by Tamar Myers
Toy shivered and managed to laugh at the same time. ‘That is pretty ironic: a man who cuts into the body’s most vital organ has to have his mama cut his steak for him. At least she doesn’t do that anymore.’
‘That’s right, dear,’ I said, ‘but only because I cut his meat for him. The woman who spent thirty-three agonizing hours bringing him into this world – “oy, oy, such pain you wouldn’t believe” – was over here Tuesday night and wanted to cut up his ground beef casserole for him.’
‘And?’
‘I sent her back to the convent with a mashed turnip and turkey liver pie.’
‘Yuck,’ Toy said. ‘You made that?’
‘Bite your tongue, dear. We had a dessert exchange at church and I ended up being the loser for the eighth year in a row. Anyway, make nice with Granny now so we can get on with our business.’
Toy cleared his throat loudly and squared his shoulders. ‘Again, Magdalena, I don’t see your granny. Frankly, and I don’t mean any disrespect, neither do you. Ghosts don’t exist; they are just figments of overactive imaginations.’
‘Bullfinches!’ Granny said.
If Toy hadn’t been so startled by the force of Granny Yoder’s outburst, I might have jumped into his strong, sinewy arms and have him hold me next to his sculpted body for protection. As it was, I thought the young man was going down for the count, and I was going to have to scrape him off my cheap facsimile of an Oriental carpet. After that I would clasp him tightly with my stick-like appendages, pressing him against my bony carapace until he got his second wind and demanded that I release him.
‘Stop it, Magdalena,’ Toy said angrily when he could at last speak. ‘Stop it with this ghost nonsense. I don’t know how you’re managing to pull off these illusions or that bit when you threw your voice just now. This is not the time for parlour tricks – no pun intended.’
My temperature had started to climb but premenopausal hormones had nothing to do with it. ‘Don’t toy with my temper, Toy. I may exaggerate but I don’t fabricate out of whole fabric, not when it’s official police business.’
‘Listen,’ said Toy, ‘I’ll take your word for it that you keep your files in some hole under your living-room floor—’
‘Hole, shmole!’ I said. ‘That is a proper cellar with head clearance even for yours truly, she who stands five foot ten in her thick cotton stockings. My ancestor who built the original house was one of the Hochstetlers who survived the Northkill Amish massacre. The family managed to survive the night in the cellar of their burning log cabin by splashing cider on the wood ceiling. Although attacks from the Delaware Indians had ceased by the time the family moved here, their memory had not. Think of this as the prototype of a “safe room.”’
‘Hmm,’ said Toy, ‘it seems more like a death trap with a trapdoor to me.’
‘Ignorance may be bliss for some, but in this case it’s a wide miss. This cellar has an escape tunnel, which was originally built by my ancestors who had survived massacres in the eastern part of Pennsylvania. But the other trapdoor opens above a so-called “safe-room,” which the Babester insisted that we build – never mind, I have said too much. I shouldn’t have even mentioned the existence of the second safe room. The fact that one is safer than the other—’ I slapped both cheeks. ‘For further penance, I shall chew a mouthful of thumb tacks and wear lipstick to church.’
‘Hussy,’ Granny Yoder hissed. ‘Only trollops wear lip rouge.’
‘You tell her, Granny,’ Toy said with a laugh.
‘Aha,’ I cried, ‘you can hear her!’
‘What?’ Toy said. ‘I didn’t hear your granny; I heard you threaten to wear lipstick to church. Your kind of Mennonite doesn’t wear “war paint,” as you have so often, charmingly described it.’
‘Give me a break,’ I said.
‘Puh-leeze,’ he said, ‘can we finally get back to discussing the matter of the corpse and the countess?’ With that he took one of my wrists in one of his impeccably manicured hands and steered me gently back into the dining room.
In my opinion, a man who grooms his fingernails without being coached is such a rarity that he should be given protected minority status. If he keeps his nostrils and his ears free of unsightly hair, he deserves public recognition. But woe to the man who dares to eat at any establishment, no matter how humble, in a sleeveless garment locally referred to as a ‘wife-beater’ T-shirt. ‘Armpit hair and haricot vert are not compatible,’ a winsome wag of the feminine persuasion once wrote.
Now where was I, besides feeling the pleasant warmth of that perfectly cared-for hand? Ah, yes, I was facing off with a very stubborn young man who couldn’t be honest with himself.
‘Cee-Cee is not a countess; she is simply a Lady – with a capital L, because she’s not always a lady, if you get my drift.’
‘Look,’ he said, just to prove my point about being stubborn, ‘if your granny really did hang around as a ghost, why don’t you have her communicate with Yoko-san directly and have her get the whole gruesome story from start to finish? Or more to the point, why is it that you can’t communicate with the remains of your Japanese guest and this Cee-Cee girl can?’
‘I’ll take your questions in order, dear. First of all, Granny doesn’t realize that she is dead. If she did, she’d be in Heaven with Grandpa. Now, I know that’s not good Christian theology—’
Toy let go of my wrist and planted his tight, round buttocks on the dining-room chair next to me. ‘Spare me the sermon, Magdalena. I’m crossing your granny out of the picture for good. But the English girl; that’s another story. That one’s hard to explain.’
I smiled wryly. ‘Impossible is more like it – unless the girl had a chance to peek at the official police report on Yoko-san’s disappearance. That report is stored in the files at your office.’
Toy is generally a mild-mannered man, but just then he pounded the table so hard that crumbs from the breakfast scones danced. ‘You better darn well be joking,’ he growled. ‘I keep my cabinets under lock and key and nobody else has access to their contents. Even my secretary has to ask for the key when she wants to file something away, and Darla Hipslinger has been with me for eighteen months.’
‘It was nineteen as of last Thursday,’ I said pleasantly, ‘but who is counting? Certainly not Darla. When I interviewed her for that job she thought that a year had just ten months in it. It was you who told her that she had the job before we’d had a chance to confer.’
‘That’s because she’d be working for me.’
‘But I’d be paying her salary. I’d also have to be assaulted by the sight of her gigantic bosoms bobbling about in her low-cut blouses every time I stepped foot into the police station, which, by the way, I also maintain.’
Some men emit an off-putting odour when they are angry, reminiscent of a polecat, but not Police Chief Toy. Warm gingerbread pudding with lemon sauce was as close as I could describe his scent, perhaps giving a literal interpretation to the expression ‘I could eat him with a spoon.’ Yes, I know, according to both Jesus and Jimmy Carter I have already committed adultery in my mind, but I had not intended to. I had not set out to lust after a man younger than my oldest set of sturdy Christian underwear. It just happened!
‘What’s come over you, Magdalena?’ Toy said curtly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You’re behaving strangely.’
‘Yam I – I mean, am I?’
‘Yes. If it wasn’t so preposterous, one might be tempted to think that you’re jealous of poor little Darla.’
When they say that the truth hurts, is that because it stings as if one’s face has been slapped? ‘Excuse me?’
‘Forgive me; like I said, it was an asinine thing to say. I mean, what would a gorgeous mature woman like you see in a dud like me?’
I tried responding but my tongue, which had become detached from its base, was roiling around in my mouth in a sea of foam like a giant eel and was threatening to strangle me. I tried swallowing t
his saliva-covered monster, but that only made things worse.
Toy appeared to observe me warily. ‘You’re not coming down with the flu, are you?’ he asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your eyes are hooded and your face is pale,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘If you’re going to get sick, please turn and face the other way; this is a freshly-laundered uniform.’
I gasped. ‘Why I never!’
‘These incidents can be hard to predict,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Why, once in Charlotte, at my Auntie Gayle’s house for Christmas dinner – or was it at Uncle Rob’s, when we were there for Easter brunch—’
‘Please spare me the nauseating details,’ I hissed. ‘Physically, I am quite all right.’
‘And emotionally?’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ There are times when I am sure that my words are capable of slicing through a block of aged, extra sharp Irish cheddar. However, it is rarely my intention to be downright mean. When I was nine years old I purposely leaked India ink from my fountain pen on to Norma Harmon’s pink party dress. Granted, this was not a nice thing to do, as my sore bottom reminded me for the next few days. Then again, Norma had unwisely chosen to wear that dress to school just to taunt me, so I wasn’t entirely at fault. Anyway, what got me dancing with the Devil cheek to cheek that day was that Norma Harmon had invited every girl in my class to her house after school, except for me. The reason for my exclusion, relayed to me by my mother, was that my feet smelled. Anyway, that’s as mean as I ever got.
‘Magdalena, you are not superwoman,’ Toy said, interrupting my reverie. ‘You don’t have to keep pretending that you are.’ He reached across the table and scooped my twitching hands up in his. ‘You’re a hard woman to read; perhaps I was way out of line before. If so, I apologize. No, I do apologize. Of course, you’re just stressed out by the corpse on the roof of your elevator car. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Like, duh, right?’
Like duh? Alas, poor Yoko-san, what would William Shakespeare think of his language now? Who knows? He might well embrace it, given that he had a penchant for inventing new words himself.
‘Right,’ I said to Toy, just to prove that I was hip and not in need of a hip replacement.
With his strong, masculine but well-manicured hands still holding mine, he began to muse out loud. ‘What we need now is some sort of game plan. Right?’
‘Right, again.’
‘Magdalena, you hired me; you know that you got me up here on the cheap because I graduated at the bottom of my class.’
‘Shh,’ I said. ‘The walls have ears. Besides, we agreed never to speak of that again.’
‘Yes, but you know that I don’t think good under pressure.’
‘Well.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You don’t think well under pressure. Good is incorrect usage.’
‘You see? I can’t speak well under pressure, either.’
‘Not to worry, dear; I am not the grammar police.’ I pulled my hands somewhat reluctantly from the warmth of his. Truth be told, for me there are few pleasures which can trump that of a full-scale murder investigation. ‘This is what we’ll do,’ I said. ‘You just follow my lead and in no time at all we’ll solve the case of the corpse on my elevator car roof.’
FOURTEEN
‘First,’ I said, ‘we need to ascertain whether or not Yoko-san’s death was murder or an accident.’
Unlike yours truly, Toy is ‘married’ to electronic gadgetry. Nonetheless, when it comes to investigating crimes he prefers to jot information down by hand in pocket-size notebooks using ballpoint pens. He said this practice comes from years of watching television shows about private investigators.
‘Agreed,’ Toy said as he scribbled away at the tiny tablet. ‘And we can’t rule out suicide, either.’
‘What? I’m not trying to be argumentative, Toy, but who in their right mind would squeeze apart the elevator doors on the upper level, lie atop the roof, and then wait for someone to ride the elevator up and hopefully squish them against the ceiling?’
Toy’s eyes scanned me calmly. Kindly. Even lovingly – in the good friend sort of way.
‘Magdalena, who in their right mind commits suicide?’
‘Touché, Toy,’ I said. ‘So, how do we proceed from here?’
Toy raked one of his impeccably groomed hands through a head of thick brown hair. ‘If this was one of those cosy mystery novels that you ladies are so fond of reading, I would suggest that we begin with a cup of tea – perhaps even a pot – while we rehash the facts and wait for an epiphany.’
‘I beg your pardon, dear. What makes you think that I read those dreadful mystery novels?’ I rolled my eyes in mock dismay. ‘I read only nonfiction books; why read fiction, I say? After all, fiction is all made up.’
Even when he grimaces, Toy is devilishly handsome. ‘Somehow I think you’re not kidding. Well, anyway, here’s what we do: we divide the work even-steven. First I’m going to call in a forensics coroner from Harrisburg. I’m thinking of Dorothy Stillbladder. She’s said to be the best the state has to offer. What are your thoughts?’
‘I think that she is a brave woman not to have changed her name,’ I said.
‘She did,’ Toy said. ‘That’s her married name. It used to be Jones. But trust me – she is the best at what she does. She’s the one who found a pinkie bone in a landfill and correctly identified it as belonging to a left-handed, bisexual, female, vegetarian, octogenarian, Mennonite pole-dancer who was six foot nine inches tall, raised parakeets and was allergic to wool, kale and broccoli.’
‘No way!’
Toy smiled coyly. ‘That’s all true, except for the Mennonite part; she was actually Methodist. Anyway, I also plan to interrogate the other guests who were staying here at the inn the weekend of Miss Yoko-san’s demise.’
‘No can do,’ I said, only half listening. I was trying to wrap my head around that image of a six-foot-and-nine-inch Methodist pole dancer who raised parakeets. Not that I ever wanted to dance around a pole, or with a Pole, but I have always wanted to raise parakeets! Budgies, the Australians call them. Cute little things they are – and so non-judgemental.
‘Earth to Magdalena,’ Toy said.
‘Not again,’ I wailed. ‘Why does everyone always say that?’
‘Because you always look so spaced out. You’re not on anything, are you, Magdalena?’
‘On anything? Like what?’
‘Like drugs. Marijuana, for instance.’
Now that hiked my hackles so high that I had to stand up in order to keep them company. ‘I am high on the Lord!’ I snapped.
‘Whoa there, I’m just covering all my bases.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I can tell you right now that you won’t get anywhere trying to interview the other guests who were here the same week that Yoko-san was.’
Toy frowned, causing me to feel a sinful urge to reach across the table with a long, spindly arm and smooth his troubled brow. ‘Don’t you be saddling me with your limitations,’ he said archly. ‘I’m a trained interrogator; you’re an innkeeper. Hmm, I doubt if you’ve even trained for that sort of work.’
I brushed some scone crumbs into my hand before rising and then pointed with my chin towards the front door. ‘Well, good luck interviewing the dead. You’ll find Scott and Lois Robinson in Evergreen Cemetery in Covington, Kentucky. They were killed in an automobile accident. They were on their way back home from holiday when their brakes failed.’
Toy considered this new information for a minute. ‘So, were they, and Yoko-san, the only guests that you had that week? Don’t you rent out six rooms?’
‘“Six en-suites for the spiritually mature who find they are ready to take on the inequities of life,”’ I said, quoting from my welcome pamphlet, for which I charge a measly ten dollars (I’ve been thinking of raising the price to fifteen). ‘But to answer your question, yes, there were just the three of them. The others, a party of four from Toronto
, cancelled at the last minute because one of them heard an anti-Canadian joke on late-night television. Tell me, Toy, as one who regularly indulges in worldly entertainment, are these anti-Canadian jokes a common occurrence?’
‘Eh!’ Toy scoffed. ‘They’re not anti-Canadian jokes by any means! We love our Canuck neighbours; some of us down in the Carolinas love them even more than we love you Yankees.’
‘Why, I never!’
‘Those jokes are all told in good fun, kind of like you’d rib a favourite cousin who was maybe a little—’
‘You better stop while you’re ahead, dear.’
‘Advice taken.’ Toy glanced at the functioning replica of a genuine grandfather clock in the far corner of the dining room. ‘When will the Sisters of Apathy be finished with their shimmying and shaking?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Pretty soon, I reckon. They’re getting long in the tooth – and I mean that literally, in some cases.’
‘Well then, we – I mean, I – better hurry up and come to a decision about what to do. Uh – hmm – you know—’
I wasn’t born yesterday; I’m pretty sure of that, because I remember yesterday, and I can’t remember being born. I have, however, been on the earth long enough to recognize the sounds of a man desperately pleading for help. The Bible exhorts us to love our neighbours as ourselves; therefore, I was obliged to lend the floundering, flustered and fledging chief a helping hand – an un-manicured one to be sure, but nonetheless one which was quite shapely. Can I help it, however, if the solution that I was about to share may have involved some methods that a person with more rigid ethics – say a perfect person – might find objectionable? After all, I am but a sinful creature. However, and this is speaking plainly, if I might, I have yet to stoop to the standards of many an elected politician.
‘Get behind me, Satan!’ I cried. ‘What a wicked, wicked thought thou dost tempt me with!’
‘Oh, Magdalena,’ Toy said, sounding immediately relieved, ‘you are a strange bird but you never fail to come through for me. The Devil, indeed! You make Him sound like a real person.’
