Plain Murder (2 page)

“We advertise that Stone Mill House is in the heart of
Ah
-mish country. I'm not
Ah
-mish. If I were I wouldn't be allowed to run a B&B.” She smiled. “But all the men and women who work here are Amish. Our food is very traditional.”

Rachel wasn't about to admit that she had once been Amish. She rarely shared that with strangers. Too personal. “You should come in and have a look around. Everything we sell is Amish-made.”

“I wanted to know if there was room service. That's why I was calling. My sister and I want breakfast in our rooms. We're taking the Zook buggy ride at nine thirty.” Ms. Hess entered the shop and zeroed in on Mary Aaron's “Diamond in the Square” crib quilt on display near the front counter. The counter had once been a teacher's desk from an Amish schoolhouse in the next county over, something Rachel had picked up at an auction.

“I'm sorry. We don't offer room service. Meals are served in the dining room, but you're welcome to take anything upstairs.” Rachel kept smiling. Ninety percent of her guests were lovely people, but the other ten could be . . .
interesting
. “Breakfast is already set up there. We have an assortment of fresh fruits, cereal, and pastries, and our cook, Ada, will be happy to make you pancakes, bacon, scrapple, eggs, whatever you'd like. This morning, she made an amazing fresh blueberry syrup. It's so good, I could eat the stuff with a spoon.”

Ms. Hess dragged an acrylic fingernail over another quilt and examined the tag. “Pricey, aren't you?”

“Authentic Amish quilts are all hand-stitched, more a piece of artwork than a bed linen. Mary Aaron's quilting is recognized as some of the finest Amish work in the county. Most people prefer to display her quilts as wall art rather than—”

“You said it was sewn by
Aim
-ish.” Ms. Hess regarded Rachel dubiously. “ ‘Mary Aaron' doesn't sound
Aim
-ish to me.”

“Her actual name is Mary Hostetler. We tend to use the same names over and over in our families, so to avoid confusion, we use a lot of nicknames. We call her Mary Aaron as in Aaron's Mary. Aaron is her father.”
And my uncle,
Rachel thought, but again, that was personal information. Then she realized she'd said “our” families . . . Luckily, the woman didn't seem to have noticed.

“And the father's
Aim
-ish?”

“He is
Ah
-mish,” Rachel confirmed with a nod. “And so is Mary's mother.”

The woman grimaced. “I've never heard of such a thing. What if they had a son? What do you call him?”

“It depends. Hannah and Aaron Hostetler have a son named Alan. We just call him ‘Alan' because it's not a common name. But we call their son John ‘John Hannah' because there must be a dozen John Hostetlers in the valley. Hannah's son John”—Rachel made her best
and there you have it
gesture—“is, thus, John Hannah.”

Ms. Hess looked at Rachel for a moment over the top of her pink glasses. “That's the silliest thing I've ever heard of.” She inspected the quilt again. “Are you certain this is handsewn? The stitches are too even. It looks machine—”

“Rachel! Rachel!”

Glancing out the window, Rachel spotted Mary Aaron—black bonnet strings flying—racing up the front drive, her push-scooter left on its side in the grass. Her feet were bare, and she was wearing a rose-colored traditional ankle-length dress with a white apron over it.

“In the gift shop!” Rachel called through the open window, wondering why Mary was in such a hurry this morning.

Rachel turned back to her guest with a smile. “You're in luck. Here's Mary Aaron now. You'll be able to meet her. I know she can answer any questions you may have about her quilt.”

“Does she talk English?”

“She
speaks
English perfectly,” Rachel assured her.

“Because sometimes it's difficult to understand foreigners.”

“I can assure you that Mary Aaron's English is excellent.” Rachel stepped into the hall just as Mary Aaron threw open the front door and burst inside.

“Come quick!” she exclaimed. She was breathing hard; beads of sweat ran down her face. She must have rushed the full three miles from her house on her push-scooter.

“You have to come!” Mary Aaron said, switching from English to Pennsylvania Deitsch when she caught sight of Ms. Hess staring at her from the gift shop doorway. “It's Willy. He's been found!”

Willy O'Day's mysterious disappearance had been the subject of conjecture in Stone Mill for the last eight months. The prominent English businessman had vanished without a trace, and no one had heard from him since.

“So the rumors were true?” Rachel asked, also in Deitsch. “He ran off with that blond waitress from the diner?”

“Ne.”
Mary Aaron shook her head.

For the first time, Rachel realized her cousin's face was pale, despite her rosy cheeks from the effort it had taken to get here on her scooter.

“Get your head covering, Rachel. It's bad, really bad. My
dat
needs you!”

A sense of dread came over Rachel as she realized the extent of her cousin's distress. “What is it? What's happened to Willy?”

Mary Aaron grabbed Rachel's hand. “He's sleeping the long sleep in our cow pasture.” Tears welled up in her big brown eyes and spilled down her dirt-streaked cheeks. “And the police think
Dat
put him there.”

“Will you come, Rachel?” Mary Aaron pleaded. “We need your help.
Dat
needs you.”

Rachel nodded. “Of course I'll come.” She turned back to her guest. “I'm afraid I have an emergency. I have to go.”

Ms. Hess frowned as she stepped out of the gift shop and into the hall. “I'm interested in this quilt. Can't your errand wait until—”

“Sorry.” Rachel reached around her guest and pulled the gift shop door shut behind her. She flipped the wooden sign around so that it read:
CLOSED. Please come again!
“Family comes first.”

“But the quilt.”

“We can talk about it later.” Rachel indicated the door across the hallway. “Breakfast in the dining room,” she said. She turned to Mary Aaron. “Wait for me out front. I'll bring the Jeep around. We can throw your scooter in the back.”

The church districts in Stone Mill were Old Order and very conservative. Members weren't permitted to operate any type of motor vehicle; they used horse-drawn wagons and carriages. Mary Aaron was, however, permitted to accept a ride from Rachel.

“We have to hurry! The police are talking to him. You know how
Dat
can be.”

“It'll be all right.” Rachel gave her cousin's hand a quick squeeze. “We'll straighten this out.”

Mary Aaron opened her mouth to answer and then closed it abruptly, but Rachel knew what she was thinking. Willy and Uncle Aaron had been feuding for years. Everyone knew how much the dead man and Uncle Aaron had disliked each other; they'd had a public shouting match at the livestock sale only days before Willy disappeared. It had been such a scene that the bishop, two preachers, and a deacon had called on her uncle that evening—not a particularly pleasant visit for any of them, she imagined.

“Meet you out front,” Rachel repeated. Then she went down the hall, exited the main house, and entered the kitchen, where Ada was patting loose sausage into round cakes and dropping them onto a skillet.

“I've got to go to Uncle Aaron's,” she explained in Pennsylvania Deitsch. It was an old German dialect used only among the Amish in North America. “Please see that the guests get breakfast and ask the girls to . . . you know, the usual morning chores.”

Ada's pale-blue eyes narrowed. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a plump middle and a wide bottom, but she exhibited none of the joviality usually associated with a plus-size woman.

“You'll manage fine,” Rachel said with forced cheerfulness as she snatched her keys from a hook near the back door. Ada could be prickly, but she was a capable woman and Rachel couldn't run the business without her. “I'll be back soon,” she promised, crossing her fingers behind her back.

On her way out, she paused long enough to snatch an elastic hair tie and a handful of large bobby pins from a drawer. As she stepped onto the back porch and into a pair of black Keds, she began to plait her hair into a single braid.

She couldn't believe Willy O'Day was dead. Not just dead. Dead in her uncle's cow pasture. That chill that she'd felt earlier returned and rippled down her spine. It didn't seem possible. Willy had been missing since October. He couldn't have been lying in the pasture all that time. Someone would have found him. The
buzzards
would have found him.

She hurried across the grassy back lawn. Securing her braid with the hair tie, she took a few quick twists and then used the pins to fix it tightly to the back of her head.

This all had to be a misunderstanding. Things like this happened to strangers on the evening news. Unexplained disappearances and deaths happened in Harrisburg or Philadelphia, not in peaceful Stone Mill. It was ridiculous for the police to even consider that Uncle Aaron might be involved. He was Amish. He'd had the centuries-old canon of nonviolence bred into his blood and bones.

Rachel tugged open the carriage shed doors and entered the semidarkness of the stone outbuilding to climb into her Jeep. In the driveway, she circled the house and braked long enough for Mary Aaron to lift her scooter into the back and climb in beside her.

“Seat belt,” Rachel reminded automatically. Amish buggies didn't require seat belts, and whenever she transported one of the Plain folk, she had to remind them about safety.

“Could you get my scarf?” Rachel nodded and motioned toward the glove compartment.

Mary Aaron opened it, pulled out a crumpled men's bandana, and attempted to smooth out the wrinkles.

At a four-way stop, Rachel took a moment to cover her head with the bandana and knot it at the nape of her neck. “You're certain Willy's dead?” She slid the car into first gear and went through the intersection. “He didn't just fall and hit his head or something?”

“If he did, he fell into his own grave and then revived just long enough to cover himself up. Someone working for the power company found him.” Mary Aaron grimaced. “No, he's dead all right.
Dat
said it looked like someone bashed in his head.”

“He was murdered?” Rachel whispered.

“
Ya.
Willy O'Day was murdered. Right there on our farm. And the way the police are acting, they think
Dat
did it.”

Rachel didn't know what to say . . . so she said nothing. The blacktop narrowed and snaked downhill toward the rich bottomland where the Hostetler farm lay. She pointed. “Behind the seat. Would you get my skirt and blouse?”

Rachel wasn't Amish anymore, and everyone knew it. Her leaving the faith was a disgrace that her family lived with every day. She was an Englisher to the Amish, but still, if she expected to be welcome among them, she couldn't show up at her uncle's place in jeans and a T-shirt. And if she wanted any of her family to speak to her, she had to wear a head covering. The modest shirt and calf-length denim skirt was a hard-won compromise, but the best deal she could make.

“What if they've arrested
Dat?
” Mary Aaron held the clothing on her lap so it wouldn't blow out of the Jeep.

“They won't,” Rachel replied, but the words felt awkward. “So what if Willy's body is on your property? That doesn't mean your father killed him.”

“
Dat
threatened him.” Mary Aaron chewed nervously at a ragged thumbnail. “ ‘If you ever set foot on my farm again, Willy, you'll be sorry.' That's what he said.” She hesitated. “At least that's what everyone says he said. I wasn't there.”

Rachel glanced at her cousin, then back at the road. “People say things all the time that they don't mean.”

Her uncle was known to be taciturn, even gruff, but never violent—at least not to humans or animals. But he had a reputation. He'd once gotten so angry with his windmill when it kept breaking down that he'd hacked at the supports with an ax until the whole thing crashed into the garden. And then there was the incident with the grape arbor when he'd taken the same ax to it in front of a group of women who had gathered at his farm to quilt.

“He wouldn't hurt anyone,” Rachel continued. “He couldn't even put his own driving horse down when it broke its leg.”

“That's different.
Dat
likes horses. It's people he has problems with. Especially English people.”

Uncle Aaron had never been mean to Rachel when she was a child; he hadn't been exactly warm and friendly, either. Since Rachel's return to Stone Mill, however, he'd barely been civil. The Hostetlers had always been sticklers for following the
Ordnung
—the rules—and Rachel had broken the rules. All of them. Her father's people, the Masts, were equally devout, but much more easygoing in gray areas, such as runaway children and dealings with the English.

Rachel and Mary Aaron rounded a sharp curve in the Jeep and climbed a hill to an intersection. It was blocked by a police cruiser. A state trooper stood in the middle of the road and held up one hand. Rachel pulled her Jeep alongside him. “This is Mary Hostetler,” she said. “She lives on the Aaron Hostetler farm just ahead.”

“The road is closed to all traffic,” the officer deadpanned.

“But how do I get home?” Mary Aaron looked like she was fighting tears. “My mother needs me.”

“Sorry. No exceptions.”

“Can we park and walk in?” Rachel asked. She knew several of the local policemen, but she didn't recognize this trooper.

“Sorry.” He waved his hand, indicating she could make a left or a right. “You'll have to move along.”

“All right, Officer.” Rachel turned down the one-lane road to the left. Once they had gone a quarter mile and were out of sight of the policeman, she turned onto an old logging road.

“The bridge?” Mary Aaron asked.

Rachel nodded. She drove a short distance, far enough so that the trees blocked sight of her Jeep from the road, and stopped. Climbing out, she hastily stepped into the denim skirt. It fell halfway between her ankles and knees. Next, she donned the blue blouse over her T-shirt. “Will I pass?” she asked her cousin in Pennsylvania Deitsch.

Mary Aaron shrugged. “Not as Amish, but you're Plain enough.”

Definitely not a compliment, in Rachel's eyes. But Plain was good where she was headed. She tucked the Jeep key into a hidden zipper pocket of her skirt and set off through the woods. She could tell by the crunch of leaves and undergrowth that Mary Aaron was following.

It wasn't far to the river. It was deep, rocky, and, because it was spring, fast-running. No chance of wading across it today—too much water. But downstream were the remnants of an old covered bridge. There were missing floorboards, and it was too rickety for even a horse and wagon, but the stone foundation had survived two hundred years of spring floods. Rachel had crossed it dozens of times as a child, and she was certain they could safely cross it now. Old stand timber grew thick on the far side. The nearest land was Mast property, but just beyond that parcel lay the boundaries of Uncle Aaron's farm.

“So tell me again how Willy was found,” Rachel said.

“Someone found him in the pasture. Someone working for the power company. I guess they were checking something on the highline that cuts across our property,” Mary Aaron explained.

Rachel pushed through a blackberry bush and stopped to extricate her skirt from the briars. “And they're certain it's Willy?”

“It must be. One of the firemen said it's him. It's awful: fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances.
Mam
didn't know whether to stay with
Dat
or run and hide. You know how shy she gets around Englishers—strangers, anyway.”

“Ya,”
Rachel agreed. At home or at church, her Aunt Hannah would chatter like a blue jay, but when she came to town, she rarely spoke, except in brief sentences, gaze cast downward. Even at Wagler's Grocery, where she shopped twice a month, she pointed at what she wanted in the deli case and one of the clerks just gave her a pound. No matter what she bought—bacon, scrapple, cheddar cheese—she got a pound.

“Rae-Rae, have you crossed here lately?” Mary Aaron asked, hesitation in her voice.

Mary Aaron's use of Rachel's nickname made her look ahead, through the trees. What she saw made her stomach pitch. The bridge had not fared well over the last few winters. The roof was gone, the sides were rotten and gaping, and there was a stretch of beam running out to the first stone piling without any flooring or walls at all. It took a minute to assess the situation and choose the best path across. “You game?” she asked her cousin.

“If you are.”

Moments later, they stood at the river's edge. It had rained heavily earlier in the week, and white water foamed around granite boulders protruding from the river. Rachel swallowed, glanced down at the raging force, and sucked in a deep breath. “It looks like it will just be a matter of moving from beam to beam,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the rush of the water. “If the worst happens, we swim.”

Mary Aaron stared at the rush of water and gulped. The first beam was broken. They'd have to jump down onto the rocks, then up to the next beam. “It would be awful cold.”

“It would be.” Rachel took a leaping step, landed on a slippery rock and turned back to her cousin. “So I guess we'd better not fall in.”

 

Ten minutes later, Rachel and Mary Aaron—somewhat worse for wear—climbed a stile over a stone wall onto Uncle Aaron's south pasture and were immediately engulfed by a wave of small Hostetlers, Masts, Beilers, and Bontraegers, accompanied by several dogs. The Zook twins were leading the pack—beating out Zebby Beiler on his black pony.