Plain Murder

Book 1: Stone Mill Amish Mystery

by Emma Miller

Genres: Amish & Mennonite; Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery

Synopsis

In this unique mystery debut, a shallow grave is found on a Pennsylvania farm, and one woman straddling the Amish and outside worlds must uncover a killer--and create a life on her own terms. . . Fifteen years after leaving her Old Order Amish life, Rachel Mast has returned to Stone Mill, Pennsylvania. Corporate success didn't bring true happiness, but Rachel also knows she can never be Amish again. Instead she runs a B&B and tries to help her community in ways they can't help themselves. But now a gruesome discovery has been made on her Uncle Aaron's cow pasture--the body of prominent Englisher businessman Willy O'Day. Aaron refuses to hire a lawyer, trusting his innocence, and his faith, to see him through. Rachel isn't so sure, especially given the long public feud between the two men. Her relatives won't speak to the police, but they will talk to Rachel--if she puts on a skirt and bonnet. Rachel knows emotions and entanglements run as complicated in the Amish world as outside it. But as she delves deeper to clear Aaron's name, she discovers secrets that put her own life in danger. . .

Release date: December 31, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 274

Sample

Stone Mill, Pennsylvania

Rachel Mast was the most unusual person in town, a party of one. She had one foot firmly planted in her Amish youth, the other reluctantly planted in the “college grad, Phi Beta Kappa, Wharton MBA, corporate-ladder-climbing junior partner” of her adulthood. This morning, the Amish girl won out as she walked barefoot across the wide lawn and jammed the OPEN flag into the grass. Satisfied that the flag would not block the modest wood sign—

Rachel gave herself a minute to simply enjoy her leap of faith . . . her B&B.

Built from fieldstone, the house was a nearly square, solid, gabled two-and-a-half-story structure with a wide center doorway, eleven windows, and two perfectly matched stone chimneys. There was a recessed two-story addition in the back, and attached to that, the stone summer kitchen, with its tiny windows and its own enormous chimney.

Approaching the house, she couldn’t help but admire the Federal-blue shutters and black door that tied everything together. It had taken her days to scrape those shutters down to their original 1798 color and several hours of mixing paint to match it, but every minute had been worth it.

Two years earlier, nearly eleven months had gone into work on the main house, which still wasn’t a hundred percent done. It had turned out to be a huge money pit. Her 401(k) was empty. All the stock options used up. Nearly every penny of her savings—along with the traditional blood, sweat, and tears—had gone into the building, which had been neglected for thirty years.

This was not just a house, however; it was artwork, worthy of the finest canvas. The huge oak trees framing the home stood like ancient sentinels, their broad branches forming a canopy of green leaves that shaded the house, the thick lawn, and the cobblestone drive. No one knew if the property got its name from the town or the other way around, but both the house and the historical village now shone like new pennies.

Off to the west, mist rose off the rolling farm fields in ghostly shrouds. A cool breeze coming down the mountain would dispel them soon enough. Mountains surrounded this valley of rich, loamy soil. Those same mountains had both protected the farmland and shielded the inhabitants from the outside world for generations too many to count. This morning, the May air smelled of climbing roses and jack-in-the-pulpits.

By the time Rachel was seventeen, she had no longer felt at home here in the world of the Amish that she’d been born into. She’d thought there was too much to do, too much to see, too much to learn beyond the valley. Now, after fifteen long, stubborn years trying to fight the ties that bound her here, she was back home. Not Amish, probably never to be Amish again, but home nonetheless.

Rachel walked back toward the house, the cool, damp grass under her feet. She had plenty of work to do, but the first hour or two of her day was always hers alone. There’d be plenty of time later to see to her guests and wait on the customers in the gift shop—tourists she hoped would come.

She had eight guest rooms. She was happy that she’d never had to turn someone away, but it would have been nice to be full, at least once. She’d welcomed a young priest yesterday afternoon, then two middle-aged sisters from Bayonne, New Jersey, later on. None of them had come down for breakfast yet, but Ada Hertzler was already in the kitchen, brewing coffee and sliding a cast-iron pan of cinnamon rolls into the oven.

The coffee and rolls would be just the first course. Ada would follow that with scrambled eggs, sausage, scrapple, and blueberry pancakes with the fresh, warm blueberry syrup Rachel had spotted simmering on the back of the stove when she’d grabbed her first cup of coffee at six. Her stomach rumbled just thinking of Ada’s pancakes.

Taking the granite entrance steps two at a time, Rachel swung open the heavy front door. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and she, involuntarily, glanced over her shoulder. “Naddish,” she chided herself. Foolishness.

She had every right to use this entrance. She wasn’t a barefoot Amish child with skinned knees delivering eggs and butter. She was barefoot, but there was no one here, Englisher or Amish, to scold her and send her around to the kitchen door. She owned Stone Mill House. Or, at least, she and Bank of America owned it.

She was learning that the values one grew up with were hard to shake. The Amish didn’t borrow money from banks. An Amish member of Stone Mill never bought anything—not a house, not a horse, not a jar of jam—unless he or she had the cash to pay for it. “The borrower is a servant to the lender,” any one of her friends, family, or neighbors would gladly quote.

Taking the mortgage on the Stone Mill House and property had set tongues wagging for months. No matter how many times she tried to explain to her father, her siblings, her uncles, her aunts, or her cousins that mortgages were sometimes necessary, no one bought it. Of course, her mother wouldn’t discuss it with her. Her mother didn’t discuss anything with her.

Starting a B&B in a nontourist town in depressed central Pennsylvania during an economic downturn would have distressed her Wharton professors as much as the mortgage did her family. But she was convinced that her clientele would grow as the tourist trade found its way to this secret Brigadoon. With large families and the scarcity of farmland for sale, the town had found itself forced to transform from a strictly agricultural area to a tourist destination. Business had already picked up over the last year at Wagler’s Grocery, Elijah’s Furniture, the Seven Sisters Quilt Shop, and Russell’s Hardware and Emporium.

Stone Mill was a picturesque Amish village with none of the commercial ugliness of Lancaster—no strip malls, no outlet stores, no neon signs proclaiming Gut Food or Dutch Miniature Golf. There were no twenty-foot-high plastic Amish figures luring tourists into T-shirt marts or big-box discount stores. The nearest Dairy Queen was twenty miles away.

The Old Order Amish of Stone Mill were strongly conservative, and had been reluctant to listen to Rachel when she had told them that they needed to change or see their way of life disappear, along with their children. Eventually, both Amish and Englishers, over the course of more town meetings than Rachel could recall, agreed that this was the only way to keep the town from dying out. People didn’t have to leave their farms and their businesses and move away. They could change what Stone Mill was without changing themselves or their values.

The citizens of Stone Mill gave visitors what they had to offer and that was a sliver of the idyllic life of yesteryear. For a few hours, a few days, or even a week, guests could buy homemade crafts, visit a farm that had been run the same way for the last hundred and fifty years, and taste food prepared the way their great-grandmothers had made it.

Rachel walked across the original wide-plank flooring of the spacious center hall with its ten-foot-high plaster ceiling and broad walnut staircase. She hung a left into the onetime parlor, now a gift shop.

Here, she displayed authentic Amish crafts: hand-stitched quilts and braided rugs and delicious jams, jellies, relishes, and candies. There were also a few carefully chosen pieces of pottery, hand-woven reed baskets, and traditional, faceless Amish dolls. Along one wall, she displayed books on the history of the area and Amish culture, written by a professor at Penn State University. There were no T-shirts, no sunglasses, no bobblehead Amish farmers. Nothing made of plastic and nothing made in China.

Golden rays of sunlight spilled through one of the two tall, deep-set windows. Bishop, a large seal point Siamese, was stretched full length on the wide windowsill. He was pretending to be asleep, but Rachel knew better. “Admit it,” she said. “You think the gift shop is a good idea.”

She went to the window to open it and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the wavy glass. She had few mirrors in the house—another throwback from her childhood—but she couldn’t resist taking a peek. Her straight strawberry-blond hair fell well below her shoulders, framing her fair-skinned, freckled face. Her hazel eyes were very green this morning.

Was she attractive? It was a question she’d asked herself many times, a question that she’d once asked her Grandmother Mast.

“Grossmama, am I pretty?” she’d asked, knowing that just saying it was evidence of pride, or hochmut, one of the worst traits a well-brought-up Amish girl could exhibit. She must have been nine or ten, and she’d run home from the one-room schoolhouse in tears because sixth grader Jakob Peachey had called her a “beet-headed puddin’ face” and everyone had laughed at her.

Her grandmother hadn’t admonished her. Instead, she’d pulled Rachel close to the porch rocker where she’d sat shelling peas and studied her face. Even now, Rachel could remember how her cheeks had burned. She’d tried to pull away, but Grossmama had held tight to her sleeve and inspected her features carefully.

Finally, when Rachel had thought she would die of embarrassment, her grandmother had said, “Your forehead is high like your mam’s, and you have her nose. Not too big, not too small. Your mouth is wide, a Mast mouth, but you will grow into it, and you have your dat’s eyes. Ne, I would not call yours a beautiful face, but beautiful never lasts. Yours is grefta—strong. It is a face that people will trust.” Grossmama had tapped her on the forehead. “You have a gut brain and a pure heart. Better to be smart than beautiful, Rachel.” Her grandmother had smiled, showing small, even, perfect teeth. “So, dry your tears. It is a face that men will like, and of that, you must be ever watchful.”

A strong face, Grossmama had declared. And better than beautiful. Rachel looked at herself again and shrugged. It would have to do. She reached over the cat and pushed up the window, letting the fresh air into the room.

Bishop deigned to open his slanting eyes and stretched, but made no comment. The cat had no opinion on business matters. It simply wasn’t his way. Mundane, petty commerce was beneath Bishop’s dignity. He concerned himself with eating, sleeping, and finding the most comfortable spots in the house to perch and observe the goings-on of Stone Mill House.

“I know I’m right.” Rachel paused to scratch behind the Siamese’s ears. He didn’t consent to actually purr, but he did give what could only be described as a tiny rumble of pleasure. “This place is special,” Rachel murmured. “People who want a genuine experience will come.”

“Excuse me.”

Rachel turned to see one of her female guests, either Ms. Baird or her sister, Ms. Hess—Rachel wasn’t sure which—surveying the room from the open doorway.

“Good morning,” Rachel said, hoping that the woman hadn’t heard her conversing with a cat. She assumed her best hostess smile. “Were you looking for the dining room? Coffee’s on. But you probably already knew that by the heavenly smell.”

Not even the slimmest of smiles.

The woman peered at her through pink, rhinestone-studded glasses. “I rang the desk, but no one answered.”

“Sorry, I was outside.” There was a wall phone in the kitchen, but Ada wouldn’t have answered it. As far as Rachel knew, Ada had never gotten within three feet of the abomination called a telephone. Phones were against the Old Order rules, and Ada never broke the rules.

Ms. Hess—Rachel thought this was the younger of the two women she’d welcomed last night—was tall and thin with short, spiky hair that was an unnatural shade of rhubarb. Her yellow capris, peppered with oversized blue flowers, clung to her like a second skin. Her nearly transparent orange peasant blouse, over a tiger-stripe bra, matched her four-inch-high wedges. “Is this the gift shop?” she demanded in a nasally tone that had all the comfort of fingernails grating on a chalkboard.

Rachel glanced at the open door. Patience, she reminded herself. Her Gift Shop Open sign still hung there. Her business permit and her MasterCard/Visa placards were plainly displayed. “Yes,” Rachel answered pleasantly. “You’re welcome to come in.”

“I’m a guest here.”

Rachel nodded. “It’s good to have you. I checked you and your sister in last night.”

The woman stared pointedly at Rachel’s bare feet and then slowly lifted her gaze, taking in Rachel’s worn blue jeans and her raggedy T-shirt that read Penn State 5K Buggy Run 2012. “Are you Aim-ish?” she asked. “You don’t look Aim-ish. I thought the pamphlet said this was an Aim-ish B&B.”

“We advertise that Stone Mill House is in the heart of Ah-mish country. I’m not Ah-mish. If I were I wouldn’t be allowed to run a B&B.” She smiled. “But all the men and women who work here are Amish. Our food is very traditional.”

Rachel wasn’t about to admit that she had once been Amish. She rarely shared that with strangers. Too personal. “You should come in and have a look around. Everything we sell is Amish-made.”

“I wanted to know if there was room service. That’s why I was calling. My sister and I want breakfast in our rooms. We’re taking the Zook buggy ride at nine thirty.” Ms. Hess entered the shop and zeroed in on Mary Aaron’s “Diamond in the Square” crib quilt on display near the front counter. The counter had once been a teacher’s desk from an Amish schoolhouse in the next county over, something Rachel had picked up at an auction.

“I’m sorry. We don’t offer room service. Meals are served in the dining room, but you’re welcome to take anything upstairs.” Rachel kept smiling. Ninety percent of her guests were lovely people, but the other ten could be . . . interesting. “Breakfast is already set up there. We have an assortment of fresh fruits, cereal, and pastries, and our cook, Ada, will be happy to make you pancakes, bacon, scrapple, eggs, whatever you’d like. This morning, she made an amazing fresh blueberry syrup. It’s so good, I could eat the stuff with a spoon.”

Ms. Hess dragged an acrylic fingernail over another quilt and examined the tag. “Pricey, aren’t you?”

“Authentic Amish quilts are all hand-stitched, more a piece of artwork than a bed linen. Mary Aaron’s quilting is recognized as some of the finest Amish work in the county. Most people prefer to display her quilts as wall art rather than—”

“You said it was sewn by Aim-ish.” Ms. Hess regarded Rachel dubiously. “ ‘Mary Aaron’ doesn’t sound Aim-ish to me.”

“Her actual name is Mary Hostetler. We tend to use the same names over and over in our families, so to avoid confusion, we use a lot of nicknames. We call her Mary Aaron as in Aaron’s Mary. Aaron is her father.” And my uncle, Rachel thought, but again, that was personal information. Then she realized she’d said “our” families . . . Luckily, the woman didn’t seem to have noticed.

“And the father’s Aim-ish?”

“He is Ah-mish,” Rachel confirmed with a nod. “And so is Mary’s mother.”

The woman grimaced. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. What if they had a son? What do you call him?”

“It depends. Hannah and Aaron Hostetler have a son named Alan. We just call him ‘Alan’ because it’s not a common name. But we call their son John ‘John Hannah’ because there must be a dozen John Hostetlers in the valley. Hannah’s son John”—Rachel made her best and there you have it gesture—“is, thus, John Hannah.”

Ms. Hess looked at Rachel for a moment over the top of her pink glasses. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of.” She inspected the quilt again. “Are you certain this is handsewn? The stitches are too even. It looks machine—”

“Rachel! Rachel!”

Glancing out the window, Rachel spotted Mary Aaron—black bonnet strings flying—racing up the front drive, her push-scooter left on its side in the grass. Her feet were bare, and she was wearing a rose-colored traditional ankle-length dress with a white apron over it.

“In the gift shop!” Rachel called through the open window, wondering why Mary was in such a hurry this morning.

Rachel turned back to her guest with a smile. “You’re in luck. Here’s Mary Aaron now. You’ll be able to meet her. I know she can answer any questions you may have about her quilt.”

“Does she talk English?”

“She speaks English perfectly,” Rachel assured her.

“Because sometimes it’s difficult to understand foreigners.”

“I can assure you that Mary Aaron’s English is excellent.” Rachel stepped into the hall just as Mary Aaron threw open the front door and burst inside.

“Come quick!” she exclaimed. She was breathing hard; beads of sweat ran down her face. She must have rushed the full three miles from her house on her push-scooter.

“You have to come!” Mary Aaron said, switching from English to Pennsylvania Deitsch when she caught sight of Ms. Hess staring at her from the gift shop doorway. “It’s Willy. He’s been found!”

Willy O’Day’s mysterious disappearance had been the subject of conjecture in Stone Mill for the last eight months. The prominent English businessman had vanished without a trace, and no one had heard from him since.

“So the rumors were true?” Rachel asked, also in Deitsch. “He ran off with that blond waitress from the diner?”

“Ne.” Mary Aaron shook her head.

For the first time, Rachel realized her cousin’s face was pale, despite her rosy cheeks from the effort it had taken to get here on her scooter.

“Get your head covering, Rachel. It’s bad, really bad. My dat needs you!”

A sense of dread came over Rachel as she realized the extent of her cousin’s distress. “What is it? What’s happened to Willy?”

Mary Aaron grabbed Rachel’s hand. “He’s sleeping the long sleep in our cow pasture.” Tears welled up in her big brown eyes and spilled down her dirt-streaked cheeks. “And the police think Dat put him there.”

“Will you come, Rachel?” Mary Aaron pleaded. “We need your help. Dat needs you.”

Rachel nodded. “Of course I’ll come.” She turned back to her guest. “I’m afraid I have an emergency. I have to go.”

Ms. Hess frowned as she stepped out of the gift shop and into the hall. “I’m interested in this quilt. Can’t your errand wait until—”

“Sorry.” Rachel reached around her guest and pulled the gift shop door shut behind her. She flipped the wooden sign around so that it read: CLOSED. Please come again! “Family comes first.”

“But the quilt.”

“We can talk about it later.” Rachel indicated the door across the hallway. “Breakfast in the dining room,” she said. She turned to Mary Aaron. “Wait for me out front. I’ll bring the Jeep around. We can throw your scooter in the back.”

The church districts in Stone Mill were Old Order and very conservative. Members weren’t permitted to operate any type of motor vehicle; they used horse-drawn wagons and carriages. Mary Aaron was, however, permitted to accept a ride from Rachel.

“We have to hurry! The police are talking to him. You know how Dat can be.”

“It’ll be all right.” Rachel gave her cousin’s hand a quick squeeze. “We’ll straighten this out.”

Mary Aaron opened her mouth to answer and then closed it abruptly, but Rachel knew what she was thinking. Willy and Uncle Aaron had been feuding for years. Everyone knew how much the dead man and Uncle Aaron had disliked each other; they’d had a public shouting match at the livestock sale only days before Willy disappeared. It had been such a scene that the bishop, two preachers, and a deacon had called on her uncle that evening—not a particularly pleasant visit for any of them, she imagined.

“Meet you out front,” Rachel repeated. Then she went down the hall, exited the main house, and entered the kitchen, where Ada was patting loose sausage into round cakes and dropping them onto a skillet.

“I’ve got to go to Uncle Aaron’s,” she explained in Pennsylvania Deitsch. It was an old German dialect used only among the Amish in North America. “Please see that the guests get breakfast and ask the girls to . . . you know, the usual morning chores.”

Ada’s pale-blue eyes narrowed. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a plump middle and a wide bottom, but she exhibited none of the joviality usually associated with a plus-size woman.

“You’ll manage fine,” Rachel said with forced cheerfulness as she snatched her keys from a hook near the back door. Ada could be prickly, but she was a capable woman and Rachel couldn’t run the business without her. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised, crossing her fingers behind her back.

On her way out, she paused long enough to snatch an elastic hair tie and a handful of large bobby pins from a drawer. As she stepped onto the back porch and into a pair of black Keds, she began to plait her hair into a single braid.

She couldn’t believe Willy O’Day was dead. Not just dead. Dead in her uncle’s cow pasture. That chill that she’d felt earlier returned and rippled down her spine. It didn’t seem possible. Willy had been missing since October. He couldn’t have been lying in the pasture all that time. Someone would have found him. The buzzards would have found him.

She hurried across the grassy back lawn. Securing her braid with the hair tie, she took a few quick twists and then used the pins to fix it tightly to the back of her head.

This all had to be a misunderstanding. Things like this happened to strangers on the evening news. Unexplained disappearances and deaths happened in Harrisburg or Philadelphia, not in peaceful Stone Mill. It was ridiculous for the police to even consider that Uncle Aaron might be involved. He was Amish. He’d had the centuries-old canon of nonviolence bred into his blood and bones.

Rachel tugged open the carriage shed doors and entered the semidarkness of the stone outbuilding to climb into her Jeep. In the driveway, she circled the house and braked long enough for Mary Aaron to lift her scooter into the back and climb in beside her.

“Seat belt,” Rachel reminded automatically. Amish buggies didn’t require seat belts, and whenever she transporte. . .