Assaulted Pretzel

by Laura Bradford

  A tall figure jumped down from the driver’s seat and made its way around the buggy, the man’s straw hat and hunched shoulders shielding his face from view.

  “Hello?” she called out, rising to her feet as she did. “Who’s there?”

  Less than a second later, the man stepped into the light and tilted his head ever so slightly in her direction, the butterflies his presence sent up in her stomach supplying his name before her eyes could offer their confirmation. “Ben. Hi…Is—is everything okay?”

  “Yah. But I am not here to talk of me. I am here to see you. To know that you are okay.”

  She took a half step, half stumble backward. “Me? But, I don’t understand.”

  He took the steps of the porch with ease and gestured toward the swing. “Will you sit with me, Claire?”

  When she hesitated, he took her hand and gently guided her toward the swing, the unfamiliar feel of his hand on hers making her more than a little light-headed. “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in bed by now? I know your day starts very early…”

  “I could not sleep. I thought only of what Esther said when she came by Mamm and Dat’s house to bring Eli a plate of cookies.”

  She willed herself to focus on something other than the feel of his thigh alongside hers as the swing began to sway beneath them. “Esther?”

  “Yah. She told of your worry and your sadness at the shop this afternoon. She said you did not smile.”

  She felt her face drain of all color. “She told your parents that?”

  “No. She told only me.” He studied her closely, the tenderness in his eyes every bit as real as his simple black suspenders. “So please, Claire, won’t you tell me what is troubling you? I know I am Amish and that I do not understand everything about your world, but I do have good ears.”

  “I’m fine, Benjamin. Really. I was just tired today.” She ran her hand along the swing’s armrest, breathing in the clean night air as she did. “Which is exactly what I told Esther, too.”

  “Yah. But she believes it is more, and I do, too.”

  She pulled her hand back to her lap. “I was going to head in to bed in a few minutes. I just wanted a little more fresh air.”

  “If you were so tired it took away your smile, you would be asleep at this moment.”

  “And you?” she proposed. “What would you have done if that were the case?”

  Benjamin turned his head to look out at his horse, the gentle breeze that lifted her hair unable to reach his beneath the rim of his hat. After several long moments, he looked back at Claire. “I would take the buggy home and look for tomorrow to come.”

  She didn’t need access to a mirror to know his words had brought a flush to her face. Nor did she need the tremble in her hands to know they were treading in dangerous water.

  Benjamin was Amish.

  She wasn’t.

  Those two facts, coupled together, were enough to make her stop the swing and rise to her feet, the need to walk around the porch as much about self-sanity as anything else. Yet even as she walked, she could feel the weight of his eyes as they followed her to the front railing.

  “I guess I just have a lot of things on my mind is all.” There, she said it. Lifting her chin to the breeze, Claire took a deep breath then let it release slowly. “It’s been a long week.”

  “Tell me. I will listen.”

  She blinked away the sudden burn that meant tears were near. There were times, when she was busy at the shop or engaged in her day-to-day life, that she actually saw her failed marriage to Peter as a distant memory. And other times, the heartbreak was still so raw it was hard to believe so much time had passed.

  Having a man like Benjamin care about her feelings had her walking a fine line between the two. Because while she was grateful for his genuine concern, it also left her wondering how her own husband could have been so uninterested in everything about her and her life.

  “Please, Claire. I will listen,” he repeated.

  Slowly, she turned her back to the distant fields and leaned against the railing, the words coming slowly at first. “I’m worried about Aunt Diane. She seems to think what happened in the Karbles’ room is all about a shortcoming at the inn. And it’s not. Whoever killed Mr. Karble was looking for something in that room and they’d have gotten in no matter what kind of security measures she may or may not have had in place.

  “I’ve told her it’s not her fault, most of the guests have told her it’s not her fault, and even Jakob has told her it’s not her fault. Yet she doesn’t seem to be able to shake this disappointment she has in herself. And, Benjamin? It’s painful to watch.”

  “One day soon she will see.”

  Oh, how she wished she shared even a tenth of Benjamin’s optimism…

  “What else?” he asked. At her furrowed brows, he rephrased. “What else has taken your smile away?”

  Instinctively, her hand dropped to the pocket of her pants and the folded paper inside. She’d been so busy with Ann prior to dinner, she hadn’t been able to secure enough privacy to take a second look at the note until after dinner was served and Diane had shooed her from the kitchen. And then, when she finally had the chance to look at the equations more closely, she wished she hadn’t.

  Because the numbers, coupled with everything Esther had told her in the shop that afternoon, suddenly pointed to a very unsettling place.

  “Claire?”

  She pulled her hand away from her pocket and waved it in the air in what she hoped was a lighthearted motion. “I’m just worried about my aunt is all. Really.”

  But even as she offered the most believable placation she could, she knew it fell short. Especially for someone like Benjamin, who seemed to be in touch with everything—his horse, Eli, Ruth and her business, his farm, his life, Claire…

  Benjamin halted the movement of the swing with his boot and stood, closing the gap between them with only a modicum of hesitation. “Why did you ask questions about Daniel Lapp?”

  She swallowed once, twice. “I was just curious about his business.”

  Reaching out, he placed a gentle finger beneath her chin and nudged it upward until they were eye to eye. “Why did you ask questions about Daniel?” he repeated.

  She searched for another way to evade his question or to change topics completely, but the feel of his skin against hers made it difficult to think let alone play games. “Mr. Karble’s decision to manufacture the Amish toy line in Michigan must have devastated Daniel.”

  He dropped his hand to his side but not before sweeping it upward and cupping the side of her face for the kind of split second that felt like hours. “Yah. He had promised toy-making work to a few men. He did not want to go back on his word.”

  Again, she fingered the note through the outside of her pocket. “It also threatened his ability to make a living in light of the fact he sold a huge chunk of his farm to one of your neighbors.”

  “Stoltzfus,” Benjamin supplied.

  “Yes, that’s the name.”

  “Daniel made do before the notion of a new toy line; he will make do after.”

  She turned her head to the side, her gaze moving from Benjamin’s horse and buggy to the ever decreasing number of lights in the homes at the end of the driveway. If she took the note straight to Jakob and she was wrong in her deciphering, Daniel and Sarah would be subjected to unnecessary scrutiny. If she showed the note to Benjamin and got his read on the situation, she was burdening someone else with the same worry that had her sitting out on the porch at eleven o’clock at night instead of fast asleep in her bed.

  The only thing left to decide was who could handle the stress more—a potential suspect and his pregnant wife, or the quiet yet reflective man who was standing in front of Claire at that exact moment?

  Exhaling an errant strand of hair from her cheek, she reached into her pocket and extracted the memo Sarah had all but shoved in her hand earlier that day. Without a word, she
held it out for Benjamin to take.

  “What is this?”

  “You’ll see.”

  With careful hands, he unfolded the page and stared down at the memo they’d first seen together only days earlier. “I have seen this.”

  “Turn it over,” she whispered. “There’s more.”

  He did as she asked then held the paper up to the light. “I do not see—wait. I see it now. It is numbers.” He glanced back at Claire. “These are numbers. But what do they mean?”

  “I think they are a loss statement.”

  “Loss statement?”

  “A profit and loss statement,” she rushed to explain. “I make one of those for the shop every month so I can see how much I spent and how much I earned. It helps me identify weak places while highlighting the areas that are working.”

  “Yah. I do that with the farm, too. But I did not know it had a name.” Benjamin looked again at the paper in his hand. “This is yours?”

  “No, that belongs to Daniel.” She lifted her hands to her face and peered at Benjamin across her fingertips. “And if I’m reading them right, I think they give Daniel a pretty substantial motive.”

  He waited for her to continue, but when she didn’t, he pressed for more. “What is this motive you speak about? Motive for what?”

  Pushing off the railing, she sidestepped Benjamin only to double back in his direction after barely straying more than a foot or two. “For Robert Karble’s murder.”

  Chapter 17

  The sliver of moonlight that slipped its way under Claire’s drapes had started at her slippers and slowly made its way to the end of her bed, its farewell to dawn literally just around the corner. From a scientific standpoint, she supposed she should be fascinated by the visual passage of time, but considering the incessant tossing and turning that had enabled her to watch it in the first place, she wasn’t.

  What she needed was sleep.

  Unfortunately, the part of her brain that was supposed to be able to shut off in order to make that happen wasn’t cooperating. At all.

  Tossing her thin cotton blanket to the side, she swung her legs off the bed and sat up. Lying there, hour after hour, was doing absolutely nothing for her beyond birthing a headache she could no longer ignore any more than the guilt she felt over unleashing her fears on Benjamin.

  If she was lucky, the fruit of her amateur sleuthing hadn’t affected the man’s sleep in the slightest. But, deep down inside, she knew better.

  Sure, he’d tried to offer rebuttals to Claire’s hypothesizing where Daniel was concerned, but even she knew they were halfhearted. Daniel had motive, plain and simple.

  She wiggled her feet into her slippers and pulled her robe from its resting spot at the bottom of her bed, the image of a headache-relieving cup of coffee guiding her every move. When she was fully robed and ready to go, she stepped into the hall and looked both ways, the absence of light beneath the doors of the surrounding rooms reminding her of the need to be as quiet as possible.

  Yet, just as quickly as she turned toward the staircase and its access to the kitchen, she turned back, the pull of Room Six in all its taped-off glory winning out over the promise of coffee.

  It was hard to believe she’d stepped into this same hallway three evenings earlier to pinpoint the culprits behind an argument that had brought such an untimely end to her last decent night’s sleep. And just as happened that time, she found her gaze riveted on the room across the hall from her own. This time, though, the door was wide open with entry denied by a piece of yellow crime scene tape and the internal voice in Claire’s head that told her to stay away.

  She didn’t listen.

  Instead, with nary a glance in either direction, she succumbed to the pull that was her curiosity and inched her way over to the tape, her eyes grateful for the illumination provided by the wall sconces lining the hallway from end to end. Their light, while dim, made it easier to survey a room that had yet to be turned back over to Diane.

  In the center of the room, as was the case in each of the second floor’s additional guest quarters, was a queen-sized bed that spoke to a time when furnishings were tastefully elaborate. Had the sheets and blankets not been ripped off in an intruder’s haste, she knew it would have beckoned as a comfortable haven at the end of a long day. To the left side of the headboard was a nightstand. Atop the mahogany surface was an alarm clock, a tipped-over tissue box that had been emptied out across the floor, and a paperback romance novel that gave evidence to which Karble had slept where once the arguing had finally subsided on their last night together.

  A dresser along the far wall was missing three of its four drawers. The fourth drawer was extended in a fully open position. Rising up on her toes, Claire peered into its empty depths. The rest of the drawers hadn’t gone far, their contents tossed about like the drawers themselves. Socks and shirts that had once been folded were strewn about the room like confetti after a New Year’s celebration.

  Swinging her focus back to its starting point, she zeroed in on Rob Karble’s side of the bed and its own picked-over nightstand. Like Ann’s, a tissue box had been knocked on its side, its contents spilling out from the oval opening on top. Next to the box was a man’s gold watch that, to Claire’s untrained eye, looked to be rather expensive, its continued presence on the nightstand clearly obliterating simple robbery as a motive for the room’s ransacking.

  She looked back toward the overturned drawer closest to where she stood and surveyed its immediate area, a familiar wooden shape sticking out from under a necktie soliciting a gasp from deep inside her throat.

  “Claire?”

  Spinning around, she stumbled backward into the tape, ripping its left end from the wall and creating an undeterred entry point where only seconds earlier there had been none. She glanced down at the tape by her heels and then back up at the woman staying in the room beside her own. “Oh. Melinda. I…I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Really? I couldn’t have guessed.” Flicking her perfectly manicured fingertips in the air, the fully dressed woman punctuated her sarcastic retort with a quick smile before sidling up beside Claire. “So what made you gasp the way you did just now? Because, if I didn’t know any better, I’d have to think you saw a ghost or something.”

  Claire looked again at the necktie and the familiar toy peeking out from beneath its widest point and steadied herself against the edge of the open doorway. “I…I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  Melinda rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling, releasing an exasperated sigh in the process. “C’mon, Claire. Of course you do. A person doesn’t just gasp like that unless there’s a reason.”

  Slowly, she pulled her hand from the wall and pointed toward the wooden figure that had become the only thing she could see in the entire room. “Do you see that little toy right there? The one peeking out from underneath that blue and gray tie?”

  Melinda followed the path made by Claire’s finger, her subsequent nod answering the question in short order. “So? What about it?”

  She paused to take in the sturdy string and the movable legs, the design and the craftsmanship identical to the toy she’d seen in Esther’s hands not more than twelve hours earlier. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Of course. It’s called a Jumping Jack.”

  “Does Karble Toys make Jumping Jacks, too?” she asked, although, if she was honest with herself, she was afraid she knew the answer already.

  “It was about to.” Melinda crossed her arms in front of her chest. “But now? If I was a betting woman? I’d say that’s the last toy Ann will allow across our production line once she’s willed the company.”

  Claire bit back the urge to set Melinda straight on the true ownership of Karble Toys but opted, instead, to keep the conversational focus where it needed to be for the moment. “The last toy? But why?”

  “Because it’s that exact toy that brought Robert here in the first place.”

  “Here?” she echoed in a whisper.<
br />
  “Yes, here. To this place”—Melinda spread her arms wide to indicate the inn before dropping them to her side—“and to Heavenly…the place where he was murdered.”

  She shook away the image of the toy guru’s lifeless body behind the Schnitz and Knepp festival booth and looked, again, at the Jumping Jack. “So how did he get it?”

  “It was sent to him in the mail about four weeks ago.” Melinda leaned her shoulder against the wall and drifted off to a different place and time, her words bringing Claire along for the ride. “I’ll never forget the moment Daisy brought that package into Robert’s office. It was in a padded white envelope that had been addressed in pencil. The boss took one look at it, made a face, and stuck it off to the side of his desk so we could finish a discussion we were having about the upcoming holiday season. When we were done, I headed back to my office down the hall and he got back to the third-quarter reports he’d been poring over all week.”

  Melinda squared her back with the wall before sliding her way down it and into a seated position with her knees pulled close to her chest. “The next thing I knew, it was six thirty and it was time to head out to meet some of my girlfriends for dinner. So I grabbed my computer and my purse and I headed down the hall past Robert’s office. And there he was, sitting in his chair, staring down at”—the woman pointed around the corner and into the Karbles’ former room—“that toy. His face was as white as a ghost and he was shaking his head in complete disbelief.”

  Claire looked from the toy to Melinda and back again, the identity of the person who’d sent the package all but certain in her mind. “So Daniel Lapp mailed that toy to Robert in the hope of garnering some attention for his—”

  Melinda’s head began shaking before Claire had even finished her sentence. “Not Daniel. The other one.”

  “The other one? What other one?” And then she knew. Daniel hadn’t sent the Jumping Jack to Robert Karble. Isaac had.

  The Jumping Jack was Isaac’s signature toy.