Murder, Simply Stitched: An Amish Quilt Shop Mystery (10 page)

I raised the mug to my lips and sipped. As soon as the tea was in my mouth, my lips and tongue felt like they were on fire.

T
he burning sensation in my mouth wasn’t from the tea’s temperature but from a spicy ingredient. No wonder she called it Witches’ Bite.

Willow watched me eagerly. “So?”

“What’s in there?” I croaked. “There something sharp and it’s not sweet potato.”

She twirled her crystal on its chain. “Cloves. I dropped a handful in the cauldron during a moment of inspiration. I thought it would give the tea some layers and kick.”

“I feel like I’ve been kicked into the next county by those cloves. Water?” I asked weakly. “Can I have some water?”

“Oh, pooh, Angie, it’s not
that
bad.” She stood up and walked behind the tea counter to the sink. She filled a coffee mug with water, brought it back to the table, and set it in front of me.

I grabbed it and drank. It helped a little. At least it helped my mouth. The burning sensation simply moved to my throat. When I could speak, I said, “Don’t include the cloves. The cloves are a bad idea.”

“Let me see.” She blew on her tea.

“I’m not tasting that again.”

“I know.” She wrinkled her nose. “This is for me.” She took a sip and jumped out of her chair for her own glass of water. After Willow and I both recovered from the tea, she placed a plate of warm orange scones in the middle of the table. “These should make up for the tea.”

I chose a scone and smiled. “It’s a start.”

Willow sniffed her mug of tea, but she didn’t take another sip. “Mmm . . . I think it could use fewer cloves—I may have gotten carried away—and more sweet potato too.”

It was time to return to the reason I was there. “What can you tell me about Wanda? What was she like? I knew her but not well.”

Willow broke off a piece of orange scone and considered my question. “She was a friend. We were on several committees together over the years and then the township trustees. She was quite a bit older than me and has been a township trustee much longer. I was elected two years ago. I think Wanda had already been a trustee five or six years by the time I joined. She’s the longest standing member, even longer than Head Trustee Farley Jung. Everyone thought she would be a shoo-in for the election in a couple of weeks.”

I stopped a piece of scone midway to my mouth. “Election? What election?”

“The election to choose the new head trustee. Farley has held the post for six years and reached his term limit.”

“Why don’t I know about this? I haven’t seen any signs up around town.”

“Rolling Brook has an ordinance against political signs in the main shopping district because it would bother the tourists. With all the Amish, Rolling Brook isn’t the type of place where we talk about politics much.”

Apparently Rolling Brook has a lot of ordinances I don’t know about.

“Let’s see, what else do I know about her?” Her blouse billowed around her face as she moved. “Wanda was divorced.”

“The sheriff mentioned that. Was it recent?”

“About three years ago, so I would say recent enough. She and her ex-husband only speak through their lawyers.” She scrunched up her nose. “It didn’t end well.”

“Why do they still need lawyers? They don’t have any children. Isn’t the divorce settled?”

“Well, from what Wanda says her ex is trying to sue her for alimony. She always made more money than he did.”

I blinked at her. Willow had turned into a wealth of information about Wanda.

Before I could ask her more about this she moved on. “And then there was her nephew, who is a headache to be sure.”

“I met him at the auction. Well, I sort of met him at the auction. What do you know about him?”

“Reed?” Willow asked.

I nodded.

“He’s been giving her fits. From the little bit I heard from her, her sister is twenty-some years younger than she and wants to be an actress in LA. She shipped Reed to Ohio because he was too much trouble while she pursued her career.”

“Poor kid.” I paused. “I heard about the covered bridge.”

She sighed. “That’s not going to make him any friends in this county.” Willow sipped her tea. “He got into some trouble out there in California too. Caught with alcohol in school.”

“You think he was acting out because his mother wasn’t paying attention?”

Willow broke off another piece of scone. “It’s hard to tell. He’s not a happy kid. I saw Wanda with him once at the mercantile, and he looked as if he wanted to be anywhere else in the world.”

“He’s a teenager. I can see why he wouldn’t love the mercantile.”

She nodded and pulled a tray of silverware closer to her. She began to polish it. “I suspect the moment he turns eighteen he is out of here, if not sooner.”

“He might not have to wait that long. Sheriff Mitchell says he doesn’t have any other family here in Ohio, so he will have to go back to California to live with his mom.” I scooted the offending teacup away from me. The orange scone had gone a long way to erase the taste of it, but just the smell of that tea made me nauseous. “What I don’t get is how he got the job at the auction yard.”

She set the spoon she had polished on the table. “The Amish auction yard? They don’t hire English folks.”

“He was working there yesterday on a school day. Wanda had to know since she was there too.”

Willow examined her reflection in a butter knife. “I’ve never heard of them hiring any non-Amish before.” She set it in the basket.

“The sheriff mentioned that Wanda had complained to the department about prank phone calls. Do you know anything about that?”

She thought for a moment. “Now that you mention it, I do recall her saying it in passing.” She stirred her tea. “I’m sorry to say I didn’t think much of it. Wanda was a suspicious woman and always claimed someone was upset with her or wanted to harm her. She’d been like that as long as I’ve known her, so when she complained about the phone calls, I thought it was nothing.”

It seemed the sheriff wasn’t the only one who brushed off Wanda’s paranoia.

It was time to ask her the questions that brought me to her doorstep in the first place.

“Why can’t the Millers build the factory at the end of the street? What ordinance does it break?”

She frowned for the first time. “Don’t you have a copy of the township ordinances? Every business should. Didn’t you get it in your welcome basket from the township?”

“I didn’t get any welcome basket,” I said, and thought to myself,
And what kind of place gives rules and regulations as part of a welcome basket anyway?

She placed a hand to her cheek. “I’m so sorry. I must have forgotten to give you a basket. How silly of me. It slipped my mind because I was so caught up with the Watermelon Fest, and then you found that dead body in your shop. Something like that can derail a person’s thoughts.”

It certainly could.

She pursed her lips. “I’m sure I have a copy of the town’s ordinances in my office. Let me go grab it now. I really should have it memorized, but I admit I do not. I can’t even remember my own phone number at times. Farley asked us to have the building code memorized for the next meeting. That’s when we will discuss the Millers’ factory again.”

There still was a chance the township would approve Aaron’s request? I sat up straighter in my chair. “When’s the next meeting?”

“Friday. At seven in the evening in the Mennonite meetinghouse just a few blocks from here.”

“That’s tomorrow. Will you know all the building codes by then?”

“Phweet!” she sniffed. “I don’t have time to read it. Farley will know it backward and forward, there’s no reason I need to. Even if I tried I could forget it before the meeting.”

“How long is it?”

“It’s rather long. I’ll be right back.” She jumped out of her chair and disappeared behind the damask curtain that separated the kitchen from the tearoom.

What does rather long mean? It could be a long night if I planned to read all of the township ordinances before the meeting tomorrow. I hoped that it wouldn’t come to that. All the ordinances couldn’t be about building codes, could they?

Willow returned one minute later holding a six-inch ringed binder. Pieces of paper came loose from the three rings and threatened to float to the floor. She shoved them back in place, creasing them and mangling their edges.

I gaped at the binder. “That was supposed to be in my welcome basket? How could anything else fit in there?”

“Oh, we are able to fit in a few of my specialty teas and some jam. The baskets we give the new people in town are pretty big.”

They would have to be.

She set it on the table with a thud.

I caught both of our teacups as they threatened to tip over. “It’s the size of the dictionary, and not any dictionary, like OED-sized.”

“You can see now why I am not too eager to memorize it.” She drummed her fingers on the top of it. “It is rather lengthy. I think the problem is instead of revising old ordinances we just add new ones. That’s where it can get tricky because unless the old ordinance has been specifically ruled out by the new one, both may be in effect.” She sighed. “No one in Rolling Brook governance would make it a day in Columbus let alone Washington.”

I pushed my half-eaten scone away and gingerly lifted the cover of the binder. The first page was old mimeograph paper. My mouth fell open.

“We haven’t gotten around to putting it all on the computer either. How can we? Even though we’re elected officials, no one in the township trustees is paid to do the work. We don’t have time to type this entire thing. Of course, the later ordinances are saved on a computer.”

“No one has gone through this and removed any old documents? Not once?”

Willow thought for a minute. “I can’t say that. I think a council member did it in the seventies. That’s why there are all the typed pages. I imagine when the township began the ordinances were handwritten. There would have been much fewer ordinances then, so maybe it wasn’t such a big job.”

Maybe I was aghast about the ordinances because I knew how much they would have upset Ryan, my ex-fiancé who was a lawyer in Texas. Nothing drove him crazy like disorganized legal documents, and he complained about it to me constantly. If he saw this mess, he would have needed CPR.

Willow squinted at me. “If you are so upset by it I’m sure the township trustees would be happy for you to volunteer to organize it better.”

I made an X with my arms. “No, thank you. Don’t look at me for that job.”

A teacup-shaped sticky note stuck out of the top of the binder. She flicked it with her finger. “This is as far as I got.” She laughed.

I picked up the binder and placed it in front of me. “You could use this thing as an arm weight.”

Carefully, I turned to the page about the building code. The sticky note marked the title page to the section on mimeograph paper. Oh boy. “You didn’t get very far.”

“I haven’t read any of it yet. It’s so boring. Who cares how wide doorways need to be? Yawn.” She covered her mouth in a mock yawn.

“Apparently Wanda cared, if she convinced all the trustees to enforce these rules against the factory.”

“She didn’t convince me, but I was overruled by the majority.” She sighed. “Wanda loved rules and structure. She hated to see anyone getting away with something she thought they didn’t deserve.”

“Why wouldn’t Aaron deserve the factory? He’s an upstanding member of the township and runs a successful business.”

She shrugged. “His factory didn’t fit within the rules. That made him undeserving in Wanda’s eyes.”

“Do you have a copy of his plans?”

She pointed at the binder. “They are tucked in the front pocket of that. I can’t say I’ve gotten around to looking at it all that closely.”

I flipped the pages to the front of the binder and removed Aaron’s proposal from the front. I leafed through the short document. There was an architectural rendering of the factory in the back. It was just as simple and concise as I expected it to be. I tucked it back into the front of the binder. “It going to take me all night just to read the building section,” I murmured.

She snapped her fingers. “That’s a fabulous idea. You read and tell me what it says before Friday’s meeting.”

I didn’t tell her I planned to read it to discover a loophole, which would allow the Millers to build their pie factory. “So I can take this with me?”

“Goodness, yes. You should have a copy of it by now anyway. I’ll make sure we find you a copy to keep. When we do, you can give this one back to me.” She stood and walked behind the counter. “It looks like it might rain today. Let me get a bag for you to put it in. If anything happened to it, Farley would hold me accountable.”

“I’ll be careful with it,” I promised.

She returned to the table with a plastic grocery bag. “I know you will. The bag will protect it from the rain.” As she handed me the bag, rain began to splatter against the tea shop’s roof and windows.

“You’d better skedaddle across the street before the weather gets much worse,” Willow said.

I still had so many questions to ask Willow about Wanda, but I felt like the tea shop owner was trying to shuffle me out the door. I had been there a long while, but there were so many unanswered questions. Who was Wanda’s ex-husband? Why did he request alimony? What did Wanda do for a living? Surprisingly, I didn’t even know the answer to that last question. I swallowed. All these questions showed just how much I didn’t know about Wanda Hunt.