Chapter 9
By the time Leah had revealed the knowledge she’d gained about the twins this afternoon, she felt much better. It was such a comfort to walk arm in arm with Jude, their pace slower now that she had shared the most appalling of the details about Adeline and Alice. When Jude stepped in front of her, stopping at the edge of the unplowed cornfield south of the house, his eyes glimmered like dark, hot chocolate.
“Leah, I had no idea my girls were so far gone,” he said sadly. “You probably saved them from a fate worse than we want to imagine when you went after them today, and I owe you a debt I can never repay.”
Leah’s heart thudded steadily when he pulled her close and kissed her. The evening wind was picking up enough that she grabbed the strings of her kapp to keep it from blowing off, yet the cold didn’t faze her. She always felt so safe and warm—so centered—when Jude held her this way. “What bothered me most was that the girls seemed so comfortable with their cigarettes and beer in that smoky old pool hall,” she said, shaking her head. “Another girl around their age was so deep into flirting with two of the guys that they pulled her tank top down and—well, I—I was about ready to run at that point.”
Jude sighed, resting his forehead against hers. “When I smelled smoke on you, the pool hall was the first place that came to mind,” he admitted. “Back in my wilder days, Jeremiah and I spent some time there. I can only imagine how much tackier the place must be by now, and I can’t imagine the clientele has improved over the years, either.”
“Why would so many young men be spending their time there?” Leah asked in disbelief. “Why don’t they have jobs, or families, or—”
“A lot of them work the night shift at the pet food processing plant down the road—not that such work makes them bad people,” he added quickly. “It just means they have time to kill during the day, and at that age, young men tend to congregate at places where they can eat cheap meals and drink beer. I’ve known a few Amish boys who’ve worked at the plant—and a few who’ve spent some time shooting pool during their rumspringa.”
Leah frowned, considering this. “I can’t imagine Plain fellows wanting to endure such ridicule about their clothing, just to play pool and drink beer.”
Jude smiled sadly at her. “They wear English jeans and shirts, just like Alice and Adeline, so they sort of blend in with the crowd,” he explained. “Considering how Jeremiah and I did that now and again, I should’ve guessed my girls might be masquerading as English. I just never dreamed they’d have any reason to go to such a dive.”
“Maybe those English guys they supposedly run with work at the pet food plant,” she mused aloud. “I didn’t see any sign of them, but I got the feeling the girls were waiting for them.”
“With dangly earrings and Tinker Bell tattoos,” Jude muttered, shaking his head as he gazed toward the house. “I have half a notion to cut down that big tree by their bedroom window, except it shades that whole side of the house in the summer.”
Leah smiled sadly, tracing the lines that bracketed Jude’s mouth until her fingertips teased his cropped, curly beard. “I suspect they’d find other ways—other times—to slip away, if they’re so intent on being away from home to socialize with boys.”
“Jah, well—their old man might just take them down a peg or two,” Jude blurted out. “Rumspringa or not—no matter what they heard through the wall—I’m still their dat, and I’m responsible for their well-being until they marry. At the rate they’re sliding downhill, no respectable Amish men will want to hitch up with them if they’ve become too worldly or too free with their favors.”
Leah winced. Alice and Adeline might be sophisticated enough to pass for English at a pool hall, but that didn’t mean they knew how to prevent a pregnancy. And because they did everything together, chances were good that if one of them was getting intimate with boys, the other was, too.
Jude would love and support his girls no matter what they did, but he would be crushed—and he’d become the topic of hot, disapproving gossip—if he had to send the twins away to have babies out of wedlock.
“What’s our next move?” Leah asked softly. “Just so you’ll know, I had to promise them I’d not tell you anything to get them to come home today.”
“Puh! They lost the right to our silence the moment Jeremiah walked into the sale barn with Stevie today to tell me where you’d gone. Bishop Vernon was in on the conversation, too.” Jude wrapped his arm around Leah’s shoulders and started walking toward the house. “It’s time for some tough talk on my part and some straight answers on theirs.”
Although Leah knew they were doing the right thing by challenging the twins to own up to their questionable behavior and change their ways, she prayed that Jude would find words to straighten them out without further alienating them. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it must be for them to question their lineage—to doubt their deceased mother’s integrity.
Please, Lord, don’t let them rush down the same primrose path Frieda followed, getting too involved with those English boys just to spite their dat. They have no idea how quickly their lives can spin out of control.
As they got close to home, squares of soft yellow lamplight glowed in the windows, and the white house seemed to shimmer serenely in the blue light of the dusk. Leah’s sense of peacefulness was shattered as soon as she and Jude entered the kitchen: Adeline and Alice awaited them at the kitchen table, their young faces showing they were spoiling for a confrontation.
“I suppose you told him every little thing,” Alice accused, glaring at Leah and then at Jude.
“Why should we stay here, when no one respects our right to privacy?” Adeline put in without missing a beat.
“Matter of fact,” Jude jumped in before the twins could continue, “you can stop blaming Leah right now, because your uncle Jeremiah—not to mention Bishop Vernon from Cedar Creek—had already caught wind of your mischief and informed me about their suspicions before Leah did. The Amish grapevine runs swift and spares nobody, girls, so rest assured that your reputations are already toast.”
As one, the girls each raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “That is such a stupid threat that—”
“You can’t tell me that anybody knows where we’ve been, so—”
“Leah found you, didn’t she?” Jude challenged. He rested his hands on the tabletop, leaning low to gaze into Alice’s eyes and then Adeline’s. “You girls are grounded. You’re not to leave home except to go to church unless you’re accompanied by either Leah or me. No arguments.” He held out his hand. “I’ll be taking your cell phone, too, since you somehow latched onto a much fancier model than the bishop or I allowed you to have.”
Their eyes widened as they indignantly sucked in air.
“But you can’t—”
“While we’re in rumspringa, you have no—”
“Like it or not, I’m your father and I’m responsible for you,” Jude interrupted in a rising voice. “Girls who wear sheer blouses that show off their black underthings and Tinker Bell tattoos are already on the highway to hell, so starting now, your rights and privacy are the least of my concerns. You’ll be staying home, so you won’t be needing those tight jeans or dangly earrings—”
“You can’t touch our stuff!”
“If you sneak into our room, so help me—”
When both girls rose indignantly from the table, Jude grasped their shoulders. “I’m serious. You can run off to your room, but not before you hand over your phone,” he insisted. “I suspect it’s in one of your apron pockets.”
Glaring in disbelief, Adeline and Alice appeared ready to bolt from Jude even as he held their gazes and their shoulders. Finally, Adeline reached into her apron pocket and hastily tapped on the screen of the cell phone before pressing hard on a button on top of it. She tossed the phone onto the table.
With red faces and muttered curse words, the girls rushed from the kitchen. Moments later the angry thunder of their sneakers on the wooden steps and along the upstairs hallway filled the house with their resentment. Their voices were muffled, but after their bedroom door slammed, the strident tone of their conversation filtered into the kitchen.
Jude raked his hand through his dark hair. “That didn’t go well,” he muttered in frustration. “I suspect the only way I’ll keep them home is to take the wheels off their buggy—or stable their mare over at Jeremiah’s.”
“I’m sorry,” Leah murmured. “The moment we walked in, they were set on confrontation. No matter what you’d said, you weren’t going to win them to your way of thinking.”
“When did they get so cynical? And so rude?” Jude gazed into Leah’s eyes, appearing totally baffled. “While Mamm was here, I saw nothing but compliant, well-behaved girls, but my mother was obviously as clueless as I’ve been. I can’t believe all this foul talk and indecent clothing—and tattoos!—have come about in the three months we’ve been married.”
Leah shrugged helplessly. “They were gone some, jah, but they were here most of the time—or so I thought. Maybe they’ve had us all fooled.”
“They’re thinkin’ to hitch up with those English guys real soon. They don’t wanna be Amish no more.”
Leah’s heart sank as she turned to see Stevie’s shadowy form in the doorway of the front room. Jude groaned and pulled out a chair so he could sit down and lean his elbows on the table. “What else have they told you, son?” he asked gently. “Do you know these boys’ names?”
Stevie entered the kitchen to take his usual seat beside his dat, so Leah sat down, too, at Jude’s left. “Nope, they don’t tell me nothin’. Sometimes I hear ’em talkin’ in their room, when they’re gettin’ ready to leave and they’re excited. They don’t know I can hear ’em.”
Leah pressed her lips together grimly. She couldn’t imagine being anything but Plain, and she’d never entertained thoughts of leaving the Old Order. Even when she’d been a teenager and some of her friends had whispered about the exotic lives they might live if they found English husbands, she’d never believed those girls would really leave the Amish church. Indeed, those friends had been married to Amish men for years now and had large families....
But this situation with Alice and Adeline sounded a lot more serious. “Do they want to leave because of me, Stevie?” Leah asked cautiously.
The boy shrugged, shaking his head. “I dunno, but I don’t think so,” he replied after he’d thought about it. “They’re girls, and they get wild-hare ideas sometimes, like maybe once they get married their lives’ll be perfect and they won’t have no more problems.”
Leah’s eyebrows rose. Such an observation seemed beyond a five-year-old boy’s comprehension, yet Stevie had obviously thought at length about his sisters’ situation.
“What problems?” Jude asked, exasperated. “They have a comfortable home and—even if they don’t like knowing that I might not be their birth father, they surely can’t hate living here badly enough to go English. They have no idea—”
“Jah, they have no idea what they’d be getting themselves into,” Leah echoed, grasping Jude’s forearm in sympathy. “What they’ve seen of English life in the pool hall—or riding around with boys—is not reality.”
“Thank God,” Jude put in quickly. “It’s one thing for teenage girls to keep secrets from their parents, but it’s another thing altogether when they believe that getting away from home will guarantee them the happily-ever-after they apparently envision. You’d think they’d know that, after witnessing the stress and strain of some of the marriages they’ve been around all their lives.”
Leah wondered if Jude was referring in part to the years he’d spent with Frieda, but it wasn’t her place to ask. Her heart went out to Jude, who stared glumly at the table, scraping a little spot of food with his fingernail.
“I need to talk to them before they really go off the deep end,” he said in a tight voice. He picked up the cell phone, shaking his head. “I should go upstairs right now and—”
Leah sensed Alice and Adeline were in no mood to listen to reason, and that Jude would only be deepening the chasm that seemed to loom between them and their dat. “Maybe in the morning, when we’re all calmer, we’ll have a better idea about what to say to them so they’ll actually listen,” she suggested, tightening her grip on Jude’s arm. “You don’t have a sale tomorrow, so we’ll all be home together and we can hash this out.”
* * *
Come very early in the morning, however, Leah was awakened by loud voices in the kitchen—and she realized that Jude’s side of the bed was cold, as though he hadn’t been beside her for quite some time.
“You don’t own me!” one of the twins yelled.
“You’re not even our dat, so butt out of our lives!” her sister lashed out vehemently.
Fumbling for her robe, Leah hurried from the bedroom.
* * *
Jude had prepared himself for the worst, but he still couldn’t believe his eyes. Around ten-thirty the previous evening, a rumbling truck had wakened him from a fitful sleep and on impulse he’d checked the twins’ room. He’d known as soon as the door didn’t budge that the girls had sneaked out despite his insistence that they stay home. When he’d pushed aside the dresser blocking the door, the open window told him all he needed to know—and the clothing strewn around the room and on the undisturbed beds scared him into remaining awake the rest of the night.
He’d been on the verge of going to fetch Jeremiah—but he’d reasoned that the girls wouldn’t be at the pool hall this time. And when he’d gone to saddle Rusty, and he’d seen that the girls’ rig and their mare were still in the stable, he’d thought better of rousing his brother for a wild-goose chase. If the girls had left with their English boyfriends in that backfiring truck, they had all the advantages on their side.
So he’d wrapped himself in a blanket and waited in the girls’ room, watching for them in the moonlit night. He spent a lot of the time pushing and prodding on the cell phone he’d confiscated, but the screen remained blank—he had no idea how to turn it on. Around four in the morning the girls had dashed in from the road, clambering up the tree like lithe monkeys. He’d stepped into the corner of the room until they were safely inside, slipping the phone into his pocket.
“We’re going downstairs to talk about this right now,” he’d said, hoping not to waken Stevie and Leah.
Alice and Adeline’s shrieks could’ve roused the dead, but somehow he herded them downstairs and into the kitchen. Waves of resentment rolled off them as he lit the lamps—and even in the low glow of the lantern he set on the table, he saw the irrefutable evidence of the trouble they were in. The makeup they were wearing was smudged and their long hair hung rumpled around their shoulders—and when they removed English-style jackets he’d not seen before, telltale bruises on their necks completed a picture he didn’t want to witness.
Despite the fear that curdled Jude’s stomach, his anger got the best of him. “Care to tell me why you defied me by sneaking out in the night?” he demanded.
“You don’t own me!” Adeline blurted out.
“You’re not even our dat, so butt out of our lives!” Alice cried out defiantly.
Memories of the night these girls had been born flashed through Jude’s mind. How could he make them believe that despite their mother’s duplicity, he had loved them—had considered them blameless and innocent and utterly wonderful since the moment he’d first laid eyes on them?
“I’m sorry you see it that way,” Jude whispered. He prayed for a calmer mind-set in which the right words would bring the three of them to resolution—or at least help them speak in more civil tones. “If we can stop placing blame for a moment—if we can acknowledge that no one in this room was responsible for the fact that I’m not your birth father—maybe we can talk about the more serious situation we’re in right now.”
“And if you think you’re old enough to run off with English boys—to marry them and escape your Amish life,” Leah asserted from the doorway, “then you’re old enough to answer our questions truthfully.”
Jude sighed, regretting that the girls’ clamor had awakened Leah—yet he was relieved to see her tying the belt of her robe and approaching her seat at the table with a resolve that bolstered his courage. Even with her pale, tired eyes and her long, loose hair pulled hastily back in a kerchief, she’d never looked stronger or more beautiful to him.
“What do you want to know?” Adeline challenged.
“You won’t like the answers,” Alice warned them archly. “You probably won’t even understand the answers, seeing’s how you know a lot more about ducks and goats than you do about being a wife or a—a mother.”
Leah blanched and Jude grasped her hand. “Let’s also remember that Leah wasn’t around when you were conceived, so you don’t need to include her in your resentful accusations,” Jude insisted. “For starters, why’d you get those tattoos? And why Tinker Bell?”
The twins exchanged secretive glances. “Our English guys think tatts are sexy,” Alice purred. “So they took us to the tattoo parlor and paid for them.”
Jude swallowed hard, reminding himself that he was bound to see and hear more than he’d ever wanted to know during this conversation.
“Tinker Bell’s our mascot—our role model,” Adeline continued with a furtive chuckle. “She can fly—so she can leave whenever she wants to.”
“With just a wave of her wand, her pixie dust makes everything right again,” Alice added breezily. “Tink loves to have fun—and so do we. And to our way of thinking, you can call them frolics, but a bunch of women getting together to clean house or cook for hundreds of people coming to a wedding—”
“Or canning vegetables in a hot kitchen, or even spending a day hunched over a blasted quilt, gossiping,” Adeline interjected with a sneer.
“—is not our idea of fun or frolic,” Alice finished quickly. “There’s more to life than working all the time! All Amish women ever do is work.”
Leah sighed. She was no stranger to such observations, because she’d escaped what she’d perceived as women’s work by spending her time with Dat and the animals. True enough, raising livestock had been her livelihood, but even on cold, snowy days she’d considered barn chores a lot more fun than the canning, cleaning, and quilting the twins had just mentioned in such disgusted tones.
“When I was your age,” Leah began carefully, “I thought marriage would be the perfect answer to the problems I perceived in my life—”
“Hah! Who did you think would marry you?” Alice sassed.
“Jah,” Adeline put in with a laugh, “most guys probably thought of you as being one of them! More a man than a—”
“That’s enough of such talk!” Jude blurted out. “When did you become so crass? So insensitive to everyone else’s—” He sighed loudly when Leah rose from the table wearing a perplexed expression. How he wished he’d been able to quash the twins’ talk before they’d hurt her feelings again. “Honey, please sit down,” he pleaded. “I thank God every day that I recognized you for the fine woman you—”
“Don’t you hear it?” Leah demanded as she hurried toward the front room. “I think there’s a baby crying outside.”