Free Disappearances by Linda Byler

calendar pages up and down all afternoon. She was hysterical by the time she reached the kitchen, frightening her mother so badly, she had to sit on the recliner, seeing spots in front of her eyes.
    When the police car pulled up to the door, Mam waved a hand in Rebekah’s direction, who answered the door with tears streaming down her face and dropping on her dress front. Dat and Reuben were brought to the Miller homestead, Mark came with Richard Caldwell, clearly beside himself with joy, Richard’s voice booming as if he really was holding a megaphone. The police had offered a phone to Sadie so she could call her family.
    Leah, after she learned of the joyous news, told a most amazing story. Her sleep had been restless all night. But a few minutes before four o’clock, she awoke with a great and intense urge to pray for Sadie.
    “All the while, I had this sensation of falling. But after I prayed, I fell asleep, deeply, better than I’d slept all night.”
    No one at this point knew how or when Sadie had escaped, or even if she had escaped, but they all agreed—wasn’t Leah’s dream something? Wasn’t it awesome how God heard and answered prayer?
    Next they discussed whether they should let Sadie fly home. Riding in an airplane was verboten. Should they confer with the ministry to see if it was allowed in a case of emergency? Dat said just fly her home. Mark said the same thing. And everyone also agreed that Mark should be the one to make a return phone call to Sadie. He was, after all, her husband.
    She was asleep on the sofa at the police barracks, wrapped in her cocoon of safety, when Mark’s phone call came through. Gently, Cindy, the tall, thin receptionist, woke her.
    “Sadie Miller? There is a phone call.”
    Immediately Sadie sat up, throwing back the blanket in one clear sweep, stumbling a bit, but following her eagerly to the cordless phone, taking it with her to a corner of the room where she could squeeze her eyes shut and blow her nose and sob and talk and laugh, and no one would see her.
    His voice! She had forgotten that deep, gravelly baritone. She couldn’t talk at all, just cry, until Mark thought there was no one there and said, “Sadie? Are you there?”
    She had to answer, and all that came out was a hoarse squeak. Finally she croaked a pitiful, “Oh. Oh, Mark!”
    Then he began crying, and no one said anything for quite some time, until finally Sadie took a long, shuddering breath and said she was fine and asked how soon were they coming to get her.
    “No, I do not want to fly home, Mark. I had enough of being too high up in the air to suit me for the rest of my life.”
    When they hired a driver, he figured his GPS system would get them to Brent, Colorado, in about 12, maybe 13 hours. He could leave after two o’clock. Everyone went along, the 12-passenger van holding them all quite comfortably. No one wanted to stop to eat or sleep, rolling into gas stations, grabbing sandwiches, and back on the road they went.
    They encountered a snowstorm after about six or seven hours of travel, slowing them to a mind-numbing crawl across a corner of Wyoming. The driver peered through a whirl of white until he proclaimed the roads unfit for travel.
    They were forced to stop and stay at a motel, the rooms reeking of stale air and cigarette smoke, the beds hard as nails, in Reuben’s words, and nothing to eat except stale crackers and bitter coffee. The fact that he found the Discovery Channel on TV soon smoothed over the sadness of stale crackers and coffee, and when he discovered Animal Planet on another channel, he was quite beside himself with amazement.
    Twenty-four hours later, they rolled into the Brent police barracks with the voice from the GPS as their guide. “What an absolute miracle,” Dat proclaimed the small device.
    Sadie had been taken to the Hilton Inn a block away. She was pacing the second-floor lobby, dressed in the much-washed blue dress, still without a covering, but showered,