A Deadly Shaker Spring

by Deborah Woodworth

  Without touching Samuel again, Rose studied his position and the area around him. He looked almost too peaceful, leaning sideways in the chair. Had he experienced any pain at all? Surely he would have writhed and fallen forward, or tried to get to the door to call for help from the sleeping Believers upstairs. Instead, he looked all too much as if he had sat down for a snack, eaten one bite, and died instantly. The cookies were arranged too precisely, the bite a large, perfect semicircle. No crumbs on the table or floor. The effect was unreal, like a stage set for a scene in a play.

  “Let’s call Doc Irwin and ask him to take a look at Samuel,” Rose said.

  The swinging door from the dining room slammed open against the kitchen wall. “What is going on?” Wilhelm glowered at Rose as if she must be responsible for whatever had happened. Rose stepped aside to reveal Samuel’s lifeless form. Wilhelm’s stern face crumpled. “Samuel,” he said. “Nay, not thee.” He bent over the body and began to lift.

  “Nay, wait,” Rose said.

  Wilhelm turned in surprise. “Sarah said he had a heart attack. We must prepare him for burial. He shouldn’t just sit here.”

  “I think Doc Irwin should see him.”

  Wilhelm’s expression hardened. “Nay, no more outsiders. Josie’s diagnosis is enough. There is nothing here but a heart attack. Surely we can handle our own natural deaths.”

  “Josie is troubled by this death, too,” Rose said. “What if it isn’t a natural one?”

  “Nonsense. And to suggest such a thing to anyone from the world would be more than foolish, it would be dangerous. Outsiders are prone to mindless persecution and would accuse the first Believer to cross their path.”

  Rose exchanged a glance with Josie, who raised her eyebrows. “Wilhelm,” Rose said, “did Samuel confess to you?”

  Wilhelm shook his head and looked down with sadness on Samuel. “Nay, we hadn’t time. He had agreed to confess, though. We were to meet this morning after breakfast.”

  Samuel was a good man. If he was killed, as Rose believed, he deserved better than this—to hang over the side of a chair in a cold, empty kitchen, with half-eaten cookies, the evidence of a broken personal vow lying out for all to see. That Wilhelm felt his death softened Rose’s heart toward him.

  “Who else knew of Samuel’s intention to confess?” she asked.

  “No one that I know of.”

  “I suspect someone did. Wilhelm, you yourself have said that these recent incidents—the broken fence, the rats in the schoolhouse, the smashed preserves—are the world trying to strike at us. Suppose Samuel’s death and what happened to Sarah are somehow related to the other incidents? Suppose the world means us very serious harm? Shouldn’t we do everything we can to protect ourselves, to find out what is going on?”

  Wilhelm stared at the kitchen walls, where shiny copper-bottom pans, hanging from pegs, sparkled with the first light of the morning sun. When he turned again to Rose, the fatigue in his eyes made him look all of his sixty-one years.

  “All right,” he said. “Call Doc Irwin. But I must be here when he examines Samuel.”

  THIRTEEN

  “NOTHING BUT A HEART ATTACK, PLAIN AND SIMPLE,” Doc Irwin announced to Rose and Wilhelm. “No doubt in my mind. I’ll be glad to sign the death certificate. Don’t see why we need to bother Sheriff Brock over this. Remember, he’s none too fond of y’all. Wouldn’t do to go stirring him up over nothing.” Doc snapped shut his battered brown medical case and slipped his spectacles into his vest pocket.

  “I’m confused about why Samuel would eat rosewater cookies when he had vowed to avoid sweets,” Rose said as the three of them moved into the dining room, away from Samuel’s still body.

  “Because it was a foolish vow, and he got hungry,” Wilhelm said.

  Doc Irwin laughed. “That would be a mighty tough vow to keep,” he said, patting his own round stomach. “Anyway, Miss Callahan, I just can’t find any evidence of foul play. Best to let things be.”

  Wilhelm fidgeted, clearly longing to do something active. He was a man whose limbs always sought motion. “I’ll begin preparations for the burial,” he said, pushing the end of a bench to make it line up with a long dining table. “Eat at the Ministry this evening, Rose. We have much to discuss.”

  “Did Samuel ever show signs of heart problems?” Rose asked Doc Irwin after Wilhelm had left.

  “No, but those pesky things can sneak up on a man. Samuel didn’t complain much, far as I could tell, so he might have had pains no one knew about. Sometimes a man doesn’t want to know what his own body is telling him.

  “I knew Samuel for years, you know,” he said, touching Samuel’s shoulder lightly. “He used to stop by the office back when he delivered herbs around to the hotels in town, twenty-five or thirty years ago now. He liked to talk about medicine and what herbs might be good for this or that. Used to leave some samples with me, trying to get me to broaden my horizons, he used to say. I’m mighty sad he’s gone. We had some good talks, me and him and that other fellow he used to travel with a lot.”

  “What other fellow?”

  Doc Irwin frowned and the furrows spread up to his bald head. “Can’t quite recall, it’s been so long now. I do remember he was real interested in my medicines and how they worked. He was a young fellow about Samuel’s age, as I recall. But we were all young then. Is it important?”

  “Probably not. Thank you for your time, Doc.” But she vowed to herself to have a private chat with Deputy O’Neal soon. Perhaps he would be more open to hearing her suspicions.

  Rose had not expected pangs of guilt to be part of learning to be eldress, but here she was, feeling guilty as she ascended the sisters’ staircase to the second floor of the Center Family Dwelling House, then slipped across to the east side of the building, where the men’s retiring rooms were located. Her heart hammered noisily, or so it seemed to Rose, but she told herself she had no reason for either guilt or fear. She was on a legitimate errand. Besides, she had waited impatiently through the noon meal and made sure that all of the brethren, as well as the hired men, had headed back to the fields for an afternoon of planting before attempting her visit to the men’s living quarters.

  She had been in the rooms many times before, of course, especially when she was a young sister. After the brethren left for work in the morning, sisters came through to clean and mend. But this time she was alone and trying hard not to be seen as she eased open the door of Samuel’s retiring room and slipped inside.

  Brilliant sunshine struggled to penetrate the white curtains still drawn across Samuel’s window. Unlike Rose, who had been a trustee and needed more space, Samuel had spent his sleeping hours in a small, one-person retiring room at the far east end of the hallway. He could have had a much larger room. So few brethren remained that each could almost have had a floor to himself, though most chose to live closer together than that. Samuel had chosen the smallest room. More atonement for his sins, Rose supposed.

  She took a moment to let her eyes roam around the room, not sure what she was looking for. Like other retiring rooms, this one was plain and sparsely furnished, much like her own. Contrasting with the white walls, a pine furring strip circled the room and held evenly spaced wall pegs, most of them empty. A flatbroom hung from one peg, and a clothes hanger holding Samuel’s blue Sabbathday suit hung from another.

  Rose opened the door of the cast-iron wood-burning stove and found it thoroughly cleaned. She was not surprised; the nights were growing warmer. A built-in maple chest of drawers reached nearly to the ceiling. Taking care to be quiet, she pulled open the drawers one by one. Her heart began to pound again. She was certainly familiar with men’s clothing, having mended her share, in addition to spending time in the world. But she would have difficulty explaining to a passing brethren why she was going through a dead man’s dresser. She paused and breathed deeply until the silence of the building calmed her.

  Samuel had organized his belongings with a neatness that seemed excessive,
even for a Believer, who was expected to strive for perfection. He owned few pieces of clothing, but he had spaced them out among the drawers so that nothing overlapped and no article was piled on top of another. Rose saw quickly that nothing unusual hid in those drawers.

  She turned to the recessed storage cupboard, identical to her own. She opened the cupboard door to find a stack of four books, arranged precisely, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top. She picked up the top one, Benjamin Youngs’ The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing Containing a General Statement of All Things Pertaining to the Faith and Practice of the Church of God in this Latter-day, a well-thumbed volume published more than one hundred years earlier. Samuel’s spiritual path should have led to the role of elder had it not been for his one mistake—not his sin of the flesh; that could have been forgiven and forgotten. Nay, it was his weakness of pride that had kept him alone in this tiny room and unfulfilled as a Believer. He could not bear for anyone to hear his sin.

  A floorboard creaked outside the retiring-room door. Rose placed the book back as she had found it but did not dare close the cupboard door for fear a hinge would squeak. She caught her breath and waited. The sounds stopped. Was someone listening outside the door? Down the hall, a door opened and closed. Rose slowly exhaled. Merely a brethren getting something from his room. She eased the cupboard door shut and waited again. Soon she heard a door open and close once more, and footsteps creaked past and tapped down the staircase.

  Rose told herself to contemplate the sadness of Samuel’s life later, in prayer. Now she moved toward his bed, a thin mattress and small wooden frame on wheels for easy movement during cleaning. The coverlet had been turned down for bedtime, and a nightshirt lay across the sheet, but the bed looked as if no one had slept in it. Rose had left instructions that no one clean the room, so Samuel must have begun to prepare for bed before leaving his room the previous evening.

  Finally, Rose turned to Samuel’s desk, the most elaborate piece of furniture in the room. Samuel had been known for his devotion to the Shaker tradition of keeping a daily journal. According to the brethren, he often sat up writing an hour or more before bedtime. Many years earlier, Hugo, the Society’s carpenter, had designed and crafted Samuel’s desk especially to make his writing hours more comfortable after a day spent tilling or planting or harvesting. The basic design was called a “workstand,” the same one used for all the sewing tables, with drawers that pulled out the sides rather than forward into the knees. Hugo had made an extra-large writing surface that extended out from the desk at a proper height for Samuel’s long legs to move freely underneath. The writing surface swung upward to reveal a recessed area, as in a child’s school desk, for storing papers and pens and books.

  Rose lifted the desktop, and this time her heart pounded with excitement. Samuel would never have left the storage area in this condition. Papers were strewn chaotically, some bent and crumpled. Most of the pages contained calculations, lists, and production figures. Spare pens, pencils, and a ruler lay scattered in no order. An ink bottle with a loose lid rested on its side, and a splotch of india ink stained the paper underneath. Someone besides Samuel had been in this room. Rose pulled open all the desk drawers and found the same mess whenever the drawer held papers. A small drawer holding stationery and postal supplies was jostled but still neat.

  The journals. All this—the special desk, writing materials, notes—everything existed so that Samuel could write his journals. But there were no journals. Rose reexamined every drawer and cupboard in the room, and she found not a single journal, including the one in which Samuel probably had written just hours before his death.

  FOURTEEN

  ROSE TORE INTO THE EMPTY TRUSTEES’ OFFICE, closed the door, and paced across the room three times. She grabbed the phone, hung it up again without speaking, and returned to her pacing. Tendrils of hair escaped from her thin cap and gathered like puffs of pale red cotton around her face.

  That evening she was to dine with Elder Wilhelm in the Ministry. When she’d left Samuel’s room, after finding his journals missing, she had fully intended to use her own authority to insist the police investigate Samuel’s death as a murder. Now she found herself in a dilemma. As Doc Irwin had pointed out, Sheriff Brock was no friend to the Shakers. If Samuel had indeed been murdered, Brock would not be inclined to look beyond the boundaries of North Homage for his killer. He could be more of a hindrance than a help in finding the truth. She could not imagine convincing him to consider any links between Samuel’s death and the recent attacks on the Society, let alone incidents that happened decades ago.

  Wilhelm, on the other hand, was convinced that whenever anything went wrong, the world was at fault. If she convinced him that Samuel was murdered, he would use the information as an opportunity to grandstand against the world. Rather than seek the killer through conventional means, he would shout the evils of the world from the Meetinghouse floor. She wouldn’t put it past him to go out among the world’s people and fault them to their faces. In the end, he might tighten the bonds among Believers, but at the expense of peace with their neighbors.

  Rose suspected what Wilhelm would refuse to consider—that Samuel was probably killed because he knew something damaging. The killer might know that Samuel was a devoted journal-keeper. It would be like Samuel, who could not bring himself to confess in person, to write his sins as a way of salving his guilt. Suppose those sins, if they came to light, could damage another person—or persons?

  Who else but a Shaker, one of their own, would even know where Samuel’s room was located, let alone be able to sneak into it and remove his journals? Was there any other possibility?

  An apostate. An apostate might have known Samuel well enough to be aware of his journals, but could he convince Samuel to meet in the kitchen, kill him, find his room, remove all the many journal volumes, and escape without being seen? Surely not. If an apostate was involved, and Rose believed it probable, it looked as if a Believer might be assisting him.

  The name she had resisted thinking forced itself into her mind. Sister Sarah Baker. She had caught Sarah meeting with Caleb Cox, an apostate. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Perhaps Caleb was just a sad drunk for whom Sarah felt pity, not a dangerous man with a secret. Rose hoped so, but would not count on hope alone. Certainly Agatha, in her journal, had noted Caleb’s unpredictability—assuming that C.C. meant Caleb Cox.

  Rose placed a call to the Ministry House and left a message for Wilhelm with the kitchen sister. She would be unable to be there for the evening meal because neglected trustee’s work called her to town. She said nothing about trying to meet with him later. She would put that off as long as possible.

  In the Trustees’ Office kitchen, Rose greeted the two young kitchen sisters and brewed herself a pot of rose hip and lemon balm tea. She carried a tea tray upstairs to one of the unoccupied retiring rooms on the second floor. Years earlier she had converted the room to storage for years of trustees’ records that were cluttering her office downstairs. Trustees were generally meticulous about record keeping when it came to the Society’s finances, businesses, and real estate. If anyone had recorded with whom Samuel traveled and worked, besides Samuel himself, it would have been a trustee.

  The room had a musty, closed-in smell. Rose slid aside the plain white curtain and cracked open the window. Dust motes swirled in the sunlight. She’d ask one of the sisters to clean soon. They were always short-handed these days, and the room was often forgotten. Hugo had built the tall, simple bookcases that lined one entire wall. Otherwise, the room held only a small writing desk and a ladder-back chair. The strip of pegs lining the remaining three walls was empty. Even the broom had been pressed into service elsewhere.

  She ran her fingers along the filmy spines of her predecessors’ journals until she came to 1910. Though she had started with Agatha’s 1908 journal, she had found nothing pertinent until 1910, so this seemed a good choice. She also pulled 1911 and 1912, settled at the desk, and ope
ned the first volume. She crinkled her nose at the fetid odor of mildew, the legacy of decades of steamy Kentucky summers, and pulled her sweet-smelling tea closer.

  Sister Fiona had written the volume. Rose had worked beside Fee until her death several years earlier, when the Society decided that one trustee was enough for the shrinking community. Fee was a small, bright Irishwoman, with quick eyes that missed little. Ever frugal, her longhand was tiny, and she crammed as many words as she could onto each page.

  Rose had drunk half a pot of cooling tea and squinted at the difficult writing for nearly an hour before she began to find what she sought. Thank goodness Fiona had not felt compelled to identify people only by their initials, as Agatha had.

  Samuel checked in this morning to report on his very successful journey to Cincinnati and back. He did the trip in a circle, visiting as well all the hotels and restaurants in Languor, Lexington, Frankfort, Louisville, and Covington—avoiding, of course, the less reputable establishments known to be scattered about. He took young Klaus along and kept a close eye on him, but no problems arose. They were greeted warmly by most, if not all, but that’s to be expected. They report the following sales:

  Rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme, and dill: 72 dozen tins

  Candied angelica root: 138 boxes

  Applesauce: 254 jars

  Raspberry, sour cherry, and peach preserves: 311 jars

  All in all, a most productive trip. Samuel said that Klaus will do well enough as a traveling companion, but I had the feeling he was holding something in. All did not go well between them, I fear. I’m wondering if it was not so easy for Samuel to keep the lad from straying. Perhaps I’ll keep him home next time and send another companion with Samuel.