by Tamar Myers
My stomach did a sudden flip-flop, which had nothing to do with Freni’s flop of a meal. The caller had pronounced my surname to rhyme with “otter.” There were only two possibilities that came to mind; either one of my celebrity friends could not be trusted and had shared my number with a friend, or one of my celebrity friends couldn’t be trusted and had sold me out to the paparazzi. Whichever the case, you can be sure that some high-ranking politician or Hollywood personality was going to pay dearly for his or her judgment in error. I know, vengeance is God’s call, not mine, but there is nothing in Scripture that says the Good Lord doesn’t use common folks like me to mete out his divine judgment. A well-placed rumor, early morning phone calls, a five-pound sack of dandelion seeds—the possibilities were endless.
“I have no comment,” I screeched. “You, on the other hand, have a lot to say for yourself. Who are you, and how did you get this number?”
During the ensuing silence, the tobacco lobby down in Washington saw the error of their ways, and Joan Collins won the Nobel prize for literature.
“Uh—like I said, this is Stuart. I’m calling on behalf of Tight As A Drum Basement Enterprises.”
“What?”
“This is a courtesy call. We’ve had—”
“How can this be a courtesy call when you just interrupted my lunch?”
“Uh—ma’am, we’ve had a lot of reports lately from homeowners on your street who say their basements have been flooded. Have you noticed any dampness in yours?”
“I don’t live on a street, dear, I live on a country lane.”
“Maybe so, ma’am, but many of your neighbors have reported leaky and flooded basements. Uh— when would be a good time for one of our representatives to come out and look your situation over? Let’s see, I can squeeze you in tomorrow at—”
It was time to have a little fun. “I don’t think that’s possible for my neighbors’ basements to flood, dear. We live on the peak of a high mountain—you might even say that our homes cling to the crags. If my neighbors’ basements are flooded, then the town of Bedford is under water, along with New York City and the entire Eastern Seaboard—in which case, don’t you have bigger fish to catch?”
“Miss Yoder, I’m just doing my job.”
“You job is to intrude into people’s homes and lie about their neighbors’ basements?”
“I’m not lying,” Stuart snapped. “That’s what my information says.”
“Well then, dear, who are some of these homeowners with leaky basements?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”
“Why not? If my neighbors’ basements are being flooded, I need to know so I can help out. You know, like go ark-shopping for them. Round up animals two by two.”
Stuart sighed. “Miss Yoder, are you mocking me?”
“Of course, dear.”
“I thought so. Well, let me tell you something, lady. You can’t have it both ways.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You can’t bitch about my generation being lazy, but then when we get jobs, yell at us, or worse yet, mock us like you were just doing.”
I swallowed back my irritation at the B word. “Surely there are other jobs out there besides telephone sales.”
“Hey, if I don’t do this job, somebody else will. So what difference does it make?”
“I’m sure there were a few Nazis who said the same thing.”
“Nazis? Are you crazy, lady? I don’t have to take this, you know.”
“Neither do I, dear. Now before I hang up, how did you get my telephone number?”
“That’s privileged information, ma’am.”
“You’re darn tooting,” I said. That’s as close as I ever come to swearing. “My telephone number is privileged information. Now, if you don’t want to tell me, put your supervisor on the phone.”
In the silence that followed, Dennis Rodman learned manners, Jerry Springer acquired good taste, and Tamar Myers’s latest book was nominated for an Agatha Christie award.
“Uh—well, my supervisor just stepped out.”
“Tell you what, dear. You give me your telephone number and I’ll call you back in ten minutes. Maybe your supervisor will have stepped back in by then.” Stuart hung up.
I hadn’t gotten as far as my bedroom door when the phone rang a third time. Stuart was persistent, I’d grant him that. It would be a shame to let such an admirable quality go unrewarded.
I snatched up the still warm receiver. “You were absolutely right, dear! Help! The water’s getting higher. It’s up to my knees now. Oh, no, it’s up to my waist—no, make that my throat! Glug. Glug.”
“Pull the plug.”
“What?”
“Pull the plug,” Melvin Stoltzfus said. “That’s what I did, the time I almost drowned. Had to figure the damned thing out myself though. Mama refused to tell me.”
“Melvin! What are you doing on my private line?”
“Susannah gave it to me, remember? Look, Yoder, I don’t have time for idle chitchat. Are you still drowning, or can we talk now? This is official police business.”
“Babble away, dear.” While he lectured and hectored I would think of all the possible ways to pull Melvin’s plug. Such thoughts were a sin, of course, but I’d been nursing some major grudges lately—most having to do with my slime-sucking, pseudo-ex-husband Aaron. As long as I was going to take the Good Lord’s time confessing my sins, I may as well make it worth His while.
“The coroner just called, Yoder. I tried to call you on the other line. Where were you?”
“Eating lunch.” One way to pull Melvin’s plug was to put bug poison in his food. As a mantis, he would be especially susceptible.
“Still eating? I told everyone they had to be back here by one. It’s quarter after right now.”
“Freni got into one of her funks.” It was close enough. Anyway, I’m sure lots of Freni’s funks have gone by unrecorded. And please note, I did not blab to Melvin about Barbara’s delicate condition.
“Yeah, well, see that you get them here A.S.A.P.”
“I am not your flunky, dear,” I said with remarkable restraint.
My Christian charity was wasted on Melvin. “Aren’t you even going to ask what the coroner had to say?” I was stunned. Melvin was itching to share, which wasn’t like him. Whatever the coroner had to say must really be good.
“So, dear, what did the coroner say?”
“The coroner declared Mr. Mitchell officially dead.”
“Permanently?” Tit for tat for the twit.
“Very funny, Yoder. Do you want to hear the rest or not?”
“Absolutely.”
“Like I was about to say, he removed wood fragments from the deceased’s forehead.”
“Hmm.”
“He said one of them was red.”
“No kidding, you—”
“Red paint, Yoder. What do you think I am, a twit?”
I sat down heavily. What did happen to my barn door prop? Could that possibly be the murder weapon, and if so, where was it now?
“It wouldn’t make me liable, would it?” I asked, thinking aloud.
“Yoder, are you there? I mean all there?”
“Look who’s calling the kettle black. So, did the coroner have anything else to say?”
“Hold onto your hat, Yoder. This is the good part.” He was positively gleeful. “Are you sitting down, Yoder?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. I had a hunch this was going to be bad, and I had long since learned that a hunch from a woman is worth two facts from a man.
He took a deep, dramatic breath. “The knife blade was still embedded in the back of his neck.”
“Get out of town!”
“No kidding. It had broken off, of course. It was stuck in his vertebrae.”
“How gruesome.” A vision of George Mitchell’s dancing eyes played across my mind’s screen, and I blinked to dislodge it.
“Wait,” Melvin said, “it gets e
ven better. Doc said it looked like some kind of kitchen knife. But one with a short blade. Mama has one of those—what does she call it—oh, yeah, a paring knife.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Did you say paring knife?”
“You got a hearing problem, Yoder? Boy, wait until Mama hears this. Freni Hostetler—her best friend—my number one suspect.”
“What?”
“She didn’t fool me for a second, Magdalena. You’re the one who insisted that I leave her off my list of suspects. What do you have to say about that now?”
“You’re an idiot, that’s what! Think for once, Melvin. You know Freni. You know her almost as well as you know your own mother. Could your mother kill a man?”
“You’re damned straight she could. Only Mama is smarter than Freni. She would have used a rolling pin instead of barn siding. Much less likely to leave splinters with a rolling pin.”
“Melvin! I’m telling!”
I distinctly heard him gulp. “I was just kidding, of course. But I’m not about Freni. Have her come in with the rest.”
“I most certainly will not. You’re a sandwich short of a picnic, dear, if you think a seventy-five-year-old Amish woman stabbed George Mitchell with her paring knife.”
“Oh, yeah? You can’t argue with evidence, Yoder. Doc said it was definitely a paring knife.”
“There are four other cooks staying at the inn, for crying out loud. That knife could have belonged to any of them.”
The mantis mulled that for a minute. “Did any of the others bring paring knifes with them?”
It was perhaps the most reasonable question Melvin had ever asked, and as such, it deserved a straight answer.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” Melvin sounded as shocked and pathetic as Susannah did when I told her that Santa Clause wasn’t real. Susannah, however, was married at the time and at least had a spouse to turn to for comfort.
“So you see, it could have been someone other than Freni.”
“Did they all bring knives?”
“How should I know? I didn’t make them fill out inventory lists.”
“But you know of at least one who brought a knife, right?”
“Uh—right.”
I could hear the malevolent mandibles mashing against the mouthpiece. “So who was it, Yoder?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“What the hell do you—”
“Don’t swear, Melvin, or I’ll never tell.”
“You tell me, Yoder, or I’ll arrest you.”
“On what grounds?”
“Obstructing justice.”
I cast about for something soothing to say. Unfortunately my brain isn’t nearly as sharp as my tongue.
“Look, if you arrest the wrong person on insufficient evidence, you could be sued. We go back a long way, Melvin—I’ve known you since you were in diapers. We might not always get along, but I care what happens to you.” There was truth of a sort in that last statement.
“What are you proposing, Yoder?”
“Give me two hours, Melvin, and I’ll tell you who brought a knife and who didn’t. I might even tell you more.”
“What do you mean by ‘more’? You know something, don’t you, Yoder?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Is it a deal?”
“One hour, Yoder. That’s all you get, and that includes driving time. I want you down here in person, at my office, at two-thirty sharp.”
“But that’s not enough—”
The phone buzzed in my ear. Melvin, the miserable mantis, had hung up.
The fire in the den had burned itself out. There were still clumps of smoldering ashes, and I jabbed them viciously with my poker. I didn’t expect to find anything, certainly not a piece of wood still bearing flecks of red paint.
A faint “ping” sent my heart racing. Could it be a nail? The bent nail from the strip of barn siding I once used as a doorjamb? I poked again. Nothing. Perhaps the nail had fallen through the grate. Well, it was certainly too hot to remove the grate, and I was not about to lie on my belly and get a snoot full of ashes.
I put the poker away and hurried back to the dining room. No telling what the mice will do when the cat is away. Especially English mice. I had a hunch this pack of rodents was up to no good.
My hunch was half right. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I flung open the door. There, in the dining room, was Freni, frolicking with the guests—like they were equals for crying out loud! She was laughing loudly and hopping about like a toad on hot sand. It was unseemly behavior for a ten-year-old Methodist girl, much less an Amish woman in her seventies. I stood silently in the doorway for a minute watching these shameless antics.
“Twins,” Ms. Holt said, as if it were a dirty word.
“Have they picked out any names yet?” Gladys asked.
“Yah,” Freni said, without a second’s hesitation. “Freni for the girl and Mose for the boy.”
“Very interesting,” I said, stepping forward. “So they know the babies’ sex already?”
“Ach!” Freni blushed from her prayer cap to tips of her brogans, but she recovered as quickly as Aaron did after you-know-what. “Shame on you, Magdalena, for scaring an old woman like that.”
I smiled smugly. “This morning when I talked to Barbara she didn’t know the sex. And what’s this I hear about twins? Barbara didn’t say anything about twins.”
Freni’s face fell like a souffle when the oven door is slammed. “You were telling the truth? No twins?”
“It is not twins,” I said. My fingers were crossed of course, since triplets often include a set of twins.
“That’s too bad,” Gladys said kindly. “But maybe it will be a girl and they can name it Freni anyway.”
“Maybe there’ll be a girl,” I said, “but if they named her after Freni, they might well call her Veronica. Freni is the Pennsylvania Dutch diminutive of that name.”
“What is Mose short for?” Art asked. “Moses?”
“Exactly. But Mose isn’t short, only Freni is,” I said wickedly.
“Ach!” Freni fled to the kitchen, her apron strings flapping behind her.
I followed. Freni heard me coming and scurried to the far corner and pretended to be searching for something in a cupboard.
“Looking for something, dear?”
“Just leave me along, Magdalena.”
I tugged on her apron until she turned. “Melvin just called. The coroner just called him. It seems he found the blade of a paring knife still in George Mitchell’s neck.”
“Ach! I didn’t do it, Magdalena. Do you want to count my paring knives? I have two. Three, if you count the one Mose’s mother gave me when we got married, but it wouldn’t cut butter on a summer day.”
I patted her arm reassuringly. “I believe you do, dear. But it’s Alma I’m not so sure about.”
“Alma? But she’s family.”
“Her family scalped our family, dear, when all our family did was buy land that someone else had stolen from her family. But that’s beside the point. She claims to have lost her paring knife, remember?”
“Yah, but anyone could have taken it. There aren’t any locks on these drawers.”
“You’re right, anyone could have taken it. Now we just need to convince Melvin of that.”
Freni pulled her arm away. “You told Melvin about Alma losing her knife?”
“Please, dear, do I look that stupid?”
Freni graciously bit her lip.
“He’s given me one hour to come up with a suspect. If I don’t have a sacrificial victim for him by two-thirty, then he’s going to pick the person who looks to him like the most obvious suspect.”
Freni’s eyes grew behind her rimless glasses. “Who?”
“You, dear.”
“Ach!” Freni clutched the bib of her apron. “I can’t go to jail now, Magdalena. Not with little Freni on the way.”
“You’re not going to jail, dear. You’re his mama’s best fr
iend, remember? But he will give you a hard time, that’s for sure. Freni, when you were spending time with Alma this morning, did she seem at all— well, nervous?”
My stout cook and cousin stamped her right foot. “That woman is the salt of the earth. She did not kill Mr. Mitchell. You’re barking up the wrong post, Magdalena.”
“That’s tree, dear.”
“Try barking up the tree with red leaves, Magdalena.”
“Excuse me?”
“The one with the fancy shmancy clothes.”
“Ms. Holt?”
“Yah, that’s the one. She keeps her knives in her room.”
“Really?”
Freni nodded and bade me step closer by wagging a crooked finger. “You should see the things she brought with her. Pots and pans made out of glass! Who ever heard of such a thing? I gave her a drawer for utensils, but she didn’t put a single knife in it. She said keeping knives in drawers made them dull.”
“So where does she keep her knives?”
“In a box. It’s in her room, on the dresser next to her bed.”
“Did you get a peek inside the box?”
“Ach,” Freni said indignantly. “What do you think I am, a snoop?”
“Certainly not, dear. Well, I guess it’s time for me to grill Ms. Holt. By the time I’m through with her, she’ll be like the weenie that fell off the stick and landed in the coals.”
“Be careful not to burn your fingers,” Freni said wisely.
Kimberly McManus Holt was daintily sucking sherbet through a straw when I returned to the dining room. I tried to beckon her discreetly away from the table, but she was not a cooperative weenie. I had no choice but to be straightforward.
“Ms. Holt, may I have a word with you?”
She slurped a final time and patted the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “Certainly.”
“Alone, dear.”
She glanced around at others and smiled stiffly. “Is that really necessary?”
I simply had no more time to waste. “Not if you don’t mind being grilled like a weenie.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Let’s just say that I’m doing a little legwork for Police Chief Stoltzfus. I have some questions to ask you. Some of the questions might not be to your liking. Now, I can ask you them here, in front of the others, or we can retire to the parlor where we can have some privacy.”
