“I think my mother suspected something was going on. Sometimes she got this look . . . and one time when I was out too long she came to find me. She must have heard us laughing and chattering before one of the boys spotted her. But when they hid and I hurried to meet her, she didn’t say anything. She just helped me gather sticks and led me home.” Sighing, she shrugged. “But they found out about it when I was sixteen.”

“How?” he asked with surprise. If her friends had moved two years prior to that, how could her parents possibly find out she used to have friends?

“I told them,” she admitted grimly, and then explained. “I had a little sister. Jilly. She was seven years younger than me so always remained at the farm when I went to the woods, but when I was sixteen she became ill. We’d had colds, fevers, and flus before, but this was different. She was in terrible pain and so sick,” Allie said with remembered anguish.

“What did she have?” Magnus asked with concern, running his hands over her arms in an effort to soothe her.

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t take her to the doctor to find out,” she said with frustration. “I thought maybe they didn’t know about doctors and how they could help. I guess I was incredibly naïve,” she admitted with a sigh. “But that’s why I told them about my friend Bethany and her appendicitis. I thought if they realized doctors could help Jilly, they’d take her to see one.”

“But they refused?” he guessed quietly.

Allie nodded. “I think Mother wanted to. She kept giving Father this pleading look as I talked. But he wouldn’t even consider it. Illness was a trial given to us by God, a punishment for our sins. We had to have faith in Him and pray for forgiveness and healing. That was the only thing that could save her, he said, and then he beat me for my sin in disobeying him, telling me the whole time that Jilly’s illness was because I had sinned and allowed those heathen children to corrupt me.”

“You did not believe him, did you?” Magnus asked with concern.

“I was a very young, very unsophisticated girl for sixteen,” she told him solemnly. “And yes, I might have believed him, but as she bathed the welts on my back, my bum, and the back of my legs from his beating, Mother told me—”

“The scars,” he interrupted solemnly, recalling how the sight had shocked him when he’d seen them covering her back, bottom, and upper legs. The memory of them now told him how violent and vicious her father’s beating had been.