“She already wants that,” I said. “I think she’s going around the village telling people that we are already engaged.”
“She’s a visionary and says what she wants,” Cass said, setting Jethro on the floor. “I can respect that. Also, I did a great job at the manager thing. There are a few particulars I want to go over with him prior to finalizing the contract. . . .”
“Contract?” I squeaked.
“Of course. There is always a contract.”
“I thought we came here to solve a murder. I think I am much better at solving murders than being a television star.”
“You haven’t given the TV thing the old scouts try yet.”
I groaned.
Across the kitchen, Jethro had his snout buried in the dirt surrounding a potted plant. “Jethro!” I called.
The pig lifted his head from the pot with dirt on his black and white nose. I sighed and grabbed several napkins from the dispenser on the table. I knelt in front of the pig and cleaned his nose. He seemed perfectly content to let me do it.
“See,” Cass said. “You and Jethro have chemistry together. Gourmet Television’s audience will love it, and Juliet will be over the moon.”
As I cleaned his nose, I said, “I don’t know what Aiden will think of it though.”
Jethro looked up at me with a bemused expression on his face as if to say, “Oh, you silly human girl.”
“I agree with the pig.” Cass got out of her chair. “It all will be well. We just have to catch a killer, get the bishop or whoever to give your grandma permission to shoot in the candy shop, and launch your new career. Easy.”
“So easy,” I muttered.
I stood up. “At least Juliet will be pleased that Jethro might become a television star. I came through on that.”
Cass shook her head. “Technically, I came through on that, but I will let you take this one because of Aiden.”
“Gee, thanks.” I looked down at the pig. “The question is, Do you want to be a star?”
Jethro stood up as if he was ready to get to work.
“He definitely has star power,” Cass said.
I had to agree.
The pig ducked his head as if embarrassed. I knew he was nothing of the kind. Jethro had to be the most self-confident pig in the world with the number of compliments Juliet bestowed on him on a daily basis.
“Now what?” Cass asked.
“Well,” I said. “We are in the guest house where Rocky was staying, and no one is around.”
“True.”
“Her room must be in here somewhere . . .” I trailed off.
Cass smoothed her purple hair back over her right eye. “Ahh, I see, and you want to search it.”
“Not search. Just check it out.” I tucked the kitchen chair back under the table. I would be happy just to get out of this buggy-happy kitchen. I love Amish buggies as much as the next person, but it is all a little much to digest en masse.”
She laughed. “Search, check it out, I’m game. Let’s go find some clues, shall we?”
“We shall,” I said.
Chapter 18
I picked the pig up, tucked him under my arm, and walked out of the kitchen. Cass and I went back through the dining room with the boxes of equipment and miles of cords. The staircase to the second floor was right next to the front door. I half expected to see Pike in the living room where we had met him less than an hour ago, but he was gone.
“If anyone asks us what we’re doing,” I said, “just say we are looking for Eric.”
“That’s true,” Cass said as we reached the foot of the stairs. “Because I am looking for Eric. I want to give him a piece of my mind.”
I shot her a look as I went up the first step with Jethro still in my arms.
The wooden stairs creaked and whined with my every step. They were plain, polished wood, which made me think that even if this wasn’t an Amish house, it had been Amish made. On the second-floor landing, the floor was lined with doorways on either side. There had to be six rooms on the second floor. All the doors were closed.
Jethro was a small pig, but he was dense. He grew heavy in my arms, so I set him on the hardwood floor when I reached the second floor.
“How can we know which room was hers?” I asked. “We can’t try every single one. What if someone is inside their room? We can’t barge in on them.”
“Sure we can,” Cass said. “If someone is on the other side of the door, we say we are housekeeping and book it.”
“I don’t think the guest house has housekeeping.”
“They should.” She brushed her hair out of her eye. “We really should have thought this through more.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Jethro pressed his snout on the floor and sniffed. He snuffled down the hallway behind us.
“Well,” she began, “if we’d thought this through a bit better, we could have borrowed some plain dresses from your grandmother and looked like Amish housekeepers. We really need to start packing multiple disguises if we are going to keep doing the crime-solving thing.”
I sighed. “Cass, you would never pass for an Amish woman, even in a plain dress.”
“It’s the hair, isn’t it?” She touched a black piece of her hair. “It’s too much.”
“The hair is part of it,” I admitted. “Let’s get this over with.” I started to reach for the closest doorknob when a large Amish man stepped out of a bedroom farther down the hallway. He turned to make his way toward the stairs. When he spotted Cass, Jethro, and me standing in the middle of the hallway, he pulled up short.
In the time that the man stood there frozen in place, I got a good look at him. I would say that he was about fifty and had a dark-but-turning-to-gray beard. His eyes were narrowed, so I couldn’t make out the color, but I got the feeling they might be dark. I recognized him from somewhere, but I couldn’t place him.
At the same time, I could feel him sizing me up. “We’re looking for Eric Sharp,” I said.
The man didn’t utter a word, but my speech must have spurred him into action because as soon as I spoke, he began to move again. He ran toward us.
Cass and I jumped out of the way, but as he hurried down the hallway, Jethro stepped in front of him. The man stumbled over the pig, falling to the floor.
Jethro squealed.
I scooped up the pig, hoping he wasn’t hurt. If Jethro was injured on my watch, I wasn’t sure if Juliet would ever forgive me, no matter how big a star I made him. She might be excited about the idea of her son marrying me, but her pig was really number one in her life.
I stared at the man on the hardwood floor, holding Jethro to my chest. “Are you all right?”
He scrambled to his feet without a word.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
He didn’t even bother to look over his shoulder at me but ran toward the stairs. As he ran away, something fell from his coat pocket and clattered to the floor just before the top step. He didn’t slow down to see what he had dropped. He just kept running.
Still with Jethro in my arms, I hurried to the edge of the stairs and watched as the front door slammed closed after the Amish man. I looked to the floor to see what had fallen. Something had rolled up against the wall. First, I set Jethro on the floor, then I picked up a small wooden baby rattle.
It was clearly a toy for an Amish child. It was made of plain wood that had not been painted or adorned. I shook it, and the beads or dried beans inside clattered together. I stared at it.
“What have you got?” Cass asked.
I showed her. “It’s a baby rattle.”
Cass took the rattle from my hand and shook it.
“Why would an Amish man, who clearly was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, be running around with a baby rattle in his pocket?” I asked. “Does he have a baby and keep the rattle just in case? It seems like an oddly shaped and noisy item to carry around in your coat unless you have a baby with you.”
“I didn�
��t see a baby,” Cass said, handing the rattle back to me.
“Neither did I.” I turned back and faced the hallway. Holding the Amish rattle, I walked up to the doorway from which the man had come. Could it be Rocky’s room? Before the Amish man had tripped in the hallway, I had been all ready to give up my plan of searching her room, but that had been because I didn’t know which room had been hers, and now I just might know.
Jethro stood next to me, pressing his warm body into my leg as if he needed the comfort or perhaps trying to encourage me to open the door. The latter seemed more in keeping with the adventurous pig.
“You think that’s Rocky’s room, don’t you?” Cass stood on the other side of Jethro.
For a moment, I wondered what kind of picture we made. Two women standing on either side of a black and white polka-dotted potbellied pig. We made quite the trio.
“I could be wrong,” I said. “It might not be Rocky’s room, but we need to check. If it is, the Amish man running away needs to be reported to Aiden.”
Cass nodded. “For sure, and it would be better if we had all of our facts straight before we took this information to Hot Cop.”
I sighed. “Please stop calling him that.”
She shook her head as she reached for the doorknob. “That’s not going to happen. It’s the perfect name for him. Very descriptive.”
“It’s probably locked,” I said.
She turned the knob with no trouble. “Nope. Not locked.”
Jethro pressed his snout against the wooden door and pushed in.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, okay, I guess we all are curious about that room.”
Cass pushed the door open the rest of the way, and the three of us stepped inside. Waning sunlight streamed in through the window. A lacy curtain covered half of the window and blew in the breeze. The chill air in the room made it twenty degrees colder than the rest of the house. I shivered.
It was December. Why would the window be open? It was freezing outside. I looked back at the bedroom door that Cass had left half open. The window and the door were the only two ways into the room.
I walked over to the window and was careful not to touch anything as I peered outside. Just to the left of the window there was latticework with some sort of vine growing up it. It was the perfect way to climb up the side of the house and enter without being seen.
I stepped back. There was a clear boot mark on the windowsill. This must have been the way the Amish man had gotten into the room. It made me wonder why he hadn’t gone out that way too. Why risk walking through the house where he could be seen, which he had . . . by Cass and me, and Jethro, too, I supposed.
Cass joined me at the window. “You have something there, Sherlock?”
“I think so. I think this is how that man got inside.”
I knew I should call Aiden, but I didn’t think we were in any immediate danger. The man was long gone by now. If I wanted to take a look around the room, now was the time.
I stepped back from the window, taking care not to touch anything. Cass did the same. “What are we looking for?” she said.
“I’m not sure. Whatever that man was looking for, I guess.”
“Not super helpful, Bai.”
I shrugged. The bedroom was clearly a woman’s room. There was a pair of earrings on the dresser, as well as hair spray and a bottle of expensive-looking lotion. Now that I thought about it, the hair spray was expensive too. I recognized the name brand. A pair of black three-inch-high heels stood at the foot of the bed. I walked over to the closet. The door was open.
Form-fitting dresses and ladies’ suits hung in the closet. I didn’t know where she’d planned to wear those outfits in Holmes County, or the high heels for that matter. Neither were common attire in Harvest. She would have stuck out like a sore thumb at the Christmas Market.
My conscience was nagging me to call Aiden, so I knew I needed to search the room before I chickened out completely. I put on my gloves, which I had handy because it was below freezing outside, and opened the desk drawer. There was nothing inside it other than a notepad and a Gideon Bible. On top of the notepad there was a business card. I picked up the card. The card read ROCKY RIVERS PRODUCTIONS. The tagline read, “Where reality becomes television.” I frowned. Rocky must have owned her own production company in conjunction with Gourmet Television. Or perhaps it was completely separate. In any case, I knew it was something Aiden must be aware of by now. I was certain he’d looked into Rocky’s financials since her death, or at least someone in the department had and reported back to him.
After I put the card back, I noticed there was a laptop cord plugged into the outlet but no computer. Had the Amish man been carrying a computer, I would have noticed it, especially when he fell. I realized that the police must have already been in this room and taken Rocky’s computer, her phone, and anything else that might give them a clue as to who might have killed her.
The nightstand drawer had a flashlight in it; that was all. I moved on to the bathroom. Makeup and bottles and tubes of creams and lotions lined the counter. Even though there was a lot there, it was all displayed in a neat row with the labels pointed out. It looked nothing like the counter in my apartment back in NYC, which had been strewn with makeup and hair products that I’d slapped onto my face and hair before I ran out the door. Since moving in with my grandmother, I had streamlined my morning routine considerably and wondered why I’d ever felt I needed all those products in the first place.
Most of Rocky’s skin treatments and makeup said “anti-aging” or “look younger” on them. She had been a beautiful woman, and apparently she had been bound and determined to stay that way. Maybe by dating a younger man like Eric, she’d put extra pressure on herself to stay and look young.
I couldn’t see why a male Amish intruder would have any interest in anything on the bathroom counter. I almost left the bathroom, but at the last second I picked up her makeup case and peered inside. It had all the things I would have expected in it: makeup brushes, mascara, blush, and foundation. I was about to set it back down on the counter when I realized that there was a tiny tear in the lining.
I heard Cass rummaging around in the bedroom.
I bit my lower lip. Should I investigate the tear? If I did, what would I say when Aiden saw it, as I knew he would. I had to report the break-in to the police. We should never have come into the room, should have reported the Amish intruder right away. That’s what an upstanding citizen would have done.
Before I could change my mind, I wiggled my pinkie finger into the lining. It touched something smooth like paper. It was hard to tell exactly what it was with my gloves on. In any case, I knew it wasn’t part of the lining.
I pulled back with my finger, and it came away easily from the side. I saw that the lining was held in place with a thin piece of Velcro. Inside was a glossy piece of paper. I removed it and set the case back on the counter exactly where I’d found it.
The piece of paper had been torn from a magazine. As I unfolded the glossy slip, it was slippery in my gloved hands, but I didn’t dare take the gloves off and risk leaving my fingerprints on what I thought must be an important bit of evidence.
The glossy was an advertisement for Keim Christmas Tree Farm right here on Tree Road, just half a mile away. Cass and I had passed it on our way to the guest house.
The professional photograph in the ad showed a picture of fir trees with an Amish buggy positioned on the side. The ad read “Authentic Amish trees!” As far as I knew, there wasn’t any difference between an Amish tree and an English tree. A tree was a tree, but it was an interesting marketing tactic, since for some people buying Amish-made or in this case Amish-grown things seemed to be more authentic and real than those bought at a big-box American store.
Keim Christmas Tree Farm was the farm that was selling Christmas trees at the Christmas Market on the square. Had Rocky planned to buy a Christmas tree from them? How could she get it back to New York, I wondered, bu
t I suppose a woman with her money would find a way to do it. Or maybe she’d wanted to buy a Christmas tree or use the farm for a scene in Eric’s Christmas special. That made much more sense, but if that was true, why would she take such care to hide the ad in her makeup case lining? The Velcro clearly had not been part of the makeup case’s original design, so that meant Rocky had tampered with the lining in order to hide things there, important things that she didn’t want to be found.
I stared at the piece of paper in my gloved hand. That meant this was an important detail, a clue even. I could be holding the very reason why she was killed. Where I had seen the Amish man before came back to me all in a rush. It was at the Christmas Market. He was selling the Christmas trees at the market for Keim Christmas Tree Farm, the same one in the glossy ad in my hand. That couldn’t be coincidence, could it?
He’d broken into Rocky’s room looking for this because it tied him to her somehow. But how? What relationship could Rocky have had with an Amish Christmas tree farmer? Maybe that was for Aiden and the police to sort out.
I removed my cell phone from the back pocket of my jeans and took a picture of both sides of the piece of paper and several of the makeup bag and its secret pocket in the lining.
There was a knock on the door to the bedroom. “Is someone in here?”
My heart jumped into my throat because I immediately recognized the voice.
“Bai, we have company,” Cass whispered from the bedroom.
Chapter 19
As carefully as I could, I tucked the glossy magazine clipping back into the makeup pouch and set it back on the counter right where it had been before. I removed my gloves and shoved them into the pockets of my coat.
“This is the sheriff’s department,” an official voice said.
“Don’t shoot,” I heard Cass say on the other side of the door.
“What are you doing here? Where’s Bailey? I know she’s here if you are.”
I opened the door to find Aiden with his gun drawn but pointed at the floor. Cass was standing in the middle of the room with her arms folded over her chest. Deputy Little stood just behind Aiden. His eyes were the size of dinner plates.
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