Murder, Handcrafted (Amish Quilt Shop Mystery)

by Isabella Alan

  “Angie,” Mitchell said in his most reasonable tone, which I found particularly annoying at the moment, “we’ll search the woods. We’ll follow every lead. You know that. Now go inside the house. I need to talk to Jonah and my officers alone.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “Please,” he said, staring at me with those aquamarine eyes, which always seemed to turn me into a puddle.

  I frowned, but I knew I could find out what transpired between Mitchell and Jonah when I had the chance to talk to my friend, and I was concerned about my parents, especially my dad since he had an injured back. However, I wouldn’t let Mitchell get off that easily. “Fine,” I said, expressing all of my displeasure with my voice.

  He sighed.

  I looked around for Oliver and found him lying in the grass next to Petunia. The goat, who usually enjoyed crowds, lay on the grass with her head on her front hooves. I knelt beside her. “Are you all right, Petunia?”

  Before I knew it, Jonah was kneeling beside me.

  “Jonah, I still have some questions for you,” Mitchell called, but there was resignation in his voice.

  Jonah stood, pulling the large goat up by her lead. Petunia struggled to her feet, but then gave me a strong head butt that sent me reeling back. Luckily Mitchell caught me before I tumbled into the grass.

  Mitchell held on to my upper arms until I was solidly upright, and then let me go. I hadn’t even known he had crossed the yard to join us.

  “Looks like she’s fine after all,” I muttered.

  “Maybe,” Mitchell said, “you should put Petunia somewhere else. She tends to be a distraction.”

  Briefly, I wondered how many county sheriffs had to worry about distracting goats in the middle of their police investigations, not to mention a possible Bigfoot sighting. Mitchell took it all seriously and professionally.

  Jonah tried to hand me Petunia’s lead. “Can you take her?”

  “Me? Take her where?” I squeaked.

  “To your shop. I’ll come pick her up after the police are through with me.”

  “Why did you bring her here anyway?” I asked.

  His shoulders dropped. “She ate Miriam’s favorite apron. I was afraid if I left her on the farm, I’d come home to goat stew.”

  I grimaced and scratched the goat between the ears. Sure, Petunia was annoying, but I didn’t want anything to happen to her. I’ve seen Miriam when she was mad. It wasn’t pretty.

  “Do you just want me to drop her off at your farm? It’s no trouble. I could put her in the barn with the other goats, so she’s out of Miriam’s way,” I offered. “Maybe that would be better.”

  “Nee. Nee,” he said quickly. “Miriam would not like that. It’s best if Petunia stays with you, and you both stay away from my farm.”

  I interpreted that to mean Miriam would not like to see me. Ever since I moved back to Ohio, all I’d received from Jonah’s wife was dirty looks and blatant animosity. I wish Miriam was more accepting of me. The Grabers, other than the Millers, were my closest friends in the county. I wish Jonah’s wife was open to being my friend or at least tolerating me.

  I sighed with resignation, not sounding much different from Mitchell had a moment ago. “Okay, I’ll take her. She can hang out in the yard behind Running Stitch until you can come and fetch her.”

  Jonah let out a sigh. “Danki, Angie. I don’t want anything to happen to her. I have grown quite fond of her.”

  Mitchell took a step back in the direction of the crime scene and waited. “Now that the fate of the goat is settled, Jonah, will you join me by the trailer? I would like you to take me through your discovery moment by moment.”

  Jonah nodded, and two of the men I cared for the most walked away. One was the cop and one was the suspect. Mitchell liked Jonah. The two men were friends, in a way, at least through me. Mitchell would know in his heart that Jonah couldn’t have killed anyone, but Mitchell was also a cop. He wouldn’t be able to ignore the facts. Jonah had means and opportunity to set the electrified traps for the ill-fated electrician. The only piece Mitchell was missing was Jonah’s motive, which I knew about even though Mitchell did not.

  “Let’s go, guys,” I said to Oliver and Petunia. I headed around the side of the house toward the front yard, but two EMTs were coming from that direction with a gurney with an empty black body bag lying on the top of it. I spun around. “I think we should go through the house.”

  I wanted to leave the yard quickly. The last thing I wanted to see was the EMTs and coroner roll Griffin’s body into the waiting bag, especially if he was in as poor condition as Mitchell had described. I had seen that before, and it was never pleasant.

  I walked into my mother’s house with a goat on a leash and my Frenchie on my heels. We would see how well this would go with my mother. The best course of action would be to move Petunia through the house without being seen. I could tether her to a tree in the front yard before my mother was the wiser.

  There were two crime scene techs in the kitchen examining the broken French doors. If the techs thought it was odd that I was walking a French bulldog and a Nubian goat through my mother’s half-destroyed kitchen, they didn’t let on. Maybe they were immune to my antics at this point. I had been dating their beloved sheriff for well over a year.

  Mitchell’s men might have ignored my menagerie, but my mother could not.

  “Angela Braddock!” my mother screeched the moment she saw me. “What are you doing with a goat in my house? Is it not enough that your father is injured and a man has died in my backyard? Now you bring a farm animal to tramp through my dining room and mark up my new floors?”

  I looked behind me. Sure enough, there was a trail of muddy hoofprints, but I really didn’t know what difference that made. There were multiple muddy boot prints all over the floor, crisscrossing the polished hardwood in all directions. I knew better than to say that to my mother.

  Mom stared at the floor, placed a hand over her mouth, and burst into tears.

  I blinked at her for a moment. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen my mother really cry. Maybe when my aunt Eleanor, her sister, died, but I couldn’t actually recall her shedding a tear. My father was the sensitive parent in my family. He had been known to weep at sappy movies and holiday commercials on TV.

  Since seeing my mother cry came as such a shock, it took me a second too long to react, and I caught her just as she appeared to be crashing to the muddy hardwood floor under her feet.

  “It’s all so horrible,” she cried into her hands. “That poor man.”

  I made sympathetic noises and guided my mother toward the living room where Deputy Anderson had said Dad had been questioned by another officer.

  Not able to get Petunia outside, I walked her into the living room with her leash in my left hand. My right arm was around my weeping mother.

  “AngieBear!” My father waved from his enormous brown leather chair. His walker sat within easy reach. “One of the officers told me that you were here, but then he wouldn’t allow me to go into the backyard to see you.”

  Mom sniffled.

  My father’s attention turned to her. “Daphne? Are you all right?” Dad sounded worried. I bet he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen my mother cry either. He looked to me. “What’s happened?” He struggled as if he was about to get up.

  “Please don’t stand up, Kent. Your back.” My mother sniffled.

  “She saw the tracks that the police made on the floor,” I said, deciding to leave Petunia out of it, “and lost it.”

  “Oh, my dear.” Dad held out his arms, and my mother perched on his lap. Seeing that they might need a minute, I took it as an opportunity to put Petunia outside. I didn’t want her within view when my mother collected herself. I hoped the crying jag would erase my mother’s memory of the goat altogether. I didn’t hold out much hope
of that happening though. I told Oliver to stay in the living room with my parents before slipping out.

  In the front yard, I walked Petunia to the one lone tree and wrapped her lead around it. She knocked me with the top of her head, more gently this time.

  I scratched her behind her right ear. “I know that you don’t like to be away from the action, but you can’t go in the backyard and Mom will have a fit if you’re inside the house.”

  She dropped her head and started eating some of my mother’s hostas that were circling the tree. I groaned, hoping my mother wouldn’t notice. She had bigger problems with the dead body in her backyard, but the munched hostas might just send her over the edge.

  Across the street from my parents’ stone house, bright white sheep peppered the hillside. South of the sheep farm was a dense wood, much like the one found behind my parents’ house. Mom and Dad didn’t have any neighbors to speak of. It was the perfect place to commit a murder and not be seen. I wondered what the Amish family living on the sheep farm thought about all the flashing lights and sheriff vehicles coming from the top of the hill.

  Across the street there was an enormous oak tree in the middle of the hillside. Usually, the tree was surrounded by sheep enjoying the shade it offered. The sheep were as far away from the oak tree as they could get. It wasn’t so much the lack of sheep around the tree that caught my attention, but something half hidden by the tree’s trunk. The figure rose and stood. I stared, blinked, and stared.

  It looked like—I could hardly even think it—it looked like Bigfoot.

  “This has to be someone’s idea of a joke,” I said.

  Chapter Seven

  The sound of an oncoming buggy momentarily distracted me from the thing hiding behind the tree. Eban Hoch drove a small pony cart up the steep hill to my parents’ home. The closer he drew to the house, the slower he went. He seemed to be taking in the scene slowly. I imagined that the ambulance, police cars, and crime scene vans were not what he expected to find when he left for my parents’ house that morning.

  I turned back to the tree. The figure was gone, but I suddenly remembered seeing it in the woods behind my parents’ house the day before. I hadn’t gotten a good look at who or what that had been.

  I ran over to Eban as he parked his pony cart behind a police cruiser. “Did you see that?”

  Eban climbed out of his cart and tethered his pony’s reins to my parent’s mailbox post. “What is going on? Where is Jonah?”

  I pointed across the street. “Did you see that?”

  He pulled down on the reins to make sure they were secure. “Did I see what?”

  That was a tough question to answer. “I thought I saw someone behind that tree there.” Again, I pointed at the giant oak tree that must have been at least sixty feet tall. The trunk was easily ten feet around.

  “Nee. I didn’t see anyone.” He pointed at the house. “Why are the police here?”

  I shot one more look at the tree. “I might as well tell you. There’s been an accident and the electrician Griffin Bright, who was here yesterday, is dead.”

  Eban’s face paled to a deathly white. “He’s dead?”

  I nodded.

  “What should I do? Should I go home?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “The police might want to talk to you.”

  “Me? Why would they want to talk to me?” He appeared a shade paler.

  “You were here yesterday when Griffin was.”

  He frowned. “Maybe I should go find Jonah and ask him about working today.” He took a step in that direction.

  “He’s in the backyard with the police.”

  Eban hesitated.

  “Jonah would like to see you, I’m sure,” I said encouragingly.

  Eban nodded and walked around the side of the house.

  That left me alone in the front yard with Petunia and whatever I had seen across the street. Part of me wondered if I had imagined it. I mentally cursed Deputy Anderson for putting the Bigfoot idea in my head.

  But to be on the safe side, there was no way I was leaving Petunia outside with a Sasquatch running around. Jonah entrusted her care to me. What would I say to him if I had let an imaginary creature eat his goat for breakfast?

  I stared intently at the oak tree, but whatever had been there was gone. Where could it have gone? The tree stood in the middle of a pasture. There was nowhere to hide, and I hadn’t seen it run away, but then again, I had been distracted by Eban’s arrival. Whatever it had been could have dashed into the woods to the south then.

  I still had to tell Mitchell about what I saw. Whoever or whatever it was lurked around my parents’ house where a murder had taken place. It might be the killer. The one thing that I knew was that it couldn’t have been Nahum Shetler. The thing was too big, and Nahum had never been shy about confronting me before.

  I headed back into the house with Petunia lagging behind me eating as many of my mother’s flowers she could as she went. At the door, I ran into Deputy Anderson, whose face was still flushed. Part of me felt sorry for the guy. True, he wasn’t the most competent deputy in the world, but he idolized Mitchell and wanted only to impress the sheriff. The sad part was he failed at that, repeatedly.

  “Anderson,” I said, holding on to Petunia’s lead, “I just saw something behind that oak tree across the street.” I swallowed. “I think it was whatever Jonah saw when he discovered the body. You should go over there and check it out.”

  Color drained from his cheeks as if I had asked him to jump from the top of the Empire State Building. “Why didn’t you check it out?” he asked.

  I scowled. “Me? I’m not a police officer. I shouldn’t be running off after potential murderers.”

  “That never stopped you before,” he countered.

  He had a point. “I couldn’t leave Petunia.”

  Deputy Anderson stared across the street again at the tree where I had seen the thing. I still had no idea where it could have gone. It was hard to guess the size because the tree was so far away.

  “Well?” I asked. “Are you going over there?”

  He chewed on his lip. “The sheriff sent me out here to get more evidence bags.”

  “You’re wasting time. It might be getting way.”

  “It?” He swallowed.

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know that it’s an it, but it’s a something. You need to go check it out.”

  The young deputy shook his head with the defiance of a toddler. “I can’t. The sheriff would wonder what became of me if I didn’t return immediately.”

  “Sure, Mitchell would,” I argued. “But once you explain where you were, he’d want you to do this more.”

  “I’d want Anderson to do what?” Mitchell asked.

  I turned to find a tired-looking sheriff standing in my parents’ wide front doorway. There were circles under his eyes that I hadn’t noticed when he’d first arrived. Maybe they had appeared after seeing Griffin Bright’s battered body. I knew every murder that happened in the county sat squarely on his shoulders. He took each death personally and investigated it to the very end. I wondered if the extra weight this time was because the murder involved my parents.

  Mom and Dad liked Mitchell and were always kind to him, but Mitchell couldn’t forget how far my mother had gone to convince me to take my ex-fiancé, Ryan Dickinson, back. Ryan was a successful corporate law attorney and member of Dallas’s high society. Mom thought he was a perfect fit for me and the life she had wanted me to live. Once upon a time, I had too. Then, I met Mitchell. I knew I was misguided in that regard. My mother disagreed with me and went as far as to bring Ryan to Ohio with her and my father my first Christmas back in Holmes County. It had all worked out in the end, but Mitchell had not been amused.

  I cleared my throat, and pushed thoughts about that year’s super-awkward Christmas to the back of my
mind. I had more important things to think about at the moment, such as murder and a Bigfoot on the run. “I thought I saw a person over by the side of that tree. He was watching the house.”

  “A hiker?” he asked.

  “Noooo.” I drew out the word. “It sort of looked like a cross between a man and a gorilla.”

  He gave me a look that said, Et tu, Angie?

  I waved my hands. “I’m not saying it’s Bigfoot, but there was something there. I told Anderson he should check it out.”

  Mitchell studied me. “Is this a new Angie, one not willing to run headfirst into danger?”

  I frowned.

  There was a little of the sparkle back in his aquamarine eyes. “Because if it is, I really like her.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “I resent that remark.”

  Mitchell nodded to Deputy Anderson. “Go check it out.”

  The deputy hesitated.

  “Anderson?” Mitchell arched his dark brow.

  “Right, sir.” He straightened his spine and marched across the street and down the hillside.

  Mitchell shook his head and removed his cell phone from his belt. “Send two uniforms across the street to help Anderson search for a suspect matching the description that Jonah Graber gave us at the crime scene . . . Yes, that description.” He ended the call without saying good-bye.

  For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to have the power to bark orders like Mitchell just had and have people snap into action. I had proof that they did because two uniformed officers jogged around the side of the house. Mitchell pointed across the street and they took off down the hill much faster than Deputy Anderson had. I could see all three deputies circling the tree as if playing an odd version of Ring Around the Rosy.

  “What’s that look on your face for?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking that I would like people to hop to when I give the word. Even Mattie questions me when I tell her to do something at the shop, and she’s Amish.”