Lethal Licorice Read online

  Esther and their older brother, Abel, allowed Emily to help me to an extent. I knew the extra money helped the family of three young, unmarried siblings. However, I suspected Esther and maybe even Abel would like to limit Emily’s time with me. Maybe they thought I would corrupt her with my big-city English ways.

  “I just don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to Jethro.” Juliet sounded as if she was on the verge of tears.

  “I’ll help you look for him,” I said quickly before she could break down. “I’ll start looking around the church. Meanwhile, why don’t you take a lap around the square and ask people if they have seen him. He’s pretty distinctive-looking; people would remember if they saw a polka-dotted pig. We’ll meet in front of the church in fifteen minutes.”

  She clasped my hands in both of hers. “Oh, thank you, Bailey. Thank you so much. I’m so glad that you moved here, not just for my son, but for the entire community. You’re such a blessing.”

  I internally groaned when Juliet mentioned her son. I had not moved to Harvest, Ohio, for her son. Somehow Juliet had gotten it into her mind that he and I were destined for each other. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t find her son, Aiden Brody, appealing. He was the very handsome sheriff’s deputy and had close ties to my family. After Juliet and Aiden moved to Harvest when Aiden was just a child, my grandparents gave them a place to live until they were on their own two feet. The Brodys had remained friends with my grandparents ever since. Despite the family history and the fact that I found Aiden almost painfully attractive, we were just friends, regardless of the plans his mother and my grandmother might have for our future.

  Before I left the booth, I tidied it the best I could so it would be ready for the licorice judging.

  By the time I finished, Juliet was already speaking to the third candy maker in the row, asking him if he had seen Jethro.

  “You’re looking for a polka-dotted pig?” the man asked in a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent.

  Even though I had an hour before the licorice judging, I didn’t wait to hear Juliet’s reply to the man. I shoved my cell phone into the back pocket of my jeans and hurried through the crowd, past the gazebo, and across the street, aptly named Church Street, to the large white church. Even though I hadn’t lived in Harvest long, I knew the church well. On my first full day in the village, I had used the kitchen to make wedding desserts.

  Two autumnal wreaths adorned the church’s main entrance. Instead of running up the stone steps to that entrance, I jogged around the side of the building to the back. A small parking lot sat behind the church, where the pastor, Reverend Brook, and the other church staff parked. Next to the parking lot, a cemetery encircled by a weathered wooden fence stretched away from the church.

  Two men in white coveralls were whitewashing the fence and were about two-thirds done. I wondered why Juliet hadn’t mentioned the painters when she told me that Jethro had gone missing. Then again, I couldn’t be entirely sure she’d noticed them. Juliet seemed to be caught in a daydream most of the time.

  I approached the two men. “Excuse me.”

  “We need to hang a ‘wet paint’ sign on here,” the first painter said to the second.

  “Right, boss,” the second painter said.

  “Excuse me,” I said a little more loudly.

  The two men turned and stared at me. “Are you lost?” one asked.

  “Lost? No. I’d like to ask you if you saw a pig a little while back, sometime this morning. The last place he was seen was here, behind the church.”

  “A pig?” the other painter asked. “Is this a joke?”

  I shook my head. “No. He’s about the size of a toaster and is black and white polka-dotted. He has a black dot around his right eye.”

  “A pig with polka dots.” He snorted. “Now, I know you are pulling my leg.”

  “I’m not. He was here this morning when volunteers for the ACC were taking candy-making supplies from the church.”

  “I saw a lot of people coming in and out of the back of the church,” the first painter said. “But no pig with or without polka dots.”

  My shoulders drooped. “All right. Thanks anyway.”

  “Cheer up, girl. Don’t cry over a lost pig,” he said in a mocking tone.

  I frowned at him.

  “If I were you, I’d stay away from bacon until he shows. You know, just to be on the safe side.” He grinned.

  His partner laughed, and I glared at them before walking away. At least Juliet hadn’t been there to hear the two men make light of Jethro’s disappearance.

  I checked my cell phone for the time. Almost fifteen minutes had passed since Juliet and I had parted ways at my table. I walked around the side of the church. Juliet was at the church steps waiting for me.

  Her blue eyes were wide. “Did you find anything?”

  I shook my head. “There were two painters working on the fence around the cemetery.”

  She nodded. “Yes, Reverend Brook hired them to paint the fence. It goes all the way around the graveyard. What did they say?”

  I frowned. “They haven’t seen Jethro.”

  Juliet removed her crumpled tissue from her pocket again and dabbed at the corner of her eye. “I called Aiden, and he said he would come as quickly as he could and help us look for Jethro. I know he has a lot to do with so many people in town. I shouldn’t have worried him with my little troubles.” She looked as if she was about to cry again.

  “Jethro missing is not ‘little troubles,’” I said. “And Aiden knows that. I’m sure he’s as worried as you are.”

  She sniffled. “He’s such a good son. He’ll make a good husband someday.”

  That hint was as subtle as a brick in the face.

  I balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to flee in case of more husband material talk. “I should return to my booth soon, but I have a little time. Where else should we look?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. We’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Not everywhere. Let’s check inside the church. Jethro might have gone in there while you were moving supplies, and he does feel right at home in the church.” I didn’t add that the reason Jethro felt at home inside the church was that Juliet spent most her time there. Everyone in Harvest knew she was sweet on the awkward widower pastor, Reverend Brook. Everyone, that was, except for the befuddled reverend himself.

  Juliet clapped her hands and then threw her arms around me. “Bailey King, you are a genius! Why didn’t I think of that? Of course, Jethro would run into the church. He is so fond of Reverend Brook. He would run to the reverend for comfort if he was scared by the crowd. Let’s go there now.”

  I glanced at my cell phone and checked the time once more. The closer the candy judging came, the antsier I felt. I had participated in all sorts of competitions in New York against the best chocolatiers in the world. This felt different, as if there was more on the line for me personally. If I won this contest, it would prove to the world, or maybe just to myself, that I hadn’t thrown my career away when I made the decision to move to Ohio to take over Swissmen Sweets.

  Juliet climbed the steps to the church. The front door was open, and Juliet marched inside without hesitation. I entered a little more timidly. I hadn’t been back in the church since the wedding in September, which hadn’t ended well.

  By the time I stepped across the threshold into the building, Juliet had her hand on the handle of the sanctuary door. I stepped forward and paused. There was a hushed feeling to the place. It was as if the building was holding its breath for Sunday, the next time it would be needed. Until then, it stood tensely at attention.

  I hadn’t been in many churches in my life. When my father had left the Amish way to marry my mother, who was English, he had not only left his Amish life behind but also his belief in God. I believed in God, at least I thought I did. I knew that my grandmother did. My grandfather had, too, and they were some of the most contented people I had ever known. However, now that my
grandfather was gone, my grandmother seemed a little lost.

  A terrible groaning sound came from the other side of the sanctuary doors, as if some type of animal was being strangled. Juliet threw the door open and ran inside, and I raced after her, catching the door before it closed.

  The enormous organ was the centerpiece of the sanctuary. It started at the base of the narthex and went all the way up to the cathedral-high ceiling. There was a golden star at the top of it. Sunlight streamed in through the clear glass windows and reflected off the silver pipes that could be seen through the openings in the wooden façade.

  The girl, the same strawberry-blond Amish girl I had seen on the square less than an hour ago, sat at the three-tiered keyboard and pressed a key, and that terrible strangled cat sound started again.

  Juliet covered her ears. “I don’t think it’s supposed to sound like that,” she whispered to me.

  The door to the sanctuary slipped through my fingers and slammed closed behind me with a resounding boom. Juliet spun around, and the girl at the very front of the sanctuary jumped as if she had been shot.

  “I’m so sorry,” I stammered.

  Juliet covered her mouth with her hand. “Charlotte, I’m so sorry to disturb you when you are practicing.”

  Charlotte’s face cleared. “It’s all right. I think Reverend Brook is in his office.”

  Juliet shook her head. “I’m not looking for Reverend Brook. I’m looking for my pig. Have you seen Jethro? He’s been missing since this morning. We’ve looked everywhere outside for him. Bailey”—she nodded at me—“suggested that we try the church because he might have felt safer inside the church with so many people in town.”

  Charlotte looked stricken. “I wish I could say that I have seen him. I only just began practicing. If he wandered in here this morning, it was before I arrived.”

  Juliet’s shoulders sagged. “Will you keep an eye out for him?”

  “I will. Maybe Jethro tried to tune the organ,” she joked. “It sounds very odd today. I would hate for your regular organist to think I harmed it in some way. It’s very nice of him to let me practice here.” Charlotte got up from the organ. I noted that she was in her stocking feet, no shoes. I don’t know why that detail stuck out, but it did. She tiptoed to the small door at the left side of the organ and opened it. Her screams reverberated off the flying buttresses above our heads.

  Propelled by the sound, I ran forward. Charlotte stumbled back from the door with her hand over her mouth and nearly collided with me. I grabbed her before she could fall over the organ platform. Silent tears rolled down her flushed cheeks. Once she was leaning against the organ bench, I let her go. I went to the open door, pulled it open more widely, and stepped inside the cramped space.

  I found myself in an area no more than the width of a coffin. I was surrounded on three sides by wood and metal—the working innards of the organ itself. The comparison to a coffin couldn’t have been more accurate because a limp white hand hung down from the platform above me.

  Jethro was still missing, but I’d found Josephine Weaver. She was dead.

  Chapter 3

  I stumbled backward, and a sharp lever rammed into my spine. I didn’t care. I wanted to get as far away from Josephine as I could in the cramped space.

  Josephine’s swollen tongue stuck out as if it was too large to fit inside her mouth. Her lips were red and blistered, and so were her cheeks. It looked like a case of hives. My first guess was an allergic reaction. Was she allergic to bees and had gotten stung? But it was October, and there weren’t that many bees around this time of year; most had returned to their hives for the winter or died in the cold nights. If she had been stung by a bee, the blistering on her face led me to believe she’d been stung in the mouth. I shivered at that thought. It seemed just too gruesome. It seemed much more likely that she’d eaten something she was allergic to, such as peanuts or shellfish. Those were the first two possibilities that came to mind because they were the most common allergies. There wasn’t much shellfish to speak of in Amish Country, but there was plenty of food made with peanuts or peanut butter.

  At JP Chocolates back in New York, we always had to be careful about where we prepared anything with peanuts or any kind of nuts because peanut and other nut allergies were so common. I suspected this type of allergy was the most likely culprit in the candy maker’s death.

  But that didn’t answer the question as to how she’d gotten inside the organ or on the platform five feet from the base of the door. Had she felt unwell and decided to climb up there to hide? Perhaps she had become disoriented and wandered into the organ and climbed the platform. That seemed unlikely. As far as I knew, Josephine had no reason to enter the church. She was Amish, and although I knew Amish ladies were members of Juliet’s quilting circle, which met in the church’s fellowship hall, I had never seen Josephine there. If I ruled out her walking into the organ under her own steam, that left only two possibilities. Either someone had forced her inside the space or put her there after she was incapacitated or already dead. I swallowed hard. That meant only one thing. That meant it was murder.

  “The police are on their way,” I heard Juliet say from the other side of the organ’s tiny door. Her voice echoed inside the organ. I looked up. The pipes rose twenty feet in the air. It was an engineering marvel and a wondrous instrument that was now tainted with the stain of death.

  “I hear a siren,” Juliet called.

  I jumped. The siren was my cue to move. The last thing I wanted was for the police to find me in the tiny space with Josephine’s body. My plan was to stay under the radar. What Charlotte had discovered had nothing to do with me.

  I wriggled out of the tiny space to find Charlotte sitting on the steps leading to the stage. Juliet knelt next to her, rubbing her back.

  Sheriff’s Deputy Aiden Brody strode into the church with a sure and long stride. Aiden was tall, with a loose, lanky build, and with hair and eyes almost the same shade of chocolate brown. If I was casting “small town sheriff’s deputy” in a movie, the actor would look just like Aiden, right down to the lopsided smile, the dimple in his right cheek that appeared only when he was amused, and that penetrating gaze.

  Aiden removed his navy Sheriff’s Department ball cap. Something about the small gesture of respect for the place of worship tugged at my heart, and I had to look away.

  Aiden Brody couldn’t have been more different from Eric Sharp, my ex-boyfriend and the bad boy of the New York celebrity pastry chef scene, if he tried. Yes, in New York there was such a thing as a bad boy pastry chef. You could find just about anything in the city.

  For nearly a year, Eric and I had kept our relationship secret because he had been on the board’s selection committee for Jean Pierre’s replacement when my boss announced his retirement well after age eighty. As Jean Pierre’s protégé, I had been favored to win the position. If the rest of the selection committee had found out Eric and I were together, I would have been disqualified, and everything I had worked for would have been lost.

  Even knowing that, I had been unable to stay away from Eric. Being with him was like playing with fire. I never turned him away when he showed up at my apartment doorstep. It was behavior that I had trouble explaining, even to myself. Maybe I was attracted to Eric because seeing him was exciting, reckless, and sneaky. I would never have used any one of those words to describe myself before dating him. I worked at being the best chocolatier that I could be. I gave my all to my career, and I lived and breathed chocolate. Eric seemed like an escape from the life I’d boxed myself into.

  Keeping a secret of that caliber for a whole year was impressive, but that secret, like all secrets, couldn’t be maintained forever, and it blew up in my face, thanks to a New York City tabloid. The newspaper revealed that I wasn’t the only woman in Eric’s life. I should have known a playboy like Eric wouldn’t be satisfied with one secret girlfriend when he could have two. Was it any wonder I’d sworn off men? That included sheriff’s d
eputies, especially sheriff’s deputies who had once considered me a murder suspect and would—I know—do so again in a heartbeat.

  Aiden scanned the room with his milk chocolate eyes.

  I listed the different kinds of chocolate in my head as I always did when I was stressed. It was a mantra I went back to again and again. White chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, sweet chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, cocoa, couverture, vermicelli . . .

  The chocolate litany didn’t help. I swallowed as the image of Josephine’s dead body came to the forefront of my mind again. I couldn’t believe that the woman who had been yelling at me in the middle of the square just shy of two hours ago was now dead and crammed inside an organ. There had been no indication that she’d been sick when I’d last seen her. In fact, she’d been full of vim and vitriol. That just strengthened my belief that she was most likely murdered.

  Juliet rushed to her son’s side. “Oh, Aiden, it’s just horrible.” She threw her arms around her son, who was a good foot taller than she. He patted her back. In that moment, she was more like the child than the parent. Aiden looked over his mother’s head and locked eyes with me.

  I turned away and went to Charlotte, who was perched on the steps leading to the organ platform.

  Charlotte buried her head in her knees. I sat next to her, and she leaned into me. “Shh.” I rubbed her back. “I know that it was a scary discovery, but the police are here now and will take care of everything.”

  She lifted her face from her skirt, which was damp with her tears. Her oval face was pale, and her light hazel eyes were wide with sheer fear. I thought back to when I’d first seen her on the square this morning. She had spotted Josephine and had seemed terrified then too, maybe less so, but she was clearly scared and worried as she’d watched Josephine. Did that mean that she knew her? Most of the Amish in Harvest knew each other. That, however, did not explain the kind of fear I’d seen on the girl’s face.