Shunned and Dangerous (An Amish Mystery) (14 page)

I
f she weren’t so hyperaware of everything about him at that exact moment, Claire might have reached across the table and tried to smooth the worry from Jakob’s face. But when her heart started racing at the image of touching him, she knew it would be a bad move.

It wasn’t all that long ago that her heart had reacted the same way whenever Benjamin Miller was near, as well. And while she knew her feelings for Jakob were growing with leaps and bounds, she was also well aware of the way her thoughts still meandered toward Benjamin and the life he’d proposed every now and again.

“I’m not being the best company, am I?” Jakob finally asked as he pushed his half-eaten hamburger off to the side and propped his elbows on the edge of the table.

She took a bite of her chicken sandwich and tried to think of the best way to address his comment without sounding patronizing. “You have a lot on your plate. I think it would be odd if you weren’t distracted.” That said, she couldn’t help but wish for a do-over of that moment without the cloud of Harley Zook’s murder investigation hanging over their time together.

Jakob rubbed at his chin, shaking his head as he did. “Is it just me or don’t you find it ironic that the one person who continued to reach out to Rita and Patrick more than a decade after John’s murder was Harley Zook, himself? I mean, of everyone on the fringes of what happened back then, Harley was the one who had a right to be angry, to resent a man who robbed him of his brother based on reprehensible ignorance. Yet, there Harley was, offering to expose Patrick to the one thing he’d finally allowed himself to have after sixteen long years of trying to maintain a connection with his dead brother through a herd of cows.”

She peered at Jakob over her water glass. “You lost me.”

“Harley. He always loved building things. When a barn burned, he was the first one there, leading the charge to raise a new one. When repairs needed to be made at the school down the road, he made them despite not having any children of his own. It was his passion the way police work was mine and dairy farming was John’s.”

“Oh, I get it now. He abandoned his own intended career path to follow John’s in his absence, right?”

Jakob nodded, once, twice. “From what—um, I
gather
, Harley jumped into the dairy business with both feet for the first thirteen or fourteen years. Then, around that time, he got wind of the fact your aunt was looking for a fix-it man and he did a few odd jobs for her here and there over the next year or so. Something about doing that kind of work again really spoke to him and he started devoting more time to that and less to the dairy farming.”

She considered calling him on the details Diane hadn’t provided but decided to let it go. If Jakob wanted to keep the occasional clandestine meeting with his sister a secret, it wasn’t her place to out him. Instead, she kept the conversation on topic and hoped he’d trust her enough one day to actually come clean on his own. “I suppose that explains a lot about the farm being the way we found it.”

“There’s not a lot of room for pursuing passions in the Amish community. People who have a special affinity for painting like my sister, Martha, can paint . . . if it’s on a stool or something useful that will make money. But Harley? He liked working with his hands. He truly liked it for what it was. The fact that it also happens to be a field that fits well with the Amish made it a no-brainer. But then John died and Harley pushed his own interests to the side. He finally allows himself the chance to live his own life instead of the one left to him, and someone decides to take it from him.” He filled his cheeks with air only to let them deflate slowly, audibly. “Would you mind if I try and talk through some of my thoughts with you? See if they make sense to someone other than a guy who wants to find anyone but his father to blame for Harley’s murder?”

She set down her glass and pushed her plate to the side, too. “Of course. Go ahead.”

“Okay, so Patrick was around ten when his dad shot and killed John. Carl stays under the radar for nearly six months. When he’s fingered for the crime, he essentially confesses . . . proudly. He ends up in jail where he remains to this day.”

“Go on . . .”

“So Carl is hauled off to prison and his kid is left behind, angry at the world. He’s lost his dad, he’s probably taunted in school for being the son of a murderer, his mother takes a second job to make ends meet, and he suddenly finds himself alone in more ways than one. He starts acting out. You know, the whole negative attention is better than no attention you mentioned earlier . . .”

“That’s what they say. And it certainly sounded as if that was the case listening to Rita a little while ago.”

“The rare times he quieted down, it was in preparation for the next major meltdown. Which, if you think about that, could point to a period of plotting.”

“Plotting?”

“Yeah. Because if you think about everything Rita said, the times that he was quiet were probably when he was plotting his next move.”

She traced her finger along the outer rim of her glass and tried to imagine what the past sixteen years had been like for Rita Duggan, the accidental single mom of an angry little boy. “That had to be a tough way to live, you know?”

“My only question now is this: what was he plotting during the quiet period that ended a mere day or so before Harley Zook’s murder?”

Her mouth gaped. “Wait. You think Patrick may have been plotting Harley’s murder during that time?”

“Sure. Why not? It could fit.”

“I suppose. But what would his motive be?” she asked.

“Anger. Revenge. Take your pick.”

“But sixteen years later?”

“Sixteen years later . . . when the man who gained the most from Carl’s incarceration became a daily part of Patrick’s life.”

She pulled her hand from the top of her cup and ran it through her hair, the dull but lingering scent of spoiled milk still clinging to its ends nearly two hours later.

The Zook farm . . .

Closing her eyes against the image of the spray-painted threat she’d managed to forget temporarily, she sighed. Nothing in the world would please her more than to see Jakob’s despair over his father’s potential role in Harley’s murder disappear once and for all. Patrick as the killer would make that happen.

But to stay silent and let Jakob close in on that target without full disclosure would be unthinkable.

“Did I say something wrong, Claire?”

She inhaled the courage she needed to answer and prayed she was doing the right thing at the right time. “Jakob? I have something I have to tell you. Something I found after we hung up the phone earlier. You know, while I was still out at Harley’s farm . . .”

Something about the tone in her voice made him pale. “Tell me.”

“I . . . I . . .” She stopped, swallowed, then made herself start again. “I think I found one of the signs Isaac was talking about the other day. The ones he said prove Mose’s anger was gathering to a breaking point.”

“Just one?”

She thought back over the patches of paint she’d found in the barn earlier in her visit and shook her head. “When I first saw the swaths of paint in the barn, I figured Harley had been testing colors or something. But now, in light of what I found at the end, I think they were probably there to cover more of the same.”

“I don’t understand. What did you find?”

“I found a threat spray-painted across the foundation on one side of Harley’s house.”

“A threat? What kind of threat?”

“The worst kind.” She knew she was being a little evasive, but knowing her words were going to send Jakob right back to where he’d been in the investigation prior to their stop at Rita Duggan’s house made sharing them all the more difficult.

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Tell me, Claire. What did it say?”

“‘One more and you’re dead,’” she whispered.

He staggered backward only to drop into his chair once again. “‘One more and you’re dead?’” he repeated.

“Isaac could be wrong, Jakob.” This time, she reached across the table and patted his arm, any racing of her heart be damned. “It might not mean anything at all.”

“Or it could mean everything.”

At the crack in his voice, her pat turned into a squeeze and her report into a plea for caution. “Anyone could have written that, Jakob! Maybe it was a—a group of crazy English teenagers who dared one another to write on an Amish house instead of the usual overpass or playground wall.”

“Or maybe it was a warning from one Amish man to another,” Jakob whispered, his pain so raw, so real she found it difficult to catch her breath.

“C’mon, Jakob. The sentence doesn’t really even make any sense. One more? One more what?”

For a moment she didn’t think he was going to answer. Then, when he finally did, she couldn’t help but wish he hadn’t.

“One more son out from under my father’s day-to-day scrutiny?”