Sins of a Shaker Summer

by Deborah Woodworth

  A shadow fell across the plant she was examining.

  “You didn’t bring a basket,” Willy said, “so I brought you this.” He held out a battered, grimy wooden bucket.

  “Thanks.” She put a sprig in the bucket and scooted over to another plant, but Willy stayed put. “I don’t want to interrupt your work,” she said.

  “It’ll keep,” Willy said. “I was just thinkin’ how you remind me of my granny.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, I mean you’re much younger and all, but just the way you are with herbs. Like how you’re touching that boneset leaf right now, like it was a baby’s cheek. My granny used to do that.” Willy squatted next to her. “Not with boneset, of course. She always said it wasn’t worth its own name. It never did cure much of anything.”

  “Why are we growing it, then?”

  Willy shrugged. “Dunno. I just plant ’em.”

  “What do you think of the rest of the plants in this garden?” Gennie asked.

  “They’re okay. A few are good. Most of ’em my granny’d pass by, but they won’t make you sicker.”

  “So none of them are poisonous?”

  “Nah.”

  “And the plants you found in the woods—are they all poisonous?”

  Willy frowned. “Now that you mention it, yeah, all the ones I found could knock out a bear, if he was dumb enough to eat it.”

  “Did your grandmother use any herbs like the ones in the woods?”

  “Well, yeah, but she knew the right way to mix a cure. She never would’ve—”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Gennie caught a movement. She glanced up to see Benjamin emerge from the Medicinal Herb Shop. With long, quick strides, he veered to the right, a direction that could take him to the Trustees’ Office. Gennie didn’t stop to worry about what Willy might think. As soon as Benjamin had turned his back, she jumped to her feet and raced to the shop. It hadn’t occurred to her before that Benjamin would move with such speed. Of course, he might not be heading for the Trustees’ Office, but she couldn’t take that risk. As she reached the shop door, Gennie took a gulp of air to hide her nervousness.

  She started speaking as soon as she was in the door, before Andrew had a chance to question her presence. “I’m just here to use the phone for a quick call to Josie. She asked me to do something for her. You don’t mind, do you?” She was halfway across the room before she realized that Thomas was standing with his back to her and with the phone receiver at his ear.

  “He’s taking some orders,” Andrew said. “He probably won’t be more than ten minutes or so, but it might be quicker if you just walked over to the Infirmary.”

  Gennie had heard some new and colorful language since leaving North Homage for the world, and it was all she could do to keep it to herself. She nodded and left, careful not to run until she had cleared the entrance.

  In a way, Andrew had been right. The Infirmary was the closest phone. Gennie ran through the grass for the door. She plunged into the waiting area, where Josie sat at her desk, shaking a light brown powder onto a scale. As Gennie bolted past, Josie jumped back in alarm, setting her several chins quivering. The jar of powder slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor. A cloud of fine dust puffed into the air.

  “Goodness, what has happened?” Josie asked, ignoring the mess on the floor.

  “No time.” Gennie grabbed the phone and dialed the Trustees’ Office number, praying for the speediest connection ever made. The ringing seemed interminable.

  “Come on, Rose, answer, please answer,” Gennie whispered. She heard a click, and the ringing stopped. A man’s voice answered. It was Benjamin.

  Rose had figured out almost all the symbols on the map when she heard the phone ring in the hall. She realized she hadn’t thought her plan out very carefully. If someone other than Gennie was calling, it might seem suspicious for Rose to answer. She decided to take the call itself as a warning and let it ring.

  She replaced Patience’s journal, with the map stuffed back inside it, on the bookshelf. As she turned to leave, she saw Benjamin’s old journal still lying where she’d tossed it. She grabbed it and pushed it back beside Patience’s. Aware she’d lost precious time, she ran for the door and clutched the knob just as the phone stopped ringing.

  She had turned the knob and opened the door a sliver when she heard a man’s voice. Benjamin stood a few feet away, his back to her.

  “Hello? Hello? Impossible contraption.” Benjamin muttered what sounded like a curse. “Hello, Gennie? What on earth . . . ?”

  Not daring to click the door shut, Rose eased her hand off the knob, then flattened herself against the wall. He was too close; she’d never be able to sneak past him and down the stairs. Her only hope was that Gennie would find a way to convince him to leave without going into his room. She could think of no appropriate prayer for her situation, so she simply begged for mercy.

  “Why would Josie need to see me?” Benjamin said. “Oh well . . . Yea, I probably am the best one to help her with that; Andrew isn’t really up-to-date. What, right now? Can’t it wait? Oh, all right. I’ll be right there. Yea, right away; I said so, didn’t I?”

  Rose heard a tap as Benjamin hung up the phone, followed by his voice uttering something unintelligible but irritable. Then silence. Would he be considering whether he could delay long enough to complete his errand in the Trustees’ Office? Finally Rose heard the patter of work shoes on pine stairs. She let her breath out in relief and crumpled to the floor.

  She gave herself a few seconds to steady herself. Then she slipped into the hallway and listened. When she heard the outside door click shut, she crept down the stairs and watched out a window until Benjamin was out of sight.

  The bell for midday meal would ring soon. Rose considered sneaking one last look at the map, but it wasn’t worth the risk. She had a knack for memorizing maps, honed during her years as trustee, when she had directed the Shakers’ small sales force and conducted real estate transactions. What she had in her head was enough to help her understand what had been happening in her village. She hurried away from the Trustees’ Office before other Believers began emerging for the noon meal.

  Rose returned to the woods north of the cemetery. This time she knew exactly where to look. Rather than tramp through the brambles, she circled around the far northwest edge of the woods. She slowed down and kept her eyes on the edge of the woods until she found what she’d expected—a stand of plants about three feet high, with large, white, trumpet-shaped flowers that had a pale violet tinge to them. Jimsonweed.

  The rank smell brought back memories of Rose’s childhood, when North Homage still grew some jimsonweed. Even then they were phasing it out. Though it had many medicinal uses, it was also highly poisonous, and Josie preferred to work with milder substances. Gradually the Society had eliminated both the cultivated and the wild plants. Rose still remembered Josie showing her the plant and warning her not to touch it and never, ever to eat the berries.

  Rose was almost certain that Nora and Betsy had found this plant somehow and had eaten some part of it. Luckily, the fruit had not yet formed, so the girls had probably consumed flowers and perhaps leaves. The seeds would most surely have killed them.

  As she cut back through the woods, Rose came upon a flattened area under a large maple. It looked as if some animals, or perhaps children, had spent some time sitting on the mossy ground. She examined the area, pushing aside undergrowth, until she found two cracked white cups and small plates under a pile of leaves. They were from the Shakers’ tableware and must have been discarded when they cracked irreparably. This was where Nora and Betsy had their “tea.”

  Rose took the crockery with her and went directly to the Center Family kitchen, where the kitchen sisters were already serving the midday meal.

  “Where’d you find that old stuff?” Polly asked. “Here, let me get rid of it for you.”

  “Nay, I have a reason for keeping it,” Rose said, holding the cups and p
lates tightly to her chest. “But you could do me a favor. Go get Nora and Betsy from the dining room and bring them to me. Tell them I just need to talk with them for a minute or two.”

  Polly gave her a doubtful look, then shrugged and left. She returned with two wide-eyed girls, who had to be pushed toward Rose. When they saw what she held, they stopped, and Polly almost stumbled over them. She gave each of them a shove from the small of the back.

  “Go on, girls. I’m short on kitchen sisters, and I don’t have time for your silliness.”

  “Nora, Betsy,” Rose called, “come on over. Don’t be frightened. I’m not angry with you.”

  With a nervous glance at each other, the girls held hands and walked over to her.

  “I found these cups and plates in the woods near the cemetery. That’s where you had your tea, isn’t it?”

  Nora nodded.

  “And you ate some flowers and leaves, didn’t you?”

  Both girls nodded.

  “Was one of the flowers big and white?”

  “I told you we’d get caught if we ate a bell, Nora, I told you.” Betsy let go of Nora’s hand and looked up beseechingly into Rose’s face. “We weren’t supposed to eat the bells. That’s what Janey and Marjorie told us. The bells have bad magic, and a bad angel protects them.”

  “And who told Janey and Marjorie that the bells have bad magic?” Rose asked

  “Their mama, I think. But Nora wouldn’t listen.”

  “I did, too, listen,” Nora objected. “It’s just that I thought they probably got it wrong. They don’t know a lot,” she said, with the smugness of a smart little girl. “I thought the magic was probably just stronger, not bad, so I made sure we didn’t eat much, just one flower and a couple of leaves.”

  “Okay, for telling me the truth, you are forgiven,” Rose said. “But these tea parties must stop. You must never again eat something if you don’t know for certain that it isn’t poisonous. Do you understand?”

  Nora and Betsy nodded.

  “All right, you can go back to your meal now.”

  The girls scampered off, and Rose glanced around the kitchen. Polly had said she was shorthanded, and Rose realized that Gertrude wasn’t there.

  “Oh, who knows?” Polly said when Rose asked where Gertrude had gone. “Probably up to her retiring room to have a good cry. It’s all she seems to do these days. She’s behaving more and more strangely. I think she must be getting really old or something. As she left, she told me I could be Kitchen Deaconess from now on. As if I want to.”

  “Come in,” said a weepy voice, as Rose knocked on Gertrude’s retiring room door.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Rose entered to find Gertrude packing all her belongings in laundry sacks.

  “Getting my affairs in order,” Gertrude said. “I can’t run from it any longer, Rose. My conscience is aching, and I must pay for my crimes. Gennie said that her young deputy will be here for the purging tonight, so after I confess my horrible sins, I’m going to turn myself in to him. Don’t try to talk me out of it. This is the only way to atone.”

  Rose threw up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Gertrude, I am convinced that you did not kill Patience. If only you will wait and let me resolve this. Please.”

  “It’s no use, Rose. I’ve made up my mind.”

  “All right, have it your way,” Rose said. “But I intend to find out what really happened. I’ll just work faster, that’s all.” She squeezed Gertrude’s shoulder and turned to leave.

  “Rose, I believe I should warn you.” Gertrude held a clean white kerchief against her stomach as if stanching a wound. “There has been some talk going around of asking you to step down as eldress. I told my kitchen sisters never to repeat such nonsense, but they said several of the other sisters are saying it. Especially Elsa. She’s been saying that you’ve broken your vow of celibacy. You haven’t, have you?”

  Rose unclenched her teeth long enough to say, “Nay, I most certainly have not! Thank you for telling me.”

  She took the staircase two steps at a time, moving fast to work off a portion of the anger surging through her. The rest of her fury would serve her well as she pushed to fit the pieces together before what she had come to think of as the dreaded purging.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ROSE LEFT BY THE FRONT DOOR OF THE CENTER FAMILY Dwelling House just as the sisters and brethren were filing out their separate doorways from the dining room. She waited outside on the path until Gennie reached her.

  “We have work to do,” Rose said.

  Gennie nodded and followed in silence to the Ministry House. Once they had ensconced themselves in Rose’s retiring room, Gennie let her curiosity bubble over.

  “Tell me everything,” she said. “Did you make it out of Benjamin’s room without being seen? What did you find there? I heard rumors going into the dining room that Gertrude has confessed to murdering Patience.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rose said, responding to the last topic first. “I’m afraid her conscience is finely honed. Anyway, we will have to let her suffer pangs of guilt until we can straighten this mess out. As for what I saw in Benjamin’s room—and many thanks for giving me a way to escape—I found the drawings you saw in the Medicinal Herb Shop. They are maps of North Homage, showing the location of plantings of dangerous herbs which we Shakers no longer use in our cures. Someone is undoubtedly using them in some of the experiments going on in the shop. We can’t be certain who planted them, or whether it was a group effort on the part of the Mount Lebanon Believers. Until we know for certain, we can’t afford to trust any of them.

  “I also determined that Nora and Betsy found or were told about some of these plantings and that they were made sick by eating jimsonweed.”

  “Jimsonweed? That sounds familiar,” Gennie said.

  “It’s also called angel’s-trumpet. When I saw the symbols on the map, I began to understand. The ‘horn’ was supposed to be a trumpet, the cowl was for monkshood, and so on.”

  “Angel’s-trumpet.” Gennie rolled the words around and listened to them. “So do you think that when Nora mentioned a ‘bad angel’ . . .”

  “Irene told the children not to eat any flower that looked like a bell because they were protected by a bad angel. Jimsonweed causes hallucinations. My guess is that Nora’s guilty conscience created visions of a bad angel after she’d eaten a plant she’d been warned not to eat.”

  “So how does this help us know how Patience and Hugo died?”

  “At this point, all I can do is speculate,” Rose said. “My guess is that either Patience or Benjamin was responsible for the poisonous herb plantings, but certainly both of them knew where to locate each plant. And someone might have been experimenting with the herbs, disguising their presence in curatives with peppermint. Which, I think, might be how Hugo became ill.”

  “By accident?”

  “Yea, by tragic accident. Apparently Andrew could not be sure what was in the jelly—at least, he hasn’t told me, if he does know—but if we can convince Grady to have it analyzed, we might find evidence of one of those dangerous herbs.”

  “I’ll convince Grady,” Gennie said.

  “If we are successful, he may need no convincing.” A dark cloud passed across the window, sending shadows leaping through the room. Rose was reminded that she had only a few hours before evening.

  “Do you have a suspicion about whether it was Patience or Benjamin who did the plantings?” Gennie asked.

  “Benjamin. I think he wanted so much to show himself superior to the others that he was willing to take the chance of poisoning someone. Patience could easily have found out about the plantings while she conducted her personal rituals. Maybe she saw Benjamin actually plant seeds or check on his harvest. It’s quite possible that she saw the jimsonweed and got the idea to use it to help deepen her trances.”

  “So her gifts were not real after all?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. “I really don’t
know.”

  “Do you think her death was an accident, too?”

  Rose leaned back in her chair and rocked gently. “Nay, I’m afraid I do not. I am more than ever convinced that someone killed her. Patience always kept her eyes open, and she knew a great deal about her fellow Believers.” She pulled her list of suspects out of a desk drawer and handed it to Gennie. “Some of her knowledge was true, and some was merely conjecture. Either way, since the information came out most often during trances, it had the ring of truth to it, and that made her potentially dangerous.”

  “But we still don’t know who might have thought her dangerous enough to kill her?”

  “Nay, that is what we still must find out.” Rose checked the small clock she’d brought in from her bedside. “And we don’t have long to do it. The purging starts immediately after evening meal.”

  “What shall I do?” Gennie asked.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to stay out of this?”

  Gennie laughed. “Rose, you know that if you don’t give me an assignment, I’ll just create one myself.”

  “And that could be worse than my worst nightmare,” Rose said. “All right, perhaps you could talk more with Irene. Confirm our guess that she warned the girls about the poisonous plants and try to find out how she and the children knew about their existence. But for heaven’s sake, stay out of trouble.”

  “What if Irene killed Patience?”

  “If you become fearful of her, use those wits of yours. Get away from her and find me immediately. Do you promise?”

  “Of course, I promise. Where will you be?”

  “Probably at the Medicinal Herb Shop, since I’m suspicious of everyone there.”

  “Are you accusing one of us of harming Patience? We would never do such a thing,” Andrew said, hurt in his voice. Rose had decided that the quickest, safest route was direct confrontation, so she faced Andrew, Thomas, Benjamin, and Willy inside the Medicinal Herb Shop. She had hoped that the culprit would break down when confronted with his secret and the enormity of his crime. After all, she’d reasoned, three of them were Believers. They had vowed not to kill even for a just cause. Surely the guilt of knowing he had murdered another human being, and a fellow Shaker at that, must be nearly unbearable. But so far she had not seen so much as a flicker of remorse. She decided to recount what she had pieced together about Patience’s accusations against each of them.