Dancing Dead

by Deborah Woodworth

  “Dear one, what has happened?” Rose knelt on the dusty floor and reached toward Mairin. She expected to be rebuffed. In all the troubled times she and Mairin had shared, she had never heard the child cry with such anguish. In fact, she rarely showed emotion at all. But this time she scrabbled to her knees and threw herself into Rose’s arms, wedging the panicked kitten between them.

  Rose extracted the kitten and handed her to Nora, then folded Mairin in her arms. She murmured soothing words and stroked the girl’s disheveled curls. Mairin sobbed until she began to hiccup. Rose tried to ease Mairin away a few inches, to see her face, but the child clung to her.

  Rose gave up and whispered in Mairin’s ear, “Can you tell me what has happened?”

  For several moments, Mairin’s small body remained rigid. Then she pulled back and looked at Rose. Her eyes were red and puffy, and she had the exhausted look of a child at the end of her endurance. She hiccupped and said, “I have to show you.”

  “All right, then. Can you do it now, or do you need to wait awhile longer?”

  “We can’t wait.” Mairin cast a worried glance in Nora’s direction. “I’ve got to keep Angel safe,” she said. “I’m afraid she’ll get hurt.” She squirmed out of Rose’s grip and reached for the kitten. “She’s got to stay with me. I have to protect her.”

  “What if you and I take Nora and Angel to Sister Agatha’s retiring room. Will that be safe enough?”

  Mairin bit her lower lip. “Okay, but they have to stay there until I get back.”

  “Agreed,” said Rose.

  By the time they’d left Nora and the kitten in Agatha’s care, Mairin seemed her old self again, though subdued. Rose’s heart was pumping with anxiety. Mairin was not a child who allowed much to penetrate her outer reserve. Mairin stared straight ahead, her face set in grim lines, as she led the way across the lawn toward the abandoned South Family Dwelling House. She paused at the cellar door, then seemed to change her mind and led Rose around the side of the building. They arrived at the sisters’ entrance. Mairin took Rose’s hand and stood in front of the door.

  “Should we go in?” Rose asked.

  Mairin nodded, but still held back. Fear clamped down on Rose’s throat, constricting her breathing. The child seemed terrified.

  “Couldn’t you just tell me what to look for?” Rose asked. “Then you could stay out here and wait for me.”

  “Nay,” Mairin said, “I’ll take you.”

  Rose had the distinct impression that Mairin was protecting her. She held the girl’s hand more tightly and pushed the door open. Mairin stepped in first. When Rose pulled the door shut behind her, the hallway seemed alive with eerie movement. But it was only swirling dust caught in the sunlight. She was allowing her imagination far too much freedom. It was entirely possible that someone was playing at haunting the village, for some unknown reason, and Mairin had found some evidence of the deception. That would surely upset the girl, who had come to believe the ghost was her guardian angel.

  Rose followed Mairin through the hallway and downstairs to the kitchen. From the kitchen, another short stairway led down to the root cellar, where Mairin had spent so much secret time—and where she had hidden her kitten. The dank, earthen smell had become familiar to Rose, but she didn’t find it pleasant. She couldn’t understand why Mairin was so drawn to the place.

  A narrow dirt passageway led all the way to the cellar door. Small storage rooms branched out on either side of the hallway. Mairin stopped at the first entrance on their left, across from the room in which she’d hidden her kitten. She stood in the opening, still and silent. The cavelike room was in near total darkness, so Rose took a step inside. Mairin squeezed her hand as if to stop her, then let go. Rose entered without her. The room’s packed earth walls were lined with strong, wide shelves that once had been filled with canned goods. As Rose’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw a bundle of clothing on one of the lower shelves at the far end of the room. So she’d been right—this was the ghost’s dressing room.

  Eagerly, she approached the bundle and knelt on the dirt floor. She reached out to grab it, but the fabric did not give. With instant certainty, she knew what she had touched. Someone was inside those clothes. Someone who did not respond to noise or to touch. No skin was visible because a wool jacket had been draped over the body’s head and arms. Behind Rose, Mairin whimpered. For her sake, Rose kept her own reactions under firm control. Though she wanted to leap back, she forced herself to lift the jacket and look underneath.

  Open eyes stared back at her. They did not see her, of course. They would never see again. She had found Brother Linus Eckhoff.

  Rose dropped the jacket back over his face and stood. She kept her back to Mairin for several moments while she tried to compose herself. Then she scooped Mairin into her arms and didn’t put her down until they were out in the sunshine.

  “I’m so very sorry you had to see that, little one,” Rose said, as they put some distance between themselves and the dwelling house. “I’m going to take you right to Agatha’s retiring room. I want you to tell her everything, okay? Will you promise me that?”

  “Okay, I promise.” Mairin pulled ahead, clearly eager to get to the comfort of Agatha’s presence.

  “I have to call the police, so I must leave you with Agatha.”

  “Okay.”

  Rose wished that she, too, could curl up at Agatha’s feet, but her duty lay elsewhere. One of her Children had been murdered.

  Thirteen

  “I WANT TO BE INVOLVED AT EVERY STAGE.” ROSE HURRIED to keep up with Sheriff Grady O’Neal as they neared the South Family Dwelling House. His two officers, Hank and Bar, followed behind, pausing now and then to give stern warnings to the crowd collecting behind them.

  “I can’t promise anything, Rose.” Grady said.

  “You can promise or not, it makes no difference. Someone is killing our guests and us, too. We have a terrible enemy, and I want to know who it is.”

  “Don’t you trust me to find out?”

  “It isn’t a matter of trust. I cannot—will not—sit idly and let a killer roam free among us. To kill another human being is the most despicable of sins.”

  “I agree, Rose, and I know that Brother Linus’s death is a terrible blow to you, but . . .” Grady reached the sisters’ entrance to the South Family Dwelling House and held the door open for Rose. This was not the time to quibble about using separate doors, she decided. She entered and waited for him.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  Rose led him toward the kitchen.

  “Look,” he said, “I know better than to try to keep you out of it altogether. Just be careful, okay? And could you keep Gennie out of it, for once?”

  Had she felt more lighthearted, Rose would have laughed. “My ability to tell Gennie what to do,” she said, “is equal to your ability to tell me what to do.”

  “I can’t argue with that. Down here?”

  “Yea. In the first room to your left.”

  Grady flipped on a large flashlight and examined the entire room before shining the light on the sad pile of clothing lying as if tossed on the shelf. Grady lit the floor in front of him and examined it as he approached the body. When he reached Linus, he shone his flashlight slowly over the body before gingerly lifting the jacket and examining the face.

  “Has anyone touched anything?”

  “Nay. Mairin and I both lifted the cloth over his face, just as you did. I asked Mairin, and she insisted she touched nothing else. Believe me, neither of us wanted to.”

  Grady looked back over Rose’s shoulder. “Hank, get on back to the Trustees’ Office and watch for Dr. Hanfield; bring him back here. Bar, you go cordon off all the entrances to this building, and keep folks off the grass. Get them to go home, if you can. I doubt we’ll find much in the way of evidence, but the last thing we need is folks trampling everything in sight.”

  He snapped off his flashlight and rejoined Rose in the hallway. “Did Mair
in say what time she found him?”

  “I’m afraid Mairin has been wandering around at night,” Rose said. “We’ve tried to get her to stay in bed, but . . . Well, she said that right around two o’clock on Sunday morning, she went to check on her kitten—it’s a long story, but she’s watching over a tiny kitten she found near this building. I’m allowing her to keep it in an unused retiring room in the Children’s Dwelling House. She played with it for a while, she said. When it went to sleep, she started watching out the window, which faces north and gives her a clear view of the back of this building. She was looking for lights—this so-called ghost, you know. She said she saw the cellar door—down that way, at the end of this hallway—she saw it open upward and someone came out.”

  “Could she really see much that time of night?”

  “She claims the moonlight was strong enough to see the figure, but not who it was. It was wearing a cloak, like this creature who keeps appearing in our buildings at night.”

  “I’ve heard about that.” Grady turned away, but not before Rose saw him smile. “This figure, was it short, tall, anything noticeable about it?”

  “She said it bent over while it ran, so she wasn’t sure if it was tall or short, man or woman.”

  “Ran where?”

  “West, from what she said. It could have been going back to Languor,” Rose added, with slight hope.

  “Yeah, or the Shaker Hostel. Why did she wait until now to tell you?”

  “The poor child was trying so hard to do as we’d asked—to stop wandering around where she wasn’t supposed to be. She was afraid we didn’t want her looking out windows, either, so she resisted admitting she’d done so.”

  Grady poked his head back into the dank storage room. “I’m going to take a closer look at him. No telling when Dr. Hanfield will get here, and I can’t wait forever. You stay here.”

  Rose ignored his order and followed him into the room. “Well, at least stand back,” Grady said. Rose ignored him a second time.

  Linus’s body was wedged between the lower and middle shelves, close to a dark corner. Even close up, it was hard to make out any details. Grady left the jacket hanging over the dead face and began an inch-by-inch examination of the rest of the body, using only his flashlight. Finding nothing, he began again, lightly touching areas as he went. He reached the hipbone and something crinkled.

  “Here, hold this.” Grady handed the flashlight to Rose. “Point it right here,” he said. He felt around the hipbone and found Linus’s pants pocket. Again, something crackled. Grady reached into the pocket and pulled out an envelope. It had been slit open and held a folded sheet of paper. Grady removed the page and opened it under the light.

  “Looks like some sort of official document,” he said. “Let me have the flashlight; the print is faded.”He held the pages low, with the top folded toward him, so Rose couldn’t see the writing clearly enough to read it. Abruptly, he refolded the paper and slipped it into an inside pocket of his uniform jacket. Even in the dim light, Rose could see Grady’s jaw muscles tighten. “Did you say that Wilhelm has been out of town on a sales trip?”

  “Yea, he’s been with Andrew. They are returning today.”

  Grady nodded, then spun toward the opening to the hallway. He reached the stairs and took the first two in one leap.

  “Please, Grady, tell me what’s going on.” Rose reached toward him, and stopped just short of touching him.

  Grady paused but kept his back to her. “I have reason to believe Wilhelm might be involved in these murders.”

  “What? That can’t be. He’s been out of the village the whole time, and anyway, what could Wilhelm possibly have to do with Mina Dunmore’s death? He barely knew her.”

  Grady turned to face her. The look on his face made her breath catch in her throat. “He may not have known Mrs. Dunmore very well, but he most certainly knew of her.” He patted his jacket. “What I have here is a birth certificate, dated forty years ago. It’s for a girl by the name of Wilhelmina Lundel. Her father was named Wilhelm Lundel, aged twenty-two. Sound familiar? Were you aware that Wilhelm had once been married?”

  Rose couldn’t seem to form words, so she shook her head and leaned against the cold packed earth of the root cellar wall for support. It smelled like the inside of a grave.

  “Aren’t you Shakers supposed to confess stuff—like deserting a wife and child?” Grady’s voice was cold and hard as Kentucky limestone. He turned on his heel and climbed the stairs toward the kitchen.

  With an effort of will, Rose suppressed her shock and hurried after him. As he was about to open the kitchen door, she called, “Grady, wait. Please don’t jump to conclusions. I can’t believe . . . Surely this is more complicated than it seems. How can you be sure Mina Dunmore really was Wilhelmina? Can’t we discuss this before you arrest Wilhelm?”

  Grady let go of the doorknob and turned around. “All right, I guess I owe you that. Of course we’ll investigate the authenticity of this document, but even if Mina Dunmore was using Wilhelmina’s identity, that doesn’t mean Wilhelm would have known she was a fake. In my experience, the simplest answer is usually the right one. And this looks pretty simple to me. Mina Dunmore comes here to find her father, maybe to embarrass him, maybe to get money, who knows. Probably not for a happy reunion, though. Wilhelm wants his past kept secret, and he sure doesn’t intend to be blackmailed. He wants to get rid of Mina Dunmore. Meanwhile, one of the brothers has gotten involved with her, and he learns Wilhelm’s secret, too. Maybe Linus finds Mina’s body, or maybe he watches Wilhelm kill her—either way, Linus knows he can identify the killer, so he decides to try a little blackmail himself. He gets Wilhelm to meet with him in the middle of the night and Wilhelm kills him. Wilhelm probably figured it would be weeks or even months before anyone found the body down here. Maybe he planned to return later with a shovel and bury the body. This floor is hard, but it’s still dirt, and Wilhelm is a strong man. Anyway, that’s more or less how I see it.”

  “There’s a problem with your theory,” Rose said. “If Wilhelm killed Linus, why on earth would he leave the birth certificate on the body? You found it easily; why wouldn’t he?”

  Grady hesitated, but not for long. “Maybe he heard sounds in the house, so he ran off, intending to come back later. Maybe he heard Mairin coming. As I said, he figured no one would come down here while he was out of town.”

  Rose shook her head vigorously. “Nay, that can’t be what happened. Mairin was still in the Children’s Dwelling House, looking out the window, when she saw the cloaked figure leave by the cellar door. And besides, how much effort would it take to extract that envelope from Linus’s pocket and take it away? Surely he would have had time to do that, even if he heard noises.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He might not have known exactly where the document was, or even that Linus had it on his person. And we don’t know what interrupted him; maybe he needed to get out fast.”

  Rose brushed a curtain of errant red curls off her forehead and poked them under her white cap, as if that would clear her mind. “Are you thinking that our ghost might have frightened him?”

  Grady shrugged. “It’s certainly possible. Not that I think it’s a real ghost, no matter what everyone around here believes. But Wilhelm might have thought it was real and run like the dickens. I’ll bet that would make him forget all about searching the victim’s pockets for evidence. Anyway, he’d have felt pretty sure he’d have a chance to come back. Look, Rose, you didn’t know about Wilhelm’s past—his marriage and baby and so forth. You have to admit his behavior has been mighty suspicious.”

  “I wouldn’t necessarily know about Wilhelm’s past. He came from another village while I was still a child. He probably confessed to Brother Obadiah, who was elder then, and Obadiah might have kept the details to himself. We used to confess often to the entire community, and many of us still do on occasion, but it isn’t absolutely essential. Wilhelm is not acting suspicious, he’s just . . . acting like W
ilhelm. He keeps apart; he believes that’s how an elder should be, so he can lead with authority. It’s one of the many things we don’t agree on, but it isn’t evidence of murder. He is truly a devout Shaker, no matter what you may think of him otherwise. He simply would never kill. I will not believe that he is responsible for these deaths; it’s unthinkable.”

  “I’m sorry, Rose,” Grady said. “I disagree. And I can’t take the chance of Wilhelm slipping away while we investigate.” He ran a hand over his face as if suddenly tired. “One thing I want you to know,” he said. “I really believe we’ll find all the evidence we need; I’m not just turning on Wilhelm because he’s a Shaker. I wouldn’t do that. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know.” Rose felt the strength ebb from her body. For the first time, her determination flagged. At the moment, she saw no way out of this mess, and it might well destroy her village, her home, her Family. Somehow she had to find the strength to keep pushing through the fog until she reached clarity. Even if it meant Wilhelm’s destruction. Many times she had wished Wilhelm gone, out of her hair, but not like this. She couldn’t let him be blamed without absolute proof of his guilt—and only she would be resolute enough to search for that proof.

  “What is the meaning of this? Why was I not told about these killings?” Elder Wilhelm ignored Grady and scowled at Rose as he lumbered toward them like an enraged bear. He and Andrew had returned to the village early, while Grady was still investigating, and he’d come to find them immediately. His thick white hair looked as if he’d just leaped out of bed and forgotten to comb it. A small crowd was gathering around the group, looking for entertainment.

  “Wilhelm, perhaps we should discuss this in the Ministry House, where we can be private,” Rose said.

  “I should have heard the news from thee,” Wilhelm said to Rose, ignoring her hand signals to keep his voice down. “Instead, I heard rumors and innuendo, and it was left to Sister Elsa to give me the truth.”