A Simple Shaker Murder (31 page)

She hadn't expected him to move so slowly. He was several yards shy of the exit. She just had time to slip through the door and trap him inside the Meetinghouse, where the others could help restrain him.

Rose entered the sisters' door and closed it behind her just as Earl turned to make his escape.

“What the hell . . .” Earl said, as he saw Rose. “Get out of my way.”

“I won't,” Rose said. “You've killed another human being and threatened a child. I can't let you go free.” Her voice shook. She was well aware of his superior size and strength.

“Look, just get out of the way.” Earl took a step toward her. “I don't want to hurt you.”

“Your real concern is escaping unseen,” Rose said. “If you harm me, the others will come after you immediately; you won't have time to get away.”

Earl reached in his trousers picket and withdrew a small
object. With a practiced flip, he opened it into a knife. Rose drew in her breath to shout for help.

“I'd keep very quiet, if I were you,” Earl said. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead, and his face had turned an alarming red. “These are your choices. Let me go and give me time to get out of here, and you'll never hear from me again. If you send anyone after me, I'll kill them, if I have to—do you want to be responsible for more killing? I don't think so. Or you could scream, and I'd have to hurt you, and then, so help me, I'd hurt that little girl you're so fond of.” Rose heard the desperation in his hoarse voice. He was likely to do anything.

“Earl?” Celia was walking toward them. “Earl, what's going on?”

Earl started at the sound of her voice. Rose jumped sideways to escape the knife point aimed toward her stomach. She opened her mouth to scream and warn the others, but Earl was quicker. He lunged at her, grabbed her around the waist and held her in front of him. Rose felt the sharp tip of his pocket knife pricking the skin covering her right kidney.

Celia screamed and screamed again, as she backed away. The cacophony in the large room hushed to silence, and all eyes turned toward Earl and Rose.

“What's all this about?” Gilbert looked more puzzled than frightened.

“You shouldn't have brought the girl here,” Earl said. “You should have let her stay lost. Send her over here to me.”

“Now, Earl, we've gone over and over this. The girl's the only one who can convey the real meaning of these drawings. It's the only way we can really show the Shakers the truth about—”

“Gil, I don't deny that your foggy grasp on reality has been useful to me more than once, just as your cousin's was, but right now, don't try to think. Just push the girl over here, and we'll leave, and the rest of you can go on with your lives.”

“Nay, you must not!” Rose cried out.

“Earl?” Celia had regained her composure, now that Matthew stood beside her. “I don't understand. I thought . . . well,
I thought we were going to get married and let Gilbert take care of the village. We were going to build a mansion, that's what you said after Hugh died. You promised.” Her bright red lips formed a pout that might have been appealing had her voice been less shrill.

Earl's gaze skimmed Celia's body with a mixture of irritation and regret. “That was the plan,” he said. “More or less. It isn't the first plan I've had to change at a moment's notice.”

“You killed Hugh!” Celia's eyes widened until the whites showed all around the intense blue irises. “You killed Hugh so you could marry me and get Hugh's money, didn't you?”

Matthew pulled Celia back behind him.

“Very brave,” Earl said, with a laugh. “I wish you well with her. I don't think I could have stood it, even for the money.”

“Why don't you get out of here,” Rose said. “You can take one of our horses, or our car, whatever you want. We'll let you go, I promise you,” she said. “Just leave Mairin with us.”

“I can't,” Earl said. “She's got to go, and so do you.” He pressed the blade harder until Rose felt it break through the thin wool of her dress and touch her skin.

“You can't get away,” Rose said. “It's time to give up.”

“I have no choice. Don't you see?” Earl had begun to plead.

“You do have choices.” Rose forced herself to relax in his grip. “If you kill me and Mairin, it will be cold-blooded. I don't think you ever wanted to kill anyone, did you? Not Mairin, surely, or you would have done so the day you threatened her in the woods outside the school yard. My guess is you didn't want to kill Hugh, either.”

Earl shuddered and almost withdrew his knife, but he recovered before Rose could pull away. “Of course I didn't want to kill anybody. I'm not a murderer, I'm really not. I just didn't have a choice. Hugh didn't give me a choice. He was going to turn me in, ruin my life. I'd have gone to prison anyway, if I'd let him live.”

“Hugh knew something about you, didn't he? Something he threatened to reveal? Did it have to do with gambling debts?” Rose guessed.

“Earl!” Gilbert said. “What's she saying? Hugh never used to gamble; are you the one who led him into it?”

Earl made a sound that was somewhere between a snort and a sob. “Hugh? Gamble? Hugh the saint? No, all he ever did was give his money away to the needy. Well, I was needy, too, and the only way I could get any money was to win it. I was good at it, too, until my luck ran out. Hugh was so kind to others, but when I asked him for a loan, he just lectured me on how well off I was, compared to the truly poor. I was thousands of dollars in the hole. I was getting threats. So I offered to hand out his checks for him—he always preferred making the promises, anyway.”

He scowled at Gilbert. “Hugh was a lot like you in that.”

“You forged the suicide note and left it for Gilbert to find, didn't you?” Rose asked. “Was that so he would be a suspect, in case the sheriff suspected a forgery?” She twisted to watch his face.

Earl didn't answer, and she knew she'd hit upon the truth.

“Why didn't the sheriff suspect?” Rose asked.

Earl's eyes flashed as if a circuit in his brain had blown. “If it hadn't been for you . . .” He jabbed the blade a fraction harder until it broke her skin.

Rose gasped in pain but held still.

“No, he'll kill you! He said so!” Mairin broke away from Gilbert and threw herself toward Earl's feet. She grabbed his ankles and tried to pull him off balance, but she was far too tiny. He staggered and Rose squirmed out of his grasp. Earl regained his balance, then reached down and grabbed Mairin by her thick, fuzzy hair and yanked her off the ground. She screamed in pain. A roar of fury surged through Rose's body, and she threw herself at Earl like a crazed lioness. She felt a searing pain in her upper arm, yet her rage was stronger. She hung onto Earl, leaning her weight against him until he started to fall sideways. She heard a child's scream and then a gunshot, and blacked out with a prayer for forgiveness on her lips.

“T
HIS TIME IT
'
S YOUR TURN TO REST IN THE
I
NFIRMARY,
” A
NDREW
said, as Rose drifted to consciousness. Mairin sat on the edge of her bed.

“Why does my shoulder hurt so much?”

“Because you were stabbed, remember? You—Shaker eldress, bound by a vow of nonviolence, flung yourself at an armed man, in defense of a sweet little girl. Is any of this sounding familiar?”

Rose groaned. “I'll have to confess for the rest of my life for this.”

Andrew laughed. “Agatha declared that you've been punished enough,” he said. “One confession will do the trick.”

Rose pushed herself up on her good elbow. “Mairin, were you hurt at all?”

Mairin offered a larger-than-normal smile and shook her head.

“Mairin is staying in the Children's Dwelling House,” Andrew said. “Given her treatment at the hands of the New-Owenites, it looks like we can keep her with us.”

“Thank God.” Rose fell back on her pillow with a grimace of pain.

“Indeed.”

“And the New-Owenites themselves?”

“That's another story. Did you realize that Earl Weston was killed? Nay, you didn't kill him,” Andrew said, at Rose's expression
of horror. “You were stabbed in the shoulder, and the pain and loss of blood were too much for you. You blacked out just as Deputy O'Neal burst through the women's entrance to the Meetinghouse. He thought Earl had killed you, and he shot by instinct. He killed Earl with one bullet.”

Mairin seemed unmoved by Andrew's description.

“How long have I been here?”

“Just over a day,” Andrew said. “Josie gave you a sedative we've been working on in the Medicinal Herb Shop, and it worked better than we'd predicted. Just as well, though. Josie said you missed quite a lot of pain, including the stitching up. I was glad for that. And now you need to rest.”

“Not until I have answers to all my questions,” Rose said. With the arm that wasn't taped up at her shoulder, she reached over and took Mairin's hand. “You were hiding in the barn and you saw what happened to Hugh, didn't you? All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I was up high, and Hugh came in first,” Mairin said, without emotion. “He looked really scared, and he pushed a big box over and stood on it and reached up with his arm. I didn't know what he was doing. He couldn't reach that high. Then he got a long rope and laid it out like a snake, and then Earl came.”

“Did they fight?”

“The way they always did, with yelling. I didn't understand all of it. It was something about money. Hugh was really mad at Earl and said he had to go tell the police what he'd done, and Earl said he wouldn't, and then Hugh pointed to the rope and said . . .” Mairin frowned. “It was something like ‘take the way like gentlemen.' ”

“Take the gentleman's way out?” Rose guessed.

‘That's it. Then he started to leave, and . . .” A hint of fear cracked Mairin's impassive mask.

“It'll help to talk about it.”

“Earl picked up the rope and came up behind Hugh and threw the rope around his neck and squeezed really hard. Hugh
was the only one who was nice to me. I'm glad Earl got killed.”

Rose squeezed the girl's hand and said nothing about the sin of violence. If anyone had earned a moment of anger, it was Mairin. And feeling anger was better than not feeling anything at all.

“Did you see Earl take Hugh out of the barn?” she asked.

“Yes. I didn't understand what he was doing. He looked at a window, and then he took the rope and just threw Hugh over his shoulder and left really fast. So I got down and followed him. That's when he went to the orchard, and I climbed a tree to see what he was doing.”

Rose nodded. “He was worried about daylight, and the brethren arriving for their early chores. So he moved to the abandoned part of the orchard. And I'll bet the rope was too long, and he had to cut it, right?”

“He used a penknife, a really dull one. My penknife is sharper than that,” Mairin said, with scorn.

Rose rested her head against the lavender-scented pillow. Earl's penknife had been sharp enough to do damage. “Andrew,” she asked, “how did Grady know to come to North Homage?”

Andrew laughed. “He said he hardly had a choice. He'd had a call from me, from the train station, telling him I'd had dinner with Hugh's lawyer, who suspected Hugh was being swindled by Earl. Then Nora called him. When Gilbert came to get Mairin—he'd watched you go in there, by the way—he couldn't manage two girls, and he didn't really take Nora seriously. He should have. And finally, Grady had confronted Sheriff Brock about his failure to pursue Hugh's death as murder. Brock will be resigning.”

“What?”

“It's true. Brock
had
suspected, after he thought about it awhile, and he tried to call Gilbert, who'd gone out of town. He got Earl. And Earl dropped a number of hints that, if the sheriff would forget his suspicions, then he—Earl—would personally see to it that we Shakers disappeared, and our land
and businesses would become available for purchase at a very reasonable price. But Languor is stuck with us. Gilbert has admitted defeat, and his group is packing up to leave. We'll be auctioning off quite a lot of furniture to help bring our finances back to order.”

“Have they gone yet?” Rose sat up, suddenly alert.

“Nay, not yet.”

“Then would you do something for me? Would you find out what Gilbert kept locked in his wall cabinet? If he is chastened enough, perhaps he will even tell you.”

“Oh, I know what's in there,” Mairin said. “Hugh told me once. He said Gilbert made drawings, like me, but he always kept them locked up because he didn't want anyone to mess with them—you know, add things or anything.”