“No, Mother, I’m not saying that. You deserve every happiness. I just don’t know that you will find it with Blaze. I don’t believe he has the right intentions.”

  “You think the only reason that he has any interest in me is because I’m old and have money. I will have you know that we have a lot in common. We both love tennis.”

  I really should not be here for this conversation. Before Margot could stop me a second time, I slipped away. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t bolt across the street and back onto the square.

  When I was settled in my chair, Charlotte leaned over to me. “What happened?”

  I shook my head ever so slightly and tried to concentrate on my plate of food. I have to admit that a good bit of my appetite was gone. I felt for both Margot and her mother. I glanced down at the end of the table and saw Blaze filling his plate for a second time while chatting happily with those sitting close to him.

  His eyes met mine and his face broke into a wide grin, a grin that made me uncomfortable. I looked away.

  Maami, who sat across from me, leaned over the table. “Are you all right, Bailey?”

  I smiled. “I’m just fine, Maami. I have a lot on my mind like always.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  Juliet and Reverend Brook sat to the right of my grandmother. Juliet broke off a piece of turkey and tucked it under the table. I took a peek under my side of the table and saw Jethro at her feet. Not only did he have that piece of turkey, but he had a full plate of food.

  He certainly was living high on the hog, as they say.

  “It’s Aiden, isn’t it, Bailey?” She wiped her fingers on a napkin and picked up her fork. “How can it not be? The two of you have been apart so much in the last few months. How is it even possible to carry on any relationship at all, let alone a romantic one?” She looked lovingly at Reverend Brook, who had just taken a huge bite of stuffing; his cheeks were puffed out on either side of his face like a greedy chipmunk’s.

  “I don’t know how I could be away from my Reverend Brook for that long. We rely on each other.”

  I hadn’t been thinking of Aiden, but I didn’t see that it would be worth contradicting Juliet. It would only make her talk about Aiden’s absence from Thanksgiving more.

  I concentrated on my meal instead.

  Margot and Zara came back to the table, but it was clear the two of them weren’t happy with each other. I shook my head. Everyone had their personal family drama.

  I resumed eating and talking with my family and friends. Gradually, the mood seemed to lift, until there was a commotion at the end of the table.

  Zara jumped up from the table and screamed. Next to her, Blaze’s face was bright red and blotchy. He held onto his throat and collapsed forward, face first into his mashed potatoes.

  There was another scream. I guessed it was Zara again.

  Gator growled under the table. Juliet must have heard him because she scooped Jethro up into her arms, out of harm’s way. Jethro was twice the size of little Gator, but no one would think he could stand up to the tiny dog if they came face to face.

  Deputy Little ran to the end of the table and pulled Blaze’s shoulders until he was sitting upright. Margot cleaned Blaze’s face with a napkin.

  “He’s having an allergic reaction!” Zara cried. “Did he eat peanuts? Did someone give him something with peanuts?”

  My heart stopped as I thought about the buckeyes on the dessert table that I had offered to Blaze. Had he taken one after all? He was so clear about his allergy. It was unlikely he’d knowingly eat anything with nuts in it. He had almost seemed scared of being close to the table. Seeing his allergic reaction now, I could understand why.

  “Where’s his shot? Where’s his shot?” Zara was screaming. She dumped his satchel on the grass. “Where is it? He carries an allergy shot with him at all times.” She rifled through the debris on the ground, but there was no shot. A flyer caught my eye. It was a handwritten advertisement for the Wittmer Poultry Farm. Why would Blaze have that in his bag? Was it a place he wanted to go while in Holmes County? It seemed to me to be an odd choice.

  “Does anyone have an allergy shot on them?” I jumped on my chair. “A man is having an allergic reaction to peanuts.”

  I received blank stares.

  “An ambulance is on the way,” Charlotte said, holding up her new cell phone. It still seemed odd to me that she now carried the device.

  Deputy Little and two other men knelt by Blaze’s chair and turned him on his side.

  “I have Benadryl.” A young woman handed the bottle to Deputy Little. “Maybe it would help.”

  Deputy Little seemed to be unsure, and from what I could tell it was going to take a lot more than Benadryl to help Blaze.

  In the distance, there was the sound of an ambulance. It would be here soon. Sooner than I expected even. Harvest didn’t have its own police or EMTs. Everything came from the county, which covered a wide area. The ambulance must have been close when Charlotte made the call. This was very good news.

  Surely, the ambulance would get here in time to give him a shot.

  “He’s not breathing,” Deputy Little said.

  Zara began to wail. Margot tried to comfort her mother and was pushed away.

  Deputy Little and another deputy out of uniform moved Blaze from the chair to the ground. They laid him on his back and started CPR.

  When the ambulance arrived, three EMTs jumped out of the vehicle and ran across the square. Deputy Little and the other officer moved out of their way.

  The EMTs worked on Blaze for a few minutes while Deputy Little and the other officer ushered everyone away from the table.

  I edged out of the way but remained in a spot where I still had a clear view of what was going on. The EMTs gave Blaze a shot. I guessed that it had to be for the allergic reaction. His face was covered with hives and so were his hands. Those were the only parts of his skin I could see. With such a reaction, I guessed he might even have hives in his mouth.

  Over my shoulder, I looked at the dessert table. At the end was the buckeye display. Maami had been so proud of those buckeyes when she made them. Could they have led to this tragedy?

  The EMTs’ attempts at CPR slowed and the two technicians looked at each other over Blaze’s prostrate body. One pressed his lips together in a line, and the other shook her head.

  That’s when I knew the truth. Blaze Smith was dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The EMTs carried Blaze away on a stretcher, but no one commented that he was dead. I believed the EMTs and I were the only ones who knew that. Zara and Margot hurried after them. They would both know the truth soon.

  “What an awful thing to have happened,” Juliet said.

  “What do we do?” a woman asked no one in particular. “Do we go back to our meals as if nothing happened? That poor man. I hope they are able to help him.”

  “Please, please, everyone go back to your seats.” It was Ruth Yoder speaking this time. With Margot out of commission, she had rushed in to take charge. “Bishop Yoder will lead us in a prayer for the ill man, and then we will continue giving thanks for the gut things that Gott has done for us.”

  Bishop Yoder said a prayer that was thankfully much shorter than his meal blessing, and for the most part, everyone went back to their seats. Everyone except Deputy Little.

  Quietly, the deputy cleared away Blaze’s dishes. I noticed instead of taking them to the trash cans at the end of the square, he carried them to his department SUV. He put them in containers from the back and spoke with another deputy, who accepted the containers and drove away.

  Next to me, Charlotte chewed on her lip. She had seen the same thing, and she had been around enough murder investigations to know what it meant.

  “I think we are ready for dessert,” Ruth said. “Bailey?”

  I jumped in my seat when Ruth spoke my name. “Wh-what?”

  “Dessert,” she said in her customary sharp voice. “You were in charge of that, weren’t you?”

  I stood up. “Right.” I began to clear away my plates. “Charlotte, can you tell the ladies who agreed to cut the pies for us that we’re ready?”

  She nodded and took the dirty dishes from my hands. “I’ve got these, Bailey.”

  I thanked her and went to the dessert tables across the green.

  “Bailey.” Deputy Little walked up to me. “I need to know which of your desserts have peanuts in them.”

  My shoulders fell. “Blaze is dead, isn’t he?” It was something I already knew, but I still dreaded his answer.

  “I’m afraid so. He went into anaphylactic shock. Because of what Zara said, we assume it was from eating something with peanuts.”

  “It didn’t have to be from my desserts. It could have been from any of the dishes that were served today,” I said. “They were made by so many people. How are we to know that someone didn’t use peanut oil on something? From the looks of it, Blaze’s allergy was serious. If it was that bad, peanut oil could have been enough to cause a reaction.

  “You’re right, but we know that some of your desserts have peanuts in them.” He eyed the buckeyes. “So this is the best place to start.”

  I closed my eyes and reminded myself that he was just doing his job. “Take the buckeyes then, and on the pie table there is a peanut butter pie. Don’t forget the peanut butter church spread that will be on every table.”

  “Thank you. I did forget that. It’s so ubiquitous to Amish dining, I don’t even see it anymore.”

  In some ways, Amish church spread was like ketchup. Not that it was put on the same food, but because it could be found on every dining table in every Amish restaurant, whether you wanted it or not. It was a creamy mixture of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff that was a favorite for Amish yeast rolls before a meal. It was so sweet that it might rot your teeth right out of your head, and a diabetic might pass out at the sight of it. If Blaze accidentally ate any peanut butter, my money was on that spread and not my buckeyes. Especially because we’d talked about them, and he knew full well not to touch them.

  “I’ll have the lab test that too. Maybe they will be able to find the source of the peanuts in his system by testing the concentration of peanuts in the desserts and the church spread,” he said.

  “Little, be straight with me.”

  He sighed as if he didn’t like what was coming next.

  “How much trouble is Margot in?”

  “You’re assuming this is a homicide,” he said. “It would be pretty difficult with everything Blaze ate today to prove that he didn’t ingest something like peanut oil—as you already suggested—merely by accident.”

  “Okay, but assuming this is a homicide.”

  He sighed even louder this time.

  “Assuming that, how much trouble is she in?”

  “Well, I would say that she would be a strong person of interest. She made it no secret that she was upset with her mother’s engagement. Then, less than an hour later, her mother’s betrothed is dead? That will raise some questions.”

  “But she wasn’t at the table when it happened. Neither she nor Zara were at the table then.”

  “That is true, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have anything to do with it. Again, assuming it was a homicide, which I’m not.”

  “Oh, me either,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Bailey, do you need any more help with the desserts?” Maami joined us at the dessert table. She looked from me to Deputy Little and back again. “Oh dear, what is wrong? The two of you have such long faces.” She clapped a hand to the side of her face. “Nee, don’t tell me that poor man was murdered!”

  Deputy Little frowned at me. “It’s your fault that her mind would even go there.”

  I knew this was true.

  “Blaze died from an allergic reaction,” I told my grandmother. “There’s no reason to suppose it was murder.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Deputy Little said as evenly as possible.

  “Let’s serve the dessert,” suggested my grandmother, who felt the best way to remedy any situation was to hand out candy. She picked up a tray of individual servings of pumpkin fudge. “Some people have already left their tables to start decorating the square for Christmas. It is best that we continue on and keep Blaze and his friends and family in our prayers. We must also think of a way that we can be a comfort to Zara during this time. It will be difficult for her to be away from home.” She took the tray and walked back to the people who were milling around the table.

  My grandmother was right; people were decorating the square. White twinkle lights were in the process of being wrapped around the gazebo’s posts, and ornaments and velvet ribbon were being strung from the pine trees.

  “That is good advice,” Deputy Little said and gave me a pointed look.

  It took everything in me to resist scowling at him. When I first met Deputy Little, he was a fresh-faced junior deputy in the department who hung onto Aiden’s every word. It seemed now that he was no long working in Aiden’s shadow, he had come into his own. I should be proud of him for that. He was engaged to my cousin so he would be family soon, but I didn’t like having my questions shut down, no matter who was doing it.

  At the next table, a line formed as people waited for their pieces of pie. Everyone seemed to be over the shock of a man falling into his mashed potatoes in the middle of the meal. I picked up my own tray of candy, peppermint bark in individual cellophane bags. I’d decided to include it in this meal because of the holiday decorating that was taking place today and as a nod to the start of the holiday season.

  As villagers, both English and Amish, decorated the square and others cleaned up the meal, you wouldn’t have suspected that anything ever went wrong in this little village. As I’d thought many times before, it looked like a Norman Rockwell postcard where everyone was smiling and giving their neighbor a hand.

  But I knew otherwise. Murder and death happened in this place, and I knew that some of the smiling faces around me hid very dark secrets. That didn’t just apply to the English either. There were many secrets in the Amish community as well.

  “Earth to Bailey,” a deep voice said.

  I blinked and found I was standing in the middle of the square, holding out my tray of peppermint bark to no one.

  I yelped and the peppermint bark tray went flying. “Aiden!”

  He jumped back. “Well, that was not the greeting I was expecting. I had been hoping to surprise you, and it looks like I have done it.”

  “I’m surprised.” I looked at the cellophane bags all over the grass. “Oh gosh. At least they’re wrapped.”

  Aiden bent over and picked up four in one swoop, then put them on my tray. “We’ll have them picked up in no time.” He smiled at me. “Are you glad to see me?”

  Was I glad to see him? Hundreds of emotions ran through me, but one pushed the rest aside: relief. I was glad to see him. I was very glad to see him indeed.

  Aiden was tall and handsome. His blond hair caught the sunlight and the expression in his brown eyes, which always reminded me of milk chocolate, shifted from humor to concern. He wore jeans, a casual brown sweater that was the same color as his eyes, and sneakers on his feet. He was perfect.

  I crushed him in a hug. “I’m so happy to see you.” The peppermint bark fell off my tray again.

  He laughed. “I’m glad to see you too. I’ve missed you. Now, let’s pick up these candies and carry them to safety before you throw them on the ground again.”

  “I’m not throwing them on the ground,” I said. “It’s been a crazy day.”

  The corners of his eyes narrowed again. There must have been something in my voice that alerted him to the fact that it was more than the usual village gossip bothering me. It was much more. A man was dead.

  I closed my eyes as if I could somehow block out the memory of Blaze struggling for breath. I opened them again. The closed eyes only made the memory that much more vivid.

  Aiden took my hand. “Bailey, what’s wrong?”

  I looked into his chocolate-brown eyes. When we first met, it was his eyes that I noticed. Having been a chocolatier in New York City for the better part of a decade, chocolate was always on my mind.

  “A man had an allergic reaction to peanuts. He didn’t have his shot, and it was too late to save him by the time the ambulance arrived.”

  He stared at me. “What? But everyone on the square is going on as if it’s business as usual.”

  I lowered my voice and hoped that he would follow suit. “I don’t think they know that he died. I believe they think he just went to the hospital.”

  He nodded. “Who is he?”

  “Margot’s almost-stepfather, Blaze Smith.”

  Aiden stared at me. “Come again?”

  We picked up the peppermint bark as I gave him the quick version of the day’s events.

  “Wow, Margot’s mother sounds like she’s really something. What kind of name is Blaze Smith?” Aiden asked. “Not an Amish one, I can tell you that.”

  “He was about as far from Amish as you can get,” I said. “And I can’t see Zara with someone connected to the Amish anyway. From what Ruth Yoder said, she was hard on the Amish when she was a judge in this county. She’s not well liked by the community.”

  “You know, now that I hear her last name, I remember when I started in the sheriff’s department, there were murmurings about Judge Bevan. I didn’t know who she was or even that it was a ‘she’ since she had retired before I took the job. There haven’t been that many female judges in Holmes County, so I assumed the judge was a man.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t surprised. Holmes County wasn’t the most progressive county in Ohio, and not all of that had to do with the high numbers of Amish living there.

  “I see Little moving through the crowd. My guess is he’s trying to find out if anyone saw anything suspicious. I know the death hasn’t been ruled a murder as of yet, but it’s best to act like it might be until you know for sure. If he waits until tomorrow or the next day to ask people what they saw, there’s no telling what they’ll remember, assuming that they remember anything at all. Why don’t you keep passing out dessert, and I’ll go check in with Little and see what’s going on?”