Custard's Last Stand (An Amish Bed and Breakfast Mystery with Recipes Book 11)

by Tamar Myers

  “I already belong to a church, thank you very much.”

  “Miss Quiring, it’s me—Magdalena Yoder.”

  “Yes, I’m getting older, but my church sends a van around to pick me up.”

  “I know, dear. You go to my church.” There was nothing to be gained by telling her I was the one who donated the van.

  “We don’t drink beer at my church,” she said and started to close the door.

  One of the benefits of having big feet and wearing clodhoppers is the ability to stop folks from shutting their doors all the way. If I’m really quick and turn my feet sideways, they can’t shut them at all.

  “Miss Quiring,” I shouted, “I’m Magdalena Yoder. Can I come in?”

  The woman barely comes up to my bosoms. She’d shrunk a bit since the last time I saw her, but my bosoms had gotten lower, so in that respect nothing had changed. She stared up at my lips, trying to make sense of what I’d said.

  “Did you say Magdalena Yoder?”

  “As big as life and twice as ugly.”

  “Ugly, you say? Why, I’ll have you know I was Miss Bedford County of nineteen forty—”

  “Not you, me. I’m the ugly one, and it’s only an expression.” Thank heavens I’d had practice talking on a cell phone; otherwise I never would have made myself understood.

  “Well, yes, you always were a homely child, Magdalena. Now, what is it you said you wanted?”

  “I’d like to come in and ask you a few questions.”

  For a few painful seconds I saw loneliness and pride duke it out. Loneliness won.

  “Come in then, but mind you don’t let the birds out.” I’d known the woman my entire life, but I’d never been in her house. I’d never had occasion to. Mama didn’t believe in wasting money on piano lessons, not when she could teach me herself Never mind that Mama played the piano with all the grace of a drunken marionette, and every song she taught me sounded mysteriously like “Chopsticks.”

  There was certainly no mistaking why Miss Quiring’s house smelled like a birdcage. There were only two real birds, canaries both, but they were not confined to a cage. Their names, I learned immediately, were Mendelssohn and Mozart. They flitted about the room in a dither, all the while depositing feathers and droppings, like a yellow snowstorm punctuated by hail. I had to brush the sofa with my hand before I sat. Even then it was better to squint.

  “Keeping them locked up in a cage would be cruel,” Miss Quiring said after I’d shouted myself hoarse asking the question.

  I nodded, needing to save my voice for the question I’d come to ask. “Was Wanda Hemphopple here for a lesson Tuesday morning?”

  “Gracious me, I hope it won’t topple. I’ve heard there’s a rat in there that likes to eat birds. Do you think I should lock up my canaries when she comes? I could chase them into the bathroom.”

  As much as I would have liked to track down the origins of yet another rumor about Wanda’s ’do, I really needed to get down to business. “That was a dog, not a rat,” I croaked, “and it was a one-time thing. I wanted to know if Wanda was here yesterday morning? Did she have a lesson?”

  “She told you about her lessons?”

  “Someone did,” I said, hoping she’d heard an affirmative answer.

  Apparently she did. “Well, there’s no shame in not knowing how to read. It was the school’s fault, if you ask me. Not Wanda’s.”

  Already I disagreed. “The school has enough of a job teaching kids how to read words. Reading music, on the other hand—”

  “I’m talking about reading words,” Miss Quiring said, her hearing suddenly restored. “It’s amazing how some folks compensate. Running a business like the Sausage Barn and not being able to read past a third-grade level—one has to admire the woman.”

  “Wanda Hemphopple can’t read?”

  “Well, she can now. What do you think I do, give her piano lessons?”

  I was stunned. “Yes, that’s exactly what I thought.” Miss Quiring’s hearing was on a roll. “Piano lessons to Wanda? Now, that’s a good one. Ha! Why, that woman has less talent even than Magdalena Yoder.” “Than who?” Both Magdalena and Yoder are common names in these parts, but to my knowledge there is currently just one—and that would be moi—who uses both monikers.

  “Tall skinny girl I taught in elementary school some years ago. Couldn’t carry a tune if you handed her a radio and told her to walk.”

  “Wait a second. When was that?”

  “Like I said, it was years ago—but I remember her like it was yesterday. I’d given her a solo to sing in the spring festival, on account of I felt sorry for the big ga¬loot. Was that ever a mistake. She hit so many wrong notes half the audience got up and left before the piece was finished.”

  “That was because the stupid spring festival was held outdoors,” I wailed, “and it had started to rain.”

  “That’s right, she sounded just like a train. But after-wards her mother still had the nerve to ask me if I wouldn’t give that tone-deaf daughter of hers piano lessons. And at a discount yet.”

  “Mama asked that?” I had no trouble believing the discount part, but that my penny-pinching progenitrix was willing to part with any of her pennies was music to my ears. Mama’s only answer to me had been a flat-out “no.”

  “Speak up, child—you’re not making any sense.” “I’m hardly a child, dear. That was me all those years ago.”

  “Ears? Yes, I pull ears if children don’t listen, and I’m not ashamed of it. Schools have gotten too liberal these days—won’t allow corporal punishment anymore. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Says so right in the Bible. That’s why I no longer teach, you know.”

  “For that every child in Hernia should be grateful,” I whispered. I said it so softly my left brain couldn’t even hear my right brain, much less my mouth.

  “I heard that!”

  “Uh—I don’t think so, Miss Quiring.”

  “You said children should be grateful I no longer teach.”

  I stood. “Well, it may have sounded like that, but— oh, before I forget, what time Tuesday morning did Wanda have her reading lesson?”

  “Seven thirty, like she always does. The actual lesson lasts about half an hour. Then I make her stay an extra hour to read on her own.”

  “So she didn’t leave here until nine?”

  “Wine? I’ll have you know I don’t even allow beer in this house.”

  “I didn’t say wine—”

  “I know what you said, young lady.” She was spry for a woman of her years, and apparently a good jumper as well, because the next thing I knew she had me by my left ear and was twisting it like it was nothing more than a piece of dough. Believe it or not, that was a new twist. In the old days, when she was taller than I, she would have merely given my ear a good tug to get me out of my seat, before taking her director’s baton to my comely caboose.

  “Ow! Miss Quiring, that hurts.”

  She twisted harder, leading me to believe it was a certain Mennonite woman who invented those sugary treats called elephant ears available at county fairs. And those curious pastries have nothing to do with pachyderms, but once graced the heads of this woman’s music students at Hernia Elementary.

  There is only so much pain a body can take, even if it belongs to a committed pacifist like myself When I reached my breaking point, I did the unthinkable and pulled one of Miss Quiring’s ears.

  28

  “Oh Mama,” I wailed, “I can’t believe I did it!”

  Mama couldn’t hear me, of course. Ever since she died, her hearing has been worse than that of Miss Quiring. Still, I find it comforting to sit at the foot of Mama’s grave—I don’t dare sit on it—and pour my heart out to a woman I couldn’t have said the same things to when she was alive.

  But just because Mama can no longer hear with her flesh and blood ears doesn’t mean she’s not listening. I know she’s aware of what I’m saying, because I hear her responses in my head. I can be certain these response
s are hers, and not just the figments of my imagination, for two reasons: (a) I don’t have an imagination, and (b) even if I did possess some small shred of imagination, it could never come up with the things I hear in my head.

  “Magdalena, dear, did you pull both her ears, or just the one?”

  “Just the one, Mama.”

  “That’s a shame. While you had the chance, you should have given them both a good hard tug. Maybe even got her in a headlock and given her a few noogies.”

  “Mama!”

  “I never did like that woman, dear. Always picking on you like that, just because you had a tin ear.”

  “But you were going to buy me piano lessons.”

  “I was? Oh yeah, well, write it off to a moment of weakness.”

  “Mama!”

  “Magdalena, you sure wail a lot, you know that?”

  “You would too if you had my problems.”

  “And just what would those problems be?”

  “For starters, I have a sister who never grows up, a cook who quits at the drop of a saucepan, a hunky fiancé who is not of my faith, a foster child with more holes in her body than a pound of Swiss cheese, and a murder case to solve, which is currently going nowhere.”

  “Quite whining, Magdalena. First of all, Susannah may not be your ideal sister, but she loves you dearly, which is more than I could say about my sister, Matilda. Not to mention the fact she worships the ground you walk on, which I can’t for the life of me—”

  “That’s because you’re dead, Mama.”

  “Whatever. Now, where was I, before you so rudely interrupted?”

  “I think you were about to mention Freni.”

  “Yeah, Freni. Salt of the earth. So what if she quits? You always get her back. And as for that cute guy you call the Babester, calling off the marriage isn’t going to help him see the light.”

  “Mama! I wasn’t even thinking about calling it off.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Magdalena. You know how I hate that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now, about that child Alison. You should thank your lucky stars for the opportunity to raise her, as difficult as it might be. You foolishly waited too long to have a child of your own—”

  “It’s not like I had a choice, Mama.”

  “Oh, yes, you did. Remember Wilmer Sprunger?”

  “The man with two Adam’s apples?”

  “That extra Adam’s apple was a sign of virility. You could be the mother of an entire brood by now if you hadn’t been so picky.”

  “What about the murder case, since you seem to have an answer for everything?”

  “Give me a moment, dear. You always were so impatient.”

  While Mama took her own sweet time thinking, I looked around me. Settlers’ Cemetery straddles the crest of Stucky Ridge and has commanding views of the countryside. It is the place to be buried in Hernia, and only the direct descendants of the town’s founders can be interred there. From Mama’s grave site I can look right down on the PennDutch Inn. I barely have to turn my head to see where Freni lives. This is truly the land of the pilgrims’ pride, land where the Indians died, or however that song goes. Every time I visit the cemetery I feel connected to my past, and therefore to my future.

  “So, Mama,” I said, after admiring the view and feeling my roots for a respectable length of time, “what’s your theory?”

  “Rush, rush, rush,” Mama said. “All you ever do is rush me, but okay, here goes. You can cross Sam off your list.”

  “Reason?”

  “He’s your cousin, for crying out loud. Besides, Samuel Nevin Yoder is a coward. Always has been. He doesn’t have the cajones to stand up to his wife, Dorothy, much less murder someone.”

  “Mama! You used a bad word.”

  “I’m dead, Magdalena, or have you forgotten? I can say anything I want.”

  Do you see what I mean? The voice I hear when I visit the cemetery could only be Mama’s. I could never dream up such language on my own.

  “Go on, Mama,” I begged.

  “Well, as you found out on your own, Wanda Hemphopple has an alibi. An airtight one too, I’d say. There’s not another soul in Hernia who would risk having her ears pulled to contradict that old woman. By the way, how does your ear feel?”

  I touched the injured party. “It’s still a little sore.”

  “Do you ever stop complaining? Now, where was I?”

  “You’d just crossed Sam and Wanda off my list. That leaves Principal Herman Middledorf and Elspeth Miller.”

  “Do you want my opinion?”

  “Yes?” I asked anxiously.

  “Think about it, Magdalena. Don’t be such a dummkopf. Miss Quiring had an alibi, but Herman has three hundred and eighty-five.”

  “He does?”

  “Honestly, Magdalena, you can be so slow at times. Students—that’s what I’m talking about. And of course teachers. A high school principal has his hands full at eight in the morning.”

  “Okay, okay. So that leaves Elspeth. But of the four of them, she would be least affected by a five-star hotel. Custard’s last stand was not going to take any business away from the feed store. And even if they widened the road in front of it, what’s the worst that would have happened? She’d have lost a little of her parking lot, that’s all.”

  “Again, you’re not thinking, silly. A wider road means more traffic—the Amish wouldn’t have liked that. Too dangerous for horse-drawn buggies.”

  To my credit, I refrained from calling Mama a dummkopf. But clearly, eleven years of decomposition had not done her brain any good.

  “Elspeth could have sold that store to developers and built a new one farther out from town. On Augsberger Road, for instance.”

  “Unless she had something to hide under that parking lot of hers.”

  “Hide? Like what.”

  Mama’s sigh of exasperation lifted a stray wisp of hair on my forehead. “Do you really know what happened to her husband, Roy?”

  “He took off someplace to escape being abused by Elspeth the Hun.”

  “Give me a break, Magdalena. He ran away before the fishing trip he planned with Sam.”

  I gasped. “You don’t mean—I mean, you think Elspeth killed Roy too?”

  “Well, if she was capable of killing the colonel in cold blood for business reasons—think about it, Magdalena. The woman despised her husband for his weakness. After she became a full-fledged U.S. citizen, what else did she need him for?”

  “Well—although I guess there is always the Maytag.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Magdalena.”

  “Not now, Mama, we’re on a roll.”

  “You mean I’m on a roll. Now where was I?”

  “Elspeth killed Roy. But if that’s the case, Mama, how come he never showed up dead?”

  “Maybe he will yet, Magdalena. What is it Elspeth sells in that feed store, besides feed, I mean.”

  “A little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

  “Be specific.”

  “But Mama, she sells just about everything a farmer would need, besides livestock and large machinery. You can buy barbed wire, posthole diggers, pickaxes—even cement.”

  “And why was Elspeth so upset with the water people the other day?”

  “They wanted to dig up part of her parking lot on account of a possible leak—Mama, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  But Mama, always one to have the last word, didn’t have anything else to say, not even good-bye. Just left me sitting there at the foot of her grave with my mouth open wide enough to catch dragonflies. With no salutation, I was tempted to doubt she’d even been speaking to me at all. Of course that was silly, because I never could have come to those conclusions on my own. Not me, the dummkopf.

  I waited patiently for another ten minutes and then picked a handful of dandelions and laid them on her grave. Then I tried to imagine what Mama would say about my thoughtful gesture.

>   “Is that all you think of me? Weeds?”

  The words were right, and so was the tone, but I no longer felt her presence. It was time for me to scoot my skinny patooty back down the ridge and do some serious investigating.

  Owls are nocturnal and see best at night, but I knew from experience that Elspeth Miller was the exception to the rule. Therefore, it was with extreme caution that I cased her parking lot. I even went so far as to borrow a black traveling bonnet and cape from Barbara Hostetler, Freni’s daughter-in-law. Well, actually I borrowed it from Freni, because Barbara was still not home. Freni was more than happy to lend me her daughter-in-law’s things without permission, a fact that did not please me, but what else could I do? My cook is a mere five feet two, while Barbara is six feet in her thick cotton stockings.

  Because I wear no makeup, and share a genetic history with ninety percent of the community, I can pass as an Amish woman with just the addition of the bonnet and cape. Although I drove to Miller’s Feed Store, I parked in the farthest comer toward the back and didn’t don my garb until I was out of the car. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to be suspicious.

  Clutching my cape closed to hide a too pale blue dress, I wandered about, unchallenged, in search of Roy Miller’s final resting spot. It was a busy day at the feed store and the lot was filled with Amish buggies and cars belonging to more liberal Mennonite farmers. Finding an anomaly was not going to be easy.

  I poked about for twenty minutes or so, peering under buggies, and discreetly getting down on my hands and knees on the asphalt and peeking under cars, when I remembered something Mama had said. Elspeth possessed the means of disposing of Roy’s body. In other words, she already had everything she needed in the store.

  What she didn’t have was hot asphalt and a giant rolling machine. How stupid of me to not have thought of that right away. Roy Miller could only be buried on that small portion of the lot that was poured concrete. This was restricted to the sidewalk, the curb, and a narrow strip along the street that had once been a flower and vegetable display bed. Several years ago, about the time Roy disappeared, Elspeth decided extra parking spaces were more important than showing customers the latest varieties of marigolds and pole beans.