle to stabilize it.
Elijah groaned as he looked at the wrecked buggy. “So much for sneaking out.”
I walked to Star, speaking quietly. She let me touch her nose and her head. I stroked her sides, ran my fingers over her withers and legs. I unhitched her from the buggy and led her up the slope to a fence that I could tie her to.
Nothing seemed to be broken on her either, but I could see that she’d thrown a shoe. She let me pull out a piece of nail that remained in her back hoof, and she calmed down enough to lip at some clover that sprouted around the fence post.
I walked down the embankment to where Elijah hobbled. He hopped on one foot and circled the buggy, bracing his hands on the frame as he examined it.
“Star’s okay. But she needs a trip to the farrier. How’s the buggy?”
Elijah grimaced. “It’ll take more than a trip to the wheelwright to fix it. But it might be drivable.”
“Let’s get it righted and find out.”
We scrabbled to get a grip on the side of the buggy that was aimed skyward. It was streaked in mud, and purchase was difficult. Finally, we succeeded in rocking the buggy right and left, creating enough momentum to allow it to fall back on its wheels with a clatter and a crash. We scrambled back to avoid being trapped beneath the undercarriage.
The buggy stood, bent and creaking. I could already see that the right wheel was badly warped. Elijah limped over to it and ran his fingers over the rim. He put his shoulder to it, trying to straighten it out.
The back was dented, and one light cracked out. I didn’t think that it mattered that the safety lights were out; no one was out here who would pay attention to them, anyway.
I found my comic book blown up against the fence, caked in dirt. But there was no sign of my bottle of Coca-Cola. I looked for it for a few moments but gave up and returned to the buggy.
“Is it drivable?” I asked.
“I think so.”
Elijah brushed the worst of the dirt from the seat. It took several tries and many promises of oats to get Star to back into the harness. I insisted that Elijah sit before he made his foot worse. Reluctantly, he climbed aboard while I finished cooing to Star and fastening her into the harness. I climbed up into the buggy beside him, and he stared between the horse’s ears morosely. He elevated his sore foot over the front rail.
“It’s going to be a bumpy ride,” he warned.
He was right. He started the horse out at a very slow walk. The bent wheel, on my side, wobbled along, knocking my teeth together. I felt bad for Elijah, his foot thumping along the front rail, with his broken buggy and thinking of his missing brothers.
I reached out and patted his sleeve, though it seemed an ineffectual gesture.
It was afternoon by the time we’d made our slow progress back home. I’d hoped that we’d be able to slip back into the barn unnoticed, that Elijah would be able to break the news to his father about the buggy slowly.
But dozens of Plain people had clustered around Elijah’s house. I swallowed as they turned to stare at the
