“Reverend Brook is such a dear man,” Juliet said. “Of course, the poor reverend is beside himself because Josephine’s body was stuffed into his organ, but even with that extra stress, he’s organized a search party for Jethro.” As she spoke, her southern accent became thicker. I had noticed that tended to happen when she spoke of the good reverend.
“How very kind of him.” I did my best to keep the smile out of my voice.
“He’s so sweet to be concerned about my missing pig with all that is going on.” She wiped a tear from her pale cheek.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, I found myself smiling. For some reason, Juliet and the reverend seemed to believe that their affection for each other was a big secret, but as far as I could tell, everyone in town knew that they cared about each other. Honestly, I didn’t know what she saw in the ineffectual little man, but she was smitten. That was plain to see.
“The search party will go out this evening. As you can guess, Margot is being very unhelpful and won’t let us search while all the tourists are around. We’re all meeting at the gazebo right after the competition ends for the day. The church choir will be there and several other church members.”
“That sounds like a great idea. We can cover more ground with more people. I’m happy to join in. I want to find Jethro too. I’ve grown to like the little guy even if he does bite me.”
“Bailey, those are love nips. I told you that!”
I laughed. “I know. I shouldn’t tease you when you are so worried about him. I’ll help in any way that I can.”
She clasped her hands again. “Oh, would you? We’re looking for all the volunteers we can gather. But I don’t want to put you out.”
“You aren’t putting me out,” I reassured her. “I will feel better when Jethro is safe at home again.”
She glanced at the silver watch on her wrist. “I must go. The reverend and I were going to make some calls to gather up more volunteers for the search.” She gave me a final hug and jogged across the square with her skirt flowing behind her again.
I turned and headed to my own table, hoping that Abel had left in the meanwhile. No such luck.
Emily and Abel spoke softly together at the table in Pennsylvania Dutch. Even though I couldn’t understand the words, Abel’s tone was obviously disapproving.
“Hello, Abel,” I said.
He turned and made a sound close to a grunt.
“Bailey,” Emily said with obvious relief, “I’m so glad you’re back.” She had placed the newly wrapped taffy into a basket for display.
“This looks great, Emily. I can always count on you.”
She blushed, and her brother glared at me. I suspected that Abel had been glaring at me ever since I was ten years old. I just didn’t know it. Abel had a crush on me back then, but I was much more interested in climbing trees and learning to make my grandfather’s famous fudge. After Abel tried to kiss me in the shadow of the gazebo and I jumped away, he never forgot it. I went back to Connecticut and my busy suburban life and never gave the Amish boy another thought until I met him again as an adult. As far as I could tell, he had never forgiven me for the rebuke, even though so much time had passed.
I cleared my throat as Abel continued to stare at me without speaking. “Emily told me that you are helping the ACC with setup and maintenance. That’s nice of you.”
“It’s a job,” he said.
“Umm, right.” I glanced at his sister, and her eyes went wide. I just couldn’t win as far as Abel was concerned. “I’m sure Margot and the other judges appreciate all your work.”
He scowled.
“Abel, I will be home just as soon as the competition is over for the day,” Emily interjected. “You can tell Esther that.”
He nodded.
“Abel, before you go,” I said. “Did you happen to see anything odd outside of the church this morning when you were helping with the setup?”
“You mean the missing pig?” There was the smallest smile on his face when he said this, and his reaction caught me off guard. I don’t think I had ever seen him smile before, not even when we were children.
“Well, yes, and I wondered if you happened to see Josephine around the time you arrived and were beginning to set up.”
The tiny smile disappeared. “I didn’t see the pig, but yes, I saw Josephine.”
My pulse quickened. “Was she with anyone?”
He shook his head. “She was alone.”
I felt my face fall. I should have expected this answer. It was very likely that Aiden had already asked Abel if he’d seen Josephine that morning outside the church.
“She was alone,” Abel said. “But she seemed to be waiting for someone.”
“For who?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I know nothing about how she died,” he said and scowled a little bit more. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. “This is what you want to know, is it not?”
“Well, maybe you saw something that will help the police.”
“I didn’t.” His tone left no room for argument.
“Did you speak to her?”
“Nee, why would I speak to her? She is not a member of my district,” he said as if that was reason enough not to speak to someone.
I gave him a half smile. “I’m not a member of your district either, but you are speaking to me.”
“And I should not be.” He turned and said something to his sister in their language and stomped away.
Chapter 15
Emily blushed as she watched her brother walk away. “I’m so sorry that Abel was rude to you.”
I waved her concern away. “It’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
She scrunched up her face. Not for the first time, I wondered what living with her two unhappy siblings must be like for Emily.
“You really have done a great job on the taffy. Thank you,” I said, feeling I needed to give her a compliment. Even though I couldn’t understand their language, I doubted her brother had said a kind word to her before I’d arrived at the table.
The Amish girl blushed. “It was nothing.”
I smiled. “I appreciate it all the same.”
She smiled.
Down the line of tables, the judges had just begun judging the taffy. Two uniformed deputies followed a couple tables behind the judges, asking the contestants questions about Josephine Weaver and, I noticed, bagging samples of each table’s offering of licorice from the previous round of judging.
I patted Emily’s arm. “It’s showtime.”
She raised her white-blond eyebrows. “Showtime?”
I simply laughed at her confusion over the English expression.
“Oh, green apple,” Jeremiah said when he reached my table. “How unique. Most of the other contestants went with more conventional flavors.”
“I’m not conventional,” I said.
Beatrice wrinkled her nose. “We noticed this.”
I stopped short of rolling my eyes at her comment. “The green apple is a little nod to our town’s apple harvest. Peppermint is my traditional offering.” I smiled.
“That was a very sweet idea of yours,” Margot said. “I like it that you thought of incorporating Harvest in your choice of flavors. That does speak well of you.”
Beatrice gripped her clipboard a little more tightly. “Let’s just see if the taffy is edible before we start patting her on the back.”
Emily lifted a small plate with three pieces of green apple taffy on it. Each judge took a piece, unwrapped it, and tasted. Jeremiah put the entire piece in his mouth. Beatrice took a dainty bite, and Margot pulled at the taffy until it broke into two pieces and ate one half.
Jeremiah’s eyes watered. “My, you really packed each piece with green apple flavor. Doing Harvest proud, I would say.”
“The texture is perfect,” Margot said.
“It is not terrible,” Beatrice added. Considering the source, I took that as high praise indeed.
They all made notes on their clipboards.
“Now the peppermint,” Margot said.
The three judges tasted my second taffy offering.
“This is just as good,” Jeremiah said.
“We should move on to the next table.” Beatrice folded the scrap of waxed paper her piece of peppermint taffy had been wrapped in.
“Yes, of course,” Margot said. “We have to keep to our schedule. Thankfully, this is the last judging for the day. We can regroup this afternoon and evening and, hopefully, put all the unpleasantness of the day behind us.”
I frowned. Was Josephine’s death mere unpleasantness for the ACC judges?
Before following the two female judges to the next table, Jeremiah grabbed another piece of my green apple taffy and winked at me.
“I think you have a good chance of winning this round, Bailey,” Emily said with a bright smile.
“Let’s not get our hopes too high. They still have a lot of candy makers to judge,” I said.
Emily started to package the taffy in small white boxes with SWISSMEN SWEETS embossed on the side, six pieces in each. She set them on the table for the tourists to grab. There was no candy for sale at the candy-making contest. All the candy made was given to the visitors for free. The visitors paid a small cover charge of five dollars each to attend the ACC. That didn’t seem like a lot, but with over one thousand people expected through the weekend, it added up.
The town hosting the ACC could choose how to use the money raised. Harvest planned to use the money to update the playground next to Juliet’s church. The playground equipment was the same as I had played on as a little girl when I visited my grandparents in Harvest for the summer. Even back then it had been outdated.
The ACC would be open for another hour or so after the winner of the taffy round was announced. Even so, I began to tidy up the table in between speaking to visitors who stopped by and grabbed what was left of the licorice and taffy we’d made that day. I noted, as I spoke to a woman in a red coat, that the two deputies skipped our table. I knew that Aiden had already collected a sample of my licorice since it matched the piece found in Josephine’s apron, but I was surprised that they didn’t stop to ask me any questions as they had the other ACC contestants. Had Aiden instructed them not to? I didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad sign. My intuition was leaning toward bad.
Across the square, Lindy packed up her booth. She didn’t have a single piece of taffy left on her table. There was no doubt in my mind that she was going to bolt the moment the judges announced the winner of the taffy round. I mulled over my conversation with her before the judging. I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to cause her to speak so personally of grief.
My table was in order, and Emily was chatting with friends on the other side of the square. I considered going over to Lindy’s booth to see what else I could learn from her. Before I could even walk around the table, Margot pulled out a bullhorn and walked to the top step of the gazebo. Who thought it was a good idea to give that woman a bullhorn?
“Thank you again to everyone who came to the Amish Confectionary Competition,” she shouted into the horn. “We are humbled and overjoyed by the turnout of candy makers and visitors to our little hometown of Harvest.”
The crowd that had gathered around the gazebo clapped. Emily joined me at the foot of the gazebo and squeezed my hand. “You’ll win this round.”
I winked at her.
“We hope that you will all join us tomorrow,” Margot went on, “for the last day of the competition, when we’ll announce the overall winner of the ACC. Now, without further ado, it’s my pleasure to announce the winner of this round. With the most points in taffy in the categories of taste, texture, and presentation . . .”
I felt my body tense.
“. . . the winner is—” She paused dramatically. It was evident that Margot was enjoying keeping both the crowd and the candy makers in suspense. “Swissmen Sweets!”
Beside me, Emily gasped, even though she had predicted the win. I blinked in surprise. I had wanted to win, of course, but I had never expected to take a round of the competition. I was not Amish.
Emily hugged me, which shook me out of my stupor. “Congratulations, Bailey. The green apple taffy was a hit!”
I blinked. “I guess so. Or maybe it was the peppermint.”
“It was both,” she assured me.
While Emily was hugging me, I missed the name of the candy shop that was eliminated from the candy-making competition that round, but from the resigned expression on the face of the candy maker from Florida, I guessed it was he. Everyone else just appeared to be relieved that they hadn’t been chopped. Who knew Amish candy making could be so cutthroat?
I grinned at Emily. “We live to make candy another day.” I grimaced as I realized what I had just said. Josephine hadn’t lived to make candy, literarily or figuratively, another day.
Emily smiled, clearly missing my faux pas. “We did!”
The visitors were starting to stream out of the square. Traffic on Main Street would be a mess for the next half hour. It was lucky that all I had to do was weave around the cars and buggies to cross the road between the square and Swissmen Sweets. As far as commutes went, it didn’t get any better than that.
Margot came down the gazebo steps and made a beeline for me. “Congratulations, Bailey. You have done Harvest and your grandfather proud.”
Tears sprang to my eyes at the mention of my grandfather. “Thank you.”
She held her bullhorn at her side. “Now keep it up. We need you to win it all for the town.” With that, she spun around and went to speak to the other judges.
I had to win it all for the town. No pressure, right? I sighed. I knew Margot’s compliment came with a price. It seemed everything she did had an ulterior motive, and most of the time it was furthering the success of the village of Harvest.
As I made way back to my table, visitors and other candy makers stopped me to congratulate me on the win. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had had the same reaction to Lindy Beiler when she won the licorice round. There had been so much commotion over Josephine’s death, it was lost in the shuffle.
Emily beat me back to the table. I smiled at her. “I’ll finish cleaning up here. You should go back to your shop. I don’t want to keep you too long. I know Esther must be wondering what is taking so long.”
Emily scrunched up her nose. “Esther knows I’m helping you.”
“All right,” I said. “I will leave it to you to contend with your sister.”
Emily laughed. “I’ve been doing it all my life, and I’m happy to help you, Bailey. Whatever gets me out of that hot pretzel shop works for me. It’s nice to have a break and do something different. That’s something that my sister will never understand. She has been doing the same things every day since our parents died. I don’t think she knows how to do anything else, and she would be perfectly happy if I did the same.” She said this last part with a slightly bitter tone that I had never heard in her young voice before.
Emily and I finished packing up my table for the evening. All the while, I couldn’t help but keep a close eye on the church across the square. In the last few hours, there had been little or no activity around the church. I itched to sneak inside the large white building and take another look at the organ.
I was mystified as to how someone could have lifted Josephine onto the platform inside the organ. True, she was a tiny woman, and I could have picked her up if I was forced to. However, it would take someone with a good deal of strength and coordination to lift the woman’s body over their head. But how else could she have wound up on that platform? I couldn’t imagine that she went inside the organ of her own volition. But I could be wrong. What did I know about Josephine Weaver? Next to nothing. Most of what I had learned about her had been in my short conversation with her niece, Charlotte Weaver. I still had to find out how Charlotte was related to me. That would be the next item on my agenda as so
on as I returned to Swissmen Sweets.
“Do you know Charlotte Weaver?” I asked Emily as I set my supply crate in the rolling cart from Swissmen Sweets.
She looked up from the basket that she was filling with supplies to be carted back over to the shop for the night. “Charlotte? Ya, I know her from town. We’re from different districts, though, and she is a couple of years older than me.”
Emily was twenty, so that would put Charlotte’s age at twenty-two or twenty-three. For some reason, I’d thought she was still a teenager.
“Is there anything you can tell me about her?”
She shrugged. “She’s quiet and likes to be off to herself. Maribel doesn’t care much for her.”
Maribel Klemp was Emily’s best friend. She worked with her grandmother Birdie at the cheese shop next door to Swissmen Sweets, on the opposite side of the candy shop from Esh Family Pretzels. I wasn’t too surprised to hear Maribel didn’t care for Charlotte. As far as I could tell, the girl didn’t care for many people other than Emily.
“Why doesn’t Maribel like her?” I asked.
“I suppose she doesn’t have anything against Charlotte personally. She just doesn’t much care for the entire Weaver family.”
“Why’s that?” I leaned on the table in our booth.
Emily’s smooth brow wrinkled as if she’d just realized that she might be revealing too much. She forced a laugh. “Oh, you know.”
It was my turn to wrinkle my brow. “I know? I know what?”
“Nothing. I must have misspoken.”
I didn’t think she’d misspoken at all. I squinted at her for a beat. She looked away from me. Maybe I needed to have a chat with Maribel about the Weavers.
Emily’s frown deepened. “I’m just surprised Charlotte hasn’t left the Amish way yet.”
“Why’s that?” I asked again.
“You can always tell when someone is going to leave,” she said, sounding much like her know-it-all sister. “There is a feeling about them. Like a nervousness. They are just itching to escape to something new. I always got that feeling from Charlotte. And then there is her love of music.” She snapped the lid on the gallon container of white sugar.
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