Premeditated Peppermint Read online

  I felt a twinge. He had a point. Of course, the free advertising was something that I wanted for the shop. The exposure could be unbelievable for business, but it wasn’t that easy. I had to respect my grandmother’s culture. Being on television wasn’t very Amish, and I didn’t know if her Amish district would approve. In fact, I suspected they would not.

  He must have noticed my hesitation, because the smug grin was back on his face.

  Before I could give him an answer, the shop door opened for a third time that afternoon, and the last person on the planet I would have wanted to see at that moment stepped inside.

  Tall and loose-jointed, sheriff’s deputy Aiden Brody stood just inside the doorway to Swissmen Sweets. His eyes were alert as if he could feel the tension in the room. As a seasoned law enforcement officer, Aiden was tuned in to the mood of his surroundings, and the current mood inside Swissmen Sweets was anything but welcoming.

  He took in Roden and Pike in the corner of the room. Pike had his boom leaning over his shoulder like a baseball bat ready to be taken out onto the field as he tore through his bag of candy.

  “Anyone want to tell me what’s going on in here?” Aiden asked.

  And that’s when I knew my first Christmas in Amish Country would be anything but peaceful.

  Chapter 2

  Eric’s sharp gaze swung to me. “You called the cops, Bailey? That’s not much of a welcome for me to your little town.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I did no such thing.”

  Aiden looked from me to Eric and back again. When it was clear that neither one of us was going to answer his question, he turned to my grandmother. “Clara? Do you know what’s going on?”

  Maami shrugged her shoulders. “This is Eric and his friends, and they know Bailey from New York. They are here for Christmas.”

  My grandmother had sort of got it right, and I watched as a light dawned on the deputy’s face. My grandmother might have been able to miss the media coverage of my relationship with Eric, but Aiden had not. He placed his hand lightly on the hilt of his gun. If I were Eric I would head toward the exit now. I knew that Eric worked out, but he’d never chased down a criminal or thrown one in jail as I knew Aiden had done countless times.

  “Aiden, this is my old . . .” I searched for the right word and then cleared my throat. “Aiden, this is Eric Sharp from New York.”

  Aiden’s eyes narrowed as my words only confirmed what he had to be thinking.

  “Eric is here to shoot a Christmas special for his reality baking show here in Harvest, and he was just telling us he would like Swissmen Sweets to be involved.”

  “I bet he would,” Aiden muttered. He frowned. “Are you going to do it?”

  “Well, I . . . I . . .” It was a difficult question to answer as the publicity opportunities danced in my head. Being part of Eric’s show, which aired on Gourmet Television, a major cable cooking channel, would be a huge boon to the business. Our online orders could jump 300 percent. Even considering the possibility made me dizzy. I cleared my throat. “Maami will have to decide. It’s her shop.”

  Eric grinned. “I knew you would come around, Bailey honey.”

  I ground my teeth. “I’m not your honey.”

  Eric held out his hand to Aiden. “I have always had the utmost respect for the police. What was your name?”

  “Deputy Aiden Brody,” Aiden said in a clipped voice.

  I had a sinking feeling that this encounter was about to go from bad to worse.

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Aiden.”

  The door opened for fourth time, and I started to wonder if I should begin charging admission.

  I hoped that it was an actual customer who was dropping by for a fudge sample, but I had a sinking feeling it was not as soon as a slender woman in a hip-length, wool trench coat stepped through the door. Her red hair was swept back from her narrow face by a pair of oversized sunglasses that rested on the top of her head. “Eric, where have you been? I have been looking for you for the last hour.” She removed the sunglasses, and her silky hair fell like a curtain on either side of her face.

  Eric went over to her and held out his hand. “What are you doing in here, Rocky? I thought you were waiting outside for the van.”

  She squeezed his hand for the briefest of moments and narrowed her eyes, which were an unusual color of smoky gray. “You expect me to wait for the van. Why can’t the crew do that?” She nodded at the two men in the corner of the shop. Pike had a meltaway suspended in the air on the way to his mouth, and Roden just looked bored out of his skull.

  “I needed them in here. In case we had a chance to start filming. I thought it was a good use of time to get some footage while we wait.”

  “I suppose it is,” she relented. “Time is money, and the last thing I want to spend on this project is more money. We’ve already gone over budget, and on-location production hasn’t even begun. This must be the shop you told me about. It’s quaint. You’re right—with a few tweaks, it would be a great platform.” Rocky turned to me for the first time and looked me up and down. “You’re Bailey. I recognize you from the papers.”

  My face grew hot. I knew the papers she was referring to, the weekly glossies that were sold on every corner of the city, the ones that had exposed Eric and me as a secret couple.

  She held out her hand. “I’m Rocky Rivers. I’m the executive producer on this special. Eric tells me that we will be shooting segments of the show here.” She glanced around. “This should work nicely. The lighting is great. We will have to put in a few more lights if we plan to shoot in the morning since your shop faces south, but we can make it work.” She folded her arms when I didn’t take her hand. “Is there any chance you can remove some of the clutter from the counter there? We love a clean prep place for our programs. Extra ingredients sitting around confuse the viewers, and when the viewers get confused, they stop watching. Remember that most television programming is geared toward a sixth-grade education. That goes for cooking shows as well. Although I have never met a sixth grader who liked to cook other than those adorable children we book for our kids’ baking challenges, and we have to look far and wide for them. They can be difficult to come by.” She took a breath.

  Aiden, Charlotte, and my grandmother all stared at her. They were not accustomed to how fast a real New Yorker could speak, and everything about Rocky screamed that she was a real New Yorker: her look, her speech, her manners.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said quickly because I wanted to get out what I wanted to say before Rocky could kick back into gear. “But I think there has been some sort of mix-up. Eric never got permission to film here. In fact, he just told us his plan a minute ago. My grandmother and I need to discuss it.”

  “Guder mariye,” Maami said.

  “Gud—Good morning,” Rocky said, seeming taken aback for a brief moment. She gave a quick smile. “Then you and your grandmother should discuss this.”

  I was about to ask her what was wrong when my words were interrupted by a honk that was so loud it shook the candies in the jars along the wall.

  Honk! Honk! The blaring horn came again. It sounded as if someone was strangling a goose just outside the shop.

  “What on earth is that?” Maami asked.

  Charlotte’s hazel eyes were the size of dinner plates.

  Aiden strode to the front door of the shop and opened it. “What the—” was all he said before the door slammed behind him.

  The rest of us, including Rocky, ran to the large picture window at the front of the shop and stared as a white van slowly rolled down Main Street with GOURMET TELEVISION emblazoned on the side. The van barely fit between the Amish buggies and cars parked on either side of the road.

  Abel Esh, a large, red-haired Amish man, was tying his horse and buggy up to the hitching post across from Swissmen Sweets. He secured the reins around the hitching post and then shook his fist at the van driver.

  The driver didn’t so much as blink an eye, and whe
n she was just past the front window of Swissmen Sweets, she took a sharp left turn off the road and onto the green. As the van rocked over the curb and onto the square, it sideswiped one of the gas-powered lampposts that lined the green, gouging its paint. Aiden stood off to the side with his arms folded until the van came to a stop.

  On the square, Amish and English volunteers who were setting up for the Christmas Market stared gap-mouthed at the van as it barely missed running into the display of cut Christmas trees that were for sale.

  “What is that?” Maami exclaimed, clearly never having seen anything like it.

  “Van’s here,” Eric said happily while standing next to me at the window.

  I glared at him. “That thing is yours?”

  “Of course it is.”

  Rocky shook her head. “It belongs to the network, not you, Eric. You would do well to remember that.”

  Eric shrugged as if this distinction was a minor detail.

  The driver slipped from the front seat of the van. She was a petite, dark-haired woman all in black. Aiden spoke to her, and from their body language I thought it was safe to say that the conversation wasn’t going well.

  “I had better play interference. Josie doesn’t always have the best bedside manner,” Rocky said, and strolled out the door. I caught a whiff of expensive perfume as she went. Eric and I were close on her heels.

  I jogged across the street, passing Abel Esh, who patted his horse on its cheek and murmured to the animal as if trying to calm it after its close encounter with the van. Abel glared at me and said, “I should have known all of this had something to do with you, Bailey King. This was a quiet and respectable village until you came around.”

  I ignored him and hurried over to where Aiden stood. I’d given up making amends with Abel months ago. It seemed that he was determined to hold a grudge against me that dated back to when we were children.

  “You can’t park here,” Aiden told the young female driver. “This is public land, not to mention the square is closed this week for the Christmas Market.”

  The small woman folded her arms over her chest. “All I do is my job and follow orders, and my orders told me very clearly to park in the middle of the Harvest village square, which is exactly what I’ve done. It’s been a long trip from New York, and I’m done. I shouldn’t even be stuck driving this thing in the first place. I’m hair and makeup.”

  “And,” Aiden said, “I’m going to issue you a citation for scraping the side of that lamppost. There will be a fine.”

  “You can send it to the network,” the young woman shot back.

  “I hope everything is all right,” Rocky said in a smooth voice.

  Aiden spun around and faced us. “Does this have something to do with your arrival?”

  “Yes,” Rocky said. “This is our production van. We need it for film editing purposes. What seems to be the problem, Officer?”

  “The problem is this van. You have to move it. It can’t be in the middle of the square like this. There’s no parking on the grass, not to mention the Christmas Market begins tomorrow afternoon. There isn’t space for your van here when that happens.” Aiden’s voice left no room for argument.

  “Officer, there is no reason to be upset,” Rocky said. “We have permission to be here. Do you think we would be here if we didn’t have permission? Would you like to see the paperwork?” She reached into the pocket of her expensive trench coat and pulled out a folded document. She handed it to Aiden. “That’s our permit to park on the square and to film in the village.”

  I shivered on the sidewalk next to Eric. I wished I’d thought to grab a coat before I had run out the door. It was December in Ohio, after all, and even though there wasn’t much snow on the ground, it was still bitterly cold and promised to get colder each day we drew closer to Christmas. The village volunteers went back to their business of setting up the booths and tables for the Christmas Market, but I could tell they had one eye on what was going on around the van. The Amish Christmas tree farmer seemed to be particularly interested. He had a long, dark beard and wore plain clothes. Instead of the black felt hat donned by most of the Amish, he wore a black stocking cap. The Amish man caught me staring and scowled. I looked away.

  Aiden unfolded the piece of paper slowly as if he thought it might bite him. He scanned the document. “Margot Rawlings granted you permission to do this?”

  Rocky nodded.

  I should have known. Margot was on the village board of directors, and she was always looking for ways to bring new business and publicity to the village of Harvest. I should have expected her to be the one who would let a television crew park on the square. I hoped that the network and Eric would be paying her enough money to re-sod the square after the van tore it up. I wasn’t sure that Margot had thought of that, not with a chance for publicity for the village and, I suspected, a good amount of money being waved in her face.

  A fiftyish petite woman in a black and white polka-dotted peacoat came around the side of the van. The coat was a perfect match to her black and white polka-dotted potbellied pig, which walked at the end of a hot-pink leash.

  “Is that woman walking a pig on a leash?” Eric asked from his place next to me.

  “Yes,” I said with resignation as I watched Juliet and Jethro make their way around the square in the direction of the church. I had little doubt that Juliet was on her way to pay a call to Reverend Brook, on whom she had a not-so-secret crush and who had a not-so-secret crush on her in return. There were bets running through the village that the pair would be engaged by the end of the year. Since it was December, time was running out on that bet.

  Juliet waved to me, and I waved back, hoping that she would just continue on her way to the church. No such luck, as she made a beeline for me.

  Eric gave me a side-eye. “You say that as if it is perfectly normal.”

  “In Harvest, it is. That’s Juliet and Jethro.”

  “Jethro?” Eric asked.

  “The pig.”

  “Ahh.” He grinned, and his face lit up with that mischievous look that had once made me smile.

  Juliet waved her hand at me. “Bailey, isn’t this exciting? Our little Harvest is going to be on cable television! Margot was just telling me all about it.”

  “Where is Margot?” I asked. “If this TV thing was her idea, I would have thought she would be here for the crew’s arrival.”

  “Oh!” Juliet clapped her hands. “She had to run an errand. She says she has a big surprise for the Christmas Market.” She bounced on her toes as she spoke. “She said it will make a real difference in the number of tourists coming to the village this Christmas.”

  That sounded ominous.

  Jethro stared up at his mistress in adoration.

  “Who might you be?” Eric held out his hand. “I’m pleased to meet any friend of Bailey’s.”

  Juliet took his hand in hers. “Well, how do you do? I’m Juliet Brody, an old family friend of the Kings.” She nodded at her pig on the ground. “And this is Jethro, of course. You must be Eric Sharp.” She blushed. “I have seen you on television. My, you are twice as handsome in real life.”

  Eric grinned. “Thank you. It’s not often I get a compliment like that from such a beautiful woman.”

  I snorted. Yeah, right. I knew from personal experience that women tripped over one another to shower Eric with attention and compliments. I had never been like that with him. In fact, when I had first met him, I’d thought he was arrogant and self-absorbed. I should have stuck to that opinion. In this case, first impressions were dead-on.

  Aiden stared at Juliet, who happened to be his mother, as we approached. “You knew about this?” He motioned to the van.

  She scooped Jethro off the ground and held the pig to her chest. Jethro licked her nose with his pink tongue but made no other protest at being manhandled. “Of course, I knew. Reverend Brook was consulted about it, since he sits on the village council. Margot wouldn’t have given the go-ahea
d for this if everyone wasn’t on board. Margot will be here soon.” She smiled at Eric and the two other women. “She will be thrilled to see you.”

  “We are equally thrilled to see her,” Rocky said with a smile. She held out her hand to Juliet. “Rocky Rivers, I’m the executive producer on this show.”

  “Oh!” Juliet’s mouth made a tiny O shape. “It’s just so wonderful to meet you. You can leave your van here for the moment, but I’m sure there is a better place to park it. I don’t think Margot would have wanted it here exactly. We do have the Christmas Market happening. As you can see, the entire village is in the process of setting up.” She pointed at an elderly man who was stringing an impossibly long strand of twinkle lights around each pillar of the large, white gazebo in the middle of the square. “You came at the perfect time! The Christmas Market is the height of the holiday season in Harvest. We have so many wonderful things happening. There are Christmas trees, a bonfire with caroling, all the shops like Bailey’s have stands, and we have a live nativity!”

  Eric grinned at Juliet. “You make it sound quite thrilling.”

  Juliet squeezed Jethro just a little bit harder. “It is, trust me!”

  “You still can’t park on the square,” Aiden said.

  Juliet laughed. “Aiden can be such a worrier, but I think he might be right. The church parking lot might be the best place for your van. Right now, you are blocking the Christmas tree farm’s access to the street. We don’t want to have to ask people who are buying all those beautiful trees to walk around your van. And for the elderly, it would be better if they could drive their cars up to load their trees.”

  The Christmas tree farmer stood in front of his wares with his arms crossed. If he was going for the angry pilgrim look, he’d nailed it.

  Rocky looked over her shoulder at the Christmas tree farmer, and her face went chalk white. She recovered quickly. “Right. I think you’re right. Josie, can you move the van across the street to the church parking lot?”