scandalous thing, that magazine. The women in it seemed obsessed with expensive clothing and makeup and horoscopes and sex. There rarely seemed to be much mention of the other parts of a woman’s life: of work, of families, of being part of a community.
I smiled innocently. “I would like to smell the perfume samples.”
“Ah. Naturally.”
We walked the mile to the Millers’ barn, where Elijah readied his favorite horse, Star. She was a Haflinger female, all golden with white socks and a white star on her forehead. Star was too old to breed now, but she’d been around long enough to be unfazed by traffic. I rubbed the gray flecks on her nose and murmured at her while Elijah hitched her up to his buggy.
Elijah had his own buggy, which he’d saved for with his carpentry and produce money since he was twelve. It was an open buggy, glossy black, that seated two people. It was what many called a “courting buggy”—there was no privacy whatsoever, which ensured that its occupants behaved themselves. It was terrible in rain. Elijah bought it used, and the wheels needed to be reset at least three times. But he worked on it himself, kept it as clean as any young man on the Outside would with his own vehicle.
“What if we find them?” I asked, as Elijah offered me a hand up into the seat beside him. There was no room for the boys in this buggy. I thought for a moment about suggesting that we take Herr Miller’s surrey buggy, which could seat up to five, but stopped myself. That would be too much like stealing.
“Then we’ll make them walk and follow along behind them,” Elijah said with a grin.
“What if they’re hurt?”
His grin faded. “Then we are the ones who walk.”
Star pulled the buggy out onto a rutted dirt lane, and Elijah shook the reins gently. The horse cantered out into the morning, the buggy bumping behind her for a good two miles until we got to the paved roads.
Paved roads were smoother on the metal wheels, but almost as noisy, as the buggy squeaked along the blacktop two-lane highway. Sometimes the English had issues with the horse droppings left behind as we traveled. There were always some who would honk their horns or try to spook the horses.
I remember when I was a little girl and one of the boys from school was driving a buggy down the road. He was twelve at the time. His horse was frightened by a swerving vehicle, and the boy was thrown into a ditch and killed. My mother used it as a cautionary tale, and I still had some fear of the road each time I set out upon it. Cars often whizzed past so quickly that they shook the buggy.
But there was no traffic today. A breeze moved briskly, stirring the yellowing tassels of grass by the side of the road. There was a lot to be said for traveling by buggy. One could miss so much when riding in a car—I knew from the few times I’d ridden with Mrs. Parsall. Cars went too fast, and the details blurred away. I watched for more ravens but saw none. Only a groundhog chewing gravel by the side of the road and a solitary heron fishing at the edge of a pond. My brow furrowed. The ravens sensed something that escaped the notice of the other animals.
My gaze fastened on something by the side of the road. A piece of red glass. My eyes followed over a rise in the road, seeing that a car had gone off into a ditch and struck a fence post.
Elijah slowed. “We should see if anyone needs help.”
I hopped off the seat before Star had come to a complete halt. Elijah continued forward a few yards to find a level place to pull the buggy off the road and activate the flashers.
I stepped down the grassy slope into the ditch. The windshield of the car was broken, but the headlights still gleamed. The engine was silent. I leaned into the car, peered inside.
I saw no people. Just a woman’s handbag and some children’s toys in the back seat. I swallowed when I saw a rusty stain that looked like blood smeared on the back of a baby’s car seat. The passenger’s side door was open.
“Looks like they got out,” Elijah said behind me. “Whoever they were.”
I reached into the back seat and picked up a pink plush rabbit with red plastic eyes. I held it to my chest as I studied the car seat. One of the seat belts securing it had been torn. I pointed at it.
“Maybe . . . maybe the police came and cut them out,” Elijah suggested.
My eyes fell on the handbag. Plain women carried what they needed in their aprons and dress pockets. But English women were inseparable from these bags, in which they seemed to keep everything from medicine to money to makeup.
The breeze plucked strands of my hair from my white prayer bonnet, and I picked the tendrils out of my mouth when I spoke. I voiced what we were both afraid of on the empty, eerie road. “There was mention of violence on the radio last night. Rioting.”
Elijah’s mouth flattened, and he looked at the northern horizon. “Seth and Joseph will be all right. They would not have gotten mixed up in that.”
“I know.” Seth and Joseph were pacifists, like the rest of the Plain folk. I knew that they wouldn’t be caught up in perpetrating a random spree of violence.
But it didn’t mean that they couldn’t fall victim to one.
We climbed back into the buggy and drove into town without another word passing between us. When we reached a sign that reduced the speed limit from fifty-five miles per hour to thirty-five, I knew that we had arrived in Torch. I said a prayer under my breath that we would find Seth and Joseph in short order and return home before our parents even realized that we were gone.
But my heart dropped as the buggy jingled down the road.
Torch had never been a large town. It contained less than five hundred full-time residents. During the weekends, it often appeared that there were more, since Torch catered to the tourist trade in this rural part of the state. The Olde Deutsche Restaurant served hearty Amish fare; as we passed, we noted that there were no cars in the parking lot, and the windows were dark.
We passed English houses, which seemed normal enough, with cars parked in the driveways. But more than one still had the porch lights shining in the day. And I noticed that the mailboxes perched by the side of the road were full of yesterday’s mail.
Schmidt’s General Store and gas station was positioned at a crossroads where the highway intersected the main street in Torch. Lights shone within, including a neon sign advertising beer. A car was parked in the fire lane in front, but there were none at the gas pumps.
We parked the buggy behind the store and hitched Star to a telephone pole that many Amish used for that purpose. The owner, Schmidt, sold anything his store carried to Amish youth with a wink and a nod. We often thought that he kept the alley behind the store clear specifically so that young men and women would have a place to smoke out of sight. I half expected to see Seth and Joseph loitering in the back, eating potato chips, but no one was there. Not even pigeons.
The back door to Schmidt’s was always open. We stepped around the ashtray on the back stoop and into the bright light of the store.
Music played overhead, something wordless and inoffensive. The English called it “elevator music,” but I was never quite certain where the term came from. I’d been on a handful of elevators, and none of them was ever musical.
The cases containing dairy products, pop, and beer were all lit and humming. Everything from the buzzing fluorescent lights to the drip of a toilet running in the bathroom seemed to intrude on my thoughts. The English probably considered noises like this to be part of the background, but I found them distracting. Mrs. Parsall even told me that she sometimes fell asleep to the flickering television, which I couldn’t imagine.
We wandered down the aisles. I paused beside the racks of comic books. I’d read many of the Miller boys’ comic books over the years. Joseph had a preference for
But I had a different favorite. I squatted down at the bottom of the rack, my fingers flipping through the curling pages. I plucked up an issue of
I had followed the Princess of Themyscira’s adventures since I was a little girl. I was amazed at how she was unconscious of her near-nudity and beauty, fascinated that she was stronger than the men. I also felt some pang of kinship with her, knowing that she came from a society closed off from the rest of the world. Paradise Island was, in its own way, frozen centuries behind in time. And it was even more cut off from Man’s World than we were.
