Murder, Handcrafted (Amish Quilt Shop Mystery) (9 page)

I
n my arms, Oliver whined. He sensed something was wrong too, and I knew it wasn’t just because he was disappointed over the bacon Linda would have snuck to him had she been there—although I was sure that was part of it.

I set Oliver on the sidewalk and stepped closer to the door. I leaned forward and cupped my hands around my eyes as I took a good look inside. Everything seemed to be in order. The barstools were turned upside down on the counter. The pass-through between the kitchen and dining room was closed. Nothing was disturbed. The place was just closed. That was the disturbing part. I stepped back.

“You look like you lost your puppy,” my friend Jessica Nicolson said as she walked up the sidewalk toward me. “But I see he’s standing right there next to you.”

Oliver went over to greet our friend. She bent down to scratch him between the ears, and as she did, her red hair fell over her face. Oliver always liked Jessica because she was the reason we have Dodger. Her cat,
Cherry Cat, was Dodger’s biological mother. Oliver was grateful to Jessica and Cherry Cat for letting us take in the once tiny ball of gray-and-white fluff. Now Dodger was a hefty twelve pounds of feline muscle and sass. Cherry Cat was solid gray and didn’t have any of the white markings that Dodger had, but she certainly had sass to spare. That should have been a warning to me.

“Do you know why the Double Dime is closed?” I asked.

She examined my face. “Do you want something to eat? I think I might have some peanut butter crackers back at my shop.”

My stomach growled in response. “I’m starving, but I wanted to talk to Linda more than grab a bite of lunch. What happened? Why is the diner closed?”

She brushed her hair over her shoulder. Jessica had the coloring of a true Irish lass with pale skin and blue eyes to go with her red hair. “I saw everything. I was sweeping my walk. The police came. They were there for about a half hour, and then Linda kicked everyone out and closed up. I think it’s the first time I’d ever seen the place closed in the middle of the day.” She frowned. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about why the police were here, would you?”

I wrinkled my nose.

“Oh boy,” she said. “Spill.”

I gave her a condensed version of that morning’s events. I left out my conversation with Rachel, but I included Willow and the descending Bigfoot lovers.

She tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh. “When are they coming?”

I grimaced. “I hope never.” I prayed Willow took her post on the message board down in time.

“How are your parents?” Her tone turned concerned.

“Mom’s fit to be tied, and Dad hurt his back trying to demo the kitchen himself. That’s how I pulled Jonah into this mess to begin with, because I needed his help to take over the kitchen remodel since Dad threw out his back.”

She winced. “I’m so sorry your father was hurt.”

“Thanks.” I smiled.

“But I’m really glad your mom is all right; she’s one of my best customers. I’d hate anything to impair her remodel project.” She grinned. “I’m kidding.”

Jessica owned Out of Time, an antiques shop just down the street from the diner. She had been helping my mother find unique furnishings for her new home. In that regard, Jessica is the daughter that my mother wished she’d had.

“How do I find Linda? In all the time I’ve known her, I don’t think we’ve had two conversations about her life.” I frowned, feeling terrible. I ate at the Double Dime Diner at least twice a week. Linda owned the diner, but she was also the one and only waitress, and she knew so much about my life and the investigations that I had been involved in. What did I know about her other than she worked in the diner and liked her hair fashioned in a 1960s-style beehive?

“I guess you could try her home,” Jessica said matter-of-factly. “That would be a good place to start.”

“Do you know where she lives?” I asked.

She nodded. “Actually, I do. I gave her a lift home
once when her car was in the shop. It’s in that small trailer park on Wells Road. I can’t remember the trailer number, but I’ll recognize it when I see it. Let’s go.”

“What about your shop?” I asked.

She smiled. “I was thinking about cutting out early today anyway. Let me just go close up, and we can hit the road.”

Within twenty minutes, Jessica, Oliver, and I were turning into Strawberry Way Trailer Park. The sign that welcomed us to the park was shaped like a strawberry. There were at least two dozen trailers in the park, and they were all well kept. The tiny lawns surrounding them were mowed. Spring flowers bloomed in flower boxes, and brightly colored wind chimes glittered and played in the light spring breeze. Elderly homeowners sat on the wide porches attached to their trailers, sipped iced tea, and waved to us as we drove by.

The only eyesore in the entire park was the road. The road through the trailer park wasn’t paved but composed of loose gravel. Although it wasn’t raining at present, all the rain that we’d had in the last couple of days left the road and the parking lot a muddy mess.

I parked the car and could feel my car’s tires sink into the mud as the car came to a complete stop.

“Are you sure you want to walk through this with your boots?” Jessica asked.

I looked down at my feet. I was wearing my beloved cowboy boots. They were a one-of-a-kind, custom-made pair that I’d found and fallen in love with in Dallas over a decade ago. They were aged brown leather with hand-stitched blue flowers running up
the sides. I loved my boots, and I always wore them when I needed a little extra boost of courage, like this morning when a dead guy was found in my parents’ backyard. “I’ll be careful,” I said.

Jessica grinned and got out of the car. Gingerly, I did the same. I lifted Oliver out of the backseat, opting to carry the Frenchie rather than let him sink into mud.

“That’s Linda’s trailer there,” Jessica said, pointing at a butter yellow trailer with navy blue shutters. A hanging basket of purple pansies dangled from the porch’s eaves.

I was grateful that trailer wasn’t far. As we walked across the parking lot, I took care to avoid the worst of the mud, picking my way there on my tiptoes.

We reached the edge of the trailer, and a short paved walk led to Linda’s porch steps. Jessica and I did our best to scrape the mud from our shoes before we walked up the whitewashed steps that led to the equally white porch.

The front door was open. Only a screen door separated us from the trailer’s interior. The inside of the trailer was neat and tidy like the rest of the trailer park. I caught sight of a rose-printed sofa, blue carpet, and wallpapered walls before Jessica stepped forward and rang the doorbell.

Less than a minute later, Linda was at the screen door. “Angie? Jessica? What are you two doing way out here?”

I wouldn’t call the trailer park “way out,” as it was less than ten minutes from the Double Dime Diner, but I knew our arrival must have come as a surprise.

Linda pushed open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. She wore a purple sweat suit and her normally high and beehived hair was wet and plastered to her head. It was the first time I had seen Linda outside of her 1950s waitressing uniform and her hair below the stratosphere.

Linda must have realized that too because she patted her head. “I wasn’t expecting company. I just finished washing out my hair. I must look a fright.”

“You look fine,” I insisted. “We’re so sorry to bother you, Linda, but I was wondering if I could talk to you. I went to the Double Dime first . . .” I trailed off.

She interrupted me. “It’s about Griffin, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Thought so,” she said. She might have been surprised by our arrival, but she didn’t seem the least bit taken aback by the reason for our visit. “You all have a seat on the porch while I do something with my hair.” The screen door closed after her. Jessica and I sat in two white resin patio chairs across from a vinyl-covered glider that reminded me of the one my grandmother Braddock had on her patio when I was a small child. All of my grandparents had died before I was an adult, and I felt a surprising pang of loss for missing out on having my grandparents longer. In many ways, my Amish aunt Eleanor, who was ten years older than my mother, had filled that gap in my life.

The porch’s floorboards were cleaner than my kitchen floor. I winced at our muddy shoe prints marring the pristine surface. Before I could stop him,
Oliver walked through my boot prints and tracked mud across the porch. “Ollie,” I complained.

Jessica opened her purse and rummaged through it. “I might have something in here.” A second later she came up with a wad of fast-food napkins. She handed them to me, and I knelt on the porch beside Oliver and started cleaning his paws.

Oliver didn’t like it and kept pulling his paws away. I think anytime I touched his feet he thought I might put his red boots on him that I made him wear in the snow during the winter. He hated those boots. “Ollie, you’re making this more difficult than it has to be.”

I was still kneeling on the porch arguing with my dog when Linda reappeared in the doorway. She had a pink turban wrapped around her head, which resembled the beehive look that she was known for, and carried a tray of lemonade.

Jessica jumped out of her chair and held the door open so that Linda could walk out onto the porch. The tray of lemonade smelled like bacon. Then I noticed there was a dessert plate of bacon in the corner.

Oliver caught a whiff of it too and stood at attention. His stubby tail wiggled in anticipation. It seemed he was horribly spoiled by every person in the county.

“I’m sorry Oliver made such a mess,” I said from the place I knelt. “If you have a bucket and scrub brush, I can clean it up in no time.” I grabbed Oliver around the middle and he wiggled in my arms as all of his focus was on the little plate of bacon on the tray.

She smiled. “It’s no matter. I can spray it down with
the hose after you leave. There’s no harm done. Now, get off the floor and take a seat. Poor Oliver looks like you are torturing him. The poor soul.”

I let Oliver go.

“Here you go, you poor dear,” Linda cooed, and set the dessert plate of bacon at Oliver’s feet. I gave it a forlorn look. Since I still hadn’t eaten lunch, I could have gone for my own little dessert plate of bacon to stop the gnawing feeling in my stomach. Before I could stand, Oliver already had his pushed-in nose buried in the dish.

I resisted the urge to take the plate from him. There were four large pieces of bacon on his plate, which were much more than he needed to have in a week, not to mention in a day. Oliver would not be getting any of his doggie treats that night. That was for sure.

I scrambled to my feet and sat back on the resin chair, and Linda set the tray of lemonade on the metal coffee table between the chairs and the glider. “It’s real nice of you to come by.” She nodded to Jessica, including her in the comment.

“Your home is adorable,” I said, meaning it. “I wish our visit was for a happier reason.”

She nodded and picked up the pitcher of lemonade. “I’ve been meaning to invite you by, but it’s not often I’m away from the diner. I’m there much more than I’m ever here in the trailer.”

“Why is the diner closed?” I asked.

She froze as she poured lemonade into the glass. I thought the glass would overflow, but she seemed to snap out of it just before the lemonade crested the rim
of the glass. She set the pitcher down, picked up the overfilled glass, and handed it to me. “Careful there,” she said. “I might have put a bit too much in.”

I thanked her and sipped from the glass until it was at a level I was comfortable with holding. After I did this, I slid back into my seat and waited for the answer to my question.

Before she answered she poured another glass, not nearly as full as mine, for Jessica and a third for herself. She leaned back into the glider’s floral vinyl seat and kicked off the floorboard with her stocking-clad toes. The glider gently rocked back and forth, falling into a drowsy rhythm. “I just couldn’t go on working after the sheriff and his men stopped by to tell me . . .” She looked down at her hands and closed her eyes as if holding back tears. When she looked up again, I saw there were tears in her eyes. “I had to close the diner after he told me about Griff. I couldn’t stay there and make idle chitchat with diners when I knew Griff was dead, lying in the county morgue.”

“Did you know him well?” I asked. “Was he a customer?”

She shook her head.

I leaned forward and took her hand with my free hand. “Linda, I’m so sorry. I can tell you cared about him.”

She squeezed my hand back. “Not as sorry as I am, and I did care about him, more than I can say. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

I let go of her hand. “How can you say that?”

She picked up a glass of lemonade from the tray. “I was the one who told your mother about Griff’s
electrician business. If I hadn’t done that, she would have found someone else for the job and he would still be alive.”

“You can’t know that,” I protested.

She placed her glass of lemonade back on the tray without tasting it, as if she couldn’t stomach it. “I’ve been expecting you to come.” She touched her pink turban as if to check that it sat in the correct position on her head. “Maybe not so soon, but I knew you would want to get to the bottom of what happened. I want you to do that. It’s important to me to know how Griff died and who killed him.”

“What was your relationship with Griffin?” Jessica asked.

Linda looked us both in the eye in turn. “He was my son.”

“Y
our son?” I asked. That was the last thing I had expected her to say.

She nodded. “He was my foster son actually. I was the closest thing to a stable family he and his brother ever had. I never had the opportunity to adopt them. I would have if I had been able to.” A sadness washed her face. “I never could, but I still thought of the boys as my children. I tried to do my best for them.”

There was another kernel of information. “What is his brother’s name?”

She nodded. “Blane. He’s two years younger than Griff. I always considered both of them my family even if we weren’t flesh and blood. Those boys—men now, since they are a couple of decades older than you, Angie—are the only family that I have. That I have ever had really. I was as much an orphan as they were.”

Before I could ask another question, Linda went on unprompted. “I never married. Never had the inkling to, but I do love children. Back in those days, they were reluctant to let a single woman take care of foster
children, especially two boys. There was all this gibberish that a child needed two parents to be brought up right. That’s the ideal,” she said, “but it’s not the only way. By the time Griffin and Blane came to live with me, they had been in nine homes. The boys were eleven and nine. They stayed with me all the way through high school.”

“Did the boys get along?” Jessica asked.

“Those two boys have been at each other’s throats since the day I first knew them. According to their foster information, no one wanted them, but I took them on. I knew what it was like to grow up without parents. Those two only lashed out at each other because they were hurting and angry at the world. They didn’t mean it. I did what I could to keep the peace between them. Sometimes tragedy brings two people together. Sometimes it rips them apart.”

“Did Griffin and Blane tolerate each other better as adults?” I asked.

Linda sighed. “They don’t hit and kick anymore like they did when they were boys, but they still weren’t close, even though they worked together.”

“They disliked each other, but still worked together?” Jessica asked.

“Blane is an electrician too. Together, the boys were co-owners of Double Bright Electric.” She smiled. “I always thought they got the ‘Double’ in their name from my diner.”

I looked up from my own glass. Griffin had made no mention of a business partner when I met him the
day before in my mother’s kitchen. “How long have Blane and Griffin been in business together?”

She sighed. “Must be ten years, I would guess, but they used to be. They weren’t by the time that Griffin died.”

“What happened?” Jessica asked.

“Griffin told me that they had officially dissolved their partnership when he visited me on Mother’s Day. So that was what . . . a couple of weeks ago? He said he bought out Blane’s half, but even though it was more than fair, Blane was not happy with the settlement.”

If there was a lightbulb hovering over my head, it would have started glowing at that moment. Blane was a strong suspect. But why didn’t I feel more excited by the prospect?

“Why did they argue about it?” Jessica asked. “What caused them to dissolve their partnership?”

“Griffin didn’t say, and I didn’t push for the information. I was just happy he was telling me anything about his life at all. I take what I can get with those boys.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “I suppose I’ll take what I can get with Blane now. He’s the only one I have left. Not that I’ve seen him in a very long time. He’s not as good about coming around as his brother was.”

“Did you know about any of Griffin’s other jobs? Aside from the job at my parents’? He mentioned yesterday that he would have to be at my parents’ house early because he had another larger job he was working on.”

She stared at me. “You spoke to him yesterday?”

I nodded.

“How did he seem? Was he happy?” She smiled and
pointed at the hanging basket of pansies. “He brought those to me for Mother’s Day. Aren’t they beautiful? He brings me pansies every year. I love them so. Did you know that pansies signify remembrance? I don’t know if that’s why Griff chooses those flowers for me. I like to think that it is.” She leaned forward as if eager for a report of her foster son.

I set my lemonade glass on the tray. “He seemed fine. Happy, I would say. I didn’t have the impression that anything was bothering him. But then again I only met him in passing. He was there to look over the electrical work in my mother’s kitchen.” I didn’t add that Jonah had been there too. I wondered if Linda knew Jonah had been the one to discover Griffin’s body. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. I didn’t want her to suspect Jonah in any way. I knew he couldn’t have killed Griffin. There was no way.

“You asked if I knew of any other jobs that Griffin was working on.” She thought for a moment. “He had just signed a big contract with Eby Amish Mercantile. It seems the owner wanted to increase its electrical capacity and bring the wiring that was already there up to code. I got the impression that the wiring in the building was very old.”

“The mercantile in Rolling Brook?” I asked, as if it could be anywhere else. Second only to the Millers’ pie factory, Eby Amish Mercantile was the largest business on Sugartree Street and always a popular stop for the Amish tour buses that made their way through town as they ventured through the county.

She nodded. “Griff said it was under new ownership,
and the new owner was the one who wanted all of these improvements. I took that to mean that he was doing more than just updating the outlets.”

I had heard that someone new was planning to buy the mercantile, but I had known it hadn’t happened yet because the sign over the building still read E
BY
A
MISH
M
ERCANTILE
. I had assumed that the new owner would have wanted to rename the business. Perhaps I was wrong.

“Was this job at the mercantile before or after the brothers’ partnership broke up?” I asked.

She thought about my question. “I’m not certain, but by the way that Griff had been talking, it all happened around the same time.”

Could have been a coincidence, but I highly doubted that it was.

“Do you know the name of the man Griffin was working for?” I asked.

She shook her head.

Oliver licked his empty bacon plate for every last morsel. A power washer couldn’t have done a better job at cleaning that plate.

I wasn’t worried that Linda didn’t know the name of the new owner of the mercantile. The mercantile was one block from Running Stitch; I could go down there and introduce myself. It was a neighborly thing to welcome a new business owner to the neighborhood and my duty as a township trustee. If I happened to ask a few questions about Griffin while I was at it, there was no harm in that.

“What about Griffin’s fiancée, Mallory Zeff? What can you tell me about her?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I never knew what Griff saw in the woman. At least he had the good sense never to marry her.”

Jessica and I shared a look. Linda’s entire demeanor changed at the mention of Griffin’s fiancée.

“You don’t like her,” Jessica said. It was a statement, not a question.

“I don’t. I always thought she was with Griff for his money. As far as I can tell, she spent more of her time asking him to buy things than anything else.”

“A gold digger?” Jessica arched an eyebrow.

Linda shrugged. “If the shoe fits.”

“If Griffin never married, who gets his business?”

Linda shrugged. “Blane is his only living relative, so I would assume him.” She stared at her hands.

“But . . .” I trailed off.

She met my gaze. “But the last time Griff was here, he told me that he planned to go to a lawyer to write his will. He said he should have done it years ago. In the will, he planned to name me his sole heir.” She blinked back tears. “I thought it was a sweet gesture, and to be honest, I didn’t think any more of it until this moment. I never expected to outlive him. That’s not supposed to happen.” A tear rolled down her weathered cheek.

That made Blane a suspect. I swallowed hard. Because it made Linda a perfect suspect too.