Assaulted Pretzel (20 page)

Al offered a grudging nod-shrug combination. “I guess there’s something to be said for that line of thinking, Keith, though I wish the one time would have been enough. Can’t help but feel two murders in as many months might start to hurt Heavenly’s reputation.” Turning his focus on Claire, Al nudged his chin toward the end of the table where a chair was normally placed for these meetings. “How’s Diane holding up with everything she’s had to deal with out at Sleep Heavenly? I didn’t get to talk to her when she called to say she wasn’t coming this morning. She alright?”

Claire pulled her focus from Isaac and fixed it, instead, on Al, the man’s inquiry bringing yet another worry to the foreground of her mind. “Aunt Diane will be okay. She’s still blaming herself for the break-in, and that’s weighing
on her more than I’d like to see. But that’s not why she didn’t come today. One of the couples staying with us this week wanted to take her to breakfast in Breeze Point. She’ll be here next month and—”

“Excuse me, folks, mind if I interrupt for a few moments?” For the second time that morning, all heads turned toward the door. This time, though, it was Jakob, who stood just inside the threshold of the makeshift meeting room Al had set aside in the back of his store.

Rising to his feet, Al waved Jakob over. “Good morning, Detective Fisher. Welcome. Would you like me to set up a chair for you?”

Jakob declined but not before taking a moment to note each and every business owner seated at the table. The fact that the smile slipped from his face when he got to Claire wasn’t lost on her. In fact, if she was honest with herself, it hurt. A lot. His odd behavior had come out of nowhere and left her feeling more than a little confused.

“I just wanted to stop in and assure everyone here that we’re working around the clock to solve Robert Karble’s murder. We know that a crime like this can impact a town on many levels, not the least of which is tourism. But we’ll find our man and we’ll put this mess behind us. You’ve got my word on that.”

“Then, if all goes well, maybe those of us sitting around this table can stop feeling like our livelihoods are under attack.” Howard took a hearty bite of the powdered donut he’d commandeered from the center of the table upon his arrival. “First, there was Walter’s whole thing, then there was the toy deal that went awry and threatened a few of us at this table, and now…this. Almost makes me think Heavenly got dropped in the middle of a city somewhere.”

“It could still happen, you know,” Samuel said in the
strong yet quiet voice that always made everyone stop and listen to the Amish furniture maker. “Just because that man is dead, it does not mean his company will not still make Amish toys.”

“But without Daniel and Isaac’s plans to use as guides—”

“Plans, schmans,” Al said, cutting off Keith as he did. “How hard would it be to draw up a set of simple toy plans, make them out of wood, and call them Amish?”

“It wouldn’t be hard at all,” Howard mused. “They wouldn’t truly be Amish made, but they could certainly be touted as Amish inspired.”

“Karble Toys will not make Amish line. Robert is dead.”

Isaac’s mumbled confidence was eventually picked up by Keith. “You know something? Isaac is right. Assuming Karble Toys doesn’t implode without its leader,
and
they have a public relations genius hidden away who actually
knows
what they’re doing, the company is going to want to distance themselves from what happened to Karble as soon as possible.”

“Why do you say that, Keith?” Al liberated a donut from the platter in the center of the table and hoisted it into his mouth.

“Toys are supposed to be happy. Murder isn’t. The sooner they can push that black mark under the carpet the better. Launching a line of toys that will only serve as a reminder of what happened to the company’s former president would bring what happened back into people’s minds all over again. Someone with little experience in the business might see Karble’s murder as a way to drive business on sympathy. But it wouldn’t be long before they realized their mistake,” Keith explained. “I’m just disappointed I didn’t put two and two together before now.”

Al lifted his half-eaten donut into the air and nodded at Keith. “And that, ladies and gentlemen of the Lighted Way
Business Owners’ Association, is why this guy is our marketing whiz. He thinks much faster and far savvier than the rest of us do.”

And Al was right. Keith was a smart man. But Isaac had
come
to the meeting already convinced Karble Toys would abandon its plans for an Amish line in the wake of Robert’s murder.

Was that simply because he, like Keith, had a feel for how such an event would play out in the business world? Or was it something more along the lines of a lucky guess?

Or, perhaps, wishful thinking?

“Wishful thinking,” she whispered to herself mere seconds before a chill shot down her spine.

“What was that, Claire?”

At the mention of her name she looked up to find Jakob watching her curiously from his position behind Al. “Excuse me?”

“You just said something about wishful thinking.”

In a scramble to cover her tracks, Claire quickly plastered a silly expression on her face and topped it off with a shrugged apology aimed at everyone seated around the table. “Oh, I’m sorry. I…I guess I was channeling a movie I watched last night before bed. It happens sometimes.”

She knew she sounded like an idiot, but she didn’t care. It was the best answer she could come up with in lieu of voicing the fear that had come from left field to add a second—and potentially stronger—suspect to the lineup previously reserved for Daniel Lapp.

*   *   *

C
laire stepped out of Gussman’s General Store and paused on the cobblestoned sidewalk to breathe in the crispness of the autumn day. The meeting had gone well with lots of
ideas for the upcoming holiday season volleyed around, but even Claire knew she’d been a rather lackluster member of the monthly-meeting-turned-brainstorming-session.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried to give some input on how best to make Lighted Way reminiscent of Dickens. Because she had. But every time she tried to focus for longer than a moment or two on someone’s decorating idea or suggested street-wide promotion, she found her thoughts wandering back toward Isaac. The fact the toy maker had bid a hasty retreat within minutes of Jakob’s departure had only made things worse.

Twenty-four hours earlier, she’d been heartbroken at the very real possibility that Daniel had killed Robert Karble in a desperate attempt to save his livelihood. Now, after everything she’d learned from Melinda that morning and observed on her own in Isaac during the meeting, she couldn’t help but feel as if she’d had both the suspect and the motive wrong.

Isaac Schrock certainly had a lot of factors that warranted a turn in the hot seat. He had an emotional connection with the victim—one that could have just as easily been tinged with resentment as anything else. He’d shared his love of making toys with his father and was under the impression that shared connection was going to help not only him but his coworker and even some of the people in their community. And then, while feeling good about the unexpected benefit of reaching out to the victim, he’s hit with the fact that his actions were leading the way to a business decision that was poised to hurt the same people that, only days earlier, had stood to benefit.

The man had no doubt been on quite a roller-coaster ride the past few weeks. The only question that remained was
whether he’d snapped under the pressure of the twists and turns.

“I take it you and the detective have had some sort of disagreement?”

She looked over her shoulder and smiled at the plump man who’d just emerged from Al’s side door. “Oh, hi, Howard, I thought you’d already left.” Turning around, she planted an affectionate kiss on the seventysomething man with the burgeoning belly, stubbled chin, and shiny-as-a-new-penny bald spot on the top of his head. “Did you enjoy the meeting this morning?”

The owner of Glick’s Tools ’n More tucked his thumbs behind the suspenders he always wore and rocked back on his heels, his wide smile and animated eyes quickly pulling her from the doldrums. “I enjoyed the donuts most of all. But some good ideas came up today, so I guess it was a good meeting, too.”

It felt good to laugh, and in that moment she realized just how little laughing she’d been doing since the festival. “I won’t tell Al you said that.”

“Why? I just said that very same thing to him not more than two minutes ago.”

She peeked around Howard’s stout frame toward the general store’s side entrance. “How did you come out after I did? When I left, the only one in there was Al.”

“I thought, seeing as how I ate most of those donuts by myself, that the least I could do was take the plate into that little kitchen Al’s got on the other side of the storeroom.”

“Well, that was nice of you.” And it was. She just didn’t need to sound so fervent when she said it. But she knew why she had. Somehow, someway she was hoping Howard’s
happy-go-lucky demeanor could seep into her soul and get her through the rest of the day.

“So what’s wrong, Claire? What’s got you and Detective Fisher avoiding each other the way you did when he stopped by at the beginning of our meeting? That’s not like the two of you.”

She considered protesting his observation, maybe even chalking it up to the fact she hadn’t slept all night, but, in the end, she knew it was futile. The problem, though, was how to answer without clueing the good-hearted town gossip in to the fact that Jakob and Martha were talking.

“It’s nothing, really. He’s just been distracted lately with the murder investigation and everything, and I’ve been distracted, too, worrying about Diane.”

Like a dog who’d suddenly been thrown a bigger, better bone, Howard jumped on her words. “You tell Diane that Howard Glick says that break-in wasn’t her fault. Whoever was after that Karble fellow was just finishing the job is all.”

“Finishing the job?”

Howard filled his cheeks with air then slowly released it along with a slow, deliberate nod. “Of course. Seems to me that whoever ransacked that fellow’s room was just making sure there wasn’t any proof left behind tying him to the murder.”

“But Robert Karble was murdered at the fairgrounds. How would there be any proof at an inn that’s three-quarters of a mile or so down the road from the scene of the crime?”

“I’m not talking about physical proof like fingerprints or bloody shoe tracks or anything like that.” More than a little aware of the way she was hanging on his every word, Howard paused long enough to run a hand along his stubbled jawline before stopping to scratch his chin. “What I’m
talking about, Claire, is something that links the murderer to his victim.”

“Like…” she prompted a bit impatiently.

“Like a picture or a letter. Something like that.”

Reaching outward, she grabbed hold of the railing that led to the general store’s front porch and used it to steady herself against the dizzying effects of Howard’s comment.

A letter…

I
t took every ounce of theatrics Claire could muster to unlock the front door of Heavenly Treasures and engage her first few customers with the kind of welcoming smile that came so naturally on any other given day. But with Esther having the day off, she really didn’t have any other options. Besides, business had been slow enough the past few days she didn’t need to make things worse by being unfriendly.

Still, even as she flashed just the right smile and answered any and all questions in an engaging fashion, she couldn’t help but revisit her conversation with Howard. Everything the man had said made perfect sense.

The problem was where that perfect sense pointed. Or, rather, toward whom it pointed.

So much about Isaac Schrock as Robert’s murderer fit. And it fit well.

But if she went to Jakob with everything she’d learned
and it turned out she was wrong, the repercussions from opening Isaac’s box of secrets could end up needlessly hurting an awful lot of innocent people, including Isaac, himself.

No, she needed to be sure before she said anything. She had to be. Locking up his brother for murder would be hard enough on Jakob. Saddling him with that stress prematurely was unnecessary.

She’d tell him when she had proof.

Or when she verified her suspicion that Isaac’s letter was missing from Robert’s room.

The familiar snort of a horse via the shop’s side window brought her to the screen in time to see Benjamin jump down from his buggy seat and reward the animal with a quick pat to the side of its long face. Judging by the hour, the man was making the first of many stops throughout the day to check in on his sister Ruth and her bake shop. Claire would have found it curious that it wasn’t Eli in the alley if not for the fact that Esther wasn’t working, either. With any luck, the young couple was finding ways to spend the day together as they moved toward an engagement everyone knew was coming.

When that day came, she knew she’d lose Esther as an employee. For once an Amish woman married, her attention turned toward the home and the children she’d soon birth. It wasn’t a day Claire looked forward to for herself, yet it was one she eagerly anticipated for her friends.