The Lesson (13 page)

“No,” Amos said, washing his hands at the sink. “Why would I?”

Fern eyed him. “Well, you were the last one who had it. You’ve been paying that new hired boy cash from it each night.”

Amos grabbed a dishrag. “I always put it back where I found it.”

“Wasn’t gone yesterday.” She opened up another cupboard. “Near on two hundred dollars, if a penny.”

M.K. thought for a moment. “Dad, was the new hired hand in the kitchen with you when you paid him?”

Fern stilled a moment as she waited for Amos’s answer.

Amos looked from M.K. to Fern. “Now, wait just a minute. You shouldn’t be tossing accusations at anyone.”

Fern frowned. “I have yet to meet this fellow. He’s as skittish as a young colt.”

Another mystery! M.K. was intrigued. “Who is this fellow, Dad?”

Amos frowned. “He’s the hardest worker I’ve ever seen.”

M.K. hopped up on the kitchen counter, then hopped off
again when Fern scowled at her. “Dad, what else do you know about him?”

Amos tossed the dishrag on the counter. “I know that he didn’t take money from Fern’s coffee can. That’s what I know.” He noticed the mail on the table and skimmed through it. Then he took his mail to his desk in the living room.

M.K. turned to Fern. “Erma Yutzy said she was looking around for some cash that had gone missing.”

“You were at Erma’s today?” Fern looked pleased.

“I happened to be walking by her house.”

“It’s out of the way.”

“Not today it wasn’t.” The more M.K. thought about it, the more she thought there might be a connection. According to the
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, a person needed motive and opportunity. She walked to the doorjamb of the living room. “Dad, do you happen to know if that hired hand is working anywhere else?”

“Yes,” Amos said, leaning back in his desk chair. “Erma Yutzy’s. She’s been needing someone to mow her lawn once a week because her great-grandnephew fell out of a tree and broke his arm.”

M.K. gave Fern a “See? I told you so!” look, but Fern didn’t pay her any mind. She was looking through another cupboard for her coffee can. Clearly, this hired hand had plenty of opportunity. But what would be his motive? “Dad, tell me everything you know about this hired hand.”

“I know two things. His name is Chris Yoder. And he’s a hard worker.” He put on his glasses to read a letter, a signal that he was done talking.

M.K. gave up trying to pry information from him and went back to the kitchen. She reached into the fruit bowl for an apple and took a bite, deep in thought. “I met a fellow
named Chris Yoder on the road today. Strange man. Rather accusatory.” She chewed and swallowed. “You know what I would do? I would keep a very close eye on that hired hand, that’s what I would do. Sounds like this fellow might have a case of sticky fingers.”

“You try to make things too simple,” Fern said, her head in a cupboard. “You try to make life too simple.”

But to M.K., it
was
all so simple. Chris Yoder had been on these very farms and money had gone missing. The two facts seemed to be inextricably linked.

7

M
.K. couldn’t sleep. Too much on her mind. Too hot a night. Why did they have school in September, anyway? It still felt like summer. If she were on the school board, she would only require pupils to attend school in January, when nothing much else was going on. However, she was happy to remember that she would not be teaching school in January, and not just because she hadn’t paid any attention to Orin Stoltzfus’s instructions about that coal heater.

Three more days. Just three more days and she could retire from teaching. Ah, bliss!

M.K. had the same feeling she got when she came to the last chapter of a book: a little sorry to see it end but already anticipating the start of a new story. Her time as a teacher for Twin Creeks School was nearly over. The ordeal had been grueling at times, but she had done a good deed by substituting for Alice Smucker. No scholar had died under her care, and two of Eugene’s cohorts had started to stay for the entire day. She could leave with a sense of satisfaction. Her teaching career would be over. Done. Finished!

She wondered if she should give the class a formal farewell
on Friday afternoon or simply disappear. In the end, she decided that she would make a formal announcement.

She got out of bed and crossed to the window. She sat on the sill and looked at the moon hanging low in the black velvet sky. Thin wispy clouds moved slowly in front of it. The sun would be rising in Athens, Greece, about now.

In her mind, she saw herself climbing up a steep path, walking past white stucco houses with blue shutters, and window boxes filled with red geraniums. She imagined stopping at one point to gaze at the Aegean Sea, far below the Greek village. What words would she use to describe the color of that sea? Turquoise? Azure? Cobalt?

In the quiet of the night, a horse whinnied and another answered back. She leaned her head against the window and set aside her imagined Grecian journey. She reviewed the sheep farmer’s murder one more time. She was heading down the street, away from the farmer’s pasture. Had she seen anything suspicious as she scooted past the pasture? Nothing came to mind. She didn’t even remember seeing the farmer, but there were trees in the pasture. She did remember noticing some sheep along the fence, trying to eat grass outside the fence. She smiled—even animals thought grass was greener on the other side of the fence. Maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was. But oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful to find out?

When she had reached the far edge of the pasture, she heard the shot and practically fell off her scooter. An eerie stillness followed. One long minute. Then another. And then came a sound.

M.K.’s eyes went wide. Horse hooves! She had heard horse hooves! Somewhere, a horse galloped away. Why didn’t she remember it? Was it such a familiar sound to her that she blocked it out? She squeezed her eyes shut—trying, trying,
trying
to remember. Black. Something black. A flash of black. Way down the road, a flash of black. A horse.

She gasped. Her eyes flew open.

It was that which put M.K. on high alert. A Pandora’s box of accusations had cracked open in her mind.

She had seen Chris Yoder’s black stallion gallop away from the murder scene.

As Chris woke to the sound of rain on the roof, he stretched and yawned. His mind went through a checklist of tasks at Windmill Farm that he and Amos had discussed yesterday: hay cutting, apple picking, pear picking. Amos had said he would teach Chris how to prune the fruit trees, come winter. “Not a single cut is made without a reason,” he told Chris.

Chris smiled. He could tell that Amos loved those orchards. He tended them like Old Deborah had tended her herb garden. Amos was a warm, loving man with a keen intellect. He was grateful to God for leading him to work for a man like Amos Lapp. Chris was learning quite a bit from him about how to manage a well-run farm, and he needed to get that experience if he were to have a farm of his own one day.

It was more than that, though. Chris was always drawn to wise, older men as father figures. He guarded his countenance carefully, but he valued those few men in his life who had taken an interest in him. He watched them carefully, studied them. They had taught him how to be a man.

He slipped his feet over the edge of his bed and walked to the window to see how hard the rain was coming down. He might try to get over to Windmill Farm today to talk to Amos about selling the apples and pears at the farmer’s
market in Stoney Ridge. A few days ago, he had wandered among the vendors. He recognized one person—that fellow who hung around Windmill Farm a lot. Jimmy Fisher, Amos called him. He was selling eggs at a booth to a long line of customers.

An empty booth sat next to Jimmy Fisher and that was when it occurred to Chris that Amos should consider selling apples and pears at the market. He knew Amos had an arrangement to sell most of the varieties to Carrie and Amos Miller so they could make Five Apple Cider, but this year, after a bumper crop, there would still be more apples to sell. More, even, than could be sold at Fern’s roadside stand.

Chris sought out the market manager and learned that renting a booth would only cost 10 percent of the day’s take. The market manager told him he could have the empty spot next to the Fishers’. That was an added bonus, the market manager said, because there was a local shortage of farm fresh eggs. Egg tended to draw customers to a produce stand. And those good-looking Fisher boys tended to draw customers, he added. Especially female customers.

Then Chris told him he wanted to sell Windmill Farm’s apples and pears. The market manager’s face fell. “Oh, we have more apples and pears than we can sell. If I let Amos Lapp’s orchard fruit in here, it would drive down the prices for my other vendors.” He scratched his neck, then his face brightened. “We’re short on lettuces. There’s big market demand. Ever thought of starting a market garden?”

Chris hadn’t, but he did now. He didn’t have the space he would need for a garden at his grandfather’s house, but Amos had plenty of space. He wondered if he could talk Amos and Fern into letting him work a fallow section of the vegetable garden to sell produce at the market.

Farming was starting to interest him in a way he had never thought about—he had never felt more purposeful, more optimistic about the future. It
was
a good decision to come to Stoney Ridge. Everything, finally, was starting to come together. What he discovered about farming was that a man’s worth was judged not by where he started, but where he ended up.

Mary Kate Lapp was no detective, but she was able to put two and two together and draw a conclusion in a matter of seconds—a new neighbor with a mysterious past had moved into Stoney Ridge just a month ago, money started to go missing in the sleepy little town, and a farmer had been shot dead in the middle of his sheep pasture. It was an alarming set of coincidences!

Early in the morning, an hour before school started, M.K. knocked on the sheriff’s window.

He beckoned her inside and pointed to a chair facing his desk. “Can I get you some coffee?”

Coffee? Did he think she was here for a friendly chat? She shook her head. “I thought of something! Evidence! Significant evidence. The last piece in the puzzle.”

The sheriff took a noticeable breath. “What’s the puzzle?”

What puzzle?
“The sheep farmer’s murder! I’ve figured out who did it. I’m absolutely convinced. And I think he’s also the coffee can thief!”

Clearly, the sheriff did not understand the full import of this discovery. He took a sip of coffee. Maybe he required a lot of caffeine to wake up. “What coffee can thief are you talking about?”

“The one who is stealing coffee cans in Amish kitchens!
Everyone’s talking about it. He’s living at Colonel Mitchell’s house. That would be considered squatting. Or maybe breaking and entering.”

The sheriff stilled. “Colonel Mitchell’s?”

She nodded. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! The murderer is right under our noses!”

“Slow down, M.K. Start at the beginning.” He lowered his voice as he spoke, as if he was trying to talk someone out of jumping off the ledge of a tall building. Did he think she was crazy?

She glanced at the clock on the wall. She had to get to the school soon. Sometimes, it seemed as if she needed to do everything in this town.