Murder, Plain and Simple (27 page)
hapter Forty-three
My eyes flew open. Where was Oliver? A paw touched my hand, and Oliver’s sandpapery tongue licked my cheek.
“I think it’s time we went home,” I whispered. Slowly, I sat up. I was still beside the watermelon-carving table. It was dark out. I consulted my cell phone. It was only six in the evening. Rain hit the slate roof like beads from a BB gun. Thunder rumbled but no longer cracked violently. The storm moved on and left the rain.
One thing was for sure—I couldn’t tell my mother about this, because she would be on the next plane to Ohio to remind me this never would have happened had I moved back to Texas and convinced Ryan to marry me.
Danny must have been long gone by now. Good. Oliver and I just needed to get to Running Stitch, and everything would be fine.
“Please. Please. Don’t do this,” a voice resounded from across the room. “You can get away. I will turn myself in.” I realized it was Danny. He sniffled.
“I don’t believe you. Now you will blame the girl’s death on me too. The
Englisch
system will believe you before they do me.” Now I recognized Elijah’s voice. “I will never have any peace again.”
I couldn’t see the pair, because the enormous watermelons blocked my view. I held a finger to my lips, hoping Oliver would get the picture to stay quiet. He didn’t bark. Peeking over one of the watermelons, I saw Elijah had Danny tied to one of the folding chairs from the quilting bee. Elijah held matches in his hand and three canisters of kerosene were at his feet. My eyes fell on Mattie. I held the side of my head. How did she get there?
Tears poured down Mattie’s face. “Elijah, please don’t do this. Danny killed Joseph and”—her voice broke—“and Angie too. Run away and let him take the blame.”
I’m dead?
If this was heaven, I wanted a refund.
“Why should I? I have nothing to run to. You won’t go with me.”
“I—I can’t. I can’t leave my family.”
He rounded on her. “You leave me no choice. I’m already going back to prison. I might as well be there for a reason that earns me respect.” His beard quivered. “You don’t know how those
Englischers
treat me there. I’m alone with no one who understands me. To go back would be worse than death.”
You could have been with your people if you’d stopped playing with matches,
I thought. I knew better than to share my opinion with the volatile Amish man.
“Get out of here!” he yelled at Mattie as he splashed kerosene on a hay bale closest to Danny.
Danny quivered in his seat. Mattie was incomprehensible through her tears.
“Go, Mattie,” I cried. “Take Oliver. Get help!”
My voice broke through her hysterics and her eyes fixed on Oliver hiding under one of the tables. Her eyes cleared. She ran for the table and scooped up the dog. Oliver whimpered and kicked in her arms. She struggled under his weight but ran for the open barn door. Elijah watched her go. He didn’t want her there. He still loved her, in his way.
“I thought you said she was dead.”
Danny gawked at me. “I thought you were dead.”
I touched the back of my head. “Next time you try to kill someone, Danny, you should really check to make sure they don’t have a pulse.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elijah said. “Now only the guilty remain here. This is how it should be.”
Was he planning to commit suicide by fire and take Danny and me with him? I could think of twenty other ways I would prefer to go out, and since I apparently came back from the dead, I’d like to stay alive.
Elijah dropped the lit match on the hay bale, and the dry hay ignited. Panicked, Danny rocked back and forth in his chair so hard, the chair fell over and he lay on his side, putting him closer to the flames.
Elijah smiled.
I threw all my weight against the enormous watermelon, and it rocked off its platform.
Elijah was too focused on the fire and wasn’t ready when the 230-pound watermelon hit him in the side, knocking him to the ground. He cried out and the watermelon came to rest on his right hand. I winced. I’d bet three head-sized doughnuts that his hand was broken.
“Help! Angie, help me!” Danny’s pant leg caught the flame, and his scream tore through my consciousness. I grabbed a horse blanket hanging on the wall and beat down the flames on his leg. I dropped the blanket and concentrated on the knots tying him to the chair.
The fire ran up the north wall of the barn like a sprinter at the Olympic Games. Soon it was on the rafters. Above us, the fire crackled and hissed.
Crack! The beam above us started to give way. The wood of the centennial barn was like tinder. Elijah could not have picked a more perfect setting for his final fire.
“Angie!” Danny screamed.
Another rafter fell a few feet from me. Hot embers shot up into my face.
“You should go,” Danny said. “I’m the one who caused all this. Go.”
“I don’t think so.”
The knots were no use. With all my strength, I flipped Danny and his chair onto its back and pulled. The back of the chair was metal and red-hot from the flame. I could feel the burns forming on my palms. Ignoring the pain in my left hand, I grabbed the back of the chair and pulled him toward the barn door. It was slow going, and more rafters fell. Inch by inch, we progressed to the door and I was able to drag him through the doorway into the rain. I pulled Danny as far away from the barn as the pain in my hand would allow. When we were twenty yards away, I dropped the back of his chair and fell to the wet grass. I heard the fire truck sirens making their way up Sugartree Street.
Even though it was only a drizzle now, the rain would help control the fire. I started to stand. Would the firefighters arrive in time to save Elijah? Should I go back in for him?
There was a loud crack as the center portion of the roof caved in. Inside the barn, Elijah cried out and then was silent. All I heard was sirens and rain.
ilogue
Behind the counter, loading new merchandise software onto my laptop, I laughed. “Trust me. Everyone coming to Rolling Brook wants to take a little piece of Amish Country home with them.”
She wrinkled her nose at a thimble with a tiny buggy painted on the side. “This isn’t real Amish Country.”
“Just don’t tell the tourists that.” I closed the laptop lid and picked up the small wall quilt. I carried it to the rocking chair by the front window. There I could quilt and watch customers as they came by the shop. I’d started the quilt a day after the barn fire. It would be my first quilt made solely by hand. I pieced together a simple block pattern and the quilting pattern on top was waves.
My quilt would never be as beautiful as one of my aunt’s, but I was getting there. Rachel and Anna were great teachers. The burn inside the palm of my left hand itched. Both hands had been burned, but the left was much worse than the right. How long would my hand ache? Would there be a scar as a reminder? My first real battle wound. The emergency room doctor told me to go easy on the left hand and not use it for any fine motor skills. All quilting was fine motor skills. Thankfully, I’m right-handed. I held the fabric in my left hand and quilted with my right.
Oliver snoozed on his dog bed in the corner of the shop. “I think country life suits him, don’t you?” I said.
Mattie laughed halfheartedly. “I’m going across the street to the bakery for breakfast. Do you want anything?”
“Well . . .”
She gave me a small smile. “One head-size doughnut coming up, if there are any left. Rachel can’t bake them fast enough.”
The bell on the front door rang as the door closed after Mattie. I was happy the young Amish woman was doing so well. She had been through a lot. She put on a brave face, but I knew she reeled from Elijah’s death in the barn. In time, her voice would lose its sad quality. When I didn’t return to Running Stitch after the Watermelon Fest, she’d gotten worried and walked to the barn in the rain looking for me. She found more than she bargained for. I knew a small part of her still loved Elijah and most likely always would, just like a small part of me still loved Ryan. Not that I would be willing to trade in Running Stitch for a big Texas wedding, no matter how many times my mother called me and begged me to move back. In a little quilt shop in Ohio, I’d finally found what I really wanted to do. And after the sheriff searched Danny’s apartment, I had the deed to prove the shop was indisputably mine.
I dropped a stitch and had to backtrack. Finding a person’s passion could be dangerous too. Danny was proof of that. He let his ambition get in the way, and now he awaited trial for murder and attempted murder in the county jail. To my relief, Jessica wasn’t angry at me over what became of her cousin. Last time I talked to her, she said Dodger was the pick of Cherry Cat’s litter and was eager to go home with Oliver and me when he was weaned in a few weeks.
Suddenly, Oliver lifted his head and sniffed the air. “Hear a bird, boy?”
He jumped to his feet. A second later, I heard the rattle of a buggy making its way down the street. Anna’s buggy pulled to a stop in front of Running Stitch. She tethered her horse to the hitching post and pulled a large brown shopping bag from the buggy.
I stood up to greet her, leaving my quilt on the rocker. “Hi, Anna.”
“Gude mariye,”
she said as she stepped into the shop. “
Gut.
You’re the only one here. I have something for you.”
“For me? From you?”
“It is not from me. It is from your
aenti
. I had wanted to give it to you the day after the opening of the shop.” She gave me a small smile. “But you remember how that had gone.”
She handed me the bag. It was heavy. I knew immediately it was a quilt. My hands began to shake.
“Go on, take it out.”
I reached into the bag and the folded quilt slid out easily. I spread it across the new cutting table I bought for the store. The quilt was even more beautiful than the one that had been ruined. It was also a wedding ring and had all my favorite colors, decidedly not Amish. It was navies, aquas, teals, lemons, and goldenrod yellows. “Eleanor planned to give it to you for your wedding.”
“But I’m not getting married,” I whispered.
Anna smoothed her hands over her apron. “That doesn’t matter. Wedding or no wedding, she would want you to have it.”
Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes.
“Danki.”
She laughed at my Pennsylvania Dutch pronunciation of the word for “thank you.” “We might make an Amish out of you yet.” She moved to the rocker and picked up my wall quilt. “I’m glad to see that you’re quilting again.” She moved her reading glasses to the tip of her nose and examined my work. “Your stitches are much better. Not perfect, but you are coming along nicely. You may grow into as good a quilter as your
aenti
.”
My chest swelled with pride and then I thought of Martha. “Do you think there is enough room in Rolling Brook for two quilt shops?”
She removed her glasses and tucked them into the pocket of her apron. “Martha will do what Martha will do. You need to worry less about her and more about yourself.”
“I can’t go back to Texas. This business cannot fail.” I said this as a promise to Anna and myself.
“Then work hard to make sure it doesn’t.” She patted her silver bun on the back of her head. “Now that the business with Joseph’s murder is over, you won’t be seeing as much of the sheriff, I gather. I hope you won’t be too disappointed.”
I took my quilt from her and laid it on top of my aunt’s quilt. If a side-by-side comparison was any indication, I had a long way to go to be as good of a hand quilter as my aunt had been. “Why would I be disappointed?”
She smiled wide. “I’ve noticed you watching him a time or two when you thought no one would notice.”
I folded my quilt. “Anna, the sheriff is married.”
She jerked her head back. “He is not.”
I dropped the quilt back onto the table. “Yes, he is. I met his wife, Hillary. She’s very pretty.”
Anna laughed. “Hillary is the sheriff’s ex-wife.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
A smile spread across the older woman’s face. “That changes things, doesn’t it?”
The bell on Running Stitch’s door rang as a troop of seven middle-aged women from the suburbs entered the shop. “What a cute store!” one exclaimed.
“I wish I could be so lucky as to own a place like this someday,” her friend in the hot pink visor replied.
My chest swelled with pride. “I’m the lucky one,” I told Anna. “Because the store is mine.”
The Amish woman shook her head. “No, Angie, you’re not lucky. You’re blessed.”
For the first time since I left Dallas, I thought Anna might be right about that.