Her Amish Protectors. Janice Kay Johnson
In his early thirties, stocky and stolid, Carroll had demonstrated the kind of judgment and work ethic that put him at the top of a short list for promotion. Today, he and Riley Boyd had gone to Nadia’s block to speak to the neighbors who hadn’t been home yesterday.
Ben leaned back in his desk chair. “Anything?”
“I found one woman, a Laura Kelling, who saw a light in Ms. Markovic’s place during the night Friday. She’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, but has no idea what time.”
Wonderful. “Overhead light?”
“She was uncertain about that. She lives across the street, but a few doors down. Not a perfect angle. She said the light was diffuse, just a glow coming from somewhere inside, downstairs. She claims it went out while she was watching.”
“So something about it caught her eye,” Ben said thoughtfully.
“That’s my take,” Carroll agreed.
“And she couldn’t pin down the time at all.”
“She went to bed about ten because she needed to be up by six yesterday morning. She admits to getting up at least once, sometimes twice a night.”
“Ms. Markovic was home just after midnight. Is it likely this Ms. Kelling would have needed to use the bathroom that quick?”
Officer Carroll shrugged. “Depends when she cut off liquids for the night.”
That was true, unfortunately. Ben could imagine a defense attorney trying to persuade a jury that the witness’s bladder would have held out longer than two hours and that, therefore, the light she saw had shone inside what should have been a dark building well after Ms. Markovich had gone to sleep.
After which the prosecutor would point out that they had only Ms. Markovic’s word for when she turned out the lights and went to sleep, and that it was entirely possible she had gotten out of bed at some point during the night to hide the money in a location the police were unlikely to find in any initial search.
Something he probably should have had done yesterday, he reflected, although he had taken precautions to ensure she couldn’t sneak the money out of the building and hide it elsewhere.
“Okay, thanks,” Ben said. “Have you spoken to everybody?”
“Yep. Sundays are good that way.”
Left alone again, Ben realized he was disappointed. He would have liked incontrovertible evidence to turn up showing that someone besides Nadia had taken the money. And he knew better than to develop feelings for a suspect, far less allow sympathy or any other emotion to influence him. Because of his usual objectivity, he’d been called a cold bastard; no one outside his family having any idea how much rage burned in him for one particular class of criminals. He’d succeeded in hiding it from the people he worked with until the day he came close to crossing a line that would have ended his career and conceivably resulted in jail time.
The hatred for rapists was one explanation for why his blood boiled every time he pictured a man slipping uninvited into Nadia’s bedroom, detouring from his main purpose to look his fill.
Statistically, the odds were the thief was a man. In this case, the auction volunteers, who were most likely to know who had the money, were all women except for a few men dragged in to assemble the stage, do some heavy lifting and build quilt display racks. Imagining a woman in Nadia’s bedroom instead of a man wasn’t a big improvement. Either way, what sense of security she’d gathered around herself after the tragedy would be stolen again.
Unless, of course, nobody else had ever stepped foot in that bedroom, and she knew exactly where the money was.
He wondered whether she’d give permission for a thorough search of her premises.
Ben groaned, rasped a hand over his jaw and decided to call it a day.
* * *
NADIA ENDED THE DAY feeling battered. Sick to her stomach, bruised head to toe. Remembering Ben Slater’s chiding, she dragged herself to her kitchen and examined the contents of cupboards and refrigerator. She’d skipped lunch and had no appetite for dinner, but he was right—she had to eat. Even a salad felt like too much work, so she settled for cottage cheese and a small bowl of strawberries. Finally, new lock or no, she carried a kitchen chair downstairs and braced it under the doorknob. In theory, there’d be an awful noise at the very least if someone tried to open the door.
Nadia watched TV shows that didn’t really interest her until it was late enough to go to bed. If she’d had a sedative, she would have taken it. After very little sleep last night, she was mind-numbingly tired. But once she climbed into bed, lights out, she lay stiffly. The nausea soothed by her bland meal returned with a vengeance. As if she’d recorded today’s phone conversations, they replayed in her head, some voices heavy with disappointment, others sharp. A few vicious.
Have you no shame?
I suppose you think we’re country hicks, too dumb to see through your little story.
I won’t be buying so much as a spool of thread at your shop again, and I hope every other woman in this county feels the same.
Plenty of people had been neutral, promising to let her know if the credit card had been run or check cashed. Perhaps half had promised to replace the money. A very small minority had been, like Louise Alsobrook, really nice.
Of course, it was what the nasty people said that was stuck in her head.
Nadia tried with the “sticks and stones may break my bones” thing, but still felt like an old woman when she opened the store come morning. Thank heavens she didn’t have to teach a class today! She hoped makeup, applied more heavily than usual, disguised some of the signs of her exhaustion, especially the purple bruising beneath her eyes. The fact that her eyes appeared sunken...well, there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Plus, her head ached, blinking almost took more effort than she could summon and she wasn’t sure the muscles that would allow her to smile were functioning.
But this was the one day of the week she had no help, and the sign out front listed open hours that included Mondays, ten to five. If anything of her new life was to be saved, she couldn’t hide in her apartment.
Mondays were the slowest days, businesswise, so she wasn’t surprised, and was almost relieved, that no one at all came in to browse until after eleven. Then it was a husband and wife she pegged immediately as tourists. They exclaimed over the displayed quilts, gasped at the prices and bought a set of machine-quilted place mats.
Her next visitor was Colleen Hoefling, who wanted to hear what, if anything, the police had learned, and who purchased fabric for her next quilt, or so she said. Nadia suspected Colleen, like most serious quilters, already owned enough fabric for her next ten or twenty quilts. She was simply being nice.
Colleen also shooed Nadia upstairs to get some lunch, insisting she knew how to use a cash register.
After eating, Nadia came down to the sound of voices.
The first was scathing. “And who do you think stole the money if it wasn’t her?”
“I don’t know,” Colleen said, hers distinctly cool, “but I’m appalled at the rush to judgment I’m seeing. Nadia has been nothing but friendly. She’s warm and likable. Do you have any idea how much time she gave to make the auction a success? I’m not sure it would have happened at all without her.” She talked right over the other woman, whose voice Nadia had recognized. Peggy Montgomery, whose consigned quilt was currently starring in the front window display. “What’s more, Nadia is a fine businesswoman with a good eye for color. With the way she’s selling our quilts online, she’s giving all of us opportunities we haven’t had.”
“And making a sizable commission.”
“This is her business. I, for one, am a terrible saleswoman.”
Continuing to lurk out here made her a coward. Nadia girded herself and