In Plain View (18 page)

When the voice fell silent, he thought she might look up. Because she did not, he cleared his throat.

“Just a moment.” She leaned toward The monitor, squinted, and made two quick corrections. “I’ll ask Mr. Kramer if he is available to see you.”

Not,
I’ll tell Mr. Kramer you’re here
. The difference was not lost on Rufus as she slipped through the office door and closed it behind her. On the other side the voices were low, indistinct.

She returned perhaps ten seconds later. “Mr. Kramer is unavailable. He has a number of matters to attend to before the town meeting tonight. Perhaps another time.”

Rufus was not surprised in the least, though he was fairly certain that these were not the same words Karl Kramer used to express his decision. “My business is
about
the meeting tonight,” Rufus said. “It is important that I see him.”

Her smile was vacant. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” She took her chair again. “Can I help you with anything else?”

“No. Nothing else, thank you. Only this one thing.” Rufus did not move.

“Perhaps if you were to make an appointment for some time next week.”

He shifted his weight to one leg. “The afternoon is nearly over. I will just wait and have a word with him on his way out.”

“I’m afraid he was quite specific that he did not want to see you, Mr. Beiler.” She turned over a stack of papers and moved her fingers back to the keyboard.

Rufus counted to ten.

Then he counted back from ten.

Then he turned, took two steps, rapped three times, and opened Karl Kramer’s office door himself.

At home, Annie changed into a sturdy pair of tennis shoes and made sure she wore a sweatshirt with a hood. April afternoons could turn chilly without notice. She zipped up, rolled the bike forward, and jumped on. The boys had headed east on Main Street, which meant they could have crossed the vague line between Westcliffe and Silver Cliff.

It was probably nothing. She hoped it was nothing. Just a teenage boy curious about a question in the news. But even what she scanned before shutting down the phone seemed like more than idle curiosity to Annie, and she wanted to be sure. After all, it could be dangerous. She pedaled down Main Street, stopping at a few of the shops to duck her head in and ask if anyone had seen the boys. One of the perks of living in a small town was that people were likely to know the boys and whether they had been around. Sometimes it seemed to Annie that the town had allseeing eyes.

She traced them for most of a mile before information petered out. Her last stop was a gas station.

“Hello, Hank.” Annie pulled up to the air pump alongside a service bay and fiddled with it. She pushed a couple of squirts of air into her rear tire. “I wonder if you’ve seen some boys. Kind of a strange bunch. Amish and
English
together.”

Hank laughed. “Dressed in black?”

“Last time I looked.”

“They were here.” Hank wiped oil off his hands onto a cloth. “They were hanging around the diesel pumps.”

Annie’s stomach tightened. Diesel fuel?

“The only one who looked old enough to drive was Amish,” Hank said. “If they had bothered to bring a can, I might believe somebody needed gas for a tractor. But it wouldn’t take five guys to carry a can. They’re getting nothing from me. I shooed them off.”

Annie swallowed. “Did you happen to see which way they went?”

Hank waved his rag down a side street. Annie hopped back on her bike.

Even though they had a half hour’s jump, they were still on foot when they left the gas station.

Annie pedaled into the wind, scanning the flat acres of the valley between the Wet Mountains and the Sangre de Cristos as she moved from town streets, around aging buildings at the edge of town, to broken asphalt and gravel stretches. Every now and then, someone stepped outside to check a mailbox or fill a garbage can or rake a flower bed.

Across a field, she spotted a mass of black that seemed to shapeshift, first a stretched line, then a compact ball, then a straggling string. She pedaled harder. They were cutting across open field—easier on foot than on a bike. Twice Annie lost her balance when she hit a stubborn rise of earth with insufficient momentum, her ankle taking the impact of catching herself on one foot. Annie debated abandoning her bicycle to move more quickly on foot, but she dreaded the thought of having to find her way back to retrieve it from under a random scrub oak. Annie rode when she could and walked beside the bike when she could not pedal safely. Keeping the boys in view while lugging the bike pushed her heart rate up higher than it had been in a long time.

Finally she was close enough to call out. “Joel!”

The black mass thinned as one figure paused and turned. The others slumped along, unperturbed. Annie resolved to succeed at keeping her balance on the old bike and swung a leg over its seat. She forced the top pedal down and threw her slight weight into making it rotate.

Joel heard her, she was sure of it. He paused, after all, and looked back across the field at the sound of his name. But he had turned back to follow the others. Annie saw them disappear one by one, at random intervals, but because of the rise in the hill and the distance she could not see where. She pedaled yet harder—and tumbled to the ground. Splayed in the dirt with the bike three feet away, Annie gobbled air. When she managed to get upright again and assure herself that it did not hurt to move, Joel was out of sight.

Annie kicked the bike’s front tire and left it lying in the dirt. Then she muttered, “Humble, humble, humble.”

On foot, she scrambled to where she had last seen the boys. Without the eye-bending rise and fall of terrain, she saw now where they disappeared. A slight slope hid their final steps, but only one destination was possible.

A construction site. Or at least some kind of storage site.

It was fenced and surrounded by a tent of thick plastic. Annie sidestepped along the fence line looking for an interruption to the boundary, any place they might have slipped under a loose flap of plastic sheeting or squeezed around a post.

“Hey!”

The booming voice nearly stopped her heart. “What are you doing here?”

Annie expelled breath then allowed a measured amount of air back into her lungs as she turned around. She did not recognize the tall, deeply tanned man. “Just out enjoying the countryside.”

“This is a hard hat zone.” He knocked his knuckles against his own head covering. “And it’s private property.”

Annie raised her hands, palms out. “Not looking for trouble.”

Twenty

H
ard Hat Guy gestured with one thumb that the conversation was over. He pointed Annie back the way she had come.

Annie smiled pleasantly. “Have a nice evening.”

She backtracked to where her bicycle had betrayed her and yanked it upright. Scanning the view once more, she saw for the first time the tracks of mashed weeds. Twenty feet away were the twin ruts trucks must have used. Following the boys earlier, she had descended the knoll at the wrong angle. The truck route would have been doable on the bike. She heard an engine catch and watched the man in the hard hat steer his truck onto the makeshift road and head in the other direction.

Good. The coast was clear. It took more than a guy in a hard hat to deter Annie Friesen.

On her bike again, Annie rode in the tracks down to the fenced area and around to the other side. If a construction site had a front, this was it. She approached and held still, certain that if the boys were inside she would hear them. Nothing. No shuffle. No murmur. A cat brushed her leg as it emerged through the fence. It shot off in a typical feline manner, but Annie figured the cat saved her some time looking for an opening. She laid her bike down and squatted to peer through the tear in the plastic sheeting.

Stacks of bricks. Bags of cement. Piles of lumber neatly arranged by size. Twin green wheelbarrows. Rolled rubber edging.

What was so secretive about that? Annie did not see what Carter might have been looking for, but other than some odd storage she did not see any sign of actual construction, either. She might have been strolling the aisles of a home improvement store. Relieved not to find anything more sinister, she straddled her bike again.

She still had Carter’s phone.

Rufus closed the trailer door behind him, having come to a fragile agreement with Karl Kramer. He would do everything he could to prove he meant what he said.

Next he would have to persuade a few more people that he had not lost the good sense God gave him. He untied Dolly, led her in a half circle to get turned around, and headed the cart toward home. He needed a good meal before the evening meeting.

Annie spotted Joel, perhaps a mile later, his lanky height in relief to his surroundings. He was on a footpath that ran parallel to the highway in stretches and disappeared at other times. This time she did not call his name. She just pedaled harder.

He was alone when she reached him and cut him off by riding just past him, then bringing the bicycle to an abrupt halt in his path.

He met her eyes but said nothing.

“I know you heard me.” Annie planted her feet on either side of the bike and removed her helmet.

“I wasn’t sure you were calling me,” he mumbled.

Yes, he was. Annie let it pass. “Where is everyone else?”

“Heading home for supper, I guess. Carter and Duncan have homework.”

“And Mark and Luke?” Why wouldn’t the Stutzman boys be with Joel if they were all returning to the Beiler home for the evening meal?

“Not sure. I think they went to find their
daed
for a ride. I decided to walk.”

At that rate, he would be late for supper again. Annie reminded herself she was not his mother. Joel was seventeen. He knew what he was choosing.

“What were you all doing at that storage site?”

“We weren’t.” Joel answered quickly. “It’s just a shortcut.”

That was the longest shortcut to nowhere Annie had ever seen.

She pulled Carter’s phone from her back pocket. “Carter picked up the wrong phone.”

“No wonder it wasn’t ringing constantly.” Joel put out an open hand. “I’ll get yours back for you.”

Annie swung her arm back, moving the phone beyond Joel’s reach. “That’s all right. I’ll hang on to this one for now. I know how your father feels about having cell phones in the house.”

She watched him, looking for a sign that he knew what was on the phone. The wobble in Joel’s nod was unconvincing.

“By now Carter has probably figured out the mistake,” Joel said. “I’m sure he’ll want to trade back as soon as he can.”

“No doubt. He can come by the shop.”

Joel scuffed a step away from Annie. “I should probably get going.”

Annie did not move. “What’s going on, Joel?”

“Excuse me?”

Joel did not have the same wide violet-blue eyes several of his siblings had. His were brown. Annie never could read brown eyes. She stared into them and found no hint of anything amiss, but she did not believe it.

“How is Carter getting along these days?”

Joel spread his feet and stood solid. “The
English
make everything so complicated.”