by Tamar Myers
“Are you saying they’re all cute?”
“Indeed I am!”
“Even that Schultzendorfer kid who looks exactly like a possum?”
“Okay, so maybe the Good Lord made one exception.”
“Aha! So you see it too-the marsupial thing he has going on?”
“I’m not blind, Chris.”
He shrugged, happy to be validated. “Who knows, maybe the kid will grow out of it.”
“Or not. Melvin Stoltzfus was born looking like a praying mantis and he never grew out of-oh, my Land O’ Goshen! I’d completely forgotten; Melvin is Little Jacob’s uncle.” I threw myself into young Chief Ackerman’s strong, but entirely safe, arms and began to sob.
“There, there,” he said as he patted my back. “From what I’ve heard about the man, I don’t think he’d hurt the boy-not unless he felt threatened by him directly. I mean, isn’t Melvin’s strong suit murdering adults?”
“It’s not that, you idiot-oops, did I say that? If so, a thousand pardons. My point is that an innocent little boy may have the genetic predisposition to grow up looking like an insect with eyes that swivel independently of each other.”
“Is that all you’re concerned about? Then fear not, oh inbred one. You obviously inherited the good-looking genes in your family, and as for your husband-woof; you can’t get any handsomer than that.”
I pulled free from my shameless embrace. “Uh, down, boy; the Babester is already spoken for.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry.”
“Look, dear, did you drag me away from my dear Little Jacob, not to mention the food, just to talk about babies?”
“No, ma’am.”
Suddenly the straw that littered the barn floor became intensely interesting. “Miss Yoder, you know those twenty-six people who got food poisoning the day Minerva J. Jay died?”
“I am not responsible, Chris. Just because I am the most senior deaconess, and in charge of a new search committee for a new pastor, does not make me culpable for what happens at the Brotherhood breakfast. I was helping out only because they needed an extra pair of hands; I most certainly did not have an ax to grind.”
That pipsqueak from California had the audacity to laugh. “Miss Yoder, you’re a hoot when you get all wound up. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Who are you kidding?” I said, and wagged my finger in his face, presidential style. “I’m a hoot and a holler, but I’ll have you know that my sex life is none of your business.”
Poor Chris didn’t know what else to do but laugh. Fortunately it is something he does very well.
“No, no, Miss Yoder. What I mean is that-well, never mind that just now. What I brought you in here to tell you is that nobody got sick that day except for the deceased.”
I sighed impatiently. “Of course they did. That’s why the ambulances were all tied up and I had to wait so long to get to the hospital. Why am I telling you this? You were there, for crying out loud!”
“Yes, but, Miss Yoder, I got their lab reports today along with Miss Jay’s autopsy. The reports show that none of those twenty-six people had food poisoning.”
“Why, that’s impossible! They all had to have their stomachs pumped, and some of them were in the hospital for days afterward. Irene Sprunger is still in the hospital, too weak to make it to the toilet on her own.”
“Miss Yoder, it was mass hysteria. There was nothing wrong with any of them that could be attributed to your pancake breakfast.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“As sure as I am that Little Jacob is one cute baby boy. Apparently this kind of thing is not all that uncommon. As for Miss Sprunger, as long as she sincerely believes she was poisoned, there is a good chance that her body will continue to respond that way.”
“And Minerva J. Jay?”
“There were enough drugs in her bloodstream to kill an elephant.”
“Oh, really?” Shame, shame, shame on me for feeling even a second’s worth of schadenfreude, although, in my defense, it was only because hearing this news vindicated my intense dislike of the abrasive and gluttonous Minerva. (Even more shame, I think, should go to the Germans, who felt enough schadenfreude to have deemed it necessary to invent such a word.)
“Yes, but the strange part is that they were a weird cocktail of drugs, not something you’d normally find in the system of someone who was trying to get, or maintain, a buzz.”
“A buzz?”
“I forgot. You’re not a drinker and you’ve probably never even taken-”
“I get it,” I said. The sad truth is that I’d been buzzed by an entire hive of bees on three separate occasions, but all of them inadvertent, to be sure. How was I to know what a mimosa was? Or a hot toddy? Not to mention hard cider. In my opinion, if the Good Lord intends for us to stay away from alcohol, He shouldn’t allow it to be served under such beguiling names. Then again, mine has always been the minority opinion.
“Yes, well, the drugs included prescription sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and antidepressants. Given that Miss Jay was herself on antidepressants and tranquilizers, the addition of this combination proved to be lethal. Despite her size, she didn’t stand a chance.”
“Are you officially declaring this a murder case?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I see.” I began counting silently, knowing that I wouldn’t get past four-oops, I only made it to three.
“I need your help, Miss Yoder.”
“With what?”
“Don’t play coy, please. This woman’s killer has had eight days to get a head start and cover his tracks.”
“What makes you think it’s a man?”
Then young Chris did the nearly unforgivable; he grabbed my biceps and squeezed it tightly. The message he sent was loud and clear: he was the boss, and all I had to do was to listen to him. Needless to say, I yanked my arm away to let him know that no one was the boss of me. Especially not a man half my age.
“Miss Yoder, the lab tests show that the drugs had been cooked into the pancakes, thereby altering their chemical states somewhat. Weren’t all the cooks that morning men?”
I took a tissue out of the pocket of my blue broadcloth dress and pretended to blow my nose. I honked as loud as a Canada goose and moved that wad of paper hither, thither, and yon, just so young Chris wouldn’t see the smirk that was impossible for me to corral and squash into submission.
“Actually, dear,” I mumbled, “Frankie Schwartzentruber is a woman.”
“Who?”
“Frankie only comes up to my chest on account of she’s all hunched over. She has her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, and she wears a lot of beige and brown, so she’s easy to miss.”
“Oh, you mean that elderly Asian woman who belongs to your church? I didn’t see her on pancake day.”
“She’s not Asian, dear. Frankie’s had five plastic surgeries more than Joan Rivers ever dreamed of. Her last facelift was performed in Bangkok by a surgeon who has self-esteem issues and uses her own face as a template. But the procedures are very inexpensive, I hear.”
Young Chris grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, Miss Yoder, as usual, because these are your people and you know their ways, I’d like to count on your help.”
I cocked an ear to the other side of the cavernous barn. To the best of my knowledge, my little precious was not even mewling. Then again, he might have been bawling his head off and I wouldn’t have heard him, thanks to the masticating jaws of hundreds of apparently starving people chowing down on the traditional Jewish delicacies provided by Shmoe’s Deli out of Pittsburgh. (You would have thought we’d invited locusts, not people, to the bris.)
“Look,” I said, “in the past I’ve been more than happy to use my not inconsiderable brainpower-and I say that with all humility-as well as my above-average people skills-ditto on the humble thing-to solve most, if not all, of Hernia’s baffling crimes. But, as my sister is wont to say, that was then, and this is now. Then I had just myself to consider-well, and sometime
s a hunky man-but now I have a little man to consider, one that is totally dependent on me. Forgive me, therefore, if I don’t feel like putting my life in jeopardy once again.”
“Harrumph.”
“You can’t say that, dear. Nobody says harrumph in real life, and most especially not a man your age.”
“What am I supposed to do, then? Swear?”
“You’ve got a point, but I’m still not going to do it.”
Defeated, he hung his handsome blond head. “Well, I guess this means I’m going to have to go with Plan B.”
“I guess it does-wait one Mennonite minute. What is Plan B?”
“Sheriff Hughes said that since we’re understaffed so bad, and he’s actually got a surplus of rookies this year, I could have one of them. On loan, you know. Just for this case. The kid grew up in Hernia and knows everyone in town, and we wouldn’t have to pay him on account of-”
I couldn’t believe my ears, which, by the way, were flapping like those of an elephant about to charge. “Do you perchance mean Percival Prendergast the Third?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Nix on the knave,” I cried. “The boy is a charlatan! He wasn’t raised in Hernia; he only spent his last two years of high school here because the coach was tired of having a losing football team. Yes, he may have been a football star, but he roomed and boarded with a family of transplants who moved here from Chicago. He’s as much of a Hernian as Oprah Winfrey-who, by the way, would have made an excellent vice president.”
“Harrumph again. Let’s face it, Miss Yoder, when it comes to local knowledge, you have no equal.”
I hung my head as the rules of modesty dictated, mock or otherwise. “Well, I wouldn’t say that exactly-”
“But more important, when it comes to sleuthing, it’s like you’re a natural-born prodigy or something.”
“Chris, dear, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck.”
“Huh?”
“What I mean is that flattery won’t get you anywhere. I’ve made up my mind, and the answer is no.”
“Yeah, I got that. But I’m just saying that not one of those detectives on TV could compete with you. If you were, like, in my Methods of Detecting class back in California, you would have wiped the floor with the rest of the cadets. The instructor too.”
“Really?”
“Like the time you solved that livestock-mutilation case and proved to Silas Marner that it wasn’t aliens killing his sheep-that was brilliant. Even the sheriff said so.”
“He did, didn’t he?”
“The sheriff really respects you, Magdalena. And that’s the thing: the entire community of Hernia respects you.”
“They do?”
“You ought to hear what they say behind your back. ‘There goes the smartest and best-informed woman in town.’ Why do you think you got elected mayor?”
“Because I’m rich and pay a lot of the town’s bills.”
“Yeah, but is Donald Trump mayor of New York City?”
Do you see what flattery can do? To my knowledge, the Donald has never run for public office, and Mayor Bloomberg, who is the mayor, is super-rich, but young Chris had managed to pull the wool over my eyes like a backward burnoose.
“Hernians elected me because they respect me?” I asked.
Chief Ackerman’s beautifully coiffed blond hair fell into his eyes as he nodded vigorously. “Uniquely qualified: that’s you. Nobody else could possibly interview the seven people who volunteered in the kitchen that day and get the same excellent results. But”-he shrugged as he forced back what might well have been a bogus tear-“since you’re not going to do it, I guess that’s just not going to happen the way it should.”
It must have been the Devil standing next to me that caused what happened next. My mouth opened of its own volition and the words just poured out like water from a suddenly unplugged gutter.
“Hold your horses, young man! Don’t you dare tell me what I’m not going to do, because I am going to investigate this case, and that’s that. Case settled.” I slapped my hands against each other to drive the point home. “However, this investigation is going to have to wait a couple of weeks until I can at least walk like a normal human being, and sit down without the aid of a doughnut ring. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am, but-”
“There’s no need to worry your pretty head, Chris; the killer isn’t going anywhere. His-or her-objective was to get rid of Minerva, and now, as our erstwhile president infamously said, ‘mission accomplished.’ ”
“Oh, Miss Yoder, I can’t thank you enough. Like I said-”
“No offense, dear, but put a zip on the lips.”
Do you see what the Devil made me say? And that was mild compared to what was to come.
9
Shame on me. I put on my gumshoes that very afternoon. I’d just fed the little one, and even though I was still so sore I had to sit on a foam doughnut, and had all the energy of a teenager come six o’clock Monday morning, mentally I was itching to get back in the game.
My reentry strategy was simple. Minerva lives-well, she lived-in a remodeled farmhouse about eight miles south of Hernia on Thousand Caves Road. She bought the house in the late 1980s, and I remember the event well, because she made a big flap about it. She was pursuing a life as a real estate agent at the time and was promoting the Thousand Caves area as the new retirement utopia for the fresh-air crowd. There were woods to roam, streams in which to trout fish, a lake with paddleboats, and, of course, spelunking in the myriad caves and sinkholes that gave the region its name. Lots could be had in one- to three-acre sizes and for a fraction of what one would pay anywhere else.
What Minerva didn’t tell the retirees is that the 183 acres that comprised Thousand Caves Retirement Village had been purchased from a struggling Amish farmer, who couldn’t make a go of it because that particular patch of Pennsylvania was so riddled with caves and sinkholes that the surface of cleared land resembled Swiss cheese. Even if he could manage to get his horse and plow to safely turn over a field, come a heavy rain, half the crop would disappear underground.
Then there too was the matter of her sales brochure. The photos were taken somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and depicted towering Douglas firs, and a sparkling lake with water so blue that one couldn’t help but think of Aaron Miller’s eyes (the man whom I believed I was married to, and who is the scum beneath the slime beneath the sludge beneath the ooze beneath the mud at the bottom of the pond, and I am not bitter, thank you very much). In reality, it was a pockmarked landscape studded with miniature trees, and the so-called lake was a man-made brown puddle that kept disappearing into an underlying cavern.
And although the farmhouse that Minerva bought had been built on a solid chunk of land, the same could not be said for the other potential lots. Of the dozen lots sold, only two were viable as home sites. Minerva had advertised that county utilities were available, but she didn’t say when, and didn’t say where. When the two brave couples who had bought into Minerva’s grand scheme learned that she had her own generator and pumped her water from an underground stream, they sued and won the right to back out of their contracts.
Today Thousand Caves Retirement Village consists of the loneliest house on planet Earth. If I had an imagination-which, sadly, I don’t, or a sense of irony-I could probably envision a murder mystery being set in this strange landscape of seemingly bottomless pits and elfin tress. One could, theoretically of course, toss a body into one of these black gaping holes and it would never be found, because even a thousand and one detectives from Dalmatia, each with their own Dalmatian, would not be enough to scour each and every man-size opening in the porous limestone that underlies the thin layer of topsoil.
I’d been to Minerva’s house only once before, and that was many years prior, when she, uncharacteristically, hosted the Mennonite Ladies Sewing Circle. Perhaps I just spoke too harshly, but I also remember that everyone was surprised when Minerva volunteered to do so,
and that virtually everyone in the group attended because we were all curious to see what living out there was like. But I, for one, was so “freaked-out”-as Susannah would say-by what I saw that when I got home that night I fell on my knees and thanked the Good Lord that I lived in a bustling community like Hernia.
After all, not a day goes by that I don’t hear the clip-clop of a horse pulling an Amish buggy-sometimes even twice or more a day-out on Hertzler Road, and once a family of Parisian tourists rapped on the kitchen door and demanded that I tell them how to get to Rio de Janeiro. (I told them that the most direct way was to continue on down Route 96 to Cumberland, Maryland, then head east until they caught I-95, which they should follow all the way to Miami. After that they should swim like mad until they got to the coast of Brazil, from whence they could get further directions.)
Now, where was I? Oh yes. I hadn’t been out to Thousand Caves Road for many years, but nothing seemed to have changed-at least not for the better. There was no sign of the two homes that had been started, and Minerva’s solitary house looked just as lonely and out of place as a petunia in an onion patch. Still, it was a very nice house, so Minerva’s finances must have been halfway decent.
The house was set close to the road, because there wouldn’t have been much point to a lawn in this earth-eating landscape. Even from a hundred yards away I could see the brightly colored bands of crime scene tape that crisscrossed the front door, forbidding entry to the curious-of which we have plenty hereabouts, I assure you. Anticipating that very thing, I’d brought along a pair of scissors and a roll of duct tape (I fear that one day this marvelous invention may be our only means of repairing the fractured world we live in). Before getting out of the car I checked to make sure that my cell phone was charged; it was. Then I hoofed it to the porch and snipped away.
The key I’d purloined from the chief’s desk drawer fit the front door perfectly. I’d been almost positive that it would. What I found odd was that it had now been eight days since Minerva’s death, and the chief had yet to mention anything about the envelope being tampered with, or that Miss Jay had left him with yet another puzzle to solve. Perhaps he really didn’t care if he solved it, and that was why he’d been so eager to fob it off on me, the untrained amateur. Curious, isn’t it, that fob should mean two very different things. Land O’ Goshen, there I go again, interrupting the narrative flow, which is something a real novelist would never do; thank heavens that I am merely an innkeeper with a phenomenal memory. (This is a fact, so it is by no means meant to be braggadocio.)
