Shadows of Lancaster County (10 page)

Still,
I remembered saying to my brother,
if I had to disappear all over again, my approach would be so much more sophisticated now. I’ve learned how to erase a paper trail so thoroughly I don’t think anyone could ever find me.

Filing onto the plane now, I decided that must be it. From what I could recall, we had talked about it for a while as I had laid out the three steps a person could take to start a new life and thoroughly break away from an old one: misinformation, disinformation, and reformation. I didn’t remember Bobby finding the topic particularly fascinating, but I had told him about it anyway, probably to show off all of my newfound knowledge. All of those tricks he had done on the computer last night had likely been learned from me, during our conversation.

The problem, of course, was that Bobby’s email ended by saying I should “communicate accordingly.” Unfortunately, I didn’t know how that would be. I must have mentioned some secure way a person could communicate back and forth with those who had been left behind, but for the life of me, I could not remember what it was. My mind flitted from leaving a written note in a designated spot to renting a bogus PO box in another city to leaving a message under a free online email account created just for that purpose. There were lots of ways to send and receive secure communications—or at least nonsecure communications in places made secure simply by the fact that no one would ever think to look there. But I didn’t know what method Bobby was using, and without any clear direction, poking around and trying to figure it out could take weeks.

Closing my eyes for takeoff, I silently prayed that God might help dig that entire conversation from the recesses of my brain and bring it more fully to mind. I prayed also for a safe flight, for Kiki’s recovery, for Lydia’s peace of mind. Most of all, I prayed for Bobby.

Wherever he is, whatever he needs, please keep him safely in Your hands until I can find him.

The pain was like nothing he had ever known. The knowledge that he survived the crash was of no comfort, considering that he couldn’t get to Lydia and Isaac. He couldn’t get anywhere at all.

He opened one eye, wincing at the pain that simple action caused to the other eye, which was swollen shut. It took every ounce of energy he had just to look around the dark, damp chamber. The small space smelled of earth and rust. No, not rust. Blood.

His blood.

He wanted to try and pull up on the one good leg, but he knew the waves of pain and nausea would likely put him back down again in a flash. For the hundredth time since the crash, he mentally cataloged his injuries, the cuts and gashes, the ribs that were surely broken, the bone that was still jutting out below his kneecap, the flap of skin that hung over one eye. Every movement was like reliving the pain of the crash all over again, but he knew that if he didn’t do something drastic, something to get out of here, he would die—as would Lydia and Isaac if he didn’t make it to them in time.

He closed his eyes and laid his head back against the dirt, trying to be grateful for small blessings. At least he had some blankets. At least he had water and even food, of sorts. At least he had a flashlight, though he didn’t
dare use it often, for fear that the batteries would run out. Because of the cold, there weren’t likely to be any snakes in here, nor even any spiders.

The mice were a different story.

He had been lying in this prison, this death chamber, for two days now, by his count. He wasn’t sure of that, though, as the fever that raged through his body had also been messing with his mind. In his nightmares, thousands of rats swarmed over him, gnawing at the open flesh at his knee. Then he would awake and hear the tell-tale squeak of mice near his head and start screaming, batting at them with his hands, kicking them away with his good leg.

No one heard his screams, though. No one came to save him, not even Anna. Instead, he was alone. All around him, things were dark and cold and without life.

Much like he was beginning to feel.

Two questions rolled around in my head for most of the flight, so finally I took out pen and paper and wrote them down:

Was Norman right about Bobby’s reservation to Las Vegas being bogus?

Why had Bobby needed Doug’s motorcycle when he had a perfectly good car?

No matter how much I thought about it, I could not make sense of either act. As we landed in my connecting city and pulled into the gate right on schedule, I tucked away the pad and pen and got ready to disembark, those questions still prominent in my mind. I glanced at my watch as I walked off the plane, glad I had time to do a little poking around before my next flight.

According to the record I had pulled from Bobby’s credit card, last night he had purchased a one-way ticket from Philadelphia to Las Vegas for a late-night flight that would have gotten him here around seven this morning. Considering Lydia’s insistence that Bobby had no known connection to this city or to gambling or Nevada, I hadn’t known what to think—and now that I was here in Vegas, I was starting to believe Norman’s theory that Bobby had bought the ticket as a ruse only.

Still, somebody must have made that trip in his stead, because a
withdrawal from his checking account had been made from an ATM machine in this airport at seven eighteen a.m. Who was it? A friend? A girlfriend? Obviously, that was one of the biggest concerns I had run across thus far. We already knew that Bobby had been keeping some things from his wife. Was it really that big of a leap to wonder if he had been cheating on her as well? I was having trouble coming up with any other feasible explanation, but I was determined to give Bobby the benefit of the doubt.

Out in the main lobby, I located the ATM machine in question. If I were in law enforcement, I could have requested a copy of the machine’s surveillance video and gotten an actual look at the person who had made the withdrawal. That wasn’t currently possible, however, so instead I just stood there at the machine for a moment, trying to picture the scene of what had really happened here in my mind.

There wasn’t much to see, I had to admit. After that one withdrawal—which had taken the balance in Bobby and Lydia’s checking account from $120 down to $20—there had been no other activity on that card. There had also been no charges on Bobby’s credit card for anything in Vegas, not hotels or rental car or meals.

Are you here, Bobby? Are you in Las Vegas?

I turned full circle to look at the people around me. Despite the late hour, there were vacationing tourists, business folk, exhausted-looking parents, overactive children, soldiers in uniform. There were no signs of my brother, no one-dimpled smile, no handsome green eyes, no “Hey, Bobanna!”

Feeling strangely disappointed, I headed back to my gate, wondering what I had thought I could find here just by locating that ATM machine. Had I really expected Bobby to be standing next to it, waiting for me? It felt silly to admit, but in a way I think I had, despite Norman’s more experienced opinion. Pathetic.

Back at the gate for my connection, I found an empty seat in the waiting area and sat, still working through scenarios in my mind. By combining the two questions into one, at least I was finally able to come up with a theory: What if Bobby had needed the motorcycle
because
he booked the
flight? If Bobby had been doing everything he could to make it look as though he flew to Las Vegas, it stood to reason that he would have driven to the airport and parked his car in a prominent spot in airport parking. That way, if someone were hunting him down, not only would they know he’d bought the airline ticket to Vegas, they would also find his car sitting there at the airport, waiting for his return. What more proof could one need that Bobby really had taken that trip? Somehow, he had even gotten someone to make a cash withdrawal from the ATM in Vegas for him, further proving that he was there.

But if he was only making it
look
as though he had taken the flight, then putting his car in airport parking left him with a big problem: How was he going to get back home without his car? He would need some sort of transportation, but a car rental would be reflected on his credit card whether he paid cash for it or not. He couldn’t afford to buy a used car—not that he could have found one in the middle of the night anyway—so he was left with essentially two choices: a shuttle or the train. Neither one would get him all the way home to Lydia’s sister’s farm in Dreiheit. But the train would get him to Hidden Springs, I realized, where Doug and Haley Brown lived less than a mile from the train station.

Pulse surging, I closed my eyes and tried to picture Bobby’s actions from last night. My guess was that after leaving the Internet café in Exton, he had driven to the Hidden Springs train station and parked his car there. Then he had jogged to the Brown’s house, borrowed money from Haley and took the motorcycle, then drove it back to the train station and parked it there. Switching back to his own car, he drove to the Philadelphia airport and parked in long-term parking, checked in for the flight, and then left the airport via train and took it back to Hidden Springs. There, he got off the train, climbed onto the motorcycle, and took off. To anyone else, his actions would have seemed nutty, but that was the sort of complicated ruse I had described to him years ago, when I was telling him how I would disappear if I could do it over again.

If my theory was correct, then the question that remained was why hadn’t he gotten to Lydia when he said he would? Why hadn’t he come to her sister’s farm as he had promised?

Rolling those questions around in my mind, I boarded my connecting flight. I was glad to see that the two seats next to mine were empty, so once the flight was underway, I stretched out and made myself as comfortable as possible. Slowly, I drifted off to sleep, hoping I wouldn’t wake again until it was time to land in Philadelphia. I had a busy day ahead of me, and I needed all the shut-eye I could get.