Marshmallow Malice

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Marshmallow Malice Page 7

by Amanda Flower


  “I’m so glad I finally got to meet you. I have heard so much about you. Aiden and I go way back.”

  That was the impression she’d tried to give me at the wedding. I knew that much.

  I blinked. “You heard about me from Aiden?” I asked.

  She nodded. “He said that you have been dating for a short time.”

  I frowned. Somehow she made “short time” sound bad. “It’s nice to meet you. I always like to meet Aiden’s friends,” I said.

  “We are friends. Very good friends,” she added.

  “That’s nice,” I said, thinking I was in the middle of a coded conversation and I didn’t have the key to unlock the meaning of it. “I need to check with the deputies to see if I can leave. I have a friend of my own visiting me from New York, and she will be wondering what’s become of me.”

  I started to leave again. This time, I didn’t hesitate. I wanted to get away from Kayla and her mother. There was something about the two of them that didn’t sit well with me. I spotted Aiden talking to the coroner. I knew he would be busy for a while and that wasn’t a conversation I should interrupt. I found Deputy Little standing at the entrance of the parking lot, directing churchgoers to go in through the back door. I told him I was heading home so Aiden would know where to find me when he needed to record my statement. I was eager to return to my house to tell Cass what had happened. She wouldn’t believe it . . . or, considering my track record, maybe she would.

  I sighed. Today was supposed to be Aiden’s day off, and we’d planned to spend the day taking Cass on a sightseeing tour of Holmes County before she had to fly back to the city after the Fourth of July. That wouldn’t happen now. Aiden would be completely absorbed in the murder. He had to be to solve the case.

  “Bailey!” a woman’s voice called after me, and I turned around. I was surprised to see Christine Kepler walking briskly in my direction.

  I stopped at the edge of the sidewalk.

  She hurried over to me and took a couple of seconds to catch her breath.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She waved my concern away. “I’m fine. I’m glad I caught you.”

  I waited.

  “You won’t say anything to Juliet or the reverend about what I said about their marriage back at the church? Kayla is quite upset with me about how I spoke.”

  I took a breath. “I won’t say anything,” I said. I wouldn’t say anything because it would hurt Juliet, and she already had enough to worry about this morning.

  “Thank you.” She took a breath. “I just don’t want anything I say or do to impact the relationships between our families. We have been friends for a very long time, and we are looking forward to being even closer in the near future.”

  I knew she wanted me to ask her what she meant by that, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction. “That’s good to know. I really should be getting home . . .”

  “We are close and always have been since Aiden and Kayla decided to get married.” Her lips curled into a cold smile.

  “What did you say?” I whispered.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Oh,” Christine said. “You didn’t know that Aiden and Kayla were promised to each other?” She covered her mouth, as if she felt bad for revealing this information to me, but chances were, she enjoyed telling me this news. She knew exactly what she was doing. “It’s been understood for such a long time. I would have thought Aiden or Juliet would have told you.” She clicked her tongue. “It’s not like Aiden at all to keep that from you. I’m sure he thought Kayla had moved on, and that’s why he failed to mention it. She never did.” She smiled. “Those two were meant to be together. Everyone believes it.”

  I stared at her as if she’d spoken to me in ancient Chinese. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she’d said. I had known Aiden for a year, and he’d never once mentioned anyone named Kayla in all that time.

  “My daughter and Aiden were high school sweethearts and always had a plan to get back together after they sowed their wild oats. They went to prom together, you see, and promised each other before they left for different colleges that if neither had married by the time they were thirty-three, they would marry each other.”

  I blinked at her. Aiden’s thirty-third birthday was in September, just two months away.

  “Kayla went out of state for college, and she had some wild days.” She bit her lip, as if the memory of that time was painful. “What got me through it was the knowledge Aiden would wait for her. She cleaned up her act and has a great career. Now, she’s back in the village. I think she’s realized what’s truly important. Love and family.”

  I didn’t disagree with her that love and family were important, but Aiden loved me. He was with me. He wasn’t a single man who could keep that vow he’d made as a teenager.

  Christine’s eye shone. “Aiden Brody is a man of his word, so I know all will end as it should.” Her face broke into a smile. “I won’t keep you any longer.” With that, she turned and walked back to the church, leaving me in the parking lot with my mouth hanging open.

  I stumbled away from the church with my head reeling. It wasn’t that I believed Aiden and Kayla would marry. I knew Aiden. I knew he would never cheat on me in any way, but at the same time, it would have been nice to know that an old girlfriend might pop up in our lives someday. He certainly knew about my tumultuous romantic history.

  By the time I crossed the square and Main Street in front of Swissmen Sweets, I’d calmed down. I knew Aiden would have some kind of explanation for all this. I would just have to trust him. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a conversation I could have with him any time soon. Solving the murder had to come first. I tried to put Kayla out of my mind at least for the time being. I thought about Juliet’s comment that I should help Aiden solve the murder because we’d had so much success solving crimes together in the past. I had been a help those times because the murder involved the Amish. This time, it didn’t look like that was the case.

  “What sort of trouble have you brought to the community now?” a woman’s voice asked.

  I was so deep in thought, I hadn’t seen Esther Esh walking up the sidewalk toward her shop. It was a warm summer day, so she wasn’t wearing a bonnet. Only the required prayer cap covered the top of her head.

  “Esther, I would have thought you’d be at church today.” The words came out a little sharper than I intended them.

  She looked down her nose at me. “We had church last Sunday, so today is for private study.”

  I nodded. I should have known that. Typically, the Amish meet for church every other Sunday at a church member’s home. The host rotates every time. I should have known that Esther didn’t have church that Sunday; she was in the same district as my grandmother. I blamed it on information overload in the last hour.

  Esther looked past me at the church. “I can tell from your face you have brought more trouble to Harvest.”

  I swallowed. Ever since Emily had left her family’s pretzel shop to marry and work for me, Esther had blamed me for everything that had gone wrong in the village. It was true that I had been involved in a lot of the trouble that had befallen Harvest, but I wasn’t the source of it.

  “Was it that woman?” she asked when I didn’t say anything.

  I sucked in a breath. “What woman?”

  “The woman in the palm tree dress. She ran from the reception tent yesterday and walked up and down the street, shouting and causing a ruckus. It was a terrible scene, and on a Saturday in July, too, at the height of the tourist season. She scared away four of my customers. They wouldn’t come down the street because they didn’t want to get near her. Abel finally went out and asked her to leave.”

  This surprised me. Abel was Esther’s older brother. From what I could tell, he mostly loafed about and let Esther do all the work around their family shop. He seemed to think that because he was the man of the family, he had the right to boss his sister around and do little work.

 
“What did he say to her?” I asked.

  “He told her to leave. I already told you that.”

  I had a feeling that Abel’s delivery had been less than polite. “And she left?”

  “She stumbled down to Apple Street. Not long after that, I saw you. You were covered in frosting.” She wrinkled her nose. “It was a disgraceful sight, but something I have unfortunately become accustomed to seeing since you came to live in our village.”

  “Jethro knocked over the wedding cake,” I said, and then wondered why I felt I had to explain myself to Esther. It seemed there was nothing I could do to change her opinion of me.

  She pressed her lips together.

  “Was there something else, Esther?”

  A strange look crossed her face, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. After a long pause, she said, “The woman in the dress, I thought I had seen her before . . .”

  “On Saturday?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Nee, she looked like someone I used to know a long time ago.” She shook her head. “It is of no matter. I must get home. It is Sunday and the day of rest.”

  “Who did she look like?”

  She ignored my question and went into the pretzel shop. I wasn’t going to follow her inside. It would only make her dislike me more, and I wanted to make amends with Esther, if not for my sake, for Emily’s.

  I had intended to go straight home, but after running into Esther and having her say that she thought she recognized Leeza, I decided to step into the candy shop to see if my grandmother was there. Before I unlocked the door to the shop, I sent a text to Cass, telling her that I had to stop by the shop. She wouldn’t find that alarming. The murder, she would, so I’d wait until we were face-to-face to share that news.

  Nutmeg ran to the door as soon as I was inside. His thin-striped orange tail whipped back and forth in anticipation. When he saw that it was me with no Puff or Jethro in sight, his tail dipped down.

  I bent over and scratched the little cat behind the ears. “Be patient. I swear, the three of you have become quite the trio. You will see your friends soon enough.”

  The tail came up just a hair at my promise.

  “Where’s Maami?” I asked the cat.

  As if he understood my question, he spun around and galloped through the doorway that led to the staircase to the second floor. By the time I made it to the foot of the steps, he was already at the top, looking down at me.

  “Show-off,” I said with a smile. I didn’t usually pop into the shop unannouced on Sundays, so I called out. “Maami?”

  A faint voice called back, “I’m in the sitting room.”

  I walked up the stairs and down the narrow hallway that always reminded me of the servants’ quarters in an old Victorian home. Doorways lined either side of the hallway. They led into the bathroom, tiny kitchen, two bedrooms, and, at the very end of the hallway, the sitting room. From the top of the stairs, I could see my grandmother on the sofa, surrounded by her knitting.

  She set her knitting aside when Nutmeg and I stepped into the room. Nutmeg jumped onto the arm of the sofa and eyed Maami’s pink ball of yarn. His whiskers pointed at the ceiling as he zeroed in on his mark. Maami noticed his behavior, too. She wiggled her finger at the little orange cat and said, “Nee, don’t you dare.”

  Nutmeg sat back on the sofa’s arm and began cleaning his face with his paw as if he had no idea was she was talking about.

  “Where’s Charlotte?” I asked.

  Maami smiled. “The young people from the district are having a Bible study and picnic together outside of the district schoolhouse. I convinced her to go.”

  “She didn’t want to?” I asked. This surprised me. Charlotte was a bit of a social butterfly who had come out of her cocoon ever since she’d left behind her home district and joined my grandmother’s. She always seemed to be up for a new adventure.

  My grandmother pressed her lips together. “She has grown more and more distant with the youth in the district. It worries me.”

  “You think she’s not going to choose the Amish way,” I said.

  She pressed her lips together. “It’s not my choice to make for her. My opinion is of no value. Every Amish man or woman has to make this choice for him or herself. No one else can make it.”

  I bit my lip to hold back some suspicions I had about Charlotte. I believed that she had a crush on a young man who decidedly was not Amish. However, until Charlotte told me that herself, I wasn’t putting the idea out into the world, not even to my grandmother, who I trusted implicitly.

  “You look troubled, child. What is it?” my grandmother asked.

  I sat across from her on an old rocking chair that my grandfather had made as a wedding present for my grandmother. The chair was over fifty years old and worked as if it was brand new. I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  She picked up her knitting, and soon her needles were clicking together again.

  I smiled to myself. My grandmother was always the best person to go to when I was in need of advice, but she was Amish to her very core. That meant when she was chatting with a neighbor or listening to her granddaughter, her hands had to be busy all the time. Even if it was only her hands that moved. I told her about my discovery at the church that morning.

  Her needles froze in place as I spoke. “Oh, my dear child. What a frightful thing to find!”

  It was.

  “I just wish I had been more insistent about finding out what was going on before she got into that car. If I had, she might still be alive.”

  My grandmother leaned forward and patted my knee. “You said the woman was rude to you and didn’t want your help. You tried. My granddaughter, the sad truth is, you can’t help those who refuse your help. You can only try your best and keep them in your prayers.”

  I wished I could say that her words soothed me, but it was difficult to allow myself to be comforted when Leeza was dead.

  “If you won’t believe me, you can do something,” Maami said.

  I looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Find out who killed this young woman.” She met my gaze with clear blue eyes that were the same color as mine.

  I blinked. “You want me to investigate?”

  She nodded. “I have come to realize that you are very gut at finding information that will lead Aiden to the culprits he seeks. Do I want you to put yourself in danger as you do many times?” She shook her head. “Nee. But I think there are times when your help is necessary for those who have been hurt.”

  I blinked back tears. “Thank you, Maami.”

  She straightened up and began knitting again.

  “I actually wanted to ask you about Leeza. When you saw her at the wedding, did you recognize her?”

  She frowned at her stitches. “Recognize her?”

  I went on to tell her what Esther had said to me about Leeza looking familiar to her. “I thought if Esther had seen her before, perhaps you had, too.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  She smiled. “But you are asking because you have already decided to help Aiden to find her killer.”

  I nodded. “I have.”

  She smiled. “Gut. I can help you.”

  I blinked. “Help me?”

  “If you think she was in the village before or even in Holmes County, I can ask around the district to see if anyone knew her.”

  “Really?”

  She chuckled. “I can tell you think that this is un-usal for me, but remember, my child, you had to get your insatiable curiousity from somewhere.” She winked.

  I laughed. “Okay, that would be a great help. I really do want to find justice for Leeza. Even if I did nothing wrong, I can’t run from the guilty feeling that is gnawing at my heart.”

  She reached across her lap and grabbed my hand. “I understand how you can feel that way, but please remember my dear, Gott is the only one who can help you with that feeling.�
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  I swallowed hard.

  At that moment, Nutmeg pounced at the ball of yarn next to my grandmother. He gripped it with all four sets of claws and did a somersault off the sofa onto the hardwood floor. The cat and the ball of pink yarn rolled across the floor in a puff of orange fur until they bounced off the wall.

  Nutmeg lay upside down next to the wall and blinked at us. His front claws were still in the ball of yarn.

  Maami laughed and shook her head. “Cats.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After leaving Swissmen Sweets, I felt much better about my intention to help Aiden solve the murder, even if Aiden didn’t know about it yet . . .

  Ten minutes later, I walked into my small rental house and found Cass and Puff in the kitchen. Cass was drinking coffee, and Puff munched on her morning carrot. They both appeared to be pleased with how their calm morning had gone so far.

  Cass cocked her head. “You were gone a lot longer than I expected you to be. Until you texted to say you were stopping by the candy shop, I figured Juliet had roped you into something at the church, and I was just about to head that way to rescue you.”

  I winced.

  She set her coffee mug on the table. “What is it? I know that face; something’s happened. Is Juliet okay?”

  “She’s fine. Why would you assume she wasn’t okay?”

  She folded her arms and leaned back in the chair. “The wedding didn’t exactly go off without a hitch.”

  That was one way to put it. “It’s sort of related to the wedding, but Juliet is fine.” I took a breath. “I found—”

  “A dead body,” Cass interjected. “Do not tell me that you found a dead body.”

  I grimaced.

  Cass hopped out of her chair. “Holy cow, Bai, you found another dead guy? How is that even possible? This must be some kind of record. Do you go out looking for trouble?”

  “No!” I cried.

  Puff hopped across the kitchen, the remains of her carrot carefully held in her teeth. Maybe she was searching for peace and quiet to finish her breakfast.

  Cass pointed at her. “Look at the bunny’s face—she doesn’t believe you either, and don’t even get me started on the fact that you have a bunny to begin with. Honestly, I think you have moved to Ohio and completely lost your mind. It’s all the country air.”

 

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