Blood of the Prodigal. P. L. Gaus
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over to the water.
Troyer followed.
“You’re not fishing, yet,” Branden offered. “I know you too well, Cal. Something’s on your mind.”
Troyer picked up a stone from among the tall weeds that had overgrown the lane next to the pond. He tossed it absently into the water and answered, “It’s a missing child.”
“How old?”
“Ten.”
“How long?”
“About a month.”
Branden wound slack line onto his reel. He thought for a moment and then said, “Police aren’t involved?”
“It’s Old Order Amish,” Cal said. “Bishop Eli Miller. One of the strictest in Holmes County, though his sect isn’t the most backward in the county. His grandson has turned up missing. He knows who has the boy, just doesn’t know where. He wants to meet you.”
“How would he know anything about me?”
“I reckon word gets around.”
“I reckon you’ll have told him something.”
“Told him you’re a mostly harmless, absent-minded professor who has little better to do in summers than wet an occasional line.”
“He’ll think me a shirker,” Branden complained with a laugh.
“He did say something about idle hands doing the devil’s work. So I told him of the various people you’ve helped over the years.”
“We’ve helped.”
“All right, we’ve helped. I could have told him more, but he seemed satisfied.”
“I’m supposed to have used my summers to think deep thoughts, write papers, attend conferences, that sort of thing,” Branden offered. Then he grinned, held up his pole, and said, “Tenure does have its benefits.”
“I leave Tuesday for the missions conference. I can help you get started locally, but that’s about it.” Cal shrugged and smiled apologetically.
“A missing Amish boy?” Branden asked.
“Kidnapped, essentially.”
“Old Order?”
“Moderate Old Order. Weaver branch. One of the strictest bishops.”
Branden’s gaze drifted to the long-deserted farmhouse on the hill. Gutters sagging, paint chipped, shutters fallen down. “Remember the summer we worked here, Cal?”
Cal nodded silently.
“That case was also tangled up with the Old Order.”
Cal held his silence, waited.
Branden mulled it over. After a few minutes, he asked, “And I’m to talk with the bishop?”
Cal nodded. “He’ll be at Becks Mills. At the general store in the Doughty Valley, about an hour from now. I’m to bring you there, and then he’ll want you to ride with him a spell. He said something cryptic like ‘in a month, none of this will matter,’ so we’ve only got that much time to find the boy. But, still, the bishop will want to take some time to get to know you, sound you out. It may take a day or two, I don’t know. He explained the whole thing to me as if time was short, but I gather he’s already sat on his hands a good while, as it is.”
Branden thought about that while toying absently with the line on his pole.
Cal explained a little further. “Look, Mike. We’ve known it was like this with the Old Order since we were kids. It’s just the Amish, that’s all. He came to me, but he’ll accept you. And you know it’s flat-out amazing that he’s come into town to ask for anyone’s help. So I imagine there’s more to this case than he’s told me. It’ll take time before he trusts us enough to bring us all the way in. For now, we’re going to have to handle this the Amish way. Say little. Listen a lot.”
“And what’ll you do while I clatter around in his buggy?”
Cal reached down to Branden’s lure, lifted it on the tips of two short fingers, noted where the skirt had been cut, and then grinned and helped himself to the hemostat clipped to Branden’s fishing vest.
4
Thursday, June 18
1:00 P.M.
BRANDEN rode with the bishop on the plain buckboard seat of the buggy, through the remotest Amish valleys of Holmes County. From Becks Mills, they took a circuitous route out onto 83, north to Township Road 122, dropped through Panther Valley, and traveled south on Route 58. Where 58 broke into the Doughty Valley, they crossed Mullet Run and followed Route 19 over the Doughty Creek itself. From there, they continued south and west and eventually wandered into the farms of the bishop’s district. They rolled slowly past luxuriant farms and ramshackle affairs, what the bishop called kutslich, sloppy, ill-tended. There were tall, splendid farmhouses, with no electric service. Immense bank barns and long runs of wooden fence. Pastures and fields of barley, oats, and corn. Small bridges over rain-swollen streams. Manure spreaders with their distinctive aromas. Children at play under clotheslines, with their fluttering splashes of rich Amish blues, greens, and rose. And everywhere tall windmills, Belgians hitched to slow and ponderous wagons, and light buggies pulled by spirited horses.
As they drove the narrow lanes of his district, the bishop questioned Branden about his family. About his friends, and about his profession. So Branden told how he and Cal Troyer had grown up together, fishing on summer ponds. And how Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson had spent winters hunting deer in the glens of the hardwood lowlands and pheasant along the hilltop pasture fence lines. And he explained how Cal Troyer had been changed—called to the ministry—the day Branden’s parents had died in a highway crash, as an impatient tourist had swung out around a buggy in a no-passing zone and hit their car head on.
When Branden began to speak of his job at the college, the bishop questioned him sternly on his studies of war and the weapons of war. So Branden explained that his fascination with the Civil War arose from a scholarly desire to understand the origins of conflict and the impetus to arms. And how his fifth-grade teacher had sparked his interest in the Civil War by assigning a paper on the battle of Gettysburg. How his grandfather had taken him to a rifle range with a muzzleloader when he was ten and started Branden on his quest to understand the firearms of the period.
The bishop drove and listened as Branden rode on the buckboard seat beside him and told of his cannon, fired each Fourth of July as much to commemorate Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as to celebrate Independence Day. He spoke passionately of the eloquence of Lincoln. Of the valor of soldiers, and of bravery among common men. Of the memories his grandfather had cherished of summer afternoons spent on a country porch, listening to the ancient, grizzled veterans of that war. Stories told in turn to a young Michael Branden. Memories that now spurred his research into the letters and journals of Civil War soldiers.
As time passed, the bishop’s attention seemed to stray, and Branden fell silent. On a long, uphill stretch of a gravel lane, the bishop let the reins go slack, content for the moment to have the horse trudge along at its own pace. He leaned back heavily against the buckboard and sighed like a man who had endured a surpassing loneliness.
“Professor,” he said, and then faltered. Clearing his throat, he began again.
“The ban, Professor, is not cruel.” He looked fervently into Branden’s eyes. His expression was somber, and he seemed overwhelmed by the burdens he had shouldered. “The ban is a prayerful act. The last, joyless thing that a bishop can do to turn a soul around. Often, it brings repentance.”
Branden leaned forward from the buckboard seat, rested his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers together, and studied the backs of his hands, listening, and indicating that he would listen as long as the bishop should need. The horse had brought them to the crest of the hill, and the bishop