“I’m sorry about the lateness of the hour,” she says breathlessly. “But I couldn’t sleep. I took the buggy to town to use the pay phone there.” She chokes out the words, as if her throat is too tight. “Eli doesn’t know.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “What is it?”

“I didn’t tell you something today that I should have. I think it might be important.”

“About Bonnie?”

“Ja.” Only then do I realize she’s crying. “Bonnie loves babies. She loves children. She’s so excited about teaching at the school in the fall.”

I wait, knowing there’s more.

“Chief Burkholder, she was confused about the baby.”

“What do you mean?” But even as I voice the question, realization dawns. “She didn’t want the child?”

“We would have loved the child.”

“Mrs. Fisher, did Bonnie talk about terminating the pregnancy?”

“It goes against our belief system.” She begins to cry in earnest. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was so ashamed. So determined to do this thing. It was the last time I saw her.”

The words shock me. Most Amish believe abortion is murder. During my lifetime, I’ve known two Amish women who terminated pregnancies. One of them, though she confessed her sin before the congregation, felt so condemned by her peers, she ended up leaving the Amish way. The other committed suicide.

“Mrs. Fisher, I know it wasn’t easy for you to come forward with this,” I tell her. “Thank you. I think this could be important.”

“Please find her for us, Chief Burkholder. We don’t care about her mistakes. We just want her back.”

“I’ll do my best,” I tell her. “I promise.”

The line goes dead. I take my time clipping my phone to my belt, then turn my attention to Tomasetti and recap the conversation. “She never told her husband.”

“It sounds like these two girls—Bonnie Fisher and Annie King—were behaving way outside of Amish norms,” Tomasetti says after a moment.

I nod in agreement, thinking of the third girl, whose family was killed in the buggy accident. “It would have been helpful to talk to Leah Stuckey’s parents to see if she was somehow acting out, too.”

“Might have helped us figure out if their behavior somehow ties in to their disappearances.”

“We both know certain kinds of behavior can put people at risk.” I shrug. “But does it connect the cases?”

“We’ve got too many threads, and none of them ties to anything.”

We pause when the waitress sets our burgers in front of us. We both look down at our plates. The food looks good and smells even better. We dig in with gusto.

“Let’s put everything on the table,” he says.

I go first. “Maybe there’s a religious angle.”

“The Twelve Passages Church,” he says. “According to Goddard, they don’t like the Amish.”