But this racetrack wasn’t exclusively Amish. It included Amish harness racing and English thoroughbred riders. If the race schedule that was nailed to the worn wooden wall by the entrance was any indication, it was a busy place, and the Amish races only happened twice a week. The rest of the time, the track was dedicated to everything from dressage to horse racing to lessons. It was an intricate schedule worthy of super planner Margot.

  I wondered if Amish horse racing involved gambling.

  To my surprise, no one stopped me when I walked into the track area. Ahead of me, I could see the racetrack, with a green grass circle in the middle of the dirt ring. A curved split-rail fence ran around the outside of the track. The top of the fence was capped with worn two-by-fours. I imagined that, on race day, dozens of men, and maybe a few women, would be leaning over those rails cheering on their favorite racer.

  To my right was a large enclosed stable. I stepped inside, and horses poked their noses over the stalls as I walked by. The stable smelled like manure, hay, and leather. The combination of scents was oddly comforting. Racing carts were lined up at one end of the barn, and horse tack seemed to hang from every available nail in the massive building, which was easily twice the size of any barn I had ever been inside.

  One very friendly horse bumped my shoulder with his broad nose. I stopped and patted his cheek. He was all white except for an outline of black around his eyes. It made him look as if he was wearing eyeliner. He nuzzled my palm with his horsey lips. “If you’re looking for carrots, I don’t have any. If I come again, I’ll bring you some, I promise.”

  He blew hot, pungent breath in my face, and I yelped.

  Then the horse lowered his head as if inviting me to scratch him between the ears. I obliged.

  “You are a pretty one, aren’t you?” I asked the horse. “I really should have thought this through better and brought some carrots. If you want to make friends with horses, you need carrots, am I right?”

  “That’s Cooper,” a voice said behind me, and I jumped.

  When I spun around, I found Dinah’s son, Mason, behind me.

  “He’s the best harness racing horse on the track,” Mason said. “I’d never bet against Cooper. Are you waiting for lessons or something?” He looked me up and down.

  I was wearing jeans and a checkered blouse, but on my feet, I wore sneakers. I didn’t think they were made for horse riding. Not that I knew—I had never been much for horse riding. The shoes were for running, though I wasn’t much of a runner either, now that I thought of it.

  “I hope you brought your boots,” he said, confirming my hunch that a real rider wouldn’t ride in sneakers.

  “I’m not here for a lesson,” I said. “But I am curious about Amish horse racing. I didn’t know the Amish did that.”

  He studied me and then said, “The Amish have been racing horses for a very long time. Street buggy racing is common among the young men. I don’t like that kind of racing. It’s dangerous, and it’s just Amish youth competing to see who is the coolest guy.”

  I raised my brow. That was the first time I had ever heard “Amish” and “cool” in the same sentence.

  “I prefer harness racing. That’s what we do here.” He pointed to several two-wheel carts at the end of the large barn.

  I nodded. “Are those bicycle wheels on those carts?”

  “They are,” he said, sounding pleased that I’d noticed.

  “They are faster and better equipped for racing than buggy wheels. We hitch horses like Cooper to those, and the driver sits in the seat, guiding the horse with his reins and urging the horse to run faster with a whip.”

  I winced at the thought of the whip.

  “A lot of Englischers are squeamish about the whip, but a gut driver doesn’t hit the horse with it. He cracks it above the horse. The sound is loud enough to make the horse run faster. It’s intense, and the horses are fast. Much faster than buggy horses. They are pulling less weight, and they are trained to run.” He paused. “The cart is called a sulky. Some people call it a bike or even a spider. At the start of a race, typically a truck leads the pack to pace the horses until the speed picks up. Then the truck leaves the track, and the horses go all out. It’s thrilling.” His eyes lit up. It was clear to me that Mason Stoltzfus desperately missed racing himself.

  “Are there races today?”

  He shook his head. “Not official ones. Just practice runs. Saturday is always race day during the season. You should come back then and place a bet.”

  “I might do that,” I said.

  He frowned at me as if he was trying place where he had seen me before.

  “Cooper is a sweetheart.” I patted the white horse again. “I was never one of those horse-crazy girls, but I think I could be if all horses were like him.”

  “I think most people would say that.” He stepped forward, dragging his bad leg behind him. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m Bailey King. I was at your mother’s bakery a couple of days ago. She asked me to take Hannah with me when I left.”

  He bristled. “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Ummm.” That was a more difficult question to answer. Should I tell him that I thought a murder suspect had come to the racetrack the day before? That didn’t seem like the best idea I’d ever had.

  Instead, I took this as a golden opportunity. “I was hoping I could talk to you about Hannah.”

  The friendly rapport we’d had when talking about Cooper the horse was gone.

  “I don’t know anything about Hannah. She was the daughter of my mother’s cousin. That’s it. It wasn’t like I ever spoke to the girl. She’s deaf,” he said in a way that made it seem like an insult.

  I continued to scratch Cooper’s nose to keep myself calm. I wished people would stop acting as if Hannah’s deafness was some kind of contagious disease.

  “When was it that Rosemary and Hannah came to Wooster?” I asked.

  He frowned at me. “I don’t know. Two or three years ago. Rosemary came here as a desperate woman. Did my mother tell you that? She drove her husband so crazy that he turned Englisch and ran away from her. And she never gave up. She kept pestering him over and over again. I could see her doing it.”

  “Why was that?”

  He studied me as if he was gauging whether or not he should give me an answer. “She was so nervous. The woman wouldn’t sit still. The only time she seemed to be calm at all was when she was with Hannah. My mother allowed her to work in the bakery, but she was no real help. You would not believe the number of mistakes Rosemary made that my mother then had to clean up, which made me even angrier that she would . . .”

  “She would what?” I asked, sensing the answer to this question was important.

  “It doesn’t matter. You asked me what I know about Hannah. Next to nothing. I would see her when Rosemary brought her to the shop. All I ever saw her do was sit on the floor and play with her books and toys. She was deaf, harmless, and easily forgettable.”

  I balled my fists at my sides again. “And what about Rosemary? How well did you know her?”

  He shrugged. “She worked at my mother’s bakery.” He paused. “When I was hurt and had to spend so much time at the hospital and then in rehab for my leg, she was a good cousin to my mother. Even though she was nervous, dropped things, and made mistakes, she ran the bakery while my mother cared for me. I think that’s the reason why my mother never had the nerve to fire her.” He paused. “And now she won’t have to.”

  He didn’t say “because she’s dead,” but I was sure he was thinking it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I watched Mason shuffle away and felt a twinge of empathy for him as he dragged his foot behind him. I wondered if there were surgeries and options for him to improve his quality of life. Did he not take those opportunities because he was Amish or because of a lack of money? Because of their religious beliefs, the Amish were exempt from buying health insurance, which was required for the rest of the country.

  Instead of health insurance, they relied on their districts to pool money and support anyone who was sick or in the hospital. They took up collections for those in need and saved money, whenever they could, for those times when it would be needed. I wondered if those funds sometimes became strained, as they covered so many families; perhaps, for that reason, the Amish were less likely to have intensive treatments. Or maybe the leg injury didn’t measure up against other medical emergencies in the community. There had to be times that a district must put one person’s medical bills above another’s. Most districts were made up of forty-some families, and families were large, so there were a lot of people who needed to be taken care of. If only two of those members were seriously sick or injured, the cost could be astronomical without insurance.

  After my grandfather had died, his hospital bills had been steep. The district gave my grandmother what they could to help. It wasn’t enough, and I quietly paid the remainder of the bills. I never told my grandmother I’d done that, and I never would. I wanted her to believe that her community had come through for her. I knew firsthand that not every district could cover hospital bills for every member.

  I wondered if Mason would have been able to race again if he’d had the money to pay for surgeries to correct his limp.

  I will admit I felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t forget how he’d spoken to his mother in the bakery. Even so, it was clear to me that he was hurting. Perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt. Obviously his dearest ambition was to be a harness racing driver, and an injury had stolen his dream. Now he worked in the stable every day and watched as other Amish young men did what he wanted to do most. Would he be happier if he found another line of work?

  Cooper bumped my shoulder again, and I scratched him on the nose. “You’re a sweet guy. I promise I will be back with carrots.”

  He blew his hot breath in my face again, and I didn’t even care.

  A rumble of voices shook me from my thoughts. I turned toward the racetrack. A group of men, both Amish and English, were clustered on the fence near the starting line, which was about thirty yards away from me. I walked up to the fence and leaned on it. I watched as four Amish men in plain clothes and helmets guided their horses and harness racing carts into a line.

  When all four horses had formed a straight line across the track, someone fired a gun, and they were off. I felt a rush of wind as the horses and their drivers passed me. As they flew around the curve on the far side of the track, I noticed that a cart in the middle of the pack began to wobble. It rocked violently back and forth, while the other three carts held firm. The driver pulled hard on the reins to steer his cart and horse out of the way of the other drivers.

  The other carts rushed past just as the left wheel of the wobbling cart popped off and went crashing into the fence. It bounced off the fence and careened down the track in the opposite direction.

  The cart with only one wheel now lay on its side. The driver cried for help. There were shouts in both Pennsylvania Dutch and English as men jumped over the rail and ran onto the track. The other drivers pulled up their horses. The race was over without being completed.

  I followed the men onto the other side of the track and wasn’t the least bit surprised when I spotted Deputy Little among them.

  From where I stood now, I could see that the cart had fallen on the driver’s arm. He groaned in pain. One man untethered the horse from the cart. The horse appeared to be fine. The other men lifted the cart off the fallen man’s arm.

  The driver screamed when the cart was moved.

  “It looks like a bad break,” one Amish man said. “We will have to take you to the clinic to have your arm set.”

  “But I need to train for the race this weekend,” the young driver said through the pain. From the look on his face, leaving the track appeared to be a worse fate than the injured arm.

  “Son, you are not going to be in the race this weekend. Your arm is broken. Let’s hope it’s a clean break so that you can get back on the track as soon as possible.”

  The young driver looked as if he might cry, but he stopped himself. I knew Amish men were trained to be stoic and not show their feelings. I hoped, for his sake, that he would let himself cry in private at least.

  An English woman ran onto the track. She was petite and wore jeans, a Western shirt, and cowboy boots. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s been an accident.”

  She threw up her hands. “Another one. We can’t have this happening time and time again. It’s bad PR, and as the track’s publicist, that’s a big problem for me.”

  “Calm down, Jill,” the Amish man said. “It’s just an accident.”

  “Tell that to the Ohio State Racing Commission. We could lose our license if this keeps up.”

  The man hushed her and ushered her off the track.

  I watched them go and walked back to the betting window. As I did, I saw Mason leaning over the rail, watching as the other men helped the driver off the track with a strange expression on his face. It was an odd mix of satisfaction and disgust. I also realized that he had not climbed or leaped over the fence; with his twisted leg, he most likely could not. Was that why he had that disgusted expression on his face? Was he disgusted with himself that he could not help?

  After the driver was taken away, a wagon pulled onto the dusty track. The men slowly moved the damaged cart onto the wagon.

  When the cart was safely on the wagon, one of the men ripped his black felt hat from his head and threw it into the dirt. “This was no accident. It’s the fifth time something like this has happened on the track. I am telling you, someone is causing this! There can’t be so many mishaps without a reason.”

  To my surprise, the Amish man speaking was the same one I’d seen at the hardware store. The same man who’d told me that I wouldn’t want to speak to Isaac Weiss. His jovial demeanor was gone.

  I stepped away from the rail and behind a nearby stable post. I didn’t want him to see me, but from my lookout, I could still hear the men as long as they didn’t drop their discussion down to a whisper. It turned out they were yelling, so that wasn’t a problem.

  “Amos, you need to calm yourself,” another Amish man said to the one from the hardware store.

  Good, I finally have a name for him. That will help.

  “I do not need to calm myself. I need people to stop messing with my track. Jill is right. This looks bad.”

  I frowned. His track? I thought he worked at the hardware store. Had I been wrong? When I thought back to the hardware store, I remembered that the workers had been wearing name tags. This man had not. Then why had he asked me if I needed help? I frowned.

  “We are lucky that the horse wasn’t hurt. That animal is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Michael was our best driver at the stables. We need him to finish on top,” Amos went on. He picked his hat up from the track and hit it against his thigh to knock the dust off. “This can’t continue. And I will make sure it doesn’t. Now I have to go calm Jill down again.” He stomped off the track and right in my direction.

  I slipped farther behind the post so that he wouldn’t see me and pressed my back up against it. For a moment, I had an absurd feeling that I was in a James Bond movie, but instead of being in the French Rivera, I was in Amish Country.

  When he was gone, the Amish man he’d been yelling at said to two of the younger men, “Take care of the horse, and make sure he’s not hurt. We can’t have any more mishaps. We can’t lose another animal. If we do, the state will start sniffing around.”

  I raised my brow as I heard this. Had there been an accident in which a horse had been killed? It seemed to me that there were serious problems at the Wayne County Racetrack, and I was very surprised to learn that the place was owned by an Amish man—if, in fact, Amos’s claim was true.

  “Bailey—” Deputy Little walked over to me. “I thought that was you hiding behind that post like an international spy. What are you doing back there?”

  I stepped out from behind the post. Most of the men were gone, and the horses were being guided back to the stables.

  I shook my head. “Deputy Little, I’m so glad to see you. There is something strange about this accident. From what I overheard, this isn’t first time something like this has happened. From what those men said, it’s the fifth time. Also, Mason Stoltzfus was in an accident like this over a year ago and was seriously hurt.”

  “Should I recognize that name?” the deputy asked.

  “He’s Dinah’s son. Dinah who put Hannah in my care.”

  “Oh! Where is he?” He glanced around.

  I looked around. I didn’t see him in the group of Amish men walking near the track.

  “He must have taken off shortly after the accident.” I told him about what Amos had said.

  Deputy Little rocked back on his heels. “If something strange is going on here with racing accidents, I can’t really do anything about it. We’re in a different county. It would be up to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department or the Wooster police to step in. If it has to do with gambling, it might even be a place where BCI would take the lead. I have no jurisdiction.”

  I blew out a frustrated breath and supposed that I resembled Cooper, the horse, quite a bit at that moment. I understood what Deputy Little was saying, but someone had to look into the accident at the racetrack. If not him, he should pass the information along to those who could.

  As if he read my mind, he said, “I’ll give the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department a call and let them decide who has jurisdiction. It might be BCI actually.”

  His mention of BCI reminded me of Aiden’s job offer. I put that to the back of my mind. What I needed to concentrate on now was solving this murder and making sure that Hannah was okay.

  “If you have a case that leads you out of your county, you can still investigate outside your jurisdiction as long as you give the department in charge a heads up. It’s just common courtesy.” He squinted into the sun. “We should probably leave, so I can touch base with the Wayne County sheriff’s office.”