“We got ourselves a warrant, Mr. Lundel. Nothin’ you can do about it, so you might as well step aside.”
Wilhelm held out his hand for the warrant.
“Now, Mr. Lundel, this here’s legal stuff.”
“We know a great deal about legal matters.”
Brock handed over the warrant. Wilhelm scanned it and tossed it back.
“This is persecution,” he said, crossing his thick arms over his chest.
Brock’s thin body tightened, his half smile undimmed.
“Like I said, Mr. Lundel, nothin’ you can do about it. We got the law on our side. Come on, Elsa, step around here. Come easy and we won’t handcuff you.”
“Stay still, Elsa.” Wilhelm’s bushy white eyebrows joined in a fierce line over his smoldering eyes.
“Now look here, Lundel, don’t you interfere none. Besides, y’all ain’t supposed to be violent, the way I hear it.”
“Elsa, come forward, we have no choice,” Rose said, taking Elsa’s arm.
Elsa shook off her hand. “Address me as Mother.”
Rose counted the silent seconds and watched Elsa’s plain features redden as it became clear that Rose would not call her Mother.
“The sooner you go,” Rose said so quietly that only Elsa could hear her, “the sooner we can telephone our lawyer to help you. Do you wish for Wilhelm to break his vow of nonviolence and perhaps be hurt?”
Elsa hesitated. With a doubtful look at Wilhelm’s stolid back, she stepped forward.
“Don’t you take my ma away!” Seth Pike came running from the direction of the herb fields, his hat in his hand. “She didn’t kill anybody!”
“Sorry, Seth,” Brock said, “but we got reason to think that your ma murdered Johann Fredericks on account of him knowing about her past and all.”
“That’s crazy. They’d have forgiven her for her past, wouldn’t you, Rose? Tell him.” Seth crumpled his hat in his hands and appealed to Rose. She nodded slowly.
“If she confessed to the eldress and lived a pure life from then on out, yea, she’d be forgiven,” she said. “Believers have been forgiven for much worse transgressions, committed even after signing the covenant.”
“She confessed to me,” Wilhelm said. Rose spun around in astonishment. For a sister to confess to an elder, rather than one of her own sex, was not their way.
“There, you see,” Seth said. “She didn’t have no reason to kill Johann.”
Brock shook his head and kicked at the ground with the toe of his boot. His grin widened. “Well, you see, Seth,” he said, “that ain’t all. Your ma, she’s been acting crazy lately, having seizures-like and hearin’ voices. The way we figure it, Johann threatened to spread the story of her runnin’ around, maybe he said he’d tell everyone in North Homage, so’s she’d be a laughingstock and nobody would want her to be their priestess or whatever. So she stabbed him and buried him for a while till she could get things set up, then she carried his body to the Herb House—she’s a sturdy hill-country woman—and she did some kind of ritual-like on account of his spirit being unclean or whatever. That’s the way I figure it.”
His listeners were stunned to silence by this theory. Even Grady looked embarrassed.
“Grady, handcuff Elsa,” Brock ordered. “Lundel, you step aside now.” The sheriff swept aside his jacket and held his hand just above his gun.
“Sheriff,” Rose said sharply, “there’s a flaw in your theory.”
Brock jerked his head toward her. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“We Shakers have no history of doing any sort of purifying herb rituals over the dead.”
“Yeah, you said that before, but like I said, Elsa’s crazy.”
“Yet all Elsa has done is dance as Shakers danced long ago. She slips into trances and speaks in tongues and hears messages from long-dead Believers, just as early Shakers did. Everything that she has done, everything you call crazy, is part of our history. Why would she suddenly do something so completely foreign to us as a purifying ritual for the dead? Why, how would she even have heard of such a thing? It isn’t done around here anywhere that I know of.”
Brock hesitated. He wasn’t buying her argument, she could tell, but she had planted one little seed of doubt in his mind. She glanced over at Grady, who gave her a slight nod and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “who then?”
In response to the unspoken question, Rose asked one of her own. “What if the murder and the placing of the body in the Herb House were done by two different people?”
Now she had Brock’s full attention. “Go on,” he said, dropping his hand away from his gun.
“Well, what if the two acts were done for different reasons? Johann’s killing may have been a matter of expediency. Maybe he knew something or was blackmailing someone, and that person wanted to be rid of him.”
“And Molly?” Sister Josie asked softly.
“I suspect that Molly found out who killed Johann and conducted her own version of blackmail. You’ve all heard by now about the money and beauty items that Gennie found under Molly’s mattress and again in the Water House. My guess is that those were payments from Johann’s killer for Molly’s silence. But finding Johann in the Herb House, that didn’t make sense to me. Not until just recently, when I was reminded of long-ago times.” She turned to Seth. “You moved Johann’s body, didn’t you?”
Seth jutted out his chin in defiance before bowing his head.
“Yeah, all right,” he said. “That was my doing. But I didn’t kill him, I swear to God.” His voice broke, and he took a moment to steady it. “I couldn’t sleep one morning, so I went out to work before everyone else even got up. I cut through a field next to the Herb House, one that got harvested early and tilled under way back before I got to town. Most of the dirt was crusted over, but there was this one area that felt soft, like it just got dug. Seemed funny to me. I had a shovel with me, so I dug down a bit. And that’s how I found him. Me and Johann, we weren’t getting along so good at the end. He even tried to get money out of me. He threatened to tell Peleg Webster that Ma wasn’t sure he was my real father. Then I wouldn’t get Peleg’s farm. That farm’s my chance to make something of my life. So I wasn’t all broke up about finding him dead. But I sure was spooked. That’s what gave me the idea—feeling spooked.”
“So you carried him to the Herb House?”
Seth nodded. “At first all I thought was to get the police. I ran clear past the Carpenters’ Shop before I got this idea. That’s when I saw those clothes hanging out. I grabbed them and run back. I switched his clothes so he’d look like a Shaker.”
“Where’s his real clothes?” Brock asked.
“I sneaked them back to my pa’s farm last market day. Buried them in one of his fields.”
Seth twisted the rim of his misshapen hat. “I’ve been mad ever since I saw you again, Rose, that’s why I couldn’t sleep in the first place. I just thought, here’s my chance to get back at you, at all of you. So I laid him out on the table and put Shaker herbs on him like he’d been laid out for a ritual. That way, I thought Shakers would be blamed.” He raised his eyes to Rose. “How’d you figure it was me?”
“May I speak with Seth privately for a moment?” Rose asked the sheriff.
Brock frowned.
“I’ll tell you about it afterward, I promise.”
“Yeah, OK, but just for a minute. I still figure Elsa’s guilty. Maybe craziness just runs in the family.”
“It was the fresh rosemary that led me to you,” Rose said softly as she and Seth walked toward the middle of the village. “In the bouquet on Johann’s chest, Gennie remembered finally that all the herbs and flowers were dried except the rosemary, as if someone had picked it especially. When we spoke the other day, you called me Rosie. That was one of your old nicknames for me, but there was another. I remembered that when we were together, I talked all the time about herbs, how to grow and use them. So after a while you started calling me Rosemary sometimes. You wanted
me to remember that, didn’t you?”
Seth nodded, his eyes cloudy. “I wanted you Shakers to be blamed for Johann, but I guess maybe I also wanted you to know I set it up. I wanted you to know you were being punished. I never expected you’d be the one to puzzle out the whole thing, not the sheriff. I figured you wouldn’t let on what you knew, if it meant talking about you and me.”
“Did you think I would let a Believer be arrested and say nothing, just to avoid discussing my own past?”
“OK, I was wrong to do what I did, but Rose, I didn’t kill anyone, I swear. I swear I didn’t.”
Rose nodded slowly. “I think you could have, mind. If the bouquet hadn’t disappeared from Johann’s chest, I might still think you did do it. You had a lot to lose if Johann made good his threat to tell Peleg Webster he wasn’t really your father. But there is someone with a great deal more to lose.”
TWENTY-TWO
GENNIE PAUSED BEFORE THE BACK DOOR OF THE Carpenters’ Shop. She really shouldn’t talk to one of the men alone. But she couldn’t just leave, either. It was partly her fault that Molly was dead. She had to follow whatever idea came to her. She reached for the doorknob, then withdrew her hand. She should at least go to the front door.
As she’d half turned to leave, the door jerked open, sending her tripping backwards. Sister Charity, her wide eyes nearly taking over her face, froze like one of the frightened jackrabbits Gennie often surprised in the herb fields. She shook herself and brushed past Gennie.
The door hung open. Gennie peeked inside. Everything seemed normal to her, so she ventured through the doorway. Albert worked in the far corner, his back to her. He wiped his hands on an old piece of dark-colored cloth, tossed it toward a pile of rags, and turned. A faint smile curved the edges of his mouth.
He glanced up and saw her, and his expression deadened. “How long you been standing there?” he asked in a mild voice.
“Just a moment or two,” Gennie said. “I came to ask you a few things.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the still-open door. “What happened to Charity? She looked upset.”
Albert shrugged one shoulder and walked to his workbench. “Just a nervous type, I guess,” he said. “She brought me some rags.” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the back door. “No reason that should make her upset.”
As if he were alone, he selected a wooden tool with a sharp edge that Gennie recognized as a planer and began to smooth a flat, rectangular piece of wood. His movements were fluid and precise. He ran strong, thin fingers along its edge to detect any rough spots.
Gennie thought she understood Charity’s nervousness. Albert was so hard to talk to. She edged closer to the workbench. Albert didn’t seem to notice. She took two more steps. His hand stopped. Without looking up, he said, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Um, I know,” Gennie said, relieved at the opportunity to speak. “But I wanted to ask you a few questions. You see, I noticed that your window upstairs looks right out on the Water House and, well, I wondered if you might have seen anything, anything at all, on the night of the fire. I mean, there might have been some noise, and you looked out, or surely you would have heard the fire, didn’t you?”
“I sleep soundly,” Albert said, glancing up briefly.
“Oh.” Gennie took a deep breath. “You see, I was hoping you’d looked out your window. Because I did, and I saw someone running in front of the Water House while it burned. I think it was a woman because she was wearing a Dorothy cloak. It could have been Molly. Or it could have been the person who set the fire or maybe even Molly’s killer.”
Albert planed on, and Gennie grunted with impatience. Was this man unable to say more than three words at a time?
“Don’t you see how important this is? If you saw anything, anything at all, then maybe we can figure out who killed Molly.”
Albert smoothed his hand over his wood for the longest moments that Gennie had ever endured. This wasn’t getting her anywhere.
“Nay,” he said finally, “I slept until the fire bell rang. I saw nothing.” His eyes darted toward Gennie and back again, almost shyly, to his task. “Sorry.”
Gennie’s shoulders slumped. “Me, too,” she said.
She turned to the back door. Her eyes on the floor, she lifted her skirt and picked her way through sawdust and wood chips. The floor could use a good sweeping. She was about to mention this when she saw a bundle of old aprons and dishcloths, neatly wrapped with kitchen twine. The rags Charity had delivered. Gennie stopped so suddenly she dropped her skirt, stirred up some sawdust, and sneezed. One cloth peeked out from underneath the packet. The fabric looked like a fine dark blue wool, the kind the sisters used to make Dorothy cloaks.
“Albert?”
The carpenter swiveled on his bench and threw her an irritated glance.
“Are those the rags Charity brought?”
His eyes flicked to the pile of rags. He nodded.
Heedless now of the dust, Gennie rushed to the corner and fell to her knees. She shoved aside the bound-up rags and grabbed the blue fabric. Dirt and pulled threads marred the smooth, finely woven surface, and a large piece had been ripped out of its folds, but there was no mistaking the design. Gennie held the fabric to her nose. The fibers still held the acrid smell of smoke.
“I think I’ve found something really important,” she said, while her shaking, eager fingers sought the neck lining of the cloak. “If Charity brought this, she must have been trying to get rid of it. Maybe she thought you’d cover it with paint and toss it out and she wouldn’t have to figure out how to destroy it. Oh, here it is!” She smoothed out the inner neck lining. “I was right! M. F. for Molly Ferguson.” She ran her index finger across the initials stitched into the fabric. “It’s odd that Charity didn’t rip this lining out before she brought the cloak over here.”
Gennie felt Albert standing over her.
“Maybe she didn’t have time,” he said, his eyes on the fabric in her hands.
Gennie shrugged. “Must be.” She gathered the soft folds in her arms and pushed to her feet. “I’ve got to get this to Grady. I mean Officer O’Neal.”
“It isn’t proper for a Shaker girl to talk to a policeman. I’ll take it to him.” Albert held out his hand.
Gennie wasn’t about to let a chance to see—and maybe impress—Grady slip past her. “Oh, Albert, don’t be silly. I’ve talked to policemen before. Besides, I’m remembering lots of things that I need to tell him. Like the fact that Charity wasn’t in the kitchen after the worship service Sunday afternoon. I’ll bet that’s when she met Molly. Maybe that’s when she killed her!” Albert folded his wiry arms across his chest.
“Oh, all right, you can come with me, if that will make it more proper.” A corner of the cloak fell from Gennie’s arms, and she bent down to recapture it. As she straightened, she again caught sight of the bundle of rags. A few loose rags still rested next to the bundle. One of them was a small piece of fine, dark blue wool, bearing distinct stains. Paint.
The rag that Albert had thrown aside when she entered had been dark blue. She remembered how it had landed, soft and heavy, on the edge of the pile. The truth hit her swiftly. Charity had not delivered the cloak. It was already there on the floor when Charity brought over her kitchen rags. It was Albert who hadn’t yet had time to dispose of it or to remove the revealing initials from its lining. Maybe he’d just intended to rip it up and make it unrecognizable.
Albert stood between Gennie and the open back door.
Clutching the fabric with one arm and lifting her skirt with the other, she bolted for the front door. She was young and quick and halfway to the door already. She didn’t look back, but she was sure that Albert hadn’t expected her to move so fast.
A block of wood twisted her foot. She lost precious seconds regaining her balance, but she didn’t fall. She was nearly there. She thought ahead with hope, saw herself burst through the door, run like a wild animal to the Trustees’ Office. She dropped her skirt an
d reached for the doorknob. It turned, but the door didn’t budge. She clutched the knob and threw her body against it. She hit solid wood.
She spun around to find Albert a few feet away, moving deliberately toward her, a small, wood-carving knife in his right hand. He paused before her and caressed the wooden handle with his thumb.
“I installed locks on these doors,” he said. “Elder said to go ahead, you never know what mischief the world will make. Gives me more privacy, too. For some of the things I have to do.”
“Now give me the cloak, Eugenie.” His voice had a toneless quality, lacking even the warmth of anger. It chilled Gennie almost as much as the sharp blade pointing toward her. Her knees wanted to buckle. Through force of will, she kept them straight. She clutched the cloak, bunching it in front of her like a soft, thick shield.
Albert inched closer. “Hand it over,” he said, with no show of impatience at having to repeat himself. “I’ll get it one way or another. I’m capable of hurting pretty young girls. I think you know that.”
The blade was now within inches of her. Instinctively, she stepped backward, and the doorknob hit the small of her back. He had her wedged in. If she tried to move sideways, he’d go for her at once.
“I won’t wait much longer, little sister,” Albert said, tilting his head to one side. “It’s too bad, really. Fredericks deserved what he got, but I’d rather not have to kill pretty young girls. I tried to let the other one live, I really did. I even bought her little baubles when she asked for them. But then she wanted money or she would tell the police what Fredericks had told her about me, what he found out about my past from his hobo buddies. She guessed that I killed him so he wouldn’t give me away. She kept wanting more and more so she could leave here. I even hit her, but nothing stopped her demands. It wasn’t safe to let her live any longer.”
Death of a Winter Shaker Page 18