Murder of an Amish Bridegroom

  AN AMISH SEAMSTRESS MYSTERY

  Patricia Johns

  To my husband and son, my biggest supporters. And to my parents, who tirelessly help me out in the background so that I can keep writing and the world keeps spinning. I love all of you! I couldn’t follow my dreams without you.

  Chapter One

  Petunia Yoder’s pies never turned out. Even in January, with crisp, cold, snowy days, her pies could not be counted on. That was one of many reasons she was teasingly referred to as the youngest old maid in all of Blueberry township. Petunia was absolutely unmarriageable in any reputable Amish community.

  But her ice cream turned out most of the time, and when her father Elias—owner and proprietor of On the Yoder Side Amish Tours in town—took the wagonload of tourists on their trip around the Amish countryside, her job today was to stay home and have some fresh ice cream ready for them when they passed by on their way back to the tour office in Blueberry.

  Well, that and she had a sewing job that she was working on too. Having given up on any Amish man wanting to take her as a wife, Petunia’s main focus was on growing her seamstress business. She did most of her sewing at home, but her father had given her some space in the On the Yoder Side Tour office in town to sell ready-made Amish dresses, aprons, and kapps to the tourists passing through. A surprising number of tourists liked the idea of dressing like the Amish, it turned out. But if Petunia had to provide for herself eventually as a single woman—and she couldn’t lean on her father forever—she needed to keep hustling.

  Petunia opened the chest freezer—what the Amish referred to as the ice box, since the electrical cord had been removed, and it was filled with ice to keep cool food chilled—and while there were some melting ice blocks in the bottom, there was no fresh ice, and fresh ice was absolutely necessary in the ice cream churn.

  “Oh, bother,” she murmured. “So much for staying inside where it’s warm.”

  Fresh ice was easy enough to come by once a week when Ike Smoker came through the community with his ice wagon and hauled several big blocks right to the door. And if they ever ran out between deliveries, they simply went down to the ice house and bought some. Ike even had some cloth bags of chipped ice so she wouldn’t have to chip it herself.

  Her sewing would have to wait.

  So Petunia bundled up in a sweater, a winter coat, boots, gloves, a scarf, and her black woolen bonnet that she pulled over her white prayer kapp. Staying warm while wearing a dress in a Pennsylvania winter was all about the layers. She hitched up her little two-seater, uncovered buggy—typically called a courting buggy because it held two people in plain view for all to see—and flicked the reins. Her horse, Trudy, started forward, the wheels making perfect slices through the fresh snow, and she headed down the road and toward the ice house.

  The ice house was located on the shore of Lapp Lake. Why it was called Lapp Lake, no one remembered. At some point someone named Lapp very likely owned that land. But the ice house was on the very edge of the lake, and in the winter, the ice man and whoever would come help him went out onto the frozen water and sawed blocks of ice and floated them to shore. The ice man and his assistant would pack up the blocks and take them to the insulated ice house. They did this a few times in the winter so that when the spring melt came, the ice house would be packed to the rafters with lake ice to get the whole community through the warmer months.

  Petunia’s father’s wagon, pulled by the two quarter horses, was just approaching the ice house from the other direction. The wagon brushed past some overhanging evergreen boughs, and snow misted down onto the tourists. Petunia waved at Elias, and he waved back. Several Englishers leaned around him to look at her, and some cell phones popped out.

  Petunia dropped her gaze. The Amish didn’t like having photos and videos taken of them. Her father obviously said something, because the phones lowered.

  She reined in and let Elias turn into the drive that led up to the ice house first, but all the tourists turned and stared at her as they passed, and a few smiled and waved. She waved back. They’d all see her soon enough back at the house. Then she flicked the reins and let her horse fall into pace behind the wagon.

  There had been a fresh dusting of snow overnight, and a few different buggy tracks could be seen in the snow, along with hoofprints from horses. This was a distinctly Amish location. Englishers had no reason to come to an Amish ice house in winter, and it was the one place they could be guaranteed no car tracks would be seen, and as she scanned the tracks in the snow, her guess was right.

  There were two buggies parked in front of the stable—one, an uncovered courting buggy with the horse still harnessed. The other buggy was Ike’s, and his horse would be inside the stable. Was someone visiting Ike?

  Her stomach sank when she pulled up next to the courting buggy. Of course. She’d know this buggy anywhere—especially with the scrape on one side that hadn’t been painted over yet from when her good friend, Eden Beiler, had taken a corner too close around a building. Eden was having a not-so-secret romance with Ike Smoker.

  They weren’t about to interrupt something embarrassing, were they?

  “What are you doing here, Petunia?” her father asked in Pennsylvania Dutch as he tied off his reins.

  “We’re out of ice for the ice cream,” she said.

  “Ah …” Elias nodded, then turned around to face his wagon load of tourists and switched to speaking English. “This is my daughter, Petunia. You can say hello to her.”

  There was a smattering of hellos, and Petunia smiled in return. The ice house was part of the regular tour—the list of things that amazed Englishers was rather long. Laundry washing, furniture making, sewing clothing, scrubbing floors, and even fetching ice. It left them in awe. Petunia tied off her reins too, and hopped down from her buggy.

  “Is Eden here?” Elias asked, lowering his voice. His gaze flickered nervously toward the shut door. That was the delicate question, wasn’t it? Had Eden come to see her boyfriend for a bit of privacy? And were they about to interrupt an inappropriate moment between a passionate couple with a wagonload of tourists to stare in on the scene? She could just imagine the online reviews that she checked weekly at the library…

  “I think so,” Petunia said. “That’s her buggy, all right. Maybe I should go first, in case a kapp needs straightening, so to speak.”

  “Yah, for sure,” her father agreed. “And make some noise …”

  “What about that horse still hitched up?” someone asked from the back of her father’s wagon. “How long will a horse be left outside like that?”

  “Not long,” she said. “Someone must be visiting. If we think it will be a quick visit, we leave our horses hitched up. But if we’ll be a bit longer, we’ll cover them with a blanket to keep them warm in weather like this. Or we’ll put them in the stable if we’ll be more than a few minutes.”

  Something Eden hadn’t done, to her discredit, and if she was here for a romantic visit, then she should have thought of the horse.

  “Are horses worth a lot?” a woman asked.

  “Yah, they’re our transportation, and our horsepower, so to speak …”

  Petunia tuned out her father’s explanation and adjusted her winter coat over her dress. An icy wind wound its way up her legs, and she determinedly ignored the cold. She eyed the ice house uneasily. Ike normally came outside and greeted the visitors. The Englishers loved this part.

  “Hello?” she called, and she headed toward the door, her boots crunching over the snow. Just as she reached it, the door banged open and Petunia took a startled step back. It wasn’t Ike in the doorway, but Eden, and her face was pasty white, her coat open at the front, and a strange crimson streak down the front of her purple dress. Her hands were trembling, and they had red on them, too … Blood? The details were only now starting to come together in Petunia’s mind, and her heart hammered hard to catch up.

  “Eden, are you hurt?” Petunia gasped.

  “He’s dead,” Eden whispered hoarsely. “Petunia, he’s dead!”

  Petunia pushed past her friend into the ice house. A lantern sat on a shelf, illuminating the small room in a golden glow. Stacks of ice blocks loomed up in a wall—each layer of ice separated from the ice below by insulating wood shavings that also covered the floor. Lying on his back in a pool of crimson, his eyes wide open and an ice pick sticking out of his chest, was Ike Smoker.

  “Ike?” Petunia said quietly, almost afraid that he’d answer. His eyes were glazed over, and a patch of blood seeped out of his woolen coat—hard to make out against the black wool, but it glistened oddly in the kerosene lamplight. She leaned over him, her heart thundering in her chest. There was no life left in him, but she leaned down to touch his neck all the same. He was as cold as the ice around him.

  Petunia scanned the small room in the front of the long ice house. The front of the building was the only place where there was any space to move around, and the floor was covered in a layer of shaved wood that had been scuffed by boot marks. She noticed a small flask sitting open on a shelf. There were no glasses to show how many people had been consuming the contents, either … She recognized Eden’s knitted scarf lying in the wood chips on the floor. There was no evidence of who had been in that room with him, besides Eden’s scarf.

  “Yah, he’s dead,” Petunia said, more to fill the silence than anything else, and when she looked up, she found her father first, and the touris
ts behind him, peering in the doorway with stricken looks on their faces. One man was on his cell phone, and he turned away, talking.

  “Yes, a dead body. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. We need emergency services here right away …”

  Petunia let out a slow breath. Dead. He was definitely dead, and while she’d never liked Ike—he’d been a bad sort of man who was taking advantage of her friend—seeing him lifeless on the floor made her feel sick to her stomach.

  She went out of the ice house, her head spinning.

  The tourists were huddled in a group, the man with the cell phone seeming to rise up as the natural leader, and Elias went into the ice house next.

  “The police are coming,” the Englisher man was saying. “We shouldn’t touch anything, so that they can properly investigate, and make sure that the young woman doesn’t go anywhere—the one with the blood on her hands.”

  Eden stood a few paces away from the ice house trembling, and Petunia went over to her side and put an arm around her shoulders.

  “What happened?” Petunia asked.

  “He’s dead! I’m sure of it …” Eden shuddered. “I came to see him, and—”

  “You didn’t …”

  “Kill him?” Eden looked down at her hands and then tried to wipe them on her dress.

  “Did he attack you, or …” Petunia began delicately. “Because if he attacked you, I’m sure the police will understand.”

  “Petunia, I came to talk to him! That’s all. And I found him like this. I tried to wake him up. I thought he might still be alive, and I don’t know what I was thinking because there was an ice pick—” Tears leaked past her wet lashes. “Who would have killed Ike? I know he was misunderstood, but no one hated him!”

  Petunia’s mind was moving past the shock now, and she looked at her friend in mild surprise. There were plenty of people who had reason to hate Ike—mostly Eden’s own family. Ike had been acting far too familiar with Eden. He took her driving, kept her out late, and was seen with his hands wandering in full view of any curious gaze. It was damaging to Eden’s reputation, especially since when asked about his intentions by Eden’s father, Ike had gotten angry and said that he wasn’t going to be pushed into marriage.

  And Eden, blind lamb that she was, just adored him. She wouldn’t listen to anyone who said anything against him. Petunia herself had tried and then given up.

  “What did you come to talk to him about?” Petunia asked.

  Eden looked ready to answer, then she shook her head. “It’s private.”

  “He’s dead!” Petunia replied. “There is no need to keep secrets now. And the police are on their way. They’ll ask questions too. So practice on me. What were you coming to talk to him about?”

  “About getting married.” Tears welled in her eyes again. “I wanted to marry him, Petunia!”

  But Ike had made it clear publicly that he didn’t want to get married. He thought that just loving Eden was enough for now, and there was nothing less Amish than that. The Amish dated with intention, and simply loving a girl was in no way good enough. The goal was always marriage, and Eden had a reputation to worry about, even if Ike didn’t seem to care much about his own. If Eden ever wanted a married life, which was at the heart of Amish living, then she should have been a lot more careful.

  “Oh, Eden,” Petunia sighed. “He was refusing to marry you, wasn’t he?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Eden wept. “He loved me so much, but he knew everyone disliked him. He said he couldn’t just marry me without my community’s support. It wasn’t his fault!”

  A convenient excuse in Petunia’s mind. Trample a girl’s reputation, then when the community resents you for doing so, blame their displeasure for not making an honest woman of her. Ike was many things, but he was not stupid, and he’d set the situation up nicely for himself. It wasn’t like people didn’t try to warn Eden, either. Everyone had tried.

  “But you wanted to change his mind?” Petunia asked.

  “Of course I did! I had an idea. I wanted to get married outside the community,” Eden said, lowering her voice. “I was willing to go to town and get married. They couldn’t stop us then! Who cares if people didn’t like it? It’s my life! It was supposed to be our life together, Ike and me.”

  “But your family …,” Petunia said, shocked.

  “I loved him!” Eden burst out.

  “I’m so sorry,” Petunia said. “I know. I know …”

  Because whatever Ike’s true character, which was clear enough to everyone else in the community, Eden had been utterly blind to it, and she loved him. Far off, Petunia could hear sirens on the way. The ice house was only a few miles from the town of Blueberry.

  Petunia looked back toward the brown, wood-sided ice house where Ike’s body lay, and she felt a guilty swell of relief. Ike Smoker had been a manipulative, bad man who’d taken advantage of an innocent young woman, but he wouldn’t be doing it anymore. Whatever strings had held Eden under his sway, they were snapped.

  Ike Smoker was dead, and Petunia couldn’t help but feel glad of it. Now life could return to the way it was supposed to be around here … Mostly. The shocking reality remained—someone in this well-meaning Amish community had killed him. That fact wasn’t just going to go away. And she knew that the killer was Amish because of the buggy tracks in the snow. There were no tire marks—she looked around once more just to make sure.

  Elias came back out of the ice house, and he looked shaken—his face white. He met Petunia’s gaze and grimaced. A police cruiser followed closely by an ambulance pulled into the drive, lights flashing, and Petunia gave her friend’s shoulder a reassuring pat. Farther away, she could hear the wail of more approaching sirens.

  “What do I do?” Eden asked, rubbing her hands down the front of her dress once more, but the blood had dried on her skin, sticking around her fingernails and in the lines of her hands.

  “Tell the truth,” Petunia said. “You didn’t do it! They’ll see the truth in that.”

  Wouldn’t they?

  * * *

  The police took their time in going over the scene. They questioned Elias and the tourists, wrote down their statements, took their contact information, and then transported them back to town in police vehicles. The ice house was cordoned off with police tape, and black-booted police officers tramped in and out, until a stretcher with a body bag finally emerged from the ice house, carried between two somber police officers.

  Petunia edged over to look inside the ice house again. There would obviously be fresh proof inside the building of who had actually killed Ike Smoker, and she felt an overwhelming desire to see it for herself.

  “Miss,” the uniformed officer said. “This is a crime scene.”

  “Yah, I know. I just wanted—” She stopped. There was no way to make her desire to see inside seem less macabre. So she stepped away and went back to stand with Eden.

  A police detective wearing a gray suit brought woolen blankets over to where Petunia and Eden sat in the back of Petunia’s wagon. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad—almost a walking rectangle. Even his face was square. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but his eyes held an intimidating intelligence. He strode over to where they stood and put his hands into his pockets.

  “You’re the one who found him, Miss …”

  “Eden Beiler,” she whispered.

  “Eden Beiler.” The officer’s voice was gruff, but there was kindness under the gravel. “My name is Detective Asher Nate. I’m just going to ask you a few questions.” He glanced over at Petunia. “And you are?”

  “I’m Petunia Yoder—I was here to buy ice.”

  “Right.” Detective Nate turned back to Eden. “Are you all right, Miss?”

  “No,” Eden said. “I just found Ike dead. I’m not all right.”

  “I have witnesses here who said they saw you come out of the ice house with blood on your hands.” He looked down at her blood-streaked dress. “Can you explain that?”

  “I came to talk to Ike,” Eden said. “I went inside, and I saw him on the floor. I tried to wake him up—help him. I got blood on myself …”

  “Hmm.” He pulled out a cell phone and took a couple of pictures of her hands and dress. “And who was Ike Smoker to you?”