Esther looked up at the sun. “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Ephraim’s father built it from the ground up.”

“You’ve been married long?”

“Twenty-two years.”

“Abby’s your oldest?”

She smiled, taking another lemon out of the bag. “That’s right.”

“We saw two kids coming in.”

“Rebecca and Zeke,” Esther said, still smiling proudly. “Becca is mine. Zeke is Lev’s by his late wife.”

“Two girls,” Lena said, thinking she sounded idiotic. “Must be nice.”

Esther rolled a lemon around on the cutting board to soften it up. “Yes,” she said, but Lena had heard the hesitation.

Lena looked out the kitchen window at the pasture. She could see a group of cows lying down under a tree. “That farm across the street,” she began.

“The cooperative,” Esther finished. “That’s where I met Ephraim. He came to work there, oh, it must have been right after Papa bought the second phase in the mid-1980s. We got married and moved in here a little after.”

“You must have been around Abby’s age,” Lena guessed.

Esther looked up, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. I’d just fallen in love and moved out on my own. I had the whole world at my feet.” She pressed another lemon into the strainer.

“The older guy we ran into,” Lena began. “Cole?”

Esther smiled. “He’s been on the farm forever. Papa met him years ago.”

Lena waited for more, but nothing came. Like Lev, Esther didn’t seem to want to volunteer much information about Cole, and this only made Lena more curious about the man.

She remembered the question Lev had avoided before, and felt like now was as good a time as any to ask, “Has Abby ever run away before?”

“Oh, no, she’s not the type.”

“What type is that?” Lena asked, wondering if the mother knew her daughter was pregnant.

“Abby’s very devoted to the family. She would never do anything so insensitive.”

“Sometimes girls that age do things without thinking about the consequences.”

“That’s more Becca’s thing,” Esther said.

“Rebecca’s run away?”

The older woman skipped the question, saying instead, “Abby never went through that rebellious phase. She’s a lot like me in that regard.”

“How’s that?”

Esther seemed about to answer, but changed her mind. She took the pitcher and poured in the lemon juice. She walked over to the sink and turned on the water, letting it run so it would cool.

Lena wondered if the woman was naturally reticent or if she felt the need to censor her answers lest her brother find out she had said too much. She tried to think of a way to draw the woman out. “I was the youngest,” she said, which was true, though only by a couple of minutes. “I was always getting into trouble.”

Esther made an agreeing noise, but offered nothing more.

“It’s hard to accept that your parents are real people,” Lena said. “You spend most of your time demanding they treat you like an adult, but you’re not willing to give them the same courtesy.”

Esther looked over her shoulder into the long hallway before allowing, “Rebecca ran away last year. She was back a day later, but it put an awful fright into us.”

“Has Abby ever disappeared before?” Lena repeated.

Esther’s voice was almost a whisper. “Sometimes she would go over to the farm without telling us.”

“Just across the street?”

“Yes, just across the street. It’s silly to think we were upset. The farm is an extension of our home. Abby was safe the entire time. We were just worried when supper came and we hadn’t heard from her.”

Lena realized the woman was referring to a specific time rather than a series of incidents. “Abby spent the night over there?”

“With Lev and Papa. They live there with Mary. My mother passed away when I was three.”

“Who’s Mary?”

“My oldest sister.”

“Older than Lev?”

“Oh, no, Lev’s the oldest child. There’s Mary next, then Rachel, then Paul, then me.”

“That’s quite a family,” Lena said, thinking their mother must have died from exhaustion.

“Papa grew up an only child. He wanted lots of children around him.”

“Your father owns the farm?”

“The family owns most of it along with some other investors,” Esther replied, opening one of the cabinets and taking down a three-pound bag of sugar. “Papa started it over twenty years ago.”

Lena tried to phrase her question diplomatically. “I thought cooperatives were owned by the workers.”

“All the workers have the opportunity to invest after they’ve been on the farm for two years,” she explained, measuring out a cup of sugar.

“Where do these workers come from?”

“ Atlanta, mostly.” She stirred the lemonade with a wooden spoon to mix the sugar. “Some of them are transients, looking for a few months of solitude. Others want a way of life and decide to stay. We call them ‘souls,’ because they’re very much like lost souls.” A wry smile touched her lips. “I’m not naïve. Some of them are downright hiding from the law. We’ve always been hesitant to involve the police because of this. We want to help them, not hide them, but some are avoiding abusive spouses or parents. We can’t protect just the ones we agree with. It has to be all or none.”

“Involve the police in what?”

“There’ve been thefts in the past,” Esther said, then added, “I know I’ve spoken out of turn, but Lev wouldn’t likely mention this to you. We’re very isolated out here, as you probably noticed, and the local sheriff isn’t too keen to drop everything and come running just because a pitchfork has shown up missing.”

Pelham wouldn’t come running for anything but dinner. “Is that all it’s been? Missing pitchforks?”

“Some shovels have been taken, a couple of wheelbarrows.”

“Any wood?”

She gave Lena a look of confusion. “Well, I don’t know about that. We don’t use much wood on the farm. You mean like stakes? Soybean plants don’t vine.”

“What else has been missing?”

“The petty-cash box was stolen out of the barn about a month ago. There was, I think, around three hundred dollars in it.”

“What’s petty cash kept for?”

“Running to the hardware store, sometimes buying a pizza if folks have been working late. We process the plants here ourselves, which is a lot of repetitive work. Some of the souls we get aren’t highly skilled, but others find themselves bored with it. We move them into other areas of the farm, like deliveries, accounting. Not big accounting, but going through invoices, filing. Our goal is to teach them a useful skill, give them some sense of accomplishment, to take back into their real lives.”

It sounded like a cult to Lena, and her attitude got the better of her when she said, “So, you bring them back from Atlanta and all they have to do in return is say their nightly prayers?”

Esther smiled like she was humoring Lena. “We only ask them to go to services on Sunday. It’s not mandatory. We have fellowship every evening at eight, and they’re welcome then as well. Most of them choose not to attend, and that’s perfectly fine. We don’t require anything but that they obey the rules and behave respectfully toward us and their peers.”

They had gotten way off the point, and Lena tried to steer her back. “Do you work on the farm?”

“Normally, I school the children. Most of the women who come here have kids. I try to help them as much as I can, but again, they’re usually not here for long. Structure is all I can give them.”

“How many people do you have at a time?”

“Around two hundred would be my guess. You can ask Lev about that. I don’t keep up with employment records and such.”

Lena made a mental note to get those records, though she couldn’t keep her mind from flashing on a bunch of young kids being brainwashed into giving up their worldly possessions and joining this weird family. She wondered if Jeffrey was getting the same impression in the other room. “You still school Abby?”