Chapter 3
As predicted, the snowfall ended by sunrise the following day, and while Stone Mill did get about nine inches, it was not hit by the blizzard that everyone had been talking about. At seven thirty, after Rachel had fed her goats, she and Mary Aaron set out a breakfast of fresh fruit, pastries, and cereal and went outside to begin shoveling the sidewalks. There was a heavy pewter sky, and the air was cold, but the wind had driven much of the new-fallen snow into drifts at the edge of the house, so the task wasn’t as bad as it might have been. They’d worked about fifteen minutes when Rachel’s brothers Danny and Levi came walking up, each carrying a snow shovel.
“I didn’t expect you two here this morning,” Rachel said, leaning on her shovel to catch her breath. “But I’m glad to see you.”
Levi was a sturdy boy of twelve with dark hair and a sweet smile, her favorite among her brothers, even though a sister wasn’t supposed to have favorites. Danny, soon to be fourteen, was just entering the difficult teenage years when an older sister, especially one who had shamed the family by leaving the church, could be a source of embarrassment. Lately, she’d been making an effort to get to know him better, but so far, he’d resisted.
“How did you convince Dat to let you come shovel snow for me?” Rachel asked Danny, but Levi answered.
“Didn’t tell him that’s why we were coming. It’s visiting Sunday. We’ve come to visit our sister.”
Danny averted his gaze and dug his shovel into the snow.
“Of course, it being the Sabbath,” Levi continued, “we’re not supposed to do work except what has to be done.”
“Like clearing snow for safety reasons,” Mary Aaron put in with amusement. She was wearing a blue scarf over her head and a man’s black beanie over that.
“Right,” Levi agreed. “So we can’t take money, but we can take breakfast.” He grinned, his nose and cheeks a bright red. “I’ll bet you’ve got something good in that kitchen.”
“Fair enough,” Rachel agreed. “And next time you come to help out, I’ll be sure to—” A distressed cry caught her attention, and she turned toward the street. Eddie, the boy who delivered the Sunday Harrisburg newspaper, was stumbling along the street, slipping, falling, and weeping.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel called. Eddie was a sensible youth, about the same age as Levi. “Are you hurt?” She stuck her shovel in a drift and ran through the snow, wading through drifts to reach the street. Mary Aaron, Danny, and Levi abandoned their shovels and followed her. “What happened to you?” she asked as she reached Eddie. His face was bright red with cold, his face wet with tears. The child looked terrified.
“Something wrong?” Jake Skinner had appeared on the front steps of the B&B in his coat and hat.
“We’re trying to find out,” Mary Aaron called back to him.
Rachel grabbed both of Eddie’s arms, forcing him to look at her. He was almost as tall as she was. “Do you want me to call your mom?” she asked calmly.
The paperboy nodded, wiped at his running nose with his coat sleeve. “Yeah. Could you call my mom? Please? I left my cell phone at home.”
Rachel let go of him and inspected him closely. She didn’t see any blood; he seemed more frightened than injured. “We’ll go right inside and call her, but you have to tell me what’s wrong. Are you hurt?”
Tears began to run down his red cheeks again. “It’s Mr. . . . Mr. Billingsly,” Eddie sobbed. “He’s—” The boy pointed with a shaking hand in the direction he’d just come.
“Take a deep breath and calm down.” Rachel took him by his shoulders. “What about Mr. Billingsly?”
Eddie’s wide eyes stared into her face. His normally fair skin had turned a pasty gray, his freckles standing out like raindrops on a dusty windowpane. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
Jake Skinner approached. “Is the boy hurt?”
Rachel shook her head. “I don’t think so.” And then to Eddie she said, “What were you saying about Mr. Billingsly?”
“I think he’s . . . he’s dead.” Rachel heard one of her brothers gasp behind her. “Outside . . . on his front porch,” Eddie managed. “I was delivering his paper. He . . . he wants it on the porch by the front door. Not in the yard. No tip for the month if you forget.”
“You think he’s dead?” Rachel repeated, trying to cut through the boy’s rambling. She could hear the faint wail of sirens.
“He’s got to be dead. I . . . I didn’t know it was him. I saw this . . . this thing—” Eddie choked. “On the porch. I thought it was an ice statue. You know, the ones for . . . for the contest today. But . . . but when I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t. It was a real person. All covered in ice. His eyes were open and he was . . . was staring at me.” The boy lowered his head and began to weep uncontrollably. “It was aw-awful.”
Rachel looked at Mary Aaron. “Could you take Eddie in the house and phone his mother to come and get him?”
“Vat is?” Danny asked. Both he and Levi were standing a few feet away, staring at Eddie. “Somebody’s dead?”
“Of course I’ll take him.” Mary Aaron smiled kindly at the paperboy and reached for one of his gloved hands. “Come on, Eddie. You can have something hot to drink while you wait for your mom.”
“Go on,” Rachel urged, glancing in the direction of Billingsly’s house. “She’ll call your mother for you. Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”
“No, it won’t,” Eddie said, shaking his head slowly. “It won’t. Because he’s dead.”
Rachel watched as Mary Aaron led Eddie toward the house. “Danny, you and Levi wait here. I’m going to go and see for myself.”
She glanced at Jake Skinner. He had picked up one of the snow shovels and started clearing the sidewalk, which struck her as odd since she was sure he had heard Eddie’s claim that Bill Billingsly was dead. And she was also certain her guest somehow knew Bill.
“You don’t have to do that,” Rachel called.
The man shrugged. “Needs doing.”
Rachel headed for Billingsly’s, deciding to walk on the street. A snowplow had been through already, so it was easier going than the sidewalk would have been. She quickened her pace as the wail of emergency vehicle sirens cut louder through the peaceful, tree-lined neighborhood. Could Billingsly really be dead? From what? Had the man suffered a heart attack shoveling snow?
As Rachel hurried, she became aware that Levi and Danny were following her; she heard their boots crunching on the new snow. “Go back to the house,” she called over her shoulder. They ignored her, catching up, then surging ahead. Other neighbors were coming out of their homes, some still in bathrobes and slippers. Staring. Talking excitedly. Rachel broke into a trot. Billingsly couldn’t possibly be dead.
Billingsly was definitely dead.
A few minutes later, Rachel stood in the midst of a gathering crowd of horrified onlookers. Although there were a few strangers, people in town for the Winter Frolic, she knew most of them, both Amish and English—among them several Amish couples; Jerry the mailman; Dr. Patterson the dentist; two of Eli Rust’s sons; Blade, who lived with his family a block away; and a Canadian couple who were staying at Stone Mill. She had no idea how the Canadians had beat her there.
Two uniformed state troopers were already at the scene, trying to keep civilians out of the yard and away from the house, but it was a lost cause. A minute ago a paramedic vehicle had come to a halt in the middle of the street in front of the house, but they made no move to approach the victim. One of the troopers had met the paramedics on the sidewalk and was talking to them.
Rachel, like everyone else, couldn’t stop staring. The entire scene was so bizarre that it was hard to believe it was real. Billingsly’s stately home and the yard surrounding it looked like a painting on a calendar. Snow frosted the roof, the porch, and the surroundings, and ice coated the trees and shrubbery, making a beautiful winter montage. The yard was a pristine white, the perfect tableau, broken only by the curve of a small, dark object lying half buried in the snow at the side of the house.
Rachel’s gaze kept returning to the front of the house. There were only two sets of footprints in the snow leading to the porch, one made by Eddie, Rachel assumed, and the other made by one of the troopers, who must have gone up the steps to check for a pulse. Eddie’s tracks hadn’t gone all the way up the stairs. It was obvious from his footprints where he had stopped, stared, then turned and run. His canvas bag of newspapers lay half buried in the snow at the bottom of the steps.
Everyone was talking excitedly, but in hushed tones. As Eddie had related, at first glance, Rachel would almost have taken the grotesque figure on the porch for one of the ice sculptures that had been springing up all over town all week. The thing had the distorted shape of a man. Upon closer inspection, a naked man. She glanced away, attempting to convince herself that this wasn’t some publicity stunt that Billingsly had conjured up to cause a commotion and sell papers. But she couldn’t help herself; she had to look again.
This was not an ice sculpture or a stunt.
Bill Billingsly was dead and not of natural causes. He was seated, his back to one of the large supporting pillars of his porch, his hands behind his back tied to the gray column. His legs were outstretched, as if he were lounging on the edge of the porch, his body parallel to the street. There was a length of rope wrapped around his ankles and calves.
Encased in ice.
And through ice, she could make out blue-and-white fabric tied around his mouth. A gag.
Rachel hated herself for standing there gawking at him, but she couldn’t look away as the macabre image burned into her consciousness. She took in more details: Billingsly’s dark, hairy legs and chest were as bare as his feet. He wore no hat or coat, though she could see now that he was wearing blue-and-green boxer shorts. And his eyes were open, as Eddie had reported. In fact, it was worse. Billingsly’s eyes and mouth gaped as if in a final scream, crying out for help that never came.
Rachel couldn’t help but begin to put together the facts she could assemble from the scene. Someone had obviously tied him to the porch; no one could do this to himself. She wanted to think that maybe he’d been killed and then left on the porch, but she suspected that wasn’t the case. This looked too . . . staged. Staring at Billingsly’s frozen body, she got the immediate and distinct impression that someone was making a statement.
“Could you step back, please?” One of the two troopers on the scene was trying to control the growing crowd. She was tall and attractive, even with her long blond hair tied back severely and no makeup on her face. Rachel had met her at a Christmas party she’d attended with Evan. She’d recently transferred from a troop farther west. Evan liked her; he said she was smart and had good instincts, that she was a good cop. Her name was Lucy . . . Lucy . . . Mars.
“Please,” Trooper Mars repeated, speaking with authority but not unkindly. “I need you to take a few steps back. If you could move to the sidewalk, that would be best.” She looked up and called out to several people cutting between the house next door and Billingsly’s house. “We’re asking that everyone stay off the property,” she insisted, waving them out of the side yard.
Rachel took a couple of steps back to stand on the sidewalk that had yet to be shoveled, her gaze still fixed on Billingsly’s hideous form. When she’d first reached the house, she’d been aware of no sounds but the creaking of snow-clustered boughs and the steady pulse of her own heart. Now, she was almost overwhelmed by the noises around her: the familiar click of photos being snapped with smartphones, more sirens, the clang of a fire truck, a dog whining, and Jerry’s disjointed voice, hoarse and rasping: “. . . I called it in. It was me . . . Walking my dog and the paperboy . . .” He walked toward the police cruiser with Trooper Mars, and his words were lost in the gathering hubbub of arriving firemen and more tourists and locals.
Rachel glanced to her left, and her gaze settled on her brother Levi, then on Danny. “You two need to go home. Mam and Dat will be very upset that I let you see this.” She herded them out of the crowd.
“Are you coming?” Danny asked.
“In a few minutes.” There were people everywhere now. Cars were pulling up, not just out front but on the side streets, too. In the alley behind Billingsly’s house. People were walking all over the yard. “You two go on now,” she told her brothers. “Have Mary Aaron get you some breakfast. I’ll see you for supper.”
“You’re still coming?” Levi asked.
“Of course.” She stood there after the boys walked away, watching as several state troopers and the paramedics approached Billingsly’s porch. They all stopped and studied the body. This had to be difficult for the paramedics, she thought. Being called to a scene where there was obviously nothing that could be done. She was no pathologist, but from his appearance, he’d been dead for hours.
A trooper and one of Billingsly’s neighbors began to hastily put up crime scene tape, and she was pushed back farther by the crowd. There were people everywhere. Where had they all come from? she wondered. She didn’t want to be there. She wanted to be anywhere else . . . but she’d been here last night. The thought came to her suddenly. She’d been here last night and would have to tell the police.
Billingsly hadn’t been on the porch when she’d come the previous night, obviously. But he’d been home—she was sure of that. She stared at the house, taking notice that there were no lights on as there had been the night before, neither the porch light nor any interior lights; it was a dark enough day that had there been lights on inside, she would have been able to see them. So this had happened after he went to bed?
Rachel made eye contact with an Amish woman standing near her. Mary Yoder, a distant cousin of her mother’s. She wore a heavy black wool cloak and black bonnet, her Sunday church clothes. She and her husband must have been passing through town on their way to services. There were several Amish church groups in Stone Mill and they had different Sunday schedules; while this week was a visiting Sunday for her parents and Bishop Abner’s flock, folks from another church district a mile away might soon be gathering for daylong services.
Rachel nodded and Mary nodded back, but Rachel made no attempt join the group of Amish, even though she knew most of them. They were family friends, cousins, cousins of friends. Some people might have been surprised to see their Amish neighbors there, but Rachel wasn’t. They cared as much about what happened in Stone Mill as the Englishers did.
An unmarked car pulled up behind the paramedics’ van. Two men got out. One was Evan. He wasn’t in uniform this morning. He was wearing dress pants under his parka. As a detective, he didn’t wear a uniform.
“Are they taking Billingsly to the hospital?” a bearded Amish man asked her in Deitsch. It was John Glick, Beth Glick’s uncle.
“Why would they do that if he’s dead?” Mary Yoder asked.
“Who knows what Englishers would do?” commented another man. “But who would do such a thing, even to him? It is a terrible thing to happen here in our valley.”
“I don’t understand it either,” Rachel agreed. “It’s unbelievable. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”
“After last summer, you can say that?” Rachel’s cousin Ruth asked. “After that poor girl you found drowned in the quarry?” She shook her head sadly. “You live as long as I have, you learn that there is much wickedness in this world.”
“ ‘Whoever diggeth a pit shall fall therein,’ ” someone quoted.
Sounds of agreement rippled through the small group dressed in black.
Rachel’s throat constricted. It was a quote from Proverbs her mother had always used when Rachel was a child. You get what you deserve was what it meant. But no one deserved this. Her gaze went to Bill’s body and then to Evan. Who would do something like this? she thought. Who had a problem with Billingsly? A lot of people, and she was at the top of the list. But who hated him enough to kill him?
She immediately thought of Jake Skinner. He was a stranger in town, a stranger whom Billingsly obviously had a history with, enough history to duck out of the school the previous day through the kitchen to keep from running into him. And then his behavior a few minutes ago, when he’d heard Bill was dead, was even odder. And suspicious. Who, upon hearing of the death of someone he knew, responded by shoveling a stranger’s snow?
Rachel walked out onto the street, wove her way around the police cars parked haphazardly and then back onto the sidewalk. When Evan saw her approaching, he said something to the other plainclothes detective and came toward her. She held up her hand. She knew what he was thinking. She shouldn’t be here. “I’m going,” she said when he stopped in front of her. “I just wanted you to know that I saw something odd yesterday. You need to contact a man named Jake Skinner staying at my B&B and tell him not to leave town.” She looked up into his eyes. Eyes she had fallen in love with at some point, though when she didn’t exactly know. “He shouldn’t leave until you talk to him, Evan.”