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“You realize it’s dangerous to contact your mother. Your boyfriend—”
“Ex-boyfriend.”
“Well, he’s probably keeping tabs on your mother in case you make contact.”
“I haven’t. Only through the pastors have we kept in touch. Through letters.” Loss and nostalgia clogged her throat. “My mom’s sick. I need updates, and I need to be able to run home in an emergency.”
Christina bit her lower lip and nodded. Sarah appreciated that Christina didn’t question her need to be near her mom. Just in case.
“If even one person knows where you are, you’re in jeopardy,” Christina added.
Sarah was about to say something when a quiet knock sounded on the door.
Christina lowered her voice so Nick wouldn’t overhear through the door. “If you’re not going to leave Apple Creek, I strongly encourage you to confide in my brother. He can protect you,” she repeated.
A stark reality weighed heavily on Sarah. If Jimmy Braeden found her, no one could protect her.
* * *
“A deputy sheriff’s escort to my home is more than enough. You don’t have to walk me to the door, Officer Jennings.” Sarah slowed at the bottom step of her rented cottage and turned to face him, obviously trying her best to put her protective shield back in place. Nick could see it in her eyes. She was refusing his help every step of the way.
What secret was she hiding?
“You were attacked this evening, and whoever did it is still out there.”
“I was hardly attacked. Someone threw a rock through a window, and I got in the way. It was probably kids fooling around.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “May I make sure your property’s secure?” He framed it as a question, but he wasn’t leaving until he made sure she was safe.
“Only in a small town.” Sarah shrugged and smiled, an attempt to sound light and breezy, but she wasn’t fooling him.
“I’ll check the doors and windows.”
“Okay.” Sarah sounded exhausted.
His cell phone chirped, and he glanced at it and held up his finger.
“Deputy Sheriff Jennings.”
“Hey, Nick.” It was Lila, the dispatcher. “Sheriff Maxwell caught some kids lurking around behind the general store. They were throwing empty liquor bottles against the wall.”
“Any of them confess to shattering the church window?”
“Not yet, but I imagine once we get some of their fathers in here, they’ll straighten right quick.”
“Amish?”
“Three of the five. Two are townies.”
“Are they being held?”
“Yes, at the station. If you want to put the fear of God in them, you should come in quick. I don’t imagine they’ll be there long.”
“Okay.” Nick clicked End and looked at Sarah.
“They caught some kids breaking glass bottles behind the general store. No one claims to have thrown a rock through the church window, but it’s possible.”
An overwhelming need to protect Sarah filled him. What was it about her? Her petite stature? Her vulnerability? Or was he drawn to Sarah’s fiery attitude that emerged every time he suggested something she didn’t like.
His mind flashed to his sister Christina. She seemed to have her life together now—she lived and breathed the health-care clinic—but there was a time when she, too, had been vulnerable and he hadn’t been there to help her. His stomach twisted at the thought of what might have happened if she hadn’t gotten away the night she was attacked on campus. His head told him he couldn’t be everywhere, but the pain in his heart told him he needed to try. It made him want to be a better officer.
They stood in silence for a minute before Sarah turned and inserted the key into the lock. Most people in Apple Creek didn’t lock their doors, but he supposed a single woman living out here all alone wasn’t like most people.
And enough bad things had happened, even here in Apple Creek, that eventually everyone would realize they’re not immune to evil.
Sarah pushed open the door and propped the screen door open with her hip. She turned to face him. “Since they picked up the kids breaking bottles, I’m fine out here.” There was a hint of a question in her tone.
“Hold on, you’re not slipping away from me that easily.”
Sarah narrowed her eyes. He couldn’t seem to reach her, and he wasn’t sure why he was striking out.
“I’m going to call Sheriff Maxwell and get their names, and you can tell me if you know any of them from your meetings.”
Sarah leaned on the doorframe and held the screen door open a fraction with the palm of her hand, apparently still hesitant to allow him into her home.
Once Nick gave the names, Sarah frowned. “Ruben and Ephram Zook live next door.” She stretched out her arm and pointed to the well-tended home across the field. “I’m surprised they’d get caught up in such foolishness. I’m renting the house from their parents. Their father is rather strict. However, I suppose saying an Amish father is strict is redundant.” The tight set of her mouth relaxed into an all-too-fleeting smile. “But neither boy has been to one of my meetings. I’ve never heard of them having issues with alcohol or drugs. Or being otherwise wild during rumspringa.”
“What about the other names?”
Sarah shook her head. “Not familiar to me.”
“I’ll have to talk to each of them. See if they’d been near the church first.”
“Please don’t tell anyone you asked if the young Amish men had been to one of my meetings. My work is based on trust. They’ll be afraid to come if they think I’ll rat them out.”
Trust.
Nick nodded. Strange word for a woman who seemed afraid to trust him. She was obviously harboring secrets.
“You going to be okay out here?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
Nick hesitated a fraction before pivoting on his heel and stomping down the porch steps.
Sarah Lynn had secrets. Unless her secrets drew the attention of the Apple Creek sheriff’s department, Nick decided he’d let her be.
The last thing he needed was to get caught up with someone like Sarah. It would be easy to do. But Nick had already been burned by a woman with her share of secrets.
Once in a man’s lifetime was enough.
* * *
Sarah walked through the small cottage she rented—cash only—from the Amish family next door without turning on any lights. The downstairs windows lacked curtains, and she hadn’t remedied the situation because she had to be conservative with her money. Make it last. But she hated the lack of privacy. A woman who had a stalker didn’t relish the notion of being in a lit-up fish tank. So most nights, she retired to her upstairs bedroom to read in privacy.
How long can I keep hiding? Delaying my life because I’m afraid of one man?
Sarah reached the kitchen. The white moonlight slanted across the neat and functional cabinets and stove. Englischers, as the Amish called people like her, had lived here and when they moved away, Amos Zook had purchased the house adjacent to his land for future use by one of his children. Therefore, the house had modern amenities, such as they were, that would have to be torn out once one of the sons and his new bride moved into the house. Perhaps when Ruben, their second-eldest son, married Mary Ruth. If the rumor mill was to be believed. When Sarah first heard the plans for the house, she found it amusing. Updating a home by removing modern conveniences.
Sarah opened a cabinet closest to the sink and got a glass for water. As the cool liquid slid down her throat, her mind drifted to her mother. Alone in the only home Sarah had ever known.
She and her mother had been exchanging letters through their pastors. Her mother’s were always filled with cheery accounts of what she had been up to depending on the day and the weather.
“Weeded the garden today. You should see your father’s rosebushes.” Her father had been dead twenty years, but his rosebushes kept thriving.
“Wow, had to shovel the walkway three times today. I don’t think spring is ever going to get here.”
Or...
“It’s been so hot that I’ve had to turn on the fan at night. You know how I hate to sleep with that fan.”
Despite her mother’s lung cancer diagnosis almost a year ago, Sarah rarely ever heard her mother complain about her health. And when it came time to flee Buffalo because of Jimmy, her mother encouraged her to go and live her life, happy and healthy and away from that domineering man.
Her mother made it sound like her last wish: that her daughter live a happy life. Perhaps the kind of life that had eluded her mother after she lost her husband in a drunk-driving accident.
Pinpricks of tears bit at the back of her eyes. Losing a dad as a little kid did that to a person. Her poor dad had gone out for ice cream when some drunk teenager T-boned him at an intersection. Sarah inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, a trick she had learned to calm her anxiety. It worked maybe half the time.
Sarah glanced around the dark kitchen, and her cheeks flushed. Her mother had been widowed when Sarah was only ten. She raised Sarah to be a confident, independent woman. It shamed Sarah that she had fallen for a man who was able to control her.
Instead of following her mother’s lead, Sarah had grown up fearful, cautious, contained.
Now she’d have to spend the rest of her days hiding. And pray she’d get to visit her mother again in person before the horrible disease took its toll.
A rush of nostalgia overwhelmed her, and the sudden urge to call her mother nearly brought her to tears. Sarah moved to the kitchen hutch in the darkness and opened the middle drawer. It opened with a creak, sending shivers up and down her spine. Sarah hated that she had grown fearful of her own shadow. Yet, she had turned Nick away when he volunteered to check her house. Such was the conundrum of being stalked by a cop.
Afraid, but too afraid to call the police.
Glancing around the darkened space of her current home, she convinced herself she was alone. Safe, but alone. She laughed, an awkward sound in the silence.
Boy, am I ever alone.
Leaning down, she stretched her arm to the back of the drawer. There, she found the disposable phone and a prepaid card with one hundred minutes. Items she had purchased—with cash—in a moment of weakness, but then never used. Sometimes just knowing she had a phone, a way to reach out, made her feel less lonely.
Tonight she had reached her breaking point. No one could trace the call, she reasoned. She needed her mom. What girl didn’t? She needed to hear her mother’s reassuring voice. Tonight of all nights.
Sarah flipped on a light. Her hands shook with the knowledge of what she was about to do. Sarah fumbled with the packaging until she freed the phone. It fell and clattered against the pine table in her kitchen. She scooped it up and held it close to her beating heart, feeling as if she were doing something criminal.
The tiny hairs on her arms stood on edge and she couldn’t shake that feeling that someone was watching her. She lifted her head and stared toward the back window, her reflection caught in the glass. Beyond that, the yard was pitch-black. A surge of icy dread coursed through her veins. She’d have to save up for curtains. Sitting here like a duck on a target stand with a big red bull’s-eye over her head didn’t do anything for her nerves.
She gathered up the phone’s instructions and turned off the lamp. She hurried into the downstairs bathroom, closed the door and turned on the light to read the instructions. In short order—after installing the battery and activating the phone—she was calling the familiar phone number of her childhood home. The same phone number Sarah had since the time she could reach her mother’s rotary phone mounted on the wall in the kitchen. The phone had been updated, but little else had in her mother’s cozy home.
Yeah, the Gardners didn’t have the fanciest gadgets, but they did have each other. Sort of.
With shaky fingers, Sarah pressed the last digit of her home phone number and held her breath. Silence stretched across the phone for a long time. Sarah pulled it away from her ear and glanced at it, wondering if it actually worked. A distant ringing sounded in the quiet space, and Sarah quickly pressed the phone to her ear. It was getting late, but she knew her mother didn’t sleep much nowadays.
...Three, four, five...
She counted the rings.
“Come on, Mom, answer the phone.”
She imagined her mother pushing off the recliner—maybe asleep in front of whatever show happened to be on right now—muttering about the nerve of someone calling so late. No matter how many times she told her mother to keep the portable phone by her side, her mother insisted on placing it in the charger.
Every. Time.
...Eight, nine...
Sarah’s body hummed with impatience.
“Hello,” came her mother’s curt greeting, startling Sarah who had all but given up hope that she’d reach her mom tonight.
Sarah swallowed a knot of emotion. “Mom.” The word came out high-pitched and tight.
“Sarah...” her mother said her name on a hopeful sigh.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Her mother’s tone shifted from surprised delight to concern. “Is everything okay?”
Sarah touched the bandage on her head. “Yeah, yeah, I just missed you and needed to hear your voice.”
Her mother made an indecipherable sound and started to cough, a wet, popping noise. Her mother tried to talk, but the racking cough consumed her.
Sadness, helplessness and terror seized Sarah’s heart.
She envisioned her mother reaching for a tissue and holding it in a tight fist against her mouth as her pale face grew red from the exertion of coughing. Her eyes watering. A loud gasp sounded across the line as her mom struggled to catch her breath.
Sarah muttered a curse against Jimmy. She should be there caring for her mother. Not hiding an hour away, alone in someone else’s house.
After a moment, when the coughing slowed, Sarah asked, “Are you okay?”
Her mother seemed to have collected herself. “I think I’m coming down with a cold.”
Her poor, sweet mother, always trying to protect her only daughter. Sarah hadn’t magically forgotten that her mother had lung cancer.
“Have you been keeping up with your doctor’s appointments?”
“Yes. There’s just so many. Sometimes I’ll have a coughing jag when I’m driving...” Her mother forced a cheery tone. “Now, don’t worry about me. I’m as tough as they come. Now tell me about you. I thought we were only supposed to write letters. Safer that way.”
