Murder, Handcrafted (Amish Quilt Shop Mystery) Read Online Free

room.
    I hadn’t seen many blueprints since I was in college. As part of my graphic design degree, I’d taken mechanical drawing as an elective. Even with my rudimentary understanding of how to read a blueprint, I could see the kitchen was in for a major transformation.
    Jonah rubbed his beard as he looked over the plans. “It is
gut
for me to see these before I meet with your mother. Now, I have an idea of what her plans are. It’s a much bigger job than I expected.” He rolled up the blueprint and tucked it under his arm. “I’ll take this inside to meet with her.”
    Outside of the trailer, Jonah laced up his boots, and I slipped on mine again. I was about to ask him again about Kamon, when he handed me the rolled-up blueprint.
    Jonah walked over to a pile of lumber, threw back the edge of the tarp, and pointed to a four-by-four piece of plank wood. “That will do nicely. It’s not too wet from the rain. There’s a tarp under the wood as well, which is a
gut
thing. It’ll save me time from going to the lumberyard. All I need to do is cut them down tothe right size. It will really only need to be there for about a day. I can install the new door tomorrow.”
    “Are you going to tell me more about Kamon? You can’t just say Griffin Bright murdered him and leave it at that.”
    He started to move the smaller pieces of wood off the plank. “Kamon was the son of my father’s brother. His parents died when he was boy and he lived with his mother’s family most of his life. When he was seventeen, he came to live with us. I was fifteen at the time, just started my
rumspringa
, and Kamon”—he paused as if searching for the right word—“he already knew the ways of the
Englisch
world. I admired him. He was trouble and caused trouble. He planned to leave the Amish. At the time, I thought he was what I wanted to be.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
    “You wanted to leave the Amish?” I stared at Jonah. Never for a moment had I thought he’d considered leaving the Amish way of life. It was impossible for me to imagine him as anything other than Amish. It was like trying to make Rachel Miller or Jonah’s own mother, Anna, non-Amish. It didn’t make sense.
    “I had my reasons.” Jonah started moving pieces of wood again. “My parents took Kamon in because they believed they could keep him on the right path and convince him to stay in our way of life. We’ll never know if they might have succeeded. He died a little over a year after moving in with us.”
    This was all news to me. I had thought that my aunt had kept me in the loop about the happenings with my old friends in Holmes County. Perhaps she didn’ttell me about the Grabers’ struggles with Kamon and his death because she didn’t want to worry me or, more likely, Anna told her not to. The Amish were private people to the core. They wouldn’t air their troubles to someone so removed from the community as I had been. I knew I had been only a kid myself at the time and couldn’t have done anything to help the Grabers, but guilt washed over me because I had not been there for my friends, not just Jonah but his entire family.
    Jonah grabbed the edge of the piece of wood. “Kamon’s death put me on the straight and narrow better than anything else could. I gave up my daydreams, was baptized into the Amish church, and started courting Miriam. I chose the life
Gott
wanted for me from the beginning. The life that Kamon told me about was just my imaginings. It was not
Gotte
’s will for my life.”
    “Oh, Jo-Jo,” I said, holding the metal handrail that led into the trailer. “I’m so sorry. I never knew about any of this.”
    He pulled the piece from the woodpile, and I stepped back out of the way. He laid it in the middle of my mother’s manicured yard. “You didn’t know because you weren’t here.” His voice was tight.
    I blinked at him. Was I talking to my jovial best childhood friend? I couldn’t remember a time that Jonah had ever used