Phillip and Peter, who I thought were happy to be home, circled me as they were inclined to do any time I worked with plants. Suddenly, the two goats lifted their heads and bolted for the front of the house. Lois had arrived.
I walked around the house at a much slower pace and was greeted by the sound of laughter. Lois’s laugh took me right back to my childhood. She had the loudest and most authentic laugh I had ever heard, and it made me smile. If nothing else fruitful came from these difficult times, finding my old friend again would be a gift.
Lois chortled. “Oh my word! Where did the two of you come from?”
I couldn’t help but smile at my old friend’s cheerful reaction to my two rambunctious goats.
“Millie, will you call off your attack goats?” she shouted in the midst of her laughter.
“Phillip! Peter!”
The goats looked at me and fell to all eight hooves.
Lois held her sides. “I haven’t laughed that hard since I pushed husband number four into the pool and told him I wanted a divorce. That was a red-letter day.” She dusted off her hands. “Are you ready to do some sleuthing, Amish Marple?”
I sighed. “Is that my new name?”
“It is while we are on the case. I thought it would be good if we had code names. That way people will know we’re serious.”
“I don’t think that code names for two women in their sixties will make anyone think we’re serious. They will think we’re ridiculous.”
She thought about this. “That might be even better. Let them underestimate us. My second husband did that to me, and I was the one who ended up with his fishing boat in the divorce.”
“Do you fish?”
“Of course not, but I sure wanted that boat.” Her lips curled into a smile.
I shook my head. Lois’s world and logic could not be farther from mine. “We had better get going.” I made no comment about her being late. “I think it would be best to start at the place where Zeke worked. He spent the majority of his time with those men. They will know the most about him.”
She scratched Peter, who had sidled up next to her, on the top of the head. “So we are going to just walk into the place where he worked and asked questions?”
“That’s what I was thinking, unless you have a better plan.”
“Nope. That’s a good start, and remember I have those lock picks for backup.”
“It’s impossible for me to forget.” I paused. “Just keep them in your purse until we need them. I hope it won’t come to that.”
She patted the enormous pocketbook on her hip. “I hope it will. I’d like to brush up on my skills.”
I tried not to think about what other crime-solving equipment might be in her purse. I knew there was something else though. “Let me close up the house and we can leave.”
“What about the goats? Don’t you put them in the barn while you’re gone?” she asked.
I shook my head. “They just run loose. They are gut about staying on the property, and I always keep the barn door open for them if the weather turns bad. Also, I have found that they keep unwanted guests off my farm. Most people don’t react with the same amount of glee as you did when two Boer goats start running at them full speed.”
“Wow, they could give some straying advice to my first husband. He could have really used it. Now that I think about it, the second and fourth could have used the lesson as well.”
She petted Peter and then Phillip on the head. “Maybe I should get a pair of goats, but I don’t think my landlord would like it. I have a little house in the village that I’m renting.”
After closing up the house, I climbed into Lois’s massive car and felt like a doll sitting on the long front bench seat. My feet didn’t touch the floor if I sat all the way back. Hanging from the rearview mirror was a pink stuffed poodle that was as big as my fist. “Can you see to drive with that thing dangling in your line of vision?”
She started the engine. It made a grinding sound, and then caught. “Of course I can. And it completes the 1950s vibe I was going for, paying homage to the decade in which we were born. Sadly, we’re far too young to really appreciate poodle skirts, but my mother had one, and it was amazing. I used to put it on when she was out of the house and twirl around like I was in a big dance number with Mickey Rooney.”
I remembered Lois’s mother. She was a colorful, outspoken farm wife who wasn’t that different from Lois herself, but she had been married to the same man for over fifty years. There was the difference. She’d passed on while I was in Michigan. I had heard that much about Lois while I was away.
“I am sorry about your mother. I’m sorry that I couldn’t come back for the funeral.”
She nodded, and for a moment her sparkling demeanor cracked, and I could see the true and tender Lois there. However, as quickly as it came it was gone. “I appreciated the card you sent. It was a good thing you sent it to my son’s house. I was between husbands then, which meant I was between homes. Life is funny that way.”
I wouldn’t know. I’d not known Lois’s whereabouts at the time and had wondered if my card would reach her at all. I’d sent the card to her son’s home with the hope that he would know how to contact his mother.
“Where are we headed?” she asked as we rolled down my driveway.
I gave her the address of the construction warehouse that was on the outskirts of the county near the town of Holmesville. It was located on a county road that had no street signs or lines painted on the road; few rural roads in Holmes County did. When you got out of the 39 and 62 crossroads, it was a lot of open fields, big farms, and unmarked turns. It was common for Englischers who had been led astray by GPS to wander up to the front door of my farmhouse asking for directions back to one of those two main roads in the county. It was also common for the goats to chase folks away before I had a chance to give them proper directions.
Having grown up in the county and having been born before the advent of GPS, Lois knew where we were. All I had to do was tell her the road name, and she knew exactly where we were going. There was something to be said for a strong memory.
As we drove to the construction company’s headquarters, Lois told me about her life over the last twenty years in the most concise way she knew how, which truthfully wasn’t that concise because Lois was doing the storytelling.
She had just gotten to the part about being on a vacation with husband number two, or was it number three—I can’t remember—when we came upon a modest hand-painted sign along the road that read SWARTZ AND SWARTZ CONSTRUCTION.
You wouldn’t know from the sign that it was one of the most sought-after and biggest Amish businesses in the county. As far as I knew, every Amish family in Holmes County had one son, brother, or father working at the construction company at one time or another. It was the place where many of the young men from my district worked, including Zeke; both Enoch and Edith’s first husband, Moses, had worked there too. In fact, now that I was allowing myself to think about that time again, I thought the three of them must have worked together. Zeke was the last one of the group who had still been working for Swartz and Swartz. Of course, he wasn’t any longer, and Enoch was the last one alive. I shivered at the thought.
Lois shifted the car into park. “Okay, what’s the plan?”
“The plan is to find out what Zeke did here and if anyone he worked with had any reason to want to kill him.”
“Then we track that person down and make a citizen’s arrest.” She thrust her fist into the air.
I grabbed her arm. “Nee, we take the information to Deputy Aiden and let him handle it.”
She crossed her arms. “You’re no fun at all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Lois sighed more deeply, as if I had really hurt her feelings in some way. “Here I am thinking we are going to bring in a perp, and all you want to do is tell the police about it.”
I glanced at her, knowing she was just being dramatic for effect. “Do you really
think we can bring anyone in at all?”
She held up her enormous pocketbook. “I might not be able to take someone down without risking pulling a muscle, but let me tell you . . . this really packs a wallop when I need it to.”
“Please try not to hit anyone with it. I can only guess what else you might have in there other than your lock picks.”
“I have a small brick for one,” she said as if she was telling me she’d brought a pen.
“A brick? Why on earth would you have a brick in your purse?”
“In case the lock picks are taking too long,” she said as if it made perfect sense.
I was afraid in Lois’s mind that it did.
She sighed. “Okay, I’m fine with telling the police if that’s how you want to play it.”
“It is,” I said mildly.
“But I still have a problem.”
“What can that possibly be?” I was starting to really regret my decision to allow Lois to be my driver for this investigation.
“I don’t have a code name. What about code names? Yours is great. I think Amish Marple is some of my best work, but what is mine? How can I be on a case even in this amazing outfit if I don’t have a proper name to support it? You don’t think Wonder Woman could be called ‘Sue’ when she was wearing her red boots, do you?”
“I’m not sure who Wonder Woman is.”
She groaned. “So much important cultural history is lost on the Amish.”
I must have made a face because she said, “I don’t mean that as an insult. Only you have missed a lot.”
“Intentionally,” I said. “We have chosen to separate ourselves from the rest of society.” Since I didn’t want to get into a philosophical debate with her about Amish culture, I said, “I’m sure you’ll think of an excellent code name for yourself. Just let me know what you come up with.”
“I’m not sure that you should give me free rein on my code name, Millie, but if that’s what you want to do, I won’t fight you. You might be alarmed at the results.”
More alarmed than I already was over the fact she had a brick in her pocketbook? “We can’t sit in this car forever. The men inside are going to start to wonder who we are and what we are doing here. Let’s make this visit short and sweet, as you Englischers say.”
“You bring the sweet,” she said. “I’ll bring the hammer.”
“Please don’t tell me that you have a hammer in your pocketbook too.”
“Oh-kay,” she said slowly. “I won’t tell you that.”
I got out of the car. I was too nervous over what I was about to say to the men in the warehouse to argue with Lois over her code name or about the hammer that I now knew was also in her purse. However, I had to admit that Amish Marple was starting to grow on me a bit, not that I would ever tell Lois that.
Lois got out of the car too and hiked her massive purse onto her shoulder before locking the car. I hoped that we wouldn’t go anywhere that we had to be searched because I guessed there was a lot more in that bag I didn’t want to know about.
I examined the warehouse in front me. It was the height of a two-story building, but I knew it was only one floor inside. The building had a steep shed roof made of aluminum, and the siding was gray vinyl. One of the three black garage doors was opened wide. The other two were closed. The open door made the building look like a monster with a wide, angry mouth because of where the windows were on either side of it. The windows looked a little too much like eyes watching me, for my taste.
At this late hour of the morning, I knew that most of the men had already been at work for hours. Most would have arrived around six a.m. for work, and that was after doing a number of chores at their own farms and homes when they awoke.
“Ready?” I asked.
She nodded, looking as serious as I ever saw her. “Ready. Let’s find this killer.”
Her comment about finding the killer didn’t make me feel any more confident we’d actually be able to do that, but I was willing to try. I was here for Edith, and Lois had come for Darcy. They were more than enough reason to go inside that warehouse.
I walked toward the building, with Lois just a step or two behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. “What are you doing back there?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. I have an idea. It will be part of our cover.”
“Our what?”
She didn’t get a chance to answer because a man came up to me. “Millie Fisher?”
Carter Young, Iris’s husband and a handsome blond man with a reddish complexion, walked toward me with a broad smile on his face. He wiped his hands on a kerchief from the back pocket of his denim trousers. His shirt and workpants were clean; remnants of black roofing tar scuffed his work boots.
Iris had confessed to me once that it had been Carter’s smile that had caught her attention before they started courting. His smile was so wide and genuine that it threatened to split his face in two from sheer happiness. I had known the moment I had seen Carter and Iris together that they were a match and told them both so. They were one of the couples I was most proud of putting together before I moved to Michigan.
He shoved the cloth back into his pocket. The vigorous cleaning hadn’t made a great deal of difference on his grease-stained fingers. “You will have to excuse my appearance. I was trying to fix one of our forklifts. As of yet, the engine has gotten the better of me.” He smiled. “Iris said that you might be stopping by for a chat, but I didn’t think you would actually come. I’m happy to see you but . . .” His speech trailed off when he saw Lois standing behind me.
Lois smiled, clutched her purse to her middle and made no comment.
I frowned and wondered how Iris would know that I would stop by when I’d said nothing to her about it. Then I remembered Ruth had said she would talk to Iris.
I looked back at Lois. When she didn’t say anything, I said, “This is Lois. She’s my—”
“Driver,” Lois interjected. “I’m just her driver. You know how you Amish need someone to take you about.”
Carter’s smile wavered just a bit. “Ya, that is true.” Then the smile returned at full force. “I’m happy that you have a driver to take you about, Millie. You have to be careful on these roads as tourist season picks up. Holmes County is a much busier place than it used to be before you moved away. More buggy accidents are reported than I care to think about.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I know how to drive a buggy, Carter Young.”
He waved his hands. “I wasn’t saying that you don’t. It’s just when you get older, you . . .”
“I think you should stop right there, young man,” I said, teasingly.
He laughed. “All right. That’s fair.”
“Iris told you that I was coming?”
He nodded. “She thought you would want to talk to someone about Zeke. She wanted me to keep any eye out for you in case you stopped by.”
That sounded like Ruth had told the quilting circle members I was investigating. As frustrating as Ruth’s meddling might be, I was happy that Iris had given her husband a warning to be on the lookout for me. It would make it easier if I had a person on the inside of the construction company to talk to about Zeke. I wasn’t sure that many of these men were going to be very forthcoming with a woman old enough to be their maami. Having at Englischer at my side wasn’t going to help either.
“Everyone here is shocked over what happened to Zeke. He was a strong, healthy man. If someone attacked him, his reaction would be to fight back,” Carter said.
I blinked at him when he said that. “Why do you say that? Usually nonviolence is the way of our people.”
“He was Amish, but he wasn’t a very gut pacifist. I have seen him come to blows with some of the Mennonite men who work here, and he’s even tried to spur some of the Amish into fights.”
I shivered. This was new upsetting information about Zeke. I hated to think how close he’d come to marrying Edith. If he was so openly violent at work, what was he like at home? I
didn’t even want to think about it.
Lois and I followed Carter to the open garage door; just inside was an Amish man not much older than Carter. I hadn’t known he was there. It wasn’t a stretch to think he had heard every word Carter and I had said outside the warehouse. He gnawed on a large piece of chewing tobacco. I tried to keep my expression neutral even though I hated the ugly habit.
The dark-haired, beardless man spat chewing tobacco onto the dirt floor of the warehouse, and I averted my eyes. Chewing was a common vice among Amish men. It was even more common than smoking. I wasn’t fond of it. It had cost me my husband. The few times that I had seen my Kip partake—he tried not to chew in front of me—I had asked him to stop. I should have insisted on it because he died from throat cancer. The Englisch doctors told me it was because of his tobacco habit. I didn’t bother to tell any of this to the young man who spat on the ground. It was easy to tell if a person was receptive to advice or not. This young man was most certainly not.
The inside of the warehouse smelled like freshly cut wood, motor oil, and vinegar. It was my first time in such a building. It wasn’t the sort of place an Amish woman went, but I straightened my back and held my chin up as if I had every reason to be there.
It was something my Kip had taught me. He told me, “Millie, when you feel unsure of yourself, straighten your back and hold up your chin; then you will change your own mind.”
Every time I followed his advice, I found that he was right, and this time was no different. I stood inside of the warehouse as straight as a board and began to feel far more confident than when I had entered. Lois was right next to me, holding her massive bag at the ready. I prayed we wouldn’t need to call on its contents.
Men, mostly Amish men, moved around the warehouse with purpose in their stride. It seemed to me that every last one of them knew where he was going and was in a hurry to get there. The only man who didn’t seem to be in much of a rush was the one chewing tobacco at the door.
Matchmaking Can Be Murder Page 16
