“Whoa. Let me do that.” Setting the pendant and chain on the bed, he commandeered the drawer and slid it back into place inside the dresser, sans rattle. “Well, that’s one thing off your aunt’s never-ending to-do list.”
“Knowing Aunt Diane, she’ll have it replaced with something else inside thirty seconds.” Still, she was grateful for Jakob’s help and let him know it with a sweet kiss. “Thank you. For being so smart.”
He cupped her face inside his hands as a mischievous yet tender sparkle lit his amber-flecked eyes. “I’d be happy to inspect each and every drawer up here if it meant getting another kiss like that.”
It felt good to laugh. It felt even better to be drawn in for the kind of hug that made her forget all about being tired. “And I’d be happy to welcome ten tour buses in one day if it meant getting a hug like this.”
“Jakob? Claire? Did you find the problem?”
Reluctantly, she stepped out of his arms, scooped up the pendant and chain, and deposited it into Jakob’s hand. “You found it, you tell her. Aunt Diane believes in edible rewards . . .”
• • •
Claire put down her fork and flopped back against the dining room chair. “I amend what I said earlier when we came back downstairs.”
“Oh?” Diane looked up from her spot across the table, her brows furrowing. “What was that?”
“I said you shouldn’t have made anything other than soup. But that”—she glanced down at her empty plate—“was really good.”
“I second that assessment,” Jakob said. “In fact, I’ll raise it by saying that may have been the best fried chicken I’ve ever had.”
Diane pulled her napkin from her lap, pushed back from the table, and began to gather plates and napkins. “When I heard that the Thompsons were going off on a picnic this afternoon, I offered to make some fried chicken for their basket. I made some extra and then completely forgot about it until I came in here and opened the refrigerator while the two of you were upstairs.”
Claire stood. “Oh, no, you don’t. This is supposed to be your night off, remember? That means no dishes or any other kind of cleanup for you.”
“It’s your night off, too, dear.”
“Then how about this?” Claire gently rested her plate and utensils back from her aunt and added Jakob’s on top. “How about we put these dishes in the dishwasher you rarely use, and let modern technology do the work this one time? That way we can move the fun to the parlor and try to figure out what the next step is in terms of the necklace.”
Diane opened her mouth as if to protest, but, in the end, lifted her shoulders in a half-shrug, half-nod combination. “Okay. But only if I get no grief for putting together a plate of cookies to help in our sleuthing.”
Pulling a straight face, Jakob looked up from the empty glasses and serving dish in his hands. “In the interest of peace and unity, I’d be willing to agree to that . . .”
Claire’s answering laugh mingled with Diane’s as the trio made their way toward the kitchen. Once inside, they split off in different directions—Claire and Jakob toward the dishwasher, Diane toward the cookie jar and dish cabinet. When everything was put away and organized, they retired to Claire’s favorite room in the old Victorian.
Here, like everywhere else in the inn, everything was neat as a pin. But the warm cozy seating and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves spoke to her on a different level. In fact, just as the porch swing and its view of the Amish countryside had a way of quieting her heart, this room—with these two people in it—filled it in ways she never would have guessed were possible.
“Is it just me or is there something familiar about this?” Diane asked, breaking through Claire’s thoughts and redirecting them to the pendant and chain now stretched across the armrest of her aunt’s chair.
Hoisting her legs up and onto the couch, Claire rested her cheek against Jakob’s shoulder. “It’s funny you say that, because I thought the same thing when I saw it. Yet, for the life of me, I can’t place it. I’ve tried to picture it on certain guests we’ve had but nothing fits—”
“It wouldn’t belong to one of our guests,” Diane pointed out. “That dresser has been rattling like that since it was delivered.”
She parted company with Jakob’s warm shoulder to afford a better view of her aunt seated on the other side of the hooked rug. “But you bought it at Yoder’s, and the Amish don’t wear jewelry.”
“Auctions yield items from all sorts of places, Claire. Both Amish and English alike. That dresser could have been in a home or another inn before it ended up here.”
“Jakob is right, dear.” Diane followed the chain with her index finger from the clasp to the pendant and then lifted her gaze to Claire’s. “What happens if this pendant meant something special to someone?”
She considered her aunt’s words while returning her head to Jakob’s shoulder. “Well, we both feel like we’ve seen that same necklace before, so maybe it’s not that unusual and they can just buy another one?”
“It’s not the necklace I’ve seen before.” Diane returned her fingertips to the chain before finally settling on the pendant itself. “It’s this part.”
“The pendant?” Jakob asked.
“No, the—”
Bolting upright, Claire dropped her feet to the ground. “That’s it! Yes! The image! The rose against the half moon! It’s the same image on the back of all of those books you got me turned on to when I first moved back here! The . . .” She searched her brain for a name to go with the image in her head, but when she came up empty, she made a beeline for the bookshelf in the center of the built-ins. With little more than a peek at the shelves above and below eye level, she located the correct row, plucked a book from the center, and turned back to her aunt, waving the hard cover novel in the air as she did. “These ones . . . The Subject Murders by Jane Barrett . . . Which reminds me, when does the next one come out? It’s been a while since Philosophical Death came out, hasn’t it?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, you two. What does a mystery series have to do with that pendant?”
She crossed back to the couch and handed him the book, back-side up. “See?” she said, pointing to the image beneath the author’s photo. “It’s the series logo, I guess. Though now that I say that, I’m thinking a notebook and a pencil might have been a better match.”
He stood, crossed to Diane’s chair, and lowered the book beside the pendant. “Wow, you’re right. Nice work.”
Diane ran her fingers across the embossed cover and released a weighted sigh. “For twelve years in a row, June was the release date for each new book. Then, a year ago this past June, there was nothing. Now, fifteen more months have gone by and still there’s been nothing.”
“But why?” Claire asked.
“I guess Ms. Barrett ran out of ideas.”
“Ran out of ideas? But think what she could have done with psychology or—or forensics,” Claire argued. “There were still so many subjects to go! And”—she pointed at the author photo—“she can’t be much more than five or six years older than me!”
Diane started shaking her head before Claire was even done talking. “She used that same photo for several books in a row. So my guess is she’s at least ten years older than you are, dear. Maybe more. Either way, I imagine when the well runs dry it runs dry.”
“Ugh!”
Jakob lowered himself to the ottoman at Diane’s feet and looked up at Claire. “Okay, so . . . what? You started reading these books when you were in high school?”
“No. Diane turned me on to them when I first moved here from New York. I read through all twelve in just under two weeks.”
His gaze slid back to the book and the nearly four hundred pages it contained. “But that’s a book a night.”
“It was the perfect escape at a time I needed it most.”
Reaching up, he guided her hips onto the ottoman with him and then wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “I wish I could have met you then. Ins
tead of six months later like we did. If we had, then maybe—”
“No, we met at the perfect time—after I’d licked my wounds, picked myself up off the ground, and learned to see myself as someone worthy of someone like you. That all needed to happen in order for”—she held her lips to his cheek and inhaled his scent—“this to happen.”
Then, rising to her feet once again, she picked up the pendant and chain and turned back to Diane. “I guess, if nothing else, we know our mysterious necklace owner was an avid fan of the Subject Murders.”
Diane’s laugh echoed around the room. “Considering that woman could probably hit all the major bestseller lists publishing her grocery list, I’m not sure that’s going to narrow our search down all that much.”
“But to have a necklace of the series logo? Don’t you think the person would have to be an extreme, over-the-top fan?” Jakob offered. “I mean, it’s just a book . . .”
Swapping the pendant and chain for the book, Claire met and held her aunt’s eye while simultaneously nudging her chin in the direction of the ottoman. “May I?”
“Of course, dear.”
Claire flipped the book over in her hands, cover-side up, and handed it to Jakob, her lips stretching wide in a smile fueled purely by excitement. For Jakob. “Take this home and read it. After you do, I’m going to guess you ask to read another . . . and another . . . and another. Then, by the time you’ve read them all, you’ll understand why tracking down the owner of this pendant might be far more difficult than you could imagine.”
• • •
She waited as Annie placed the final item—an Amish doll—into the shopping bag and then handed it to the seventy-something customer on the other side of the counter. “Thank you for stopping in and safe travels back home to Michigan.”
“No, thank you,” the woman said as she peered into her bag and grinned. “An hour ago, I was sad our trip was ending. But now, I can hardly wait to get home and give this doll to my granddaughter.”
Claire followed the woman across the shop to the door and then watched as she descended the steps and headed in the direction of a man waiting patiently on a bench on the opposite side of the street. “She was sweet, wasn’t she?” Claire mused, turning back toward the counter and the kapp-wearing teenager noting the latest batch of sold items in the leather-bound ledger housed beside the register. “Hey, I can take care of that, kiddo. Besides, it’s coming up on lunchtime and it’s such a beautiful day out. Why don’t you take your lunch pail out on the back stoop and enjoy a little fresh air. I’ve got things under control in here.”
“No, I am fine. I have just two more things to record—Esther’s doll and her mamm’s painted bucket.” Annie paused the pen above Martha’s page, scrunching her face in thought. “It was the bucket with the winter scene, yah?”
Claire came around the counter and plopped onto the first of the two stools housed just out of the customers’ view. “It was. In fact, I was kind of thinking about buying it myself. As a gift. For Jakob.”
“Would he like such a thing?” Annie asked, glancing up.
“Miller’s Pond was his favorite place growing up. He and Martha spent many summer afternoons there, skipping rocks and swimming. And in the winter? They skated and built snowmen just like the one in that scene.”
Annie noted the day’s date beside the correct item and then flipped to Esther’s page and did the same thing under the column marked Dolls. When she was done, she closed the book and returned the pen to the cup. “I thought your Jakob did not like being Amish . . .”
She pulled back. “Didn’t like being Amish? No—I . . . where did you get that?”
“I know that he left. After he was baptized.”
“Did you ever ask your father about it?” she asked, working hard to keep her voice even.
“Dat has much to do all the time—in our fields, and as bishop. I do not want to take his time to ask of things that happened before I was born.”
Claire tugged the second stool out from under the counter’s eave and patted its cushion. “Come. Sit. I want you to know the why behind Jakob’s decision, as it speaks to the kind of man he was when he left, and the kind of man he is today.”
Reluctantly, Annie sat, her fingers nervously working the sides of her aproned dress. But when she looked at Claire, there was no mistaking the curiosity firing behind her wide-set brown eyes. “I am listening.”
“Eighteen years ago, a member of your community—John Zook—was murdered. It took several months for the local police department to figure out who had killed him and why. Jakob was very upset by the notion that someone had taken John’s life and was essentially getting away with it. As a young boy, Jakob had been quietly fascinated by the police and that’s why, during his Rumspringa, he used his experimentation time shadowing members of the Heavenly PD. When John Zook was murdered, he wanted desperately to see the crime solved, and when it wasn’t, he made the decision to leave and become a police officer. Unfortunately, the crime was solved before he officially started the academy, but he’d made the decision to leave and there was no turning back.
“So this man, who left the Amish to try and fix a wrong, lost everything—his family, his home, and the only way of life he’d ever known. He didn’t leave to do bad or to cause harm. He left to try and make a difference for a community he loved. And he has. He might have been too late to get to the bottom of the crime that propelled him to leave in the first place, but he apprehended the person behind Harley Zook’s murder last year, as well as the person who killed your friend’s father earlier this summer.”
She forced herself to breathe, to slow her words so they wouldn’t be misheard. “He is a good man, Annie. A very good man.”
“I-I did not know of such things,” Annie whispered, lifting her attention to the front window and the sliver of the Heavenly Police Department building they could see from their spot. “But even if I did, it would not change the way my community sees him. He was to leave before baptism, not after.”
She opened her mouth to argue the point that John Zook was killed after Jakob’s baptism, but closed it as reality trumped everything she knew to be fair and right. She loved so much about the Amish—their large families, their simple lives, their honesty, and even their ability to forgive in most instances. The fact that they couldn’t forgive one of their own was something she would never be able to wrap her head around.
Still, it felt good to fill in blanks that needed to be filled in. If nothing else, maybe now, when Annie diverted her eyes whenever Jakob entered the shop in the future, it would be done with a modicum of understanding and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of respect.
Setting her hand atop Annie’s, she gave it a quick squeeze and stood. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all. Anyway, why don’t you take your lunch outside and enjoy the sunshine. When you get back, if it’s not too busy yet, I might duck into my office for just a little while to look something up on the computer for my aunt.”
“If it is okay, I was hoping maybe I could skip lunch and, perhaps, leave a little early this afternoon? Henry will be dropping something off at Yoder’s shortly before closing and I was hoping maybe”—Annie slid off the stool and began to busy herself straightening things that didn’t need to be straightened to the left and right of the register—“if it is okay with you, of course, that, um . . . perhaps I could begin walking home before he is done with his delivery.”
Claire tried her best to nibble back her knowing grin, but if the sudden reddening of Annie’s cheeks was any indication, she hadn’t been entirely successful. Before she could answer though, Annie was out from behind the counter and making her way toward the display of handmade baby bibs that had caught the eye of more than a few customers so far that morning. “I am sorry, I should not have asked to leave when I am supposed to—”
“Yes, yes, you can leave early. And you can still eat lunch outside if you’d like. We’re not busy right now.”
Annie spun
around, her answering smile lighting up the room. “Oh, Claire, thank you! I-I promise I will work hard right up until it is time to leave.”
“And this is different than what you do every day because . . .” Laughing, she plucked the teenager’s lunch pail from one of the cubbies beneath the register and set it on top of the counter. “If I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure I smell your sister’s fried chicken underneath this cloth.”
Retracing her steps, Annie returned to the counter. “Actually, I made the chicken this time. From the same recipe Eva uses. It is time I learn to cook from the recipes Mamm wrote down for us before she passed, and it is time for Eva to not worry about Dat and me all the time when she has so many mouths to feed without us. We will still go there sometimes, but it is okay for it to just be Dat and me, too. It gives us more time to talk and catch up.”
This time, when she squeezed Annie’s hand, it was with pride—pride in a young girl who had seemed so lost just six months earlier yet was slowly but surely finding her way through life with a renewed sense of self and determination. “So things with your dat are better now?”
Annie nodded. “He is still busy in the fields and as the bishop, but we make time to talk more now and it is good.”
“I’m glad, Annie.”
“Much of that change is because of you.”
“Me?” Claire echoed.
“Yah. When I came into this store six months ago, I was angry—angry at Dat for always being too busy for me, angry at”—Annie stopped, swallowed, and cast her eyes down at the floor—“God for letting Mamm die, and angry at myself for not being tougher. But you were kind to me. You didn’t turn me away when I asked for a job even though I wasn’t very polite. And since I’ve been here, you have treated me like . . . like a friend.”
She reached out, hooked her index finger underneath the girl’s chin, and inched it upward until the attention she sought was back where it needed to be. “That’s because you are my friend now, Annie. A good friend, in fact.”
Plain as Day Page 2
