Hearse and Buggy

by Laura Bradford

She’d always been of the notion that life changed in bits and pieces, small course variations that allowed a person to navigate more effectively. But now, after the way things had changed in the past few months, Claire knew that wasn’t always the case.

  Not in her life, anyway.

  One minute, she was holed up in the Manhattan apartment she’d shared with Peter, waiting—as she always did—for him to come home from work. The candles had burned themselves down to their bases, the anniversary dinner she’d prepared had gone untouched, and her heart had been broken for the very last time.

  Six months later, after caving in to Aunt Diane’s offer for some much-needed solace, she was living at Sleep Heavenly, the bed-and-breakfast her aunt owned on the outskirts of Heavenly, Pennsylvania.

  She’d come out of desperation and loneliness.

  She’d stayed after finding something she’d thought she’d lost forever.

  And in the process, she’d learned more about herself than she ever thought possible.

  Some of the things were little—like the fact that she enjoyed live music and wandering through bookstores for hours on end. Some were more eye-opening—like the kinds of things that she could use to make life decisions.

  Top on the list of things learned, though, was her unearthed passion for simplicity and tradition. She liked counting on herself, and learning to believe she could count on others as well.

  Aunt Diane had taught her that. And so, too, had the quiet, God-fearing people who lived their lives in a place as far from New York City and her life with Peter as she’d ever dreamed possible …

  “Good heavens, Claire, you look as if you’re a million miles away.” Diane Weatherly breezed into the kitchen, waving a dish towel in her niece’s direction. “You’re not thinking about that buffoon you were married to, are you?”

  Claire ducked out of the towel’s path and returned to the dishes in the sink, the warm soapy suds soothing against her skin. “Guilty as charged.”

  Diane took a rare moment to stop, her meaty shoulders drooping. “You’re not thinking about going back, are you?”

  The soup bowl slipped from her fingers at the notion of ever returning to her previous life. “Aunt Diane, there are no circumstances under which I’d ever go back. This is my home now.”

  The sixty-two-year-old clapped her hands, releasing a happy squeal as she did. “I’ve been hoping you’d decide to live here with me on a permanent basis.”

  Claire reclaimed the bowl from the sudsy water and placed it in the water-only side. “I don’t necessarily mean here as in the inn, Aunt Diane. I just mean here in Heavenly.”

  Diane’s chin rose upward a notch. “What’s wrong with the inn?”

  Realizing she’d offended, Claire rushed to explain, pausing from her dishwashing duties long enough to wipe her hands on the cloth she’d tucked into her apron. “I love the inn, Aunt Diane, you know that—”

  “I thought I did.”

  “And I do. But, at some point, once the shop is on solid footing, I’ll want to get my own place.”

  Horror widened Diane’s eyes. “But you can’t. You’re still so young … so fragile.”

  She had to laugh. “I’m thirty-one, Aunt Diane.” Stepping two feet to the right, she peered into the mirror her aunt had nailed to the wall above the dish drainer, her blue-green eyes finally void of the wounded quality they’d reflected upon her arrival in Heavenly six months earlier. Even her auburn hair featured a more relaxed look, its former bob cut giving way to one that slipped below her shoulders. “And as for fragile, not so much anymore.”

  Diane spun on her soft-soled shoes and headed back toward the dining area, a tray of turkey, dressing, and mashed potatoes balanced atop her shoulder. “We’ll see about that moving-out part when it’s time. Seems silly to get your own place unless you find a nice man. The guests always love you … even the odd ones.”

  Taking once last peek in the mirror, she followed her aunt through the series of doorways that led to the dining area where the paying guests ate each night. As she passed through the final opening, she took a deep breath, commending the scene to memory for use later on, when she was in bed, and her mind started wandering back to darker days.

  It was a technique that served her well and allowed her to sleep on nights she might not otherwise have slept.

  She supposed some of that was simply the vibes that a group of people, seated together around a table and enjoying a home-style meal, tended to give off. She knew, too, that some of it came from the feel of the room—the dim lighting cast about from the wall-mounted sconces, the large colonial-style table capable of seating twelve during the busy season, the framed black-and-white photographs of Heavenly over the years. It was, in fact, her favorite room in the inn, rivaled only by the parlor, with its full-wall fireplace, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and cozy upholstered reading chairs.

  “Miss Weatherly, I was hoping you’d come back out.” Arnie Streen, the anthropology student who’d taken a room at the inn some two weeks earlier, reached across the table, helping himself to five slices of turkey before Claire’s aunt had finished removing all of the platters from her tray. After plunking the meat onto his plate, he exchanged his fork for a spoon and dove into the serving bowl of mashed potatoes as a scrap of his red hair fell forward against his freckled cheek. “I’d like to interview that young woman in your shop tomorrow morning. Say around nine thirty or so? I’ve got some questions I need her to answer.”

  Claire wrapped her hands around the dressing bowl and made her way down one side of the table and then the other, scooping generous helpings onto the other guests’ plates before stopping at Arnie’s spot. “You mean Esther?”

  It was a rhetorical question, of course, since Arnie knew the young Amish woman’s name by heart. But like his many other socially inept ways, he seemed to be clueless to the way he rubbed people. Including Claire.

  Coughing across the turkey platter, Arnie shifted in his seat, a move Claire had come to recognize as discomfort or embarrassment—awkward emotions the man tended to exhibit in tandem with talk of Esther.

  He was an odd man, a self-proclaimed outcast who was fascinated with the Amish.

  She supposed it made sense on some level. The drastically different lifestyle of her Amish neighbors probably touched some sort of kindred place in his soul. At least, that’s what she and Diane had managed to come away with after sharing a roof with the man for the past fourteen days.

  Officially, he was there to observe the Amish culture as part of the thesis he was writing for his master’s degree—an education milestone he’d funded by shucking oysters near his Maryland home. The fact that his vast interest in the Amish seemed to stall on Esther the minute he caught his first glimpse of her was apparently beside the point.

  “Yeah … Esther.”

  Diane removed the platter of turkey from Arnie’s reach and headed back into the kitchen, returning just as quickly with a second, cough-free platter for the rest of her guests. As the robust woman moved her way around the table, she addressed Arnie. “Ruth Miller, the woman who runs ShooFly Bake Shoppe, might be a better person for you to talk to, Mr. Streen. Her brother Benjamin is a very respected member of the Amish community despite his relatively young age. Perhaps she can introduce you. I’m quite certain you could learn a lot about the Amish from him.”

  Then, with a wave of her hand, Claire’s aunt dismissed the idea as quickly as she’d said it. “On second thought, with the little problems that keep occurring at the bake shop and Ruth’s intense shyness around men, maybe it’s best if you find someone else.”

  Lifting the pitcher of ice water from the center of the table, Claire topped off everyone’s glass. “I take it you heard about the shipment of pie boxes that were stolen from Ruth’s store this morning?”

  A soft tsk emerged from Diane’s lips. “I did, indeed. Between that and yesterday’s broken milk bottles, the poor thing must be beside herself over all of her bad luck.”

&
nbsp; “Broken milk bottles?” Arnie asked between bites of turkey.

  Claire nodded. “Ruth’s brothers deliver fresh milk to her store every morning just before sunrise. But yesterday, all four bottles were smashed when she arrived.”

  “Sounds like a hate crime to me,” Arnie mused as his spoon clattered to the floor. Without so much as a word, the twentysomething plucked the utensil off the ground and dug it into his helping of potatoes, depositing a huge portion into his mouth. If he noticed the remnants that spattered onto his misbuttoned and wrinkled shirt, he showed no indication. “Regardless, Esther will be fine to interview. Besides, I think she kind of likes me.”

  For the first time since eyeing the evening’s menu, Claire was grateful the guests were always served first. If they weren’t, she’d likely be wearing her own spoonful of potatoes. She quickly forced her mouth shut, but not before noticing her aunt’s eyes rolling. Arnie Streen might be intelligent in some areas, but when it came to the cues of women, he deserved a big, fat F. With a few red circles around the grade for good measure.

  Before she could think of a response, Diane dismissed the man’s delusion with gentle diplomacy, a skill Claire admired more and more with each passing day. “Esther likes everyone.”

  When Claire and Diane were done serving the meal, a couple from Wichita, Kansas, asked them to join everyone for supper. Upon the echoed sentiment of the newlyweds seated across from the couple, as well as from Arnie, they slipped off their aprons and took a place at the table.

  Dinner was a lovely affair, as each guest shared a little about his or her own hometown, interspersed with questions about the Amish. Diane’s vast knowledge, gleaned from decades of running the inn, kept everyone enthralled in much the way it had Claire when she first arrived.

  Now, however, Claire was beginning to couple Diane’s words with her own experiences, thanks to people like Esther and some of her fellow Amish shopkeepers, who were slowly but surely becoming her friends.

  Still, Diane knew more. And when she brought out a photo album she’d compiled over the past twenty-plus years, even Claire found herself mesmerized by the pages and pages of pictures her aunt had gathered from various sources—including postcard photographers who tended to stay at the inn while on assignment.

  “The tour guide who took us through that Amish village today said they don’t keep pictures of themselves around their homes,” Gerry Baker said, leaning back in his chair and hooking an arm around his wife, Amanda. The Kansas couple had arrived the day before and were Claire’s favorite of the current guests. “The only pictures they have in their homes are on the calendars they seem to have in every room. But even those are just things like bridges and flowers and stuff.”

  “That’s true. They feel as if photographs pay homage to themselves, which is something they don’t believe in,” Claire explained.

  Amanda’s brows furrowed. “They don’t mind photographers taking their pictures?”

  “They don’t look at the photographer. Don’t keep their own photos around their homes. In fact, most of the pictures you see on postcards and in books were taken without their permission with high-powered zoom lenses. Needless to say, what those in the English world do with them is not their worry.” Diane flipped to the next page. “Likewise, most Amish families don’t have mirrors in their homes, and if they do, there’s only one, and it’s generally kept in the kitchen, making it difficult to linger for long. To have it any other way promotes vanity in their eyes.”

  “That woman could be a fashion model.”

  Claire glanced at the picture that had claimed Amanda’s interest, the beauty depicted impossible to miss. “That’s Ruth—the woman who runs the Shoo Fly Bake Shoppe just down the road.”

  “The photographer who took that shot desperately tried to convince her to abandon the Amish and pursue a career in modeling, but Ruth declined,” Diane explained as she readied her page-turning hand. “I wasn’t surprised, though. Poor thing is as sweet as they come, which, coupled with her beauty, only makes Nellie Snow all the more hateful.”

  “Nellie Snow?” Claire moved to the left to escape the flow of Arnie’s breath on her ear, the new crop of photos barely registering.

  “Hey, that’s Esther!”

  At the mention of her friend’s name, Claire forced her focus onto the picture in front of her before glancing up at her aunt with a different question. “When was this taken?”

  Diane leaned forward, a smile playing across her gently lined face. “They look so much alike, don’t they? Even I get confused at times.”

  And then she knew. It wasn’t Esther in the picture. It was a young Martha, with her parents and two brothers.

  “It’s a shame it’s been so long since they’ve seen him. I only pray that changes now that he’s back. Maybe they can find a way to forgive.”

  Her aunt’s voice hovered in the air like some distant cloud as Claire studied the face she’d met that afternoon, a face so like one she now called friend.

  Arnie paused in the middle of picking his teeth. “Which one didn’t come back?”

  Confused, Claire looked up at Arnie, then followed the path of his eyes back down to the photo. As she watched, her aunt’s finger pointed to the young man standing to Martha’s immediate left, his sandy blond hair just visible beneath the rim of his hat.

  “That one.” Diane pulled her hand from the photograph in front of them and grabbed the day’s paper off the hutch. Placing it next to the album, she pointed to the man who had sent Martha and Esther scurrying from Claire’s shop that very afternoon. “Who’s also the same as this one.”

  Chapter 3

  Claire looked up from the novel in her lap and pointed at the rose-colored love seat on the other side of the Victorian lamp. “Aunt Diane, you really need to sit. You’ve been going a mile a minute since I got back from the shop this afternoon. The guests have been fed and they’ve all retired upstairs for the night, leaving you with only one thing to do. And that’s relax. You’ve earned it.”

  “I will relax when it’s time for bed.” Armed with a dust cloth in one hand and a book of matches in the other, Diane moved from one built-in bookcase to the next, stopping from time to time to straighten a frame or knickknack and light a scented votive. “The Bakers are a lovely couple, aren’t they? And the Reynolds? Can’t you just see them as they’ll look when they come back in twenty-five years to celebrate their anniversary? Why, I’ve never seen a man look at his new bride with such love and reverence before. It’s simply a treat to witness.”

  Claire turned her head, following her father’s oldest sister around the room with her eyes, the soft flickering light creating an almost halo-like effect behind the woman’s gray-streaked hair.

  Fitting …

  “Do you ever regret not getting married?” It was a question she’d been tempted to ask often over the past six months yet had resisted until that moment.

  The woman paused, a thoughtful expression brewing behind her bifocals. “If I didn’t have you, I’d have to say yes. But, since I do, I have been blessed with the chance to know a sense of motherhood without all the red tape. Besides, with the way I tend to run off at the mouth about history and such, I’d have bored some poor fellow into an early grave.”

  A smile tugged at Claire’s lips. “You sell yourself short.”

  “And you, my dear niece, tend to make me bigger than I am.” Diane tucked the dust cloth and matches into her apron pocket and retrieved the day’s paper from the rocking chair. “I love my life, Claire. I love cooking, I love gardening, and I love meeting new people every few days or so. Through them, I learn about parts of the country I’ve yet to visit, and with them, I can share my love for this town and its people.”

  “And you’re very good at what you do.” Shifting her novel from her lap to the side table, Claire pulled her feet underneath her body and snuggled deeper into the depths of the upholstered lounge chair. “Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

  “Hap
pened?” Diane echoed in confusion.

  She pointed to the newspaper tucked beneath her aunt’s arm and nodded. “With the detective and his family.”

  A rush of sadness muted the woman’s trademark sparkle, bringing her to sit on the same love seat she’d refused to inhabit just moments earlier. “It’s a sad story, really. One I don’t see ever changing, even though I wish with all my heart that it could.”

  “Tell me,” she encouraged.

  Unfolding the newspaper across her knees, Diane gazed down at the picture below the fold. “Jakob was raised Amish right alongside his sister and his brother. He stayed close to home during his Rumspringa, his experimentation of the non-Amish world extending only to music and a fascination with the local police.”

  “The local police?” She tugged a throw pillow onto her lap and hugged it to her chest. “How so?”

  Diane scooted the paper onto the love seat and pulled her feet from her comfortable-soled shoes, wiggling her stocking-clad toes as she did. “He became friendly with members of the Heavenly Police Department. He’d ask them questions about what they did, listen to their stories, even go for a few ride-alongs when the chief allowed. But, when his year or so was over, he went back to his life and was baptized.”

  She felt her mouth drop open. “I didn’t realize the Amish could be police officers.”

  “They can’t.”

  “Then how—”

  “Sixteen years ago, a member of the Amish community was murdered as part of a hate crime. Jakob wanted a hand in bringing the perpetrator to justice.”

  Reality dawned as she took in her aunt’s words. “He joined the force?”

  Diane’s capable shoulders rose and fell once beneath her simple powder-blue dress. “He wanted to, but it wasn’t allowed. Farming is more than an occupation to the Amish. It’s also about their devotion to a commandment from God that says man is to work in harmony with the soil and nature. Police work doesn’t fit with that teaching.”

  Anxious for her aunt to continue, she merely nodded.