Suspendered Sentence (An Amish Mystery Book 4)

by Laura Bradford

  “Okay, so what were we really talking about?” He rubbed the day-old stubble on his rounded chin, taking one last look out Claire’s front window as he did. “That’s right—Benjamin Miller’s late wife. I think her name was . . .”

  When it became apparent he wasn’t going to get to the point without filling in the blank, she supplied the sought-after name. “Elizabeth.”

  At his nod, she moved on. “You don’t believe she was killed by a stray bullet from a hunting rifle?”

  “I believe half of that statement.” Howard surveyed the various shelves and displays he could see from his vantage point before eyeing the clock on the wall above the register and subsequently hightailing it back across the shop. “I’ve got to go, Claire. The missus will have my head if I’m not home when her famous chicken potpie comes out of the oven.”

  She chased after him, determined to get at least some sort of clarification for his comment about Elizabeth. “Please. Before you go . . . Which half of my statement about Elizabeth do you believe?”

  “That she was killed by a hunting rifle.”

  “And the part you don’t believe?”

  “That it was a stray bullet.”

  Chapter 23

  “You were awful quiet at dinner tonight, dear. Is everything okay?”

  Claire placed a medium-sized log into the fireplace and watched as its initial catch point grew into a roaring fire capable of heating the parlor and the entryway with ease. Yet, even as she sat there, waiting, she knew its warmth didn’t stand a chance against the chill Howard’s parting words had ushered into her heart more than three hours earlier.

  She’d wanted nothing more than to convince her fellow shopkeeper to stay long enough to explain his troubling hypothesis. But the promise of Mrs. Glick’s chicken potpie had proven to be an impossible challenger in the fight for Howard’s time and attention.

  Now, all she could do was replay his words in her mind and wonder at the basis on which they’d been formed.

  Was he right?

  Had Ben’s wife, Elizabeth, been murdered?

  And if so, by whom?

  They were the same three questions that accompanied her on her walk home from work, as she helped prepare dinner in the kitchen, as she served guests in the dining room, and at that very moment as she contemplated adding a second piece of wood to the hungry flames.

  “Claire?”

  She glanced over her shoulder and then stood, her aunt’s sudden appearance making it easy to postpone her decision about the additional log. “Have the guests all retired to their rooms for the evening?”

  “They have.”

  “This new round of folks seems to be very nice.” Claire crossed to the couch and the paperback mystery she’d placed at her spot before tending the fire. “They sure hit it off with one another, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I was a bit more focused on you this evening.”

  “Me?” She dropped onto her favorite corner of the couch and nestled in with her book. “Why? What did I do?”

  “It’s not what you did, dear, it’s what you didn’t do.” Diane stood with her back to the room’s main window and its view of the moon-drenched Amish countryside, an uncharacteristic frown on her gently lined face.

  “Did I forget a side dish?” Claire asked.

  “No.”

  She gripped the edge of her still-closed book and leaned forward. “Oh no, please tell me I didn’t forget someone’s food allergy . . .”

  “No. You did everything right concerning dinner and the guests.”

  Relief allowed her to sink back against the corner of the couch and release a much-needed breath. “Phew. Okay, so what didn’t I do?”

  “You didn’t speak more than a few monosyllables here and a few monosyllables there while we were preparing the meal and cleaning it up.” Diane swiveled to the left just long enough to pull the heavy drapes closed on yet another day. “And that’s not like you.”

  “Are you saying I talk too much on a normal basis?” she teased.

  “I’m saying I missed hearing about your day and the customers who came into the shop.” Diane came around the back of her favorite lounge chair and slowly lowered herself onto the seat. “You didn’t talk about Annie, or the smells coming out of Ruth’s bake shop, or any of your usual topics.”

  Claire freed the book from her hands and allowed her head to loll against the back of the couch as she contemplated the best way to address her aunt’s obvious concern. “I’m fine. Truly. I guess it’s just one of those days when you live inside your head more than you probably should.”

  “You’re not thinking about Peter, are you?”

  She smacked a hand over her answering snort and then laughed away her aunt’s question. “No. It’s become a rare day when I actually think of that man.”

  “Good.” Diane scooted back on her chair until she was sitting tall with her feet outstretched. “Is Annie working out okay?”

  “Annie is working out marvelously. I couldn’t ask for better, actually. But she wasn’t around for the bulk of yesterday or any of today.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Her sister, Eva, had her sixth child yesterday afternoon and Annie was summoned by Leroy’s father to help with the delivery and the other children.”

  “Oh . . . how wonderful,” Diane exclaimed. “What did she have?”

  “A little boy. His name is Melvin.” She pulled her legs onto the couch and tucked them into the narrow space between the back end of the cushions and the frame. “I didn’t see the baby, but I did get to see Annie and the other five children. They were so sweet and smiley.”

  “Which is exactly how I picture the little ones you and Jakob will have.”

  “Diane!” she scolded. “Jakob and I are just barely dating. You can’t keep talking like that.”

  “Of course I can.” Diane stuck out her tongue in playful defiance and then got back to the original topic. “Has Josiah softened any as a grandfather?”

  Still distracted by her aunt’s prediction for her future with Jakob, Claire caught only bits and pieces of the question lobbed in her direction. “I’m sorry, you asked something about a Josiah? I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Oh, I just assumed, because you mentioned him, that you’d actually met Leroy’s father.” Diane wiggled her socked toes to the front and back in what was destined to be the first of many stretching exercises the woman did on a near-nightly basis.

  “Wait. I did meet Leroy’s father, I just didn’t know his first name.” She thought back to the previous evening and the man’s harsh treatment of one very tired teenager, her head beginning to shake in disgust before she’d even completed her mental tour of the memory. “That man is rather wound up.”

  Diane moved on to her ankles by tilting her feet up and back and all around. “So I guess the answer to my question about whether he’s softened as a grandfather would be no, then . . .”

  “Soft is not a word I’d use in any form where Josiah Beiler is concerned, that’s for sure. But, then again, in all fairness, I never actually saw him interact with the little ones . . . just Annie.” She bent her head forward just enough to check the status of the fire and then leaned it back against the couch once again. “You should have heard the way he railed at her for loosening her kapp strings, Aunt Diane. You’d have thought she’d done something truly awful if you’d been within earshot to hear his tone.”

  “That’s Josiah for you. He’s fanatical about being Amish. Just ask Jakob.”

  She snapped her head off the couch and turned to face Diane. “Jakob? What does Jakob have to do with Josiah Beiler?”

  Diane lifted her left leg up, then her right leg, the agile way in which she did more than a little impressive. “From the way I understand it, Josiah Beiler is the one who led the charge against Jakob seventeen years ago.”

  “You mean when he left to become a police officer?”

  “When he first talked about leaving,” Diane correct
ed. “If you’ll remember, it was John Zook’s then-unsolved murder that got Jakob actually thinking about becoming a police officer, himself . . . so he could help solve the crime. He’d been fascinated with the profession before that, of course, but it was the murder in his own community that took that fascination into a realm where he uttered the thought aloud.

  “Oftentimes, I’ve wondered if it was Josiah’s taking it to the new bishop and thereby calling Jakob out that made Jakob feel as if he had to go through with it.”

  Claire nodded as a few more pieces of the puzzle that comprised Heavenly’s Amish community fell into place. “Oh, I get it. Miriam’s father was bishop up until a few months before Jakob left, right?”

  “Bishop Hochstetler, yes. His health was failing rapidly and that’s when Atlee Hershberger took over. What Atlee doesn’t see or know about, is delivered to his door by way of his son-in-law’s father, Josiah.”

  She took it all in, pondering each new addition on its own merits. “Do you think that’s because of the Leroy connection?”

  “Maybe,” Diane said mid–leg lift. “But I think Josiah is just like that. Knowing his son is married to the bishop’s daughter probably just adds to his unusual sense of self-importance.”

  “Does it? In terms of the Amish community as a group?”

  Diane lowered her leg to the cushion while simultaneously searching the closest end table for her current read. “There’s no elevating of anyone within the Amish community. Not in the way the English world does with its people, anyway. There are some members who are looked to with greater respect than others, certainly, but any feeling of elevation would be an individual thing inside one’s heart—and it would be something they’d never admit aloud.”

  “Okay . . .” She stopped, regrouped, and revisited a conversation from earlier in the week with someone who, essentially, shored up Diane’s conjecture. “Annie said she has a hard time knowing if her peers like her for her or because she’s the bishop’s daughter. I guess if that can happen at the teenage level, it can happen at the adult level, too, yes?”

  “I imagine it happens far less with the Amish, but I don’t believe they’re completely immune. They are human, after all. They cry and hurt and mess up like the rest of us from time to time.”

  Claire stood and crossed back to the fire, the diminishing flames and cooling temperature in the room mandating the addition of two new logs. When they were safely added and arranged with the poker, she remained seated on one of the few sections of the wood-planked floor that wasn’t covered by a hooked rug.

  “I know you’re right. I know they’re human. But there’s something about the way they try so hard to live a simple life that makes any hardship they face more difficult to witness, you know?”

  “I know. I feel the same way. Always have.”

  She continued to stare at the flames even as a very different image took front and center in her thoughts. “I’m afraid a whole bunch of them are about to hurt in unbelievable ways very, very soon and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”

  Diane’s gasp brought Claire’s focus back to the parlor and the growing fire within arm’s reach.

  “Does this have something to do with Sadie’s body being found on the Lehmans’ former property last week?”

  Oh, how she wished she could shake her head.

  But she couldn’t. Not after everything Leroy had said in her shop that morning. Not after everything she suspected he and Miriam were still telling Jakob when she passed their buggies nearly six hours after they’d been hitched to poles outside the police station.

  “Claire?”

  She thought, too, about Howard’s comment and the unsettling feeling his guess kept igniting in her own head.

  If Howard was right and Elizabeth’s death hadn’t been an accident, could it be related to what happened to Sadie? Had someone known Elizabeth was about to tell? Had someone tried to stop her?

  “Claire? Please. Talk to me. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  She shook the troubling thought from her head long enough to frame an answer that wouldn’t be too premature to share with her aunt. “It seems as if Elizabeth’s journal was right and four people did know the truth behind Sadie Lehman’s fate. Three of them are still alive and facing—or, about to face—the consequences for whatever happened that night.”

  “Like Leroy’s five little children,” Diane mumbled just loud enough for Claire to hear.

  “Six, now, but yes . . . And Miriam’s brood, too. And whatever life Michael has going for himself beyond just his run for an office he’ll never be elected to now.”

  Diane’s second gasp was followed by a distinctive clucking sound that succeeded in guiding Claire away from the fire and back to her spot on the couch. “What are you thinking, Aunt Diane?”

  The clucking eventually stopped only to be replaced by a slow, almost methodical shake of the woman’s head. “Unlike Josiah, who is fanatical about being Amish, Ryan O’Neil is fanatical about his son and their legacy in this town. He has whitewashed that young man’s life every step of the way just to get him to this point.”

  “And what point is that?” Claire asked.

  “A veritable shoo-in as Heavenly’s next mayor.”

  Chapter 24

  Claire didn’t have to look far to see the vast differences between her old life in New York City and her new life in Heavenly, Pennsylvania.

  They were there each morning as she came down to breakfast, her aunt’s cheerful “good morning” a stark contrast to the precoffee silent treatment that had ruled her mornings with Peter.

  They were there each day as she unlocked the front door of her very own dream instead of always waiting to be included in someone else’s.

  They were there when people stopped on the sidewalk just to say hi, rather than elbow past with nary an upward glance.

  They were there when the dinner she helped make for eight was actually eaten by eight, instead of the countless candlelit dinners for two that had been eaten by one.

  And they were there when she climbed into bed at the end of the day and the light peeking around her shade came from the moon and stars rather than the roof rack of a passing emergency vehicle.

  Yet, as much as she loved Heavenly and everything about her life in the quaint town, worry, stress, and uncertainty still crept into her heart. Sometimes, that worry was for a troubled friend or her often-overworked aunt. Sometimes, the stress rolled in on the heels of a lackluster week at the shop, when bad weather kept customers and their wallets at home. Sometimes, the uncertainty that had affected her faith in herself through much of her former marriage reared its head and made her second-guess whatever was building between her and Jakob.

  But that night, as she stared up at the ceiling and tried to summon sleep, it was a combination of all three that threatened the success of her efforts.

  She’d always been a worrier. It was in her blood. It didn’t matter that she’d known Annie less than a week, and the teenager’s brother-in-law and his children even less than that. Just knowing that their lives were about to change in drastic ways had her worrying about everything from trickle-down effect on her teenage employee, to the despair six innocent children were about to know, firsthand.

  The stress was easy to pinpoint, too. Benjamin was her friend and she cared about him very much. And while she hadn’t known him at the time, she was well aware of the hurt he still carried over the sudden and tragic death of his young wife—a death Howard had called out as questionable and now had Claire considering a very real and very disturbing scenario that made all too much sense.

  As for the uncertainty, well, that came into play over what, if anything, she should say regarding Elizabeth. And to whom she should say it.

  Did she raise the subject with Ben? And if she did, and it proved accurate, what would that do to him all these years later?

  Did she raise the subject with Jakob? And if she did, would he be offended at the suggestion his fel
low officers had failed to do their job fourteen years earlier, or would he see her as some sort of wacky conspiracy theorist who could never just relax?

  So many times during the course of her marriage, she’d posed work-related thoughts and suggestions to Peter, only to get shut down each time with a roll of his eyes or a dismissive turn of his head.

  Did she really want to put herself on the line like that with Jakob? Especially now that their friendship was blossoming into something deeper?

  She pulled the covers all the way up to her chin and then flipped onto her side, the lack of light seeping around the edges of her shade a by-product of the clouds that had started rolling into town, midday. With Leroy’s latest circumstances and Eva’s new baby, the likelihood Annie would be helping around the store the next day was slim to none. A night of limited sleep added to the mix would only make her Saturday even harder.

  Still, she couldn’t clear her mind and couldn’t make her eyes close for more than a fleeting second. Instead, all she could do was come back to the same terrifying certainty that had played with her thoughts all evening long . . .

  Had someone killed Elizabeth to ensure she didn’t disclose Sadie’s fate?

  And if so, who?

  She knew the likely candidates would be found among those who shared the same secret—Miriam, Leroy, and Michael.

  She also knew that to go to the extreme measure of murder to safeguard a secret, the expected fallout from that secret had to be significant.

  Rolling back to her starting position, Claire flung the covers off her upper body and lifted herself into a sitting position with the headboard as her support. Thanks to Elizabeth’s journal, they knew exactly who the remaining living players were . . .

  Miriam Hochstetler, now Stoltzfus.

  Leroy Beiler.

  And Michael O’Neil.

  Three very different people, with three very different demeanors and backgrounds.

  Miriam, by several accounts, had been a rebel during her Rumspringa years. She’d also been the daughter of the then bishop. The latter certainly provided motive for keeping the secret to start with, but would it be a powerful enough motive to kill a friend years later?