Death of a Winter Shaker (23 page)

In her relief, Rose no longer felt her lack of sleep.

“Agatha, my old friend,” she began, as she had since the eldress had lost consciousness. Agatha's eyelids flickered but remained closed.

She reached over and placed her hand over Agatha's where it lay on the coverlet. Her skin was warm, but it would be a long time before Agatha would truly be back with them. She might never return completely. Rose said a prayer of thanks to God, and to Mother Ann for interceding on Agatha's behalf.

Rose did not go immediately to the Center Family House. Instead, she placed her interrupted phone call to the eldress at the Hancock Society in Massachusetts.

Gennie hadn't been able to sleep, either. After a night of twisting her sheets off the bed, she slipped into her clothes and set out for a prebreakfast walk. She hurried past the burned-out Water House, holding her breath to avoid the damp, sour smell of the ruined wood. She reached the small patch of woods beyond the Water House. The trees remained blessedly untouched by the fire. If Molly had made a habit of going to and from the Water House, she might have hidden in these woods.

Gennie covered the small area twice and found nothing. She wasn't even sure what she was looking for. Some sign of Molly's presence, some reminder of her life, or clue to her death. Mostly, she was just moving to keep from feeling overwhelmed by her own regrets. If only she had told Rose sooner about Molly's
secret stash and her tryst with Johann in the Water House. Maybe she wouldn't be dead.

Returning to the edge of the woods, Gennie gazed beyond the charred Water House to the Carpenters' Shop and the path that ran through the center of North Homage. The Children's Dwelling House stood just east of the Carpenters' Shop. Molly could easily have reached these woods from their retiring room. Smoothing her cloak under her, Gennie dropped down cross-legged on the damp ground, her chin on her knuckles.

No one could have slipped Molly's body into the crawl space after the fire. The building was never out of sight of several Believers between the time the fire ended and the discovery of her body. She was in the crawl space, dead or dying, before the fire began. So who was it Gennie had seen running in front of the burning Water House?

Had the running figure started the fire? But if that was someone from Languor, as Wilhelm insisted, would the person have worn a Dorothy cloak? Rose said that people from the world had worn them once, but they were out of fashion now. Unless she wore the cloak to throw suspicion on the Shakers. Or maybe it had indeed been a Believer who ran in front of the burning building, and maybe she killed Molly, too.

Gennie thought back to the night of the fire. Despite the cloak, the figure had looked like a slender girl, quick and lithe. Elsa was stocky and bore down heavily when she walked. But it could have been Charity or any of the younger sisters.

The back door of the Carpenters' Shop opened and Albert Preston emerged, holding a heavy-looking pail. He dumped some dirty water on the ground near a pile of scrap wood. Gennie glanced above his head and saw a second-floor window with a thin white curtain draped across the inside. Of course, she thought, springing to her feet, Albert lives right upstairs. Maybe
he saw something that night. Maybe he doesn't even know that it's important. She started toward the shop as Albert let himself back indoors.

Wilhelm, a white lion with muscles bunched for attack, stood between Sheriff Brock and Elsa Pike, as Rose approached the group on the road just outside the Trustees' Office. They had allowed Elsa to dress, but her gray hair poked out the edges of her white cotton cap. The sheriff wore his catlike look again, as though he had what he wanted and could afford to wait for it to yield. He shoved his hat farther back on his head and brushed open the side of his jacket so everyone could see his undrawn gun. With his other hand, he reached inside his pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.

“We got ourselves a warrant, Mr. Lundel. Nothin' you can do about it, so you might as well step aside.”

Wilhelm held out his hand for the warrant.

“Now, Mr. Lundel, this here's legal stuff.”

“We know a great deal about legal matters.”

Brock handed over the warrant. Wilhelm scanned it and tossed it back.

“This is persecution,” he said, crossing his thick arms over his chest.

Brock's thin body tightened, his half smile undimmed.

“Like I said, Mr. Lundel, nothin' you can do about it. We got the law on our side. Come on, Elsa, step around here. Come easy and we won't handcuff you.”

“Stay still, Elsa.” Wilhelm's bushy white eyebrows joined in a fierce line over his smoldering eyes.

“Now look here, Lundel, don't you interfere none. Besides, y'all ain't supposed to be violent, the way I hear it.”

“Elsa, come forward, we have no choice,” Rose said, taking Elsa's arm.

Elsa shook off her hand. “Address me as Mother.”

Rose counted the silent seconds and watched Elsa's plain features redden as it became clear that Rose would not call her Mother.

“The sooner you go,” Rose said so quietly that only Elsa could hear her, “the sooner we can telephone our lawyer to help you. Do you wish for Wilhelm to break his vow of nonviolence and perhaps be hurt?”

Elsa hesitated. With a doubtful look at Wilhelm's stolid back, she stepped forward.

“Don't you take my ma away!” Seth Pike came running from the direction of the herb fields, his hat in his hand. “She didn't kill anybody!”

“Sorry, Seth,” Brock said, “but we got reason to think that your ma murdered Johann Fredericks on account of him knowing about her past and all.”

“That's crazy. They'd have forgiven her for her past, wouldn't you, Rose? Tell him.” Seth crumpled his hat in his hands and appealed to Rose. She nodded slowly.

“If she confessed to the eldress and lived a pure life from then on out, yea, she'd be forgiven,” she said. “Believers have been forgiven for much worse transgressions, committed even after signing the covenant.”

“She confessed to me,” Wilhelm said. Rose spun around in astonishment. For a sister to confess to an elder, rather than one of her own sex, was not their way.

“There, you see,” Seth said. “She didn't have no reason to kill Johann.”

Brock shook his head and kicked at the ground with the toe of his boot. His grin widened. “Well, you see, Seth,” he said, “that ain't all. Your ma, she's been acting crazy lately, having seizures-like and hearin' voices. The way we figure it, Johann threatened to spread the story of her runnin' around, maybe he said he'd tell everyone in North Homage, so's she'd be a laughingstock and nobody would want her to be their priestess or whatever. So she stabbed him and buried him for a while till she could get things set up, then she
carried his body to the Herb House—she's a sturdy hill-country woman—and she did some kind of ritual-like on account of his spirit being unclean or whatever. That's the way I figure it.”

His listeners were stunned to silence by this theory. Even Grady looked embarrassed.

“Grady, handcuff Elsa,” Brock ordered. “Lundel, you step aside now.” The sheriff swept aside his jacket and held his hand just above his gun.

“Sheriff,” Rose said sharply, “there's a flaw in your theory.”

Brock jerked his head toward her. “Yeah? What's that?”

“We Shakers have no history of doing any sort of purifying herb rituals over the dead.”

“Yeah, you said that before, but like I said, Elsa's crazy.”

“Yet all Elsa has done is dance as Shakers danced long ago. She slips into trances and speaks in tongues and hears messages from long-dead Believers, just as early Shakers did. Everything that she has done, everything you call crazy, is part of our history. Why would she suddenly do something so completely foreign to us as a purifying ritual for the dead? Why, how would she even have heard of such a thing? It isn't done around here anywhere that I know of.”

Brock hesitated. He wasn't buying her argument, she could tell, but she had planted one little seed of doubt in his mind. She glanced over at Grady, who gave her a slight nod and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “who then?”

In response to the unspoken question, Rose asked one of her own. “What if the murder and the placing of the body in the Herb House were done by two different people?”

Now she had Brock's full attention. “Go on,” he said, dropping his hand away from his gun.

“Well, what if the two acts were done for different
reasons? Johann's killing may have been a matter of expediency. Maybe he knew something or was blackmailing someone, and that person wanted to be rid of him.”

“And Molly?” Sister Josie asked softly.

“I suspect that Molly found out who killed Johann and conducted her own version of blackmail. You've all heard by now about the money and beauty items that Gennie found under Molly's mattress and again in the Water House. My guess is that those were payments from Johann's killer for Molly's silence. But finding Johann in the Herb House, that didn't make sense to me. Not until just recently, when I was reminded of long-ago times.” She turned to Seth. “You moved Johann's body, didn't you?”

Seth jutted out his chin in defiance before bowing his head.

“Yeah, all right,” he said. “That was my doing. But I didn't kill him, I swear to God.” His voice broke, and he took a moment to steady it. “I couldn't sleep one morning, so I went out to work before everyone else even got up. I cut through a field next to the Herb House, one that got harvested early and tilled under way back before I got to town. Most of the dirt was crusted over, but there was this one area that felt soft, like it just got dug. Seemed funny to me. I had a shovel with me, so I dug down a bit. And that's how I found him. Me and Johann, we weren't getting along so good at the end. He even tried to get money out of me. He threatened to tell Peleg Webster that Ma wasn't sure he was my real father. Then I wouldn't get Peleg's farm. That farm's my chance to make something of my life. So I wasn't all broke up about finding him dead. But I sure was spooked. That's what gave me the idea—feeling spooked.”

“So you carried him to the Herb House?”

Seth nodded. “At first all I thought was to get the police. I ran clear past the Carpenters' Shop before I
got this idea. That's when I saw those clothes hanging out. I grabbed them and run back. I switched his clothes so he'd look like a Shaker.”

“Where's his real clothes?” Brock asked.

“I sneaked them back to my pa's farm last market day. Buried them in one of his fields.”

Seth twisted the rim of his misshapen hat. “I've been mad ever since I saw you again, Rose, that's why I couldn't sleep in the first place. I just thought, here's my chance to get back at you, at all of you. So I laid him out on the table and put Shaker herbs on him like he'd been laid out for a ritual. That way, I thought Shakers would be blamed.” He raised his eyes to Rose. “How'd you figure it was me?”

“May I speak with Seth privately for a moment?” Rose asked the sheriff.

Brock frowned.

“I'll tell you about it afterward, I promise.”

“Yeah, OK, but just for a minute. I still figure Elsa's guilty. Maybe craziness just runs in the family.”

“It was the fresh rosemary that led me to you,” Rose said softly as she and Seth walked toward the middle of the village. “In the bouquet on Johann's chest, Gennie remembered finally that all the herbs and flowers were dried except the rosemary, as if someone had picked it especially. When we spoke the other day, you called me Rosie. That was one of your old nicknames for me, but there was another. I remembered that when we were together, I talked all the time about herbs, how to grow and use them. So after a while you started calling me Rosemary sometimes. You wanted me to remember that, didn't you?”

Seth nodded, his eyes cloudy. “I wanted you Shakers to be blamed for Johann, but I guess maybe I also wanted you to know I set it up. I wanted you to know you were being punished. I never expected you'd be the one to puzzle out the whole thing, not the sheriff. I
figured you wouldn't let on what you knew, if it meant talking about you and me.”

“Did you think I would let a Believer be arrested and say nothing, just to avoid discussing my own past?”

“OK, I was wrong to do what I did, but Rose, I didn't kill anyone, I swear. I swear I didn't.”

Rose nodded slowly. “I think you could have, mind. If the bouquet hadn't disappeared from Johann's chest, I might still think you did do it. You had a lot to lose if Johann made good his threat to tell Peleg Webster he wasn't really your father. But there is someone with a great deal more to lose.”

G
ENNIE PAUSED BEFORE THE BACK DOOR OF THE
Carpenters' Shop. She really shouldn't talk to one of the men alone. But she couldn't just leave, either. It was partly her fault that Molly was dead. She had to follow whatever idea came to her. She reached for the doorknob, then withdrew her hand. She should at least go to the front door.

As she'd half turned to leave, the door jerked open, sending her tripping backwards. Sister Charity, her wide eyes nearly taking over her face, froze like one of the frightened jackrabbits Gennie often surprised in the herb fields. She shook herself and brushed past Gennie.

The door hung open. Gennie peeked inside. Everything seemed normal to her, so she ventured through the doorway. Albert worked in the far corner, his back to her. He wiped his hands on an old piece of dark-colored cloth, tossed it toward a pile of rags, and turned. A faint smile curved the edges of his mouth.

He glanced up and saw her, and his expression deadened. “How long you been standing there?” he asked in a mild voice.

“Just a moment or two,” Gennie said. “I came to ask you a few things.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the still-open door. “What happened to Charity? She looked upset.”