Lethal Licorice

by Amanda Flower

  I frowned. “How bittersweet now that Josephine is gone.”

  Emily nodded.

  I lowered my voice. “What did Haddie say to her?”

  “I don’t know if I should repeat it.”

  I gave Emily a look, and she leaned in. “She said she’s glad that Josephine is dead because Josephine stole her licorice recipe, and she deserved whatever happened to her.”

  “Yikes.” I blinked and stared at Haddie’s receding back. Now there was a murder suspect if I ever saw one. This was good. I needed to get the heat off myself and Charlotte. I had taken a liking to the sweet Amish girl. I had also taken a disliking to her father and the district deacon. I still needed to ask my grandmother how we were related, and why I was just learning today that I had other Amish relatives.

  “Did you notice if Haddie left her table today?” I asked.

  Emily wrinkled her smooth brow. “I can’t say I noticed, but it’s been such a crazy day with the missing pig, the contest, and all the police around. And there was a short time when neither of us were at our table because you were off looking for Jethro and I was still at the pretzel shop.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. I’d forgotten about that.”

  Every cell in my body wanted to chase after Haddie and find out what she might know about Josephine’s death, but the taffy round would be held in just an hour and a half.

  “Should we finish the taffy?” Emily asked.

  I blinked at her. “Yes. Sorry. I’m just preoccupied.”

  “That’s understandable. Why didn’t you tell me about Josephine’s death before the police arrived?” Emily asked, sounding hurt. “You had to have known. You were at the church.”

  “I didn’t have a chance before the judging began.” I held out my wooden spoon to her. “Do you mind stirring for a little while?”

  Emily took the spoon from my hand and my place at the stove top.

  Even with the taffy round looming, I started to leave the table, and Emily noticed. “Where are you going now?”

  I waved at her. “Just keep stirring, I’ll be back in a second to help you pull the taffy.”

  Emily sighed, and I walked down the line to what was once Josephine Weaver’s booth.

  When I reached Lindy, I asked her, “Are you all right?”

  She blinked at me over the pot she was stirring on her burner. “I’m fine. Danki.” Her wire-rimmed glasses were slightly fogged from leaning over the boiling pot of sugar.

  She didn’t look fine to me. “Congratulations on winning the last round. I know that Josephine would have been very happy about that.”

  She covered her face with her hands.

  “Are you all right?”

  She shook her head. “Nee.”

  I wanted to pat her arm to comfort her, but instead, I folded my arms in front of me. “I’m so very sorry about Josephine.”

  She touched the corner of her eye with a paper towel.

  “I’m sure she’d appreciate that you’re going on with the competition,” I said.

  She lowered the paper towel from her face and shook her head. “That’s where you are wrong. Josephine Weaver didn’t appreciate anything I or anyone else did. She was one of the most difficult people to please.”

  “Oh?” I asked, trying to downplay my interest in this news.

  She licked her lips. “I know that seems unkind to say because of—because of—” Her voice caught.

  “Do you plan to go on with the competition?” I asked.

  She met my eyes. “I have to go on. It’s what Josephine would have wanted, even if she’d certainly find something wrong with the way I am doing it. Her business was so very important to her. It might have been the most important thing. She was widowed and without children. She poured her all into her shop. She would want me to continue for her.”

  “And the shop?” I asked. “Does the same go for the shop? What will happen to it now?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she stammered. “I haven’t thought about that yet.”

  I frowned at the way she stammered out the answer. I wondered if she did in fact know who would inherit the shop and was lying to me. If so, the question was why.

  “I’ll take it from here, Bailey, thank you,” a male voice said behind me.

  I didn’t have to turn around to know that Aiden was standing there. I stepped back from the table. “Hello, Deputy Brody.”

  He frowned at me. There was no sign of the dimple now. When I didn’t make a move to leave, he said, “Please return to your table. I need to speak with Lindy. Alone.”

  I nodded my head as if my hesitance was just an oversight. “Yes, of course.” I backed away. “Lindy, if you need anything, just let me know how Swissmen Sweets or I can help you.”

  She met my gaze. “Danki. That is very kind of you. I don’t believe what everyone is saying about you.”

  I stopped. “Saying about me?”

  She blushed. “That you tricked the judges to let you into the competition.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the sharp retort that threatened to come out. “I did no such thing.”

  Her face turned even redder.

  “Bailey, please return to your table,” Aiden said.

  I gave him a look, and Aiden folded his arms. It was clear he wanted me to leave right that second. I gave Lindy what I hoped was one last sympathetic smile and returned to my own table.

  Emily waited for me there. She had the molten taffy poured out on waxed paper in the middle of the table. It was still too hot to pull, but it wouldn’t be long now. The taffy was bright green. In a nod to Harvest’s booming apple season, I had decided to make green apple taffy. It was a bit of a gamble because there was always a chance that the taffy would be too sour. However, if I pulled it off, I could win the round.

  Emily waved a tea towel over the taffy as if it would cool more quickly with a little help.

  Before I took the towel from her, I cleaned my hands with hand sanitizer from under my table. “It will cool off when it’s ready. How do you think Lindy will do in this round without Josephine’s help?”

  “I think very well. From what I have heard from the other candy makers, Lindy does most of the work in the shop. Josephine just takes the credit.”

  I glanced down the rows of tables at the mousy woman who was speaking with Aiden. Could she have a motive to kill her boss because she did all the work? It was possible. I would have to tell Aiden this little bit of Amish gossip. I wasn’t sure any of the Amish would say it to him. They weren’t that forthcoming where the police were concerned. Considering the years they had had to put up with Sheriff Marshall, who made no secret of having little concern for the Amish in the county, they had good reason.

  Across the street in front of Swissmen Sweets, I saw an old Amish woman with a hunched back and cane hobble down Main Street. Despite all the noise and commotion coming from the square, she shuffled forward without glancing in the direction of the candy competition.

  “Emily, do you know who that woman is?” I asked.

  “Which woman?” she asked, looking over my shoulder. “I don’t see anyone.”

  When I looked back at the street where I had seen the old woman, she was gone. I looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of her. Had she disappeared into thin air? It was as if she’d evaporated. “She was just there. Where could she have gone? She disappeared.”

  “Maybe she went into one of the shops,” Emily offered.

  “Maybe.”

  “It was probably just a tourist.”

  I shook my head. “She was definitely not a tourist. She was elderly, Amish, and had a hunched back and cane.”

  Emily smiled sweetly. “You just described half of the Amish grandmothers in Harvest. Not yours, of course. Clara is still very spry.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll tell her you said that. I don’t know. There was something about that woman that stuck out to me. I feel like I have seen her before.” I was still looking fo
r the woman. I couldn’t help it. There was something about her that I couldn’t ignore.

  “Bailey?” Emily asked. “We need to start working on the taffy. We only have ninety minutes. I think it’s cool enough now to pull.”

  I nodded, knowing she was right, and I didn’t know why I was looking for that woman. I already had more than enough problems to occupy me, including what looked more and more like a murder.

  Chapter 11

  After being reprimanded by the judges for my licorice pieces being too fancy and not Amish plain, I decided to take their advice and keep it simple for the taffy round. I wasn’t going to imprint the pieces with the double S. It was time to play it safe so I could move on in the competition.

  Emily wiped her hands on a cloth. “The green apple is done. Now on to peppermint. That’s my favorite. Although I guess green apple is better for you.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. “How do you figure that?”

  “An apple a day keeps the doctor away. One of my Englisch friends said that to me once.”

  I laughed because I was guilty of this sort of logic too when it came to eating sweets of any kind. Even though I worked in a candy shop, I still loved sugar in any form I could get it. I was grateful that diabetes didn’t run in my family, or we’d all be in trouble.

  “We had originally planned to make cotton candy flavor as the second taffy,” Emily said as she rifled through our box of supplies. “Why did you change your mind and make it peppermint?”

  “Because,” I said with a chuckle, “mint is an herb, which makes it healthy.”

  She laughed. “It seems that we were thinking the same thing when it came to healthy candy.”

  I grinned. “I knew you were the right person to help me out during the ACC.”

  She beamed at me and searched through the box of supplies. “Bailey, we have a little problem.”

  I looked up from the green apple taffy, which I was examining for bubbles. “Problem? What kind of problem?”

  “I can’t find the peppermint extract. It’s not in the box.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling relieved. “That’s all? There’s more at the shop.”

  She straightened up. “I can run over and get it.”

  “No,” I said. “I can run over and grab it. I want to check on my grandmother anyway. She has been in the shop alone for a while.”

  Emily nodded with a slight frown. I knew she was worried about Maami too. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that she had become quieter and more withdrawn with each passing day since my grandfather’s funeral.

  “Start cutting the green apple. I’ll be here in time to help you finish,” I said to Emily. “I won’t be long.” I hurried out of the booth and ran toward Main Street. All the while, I kept an eye out for the old Amish woman. She was nowhere to be seen.

  When I stepped through the front door of Swissmen Sweets, the cowbell on the inner door handle jangled, and my orange kitten, Nutmeg, met me. He looked up at me and meowed with annoyance. The kitten was used to my being in the shop most of the day. It seemed he didn’t like my absence.

  I scooped up the kitten and nuzzled him under my chin. There was nothing quite as comforting as fluffy kitten fur, and I needed some comforting as the image of Josephine’s hand hanging from the organ platform entered my mind yet again. And then there was the image of my licorice in the evidence bag. That was enough to give me nightmares. Aiden hadn’t spoken to me about the licorice yet, but I knew he would. I was certain he had noticed the double S imprinted on my licorice pieces for the judging and for tourists to sample.

  Nutmeg purred, and I set him back down on the floor. He meowed in protest and wove around my ankles.

  My grandmother stood behind the domed glass counter, which was the centerpiece of Swissmen Sweets. It was where we displayed all our delicious treats. Chocolates, truffles, fudge, and caramels sat on silver trays in the display case. A small English girl in pigtails had her nose pressed up against the glass. The glass would need to be cleaned again. It was a constant battle to keep the counter clean—people, and not just kids, had a powerful urge to touch the tasty treats.

  My eyes moved from the counter to my grandmother. Her typically rosy complexion was pale, and her face looked drawn. She smiled at the English woman, who I assumed was the girl’s mother. She looked like she was buying every flavor of fudge the shop had to offer, including a couple of the newer options I had introduced to the shop: lavender blueberry and salted cappuccino. They had been a hit at JP Chocolates in New York, and I wasn’t the least bit surprised that they were a hit here as well.

  I waved to my grandmother, who gave me a slight smile as I stepped around the counter, and I slipped through the swinging door back into the kitchen, where I grabbed the peppermint extract from the shelf over the industrial mixer. The mixer was large enough that I could sit in it, not that I had ever tried. Well, that wasn’t completely true. I had tried it once as a child.

  Like all extract bottles, the peppermint was a small brown glass vial. We had more extract in storage, but we continually filled the vials instead of pouring from the larger containers. This was an old habit of my grandfather’s, who was the master candy maker in the family and the reason that I had studied to be a chocolatier. He claimed there was too great a risk of adding too much flavor when pouring from one of the extract jugs that we used to refill the vials.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see him sitting on one of the wooden backless stools, refilling bottle after bottle with a steady wrinkled hand. I bit the inside of my cheek to hold back the tears. It was still too hard to think of him without crying.

  My childhood summers were spent on my grandfather’s knee learning how to make candies and chocolates. I had fallen in love with candy making. It had never occurred to me to do anything else. What I hadn’t expected was that I would be making candies in this very shop. I had assumed by this point in my life, I would be a head chocolatier at some fancy chocolate shop in a cosmopolitan city. That had almost happened. But, surprisingly, I didn’t feel any sort of loss at not achieving that dream. Plans and priorities change, and I was starting to learn that.

  But living and working in Harvest was an adjustment all the same. I didn’t feel at home here, not yet. It was too new and so different from what I was used to. However, after a bit of time, I sensed that I could feel at home in this place that was so different from where I had come from.

  As I plucked the brown bottle of peppermint extract from the shelf, my eyes scanned over the other bottles. There was an empty spot on the shelf. I frowned, as my grandmother and I were obsessive about keeping the kitchen clean and organized. Everything had a place, and everything was in its place. I studied the bottles. Vanilla, maple, cinnamon, banana, rum, lemon. I swallowed, realizing which extract was missing. Licorice. The small brown bottle of licorice extract was missing. There should be two on the shelf. One sat in the supply crate at my ACC table. The other was missing.

  When I had gotten up that morning, there had been two bottles on the shelf. I took one for the licorice contest, but only one. The other bottle was now gone. My brows knit together. Maybe I had imagined there had been two bottles? We make so much licorice in the shop that we usually had two bottles of it on the shelf. We also had two bottles of vanilla always ready to go, as vanilla was the most popular extract of all. No, I knew there had been two bottles of licorice there this morning. I had seen both bottles.

  My hand shook as the gravity of the situation sank in. Josephine had been killed by an allergic reaction to the anise found in licorice. One of my licorice pieces was found in her apron pocket, and now my candy shop’s extra bottle of licorice extract was missing. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to tell me I was in deep trouble or to tell me that someone was making a determined effort to frame me.

  I closed my hand around the tiny bottle of peppermint extract and stepped back through the swinging door to the main part of the shop. I was happy to see that the lone customer and her little
girl were gone. On the other side of the counter, Nutmeg patrolled the perimeter of the shop like a royal guard around a queen. It seemed, in recent months, that the young cat had taken it upon himself to be the head of security detail. Nothing got past Nutmeg. I always knew when a customer was about to step through the door because he would stop whatever he was doing and go into high alert.

  My grandmother sprayed vinegar water on the front of the domed counter, wiping away the smear marks that the little girl had left there.

  “Maami,” I said, clutching the vial of peppermint extract in my hand, “did you see the second bottle of licorice extract on the shelf in the kitchen? I can’t seem to find it.” I concentrated on keeping my voice even. I debated telling her about Josephine’s death for the briefest of moments, then discarded the idea. I didn’t want to say or do anything that would upset my grandmother. She already was upset enough. I refused to add to her distress.

  She shook her head. “Nee. I thought you needed it for the contest this morning. Wasn’t the first round licorice?”

  “It was,” I said.

  “Maybe Emily took the second bottle to be safe,” she suggested. “Maybe she was afraid you might need a little extra.”

  As she said this, my worry began to fade. Yes, of course that must be it. There was no other answer. Emily must have taken the other bottle as a precaution. It was very sweet of her to be so thoughtful.

  I smiled. “That must be it.” I needed to hurry back to the contest so I could ask Emily about the licorice extract, but I hesitated before I left. “How are things here?” What I was really asking was how she was holding up that day, and we both knew it.

  She set the bottle of vinegar water on the counter. “Do not worry about me, Bailey dear. You need to return to the competition.”

  I frowned. I wanted to ask her how she felt, but I knew the Amish didn’t talk about their emotions as much as English people did. My father, who had been raised Amish, had trouble talking about how he felt too, and it had been a source of many arguments between him and my mother. My mother was the type of person who tells everyone how she feels, whether they want to hear about it or not. I fell somewhere in the middle of those two, and unlike my mother, I could recognize when someone else didn’t want to talk about his or her emotions.