Sins of a Shaker Summer (19 page)

Rose smoothed her skirt under her, sat on the grass in front of the rock, and stared at it. The more she stared, the less reason she found in Grady's theory of Patience's death. The wound seemed far too deep and destructive to have resulted from a fall on such a flat stone. And where was all the blood? Such a head wound would have bled profusely. She imagined Patience tripping, falling backward. Even weak and dizzy, she would instinctively have tried to break her own fall, wouldn't she?

Scooting up on her knees, Rose examined the ground carefully. Yea, a skid mark bore the imprint of a heel. An indentation in the ground looked like the poke of an elbow. The grass in front of her was smashed in spots, as if it had not recovered from being lain on. There seemed little doubt that someone had slid and fallen against the rock. Grady had squatted where she now was, peering at the ground. He'd seen what she was seeing, and he was a bright lad.
She would make a point of talking to him soon.

She pushed to her feet and slowly spun around, taking in her surroundings. She walked to the spot where she had found Patience, spread out facedown, her hair splayed around her bloody head. Her hair. Whatever had happened to her white cap? In the heat of July, Rose would not expect Patience to have worn her heavy palm bonnet, but a Shaker sister would never go outdoors without her cap covering her hair, not if she had any choice.

When Rose had questioned the other inhabitants of the Medicinal Herb Shop, they'd told her that Patience had left the shop in a disturbed state about midmorning, and she had surely been wearing her cap then. Rose could not imagine that she had gone back to her retiring room, removed her cap, and then come out here to pray. So somehow her cap had disappeared. Or, more likely and more sinister, it had been taken.

The evening meal was getting close, but Rose decided to explore as long as she could. Maybe the cap would show up. She walked to the base of the hill and began to circle counterclockwise until she came to the small creek that meandered along the west edge of the holy hill. Though the summer had been hot and dry, the creek, fed by an underground spring, gurgled along over clumps of sand and smooth rocks. She walked alongside the water, examining the area. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, except Patience's cap. By now, her thinking had pushed her into the suspicion of murder. The deliberate killing of another human being was horrible for her to contemplate, but she knew that it was a strong possibility. Patience had made enemies with her trance-induced denunciations. With a prick of anxiety, Rose acknowledged that she herself was one of those enemies.

She rounded a curve in the creek and saw something that puzzled her. A rock, about palm-sized, lay at the edge of the water, which flowed jaggedly over it. As far as Rose knew, this area had rested, untended and undisturbed, for
decades—close to one hundred years, in fact. The children were never brought here for outings, since it was too wild. Patience, of course, had come for her prayers and rituals, but it was unlikely she would have spent much time by the creek, which had no holy significance. Certainly she would not have bothered with any of the rocks. So why was this rough rock lying among all the other, consistently smooth ones? Her heart picked up speed as she squatted, pulled her skirts back with one hand, and reached for the rock with the other.

“Rose? What are you doing here?” Andrew's surprised voice nearly sent Rose forward into the creek. She pulled her hand back quickly. Andrew's eyes traveled to her hand, then back to her face. She stood and brushed off her skirts.

“I might ask you the same question, Andrew,” she said, as calmly as she could manage.

“Oh, I . . . Well, I thought I'd gather a few wild plants for our experiments. I saw some earlier when we . . . when all of us were . . . I suppose you must think me heartless, to have been noticing plants while Patience was lying there . . .”

“Nay, Andrew, I don't think you heartless at all.” She glanced at his empty hands. “I'm just not sure I believe you.”

Andrew followed her eyes and looked at his own open palms. “Ah, I see what you mean.” Suddenly he grinned. “You won't tell Wilhelm that I fibbed, will you?”

She shook her head, though she wondered why she was so quick to reassure him. It was unusual for a Believer to show no remorse for an untruth. “But tell me why you are here, then,” she added.

“I will if you will,” Andrew said, still grinning.

This was a game Rose did not intend to play. “Andrew,” she said, a quiet chiding in her voice.

He nodded, understanding that he had received a correction from his eldress. “I was not telling a complete untruth,” he said. “I did notice a plant while we were waiting
to hear about Patience. I saw it from a distance and thought I'd come back to investigate. If it is what it looked like, I'll be pleased to know it is growing wild around here. I haven't seen it except in the medic garden, and there isn't enough of it for our purposes.”

“And the plant is . . . ?”

“Foxglove.”

“Foxglove? Growing wild? It can, of course, but I'd be surprised that someone hasn't already harvested it into extinction. We actually use very little of it, since it is so powerful. Until you came, we had only Josie, and she isn't comfortable working with the more dangerous herbs.”

“Shall we see?” Andrew led the way through a small wooded area into a glen that somehow had escaped the decades of encroaching undergrowth. Slivers of sunlight warmed the few tall plants in the area.

Rose gazed around in confusion. “I don't see any foxglove,” she said, looking for the stalks of bell-shaped pink flowers with spotted throats.

Andrew walked over to a clump of green leaves growing in a rosette shape. He knelt over it and rubbed the leaves. “Come feel this,” he said. When he did not move a safe distance away, Rose went around to the opposite side of the plant and lowered to her knees. Andrew ripped off a leaf and held it out to her. The tip of his finger brushed her hand as she took the leaf. He seemed not to notice. She decided to do the same, though her rising discomfort forced her to stand quickly. The leaf felt fuzzy.

“You see, I'm quite sure this is a first-year foxglove plant,” Andrew said. His dark eyebrows nearly joined as he scanned the area around the plant. “The only thing that confuses me, though, is that foxglove is a biennial. It doesn't bloom until the second year, if you see what I mean.”

Rose saw. “In other words,” she said, “it is July, so why aren't there any second-year plants nearby, in full bloom?”

“Precisely,” Andrew said, with a broad smile. “Where did the seeds come from, if not from an older plant?”

Rose felt an unwelcome flush of pleasure at Andrew's delighted reaction to her quickness of mind. It wasn't until later, after they had heard the dinner bell and settled into their silent places in the Center Family dining room, that it occurred to her to wonder how Andrew, milling around with the others on the northeast side of the holy hill, could possibly have recognized a first-year foxglove hidden halfway around the hill and beyond a clump of trees.

R
OSE SAT AT THE DESK IN THE SMALL LIBRARY OF THE
M
INISTRY
House, leafing through an old journal she'd pulled from the shelf. For the most part, journals were stored in spare rooms these days, but this one was special. Wilhelm's predecessor as elder, Obadiah, had been a medicinal herb enthusiast and amateur artist. The medicinal herb industry had been booming in his day. He had kept a close and interested eye on it and had recorded his many observations in his journals, along with drawings. During the year he had written the journal Rose held, he had made a study of each medicinal plant grown by the North Homage Society, recording where it had been planted, its growing patterns, and how it was used.

Not far into the book, she found what she sought—several pages devoted to foxglove. He had drawn the plant at several stages of development and carefully printed a description next to the picture. The first-year plant looked very close to what Andrew had shown her at the holy hill. Obadiah described a low mound of fuzzy leaves; Rose recalled lightly rubbing a leaf between her fingers and feeling the fuzz. She was irritated with herself for not recognizing the plant immediately.

Rose read through the rest of Obadiah's description. Foxglove had been planted in both the medic garden and in one field north of the Herb House, so he could keep an eye
on it and keep the children away from it. The children. Could this be what Nora and Betsy had gotten into? Gretchen had found the girls between the Trustees' Office and the Center Family house, which were very close to the holy hill. She would ask Josie for more information about the symptoms of foxglove poisoning.

Questions nagged at her, though. Why would the girls be attracted to a first-year plant, without those tantalizing bell-shaped flowers? Were there more mature plants somewhere else in that same area, perhaps reseeds from decades-earlier plantings? She skimmed through the journal entry one more time. Nay, she had remembered correctly: Besides the medic garden, north of the Infirmary, the only planting Obadiah reported was in the far northeast corner of town. The holy hill was at the other end of the village. If they had simply grown wild, which was possible, surely she and Andrew would have seen a colony of mature plants nearby.

Rose leaned back in her chair. There was one more possibility, and she was not eager to consider it. Someone could have planted the foxglove in the spring, right about the time the Mount Lebanon Believers arrived. So it was also possible that Rose had just now interrupted Andrew as he checked the progress of his secret planting of a highly toxic plant. The thought caused a stabbing sensation in her heart. She slammed the journal shut and held it to her chest as she closed the room and climbed the stairs to her retiring room.

After placing Obadiah's journal with her own on the corner of her retiring room desk, she headed for the hall telephone. She was increasingly certain that Grady did not believe his own theory about Patience's death. It simply did not make sense to her that a sheriff's deputy with his skill and intelligence would dismiss so quickly the notion that the death might have been made to look like an accident. Was he investigating on his own? If he had a plan, she wanted to be aware of it.

“Rose, I'm sorry, I'm rather busy right now . . .” Grady said, after the operator had connected them.

Such distance was unusual from Grady, and Rose's suspicions deepened. “Merely a quick question,” she said. “Did you take a careful look at Patience's wound?”

“Uh . . . What do you mean?”

“Well, I was wondering what you concluded from the depth of the wound, whether you still think she simply fell on a rock.”

“I don't think we should be discussing—”

“Oh? I was under the impression that, since you believed the death to be accidental, there would be no investigation, so why can't we discuss anything we please?”

The line wasn't clear enough for her to hear it, but she was certain that Grady sighed. “Rose, listen to me. I want you and Gennie to stay out of this. Yeah, it could just be an accident, and it could be something else, but I don't want folks around here to get riled up, like they seem to do when anything happens in North Homage.”

“So you do think—”

“Rose, are you listening to me?” Exasperation drove his normally gentle voice into a higher, more strident range. “Let me do the investigating. Y'all just go on with your lives like nothing's out of the ordinary. Understand?”

This time it was Rose who sighed. “I can't.”

“Rose—”

“Nay, Grady, it isn't possible. You know that. There are undercurrents in this village that only I can bring to the surface, and my instincts tell me they are directly related to Patience's death. You are not one of us.”

“That might be for the best, you know,” Grady said, in a more reasonable tone. “I'm not so personally involved.”

“Exactly.” Rose was suddenly tired and wished she could simply turn the problem over to Grady. He would be able to seek out the truth with single-mindedness. His heart would not be weighted down with the fear that the killer might turn out to be a Believer.

Grady must have heard the inevitability in her voice. “All right,” he said. “Let's keep in touch. Just be careful, Rose, okay? I can't control Gennie any better than I can control you, so keep her safe.”

“I'll do my best,” Rose said, with feeling.

“We have a flock of hungry stomachs arriving for breakfast in just over an hour, and not a sign of a Kitchen Deaconess. What are we supposed to do?” The aggrieved voice on the other end of Rose's telephone belonged to Polly, one of the kitchen sisters, though she hadn't thought to say so. Rose leaned against the hallway wall, not yet awake enough to handle yet another crisis.

“Have you checked her retiring room?”

“Of course, did it myself first thing.” Polly's tone implied that her eldress was none too bright.

Polly was no more than twenty-one, and Rose was inclined to forgive her, at least this once. “Did you try calling Josie at the Infirmary?”

“What on earth for?”

“In case Gertrude became ill during the night, Polly.” Rose's understanding was stretching thin. “Never mind,” she said. “I'll try to find her. You get on back to fixing breakfast, and I'll send Gennie Malone over to help you.”

The sun hadn't yet made its entrance, but the air drifting in Rose's open window brushed over her skin like steam from a kettle. She splashed her face with lukewarm water. As she pulled a fresh work dress over her head, the bell over the Center Family house rang to awaken the village. She tidied her room quickly, giving Gennie a few minutes to crawl out of bed and dress before calling her to the phone.