by Tamar Myers
“Of course.” I prayed for a charitable tongue, but feeling no difference in my mouth, decided to take my chances. “And where did this all happen, Joe? Out among the haystacks?”
He gave me a pitying look. “Of course not. It happened in a barn.”
I sighed. “Benjamin and Catherine might turn a blind eye now and then, but they’re not ostriches.”
“Actually, Magdalena, ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. You see, their heads are very small in proportion to their bodies, and when they peck at the ground to eat, or turn their eggs, it only appears as if their heads are buried.”
“Thanks for the nature lesson, dear. But you know what I mean. It is preposterous to think the elder Keims wouldn’t stop such a thing from going on in their barn.”
“Oh, it wasn’t their barn.”
“Then whose was it?”
“Nobody’s.”
“Figures.”
“But it used to be the Berkey barn. You know, out there where Create-A-Dream is selling those estates?”
I gasped. “Not a half mile away from where that English couple, the Hamptons, have carved out their little kingdom?”
“You know them?”
“We’ve met. Joe, do you think the Hamptons are involved?”
His thick shoulders twitched. “Who knows? They weren’t there, of course, or I would have mentioned it.”
It was amazing, but I totally believed Joe now. Which is not to say that I didn’t still think he had problems. But then again, don’t we all?
“Okay, Joe, so Elam Keim and some of his cronies are doing drugs in an old abandoned barn.” I smiled kindly. “How does this relate to Lizzie?”
It was a definite shrug this time. “I don’t know. But it’s got to somehow. Next-door neighbor kids taking drugs, and that’s how Lizzie dies. You know, she never even had as much as a sip of wine her entire life.”
“Temperance is not all it’s cracked up to be,” I wailed.
“What?”
“Never mind, dear. Do you think those kids will be back there tonight?”
“Don’t know. That would be your job to find out, right?”
“Right.”
He looked around, suddenly nervous. “Well, got to go.”
“So soon? And we were just getting along. Can’t you stay long enough to get better acquainted with George when he gets back from his potty break?”
Joe’s response was to drop to his belly and begin the long, slow process of scuttling back across the cow pasture. He never looked back.
* * *
George was obviously not in any hurry to get back. I sat in his chair, in the shade of the willow, waiting patiently to talk to him about Joe. Then I waited impatiently. Finally boredom forced me to pick up one of his brushes, squeeze a bit of brown pigment from a half-rolled tube, and paint the outline of a third turtle on the log. Then, still bored, I took another brush and hid my name in green among the cattails.
By then it was time to boogie on out of there, so I skipped across the remaining pasture to Gabe’s. While skipping may sound like an odd choice of locomotion for a woman in her middle years, it is nonetheless a very good form of aerobic exercise. When I knocked on Gabriel Rosen’s front door, I was breathing rather hard.
“Calm yourself,” he said with a grin. “I know I have that effect on women, but I thought it was lost on you.”
I choked back my gut response. What wasn’t lost on me was the fact that Gabe was wearing only cutoff denim shorts. Short shorts that displayed strong, well-toned thighs. I had never seen his naked torso before—well, not during waking moments—and was, to put it frankly, pleased at what I saw. He was muscular, without being bulky, and he had a patch of dark hair in the middle of his golden chest that ran like a funnel down to his waistband. As far as I could see, he had no more hair on his back than did I.
“Anything wrong, Magdalena?”
“Nothing,” I squeaked.
“Come in.” He ushered me in, and as I squeezed past him, his smell made me every bit as heady as the Hamptons’ champagne. It was times like that when I wished I were a Roman Catholic. Without someone to confess my lust to, guilt was going to stay with me a long, long time.
“Have a seat,” he said. He didn’t seem at all upset with me for standing him up the previous evening. Maybe he had a very generous, forgiving spirit, or maybe he just didn’t care.
I sat on one end of a buttery soft, black leather couch. Gabe sat on the other.
“So what have you been up to?” I asked.
He picked up a book, which had been lying face-down, spine bent, on the heavy wood coffee table in front of us. “I’ve been reading this most fascinating memoir by a woman named Ramat Sreym, which I bought, by the way, at Yoder’s Corner Market. Anyway, Ramat’s parents were missionaries to the Belgian Congo, one of the most remote places on the face of the earth. She was also a well-known mystery writer, but it took her years to find a publisher willing to publish this book.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and his chest muscles rippled. “Who knows? The publishing industry doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Ramat’s memoirs are every bit as riveting as Angela’s Ashes. In the end she had to resort to asking her fans to write her mystery publisher and request the memoirs. Of course she couldn’t do this directly, so she made a veiled reference to it in one of her books.” He put the book back on the table. “So, what have you been up to?”
“Me? Well, you know, business as usual.”
He nodded. “So how did your errand go last night?”
“What?” I prayed that he had selective amnesia. If my prayer was answered, he wouldn’t remember the hours spent awaiting for me atop Stucky Ridge.
“You were in a hurry to get someplace yesterday afternoon. Everything go all right?”
“I’m sorry,” I wailed. “I tried to get there, I really did. But who knew I would have three flat tires in an Amish driveway?”
He put up a quieting hand. “Look, I’m not blaming you. In fact, I should be blaming myself. You should be blaming me.”
“Whatever for?”
His warm brown eyes left my face and focused on Miss Sreym’s book jacket. “Well, because I was a no-show myself.”
“What?”
He grinned and ran long fingers through thick black hair. “I got kind of caught up in the book I’m writing. It was the final scene, you know, where everything gets tied up neatly in a little package. Anyway, when I looked at the clock, it was already a quarter past eight. I know I should have called, Magdalena, but I was just too chicken.”
“Well!” I said with righteous indignation.
He looked back at me, his eyes now dancing with merriment. “Well, indeed. So why didn’t you call?”
“Because—well, because—” I grabbed the book off the coffee table. “Where Jackals Sing. That’s certainly an intriguing title. So it’s a good one, eh?”
“The best. But don’t try and change the subject.”
“Okay,” I wailed, “I was chicken too. And mad. I thought you didn’t care.”
He laughed. “So we’re a pair of chickens.”
“I guess so.”
“You want to try again?”
I blinked. “Try what?”
“This date thing. Our picnic.”
My heart pounded. It hadn’t beat that hard since the day I found Sarah Weaver in a barrel of sauerkraut—and she’d been dead twenty years.
“Sure,” I said through lips as dry as Mrs. Lehman’s coffee cakes.
“Tonight?”
“I can’t,” I said miserably. “I already have plans.”
Gabe’s beautiful brow creased with the merest suggestion of a frown. “My, aren’t we fickle.”
“It’s not a date,” I wailed. “I have to spy on a barn full of Amish teenagers.”
“Always ready with a joke, Magdalena. I don’t know how you do it.”
“I’m not joking!”
“Wha
t is this? Some sort of chaperone thing?”
I sighed. “Okay, if you must know, I’m investigating the death of Lizzie Mast.”
“Amish teenagers killed her? Rumor has it she died of an overdose of phencyclidine.”
“Rumor?” I said, startled.
“This is a small town, Magdalena. A very small town. Fewer people live here than on my block in Manhattan. Maybe even fewer than in my apartment building. Five minutes down at Yoder’s Corner Market or Miller’s Feed Store and you get enough information to fill the Times.”
I swallowed hard, praying that it wouldn’t be my lips to sink the ship, in the event that it sank. “But nothing about Amish teenagers, right?”
“Nothing about Amish teenagers and drugs. But this rumschpringe thing. That seems to be the main subject of conversation. It seems to be getting out of hand.”
“You know what that means?”
He nodded. “I have a good idea from the context in which it was used. My grandparents lived with us when I was a little boy, and they spoke only Yiddish. It’s remarkably similar to Pennsylvania Dutch. I can understand about three words out of four.”
That made me just a mite envious. My grandparents, with whom we lived, had spoken only Pennsylvania Dutch at home, but I had studiously ignored them—well, as much as I could. Granny Yoder had been impossible to ignore. Even after death she’s made a couple of appearances back at the PennDutch Inn, which wasn’t an inn in her time, but her domain. Anyway, after Granny died, our conversations were always in English, for my sake as well as Susannah’s. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve regretted losing that integral part of my heritage. I can still understand some “Dutch,” but apparently not as much as my Jewish doctor friend from New York City. Go figure, as he would say.
I sighed. “If my source can be trusted, rumschpringe has definitely got out of hand. The kids are supposedly using drugs.”
“Moonshine? That kind of thing?”
I shook my head.
“Not phencyclidine!”
“That I don’t know. But apparently they were aphrodisiacs.”
He grinned broadly. “You don’t say? One doesn’t normally think of a bunch of teenagers needing sexual stimulants.”
“What?”
“You did say aphrodisiacs, didn’t you?”
“Psychedelics!” I wailed. “They were imagining themselves to be devils and such.”
“Ah, well, now that makes sense. So just what are you going to do, Magdalena? Peek through the barn slats and watch them freak out?”
“Something like that.”
“Then what? Are you going to arrest them?”
“I don’t have the authority,” I said. “But I will eventually report it to Melvin. In the meantime I’m going to try and find the connection between Lizzie’s death and these kids. Assuming what I’ve heard about these kids is true.”
“Who is your source, Magdalena?”
I hesitated for a few seconds. Why did I feel more comfortable confiding in George Hanson, a complete stranger, than in Gabe? It didn’t make a lick of sense.
“Joseph Mast,” I said reluctantly. “Lizzie’s widower.”
One of Gabe’s dark brows lifted. “You think ‘Mr. Noah’ could be telling the truth?”
“Mr. Noah?”
“That’s what they call him down at the feed store.”
That angered me. I’m a lifelong resident of Hernia, and I keep an ear to the ground, and sometimes to a glass pressed against a wall, and I hadn’t, until yesterday, known just how disturbed Joe Mast really was. How was it that some big-city outsider, who had only been in town a few months, knew more about my town and my people than did I? It couldn’t have been just the language bit either. Gabe the Babe had to be the most inquisitive man this side of the Delaware.
“Joseph Mast,” I said emphatically, “is at times very coherent. In my professional opinion this lead needs following.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“The hell you say. I’m not going to let something potentially horrible happen to you. Kids on drugs can be extremely dangerous.”
I stood. “First of all, I’ll thank you not to swear in front of me. And second, I may be just a simple Mennonite woman from a nowhere town with a somewhat bizarre, if not inappropriate, name, but I have had a lot more experience dealing with criminal types than you.”
His grin looked mocking to me. “I bet you have. Look, I’m just trying to protect you.”
“Bet all you want, buster, but I don’t need your protection. And I’ll thank you to forget we ever had this conversation.”
“But Magdalena—”
I ignored him and walked resolutely toward the door. He jumped to his feet and followed me.
“What about the book? Don’t you want to borrow Ramat Sreym’s memoirs?”
“I have work to do.”
“Okay, so what about our picnic? I know tonight won’t do, but what about tomorrow evening?”
“Maybe,” I said over my shoulder, “or maybe not. I’ll tell Freni my answer, and then you run down to Miller’s Feed Store, or Yoder’s Corner Market, and see how long it takes you to get the scoop.”
“Magdalena, don’t be childish.”
I sailed out of there on the wings of pride. Unfortunately pride has rather flimsy wings, and, as the Bible warns us, is often accompanied by a nasty fall.
20
Italian Crepes
Filling
1 cup ricotta cheese
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
1⁄8 teaspoon salt
1⁄8 teaspoon pepper
Sauce
3⁄4 teaspoon crushed oregano
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons flour
1 cup tomato sauce
Filling: Combine all ingredients and mix well. Spoon mixture onto crepes and fold into triangles. Place in a baking dish and top with the sauce. Fills 8 crepes.
Sauce: Combine butter and flour in a small saucepan, cooking and stirring until smooth, about 30 seconds. Add the tomato sauce and cook for 5 more minutes. Spoon over crepes, then broil until brown.
21
I didn’t fall until I got home, and for some inexplicable reason I tripped on the sill of the kitchen door. I may be tall and skinny, but that’s not the advantage you may think it is. I didn’t fall straight down, but shot forward like an arrow, my Yoder nose leading the way.
“Ach!” Freni squawked as I plowed headfirst into her soft middle.
I scrambled to my feet. “Sorry, dear. Are you all right?”
“For shame, Magdalena. You said this drinking was a onetime thing.”
“It was! I’m just clumsy.”
Freni stood on tiptoes and sniffed my breath anxiously. “Magdalena!”
“I didn’t drink anything,” I wailed.
“Yah, maybe. But I smell a man’s perfume.”
“You do?” I grabbed my collar and tried to smell it, but alas I smelled only myself. There was not a trace of Gabe. And why should there be? The man hadn’t even touched me.
But Freni was nodding. “You have been to see Dr. Rosen, yah?”
“Maybe. But so what if I have? You like him, and you know it.”
“Yah, that is so. But what would your mama say?”
“Mama? What does she have to do with this? She’s been dead for twelve years, for crying out loud.”
Freni looked away, just as I thought I saw a tear glistening behind one lens. “She would remind you about the horse and the donkey, and not to tie them together.”
“I haven’t tied a horse and a donkey together in all my born days, and I’m not about to start now. But just for the record, did Mama tie animals together on a regular basis?”
“Ach, you make fun!”
“And you’re not making any sense, dear.”
“The Bible,” Freni said, and thumped the kitchen table like a preacher with tiny fists. “It’s in
there.”
“What is?” I asked with the patience of Job.
Freni recited a passage of scripture in High German, the language in which she reads her Bible.
“That’s Greek to me,” I said facetiously.
“But this tying of the animals—to pull the plow—they must be the same.”
Then it dawned on me. She was referring, of course, to the passage in 2 Corinthians in which Paul exhorts his fellow Christians not to be yoked together with unbelievers. The verse says nothing about horses or donkeys, but Freni had been unable to translate “yoke” into English. Of course this hadn’t stopped her from trying to interfere in my personal life.
“Not to worry, Freni dear. Gabe and I are nowhere near getting tied together like a horse and donkey. Neither of us has mentioned marriage. In fact, we haven’t even been on a single real date. We’re just friends.”
Freni breathed a sigh of relief and wiped the corner of her eye with her apron. If you ask me, she didn’t deserve to be let off the hook that easily.
“You sound just like Lodema Schrock,” I said wickedly. “The two of you been putting your heads together lately?”
“Ach!”
“Now there’s a matched set. The question is, are you both horses, or are you both asses?”
Before a shocked Freni could respond, the door to the dining room swung open and in flitted Gingko Murray. The waif was wearing a yellow sundress scalloped with white lace, and her long dark hair had been woven into a single braid that was studded with dandelions. Her tiny feet were clad in white plastic sandals and there were more dandelions tucked in the various slots. I suppose the picture the pixie created might be considered attractive by some, but I was annoyed.
