Death of a Winter Shaker Read online

  SISTER’S ROSES SAINTLY SUSPECTS

  Elder Wilhelm Lundel has a vision of returning the Shakers to their days of strength and glory, and there are those who would stand in his way.

  Sister Elsa Pike is a rough, hill-country woman with spiritual aspirations and a shady past. Rose is her chief rival for the position of eldress.

  Seth Pike, Elsa’s son, had ridden the rails with the victim, but something split them apart. Seth is a bitter man with some secrets in his past—one of which involves Rose.

  Albert Preston, a Shaker novitiate with his own secret past, claims not to have known the victim, yet they were seen arguing.

  Sister Charity McDonald is young, pretty, and seems unduly anxious since the murder.

  Molly Ferguson has many things a Shaker girl shouldn’t have—lipstick, perfume, face powder . . . and a secret that could shed some light on the murder.

  DEDICATION

  In memory of my mother,

  Virginia R. Woodworth,

  who taught me to love a mystery

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About the Author

  Also by Deborah Woodworth

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  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As I worked on this book, many people offered me support, encouragement, and, when necessary, delicately worded criticism. I want especially to thank my writers’ group: George Sorenson, Tom Rucker, Mary Logue, Andrew Hinderlie, Peter Hautman, Charles Buckman-Ellis, Marilyn Bos, and Becky Bohan. My thanks, as well, to Mary Trone for her invaluable editorial advice; to my editor, Tom Colgan; and to agent extraordinaire, Barbara Gislason. And to my family, the Woodworths; Marilyn Throne; the Schiferls; and my husband, Norm—thank you for believing in me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The North Homage Shaker village, the town and the county of Languor, Kentucky, and all their inhabitants are figments of the author’s imagination. The characters live only in this book and represent no one, living or dead. By 1936, the period in which this story is told, no Shaker villages remained in Kentucky or anywhere else outside the northeastern United States. Today one small Shaker community survives, Sabbath-day Lake, near Poland Springs, Maine.

  Deborah Woodworth

  1996

  PROLOGUE

  A WOMAN IN THE LONG, LOOSE DRESS OF THE SHAKER sister twirled on the dew-soaked grass, her arms flung straight out from her sides. Her voluminous skirts billowed around her like a dark bell. She spun silently for a minute, then, still circling, raised her face to the sky. Her cheeks glowed with the first pink rays of sunrise.

  The woman stopped and stiffened. Her body jerked as if racked by powerful spasms. Her heavy bonnet shook loose and tumbled to the ground. Within seconds, her legs collapsed beneath her. She crumpled and lay motionless, an enraptured smile on her upturned face.

  Hidden in a thicket of sugar maples, a young man crouched in the dark, watching. A dry leaf tapped his shoulder as it fell toward the ground. He gasped and steadied himself against the rough, cool bark. He told himself it was the damp, autumn air making him shiver, not fear. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being afraid.

  As the silent figure peered into the gloomy clearing, the woman opened her eyes to the sky. She rolled to a sitting position, shook the dew from her bonnet, and retied it under her chin. She heaved herself off the ground and wiped her hands dry on her skirt. With a deep breath, she began to spin again. Words tumbled from her mouth, but not words her listener had ever heard. He’d ridden the rails with all sorts of folks, had heard German and French and even some Gaelic, and this was like none of them and all of them together.

  Her watcher drew back into the darkness. Excitement made him careless, and he cracked a twig. Stifling a curse, he turned slowly and peered back into the clearing. The woman still twirled, heedless of any noise but her own strange language. The young man slipped away, smiling to himself. What he had seen could fit right into his plans, he thought. He nearly whistled but stopped himself just in time. He did not notice the third pair of eyes, watching him from the darkness.

  ONE

  YOUNG GENNIE MALONE’S LONG, DARK BLUE SHAKER cloak flapped behind her in the brisk wind as she wove through the kitchen garden on her way to the Herb House. Gennie could never resist a garden. During the summer, she had taken this path every day, no matter where she was assigned to work. She would brush her dress against the sweet lavender or chew on a sprig of spearmint when she thought no one was watching. By this time of year, the kitchen sisters had picked and preserved most of the vegetables and herbs, so Gennie had little to sniff or taste.

  Glancing around her, the girl paused to lift the edge of her bonnet and pull a few locks of auburn hair free to curl around her face. Then she ran the last few steps through the wet morning grass to reach the Herb House. Sister Rose would follow her soon and expect her to be elbow-deep in dried caraway and dill seeds. Rose might overlook a few strands of hair in ringlets, but she would not tolerate sloth.

  The white, clapboard building stood well back from the unpaved path that cut through the Shaker village. Half-hidden behind the Laundry and surrounded on two sides by herb fields, the Herb House felt like a secret hideaway to Gennie. She swept aside her skirt and eased open the door, always left unlocked. A warm cloud of strongly scented air enveloped her as she climbed the well-swept stairway to the second-floor drying room.

  She paused halfway up the stairs to play her favorite guessing game. Inhaling deeply, she could recognize some of the fragrances, even this late in the drying process. She could distinguish pungent rosemary from the sweet rose petals, sage from lemon balm, all mellowed by the smell of earth and hay. That morning the air was especially sweet, almost sickly sweet by the time she reached the second-floor landing. Though it had not rained during the past week, the humidity must have been high enough to cause some decay.

  Gennie stepped inside the drying room, her favorite place in the whole village. She’d live in here if Sister Rose would let her. Thick bunches of herbs hung upside down in rows from every possible peg, hook, and wooden drying rack. Long screens spread across tables held the smaller and more delicate items such as rose petals and thyme. The herb crops had been so full this year that the Society’s carpenter, Brother Albert, had hung long hooks from the rafters to dry the excess. Closing her eyes, she flung out her arms and twirled around, enjoying the faint crackle and the release of fragrances as her fingers tapped a few nearby bundles of herbs.

  When she opened her eyes, Gennie saw one loose bunch of catnip on the floor a few yards from her. She felt a prick of guilt, but quickly realized it was too far for her to have knocked the herbs from their high hook. As the stems dried and shrank, they sometimes slipped from the string used to bind them in bunches.

  She’d better move the catnip to a safe place. Scooping it up, she ducked under a ro
w of long tarragon stalks and found a drying screen covered with daisylike chamomile flowers. There was just room for the catnip.

  Rose would be along soon, time to get to work. Gennie unhooked a bundle of feathery dillweed and made for the large worktable under the east window. The table was long and solidly built. The sisters often sat around it to crumble and package seeds and dried herbs. On warm days, they would open the window, and she could hear them singing as they worked. The rising sun splashed light across the length of the table, across round metal tins waiting to be filled with dillweed and lavender buds.

  And across the still form of a young man. Gennie stared at his two bare, pigeon-toed feet. The dillweed crumbled in her clenched fists and trickled to the floor.

  Slowly, she stepped closer to the still form. The cloying, moldy smell she had noticed earlier grew stronger as she neared him. She didn’t want to breathe, but her pounding heart forced her to gulp the fetid air. She yanked a fresh handkerchief from her pocket and held it to her nose and mouth.

  She clutched at the hope that the man might only be ill or injured. She might still be able to help him; she had to go to him, check for injuries. She forced herself to approach the man’s face. His skin was grayish, his curly blond hair matted and dirty. Clearly, no one could help him now.

  Gennie knew him. He was Johann Fredericks, a handsome and charming drifter who had arrived in North Homage about two weeks earlier. Gennie and her roommate, Molly, had noticed him right away at mealtime, eating silently across the dining room with the brethren. He had been quite a treat to look at. Of course, Shaker girls were not supposed to do any such thing. But they had, and giggled about it together later that evening in their retiring room.

  Now Johann, though not a Believer, wore the plain, dark work clothes of the Shaker brethren. His trousers were too short for his long legs, revealing several inches of dirty ankle. Dirt clung to every visible part of his body. His bare toes looked as if they had been dredged through the mud. Gennie stared, horrified, at his grimy hands. They were crossed over his chest in a gesture of final peace. Beneath the hands lay a bouquet of dried herbs and flowers, tied with a frayed bit of twine.

  Gennie backed away and stumbled from the room.

  TWO

  THE WORRIED EXPRESSION ON SISTER ROSE CALLAHAN’S pale, lightly freckled face softened for a moment as she gazed out her office window and saw Gennie skim around the limestone corner of the Trustees’ Office.

  Gennie was her favorite of the young girls being reared by the North Homage Shakers. Rose hoped she would choose to sign the covenant and join the Society of Believers when she reached eighteen in a few months. Bright, young Believers were all too rare these days. But Rose remembered what it was like to be seventeen, though it was nearly half her life ago. She remembered how it felt to be lured by the bright, false promises of the world.

  Rose turned back to her desk, shaking her head at the memory of her own youth. A few tendrils of curly red hair pulled loose from her white cotton cap. She pushed them back under the fabric with a practiced movement and reached for the cup of rose hip and lemon balm tea she’d brewed for herself in the small Trustees’ Office kitchen. The tea had grown cold, like the air in her office, but it brought comfort. Like work and song and prayer, the daily taste of the tea, sweet and rich, bound her to the Shaker life.

  She had no regrets, she told herself. The call to become a Believer, the call that had brought her back to the Shakers seventeen years earlier, was as clear and strong as ever. All the stronger, she believed, because she had known worldly love before choosing to devote her life to the Society.

  Some of the other sisters believed that any venture into the world was dangerous. But Rose disagreed. If a young woman belonged in the world, she should be there. If she then chose the Society over the world, knowing what she was giving up, she’d follow the teachings of their foundress, Mother Ann, through eternity. But Rose knew only too well how few young people chose the Society over families of their own. She had watched North Homage’s alarming decline for many years.

  Rose sighed and pulled her work toward her. Copying numbers into a ledger book for the second day in a row had brought her aching shoulders. To ease them, she pressed back against her firm ladder-back chair, crafted by Brother Hugo especially to fit her tall, thin body.

  As the only remaining trustee of the North Homage United Society of Believers, now known even to themselves as Shakers, Rose was responsible for the community’s financial well-being, as well as relations between Believers and the outside world. Now thirty-five, she had been a trustee for ten years, and they had been good ones. Perhaps her humility needed further development, but she felt she had been born for this position.

  She examined her figures with satisfaction. Even in these dark times, the small squares on the ledger page added up to a comfortable total. Demand had been steady for packaged seeds and preserves and other Shaker products. Most of their northern Kentucky neighbors had not fared so well. Rose was pleased they were in a position to donate a goodly amount of produce to the poor.

  “Gazing into space to rest from thy exhausting labors?” Elder Wilhelm Lundel’s voice dripped with disdain. At sixty, the spiritual leader was an imposing, muscular man with a full head of white hair. His broad shoulders nearly touched the sides of her office doorway. He wore the brown smock and slate gray trousers of the nineteenth-century brethren. As required in the Society’s earlier days, he was clean-shaven. The stern set of his jaw made clear his displeasure with Rose. Again.

  As part of his plan to create a Shaker rebirth, Wilhelm had adopted the old-fashioned form of Shaker speech, using the more formal “thee,” rather than “you.” Rose allowed herself the uncharitable thought that he had done so in part because it made his words sound weightier.

  “If this calling is too difficult for thee,” Wilhelm continued, “I’m certain we can find others eager to replace thee.”

  Rose clenched her teeth in irritation. Eldress Agatha had taught her a prayer when she was a quick-tempered child—Mother Ann, lend me thy patience and humility. She used it often with Wilhelm. Rose raced silently through the prayer four times before her jaw began to relax.

  Calmer, she met the elder’s eyes. “You should take a look at these numbers, Wilhelm.” She slid the account book off the desk and held it out to him. “We’re doing well.”

  “Financially, perhaps. For now.” Wilhelm did not even glance at the page. He lifted a ladder-back chair from a wall peg and sat facing Rose, more than half a room between them. “Spiritually,” he said, “we are rotting away.”

  Rose relaxed her tired shoulders against the slats of her chair back. “I’m well aware that we are growing smaller,” she said, with the weary air of one who has endured the same argument many times too often.

  “Smaller! Hah! We are near death. A hundred years ago we had more than four thousand Believers. Four thousand! And now the eastern societies have fewer than one hundred among them.

  “We are all that is left of the western societies. Pleasant Hill, South Union, the Ohio and Indiana societies, they are all nothing but empty, rotting buildings. And why?” Wilhelm leveled a thick index finger at Rose. “Because they turned their hearts to the world, that’s why.”

  “The world is changing,” Rose objected. “Our strength has always come from our ability to adapt and give to the world. We do well in troubled times because we invent tools which save effort. We share our inventions with the world and gain friends and Believers. Brother Hugo came to us at first because we gave him a chance to develop his carpentry skills most creatively. And he has been a devout Believer for nearly sixty years now!”

  “They wallowed in luxury and adorned their bodies shamelessly,” Wilhelm continued as if she had not spoken. “They spurned the simple life of worship and hard work and modest dress, and they pandered themselves to the world. They were lost to God. And that is the result of thy ‘adapting to the world.’” His sneering tone made her words sound
foolish and shallow.

  Rose sighed. What was truly foolish, she knew, was to continue the argument.

  “What brings you here, Wilhelm?” Normally he would have summoned her to the Ministry House, to show who was elder and who was merely trustee.

  “Eldress Agatha.”

  Rose snapped to attention. “Is she all right?”

  Her mentor’s failing health worried Rose for many reasons beyond the loss of her friendship. Until a year ago, when she suffered her first stroke, Agatha had been more than a match for Wilhelm, but now Rose found that the task of tempering Wilhelm’s religious fervor fell to her. As Agatha sank, Wilhelm soared. At his insistence, North Homage Believers had reverted to nineteenth-century Shaker dress.

  “She is too ill to continue,” Wilhelm said, his heavy face showing no sorrow. “I am recommending to the Lead Society in Mount Lebanon that Agatha be relieved of her duties as eldress.”

  He can’t even wait for her to die, Rose thought. Agatha’s body might be weakening, but the two strokes had barely touched her mind. Rose felt her quick temper rising. Aware that Wilhelm was watching her reaction, she tried to give him none.

  “And who will you recommend to become the next eldress?”

  “Not thee.” Wilhelm leaned forward and planted his fists on his knees. “Thy past shows a certain . . .” His eyes glittered as he sought the most cutting words. “A certain spiritual weakness.”

  Rose bit the inside of her lip. Her past again. Her year in the world. She had returned at nineteen, confessed at worship service to the whole community, and been welcomed home. Wilhelm was the only one who continued to use her past against her. She tried to pray, but this time anger won.

  “My past is long past, you know that well, Wilhelm. I’ve confessed, I’ve atoned. Now it is up to God alone to judge me.”

  “As I’ve no doubt He will.” A small smile played on Wilhelm’s wind-roughened lips. “Meanwhile, I have another plan for thee. One which may help thy redemption.”