Death of a Winter Shaker Read online

  Rose’s fury dissolved into wariness. “What might that be?”

  “I have a journey for thee to undertake, beginning in March, when the weather warms. I want thee to lead the conversion of souls throughout Kentucky and Ohio.”

  “Wilhelm, that would be a mistake. We aren’t in the eighteenth century anymore. These are the 1930s, the country is tired and hungry. It has no energy for revivalism. We should help people now, not stir them up. As long as God feels we have work to do, He will provide us with the help we need.”

  Wilhelm stood and gripped the back of his chair, his eyes blazing. “We have a sacred calling, given to us by our beloved Mother Ann. We are called to save as many poor wretches as possible from their disgusting, carnal lives in the world. What good does mere charity do them? What is a full belly compared to the eternal joy of life as a Believer?”

  Rose wilted in her chair. So this was his plan to dispose of his two most outspoken critics. By March, if Wilhelm had his way, not only might she lose her position as trustee, she would be sent away from her home on a mission she couldn’t support. And dear, wise Agatha would no longer be eldress.

  Unless the Lead Society in New York interfered, Wilhelm would hold total control over North Homage. And he would drive them straight back to the eighteenth century. Her head had begun to throb, a common result of any discussion with Wilhelm.

  Startled by a sudden movement, Wilhelm and Rose turned to the open doorway. Gennie leaned against the doorjamb, her small chest heaving with the effort to catch her breath, brown eyes wide with terror.

  “Oh Rose!” she whispered. “It’s so horrible.”

  THREE

  EVEN WITH THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN FULL SWING and hobos wandering from town to town, violent crime was rare in small, rural Languor County, Kentucky. The Shakers’ reputation for generosity brought many hungry, homeless men—and sometimes women and children—to their door. But not everyone admired the Believers. Some resented them for their stores of meat and vegetables, and the shiny, black Plymouth parked next to the Trustees’ Office. Their refusal to fight in war, even to defend their country, infuriated many. So the discovery of a murdered man in North Homage’s Herb House stirred both anger and glee in many of their neighbors’ hearts.

  “We haven’t had a murder round here in five years,” the county sheriff, Harry Brock, said when he arrived at the Trustees’ Office steps at midmorning. “Funny it happened here, ain’t it?”

  Sheriff Brock’s thin, wiry form seemed to shift constantly. His suspicious eyes darted between Wilhelm and Rose, who stood a respectable distance apart. Running a distracted hand through his thick white hair, Wilhelm fastened his fierce eyes on the horizon. A still-shaken Gennie huddled beside Rose. The sky was splotched with black, and a growing wind whipped at Rose’s cloak. She drew the thick wool closer.

  “Sheriff Brock,” Rose said, raising her voice to command his attention. “We Shakers do not murder. To kill another human being goes against our most sacred beliefs. It is abhorrent and certainly not funny.”

  To her discomfort, Brock grinned at her. “Yeah,” he drawled, “but here we are. Funny.”

  Curious Believers had begun to cluster nearby. A plump, middle-aged sister, Elsa Pike, elbowed through a group of whispering women. She ignored Rose and barged toward Wilhelm. Elsa’s behavior no longer surprised Rose, but she had grown increasingly concerned that Elsa seemed to respect only Wilhelm.

  “Elder, we gotta do something,” Elsa said, anger pinching her plain, flat features. “Word’s out that we killed somebody. That’s hogwash, pure and simple, everybody knows we Shakers don’t kill, but there’s horses and wagons comin’ in already, just to see for themselves. Couple folks even stopped at the kitchen and asked the way to the body, of all the nerve. And if they think I’m going to cook for them and make it a party, well, they got another—”

  “Elsa!” Wilhelm rarely used a sharp tone with Elsa. It silenced her. “Yea, a young man has died, but of course we did not cause it. Go back to thy work now. There will be no extra cooking. The gawkers will have nothing to feed their disgusting curiosity.”

  Elsa hesitated. “This young man, was he one of us? One of the brethren?”

  “Nay, only a Winter Shaker, and not a promising one.”

  “I knew it,” Elsa crowed. “It’s that Johann, ain’t it? He was askin’ to get killed, the way he carried on. And with sisters and young girls, too.” Her smirk was more self-righteous than shocked.

  “Hush,” Wilhelm urged. He glanced at the sheriff, who had hurried off toward a tall young man just emerging from a dusty black Buick used by the Languor County Sheriff’s Office. Wilhelm almost pushed Elsa away, but stopped himself before he actually touched her. “Be careful about statements like that if the police question thee. Now get back to the kitchen.”

  Looking pleased with herself, Elsa trotted away on strong, hill-country legs.

  Molly Ferguson, Gennie’s roommate, stood apart from the crowd. She balanced a laundry basket on one hip, and her dark eyes fixed on Gennie. With a flick of her index finger, Molly signaled for Gennie to approach her. Molly’s eyes were wide and murky, her cheeks paled to a ghostly white against the black rim of hair edging her bonnet.

  Behind her, a group of men, mostly brethren, milled at the base of the Trustees’ Office steps. Elder Wilhelm murmured with Brothers Albert and Hugo and a tall, weathered man Gennie did not recognize. His head tilted toward Wilhelm, but he watched Rose. Rose’s attention was on Brock. She wouldn’t miss Gennie for a moment or two.

  “Hurry,” Molly whispered. She clutched Gennie’s wrist in a painful grip. “The sisters in the Laundry said you found a dead guy.”

  Gennie winced and nodded.

  Molly’s eyes went black. “Shaker?” she asked.

  “Nay, don’t worry,” Gennie said.

  “Who was he? Did you know him?”

  “Yea, but just by sight.”

  “Gennie,” Rose called, “we need you now.”

  “What was his name? Tell me,” Molly whispered, her husky voice straining with urgency.

  “Johann Fredericks.” Gennie tossed the name over her shoulder as she raced back toward Rose. When she arrived, breathless, she turned to wave to Molly. The laundry basket lay overturned, clean work smocks cascading onto the grass. Molly’s running figure receded toward the fields behind the Children’s Dwelling House.

  ***

  “This is Deputy Grady O’Neal,” the sheriff said, indicating a tall man in his mid-twenties with straight brown hair that fell forward whenever he moved. “Did you get hold of Doc Irwin? Good. This here’s Gennie Malone, the young lady who found the body.”

  Everyone turned to look at Gennie, who straightened at being called a young lady.

  “We’ll need her statement,” Brock continued.

  “I’ll stay with her while you question her, if you don’t mind,” Rose said. Her tone said that it didn’t matter whether they minded.

  “We’ll look at the scene first,” Brock said. “Here’s Doc now.”

  “Gennie, you stay here,” Rose said, placing a warm hand on her shoulder.

  “Sorry,” Brock said. “We’ll need her to tell us what everything looked like when she entered the building, what she moved or touched.”

  “But she’s only a child.” Rose’s arm went around Gennie’s shoulders and held tight.

  “Then she’s a child who found a dead body,” Brock said bluntly.

  “Besides,” said Deputy O’Neal in an educated voice that just covered a gentle Kentucky drawl, “she seems to be holdin’ up fine.” He smiled over at Gennie, who smiled back and shyly lowered her eyes.

  “Let’s go, then, but you stay close to me, Gennie.” Rose cringed inwardly as she noticed the glance that passed between Gennie and the young deputy. She would have to talk with Gennie soon.

  The Herb House door swung open easily and released the jumble of odors that Gennie had so welcomed earlier. But now the too-sweet smell was dom
inant, or perhaps she was more aware of it, knowing it signaled human decay. Rose scooted quickly through the door, holding her cloak so that it would not touch Deputy O’Neal, as he stood aside for them to pass.

  “My guess is the deceased’s been dead for a while,” said Doc Irwin, Languor’s only physician, as they entered the second-floor drying room. He didn’t elaborate.

  Returning nausea made Gennie’s stomach churn, but she clenched her teeth to control it as Doc Irwin approached the table where Johann was laid out. He leaned over and peered at Johann’s head and neck. He lifted aside the filthy hands, unbuttoned the shirt, and examined the chest area, then replaced the hands in their funereal pose. Gennie saw Johann’s chest for just a moment before Doc Irwin moved in front of him.

  “Stab wound,” he said quietly.

  Sheriff Brock leaned his head toward Grady. “Looks like that fella won’t be bothering Miss Emily anymore, don’t it?”

  As he stared at Johann’s body, a flash of anger distorted the deputy’s boyish features. In a moment, his expression cleared. He turned to Gennie.

  “Miss Malone—is it Sister Gennie?” he asked.

  “Just Gennie.”

  “OK, just Gennie, are you up to answering some questions?” He took a small notebook and a pencil stub from his coat pocket.

  “Of course,” she said, with what she hoped was spirit.

  Grady regarded her speculatively. “When you arrived this morning,” he asked, “did you touch anything in this room?”

  “Yea, I picked up a bunch of catnip that had slipped from the string holding it together.” She neglected to mention her high-spirited twirling among the hanging bunches.

  “Did you notice any signs of a struggle?”

  “Nay.” Gennie recounted for him as best she could her passage through the room toward Johann, as Grady scribbled in a small notebook. Then it came time to look once more at Johann’s body. Rose held Gennie’s hand as they walked to the table. The others stood aside to let her have a clear view.

  “Miss Malone,” said the sheriff, “all Doc did was he just opened the deceased’s shirt and lifted up his hands and put them down again the same way. So think hard. Did you touch him or move him or anything?”

  Gennie forced herself to look at the gray remains of Johann Fredericks. His Shaker work jacket had fallen open. Through the fingers of his right hand, she could see no rip in his shirt, no sign of a stab wound. She’d seen one before on the leg of a hobo who had come to the Trustees’ Office door for help. The man’s pant leg had been drenched with blood, and that was only from a small leg wound. But no blood stained Johann’s white smock and jacket.

  Gennie wondered why she hadn’t noticed before such a clean smock on a filthy Johann. Then the truth struck her. The herb bouquet on Johann’s chest had so riveted her that she hadn’t seen the state of his clothing. She noticed now, though, because the bouquet was gone.

  “Well?” Brock prodded. “That how you found him?”

  “Nay, that isn’t how I found him,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Someone moved the bouquet.”

  “What the—what bouquet, what are you talking about?”

  “When I found him, there was a bouquet of dried herbs and flowers in his hands. It was so strange . . . almost like he’d been dressed for a funeral.” Gennie saw puzzlement and disbelief in the faces of her listeners, all but Brock, whose foxlike features grew thoughtful.

  “You mean one of those bouquets hanging here?” he asked, jerking his head toward a small sheaf of lavender hooked on a nearby drying rack.

  “Nay, it was more like a real bouquet, with different flowers, but this one was dried.” Though Shakers never used flowers for adornment, Gennie remembered the enormous clusters of daisies and zinnias her own mother had loved to scatter around the house.

  “Gennie, this has been a shock for you,” Rose said. “It may have seemed as though you saw a bouquet just because you were surrounded by flowers and—”

  “Nay, I did see a bouquet,” Gennie cried. She appealed to Grady. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  Grady smiled sympathetically but said nothing. Sheriff Brock, however, grinned in a way that unnerved Gennie.

  “If she did see what she says,” he said, “it’d be mighty interesting, wouldn’t it? Makes me wonder real hard what somebody around here was up to.”

  Wilhelm had commandeered the Trustees’ Office, situated at the entrance to North Homage, from which to fend off the curious and none-too-friendly townspeople who had begun to collect. Rose worried that Wilhelm might incite the crowd, not calm it, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once. She led Brock, Grady, and Gennie from the Herb House, past partially cleared herb fields, across the village’s unpaved, main path, and up the walk to the Meetinghouse.

  The most important building in the village, the Meetinghouse was painted, repaired, and scrubbed with care. A picket fence with two gates surrounded the imposing, white structure. One gate opened to a pathway and the east door, to be entered only by men, and the second led to the west entrance, reserved for women. Most buildings in the village contained separate doors and stairways for men and women, to prevent their brushing against one another.

  Out of habit, Rose pushed open the west gate. She should have sent Brock and Grady through the east door, but she was too tired to force the issue. If Wilhelm saw them follow her through the women’s entrance, he would use it as yet another example of her unfitness to lead. She hurried them inside.

  A large room, a full two stories high, occupied much of the ground floor. Sunlight streamed through deep-set windows taller than a man. A doorway at the east end opened to offices and to a narrow stairway, which climbed to a second-floor observation room. From a small window in this room, the Ministry—the elders and eldresses—kept an eye on Believers and outside guests during a worship service. If anyone were up in the darkened room now, Rose thought, they could watch the interrogation without being observed. She hoped that the gathering crowd would keep Wilhelm busy. The less involved he was in this investigation, the more relieved she would be.

  Rose and Gennie lifted two straight, ladder-back chairs with woven seats from the pegs that lined the walls and placed them side by side on the spotless pine floor. Grady grabbed two more and put them much too close to theirs. Rose moved the chairs farther apart. Gennie started to sit across from Grady, but Rose gave her a firm push to the next chair.

  “Miss Malone,” Brock began, as Grady pulled out his pad and licked the tip of his pencil, “anything else you want to tell us? Like, how well did you know this Johann Fredericks?”

  “I hardly knew him at all,” she replied. She bit her lip but her voice was steady. “How could I? He was a man, and only a Winter Shaker anyway. I know who he was, that’s all.”

  “Whadd’ya mean, a Winter Shaker?” Sheriff Brock said sharply. “Why’d you call him that?”

  “Some people come to us in autumn, professing a wish to become Believers,” Rose explained, “but all they really want is food and clothing and a warm place to live for the winter. They leave us in the spring. So we call them Winter Shakers. We try to give to the world as best we can, but some people take selfishly.” She could have added that they planted more sweet corn and potatoes than they needed, so their neighbors could raid Shaker fields when their own larders were empty. But she doubted Brock would be impressed.

  “You got a lot of folks like that?” Brock asked.

  “Quite a few,” Rose answered. “These are difficult times. This depression has thrown many people into the streets. We can hardly turn them away.”

  Brock’s calculating eyes shifted to Gennie. “So, Miss Malone, do you know all the Winter Shakers?”

  Gennie shook her head.

  “Any reason you’d know this one?”

  Rose lightly touched Gennie’s arm, and said, “Tell him what you saw, Gennie.”

  Two male heads popped to attention.

  “What? What did you see?” Brock directed t
he questions to Rose.

  Rose folded her hands together again. “You should hear it first from Gennie. She’ll have seen much more than I could, since I was talking to Brother Hugo about bookbinding and carpentry. As I’m sure you understand, my attention was divided.” A smile teased the corners of her thin lips.

  “All right, then,” Brock said, leaning back in his chair. “What’d you see, Miss Malone?”

  Gennie hesitated.

  “It’s all right,” Rose said, smiling at her. “I saw you watching them, and I followed your gaze. I know you did not tell the monitors, but then neither did I. What’s done is done. Just tell what you saw.”

  Gennie gazed around the vast, sun-speckled room. “It happened here. You see, we are having Union Meetings again,” she explained, “once a week, because Elder Wilhelm thinks we should go back to the old ways.”

  Brock looked blank and shifted impatiently.

  Rose leaned forward. “The meetings are so the sisters and brethren can chat together,” she explained. “They are a kind of controlled social gathering. Elder Wilhelm feels that our behavior has been too loose in recent years. At times, sisters and brethren have laughed and talked together right in the street. Now we must save our conversations for the Thursday-night Union Meeting. We have monitors who keep an eye on them and guard against special looks between men and women.”

  Brock and Grady exchanged horrified glances.

  “Real interesting,” Brock said. “But what’s it got to do with this murder?”

  “Last Thursday,” Gennie began, “I was sitting with the children, watching the talking.”

  Rose thought back to the meeting. The sisters had sat in one straight row, hands folded right over left. Now and then a hand was raised to gesture, then carefully refolded. Several feet across from the sisters sat the brethren, their chairs spaced more widely so that one man could talk to two women, since there were twice as many women as men in North Homage.

  “There really wasn’t much for me to do,” Gennie continued, “so I . . . I made up a game. I tried to guess what everyone was talking about just from how they looked, you know, their faces. I watched Charity—Sister Charity McDonald—for a while, and—”