Falling to Pieces

by Vannetta Chapman

  Chapter 27

  CALLIE WALKED OUT to her car after closing up the shop Friday afternoon. Her arms were loaded with things she was taking to Deborah’s—the new fabric Deborah had ordered, the novel Callie was currently reading, cuttings from her herb garden, and charts showing the auction results.

  The first quilt had brought a respectable price. They’d barely paid attention to the closing price of the second quilt, since it occurred on the night Max was shot—but as she’d hoped, the shorter auction period resulted in a higher price. The third quilt—the signature quilt—was closing at midnight tonight. So far, the bids were higher than either of the previous two.

  Setting everything in the front passenger seat, her heart ached that Max wouldn’t be sitting there, but the doc had assured her he’d be ready to come home soon—maybe even tomorrow.

  She had slammed the door shut and walked around to the driver’s side, when she saw Shane Black pull into the parking lot in his vintage Buick.

  Funny how seeing him didn’t anger her anymore.

  He could still be here to arrest her, but somehow she didn’t think so. Since Max had been shot, she figured the focus of the investigation was officially off her, though Adalyn had said yesterday at their meeting that according to her inside sources, she wasn’t completely off the radar yet.

  Black unfolded himself from the car. It was painted a mustard yellow with a black hood and black stripes down the sides, and it looked like something an Amish teen would drive on his rumspringa, or an English teen would drive to college—in his dreams. He covered the distance between the two cars in a few easy strides.

  “Officer.”

  “Harper.”

  “What brings you out tonight?”

  He didn’t answer right away; he took a few minutes to study her intently, as if he were assessing her condition. What did he have to do that for? She was fine as long as they were bantering back and forth. If he was going to get serious on her, she might tear up.

  A month ago she’d never have thought she could care so much about a dog, but then Max was more than a dog. Acknowledging that was hard. It was as if her heart had begun to thaw and she was feeling things so much more acutely now.

  It hurt, like a fresh sunburn.

  But it felt better than the numbness she had lived with for over a year.

  “I wanted to check on you.”

  “I’m okay,” she said honestly.

  “Good.” He joined her, leaning against the blue rental. She really needed to do something about finding a permanent car if she was staying.

  Was she staying?

  “How’s Max?”

  “Doing well. He might come home tomorrow, or the next day.”

  “Glad to hear it. Place isn’t the same without him.”

  Callie nudged him with her shoulder. “You act as if you stop by every day.”

  “I might, if you were a bit more friendly.”

  “Tell me you have something new to report, because your people skills are terrible.”

  “No. Not really. I was just driving by and saw you loading stuff in this little car. Why do you drive such a small car?”

  “I was just wondering the same thing myself.”

  “Own a shop, have a big dog, probably will get married and have a passel of kids—”

  “That’s a bit personal, don’t you think?”

  “I’m just saying. You might want to think about a bigger car when you get rid of this rental.”

  “I appreciate the advice, Officer Black.”

  “Sure. It’s free.”

  “Suspected it was.” Callie opened her door, buckled up, and thought to turn down the radio before she started the ignition.

  Black made as if he was going to step away, but then pushed the door open wider, stuck his head back in, and said casually, “Poison doesn’t always kill a person.”

  Callie nearly popped the car out of park by mistake. “Say again?”

  Looking out at her yard, Black ran his hand over his face, which already sported a dark shadow, though no doubt he had shaved it that morning. The man had to have Italian genes. “Turns out poison doesn’t always kill a person, like you said. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t … what … why would you say such a thing?”

  He shrugged, stood up straighter. “Just found it interesting.”

  Slapping the top of the car, he waved. “I won’t keep you. Have a good evening.” Then he shut her car door and walked away.

  The man was infuriating. Why had he told her that? Was she off the hook? Had he learned that something else killed Stakehorn? Or maybe he was tired and had let it slip? Only Shane Black didn’t strike her as the kind of detective who just let things slip. So there was a reason he’d told her that poison hadn’t killed Stakehorn. In fact, it was probably the reason he’d stopped by.

  The question was, why?

  Callie and Deborah sat on the front porch, looking out over the fields that were now full of grain. Crops looked different here than they did in Texas, at least they did to Callie. Even from where they sat she could see Jonas on his rig, planting a second summer crop, the twins on the seat next to him.

  It was an image she couldn’t recall from home—fathers and sons working in the field together.

  Home.

  Was Shipshewana home? Or was Texas?

  She couldn’t imagine going back there, though she’d only been here a short time—four weeks to be exact.

  It felt right here. It felt as if she were connected to the last of her family.

  Finding the journal from Daisy had soothed something in her soul, had healed an ache that she hadn’t realized was long in need of repair. What else would she discover if she stayed? What other secrets remained hidden among her aunt’s things, within the folds of her aunt’s life?

  “Is lemonade okay?” Deborah set a tray with a pitcher and two glasses on the weathered table between them, then sank with a sigh into the opposite oak rocker.

  “Perfect.” Callie drank gratefully from the ice-cold glass. When she visited Deborah now, she no longer wondered at the lack of electricity, how the gas refrigerator worked, or that they were able to have running water both hot and cold—though it didn’t spew out of the faucet like it did at her place. Everything here seemed as it should be, even the heat, and the lemonade which soothed it. “Where’s the baby?”

  “Martha took him to the barn to show him the new kittens.” Deborah frowned and followed Callie’s gaze out toward the fields. “Remember when kittens and a nicely planted row solved everything?”

  “Yes. Well, no, truthfully I don’t, since I grew up in the city, but I catch your meaning.” Callie sipped again from the tart drink, pressed the cool glass against her forehead, and gazed over at Deborah.

  Callie shared with her the price the second quilt had brought.

  “It’s gut. It will help Melinda and Esther a lot.”

  “How is Aaron?”

  “His bruder tried to sneak him out to the pond for some late-night fishing, got his wheelchair stuck in the mud. If you could have seen the mess they’d created on the wheels of that chair …” Deborah paused and took a sip of her drink. “There are things he’ll need, especially as he grows older. The money will go a long way to helping.”

  “And Esther?”

  “Her parents want her to marry again, and she’s not ready. Perhaps the money will help to ease their worries a while longer.”

  They sat there in the late afternoon heat, thinking of their friends, and of all they’d been through together since the auctions had begun.

  “We need to end this, Deb. Before someone else gets hurt.”

  “Ya. I was thinking the same thing. First Margie and now Max. How is he?”

  “Fine. Doctor England said he might be ready to come home tomorrow. He wanted to keep him another night for observation.”

  “It’s gut he wasn’t hurt any worse, and he was there to protect you. It was God’s provisi
on, Callie.”

  Callie looked out at Jonas and the boys. One of the twins had dropped his hat behind the plough, and Jonas stopped the rig so he could jump down, fetch his hat, then climb back on board. It was a simple act, one probably replayed many times in a summer, but it struck Callie as being intimate and precious. She didn’t want this family to be hurt as Margie had been, as Max had been.

  “I understand what you’re saying about God’s provision.” Callie tucked her hair behind her ears, comfortable with the silence between them as she searched for the words she needed to share. “If Max hadn’t been there, I could have been the one shot. But I feel as if I somehow started this sequence of events, as if I brought evil into this place by first putting the quilts on the internet.”

  “Do you realize how narrisch that sounds?”

  “Crazy.”

  “Yes, crazy. It sounds crazy. First of all, other people in Shipshe had been on eBay before you put my quilts there.”

  Callie smiled at her correct pronunciation of the word, but it didn’t stop her.

  “Secondly, we don’t know whether the person doing this is from the outside. He could very well be a part of our community.”

  “One more thing we’ve been unsuccessful in finding out.”

  “Agreed, but if he’s from within, he was here before you arrived. If he’s from without, he didn’t arrive because of your efforts.” Deborah smiled sadly, pushed a stray hair into her kapp. “What I mean is you’ve done a fine job with the shop, but the number of people who come to market each week has remained steady at around thirty thousand for several years now.”

  “Danki for the compliment, if there was one in there.” Callie reached over and tapped her lemonade glass against Deborah’s. “Thirty thousand people. That is part of our problem. If it were only the people of Shipshewana we had to work through, I think we could figure out who the murderer is, but with all those people traipsing through our town every week …”

  Deborah set her glass on the table and drummed her fingers against the arm of the rocker. “God promises us in his Word that he has plans for us, gut plans that include hope and a future, plans to prosper us and not to harm us.”

  “You’re sure solving murders is covered in the Bible?”

  Instead of answering, Deborah cut her eyes toward her and smiled, then stood and went inside to check on dinner. Callie heard her in there, opening the oven door, pulling out the casserole which was slow-cooking, adding water from the tap.

  She would offer to help, but knew it was useless. Her cooking abilities were limited and usually resulted in more work for all involved.

  Instead she focused on Stakehorn’s murder, the recent burglaries, and how they were tied together.

  Deborah walked back out on the front porch to find Callie on her hands and knees in front of her little rental car. Kneeling beside her were Martha, Mary, and baby Joshua. All she could see were the rumps of all four of them, because their heads were practically under the car.

  “I can almost reach him,” Callie was murmuring.

  Martha sat back on her heels and shook her head. “Your arms are too short. They’re not any longer than mine. I think you’re going to have to stay the night if he doesn’t come out.”

  Callie sat back and brushed at the hair that had flopped in her eyes.

  Joshua climbed over into her lap, and Mary scooched closer, placing her hand inside of Callie’s. “Stay here tonight, Miss Callie.”

  Joshua reached up with one hand and twirled Callie’s hair; with the other hand he popped his thumb into his mouth.

  Callie looked down at the boy, drew one arm around his waist, then kissed him on top of his head.

  “Maybe he’ll come out if we get a bowl of milk,” Callie suggested.

  “He doesn’t drink from a bowl yet,” Martha explained. “Only from her mamm.”

  They all continued to stare at the car, as if it might produce whatever had vanished.

  “Lose something?” Deborah asked.

  Everyone turned and looked up at her at once.

  “The smallest of the kittens, Mamm.” Mary jumped up and grabbed hold of her hand, tugged her toward the car. “We brought him to show Miss Callie. We thought she might be lonely, since Max is still in the hospital. But the kitten scratched her by accident and she dropped him.”

  “I didn’t drop him, I set him down,” Callie corrected her.

  “And then he run under there.” Mary pointed under the car.

  “We were trying to lure him out, but he stays just out of our reach.” Martha studied the car, as if it would produce an answer to their puzzle.

  Deborah looked at the car, then at the children, and finally at Callie. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck bristle, the same way they did when Jonas ran his hand lightly under her hair. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? The solution was so simple.

  With absolute certainty, Deborah knew how they could catch Stakehorn’s killer—the same way they could catch Martha’s kitten.

  “Run inside, Martha. Fetch a length of my brightest yarn.”

  Martha cocked her head to the side, thought about it only a few seconds, then rose and dashed into the house.

  They ended up having to tie a small twig onto the end of the yarn to give it some weight. As soon as they did, luring the kitten out was as easy as fishing for perch in the pond. The calico kitten was powerless to resist the temptation. He chased the twig and yellow yarn closer and closer, until Mary was able to pounce on him.

  “Gotcha!” she exclaimed, pulling the kitten into her arms.

  “Take the kitten back to her mamm, children. She’ll be worried.”

  Mary carried the kitten, and Martha held on to Joshua’s hand. They hurried toward the barn, giggling and whispering—all once again right in their world.

  “Emergency averted.” Callie laughed as they walked back to the porch.

  “More than that, I think I have a solution to our problem.”

  “What did you do, spy something under my car?” Callie picked up her glass, took a long drink.

  “Ya. I spied what we’ve been missing. Someone poisoned Stakehorn, right?”

  “Possibly, though I had a strange visit from Shane Black just before I came out here.” She repeated what Shane had said.

  Deborah listened, then waved her hand in front of them, as if she were waving away a pesky fly. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter?”

  “Right. Forget for a minute how Stakehorn died. What’s important is that the murderer wanted you to take the fall. We can assume he was happy about that.”

  “No doubt.”

  “But just three days later—someone broke into the newspaper.” Deborah stood now, walked to the edge of the porch. “Which everyone thought was a burglar or kids who heard the place was empty.” “What if it was the same person, looking for something?”

  Callie rubbed her finger over her bottom lip. Finally she said, “I tried that angle. I tried it when my bag was missing.”

  “Stay with me a minute.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “When the paper reopened, Trent McCallister noticed a few strange things.” Deborah sat back down in the rocker. “He told us at the vet that several times things have been in the wrong place, the paper hasn’t been locked up—at first, things that he attributed to Mrs. Caldwell being old and past retirement age.” Callie began tapping her finger against the arm of the rocker.

  “But after Max was shot, he changed his tune. What if all of this is caused by the same person?”

  A bird called out, then took flight across the field in front of them.

  “Margie’s shop, your shop, even Max being shot … it’s all the same person, looking for the same thing.” Deborah sat back, picked up the lemonade, and rubbed at the condensation running down the sides of the glass.

  “You thought of all this while looking under my car?”

  “It’s just like pieces of a quilt,
Callie. It took time for them to come together into a pattern. What I saw under the car was that we need to lure the person out, just like we enticed the kitten. We need to finally give this guy what he’s been looking for.”

  “But we don’t know what he’s looking for.”

  “He doesn’t have to know that.”

  Callie continued to worry her bottom lip, studied Jonas and the twins as they made their way in from the field, then said what Deborah had known all along she’d say. “I’m in.”

  Chapter 28

  CALLIE DROVE STRAIGHT to the Gazette. Trent answered her knock on the front door of the newspaper, though it was nearing eight in the evening.

  “Hello, Callie. Rather late to be placing an ad.”

  He had a bit of newsprint smeared on his right cheek. Callie struggled with whether to tell him or ignore it. In the end, she stood on her tiptoes and smudged it off with her thumb.

  “Oh, uh. Thanks. I’ve been working on tomorrow’s edition and the press broke down again.”

  “Did you get it working?”

  “Yeah. Surprisingly I did, and I only hurt one foot kicking it in the process.”

  They stood there in the fading sunlight, and suddenly Callie felt a bit awkward. She wondered if her skirt was soiled from kneeling in the dirt with the children, then she wondered why she cared. Her palms started to sweat and she wanted to wipe them on her blouse, but she felt self-conscious doing it.

  Why was she so nervous?

  Did she actually think he would refuse them?

  Their plan couldn’t work without his cooperation, without the Gazette. It had all begun with the newspaper, and now it could all end with it. But she’d need his help.

  “How’s Max?” Trent asked.

  “He’s going to be all right. He should be home tomorrow.” Unless Trent agreed to their plan, then she’d ask Doc England to keep him an extra night.

  “That’s good news. I ran his picture on page one—the one I took the night Margie was attacked.”

  When Callie only shook her head, he ducked back into the office, came out with a copy of page one. Max had a nice four by five photo in the top left column. He was wearing his blue bandana with silver stars.