Murder, Handcrafted (Amish Quilt Shop Mystery) (10 page)

I
picked up my almost full lemonade glass again. I hadn’t drunk from it since the initial swig to prevent it from spilling. Wanting to be polite, I took another sip. My stomach churned as the acidy liquid sloshed around in my empty stomach.

“I’m sorry I’m not good company for you today,” Linda said. The creases in the skin of her face seemed to deepen, and she drooped with fatigue.

I set my glass back on the tray. We had overstayed and worn Linda out. I knew from my own losses that grief was one of the most exhausting conditions in the world. It felt as if you’d just run a marathon and not moved for days all in the same moment.

I stood. “We should go so you can rest.”

“Don’t you worry.” She smiled but didn’t get up from her seat. “I’ll be right as rain tomorrow, and the Double Dime will be open bright and early, ready for business. You come in and bring that sheriff of yours with you, and I will feed you proper.” She narrowed her eyes. “Have you eaten today?”

I could have asked her the same question. “I had a couple of doughnuts for breakfast—and coffee.” I added the coffee because it sounded healthy—sort of, I guessed, in comparison to doughnuts.

She sniffed. “Sugar like that isn’t going to get you through your day, no way. You need a hearty bowl of stew and some crusty bread.”

Linda’s meal prescription sounded right on the mark. She always knew what folks needed to eat when they entered the diner. It was her gift.

I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be in tomorrow for that stew. I bet Oliver will be hoping for more bacon too. You spoil him.”

She blushed at my kiss but seemed pleased by it too. “Everyone can use a little spoiling now and again.”

Back in the car, I was quiet as I thought over everything that Jessica and I had learned from Linda during our short visit. As always, Linda proved to be an excellent source of county information, but this time the information she held was her personal story.

Jessica leaned back in her seat. “If Blane is an electrician too, he would know how to electrify those stairs, and he would know his brother would remove his muddy boots before going into the trailer.”

I nodded slowly.

Jessica eyed me. “I thought you’d be more excited that you have a prime suspect that’s not Jonah. Wasn’t that the purpose of coming out here?”

“It was.” I paused. “But if Blane killed his brother and goes to prison because of it, who will Linda have left as far as family goes?”

“It didn’t sound like Blane was much family to her,” Jessica said.

“True,” I said. “But it still might break her heart.”

Jessica didn’t have an answer for my question.

After I dropped Jessica off at Out of Time, I drove back to Running Stitch. It was after four by the time I got there, and as promised, Sarah had locked the shop up tight. I went out back to check on Petunia.

The goat galloped to me when I stepped into the tiny backyard. “Baaa!” she complained and butted my hip with her head.

I stumbled back but managed to stay upright. You would think that as many times as Petunia had tried to and succeeded to knock me over, I would’ve come to expect it.

“Baaa!” she cried again.

I sighed. “I know you aren’t used to being left alone all day, but I couldn’t have taken you to Linda’s trailer. You would have eaten all her neighbor’s flowers—”

“Angie Braddock,” a clear strong voice rang out. “Are you talking to a goat?”

I glanced over the white picket fence that separated my tiny backyard from the alley and small patio behind Authentic Amish Quilts. “Hello, Martha,” I said, ignoring her question. I wasn’t ashamed to be having a conversation with Petunia. I talked to Oliver and Dodger all the time, but Martha just wouldn’t understand.

“Sarah Leham closed up for you again,” she said bitterly. “It must be nice to have people willing to fill in for you so much, so you can run around the county and stick your nose in places where it doesn’t belong.”

I walked over to the fence and held on to the top of one of the posts. “What do you mean by that, Martha?”

“Only that everyone in the county has heard by now about the
Englischer
dying in your parents’ home. I imagine you’ll pry into that investigation as you have so many others . . .”

I held on to the post a little more tightly. The wood dug into my fingers. “What difference does it make to you what I do?”

She jerked her neck back as if I had smacked her, and I immediately regretted my sharp tone. For the last year and a half I had been trying to make peace with this woman, and I certainly wasn’t going to win her over by questioning her.

She sniffed. “I hope you will leave the Amish community out of it this time. You have made enough trouble for us, as is.”

My guard went up. Any investigating I’d done since moving to the county had been to protect the Amish community or individual members of it.

Before I could think of a comeback, Martha went on. “I do have a concern, which I’ll share with you since you are a township
trustee
.” She said “trustee” as if my status as such was in question.

“I’m happy to share whatever concern you might have with the rest of the trustees,” I said smoothly.

At my feet, I felt Oliver lean against my leg in a show of support. Petunia came to my other side and did the same.

“I heard a wild man was spotted outside your
parents’ house this morning. You know the Amish in the county will not receive any fanciful tales like this.”

I swallowed. This wasn’t good if the Amish community was hearing the Bigfoot rumors too. I silently hoped Willow had gotten that post down in time. Maybe she had. It had been nearly six hours since I’d told her to take it down, and I hadn’t heard another peep about it.

I forced a laugh. “Oh, you know how rumors like that can be exaggerated, especially in a township as small as Rolling Brook.”

“So you are saying this is not true?”

“I’m saying that it is nothing to worry about.”

She stared over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses at me. “We will see about that.” And with that, she spun around and marched back into her quilt shop.

Slowly, I let go of the top of the fence. My knuckles cracked with the effort.

Petunia gave me a pitiful look.

I glanced over at Martha’s back patio. I really didn’t want to leave the goat there with Martha keeping watch. I removed Oliver’s leash and clicked it on her collar. “All right. You can tag along with Oliver and me.”

Both animals grinned.

I looked from one to the other. “But you both have to be on your best behavior.”

They blinked at me with solemn faces.

Instead of going back inside of Running Stitch, I walked with Oliver and Petunia down the narrow alley between the two quilt shops and out onto the sidewalk.

On the sidewalk, I turned in front of Authentic Amish Quilts and headed in the direction of the mercantile. Petunia pranced ahead of me on the leash with her head held high and eyes bright as if she were leading some sort of parade. Oliver walked briskly beside her. His legs were much shorter than the goat’s, and he had to take three steps to her one.

The mercantile looked like a general store that was reminiscent of those found in the Western television shows of my parents’ youth. Like all the businesses on Sugartree Street, the Eby Amish Mercantile closed at four, but I was hoping someone who knew about Griffin Bright would still be in the building.

As we drew closer to the mercantile, I noticed it was under construction as Linda had said, but the construction was much more extensive than I had first assumed. Large wooden crates were piled up against the side of the large clapboard building. Above the crates, the siding had three shades of beige paint lined up together as if someone was trying to choose a color. Each shade was slightly darker than the last. I was surprised this was the first time I’d noticed the work being done on the mercantile. Every day, I parked in the community lot across from the Amish store before walking to Running Stitch. I wasn’t as observant as I thought I was.

When I was a child, the mercantile had been a regular stop for Jonah and me. We purchased penny candy with the money that we had scrimped and saved or with the coins that had fallen out of my father’s pockets that I would dig out of the couch cushions. In the time I had owned my quilt shop, I hadn’t been in the
mercantile nearly as often. The Ebys and I were civil to one another but, in general, the family and their slew of relatives ignored me. The February before my aunt died, I had visited Holmes County because she was feeling poorly. Her cancer had gotten worse. While I was in the township, I happened to solve a decades-old murder with the help of my aunt and the ladies in the quilting circle that put a member of the Eby family in prison. It goes without saying they weren’t my biggest fans.

I stopped in front of the door, and Petunia licked the clapboard siding as if she was giving it a taste test.

I narrowed my eyes. “Don’t eat anything.”

She had the grace to appear sheepish.

I stood in front of the door a little longer, considering my next move. Oliver cocked his head as if to ask me if I was going to knock. His one black ear dipped lower than his white one.

I tried the door to the mercantile. To my surprise, it was unlocked even though the
CLOSED
sign was flipped outward. I peeked inside. “Hello?”

There was no answer.

Before stepping into the shop, I tied Petunia’s leash to a bench outside. “Stay here. Oliver and I’ll be back.”

Her ears drooped into a pout. Taking Petunia inside of the mercantile with all those Amish delicacies was just too much of a risk.

Inside of the shop, boxes were piled up to my waist, blocking the door from opening the entire way. As carefully as possible, I stepped around them. Oliver wriggled inside around my feet.

Overhead, many of the drop ceiling’s panels were removed, exposing the beams and electrical wires. A stepladder was in the middle of the room in front of the empty sales counter, and electrical wire dangled above the top of the ladder. An open toolbox sat at the foot of the ladder. It was as if whoever was working in that spot had stepped away for a moment with every intention of returning. I couldn’t help thinking that the man who had stepped away might have been Griffin, and those tools waiting for their owner to return had been his as well.

“Hello?” I called out again. “Anyone here?”

Still no answer. Oliver nosed the floorboards around the ladder. He whimpered.

I placed my hands on my hips. “If you’re trying to tell me there’s a dead body in here, I’m out. One a day is my limit.”

There was a shuffling sound in the back of the store that attracted both Oliver’s and my attention. A rack of hand-carved wooden canes stood by the cash register. I grabbed one of the canes and choked up on it as if it were a baseball bat. “Stay behind me,” I told my dog.

Oliver shuffled backward as I stepped around the ladder.

The shuffling sound came again. It sounded as if someone was moving boxes. I lowered the cane. Moving things around would be expected if the mercantile was in the middle of a major renovation.

I inched down the aisle only faintly aware of Oliver belly-crawling behind me. He stopped crawling, stood at attention, and took off down the aisle with his tongue hanging out.

“Oliver!” I cried. I skidded to a stop at the back of the store. To my right, there was a small office and a man and woman in Amish dress stood in the doorway. Oliver danced around their feet and appeared to be very pleased with his discovery. I dropped the cane on the floor. The man I had never seen before, but the woman I knew. “Mattie?”

M
attie jumped away from the man as if she had been burned. “Angie! What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “I thought you were at the pie factory.”

The man stepped forward and extended his hand. “Angie Braddock, I take it. I have seen you in town, but we haven’t formally met.”

I stared at his hand. “No. We haven’t.”

With his hand still extended, he said, “Mattie speaks highly of you. I’m Liam Coblentz. I recently bought the mercantile from the Eby family. I’m new to Rolling Brook, but not to the county. I live over in Berlin.”

“I’ve heard nothing about you.” I gave Mattie a pointed look as I shook his proffered hand. Even though the man was in Amish clothing, the handshake was decidedly English. Typically, Amish men didn’t shake hands with women, especially not with English women they didn’t know.

As I shook his hand, I took time to study him. He was handsome and clean-shaven. His lack of facial hair told me he wasn’t married. A good detail to note since Mattie had been looking deeply into his eyes when I first spied them. He wore plain dress, but his dark hair wasn’t cut exactly in the traditional Amish bowl cut. It was a little longer than the hair of most of the Amish men I knew and curled around his ears. His hazel eyes were kind. I guessed he was around thirty.

I arched my brow at her. “Mattie, can I talk to you a moment? Alone?”

Liam smiled. “I need to move some boxes in the office.” Liam got the hint. That was one point in his favor, but the man was working off a deficit in my book.

Even after Liam was gone, I led Mattie away from the back of the store. We stood in an aisle lined with dried Amish noodles of every shape and size on one side and jars of canned goods, from pickled beets to sliced peaches, on the other. “Is he the reason you’ve suddenly had to fill in at the pie factory so often in the last few days?” I hissed.

She stared at her hands.

“Rachel didn’t seem to know that you were working at the factory today. Now I know why— because you hadn’t been working there.”

“I’m so sorry for lying to you, Angie. I know I should have told you the truth, but I just could not bring myself to do it. I will understand if you fire me.”

I took a breath. “No one is getting fired, least of all you. I don’t think that Running Stitch could survive without you.”

“Danki.”
Her blue eyes filled with tears. “Did you tell Rachel that I lied to you about working in the factory?”

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t.”

She gave a sign of relief. “
Danki
, Angie.
Danki
for covering for me. I know that I don’t deserve it. Lying is wrong—I know this—but there wasn’t any other way that I could . . .” She didn’t finish her thought.

“See Liam?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Mattie, what are you doing sneaking out of work to see a guy? I’ve never known you to behave like this.” As soon as I said that, I realized that I was wrong. Mattie had snuck out to see her previous beau in secret on a number of occasions because Aaron and Rachel had not approved of him. Did that mean there was a reason for them to disapprove of Liam too?

“You make it sound so scandalous,” she said. “We’ve done nothing wrong. We talked and went for a ride. That was all.”

“Does your brother or Rachel know about him?”

“
Nee
, and please don’t tell them. Liam is only my friend, nothing more. You know how people talk. If I am friends with a man, they will automatically assume that there is something more to our relationship.” She took an unsteady breath. “There is not.”

That might be true on Mattie’s end, but I saw how Liam looked at her. He definitely cared about her.

Oliver whimpered at my feet.

“Can you see why I haven’t told my brother or Rachel or anyone? If you question me about Liam, how much worse do you think Aaron will be?”

My shoulders drooped. “Much worse. Look, I think we still need to finish this conversation, but right now, I need to talk to Liam about Griffin Bright.”

She sighed. “I knew you would find out that Griffin had been working for Liam. I warned him of this. He said that the sheriff was here this afternoon asking him about Griffin.”

As usual, Mitchell was two steps ahead of me. He was the sheriff and had all the resources of his department behind him, but it didn’t irk me any less.

“Does Mitchell know you’re friends with Liam?” I asked.

“Nee. Nee
.
”
She shook her head. “You’re the first to know. I should have been honest with you instead of making up that story about the pie factory. I was just afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” My brow knit together. “Mattie, I don’t care who you date. I’m happy if you finally found a good guy, but you can’t lie to me about it. Why would you? You know I would support you. I want you to be happy.”

“I wasn’t worried about you, but Rachel is your
gut
friend. What if you told her? It would be a disaster, even if you only told her by accident.”

“I would never tell anyone anything that you told me in confidence,” I said, unable to keep the hurt from my voice.

She hung her head. “I know that.”

I sighed. “I still need to talk to him,” I said after Mattie’s silence stretched into a long minute. I could never keep quiet like the Amish did. I have to fill the empty space with words.

Her shoulders drooped. “Why? Why does it matter that Griffin was his electrician? Griffin had a popular business. He must have had many jobs throughout the county. Will you visit every last one of them?”

“I’m here because this job was the one that was the breaking point between Griffin and his brother,” I said. “It might be significant to the case.”

“You mean Blane,” Liam said behind me.

I jumped.

Liam held up his hand. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I was finished with everything I could do in the back room. If I moved any more boxes while I waited for the two of you to reappear, I’d just make a bigger mess.” He smiled. “Mattie told me you might drop by with questions. I’m happy to help in any way that I can. I was so very sorry to hear about Griffin’s passing. He was a good electrician and was enthusiastic about the work.”

“What about his brother, Blane?” I asked.

He nodded. “He was with Griffin when they made a bid on the work, but then when the project began Griffin told me that the two of them had parted ways.”

“When did they make the bid?” I asked.

Liam rubbed his clean-shaven chin and thought about that for a moment. “I’d say it was about two months ago when I first took over the mercantile. I
asked the Bright brothers and another electrician to come in and give me an estimate. They were the higher of the two bids and so my second choice.”

“Your second choice?” I asked.

“There was another man I hired first.” He pointed toward the front of the store. “He left that mess you saw when you first came into the mercantile. I was sorely disappointed. He had promised me a quick and professional job, and it was anything but. I need the work to be done quickly. I can’t run a business with wires hanging all over the place.”

“What was his name? The other electrician?”

“Rex Flagg,” he said. “He works out of Millersburg. He seemed to be a nice enough guy,” Liam said as if he felt obligated to compliment the first electrician in some way. “But he was unbearably lazy.”

I tucked the name into the back of my mind to look into later. “When he fell through, you hired the Bright brothers.”

He nodded. “In hindsight, I should have hired them right off and the job would be done by now.”

“When was the last time that you spoke to Blane?” I asked.

“Actually,” Liam said, “I just got off the phone with him while the two of you were out here talking. I called to ask if he would take over the job.”

I frowned.

He grimaced. “I know it must seem callous to you that I’d be calling for a replacement for Griffin so soon, especially his brother, but you’ve seen the condition of the mercantile. I’ve already been closed for two
whole days because of the mess. I can’t be closed much longer and hope to come out ahead this month.”

Of all people, I could certainly understand concern for one’s business, but I still thought that it was cold of Liam to call Blane on the day his brother died to take the job. In my estimation, Liam had just lost the one point that he had earned with me. I glanced at Mattie, and she twisted the edge of her apron in her hands.

“What kind of work are you having done?” I asked. “I know it’s electrical, but the job looks more extensive than a repair job.”

“I’m upping the number of wires and outlets in the building. At the same time, I’m having the Internet installed and making general improvements. I thought it was best to get the entire job done at one time. Now that everything is held up with Griffin’s death, I’m no longer so sure of that.”

I frowned. “The Internet?” This announcement was a surprise for an Amish businessman. When I first moved to Holmes County, one the first things I did was increase the electrical capacity of the shop and install Wi-Fi, but I was English and needed those things for my business. Did Liam need them too? That didn’t seem like a very Amish necessity to me. Then again, he was from Berlin. Maybe he was from an even more liberal New Order district than the Grabers and Millers were a part of. It wasn’t uncommon for Amish bishops to make exceptions to their limited technology rules if their members were using that technology for business.

He nodded. “The mercantile needs to join the twenty-first century, and that transition includes a Web
site. Since I’ll be here all day, I need to be able to work on the Web site while I’m at the mercantile. Eventually, I hope to sell items through an online store.”

“You know how to build a Web site?” I couldn’t keep the doubt from my voice.

“Angie,” Mattie interrupted, “I don’t know what the Internet has to do with Griffin Bright.”

I didn’t either, but I knew the average Amish man didn’t know HTML. I pressed on. “Won’t Blane feel odd working on his brother’s jobsite?”

Liam frowned. “I suppose that’s possible, but he didn’t hesitate to take the job. He starts tomorrow and said that he should finish in a couple of days. I’m glad for that.”

“According to one of Blane and Griffin’s family members,” I said, deciding to leave Linda’s name out of our conversation, “their partnership broke up around the time Griffin took this job.”

“That must be why Blane was only with Griffin on that first day. I don’t know anything about any sort of disagreement that they had. Griffin only told me that he was going to do this job alone. I had already signed the work agreement for the contract, so I wasn’t in a place to argue. As long as he delivered, I didn’t care.”

“And was he delivering?” I asked.

He nodded. “Until today.”

Until today because he was murdered that morning. Liam didn’t need to add that last part. We all knew it.

Liam cleared his throat. “It’s time I head home. It has been a very long day. You look quite tired yourself.”

He didn’t know the half of it, and I still had Petunia
to contend with. I couldn’t take the goat back to my parents’ house, where I had promised to spend the night. By now, Mom must have noticed the decapitated tulips that Petunia had left in her wake.

I still had one more question. “Tomorrow, when Blane is here working on your store, I would like to drop in and talk to him about his brother.”

He nodded. “I don’t see any harm in that. I will see you both tomorrow then.”

Mattie nodded and whispered good-bye in Pennsylvania Dutch.

He smiled in return, and I had the sneaking suspicion that my shop assistant’s life was just about to become a lot more complicated.