He nodded, put the clock back in his pocket, and left.
Anna watched his buggy round the bend and heard a twig snap on the other side of the barn. Someone had been eavesdropping.
“Anna Miller, your mother would not approve.”
Drat. Her aenti was here. And apparently had heard the entire exchange.
The calf’s bottle empty, Anna stood up just as Kate Miller rounded the barn with a basket in her hand. Her dear aenti often brought Anna lunch when she made the afternoon meal for her family.
“Chicken soup, sourdough bread and strawberry preserves,” Kate said, handing over the basket. She frowned at the sight of Anna in her denim overalls and baseball cap, paint stain on one thigh. Kate wore the traditional calf-length modest dress and a black bonnet, which symbolized that she was married. Single women in their village wore white bonnets. Anna’s baseball cap was blue.
“Thank you, Aenti,” Anna said, the aroma of the soup and fresh-baked bread making her stomach growl.
“Is Sadie here?” Kate asked. “She ran off after we returned from Grass Creek but I didn’t see her as I walked over.”
Anna glanced out the barn doors for a sight of her young cousin. “I haven’t seen her, either. Shall I send her home if I do?”
Her aenti nodded. “I have some sewing chores for her.”
It was no wonder her cousin had run off for a little freedom while she could get it. Anna’s aunt believed that idle hands made for a wayward mind, so she tried to keep the eight-year-old occupied with chores so that young Sadie wouldn’t be able to spend too much time with her cousin Anna.
“Anna, I try to understand you,” Kate said. “But it’s been two years since your mamm passed. You won’t date anyone. You turn down good marriage proposals that come anyway. You are meant to be a wife and mother, Anna—if you are Amish.”
If. If. If. Anna had not yet been baptized in the faith.
“I don’t want to make you feel bad, Anna. But you’re setting a terrible example for the kinder. There are only eleven families in our village and lots of kinder. Including your very impressionable cousin. Sadie said just this morning that she wants to be just like cousin Anna when she grows up. Imagine if your onkel had heard that!”
Sadie would likely not be allowed to go to Anna’s house anymore at all.
Her aenti lifted her chin. “I think you should leave, Anna.”
Anna gasped. “What?”
“Take your long-put-off rumspringa,” Kate said. “You didn’t have the chance when it was customary. Discover once and for all if you want to be Amish or not.” With that, her aunt turned and headed back up the road to her home, a quarter mile away.
Her rumspringa. All during her childhood, Anna had watched the boys and girls of her village reach fourteen, fifteen or sixteen and have their rumspringa, the time when Amish teenagers could experience life as an “Englisher” with no consequences for their behavior and choices, to a degree, of course, and then commit—or not—to their Amish faith. It was then that they would be baptized into the faith, committing to the Amish lifestyle and Ordnung. As a girl, Anna had lived for that time to come, anticipating, waiting, dreaming. Whenever she’d gotten a chance to go into Grass Creek, she’d watch the Englishers—so named for the language they spoke, as opposed to the Pennsylvania Dutch of the Amish—studying how they dressed, the shoes they wore, the jewelry, all forbidden to the Amish, that decorated their necks and wrists and ears. Earlier this afternoon, when Anna had gone to Grass Creek with her family to deliver new furniture to their market stall, a woman approached wearing bright red lipstick and long dangling silver earrings, and Anna had been mesmerized by the glamour—the very opposite of plain, as Amish were supposed to be.
She’d rarely been in cars, except for taxis and ambulances. She’d never listened to music through the earphones she saw so many people wearing, never held a cell phone or looked up anything on the internet. She’d never seen Gilmore Girls or Casablanca or The Simpsons, shows and movies she only knew about through magazines she’d flipped through in town and books, which were her lifeline, along with people watching and listening. There was a great big world out there. And during her rumspringa she’d get to experience it all.
But then her dear daed had been killed in a freak farm accident when Anna was fifteen, so she’d put off her rumspringa. She was an only child, rare in the Amish world, but her parents hadn’t been blessed with other children. Two years later, just as Anna was ready to take off her head covering and use, for the first time, the internet via the Grass Creek library’s community computers, her beloved mamm got sick. Cancer. Anna had cared for her frail mother for five years before she passed. Anna was so grief-stricken, so lost without her mamm, that she’d retreated into herself, taking care of the sickly calves, painting the furniture the men of the community had built. And turned down guy after guy, proposal after proposal. Now she was twenty-four and still here. One foot out. One foot in. And not moving. But always wondering. Dreaming.
“My own rumspringa was a disappointment,” her mother had once told her. “There is almost too much choice, too much technology, too much out there. Here it is quiet and peaceful and you use only what you truly need. It’s a good way to experience the meaning of life, Anna.”
Anna’s heart squeezed with the thought of her mother, but just then she saw a pair of red pigtails fly past the barn. Spending time with her whirlwind of a cousin always lifted Anna’s mood. The girl was probably hiding from her mamm for a bit.
Anna was about to enter the barn to find Sadie when a black SUV came down the road, a man behind the wheel. Anna’s house was the first one from the main road, so perhaps he wanted to inquire about furniture or horse training or just gawk at the “plain people.” The man parked the car and got out and looked around, his gaze landing on hers.
She sucked in a breath. He was tall, over six feet, with a broad chest and narrow hips. He wore a long-sleeved button-down shirt and charcoal pants, and was clean-shaven, with a bit of five-o’clock shadow. His thick dark hair was swept back like the movie stars whose photos she saw on posters at the theater in Grass Creek. And his eyes were green. He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. And she’d seen her share of Englishers in town.
He was carrying something in his right hand. She peered more closely to see what it was. A wallet? No—it was a badge.
She froze. Police? What would an officer of the law want with their community?
As the man approached, Anna could more clearly see the badge. FBI. She felt him assessing her from head to toe, taking in the overalls, the baseball cap.
“Hi there,” he said, holding up the badge. “My name is Colt Asher. I’m an agent with the FBI’s Houston office. A woman reported seeing an Amish girl with red pigtails take a guinea pig in a cage off the curb in front of Grass Creek Pets about two hours ago. I need to have that guinea pig back.”
Anna tilted her head. “I thought government agents handled kidnappings and drugs and organized crime.”
“And stolen guinea pigs when the victim is my boss,” he said with a smile. “It’s his niece’s birthday and Christmas present.”
Oh, boy. “Did you say the perpetrator had red pigtails?” she asked, hoping she’d misheard but knowing full well she had not. There was only one girl in the village with red hair. Her eight-year-old cousin.
He took a small leather notebook from his pocket and flipped through it. “Red braided pigtails.”
Oh, Sadie. Her cousin knew stealing was wrong. The Ten Commandments were printed on a huge plaque in the kitchen of the girl’s house. Lately, Sadie had been full of