Free Murder, Plain and Simple by Isabella Alan

paws.
    She smiled triumphantly. “Works every time.”
    “You keep jerky in your buggy?” I asked.
    “Buggy rides are long. You never know when you need a bite to eat.” She climbed into the buggy with the ease of someone who did it every day of her life.
    I laughed and climbed inside, falling into the seat like a bag of sand. I hoped the dismount would go more smoothly.
    Anna clicked at the horse, and we rocked into motion. The childhood memories of riding in my uncle’s buggy came to my mind. The pleasant rattle of the carriage and the rocking back and forth were like being in an adult-sized cradle. In my mind’s eye, I could see
Aenti
in the front of the buggy working on a lap quilt. If she was seated, she was always quilting. Her mind was barely occupied by her stitches. Despite her lack of attention, she never dropped a stitch or strayed from the quilting pattern.
    Anna turned on Clay Street, and I pretended to be fascinated with the Holmes County Courthouse, which was a beautiful sandstone building with enormous arched windows on all four sides. A blindfolded lady of justice held scales over the public entrance, and a clock tower was perched on the roof. In front of the courthouse, where Jackson Street and Clay intersected, was a large green courtyard. In the middle of the courtyard was a nineteenth-century American soldier statue, austerely surveying downtown Millersburg. To the north side of the courtyard was a brick building, the Holmes County Old Jail, which now housed civil servant offices even though jailhouse bars remained on many of the windows. I suspect they left them on for historical purposes, but I wondered how the civil servants felt looking through barred windows each day. Was it a view I would come to know well because of Joseph’s murder?
    Anna lifted a hand from the reins and squeezed mine, which were folded in my lap. “I miss her too.”
    Surprised, I turned to her. How did Anna know I was thinking about my aunt?
    She adjusted the reins in her hands. “I miss her every day, but no more than when I sit down to quilt. Your
aenti
was the best quilter in the county. No one else in the circle can come close to her talent.”
    I bit the inside of my lip. “What can you tell me about the wedding quilt that was in the shop?”
    “It was some of Eleanor’s best work. She made it a few years back. It was one of the last quilts she pieced and quilted herself before she became too ill to do it.”
    I winced as I thought of it in tatters and spattered with blood on the stockroom floor.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked as a minivan whizzed past us.
    I squirmed on the hard seat. “The quilt was with Joseph.”
    “You mean he took it?”
    “No, I mean . . .” I hadn’t considered that Joseph may have been the one to take the quilt off the wall before, but I guessed it was possible. “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Then what?” Her dark brown eyes magnified by her glasses bored holes into me.
    I swallowed. “It was with his body, covered in blood and torn to pieces.”
    “But it was on the wall.” Her face paled.
    “It wasn’t when I went into the shop this morning. I can assure you of that.”
    She took a deep breath. This seemed to come as more of a shock to her than Joseph’s death. “But that’s one of her best quilts. It’s priceless.”
    Anna’s change of mood wasn’t making me feel any better about the loss of the quilt. “I know.”
    She shook her head. “There must be a reason that the quilt was there. Someone had to have made an effort to get it down off the wall. Those quilt hooks aren’t easy to work. Whoever got it down did it for a reason.”
    I hadn’t thought about it. “You think it was a message.” The morbid thought brought a sour taste to my mouth.
    She nodded and the ties of her prayer cap waved back and forth.
    If it was some kind of message, it was meant for me.

Chap ter Ten
    T he gentle rock of the buggy on pavement turned into a spine-tingling rattle on