Chapter Twenty-Three
Lois and I walked toward the lumberyard from the spot where she had parked her car. “I have thought of a cover story for us.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “A cover story?” I asked.
“We have to have a reason for being here, don’t we? So you are helping me pick out wood to build a shed in my backyard.”
“But you can’t build anything in your backyard—you’re renting,” I argued.
“I know that, but the men working at the lumberyard don’t know that.”
“Why do we have to have a cover story?” I asked. “Why can’t we say we want to talk to someone because Ben worked here?”
Lois sighed. “If that’s the tactic you want to go with, fine, but I’m telling you the cover story would be golden.”
I shook my head. I was barely able to hear her. The closer we got to the giant building, the louder the noise around us became. There was the sound of large band saws and sanders. I guessed that was how they prepared the wood for sale.
A pickup truck roared up the drive and pulled into the spot right next to us.
Lois jumped back. “Whoa, he needs to be more cautious when he’s driving. He could have killed us.”
The young Englisch man who climbed out of the truck wore jeans and a Miller’s Lumberyard long-sleeve T-shirt. Without looking at us, he walked around the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate. The truck bed was full of old barn wood. He began to unload it onto a pallet nearby, piece by piece.
Lois nodded at him and gestured with her head.
I sighed. I understood what she was trying not very subtly to tell me: ask him about Ben.
I walked over to him but remained a few feet away, out of range of the wood he was throwing onto the pallet.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
The man went right on throwing wood onto the pile. He jumped into the truck bed in one leap and began throwing pieces from the bed onto the pallet seven feet away. Bang. Bang. Bang. The wood hit the pallet. The noise was terrible.
“Excuse me?” I tried again.
Again nothing.
“Hey!” Lois shouted at the top of her voice.
Startled, he dropped the two by four he held into the truck bed. “Who are you?” he shouted over the din.
“We need to talk to someone about Ben Baughman,” I cried over the roaring sound of the saw. I wanted to get it out before Lois could tell him the made-up story about her shed.
He stared at me. “Did Flora send you?”
“Flora?” I blinked. “Nee.”
“Wait.” He jumped out of the back of the truck bed. “The two of you aren’t with Flora.”
“Do you mean Flora who works for Ford Waller?”
“Must be my mistake. Flora is the only Amish woman I—I’ve spoken to. She said that they needed wood to repair the flea market.”
“It’s going to take a little more than wood to clean up that mess,” Lois whispered to me.
“Flora isn’t Amish,” I said. “She’s Mennonite.”
He removed his work gloves and shoved them into the back pocket of his jeans. “All the same to me. If you’re not here for Flora, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”
“We need to speak to someone about Baughman,” Lois said in a cop-like manner.
“Why?” The young man began moving wood again.
“She’s his aunt,” Lois said. “His only relative in the county, so we came here to collect any personal belongings he might have left at work.”
I groaned inwardly. I knew one of these days we were going to get caught in one of Lois’s lies.
He tossed another board on the pile. “I didn’t know that Ben had any family in Ohio. He said his family was in Michigan.”
“Millie moved here from Michigan too,” Lois said, going on with her tale.
That was technically true, but I hated it that Lois was resorting to lying to get information.
Lois straightened her back. “And how do you know Ben, young man? What’s your name?”
He stared at her. “I’m Jay Kerman. I work here at the lumberyard. Ben and I worked the same shift.”
“Do you know who we should talk to about Ben’s things?” Lois asked.
“I suppose I can get my boss if you really want to speak to someone about his things, but none of us kept anything here. There’s nowhere to put anything. This is an open-air lumberyard. Nobody leaves anything here that he doesn’t want to lose.”
“We’d still like to speak to your boss.”
He tossed one more board on the pile. “Fine.”
He went into the building that all the noise was coming from.
“Don’t you think it was odd that his first thought was that we were with Flora?” I asked.
“It was because he can’t tell the difference between Amish and Mennonites,” Lois said as if that explanation was enough.
I frowned. But Jay lived in Amish Country. Even if he didn’t know the difference between Amish and Mennonite, I doubt Flora was the only woman of either faith that he knew.
“Who’s asking questions about Ben?” an Englisch man asked as he approached. The newcomer was as short as he was stocky. The muscles in his thick arms pressed up against the sleeve of his gray polo shirt with the lumberyard’s logo embroidered on it.
Lois waved. “That would be us.”
He looked from Lois to me and back again. His gaze settled on me. “You must be the aunt then.” He pointed at Lois. “No one would mistake her for Amish.”
No one would.
“That’s a little judgy, don’t you think?” Lois asked.
I gave her a look. If we wanted information from this man, it would serve us well not to annoy him.
“I’m Brandon Miller, and this is my lumberyard. I’m sorry to say that I don’t have anything of Ben’s here. I always tell the men to take their possessions home. There is no way to secure them in the yard.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Lois said. “Did you see Ben the day he died?”
He frowned. “He came in for his normal shift that day. I think it was three until eight. I closed up at eight and said good-bye to him. Usually only English men work the late shift like that, but Ben asked for it, so I let him have it.”
That was interesting, but I guessed that the other Amish men had farms and families to return home to, while Ben only had Tess. He was working all these jobs to prove his worthiness to Tess’s father, but from what Tess had said herself, there didn’t seem much point in that. Her father’s mind was made up even before she met Ben. She was going to Wyoming whether she wanted to or not.
“I’m sorry that I can’t help you, ladies, but there is nothing here of Ben’s. We were all saddened when we heard the news of his death. Terrible, terrible thing to have died in the fire like that. He was a reliable worker for me, which at times can be a challenge to find.” He shrugged. “If there is a funeral service for him, please let us know.”
I nodded. “We will.” Even as I said this, I wondered what kind of services there would be for Ben, and whether they would be here or in Michigan. I needed to ask Deputy Aiden if he had been able to get hold of Ben’s family in Michigan. No matter the rift that might have happened between them, Ben’s father deserved to know the fate of his son.
“Thank you for your time,” I said.
Brandon nodded, and then he turned to Jay. “Come inside for a moment. I want to show you where that pallet should go when it’s loaded.”
Jay nodded and followed Brandon back into the aluminum building, looking over his shoulder at Lois and me as he went. Lois gave him a little finger wave as he disappeared into the building. When the two men were out of sight, she walked around the side of the building, which was in the opposite direction from where she had parked her car.
“Lois,” I hissed. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to do what we came here to do. I’m checking out the lumberyard where Ben worked.”
“They said there was nothing to see here. Ben left the lumberyard at eight, as he expected to.”
“They say that, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick peek.”
I put my hands on my hips.
“Oh, come on, Millie,” she said, sounding like a child. “This could be my chance to use the lock picks.”
I rolled my eyes. “Lois, you heard Brandon say that they don’t lock anything around here.”
“Okay, fine, maybe today is not the day for the lock picks, but we can at least have a look around.”
“What if we get caught?” I asked.
“Then we say you wanted to see the place where your nephew spent so much time before he died, just to be closer to him. To those two, we are a couple of tottering old ladies. They will buy our story.”
“My nephew,” I said with a sigh.
“Ben told you and everyone he knew that he viewed you as an aunt. You might not be related by DNA, but you are an adopted relative. In my book, that’s just as good.” When she said it like that, I could see her point.
She crept around the side of the giant building. It was the only structure on the large cleared lot. Most of the space was used to store the wood that the lumberyard sold to customers and builders. Behind the metal building were rows and rows of wood of every type. There were also giant logs that still had the bark on them and needed to be planked. An Amish man drove a forklift weighed down with freshly cut logs. He was so focused on his task I doubted that he would have seen Lois and me even if we’d run out in front of him waving our arms.
“I really think we shouldn’t go out into the lumberyard. They are moving very heavy machinery and piles of boards. It’s too dangerous for us and for the men. We could startle them, and that will cause them to make mistakes.”
“Fine,” Lois said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think this snooping thing sounds a bit more exciting than it actually is.”
Butted up next to the building was a pile of pallets that were waiting to be used. A flash of red behind the pallets caught my eye. “Oh!” I gasped.
Lois was at my side in a moment. “What is it?”
“Lois, look at this,” I said. I walked around the pallet and grabbed the handlebars of a red bicycle and rolled it out. “It’s Ben’s.”
She stared at it. “Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” I said as I bent over the bike for a better look. “See that dent in the fender?”
She nodded.
“My sister Harriett gave him the bike when we lived in Michigan to thank him for all his help around her farm. This was years ago, when she had still been able to move around and sit outside for a bit.” I took a breath as an image of my sister in the last days of her life came back to me like a vivid dream or nightmare. It wasn’t easy watching someone die over days, months, or in Harriett’s case, years. I swallowed. “There’s a dent on the front fender from when Ben ran into a tree when he was thirteen. It was a bad accident, but it could have been much worse. He went over the handlebars and was lucky to break only his arm. He was more upset over his bike than his arm. After the accident, he saved money for months to have the bicycle repaired. He got it back into working order, but there was still a small dent in the front fender that wasn’t hammered out. Ben could have replaced the fender eventually, but he never did because he said that it was a gut reminder to go slower and think things through.”
“What are you two doing back here?” a young male voice asked. “You said you were leaving.” Jay stood on the other side of the tower of pallets with his arms folded.
“You said there was nothing of Ben’s here. Then how did his bike get behind those pallets?” Lois asked.
Jay scowled at us. “How would I know?”
“How did Ben get from the lumberyard to the flea market the night of the fire?” Lois asked Jay. “There must be twelve miles between the two sites, and he would only have an hour to make the ride. He never would have been able to walk the whole way in that time.”
“I told you, I don’t know. Why are the two of you assuming that I know anything about Ben? I don’t! I just worked with him a few days a week. It wasn’t like we were friends. He was Amish.”
“Oh-kay,” Lois said. “We didn’t mean to upset you. And for the record, Millie is my friend, and she’s Amish.”
He took a breath. “I don’t know why the bike is here. He must have left it,” Jay said. “Maybe he got a ride with someone or took an Amish taxi.”
“Can we take the bike?” I asked, but I had already decided that I wasn’t leaving that lumberyard without the bicycle in Lois’s car.
He frowned. “I don’t see why not. Just take it and go.”
Jay watched us as we rolled Ben’s bike around the side of the building and into the gravel parking lot where we had left Lois’s car.
“How are we going to get the bike in the car?” I asked.
“Oh,” Lois said unconcernedly. “We can put it in the trunk, and I can tie it down. I still have the rope from taking that chair home from the flea market.”
It took some doing, but between the two of us, Lois and I were able to lift the bike into the trunk of her car, back wheel first. She then tied it down with elaborate knots. “Did I tell you that my third husband had a boat on Lake Erie? I got really good at tying knots while we were married.”
I shook my head and wondered what else I didn’t know about Lois. Jay kept an eye on us from where he worked at unloading the pickup. It seemed to me that he wanted to be certain we actually left. I couldn’t help but wonder why he, in particular, was so worried about what Lois and I were up to when he claimed to have hardly known Ben.
“There!” Lois pulled the last knot tight. “That should hold until we can get it to your house. That’s where it should go, am I right?”
I nodded. “Do you think we should tell Deputy Aiden about the bike?” I asked.
She thought about this as she walked around the car and opened the driver’s side door. “That’s hard to say. He wasn’t that encouraging about our helping out when I called him earlier today.”
“Let’s wait then. You have to get back to the café, and I have a quilting circle meeting tonight.”
“So soon?” she asked.
“Ya, Ruth wants to talk about how we plan to replace the quilts lost in the fire. I feel bad for Iris. If I know Ruth, she will make her feel horrible about opening our booth at the flea market.”
“Iris couldn’t have known that the building would burn down,” Lois said to me over the roof of the car as I opened my own door.
I shrugged. “That won’t make any difference to Ruth, I’m afraid.” I climbed into the car.