Toxic Toffee

by Amanda Flower

  Juliet gasped and covered her mouth as if she’d just thought of something.

  I put my hand on her arm. “Juliet, what is it? Are you all right?”

  “Do you think the man’s death and the break-in are related?”

  I denied it, but part of me wondered if she was right.

  Chapter 6

  Juliet went on, “What if there is a madman on the loose breaking in to churches and killing Amish farmers? No one is safe! What has the world come to? What will we do?”

  “Juliet,” I said as calmly as I could while I took a quick glance over my shoulder. I gave a sigh of relief when I saw that Juliet hadn’t gotten anyone’s attention. An EMT was setting a stretcher on the ground next to Stephen. “Juliet, I don’t know how these two things could be connected. The break-in at this church was last night, and this is a day later. Stephen was talking to Margot and me when he fell, and there was no one else around who might have wanted to hurt him. I think it was just a sad case of a heart attack.” I took a deep breath. “There is no reason to think it has anything to do with the church at all,” I said.

  She shuddered. “The two crimes were too close together to be an accident.”

  Juliet had me there, but we still didn’t know that Stephen’s death was a crime. I prayed that Stephen had died of natural causes. Still a tragedy, but not a crime.

  “When I heard what happened on the square, I had to come and see what I could do to help. I didn’t want to leave Reverend Brook in the church alone, but when I heard that someone had fallen, I knew I would do better to come here and offer my assistance.”

  Only Juliet would believe that she could offer any assistance under these circumstances. She was a sweet woman, but maybe a tad delusional about what she could do in a crisis situation.

  “These two terrible things might be related,” Juliet said. “They really might.” She looked around. “Which means we must keep an eye out for the third. They say bad things always come in threes.”

  I shivered. I prayed that Juliet was wrong about this one.

  “Bailey!” Aiden called my name as he walked toward us.

  Juliet hurried to her son, hugging Jethro to her chest as she went. She gripped Aiden’s forearm. “Aiden, do you think this death could be connected to the break-in at the church? Do you think someone is breaking in to churches and killing people?”

  Gently, Aiden squeezed his mother’s hand and removed it from his arm. “Mom, I don’t see how at this point.”

  I frowned as I noted “at this point.” That told me that Aiden wasn’t ruling it out completely.

  His eyes narrowed. “And why do you say Stephen Raber was killed? What do you know?”

  She dropped her hand to her side. “I don’t know anything, son, but you must admit that murder has become more and more common in the village.”

  Aiden closed his eyes for a moment as if he couldn’t believe that he was having this conversation with his mother. He turned to me. “Bailey, I need to take your statement.”

  I nodded.

  He said to his mother, “Why don’t you go back to the church. Reverend Brook will need you. Deputy Little will be there within the hour, just to make sure the church is secure.”

  She patted her son’s cheek. “All right, son. You’re such a good boy.” She turned to me. “I was just telling Bailey that we must start discussing the wedding, now that she’s back in the village.”

  I grimaced.

  Aiden and I watched as his mother and Jethro made their way back across the square.

  Aiden glanced at me. “Wedding?”

  “No wedding. You don’t think I was behind any wedding talk, do you?”

  A slight frown crossed his forehead. “I would never think that, Bailey.”

  Before I could spend much time wondering what that meant, he asked me to recap what had happened up to the moment Stephen fell and then immediately after. I did as I was asked, and this time I remembered to tell him about Stephen’s son, who’d taken Puff from my arms.

  “Did you get the son’s name?” he asked.

  I shook my head, feeling disappointed in myself.

  He gave me a half smile, and the adorable dimple in his right cheek appeared. “Don’t worry about it. It will be easy enough to find out if he’s Raber’s son.”

  “Thanks.” I paused. “I just can’t believe that there has been another sudden death in the village. I told your mom that it couldn’t have been anything other than a heart attack, but I don’t know.”

  He frowned. “I don’t know either. The coroner will be the one to tell me.” He ran his hand through his blond hair. It stuck up in all directions, and despite the solemnity of the situation, I couldn’t help but notice how cute he looked like that.

  “Bailey, Bailey!” Margot cried from across the square. “We still need to discuss the toffee rabbit when you’re done with the police.”

  I sighed. “That woman has a one-track mind.”

  “Tell me about it,” Aiden replied.

  Chapter 7

  After speaking with Aiden, I left the square. There wasn’t much more I could do there, and if I stayed too long, I was afraid Juliet would return and start talking to me about china patterns. As I crossed the street to my candy shop, my head spun with rabbits, death, breaking and entering, and toffee. Even I knew that was a weird combination.

  It seemed so strange to me that someone would break in to the church kitchen to cook. In all likelihood, the church would have let that person use the kitchen in a pinch. I had even used it last year when the one at Swissmen Sweets was closed. Why break in when all you had to do was ask permission? I thought that the incident at the church made me more uneasy than Stephen’s death. Probably because like Juliet, in my heart, I suspected that the two incidents were related. The only reason to break in to the church to cook something would be to whip up something you shouldn’t be cooking—or at least that was my working theory.

  I knew that I should let Aiden get to the bottom of it all. He was the cop. He was the best cop. I should trust him to take care of this because I had more than enough to worry about on my own plate. I knew I should stay out of it. But past experience told me I wasn’t sure that I could.

  In an attempt to ignore my natural curiosity or what Aiden would call my natural nosiness, I spent the rest of the day working in the candy shop and making a plan for the giant toffee rabbit. The more I tried to talk Margot out of the toffee bunny, the more she dug her heels in. The woman really loved toffee. I settled on a six-foot-tall tan-and-white rabbit. The rabbit would be standing on his hind legs to provide the extra height. Margot wanted him tall. I decided that I would carve him out of Rice Krispies treats covered in chocolate, and then use toffee pieces as the top layer of his body to resemble fur. Hopefully, that would be enough toffee to satisfy Margot. The easiest way to make the rabbit would be to carve him in three pieces: the head, the torso, and the hindquarters, and then fuse those pieces together. I was excited to see how it would turn out. It would certainly be unlike any rabbit in any other Amish town. Charlotte and I worked on the rabbit throughout the rest of the day, and I had the hindquarters and head almost completely carved before I grew too tired to see straight.

  It was seven in the evening, still early by all accounts, but it had been a long day traveling from New York, seeing a man die in front of me, and then working on the giant rabbit.

  Across from me, Charlotte was drooping over a tray of toffee. She was as tired as I was. My grandmother, who would be up at four the next morning to make fresh candies for that day, had retired over an hour ago.

  I set my chocolate carving knife on the stainless-steel island in the middle of the kitchen. “Charlotte, you should quit for the evening.”

  She snapped to attention. “But I can’t leave you here to do all the work yourself.”

  I smiled. “I appreciate that, but I’m going to call it quits for the night too. We can finish the rabbit tomorrow. We both have had a long day. We’ll
do better work after we’ve rested.”

  “If you’re sure,” she said, looking relieved.

  “More than sure.”

  Charlotte and I made short work of cleaning the kitchen. I said good night to Charlotte and Nutmeg and left the shop for my new home.

  The best part of my rental house was I could walk there. I went to the corner of Apple Street and Main, traveled two blocks down Apple, and turned onto Cherry Lane; the third house down was my little yellow house. The small, nine-hundred-square-foot home was the perfect size for me. After months of sharing the spare bedroom in my grandmother’s apartment above Swissmen Sweets with Charlotte, the space felt giant.

  Next to the little house, there was a one-car unattached garage, and just as Aiden had promised, my suitcase was just inside the side door.

  I rolled the suitcase out of the garage and to the back door of my little house. With my hip, I held open the back screen door as I unlocked the wooden door. I stepped into the kitchen. After being gone for six weeks, I thought I would find the place very still and more than a little dusty. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There wasn’t a speck of dust in the kitchen and there was a vase of bright pink tulips on the kitchen counter. There wasn’t a note as to who had cleaned the house or who had left me the flowers, but my grandmother’s footprint was all over the place. It was just like her to do this without telling me and to do it even when she was swamped with Easter candy orders. I was so touched that tears sprang to my eyes. I really was tired. I had told Charlotte to go to bed, and I think I needed to follow my own advice.

  I inhaled the vinegar-and-lavender scent of the kitchen, which was even more proof to me that my grandmother was the one who’d cleaned the house. Those two smells mingled together always reminded me of her.

  My apartment back in New York had been in a newer building. Much like JP Chocolates, my small studio had been styled in white, clean lines, and chrome. My new home in Harvest was nothing like that, and I realized that’s how I liked it. The kitchen was old with a porcelain farm sink and black-and-white checkered floor. The tile was chipped and worn from years of use, but a few strategically placed Amish-made rugs covered up the worst of it.

  There was a large case opening that looked out through the kitchen into the combination dining and living room. A big picture window in the front of the house showed the tiny front yard that was dominated by a crabapple tree. The tree was in bloom with bright pink blossoms. I had only just moved into the house before I’d left for New York, so I still didn’t have any blinds or curtains on the front window. Tulips and daffodils that the previous tenant had planted years before were in bloom around the base of the tree and on either side of the front door.

  I should have put some type of window treatment up, but honestly, there wasn’t much to see if someone decided to peek in the window.

  The front of my house was bare. I had a small table with four chairs, a loveseat, and a low bookcase that held some of my many cookbooks and a small television. It was all I really needed. After living with my grandmother so many months in a half-Amish existence, I had learned that I could make do with a lot fewer possessions in my life. I never bothered to have most of my things shipped from New York. Cass sold them or gave them away for me. She really was the best friend a girl could ask for.

  I turned on the fan in the overhead light fixture in the main room. The fan made a click, click, click sound until it got started. When it spun at a certain speed, the clicking stopped. I thought I would have Aiden look at it the next time he visited, which I hoped would be soon. I hadn’t realized until I saw him at the airport how much I had really missed him. I had been in a few relationships in the past. Some bad and some okay, but when I had been away from those men, I couldn’t remember ever missing them. The fact that I missed Aiden was telling.

  As I walked around the living room, out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadow move across the window. I jumped and then shook off my jumpiness. I knew that it must be from travel fatigue coupled with what had happened to Stephen Raber on the square. I still couldn’t believe the man was dead. In the few minutes I had spoken to him, he seemed like such a nice person, and I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to all those rabbits. They would need to be taken care of by someone. Raber’s mysterious son maybe?

  I was convinced that I’d imagined the shadow at the window, but just to make sure, I walked over to it and looked out onto the yard. I didn’t see anything amiss, and I was about to turn away when I caught a glimpse of a person at the front door. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  A knock came, and I told myself I was being ridiculous. It was probably just a neighbor stopping by to say hello. Folks did that in the country.

  I looked through the peephole in the door, but I didn’t see anyone there. I grabbed a throw pillow from the couch and slowly opened the door. I didn’t know what I planned to do if there was some type of bandit—as Juliet would say—on the other side of the door. Challenge him to a pillow fight perhaps?

  Finally, with the door all the way open and the pillow ready in my left hand, I saw who was on the other side. It was the young Amish man I had seen on the square that morning, and even if I hadn’t recognized him, the white rabbit with the pink bow in his arms would have given his identity away.

  “Why are you holding that pillow like that?” he asked.

  I lowered the pillow. “I was fluffing,” I said matter-of-factly. “You know how pillows can lose their shape when they are sat on too much.”

  He pressed his mouth into a line as if he were not sure about that at all, and as if he weren’t sure about me either. “If you are busy with your pillow, I can come back later.” He took a step back.

  I smacked the pillow a few times. “The pillow is fine. What are you doing here?” I hated that the question came out so bluntly, but he had scared me half to death.

  “I—I wanted to talk to you.” He removed his black felt hat and made a move as if he was going to enter the house with the rabbit.

  I blocked him.

  “Can I come inside? I need to talk to you.”

  “To me? What about?” I asked, not moving an inch.

  “About my father.”

  He looked so heartbroken that I naturally stepped back, and it was just enough space for him and the rabbit to enter my home.

  “I—I’m sorry for bothering you like this.” His voice was hesitant.

  I still had a firm hold on my pillow just in case. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

  He opened and closed his mouth. It was as if the words were there, but he just couldn’t get them all the way out.

  “It’s okay,” I said, dropping the throw pillow back on the loveseat. “Why don’t we start with an easier question?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Eli. Eli Raber.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Eli. I’m Bailey King.”

  “I know.” He nodded again. “Everyone in the village knows who you are.”

  I wrinkled my brow. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Why don’t we talk at the table?” I pointed at the small table in the corner of the room.

  Eli nodded and sat in one of the chairs.

  “Would you like something to drink? Water? Coffee? Tea? I’m sorry to say I don’t have much else in here. I’ve been away from home for two months.”

  He nodded. “You were in New York on television.”

  I wasn’t too surprised that he knew about my show since it had been announced in the local Millersburg paper and had been hot gossip in the village for a few weeks. “I guess. I haven’t been on television yet. We were just filming my upcoming cooking show. Did you read about the show in the paper?”

  He shook his head. “I know Emily Esh—I mean Emily Keim.”

  I smiled, feeling a little better that Eli was friends with Emily, whom I trusted. “I’m getting used to the idea of Emily being married too.” I stood up f
rom the table and walked into the kitchen. I went to the tap and filled a glass of water for him, then set it on the table. “Is Emily the reason you’re here?”

  “Daniel Keim, her husband, is actually my gut friend.” He took a long pull from the water glass. “When he heard what happened, he left me a message on my farm’s shed phone. He said that I should talk to you because you helped him when he was in trouble last year.”

  This was true. I had helped Daniel Keim and his family when Daniel’s father, Thad Keim, was wrongly accused of murder. I had been the one who discovered that Thad was innocent of the crime.

  “You got his daed out of jail.”

  I nodded.

  “So, can you help me find out who killed my daed?” He looked down to hide the tears in his eyes, but a single tear fell, landing on the white rabbit in his lap.

  Chapter 8

  I swallowed hard and realized that I should have gotten a glass of water for myself too. “You want me to find out who killed your father?”

  “Ya, it is what you do,” Eli said.

  I frowned. “It’s not exactly what I do. I make candy and carve chocolate. I don’t solve murders for a living. That’s police work.”

  “But you have solved a murder more than once.”

  I couldn’t argue with him there. “Why do you think your dad was murdered? The police and the EMTs today seemed to think that he had a heart attack.”

  “Because he’s been afraid. There have been notes, threatening notes. They’ve gotten worse in recent days.” He swallowed. “He didn’t know I found out about the notes.”

  My brow went up. “Who wrote them?”

  “I don’t know. I think my daed knew, but I can’t ask him now. Even if I had asked him, he would have never told me. He could be secretive.” He took a sip from his water glass. “It’s not the Amish way to share your troubles with your children. It shows weakness.”

  I frowned. “Secretive” sounded worrisome to me when it was coming from a young man talking about his dead father. “Have you seen the notes?”