chapter 2
CALLIE HAD LEFT FOR A QUICK ERRAND. They had used up all of the cash-register tape — a silly thing to run out of on the biggest weekend sale of the year. She’d dashed out to buy some from the General Store, needing to feel the coolness of the fall evening on her face. Though the shop had been crowded when she left, Melinda, Deborah, and Lydia were there to help with customers. Callie had been gone fifteen minutes tops and was less than a block away when she heard Max barking. Clutching her small shopping bag and purse, she began sprinting toward her shop.
Why was Max barking as if someone’s life depended on it?
Her garden came into sight, followed by the lights of her shop.
She slowed and breathed a sigh of relief.
No fire. No police lights. Perhaps Max had merely treed a squirrel again.
Then she realized his barking wasn’t coming from the yard. He was past the yard, near the bench on the far side of the shop, near Aaron, who had rolled out to the middle of the sidewalk and was sitting there alone, gesturing to the dog.
Max was running back and forth, first toward her, then back to Aaron, barking the whole time as if he were sounding an alarm.
She started to run again — toward Aaron this time. Perhaps he was having trouble breathing. It was hard to tell in the fading light. But then she was close enough to see that he was waving her back, waving her in the direction of her garden.
So she spun around, slowing down to search for what she’d missed during her sprint toward the shop.
A cry caught in her throat when she saw the woman lying half in, half out of her shrubs, lying with her arms spread out as if she’d literally taken a flying leap onto the pavement, lying perfectly still and facedown.
Callie glanced around, hoping to see someone who might be close at hand to help, but the crowds had moved toward the center of town. No one else seemed to have noticed the tragedy occurring at the corner of her shop’s parking lot.
She crept closer, peering at the woman.
Callie knew that face. She’d scrutinized it often enough through the front windows of Quilts and Needles. How was this possible? She was staring at the lifeless form of her nemesis, her archrival, the person she’d spent the past year trying to win over to her side. As a final act of retribution, Mrs. Knepp had died in her parking lot.
Callie knelt down and put her fingers gently on Mrs. Knepp’s neck to feel for a pulse. The woman’s skin was fragile and thin beneath Callie’s fingers. It reminded her of the archived papers she sometimes stopped by to read at the Shipshewana Visitor’s Center. For over a year now, she’d sparred with this woman, but she’d never actually touched her — the realization hit Callie like a blow.
Mrs. Knepp was still warm to the touch. She couldn’t have been dead long, and Callie couldn’t feel a pulse.
Had she been standing near the shrubs and stopped breathing — perhaps choked on something or suffered a heart attack? But her hands weren’t clutching her neck or her heart. They were flung out to her side.
Mrs. Knepp had never struck Callie as particularly fragile. The old lady was tough as a drill sergeant. Why would she drop dead on such a pleasant September night?
Or had she?
Perhaps something more sinister had happened?
If so, Callie knew from past experience she needed to be careful not to mess up Shane’s crime scene.
With the first tendrils of fear sneaking down her spine, she backed away slowly. With Max’s barks still ringing loud and insistent in her ears, she turned and ran toward Aaron. As she darted past the front window of her shop, she glanced in and was amazed to see customers still milling around, folks still talking and laughing.
Didn’t they know?
Hadn’t they heard Max’s cries for help?
Couldn’t they tell that death, possibly murder, had once more invaded the town limits of Shipshewana?
She reached Aaron at the same time Matthew and Martha did.
“What’s wrong? Why’s Max barking?” Matt squatted down on the right-hand side of his brother, his face red from having run and the questions coming in a rush as he tried to catch his breath.
Martha tugged on the strings of her prayer kapp. “Are you all right, Miss Callie? You’re shaking and —”
“Listen to me, Martha. I want you to go inside. Don’t go anywhere but inside. Keep your eyes on the store as you walk in. Do you understand me?”
“Ya.”
“Once inside, I want you to have your mamm call 9-1-1. She needs to tell the dispatcher to send help quickly. She needs to notify them someone’s died.”
Martha’s eyes widened, but she didn’t ask any further questions, only turned and hurried into the shop.
Max had stopped barking when Callie arrived. Now he sat between her and Aaron, the hair on the back of his neck raised and a low growl emanating from his throat.
Aaron reached forward and touched between his ears. “It’s okay, boy. You did gut.”
Max turned and licked Aaron’s hand once, then refocused on the scene in front of him — eyes and ears still on alert.
“We weren’t even gone for ten minutes. Are you sure you’re okay?” Matt removed his wool cap and rubbed his hand over his hair. “What happened, Aaron?”
“I’m not …” Aaron pulled in a deep breath, and Callie wondered how much the shock of Mrs. Knepp’s death had affected him. “I’m not sure.”
Melinda tumbled out of the shop, her shoes slapping against the pavement as she ran to her son’s side. “What is it? Aaron, are you okay?”
She’d always been so calm, so completely composed about Aaron and his condition. The stark fear in her eyes was something Callie had to glance away from. Instead she focused on Max and on calming him down. He continued to whine deep in his throat, his gaze focused on the lifeless form at the far end of the parking lot.
“I can’t breathe —”
“Are you having an attack? Do we need to call the doctor?”
“No. It’s that you’re clutching me so …” Aaron pulled back, his face flushed. “Tight!”
Melinda stood and straightened her apron over her dress, but she didn’t step away from her son’s chair. She did peer up at Callie. “You wanted Deborah to call the police? She said there’s been a death. Are you sure?”
“I hope she didn’t alert the customers.” Callie tucked her hair behind her ears.
“No. Deborah took the cordless phone into the supply room and used it there. The customers are staring out the window because I ran. I was afraid for Aaron. Afraid that —”
“I’m fine,” Aaron insisted.
“Who died?” Matt stood and tried to see around his mother. “I don’t understand how this could have happened. We left him no more than ten minutes ago.”
“You left your bruder? Here? Alone?” The questions came like hail falling on a roof, causing Matt to flinch and stare down at his shoes.
While he explained to his mother where they’d gone, Callie wrapped Max’s leash around her wrist, then walked to the door of her shop and whispered to Deborah about what she’d found. Fortunately it was full dark now, and the customers couldn’t see the lifeless form that awaited Shipshewana’s finest.
A cruiser pulled up, red lights blazing and siren blaring.
Callie winced.
There would be no keeping Mrs. Knepp’s death a secret now. Her mind ran back over the same questions like a tongue seeking out a sore tooth. Mrs. Knepp was old. Could she have died of natural causes? Or did someone harm her?
There was something else bothering Callie about what she’d seen, something her mind kept reaching for, but like a fading dream she couldn’t quite remember what it was.
What had she seen?
Matt continued to squirm under his mother’s gaze, scuffing his right shoe against the sidewalk, leaving streaks of mud.
That was it. Suddenly what she’d seen came back with crystal clarity, but instead of feeling relief, a shiver crept down her spine, causing her to draw her sweater tighter around her shoulders.
A light storm had passed through the evening before. She recalled waking in the middle of the night to the sound of rain dripping on her roof. As she rolled over, reached out, and stroked Max, she’d breathed a prayer of gratefulness she wouldn’t need to water her garden before work.
Rain.
And gardens.
And mud.
Minutes earlier, when she’d first arrived and seen Mrs. Knepp, when she’d first run toward her, the initial thing she’d seen, even before it had registered that the woman was dead, were large muddy footprints, one on each side of the body.
Almost as if someone had stood directly over her lifeless form.
Which left Callie with two questions.
What was Mrs. Knepp doing in the bushes of Callie’s shop?
And who had stood over the old lady as she died?
Callie watched Andrew Gavin step out of the cruiser. A second police vehicle arrived, which held Captain Taylor. She knew both men quite well, given her history with the police department since her arrival in Shipshewana fifteen months ago.
Gavin was a teddy bear at heart, though physically he looked to Callie like he’d been discharged from the Marines just last week. Thirty-one years old with blue eyes that could turn to ice if you were threatening the citizens of Shipshe, all six feet of Andrew Gavin was muscular in a military way. It was something he hadn’t lost from the four years he’d spent serving overseas for Uncle Sam. His brown hair was still cut regulation length, and his brows framed eyes filled with concern as he hurried in her direction.
Captain Stan Taylor followed a few steps behind.
Callie barely remembered her grandfather, but she imagined he might have looked a lot like Officer Taylor. Warm brown eyes, bushy white brows, and a protruding stomach gave him a grand-fatherly look. Taylor’s wife constantly implemented new plans to reduce his waistline, but none had been successful to date. More importantly, he’d been kind to Callie when she’d first been under suspicion of murder her first summer in Shipshe.
Taylor took the lead. “Did we receive that call correctly, Callie? Has there been a death?”
She’d remained fairly calm since hearing Max’s furious barking, but now that Gavin and Taylor were here, her sense of detachment fled.
She raised her hand to point toward the body at the far side of her parking area and — now that she knew her friends were safe, that her worst fears were allayed — her entire arm began to shake uncontrollably.
“Over there, facedown on the pavement.” Callie began walking with them to the body. “She might have … she might have fallen over.”
“She didn’t fall,” Aaron said. “A man pushed her.”
Everyone turned to stare at the small boy in the wheelchair. He didn’t blink and didn’t look away. He waited — eyes wide, wool cap pulled down over his ears, right hand resting on the wheel of his chair.
The shaking spread to Callie’s legs, and she had to sit down in the middle of the sidewalk.
Did Aaron just say someone had pushed Mrs. Knepp?
But pushing someone onto the concrete wouldn’t kill them. Would it? How could it?
Yet she was dead.
Mrs. Knepp was dead.
Whoever had pushed her had left her body less than fifty feet from the front door of Callie’s shop.
And whoever had done it was still running around loose.