With one distinct gasp, Patrick ripped every last bit of hope from Claire while simultaneously confirming what she already knew in her heart to be true. “That’s him . . . I mean, you!” Patrick’s arm shot into the air guided by the finger he pointed at Mose. “You’re the one who fought with Harley! You’re the one who nearly got Molly killed by a car two weeks ago! You’re the one who wrote those awful things in Harley’s barn!”
With each accusation that passed through his lips, Patrick’s voice got angrier and angrier, the pain he felt over the loss of his mentor unleashing itself with a frightening furor. She tried to calm him with a quiet touch, but it was no use; the accusations kept coming fast and furiously.
“You might put on that black hat every day and fool everyone around you into thinking you’re different, but you’re not! I know you’re not! I’ve seen the things you’ve done to Harley, and you’re going to pay, just like my father did!”
Chapter 27
At first glance, the Heavenly Police Department looked like any other building along Lighted Way. It boasted the same clapboard siding, the same wide front porch, and the same tastefully written sign above the front door. In fact, the only noticeable difference that set it apart from the shops and restaurants that surrounded it on three sides was the lack of Amish coming and going through its doors.
Here there were no black hats and aproned dresses, no suspenders and head caps. Instead, police uniforms mixed only with English attire as the door leading inside opened and shut throughout the course of a day.
Taking advantage of Esther’s Saturday morning shift, Claire crossed Lighted Way and headed down the block to the station, her heart heavy. She’d felt awful calling Jakob the previous night, Patrick’s words finding their way through her mouth in a series of starts and stops that, in hindsight, had probably made the retelling harder for Jakob to digest.
All night she’d tossed and turned as she’d recalled Patrick’s accusations again and again and again, Isaac’s failure to defend his father making the whole thing even more surreal. But it was the unmistakable sadness in Jakob’s voice when she called that had driven her from bed before dawn with a feeling of unease she’d been unable to shake ever since.
She stopped outside the station to catch her breath, then pulled the door open and stepped inside, her destination, if not her reason for being there, crystal clear.
“Is Detective Fisher in?”
The weekend dispatcher—a fifty-something balding man—nodded and added a slight smile for good measure. “Ms. Weatherly, right?”
“Claire,” she corrected, not unkindly. “I’d love to have a minute of his time if he’s available.”
“I’ll check.”
Five minutes later, she was making her way down the locked hallway toward Jakob’s office, the sight of his sleep-deprived face peering at her from his doorway stirring up a potpourri of emotions best left unanalyzed in the present. “You look like you got as much sleep as I did,” he said by way of a greeting. He touched his hand to the small of her back and guided her into his office, shutting his door to the prying ears of his fellow officers the second she crossed the threshold. “I’m glad you stopped by. It’s been a long night.”
She took the chair he indicated as he perched on the corner of his desk closest to her. “Did you have to bring your father in last night?”
“I thought about it. Even had a few of our officers at the ready to do just that, but then I decided to have them hold off. Mose isn’t going anywhere. He’s far too bullheaded to even think about leaving. Besides, the Amish don’t run.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say they didn’t murder, either, but she let that go. Jakob, of all people, knew there were exceptions to every rule. After all, he himself was one of them. Instead, she allowed herself a moment to take in the dark circles beneath his eyes, the beleaguered bent to his shoulders, and the unfamiliar lines that accompanied his equally unfamiliar frown. “So were you just up all night thinking, then?” she finally asked in lieu of the instinct that made her want to smooth his hand-tousled hair from his forehead.
“I was walking around Zook’s farm with a flashlight.”
“The cows have been moved to the Hochstetler farm for now. Though, as of late yesterday afternoon, Molly was still there.”
“She’s gone now, too.” He palmed his mouth only to let his hand slip back down to the top of the desk. “I saw the message on the side of the house.”
“You hadn’t seen it yet?”
“I sent my officers out to take a peek and check the surrounding area for any clues the same night you reported it, but with the funeral and everything else going on with the investigation, I hadn’t made it out there to see it myself until last night.”
“Chilling, isn’t it?”
“More like eye-opening.”
There was something about the way he replied that caught her attention and made her sit up tall. “Did you find something?”
He pushed off the edge of the desk and wandered around his office, the room’s relatively small dimensions making him turn almost as much as he actually walked. “When I saw the words with my own two eyes, it took me all of about two seconds to know my father didn’t write them.”
She followed him with her eyes as he paced his way back and forth between the door and his as-yet empty whiteboard. “How can you be so sure?”
“The use of a contraction. Most Amish don’t use them in speech and certainly wouldn’t use them in something they’ve written. That alone screams English to me.” She, too, stood, the potential elimination of Mose from the list of murder suspects making her wonder why Jakob still looked so sad.
“That’s great news, right?”
He leaned against the whiteboard and tapped its clean surface with his knuckles. “The problem is that with the exception of the graffiti, Mose still looks good for the crime.”
She looked from Jakob to the clean board and back again before reclaiming the same chair she’d just vacated. “When Walter Snow was murdered, you had all sorts of things written on that board. And it was the same thing with Rob Karble. So what’s different this time?”
“Because I couldn’t stand looking at my father’s name with a big red circle around it any longer. It’s in my head nearly twenty-four/seven all on its own. Seeing it there just made it worse somehow.”
“The motive you had for him was revenge, right?” At his nod, she stood again and crossed to the whiteboard and its metal sill of dry-erase markers. She plucked a purple one from the lineup and pointed. “May I?”
He parted company with the board, a flash of amusement adding a much-needed spark to his hazel eyes. “By all means.”
“So how do you break it out again? Suspect? Motive? Means? Is that right?”
“That works.”
She rose up on tiptoe and carefully wrote each of the three categories across the top of the board. When she was done, she capped the purple marker and retrieved a green one, instead. Then, with a quick glance over her shoulder, she stepped to the left and the suspect column. “So other than the graffiti, you still sort of have your father, right?”
“Yes.”
She wrote Mose’s name then moved to the motive column and wrote, Revenge/Anger. “Which leaves us with means . . .”
“Harley’s body was found propped against a shovel in the middle of my father’s corn maze. You don’t get any better means than that.”
With corn maze in the means column, she stepped all the way to the left once again. “I suppose we could keep Patrick on the list for a while, too.”
“You suppose?”
“He cared for Harley way too much to be the one who killed him.”
She turned in time to see Jakob studying her with an odd look on his face. “You sound so certain.”
“After talking to him yesterday and listening to everything he had to say, I kind of am.”
“And his sneaking around the inn the other night? That doesn’t shake yo
ur resolve a little?”
“Diane called you about the hammer, right?”
“She did.”
“Well, then, you know that alone backs up the reason he gave us for being there.” Still, she wrote his name under Mose’s. “I’ll put him up here anyway, because there’s always a chance he’s a gifted actor.” Under the motive column she put ditto marks, and under means she named his role as Harley’s apprentice.
Slowly, she stepped away to study her work, her shoulders drooping almost instantly. “Two suspects—each of whom is beginning to fall apart under closer scrutiny. That’s not really much to go on, is it?”
He settled back against the desk, crossing his arms against his chest in contemplation as he did. “That’s the problem with a crime against the Amish. They’re quiet people. If they have any dirty laundry to speak of, they keep it to themselves.”
She looked again at the motive column and thought of Carl Duggan and the crime he committed against Harley’s brother sixteen years earlier. “What about hatred as a motive? Not the kind of personal hatred your father may have had for Harley, or even any lingering hatred Patrick may have had toward the man he saw as helping to put his father away . . . I’m talking about the bigger, broader hatred toward the Amish in general.”
“Other than the stuff going on at Harley’s farm, we’ve not been seeing any acts of aggression toward the Amish in our area for quite a while. And other than the graffiti, we can pretty much tie the loose cows to my father.”
“Did he admit to that?”
“He said Harley needed to be tending his cows, not driving past his house in his buggy talking about me or fixing things with Isaac.”
“I see.” She turned her back to the board and met Jakob’s eyes. “So what other kinds of motives might propel a person to kill?”
“Betrayal, robbery, jealousy, a crime of passion, obsession, money—those are the most common reasons we come across in murders.”
She began running through his list in her head, stopping every once in a while to ask questions along the way. “Any chance Harley betrayed someone other than your father?”
“Knowing what I know about Harley Zook, I’d have to say no, but I can’t be entirely sure unless someone steps up and tells me otherwise.”
“Nothing was missing from his home?”
“Again, hard to know, but his possessions seemed to be in keeping with the Amish, and we found his money in his boot—not a difficult hiding place for a would-be robber to discover.” Sensing her next question, he headed her off at the pass. “Jealousy isn’t really an emotion we see with the Amish because everyone lives the same way. And as for a crime of passion, Harley was a widower. He didn’t have any womenfolk he was courting from what Isaac told my officers. All the women his age in these parts have husbands, and he was happy living in his brother’s house and caring for the offspring of his brother’s herd.”
“Which leaves us with what?” She pulled the cap from the end of the green marker and snapped it into place. “The money you already found in his boot, right?”
“Well, money isn’t always about the actual bills. Sometimes it’s about gain, too. Though that doesn’t fit with Harley any more than a wad of cash would.” He threw his hands up in the air and shook his head. “It’s like it was sixteen years ago when John died. Nothing is jumping up and down as a motive. But I’ll find it just like the detective on that case finally did.”
She stared at the board as Jakob continued to talk, her active mind swirling around his definition of money.
Gain . . .
Gain . . .
“Claire? You still with me?”
“You said gain could be a motive, right?” she whispered against a mental backdrop that was at first fuzzy but was growing increasingly more clear.
“Absolutely. But other than Mose possibly gaining Isaac back from Harley, I don’t really see who else might have stood to gain from Harley’s death. I mean, what did the guy have? A run-down farmhouse? A relatively new mobile carpentry business? A herd of aging dairy cows? What?”
Dairy cows . . .
Somehow she managed to stifle the gasp that rose in her throat and cover it with a convincing enough coughing fit, each cough buying her more time to come up with a plan that would get her out of Jakob’s office without raising suspicion. If and when she discovered there were actual legs to her theory, she’d let him know. Until then, though, there was no sense in getting the detective’s hopes up prematurely.
Chapter 28
Somewhere between the police station and Harley’s farm, the certainty kicked into overdrive, spurred on, no doubt, by the balloon-laden signs that pointed the way like bread crumbs to the witch’s door. Yet now that she had the proverbial map in hand, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it sooner.
It all fit. And it had all been right there in front of her eyes numerous times over the past week. In fact, not more than two days earlier, she’d stared into the handsome face and instantly recognized the qualities of success—vision, drive, desire, and hunger for recognition . . . all things that had been going to waste because of another man’s waning passion.
But no more.
With Harley’s death came a second lease on a dream as evidenced by Megan Reilly’s about-face and the line of cars Claire now spied lined up around the Serenity Falls sales office—cars that until that day had been noticeably absent.
She knew the reason, yet still she wanted to hear someone else say it, someone who would wrap her theory up with a neat little bow. Turning left into Harley’s driveway, she drove up to the farmhouse, shifted the car into park, and pulled her cell phone from her purse.
Two buttons later she was smiling at the voice in her ear. “Sleep Heavenly, this is Diane, how may I help you?”
“Aunt Diane, it’s me, Claire.” She recognized the breathless quality of her voice half a beat too late.
“Claire? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Aunt Diane. Really.” She winced at the white lie and hoped the reason for it would offset any guilt that remained after they broke the connection. It was for a good cause, after all . . . “But can you do me a favor? Can you let Megan know I need to talk to her?”
“She’s already left, dear. She and Kyle headed to the airport about twenty minutes ago.”
She dropped her head forward onto the steering wheel, holding back the groan that followed the best she could. “Oh. I guess I didn’t realize they were leaving so early.”
“Megan’s mother called to say one of the boys had a stomach bug, and they moved up their flight.”
“Okay, can you hang on just a minute?” Without waiting for a reply, Claire pulled the phone from her ear and quickly scrolled through her recent calls, the Illinois number that had saved her from revealing too much to Jakob the previous day near the top of the list. “Diane? I just realized I still have her number in my phone, so I’m going to hang up and give her a quick call, okay?”
“Is this anything I should know about?”
“In terms of the inn, no. But I promise I’ll fill you in on all the details over dinner tonight.”
“I thought maybe you and Jakob might go out for a bite to eat or something, this evening. It’s the McCormicks’ and the Claymores’ last night before they all check out in the morning, and the next round of guests doesn’t come in until tomorrow afternoon, so it’s the perfect time to do it.”
She tried not to grit her teeth, but it was hard. Diane was like a pit bull when it came to her desire for Claire and Jakob to become a couple. “Jakob and I don’t have any plans. I’ll be home at the usual time and I’ll tell you about my phone call with Megan then.” Before her aunt could raise a protest, she broke the connection, quickly replacing the call with one to Megan.
It was answered on the third ring. “Claire! I’m so glad you called. I hated leaving before I had a chance to say good-bye, but Johnny is sick and I’ve got to get home to him.”
“It’s okay, I
understand.” She held the phone closer to her ear as she peeked through the trees that separated her car from the community in which Megan and her family would be living in a year. “I won’t keep you long. I know you’re on the way to the airport with Kyle right now, but I need to ask you a quick question if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” Megan’s laugh echoed in her ear. “I think you’re entitled to fire a question in my direction after all the house-hunting turmoil I subjected you to this past week. So go ahead, shoot.”
“Yesterday morning you were all set to put a deposit down on a lot in Roaring Brook, but you changed your mind at the last minute and went with Serenity Falls, instead. Why did you do that?”
She could almost hear Megan’s wheels turning just before her mouth engaged. “Um, you know why. I like the walking trails, the pond, the playground, the floor plans, and the location.”
“No, I get that. But you knew Serenity Falls had all those same things Thursday night when you made your decision to go with Roaring Brook.” She stopped long enough to phrase her final question in the clearest way possible. “What I want to know is why you changed your mind again on Friday.”
“Because that awful, rancid smell of spoiled milk was gone and the secretary in the sales office assured me it was gone for good.”
There was nothing about Megan’s answer that surprised her; in fact, it was exactly why she’d tracked the woman down in the first place. But still, having the bow tied by an actual person rather than the voices in her head was comforting somehow, maybe even a little validating.
“And since that was the only reason we had for building elsewhere, it was easy to rip up the check to Keller and Sons and make out a new one to Trey Sampson and his company.”
Trey Sampson.
The one man who stood to gain the most by Harley Zook’s murder . . .
Claire released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and stepped from the car, the message on the side of Harley’s house and its timing in relation to the man’s murder the final piece of the puzzle that still needed to be placed. “Megan? Can I ask you one more question?”
Shunned and Dangerous (An Amish Mystery) Page 20
