Grape Expectations

by Tamar Myers

  “We thought it was mostly just posturing. You know, resisting change just for the sake of doing so. Rural towns often do that. They won’t let Wal-Mart in but are happy to drive to the nearest town that does. And besides, our business plan didn’t even include locals in our profit forecast. We were looking to the sophisticated urban who wanted a change of scenery.”

  “Unfortunately, we rural rubes enjoy our scenery just like it is. Sorry if that came off harsh.”

  “Miss Yoder, when I spoke to your chief early this morning, before I was told anything about it being murder, she asked if I needed help making the necessary arrangements. I told her I didn’t, but now I think I do.”

  “I’d be glad to help,” I said.

  “And I’d be honored to accept it.”

  I told him to wait and trotted back to my car to look for Chris. I found him lying on the backseat, his knees in the air and one arm flung over his eyes. His face, from the little bit I could see, was as pale as a hen’s egg—the white ones, of course, like the Good Lord intended.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m feeling kind of queasy.”

  “I’ve volunteered to escort Mr. Bacchustelli to a funeral home. Just say no and I’ll—”

  “I’ll be fine, Miss Yoder. It’s probably just something I ate. You go on ahead and do what you need to do.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  I fumbled around under the front seat until I found a plastic grocery bag. “Be a dear and use this should the need. arise.”

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  “Toodle-loo.”

  “Miss Yoder?”

  “What?” I didn’t mean to sound quite that sharp. In my defense I’d just been invited to share a limo ride with an extraordinarily handsome bachelor. The alternative was to play nursemaid to a boy who, at any moment, could hurl a Sausage Barn breakfast at me. While Wanda’s food is tolerable going down, it doesn’t fare so well on the return trip. This I know from experience.

  “Miss Yoder, I’d be real careful if I were you. Mr. Bacchustelli might be connected.”

  “Connected to what?”

  “The Mob.”

  “Now is no time to be joking, dear.”

  “I’m not supposed to be telling you this, Miss Yoder, but the chief is having him checked out. And the chief doesn’t do things like that unless she’s got a pretty good reason.”

  “What is her reason?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “In for a penny, in for a pound, dear. And if you don’t tell me, you’re in for a ton of trouble.”

  He uncovered his eyes and sat up. “Okay, so I lied. But I’ve got a bad feeling about this guy. Did you watch The Sopranos?”

  “They came to my church a couple of years ago on a gospel tour. They were all right, but frankly, I prefer a good tenor.”

  “I mean the TV show.”

  “I don’t watch television.”

  “Well, there’s this Mob family, you see—”

  “Italian?”

  “Yes. Anyway—”

  “Isn’t that stereotyping, dear?”

  “Maybe. But still, I’ve got a hunch this guy’s bad news.”

  “Haven’t you heard, dear? A hunch from a woman is worth two facts from a man. A hunch from a man, on the other hand, is absolutely worthless.”

  I smiled sweetly before closing the door. The ability to impart insincere saccharinity is one of my greatest gifts. Unfortunately, I too had a hunch I was about to get in over my head.

  14

  Vinny Bacchustelli’s limo was a disappointment. For starters, the upholstery was calfskin. The really expensive limousines (this I also know from personal experience) use the foreskins of whales, reputedly the softest of all leathers. The vineyardist had only one TV—a small one at that—in his car, the seats did not recline all the way, and there was no sign of a hot tub. It was definitely not top-of-the-line.

  “Which funeral home were you headed to?” I asked pleasantly, pretending not to notice the banal trappings of this supposedly luxury conveyance.

  “Wilhelm I. Hinkledorf and Sons. I picked it from the yellow pages. It sounded—well, sort of upscale. Felicia was a classy lady. She would have liked that.”

  I bit my tongue, lightly placing my teeth inside the familiar grooves. I’m of the mind that a corpse no longer has a mind, and therefore shouldn’t mind what happens to it. My loved ones can toss me out on a compost heap for all I care. But to each his own.

  If I must say so myself, I exercised considerable restraint when Wilhelm I. Hinkledorf Sr. gave me his dead fish handshake before leading us on the grand tour. Although I squeezed his mitt so hard that even Arnold Schwarzenegger would have winced, I said nothing about the dandruff on his collar or the fact that one of the lenses in his glasses was so smudged that there was a hair embedded in the gunk. For the record, Wilhelm I. Hinkledorf Sr. and I go back a long way—all the way back to high school, where Billy, as he was known then, was the first of my classmates to dub me “Yoder with the Odor.”

  “I want to see your most expensive casket,” Vinny Bacchustelli said.

  Those were words to warm the cockles of my heart—well, all of them except for the word “casket.” They certainly warmed Wilhelm’s heart. He made a beeline for a behemoth of a coffin, displayed in its own little room on a marble base. Lights embedded in the ceiling illuminated every detail.

  “Behold the Slumber-berth 600. This baby is handcrafted from the finest Brazilian hickory—farm-grown trees, of course, not rain forest Observe the sheen. What you’re looking at is seventeen coats of optimum carnauba wax—again, from farm-grown trees. The brass mounts were forged to order from Welsh artisans and then chased for that Old World look.”

  I raised a hand politely. “Who chased them?”

  “The Welsh artisans. Magdalena, are you mocking me?”

  “Absolutely. Please, proceed.”

  He snorted. “Most caskets have several inches of padding to absorb leakage. The Slumber-berth 600 has twelve inches of all-natural kapok filling, but”—he reverently lifted the pillow at the head of the coffin and pulled back a corner of the lining—“see this tubing? Both air-conditioning and heating! Depending on destination—ha, ha.”

  “Heaven isn’t cold, dear.”

  Wilhelm glared at me with his left eye, the one not obscured by gunk. “Are you speaking from personal experience, Magdalena?”

  “I read my Bible. It mentions gold and giant pearls, but nothing about fireplaces.”

  He snorted again and turned to Vinny. “Please observe the lining. It is sewn from the finest Sri Lankan silk and hand-smocked by Vietnamese virgins in the city of Vung Thu.”

  “How do you know they were virgins?” It was a reasonable question, was it not?

  “Yes, how?” Vinny said. His eyes sparkled briefly.

  “Well, sir, I can only assume they are. These gifted craftswomen are novices in the Catholic convent there.”

  “Please, continue.”

  “Note the fabric on the inside of the lids—both upper and lower. It is Turkish taffeta and hand-smocked by Swedish sluts in Stockholm.”

  Vinny paid particularly close attention to the harlots’ handiwork. I felt obliged to deliver a kick to his shins so that we could move the show along.

  “Now this,” Wilhelm said and, using both arms, struggled to push the lower half of the coffin lid into an upright position, “is the piéce de resistance.”

  Two of us gaped, while the third grinned ghoulishly. We were staring at a color television and a panel of buttons worthy of a cockpit.

  “What the Devil!” Vinny said. (The word he actually used was the Devil’s home address.)

  “Local channels are included in the standard package, but we can upgrade to cable or satellite upon request. We call them the Cloud Nine options.”

  “Why on earth would a dead person nee
d television?”

  “Miss Yoder, I know you think you’re an expert on religious matters, but the truth is no one knows for sure what happens when we die. For all we know the dead have to wait a long time before being assigned their final destination. In that event, a little distraction is surely in order.” My longtime nemesis flipped a switch and the television screen lit up. “The entire system can operate for six hours on our special supercharged batteries, or we can install solar power, or even hook your loved one up to public utilities. If you pay us enough we can arrange for eight dancing trolls and a French-speaking elephant...”

  To be honest, I’m not sure about those last words. I was—and I am deeply ashamed to admit this—mesmerized by a man with glasses and curly hair. He was the host of a show. A fighting show, I believe. Two women and a man (then again, it might have been two men and a woman) were on a stage, trading verbal insults. Every now and then they hinged at each other, but at the last second the riled parties were restrained by muscled men with necks as thick as one-hundred-year-old oaks. The dialogue was hard to follow, seeing as how the audio quality was very poor. “Jerry, Jerry... beep, beep, beep... Jerry... beep, beep!”

  “How much is the Slumber-berth 600?” Vinny asked, just as casually as if he were shopping at Sears.

  That’s when I snapped out of my media-induced reverie. “Good question, dear.”

  Wilhelm forced the corners of his mouth upward for a nanosecond. “Fully loaded, I can let this baby go for twenty.”

  Even I was astounded. “Twenty dollars?”

  “I think he means twenty thousand,” Vinny whispered. Wilhelm always did have exceptional hearing. “Indeed I da The Slumber-berth 600 takes nine Nepalese craftsmen nine months to assemble. The final product is then shipped to the United States wrapped in albino yak skins. All that takes money.”

  “Someone is being grossly underpaid, dear, and it isn’t you.”

  Wilhelm recoiled indignantly. “Magdalena, I will thank you to stay out of this.”

  “Sorry, no can do. This entire thing is a travesty. Not only are you ripping off nuns, sluts, and mountaineers—not to mention the bereaved—but you are making a mockery of death. A person has a right to be buried with dignity, not forty-six channels of cable TV. It’s a sad, sad world that allows hedonistic heathens to squander their money on junk like this.”

  “One hundred and thirty-six channels,” he said through clenched teeth. “Double that for satellite. Besides, it isn’t just hedonistic heathens who buy the Slumber-berth 600. Mennonites do as well.”

  “Liar. Uh, who?” One can’t blame a gal for wanting to be informed.

  “Silas Pearlmutter buried his wife in a Slumber-berth 600. He even requested the extra-virgin silk smocking.”

  “Extra-virgin?”

  “The convent usually has six virgins working at one time—for this they assigned a seventh.”

  “I was at the Pearlmutter funeral. I didn’t see anything like this.”

  “That’s because he was afraid of people like you passing judgment. Silas paid another two grand to have the modest Humble Haven exterior fitted over this baby. Didn’t you notice how large Cynthia Pearlmutter’s casket was?”

  “Cynthia was a large woman. And then there was the matter of her extra leg.”

  Wilhelm smirked openly at me before turning his attention back to Vinny. “Do you own a plot?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “May I suggest Heaven’s Gate Memorial Gardens off U.S. Route 220? The gardens are more than halfway up Kinton’s Knob and the views are spectacular.” He pulled a PDA from the breast pocket of his jacket. “Plots 368 and 4S3 are still available.”

  “How much?”

  “Plot 368 is one hundred thousand dollars, and plot 4S3 is one-fifty. I swear it’s possible to see from that plot all the way to Harrisburg.”

  “For crying out loud,” I said, unable to take any more of this blatant exploitation of the newly bereaved, “Mrs. Bacchustelli is dead. She’s not going to be looking at the view, and even if she could, she’d be watching cable TV instead. Oops—no disrespect intended, Mr. Bacchustelli.”

  Vinny smiled wanly at me. “Miss Yoder, I appreciate your concern, but I am a grown man and of sound mind. I can make my own decisions.”

  “I’m sure you can, dear, but—”

  “Mr. Hinkledorf, I’ll take the Slumber-berth 600, extravirgin, and plot 453 in Heaven’s Gate Memorial Gardens. Which credit cards do you accept?”

  Wilhelm I. Hinkledorf Sr. smiled seductively. “We accept all credit cards.”

  “You would,” I muttered.

  “I only carry Visa,” Vinny said, after we’d been led to the office and settled into some swank leather chairs. “I have the others, of course, but why lug them around? And that way, if someone should steal my wallet, I only worry about having to cancel one.”

  As it turned out, he should have worried about paying off that one. Wilhelm I-never-met-a-credit-card-I-didn’t-like Hinkledorf Sr. tried three times to get the card accepted but to no avail. The embarrassment in that room was so thick you could have spread it on a bagel.

  Vinny touched my arm lightly. “Miss Yoder—I—uh—I don’t suppose you have your checkbook with you.”

  “Forsooth, ’tis something not to be supposed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t always carry it. But it just so happens that today I have it. You see, yesterday I had to dash out to Miller’s Feed Store to buy some mash for the chickens, but I was out of cash—Oh, I get it You want to borrow some money for the down payment.” I flashed my incisors—perhaps a couple of canines too—at Wilhelm. “Will fifty dollars do?”

  Frankly, I was taken aback by his guffaws. “I never knew you had a sense of humor, Magdalena.”

  “I most certainly don’t!”

  “Hmm.” He glanced from me to Vinny and back again. “Well, I’m afraid I’m going to require ten percent down and payment in full within thirty days.”

  I may slouch from time to time, but I’m no slouch when it comes to business. “That comes to seventeen thousand dollars! You want me to write a check for seventeen thousand dollars as a down payment on something I think is morally wrong?”

  “You’re forgetting tax, Magdalena. I need a down payment on that too.”

  I huffed, and I puffed, and I tried to blow the funeral home down, but I couldn’t. In the meantime, Vinny had his eyes closed, his folded hands held up to his face, the thumbs against his mouth. He looked like he was praying.

  “She doesn’t have the money,” Wilhelm finally said. “The rumors of her wealth are unfounded. Go figure.”

  “I do so have the money!”

  “Hmm.”

  Vinny opened one eye. “You won’t regret this, Miss Yoder. I’m good for it. Trust me.”

  “It seems that legend of her brilliant financial mind is just that,” Wilhelm said.

  That did it. That really hiked my hackles. I tore into my purse like a hog into fresh slop. It took me a while to flail through the church bulletins, coupons, stale mints, and less- than-fresh tissues, but I found my checkbook and waved it aloft like a winning door prize ticket “Ha! Do you want to see what my balance is?”

  Vinny opened his other eye. “Thxst me,” he hissed. Perhaps he didn’t hiss, but there was something about the way he said it that reminded me of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Not that I ever met that serpent, mind you—at least not in the guise of a snake, and not in that original garden. Vinny Bacchustelli was handsome, suave, and had a silver tongue. If he could talk Ed Gingerich into selling his land for a winery, he could persuade anyone into doing anything.

  “Get behind me, Satan!” I cried.

  “Excuse me?”

  I closed my eyes tightly. “I will not loan you one red cent for this foolishness. Living people are starving all over the world, and you want cable TV for your sister-in-law?”

  “I’m choosing satellite.”

  “In a pig’s ear, de
ar.” With eyes still closed as tight as clams at low tide, I felt my way to the doorway of the Slumber-berth 600 room. Then I opened my peepers and ran like Eve should have run.

  Unfortunately, I ran straight into the arms of trouble.

  15

  Concord Grape Truffle

  4 egg yolks

  1 cup sherry

  1 cup sugar

  1cup Concord grape jam

  2 teaspoons vanilla extract

  1 cup shelled almonds

  1 cup milk

  1 cup heavy cream

  1 cup light cream

  1tablespoon sugar

  2 sponge cake layers, baked and cooled

  Frosted grapes

  Shelled almonds

  In the top of a double boiler, beat egg yolks with 1 cup sugar until well blended. Add vanilla. Stir in milk and light cream. Place over boiling water and cook, stirring constantly, until custard is thick enough to coat a wooden spoon (about 15 minutes). Chill several hours.

  Meanwhile, place a layer of sponge cake in a large crystal bowl. Pour the sherry over the cake; spread with 1 cup Concord grape jam. Stuff cake layer with the almonds. Repeat with remaining layer. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

  Combine heavy cream and remaining 1 tablespoon sugar, beat until stiff. Just before serving, pour custard over cake layers. Top with whipped cream. Garnish with frosted grapes and additional almonds.

  MAKES 8-10 SERVINGS

  16

  What is more trouble than a girl who has just turned fourteen? Two of them? I suppose I gave my parents some lip in my day, but if I did, you can bet they didn’t take it. Mama was so fond of the hickory stick, it’s no wonder I ended up built like a twig. Papa didn’t believe in corporal punishment—he didn’t have to. When Papa gave you one of his sad, “I’m so disappointed in you” looks, you wanted to grab the switch from Mama and give yourself a good thrashing.

  I don’t hit Alison, and since my looks of disapproval are not only ineffective but often met with mockery, I am usually at a loss when she and I hit a bumpy patch in our relationship. (Yes, I’ve tried reasoning, but some experts believe the ability to reason isn’t even present in the early teens.) Even grounding doesn’t work with Alison. Tell her she’s grounded for a week, and before she slams her door she’ll tell you she’s grounding herself for a month. What’s a pseudo-mother to do?