Death of a Winter Shaker (3 page)

The Herb House door swung open easily and released the jumble of odors that Gennie had so welcomed earlier. But now the too-sweet smell was dominant, or perhaps she was more aware of it, knowing it signaled human decay. Rose scooted quickly through the door, holding her cloak so that it would not touch Deputy O'Neal, as he stood aside for them to pass.

“My guess is the deceased's been dead for a while,” said Doc Irwin, Languor's only physician, as they entered the second-floor drying room. He didn't elaborate.

Returning nausea made Gennie's stomach churn, but she clenched her teeth to control it as Doc Irwin approached the table where Johann was laid out. He leaned over and peered at Johann's head and neck. He lifted aside the filthy hands, unbuttoned the shirt, and examined the chest area, then replaced the hands in their funereal pose. Gennie saw Johann's chest for just a moment before Doc Irwin moved in front of him.

“Stab wound,” he said quietly.

Sheriff Brock leaned his head toward Grady. “Looks like that fella won't be bothering Miss Emily anymore, don't it?”

As he stared at Johann's body, a flash of anger distorted the deputy's boyish features. In a moment, his expression cleared. He turned to Gennie.

“Miss Malone—is it Sister Gennie?” he asked.

“Just Gennie.”

“OK, just Gennie, are you up to answering some questions?” He took a small notebook and a pencil stub from his coat pocket.

“Of course,” she said, with what she hoped was spirit.

Grady regarded her speculatively. “When you arrived this morning,” he asked, “did you touch anything in this room?”

“Yea, I picked up a bunch of catnip that had slipped from the string holding it together.” She neglected to mention her high-spirited twirling among the hanging bunches.

“Did you notice any signs of a struggle?”

“Nay.” Gennie recounted for him as best she could her passage through the room toward Johann, as Grady scribbled in a small notebook. Then it came time to look once more at Johann's body. Rose held
Gennie's hand as they walked to the table. The others stood aside to let her have a clear view.

“Miss Malone,” said the sheriff, “all Doc did was he just opened the deceased's shirt and lifted up his hands and put them down again the same way. So think hard. Did you touch him or move him or anything?”

Gennie forced herself to look at the gray remains of Johann Fredericks. His Shaker work jacket had fallen open. Through the fingers of his right hand, she could see no rip in his shirt, no sign of a stab wound. She'd seen one before on the leg of a hobo who had come to the Trustees' Office door for help. The man's pant leg had been drenched with blood, and that was only from a small leg wound. But no blood stained Johann's white smock and jacket.

Gennie wondered why she hadn't noticed before such a clean smock on a filthy Johann. Then the truth struck her. The herb bouquet on Johann's chest had so riveted her that she hadn't seen the state of his clothing. She noticed now, though, because the bouquet was gone.

“Well?” Brock prodded. “That how you found him?”

“Nay, that isn't how I found him,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Someone moved the bouquet.”

“What the—what bouquet, what are you talking about?”

“When I found him, there was a bouquet of dried herbs and flowers in his hands. It was so strange . . . almost like he'd been dressed for a funeral.” Gennie saw puzzlement and disbelief in the faces of her listeners, all but Brock, whose foxlike features grew thoughtful.

“You mean one of those bouquets hanging here?” he asked, jerking his head toward a small sheaf of lavender hooked on a nearby drying rack.

“Nay, it was more like a real bouquet, with different
flowers, but this one was dried.” Though Shakers never used flowers for adornment, Gennie remembered the enormous clusters of daisies and zinnias her own mother had loved to scatter around the house.

“Gennie, this has been a shock for you,” Rose said. “It may have seemed as though you saw a bouquet just because you were surrounded by flowers and—”

“Nay, I
did
see a bouquet,” Gennie cried. She appealed to Grady. “You believe me, don't you?”

Grady smiled sympathetically but said nothing. Sheriff Brock, however, grinned in a way that unnerved Gennie.

“If she did see what she says,” he said, “it'd be mighty interesting, wouldn't it? Makes me wonder real hard what somebody around here was up to.”

Wilhelm had commandeered the Trustees' Office, situated at the entrance to North Homage, from which to fend off the curious and none-too-friendly townspeople who had begun to collect. Rose worried that Wilhelm might incite the crowd, not calm it, but she couldn't be everywhere at once. She led Brock, Grady, and Gennie from the Herb House, past partially cleared herb fields, across the village's unpaved, main path, and up the walk to the Meetinghouse.

The most important building in the village, the Meetinghouse was painted, repaired, and scrubbed with care. A picket fence with two gates surrounded the imposing, white structure. One gate opened to a pathway and the east door, to be entered only by men, and the second led to the west entrance, reserved for women. Most buildings in the village contained separate doors and stairways for men and women, to prevent their brushing against one another.

Out of habit, Rose pushed open the west gate. She should have sent Brock and Grady through the east door, but she was too tired to force the issue. If
Wilhelm saw them follow her through the women's entrance, he would use it as yet another example of her unfitness to lead. She hurried them inside.

A large room, a full two stories high, occupied much of the ground floor. Sunlight streamed through deep-set windows taller than a man. A doorway at the east end opened to offices and to a narrow stairway, which climbed to a second-floor observation room. From a small window in this room, the Ministry—the elders and eldresses—kept an eye on Believers and outside guests during a worship service. If anyone were up in the darkened room now, Rose thought, they could watch the interrogation without being observed. She hoped that the gathering crowd would keep Wilhelm busy. The less involved he was in this investigation, the more relieved she would be.

Rose and Gennie lifted two straight, ladder-back chairs with woven seats from the pegs that lined the walls and placed them side by side on the spotless pine floor. Grady grabbed two more and put them much too close to theirs. Rose moved the chairs farther apart. Gennie started to sit across from Grady, but Rose gave her a firm push to the next chair.

“Miss Malone,” Brock began, as Grady pulled out his pad and licked the tip of his pencil, “anything else you want to tell us? Like, how well did you know this Johann Fredericks?”

“I hardly knew him at all,” she replied. She bit her lip but her voice was steady. “How could I? He was a man, and only a Winter Shaker anyway. I know who he was, that's all.”

“Whadd'ya mean, a Winter Shaker?” Sheriff Brock said sharply. “Why'd you call him that?”

“Some people come to us in autumn, professing a wish to become Believers,” Rose explained, “but all they really want is food and clothing and a warm place to live for the winter. They leave us in the spring. So we call them Winter Shakers. We try to give to the world
as best we can, but some people take selfishly.” She could have added that they planted more sweet corn and potatoes than they needed, so their neighbors could raid Shaker fields when their own larders were empty. But she doubted Brock would be impressed.

“You got a lot of folks like that?” Brock asked.

“Quite a few,” Rose answered. “These are difficult times. This depression has thrown many people into the streets. We can hardly turn them away.”

Brock's calculating eyes shifted to Gennie. “So, Miss Malone, do you know all the Winter Shakers?”

Gennie shook her head.

“Any reason you'd know this one?”

Rose lightly touched Gennie's arm, and said, “Tell him what you saw, Gennie.”

Two male heads popped to attention.

“What? What did you see?” Brock directed the questions to Rose.

Rose folded her hands together again. “You should hear it first from Gennie. She'll have seen much more than I could, since I was talking to Brother Hugo about bookbinding and carpentry. As I'm sure you understand, my attention was divided.” A smile teased the corners of her thin lips.

“All right, then,” Brock said, leaning back in his chair. “What'd you see, Miss Malone?”

Gennie hesitated.

“It's all right,” Rose said, smiling at her. “I saw you watching them, and I followed your gaze. I know you did not tell the monitors, but then neither did I. What's done is done. Just tell what you saw.”

Gennie gazed around the vast, sun-speckled room. “It happened here. You see, we are having Union Meetings again,” she explained, “once a week, because Elder Wilhelm thinks we should go back to the old ways.”

Brock looked blank and shifted impatiently.

Rose leaned forward. “The meetings are so the
sisters and brethren can chat together,” she explained. “They are a kind of controlled social gathering. Elder Wilhelm feels that our behavior has been too loose in recent years. At times, sisters and brethren have laughed and talked together right in the street. Now we must save our conversations for the Thursday-night Union Meeting. We have monitors who keep an eye on them and guard against special looks between men and women.”

Brock and Grady exchanged horrified glances.

“Real interesting,” Brock said. “But what's it got to do with this murder?”

“Last Thursday,” Gennie began, “I was sitting with the children, watching the talking.”

Rose thought back to the meeting. The sisters had sat in one straight row, hands folded right over left. Now and then a hand was raised to gesture, then carefully refolded. Several feet across from the sisters sat the brethren, their chairs spaced more widely so that one man could talk to two women, since there were twice as many women as men in North Homage.

“There really wasn't much for me to do,” Gennie continued, “so I . . . I made up a game. I tried to guess what everyone was talking about just from how they looked, you know, their faces. I watched Charity—Sister Charity McDonald—for a while, and—”

“Why her?” Brock demanded.

Gennie looked flustered.

“We both noticed her,” Rose said. “She looked troubled.” Charity was no more than twenty-three and very pretty, in a wispy way. With the whites showing all around the green iris, her eyes seemed forever startled, but Thursday evening she had seemed especially edgy.

“All right, so what'd you see?” Brock snapped.

“Charity and Johann . . . they looked at each other,” Gennie said.

“They looked at each other,” Brock repeated.

Gennie nodded. “Johann was standing with the other guests, and Charity looked right over at him.”

Rose, too, had seen the special look, though Gennie had been closer. She remembered Johann leaning against the doorjamb, his shiny blond curls curving out from under his woolen cap. He had smiled crookedly in Charity's direction and bowed his head slightly.

Brock was silent for a few moments. Grady O'Neal sat with his pencil poised.

“And?” Brock asked finally, an impatient edge to his voice.

Gennie looked up at him in surprise. “Well, that's all I saw. You asked what I saw. They gave each other a special look, and Charity blushed.”

The sheriff snorted and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

“Kid,” he said, “I don't care how special it was, if looks could kill, we'd have a prison on every block. A look don't mean nothing in the eyes of the law.” He sprang up from his chair and paced.

“Now, you sayin' those two was having a fling or something? You got hard evidence, like maybe you seen them fooling around behind the barn?”

“Sheriff!” Rose bolted up, ramrod-straight. At five-foot-eight, she could look Brock directly in the eye. “You know perfectly well that if any of us had found that Charity and Johann had fallen prey to the flesh, they would have been sent away instantly.”

Brock stopped pacing and faced Rose, a grin slowly forming. “Yeah, I know that. Just wanted to see what the girl would say.” He turned to Gennie. “Well, girl? Seen anything like that?”

“Nay,” Gennie said forcefully, “I saw no such thing.”

Brock shook his head and leaned toward Grady, but his words were swallowed by loud bursts of noise,
piercing the normally quiet village air every few seconds. Grady bolted up so quickly that his chair clattered backwards. Both men rushed through the door and toward the road, kicking up billows of dust. Rose and Gennie followed quickly.

A small crowd had gathered at the foot of the steps leading to the Trustees' Office entrance. Elder Wilhelm, planted on the top step with his arms outstretched, shouted to the air above the townspeople. His stern features hardened with the fierce concentration Rose had seen during his worship service homilies. Sister Elsa's plump figure stood two steps below him.

“Come and join us,” Wilhelm shouted. “Live a pure life. Give up the sins of thy wretched flesh, which make thee no better than the beasts in thy barns . . .”

Sister Elsa nodded over and over, her eyes closed and her face toward the sky in trancelike agreement.

Renewed blasts blotted out the rest of Wilhelm's exhortation. Now Rose identified the source of the racket. The sheriff's office's two Buicks were parked by the Trustees' Office, next to the Believers' shiny, 1936 Plymouth. In Languor County, no one locked doors of any kind, except maybe to the liquor cabinet, if one were lucky enough to have such an item. So the three sets of car doors swung wide open, and all the cars were stuffed with as many men as would fit inside. Those in the front seats jabbed incessantly at the horns.