Play It Again, Spam (Pennsylvania Dutch Mystery)

by Tamar Myers

  “Come in, dear,” I called bravely. For all I knew it was Mama. Even in my theological circles, physical resurrections have been few and far between, but if the Good Lord starts sending mortals back on a regular basis, you can be sure that Mama will be among the first. Simply put, Heaven would be a more peaceful place without her.

  “Gut marriye, Magdalena.”

  “Sam!” I jumped back into bed and pulled the covers up to my chin. “Freni, you know Sam, don’t you? Of course you do! I’ve heard you say such nice things about him.”

  Freni colored. “What is he doing here?”

  I glanced at the clock on my night stand. “What are you doing here, Sam? It’s only six-thirty. I told you this bunch of English all said they like to sleep late. Except for Mrs. Burk—she’s the one whose husband is missing—they don’t want their breakfast until eight.”

  “Yah, I remember, but last night Mrs. Burk said she wanted her breakfast at seven.”

  I groaned. “This would never have happened with the celebrities. They never ate breakfast before noon.”

  Freni hopped off my bed. “Breakfast? Why are you talking with this man about breakfast?”

  I smiled sweetly. “Because he’s my new cook. Don’t you worry, dear, I’m sure Sam wouldn’t mind rustling up a little breakfast for you too.”

  “Ach!”

  “Oh, that’s right, you already made buckwheat pancakes. Well, since I’m not particularly hungry this morning, would you mind terribly if Sam serves my share to Mrs. Burk?”

  Freni’s mouth opened and closed with the regularity of a pump valve, but no sounds came out.

  “Yes, dear?” I asked patiently.

  Like the pump she started to sputter, and then the words came pouring out in a torrent. Since my cousin is a god-fearing Amish woman they are all repeatable, but I won’t waste your time. Besides, they were in Pennsylvania Dutch. Suffice it to say, Mama would have approved of every one of Freni’s admonitions, and even Lodema Schrock would have little to add.

  When Freni was quite through she bustled her broad back out of my room and slammed the door behind her. The way the house shook I knew that Mama was adding a few vibrations of her own.

  “Magdalena,” Sam said quietly as the last bit of plaster drifted down from the ceiling, “maybe you go too far.”

  “Et tu, Brutus?” I wailed.

  Samuel looked like a possum caught in the beam of my flashlight. It was time to bring him up to speed.

  “She brings it on herself, dear. Last night was the fifty-second time she’s quit since I opened the original inn. Now, don’t just stand there, dear, tempus fugit."

  “Ach!”

  “You’re wasting time,” I explained kindly. “After breakfast we have that search to organize, remember?”

  Sam shook his head.

  I sat bolt upright. Unfortunately, this sudden action al-lowed three inches of my flannel nightgown to show. Poor Sam’s face turned the color of Susannah’s eyes the morning after her senior prom.

  I clutched the blanket to my scrawny bosom. “You’re not backing out of your offer, are you, dear?”

  Sam looked graciously away. “No, I will help with the search. But now we must search for two people.”

  “Two people?”

  Sam nodded, still focused on some dust bunnies in the corner. “Yah. It is terrible news what I must say.”

  Thirteen

  “What is it?” I wailed. “It’s Susannah, isn’t?”

  I am ashamed to admit this, but Susannah has gone missing more times than Freni’s quit her job. Some might say that gal suffers from wanderlust, but between you and me, it’s just pure lust. That’s right, it’s nothing more than sex that has inspired my sister to visit every roadside rest and truck stop in the lower forty-eight. As far as I know, Susannah has never been to Hawaii—or had sex there—but she has been to Alaska, and it is rumored that her passion was responsible for melting several igloos. But just for the record, she was not responsible for El Nino.

  “No, it’s not your sister. It’s Mrs. Yoder.”

  I drummed on the blanket with my long, slender fingers. Yoder is the most common surname in both the local Mennonite and Amish communities.

  “It’s Irma Yoder,” Sam said quickly. “Old Irma.”

  Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. There are many old Irma Yoders in the area as well, but only one Old Irma Yoder. At one hundred and two she isn’t the oldest woman around, but thanks to that cheddar-shredding tongue, she is the most memorable.

  “So, Old Irma’s gone missing, has she?”

  “Yah. I stopped by on my way here to give her some milk. She wasn’t at home.”

  “Maybe she’s off visiting relatives. Or maybe she went shopping.” I shudder to say this, but Old Irma still drives. Not that I have anything against the elderly drivers, mind you, but when they pull out on to a major highway, they should at least be going the speed of lava.

  “Ach, she was there last night. I asked her if she needed anything, and she said she could use a little milk. I promised to drop it by this morning on my way to work. Six o’clock, I tell her.”

  “You’re two-timing me with Old Irma?” Of course, I was only teasing.

  “Ach! The Bible says to give what we have to the poor, and I have lots of milk.”

  “I know, dear, I was only pulling your leg. Maybe Old Irma forgot about your appointment. Maybe she was sleeping in.” Both Amish and Mennonites are notoriously early risers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mama still gets up at five, even in Heaven.

  “Yah, first I think maybe that is so, because her car is there. But then I remember Old Irma can’t hear so well. Maybe she has not put in the—uh—uh—”

  “Hearing aid?”

  “Yah. That’s what I think to myself, so I knock even louder.”

  “And?”

  “The door opened.”

  “So you checked inside, of course.” The fact that the door was unlocked was irrelevant to our conversation. Nobody in Hernia locks their doors—except for me. And even I would probably not be doing that if Little Eddy Beiler hadn’t wandered in one fine afternoon when I was alone and with a flip of his topcoat proved to me that he was misnamed.

  “Yah, I went in and checked. No Old Irma.”

  “Hmfn. Maybe she went out for a walk and just didn’t shut it tight behind her.”

  Sam scratched his sparsely covered chin. “Yah, maybe so. Except for one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe it is not such a big thing.”

  “What is it?” I practically screamed. “Do I need to get a crowbar to pry out this morsel?”

  Sam looked like a sheep who correctly answered his algebra question. “Uh—”

  “Just tell me!”

  “Old Irma left the water running in the kitchen sink.”

  “That is serious.” I wasn’t being facetious, either. Not only can Old Irma lacerate lactose with her lingua, she can pinch a penny until it screams. It was clear to me that Hernia’s most acerbic centenarian was not just missing, she’d been abducted.

  “Maybe you should call Melvin,” Samuel said quietly.

  “Definitely so,” I said, and reached for the phone.

  “Good. But be patient, Magdalena. Melvin Stoltzfus is sometimes a difficult man.”

  “Sometimes? The man was a breach birth, for crying out loud, and he grows into a bigger pain every day. But don’t you worry about him—Vee haf our vays.”

  Sam laughed nervously while I dialed.

  My nemesis picked up on the first ring. “You have reached 555-9247,” he said in a monotone. “I’m sorry we’re unable to come to the phone right now—”

  “Melvin, I know that’s you!”

  “So please leave your message after the beep.”

  I waited until the beep. “Melvin is a big fat idiot,” I shouted, my mouth pressed against the receiver.

  “Ach! Ach!” Sam was flapping his arms in distress, so I motioned him out of the room.
Apparently, some of my ways are a little too English for the Australian.

  “Melvin! This is official police business and if you don’t stop this nonsense I’m telling your mama what you did last night.”

  His gasp flattened my ear against the receiver. “Yoder, is that you?”

  “Is that Mags?” I heard Susannah whisper in the background.

  “Of course it’s me. Who else would be foolish enough to call you at this hour of the morning?”

  “You won’t tell Mama, will you, Yoder? I mean, we’re getting married tomorrow, and we only—”

  “Can it, Melvin. I don’t want to know what you and Susannah did, or didn’t do. I want you to hop into your official police car and drive on out to Irma Yoder’s place. That’s Old Irma out on Kuntzler Lane.”

  Melvin gasped again, and my ear practically disappeared into the phone. “What for, Yoder?”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  “You mean she died?” He sounded hopeful.

  “I don’t know. She’s missing from her house. Sam—Strubbly Sam—says he was supposed to deliver milk to her this morning, and no one was there.”

  “That means nothing, Yoder.”

  “Perhaps. But her car was there—and the water was running in the kitchen sink. Melvin, this is something you should check out.”

  “Don’t tell me my job, Yoder.”

  “Do I detect a hint of fear, dear? Old Irma may have a gouda-gouging tongue, but you’re still bigger than her.”

  There was a moment of terrified silence. “I’m not afraid of her, Yoder.”

  “Of course not, dear, I didn’t think you were. So, you’ll check on her.”

  “Yes, damn it.”

  “Don’t you swear on my phone line,” I snapped, and hung up. Hard.

  I am a God-fearing woman, and dress like one. No strumpet-scarlet or prostitute pink for me, thank you very much. Ditto for yuppie yellow. The Good Lord created black before any other color—just read your Bible—when he created the darkness upon the face of the earth. Then came blue for the sky and sea, and green for plants. These are the colors he prefers us to dress in, if you ask me. But when it comes to cars, I’m sure the kind Creator looks the other way—at least He never seems to have penalized me for my red BMW.

  ***

  At any rate, Tuesday morning, the day of my sister’s shindig, I carefully selected a navy blue dress that would take me through to the evening and a pair of comfortable black brogans. Of course, my dress sleeves extended beyond the elbows and my skirt length well below the knees. Even the Lord isn’t fond of looking at those.

  When I was decently attired and had my hair neatly swept into a bun and covered with an organza prayer cap, I stepped out into the hall. Now, I consider myself to be a calm, sensible woman, so you can imagine how startled I was by the looming shape of Scott Montgomery when I tell you I literally jumped out of my shoes.

  “What on earth are you doing lurking outside my bedroom door?” I demanded.

  To be honest, he seemed every bit as surprised as I. Fortunately for him, he had laced his shoes tighter.

  “Oh! Uh—well, I was coming to see you.”

  “You were?” I must confess to feeling vaguely titillated. The tall, comely Minnesotan was by far the most attractive male guest in residence.

  “Yah,” he said in that charming land-o’-lakes accent. “I was wondering if you might have a county map we could borrow.”

  This certainly piqued my interest, but before somebody peeked into the downstairs hall, we needed to relocate to a more public spot. To be caught standing just outside my bedroom with a handsome man was one way to put a feather in my prayer cap, but it would ruin my reputation. Folks might start expecting me to wear fuchsia and coral. Prudently I shepherded him into the lobby.

  “Yes, I do happen to have a county map—and a very detailed one at that—but why, may I ask, do you want to borrow it? Are you planning to join the search party? If you are, you needn’t worry about getting lost. That’s Buffalo Mountain in the distance across the road, and Stucky Ridge is behind us. Slave Creek runs right in between and passes just on the eastern side of Hernia. The PennDutch is less than five miles north of the center of town.”

  “Thanks for the pointers. I’m sure they’ll come in useful.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question. Why do you need the map?”

  He smiled, revealing a few wispy cobwebs clinging to the overhead light. “The guys and I like to play these silly little games. Reconnaissance missions, strategy maneuvers—that sort of thing. A good map helps with the planning.”

  “I see. So, you weren’t planning to help with the search?”

  “Actually, we’d like to incorporate it into our war games.”

  I flinched. “Please, no three-letter words in this house.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You see, we’re pacifists and—oh, never mind. I’ll get you the map right after breakfast.”

  “Thank you. That’s awfully kind of you. May I please ask one more favor?”

  “Ask away.”

  “About the map—could we keep it a secret from the others?”

  “But why? That wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

  A second smiled exposed the dust bunnies in the far corners of the lobby. “That’s exactly why.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You see, part of the game is to outsmart the other players. I bet none of them have thought to ask you for a map, have they?”

  “You’re right about that.” I grinned, but genetics has determined that I have yuppie yellow teeth. I couldn’t light up a jack-o-lantern on the dark side of the moon. “So, you won’t say anything, will you?”

  “These lips are sealed, dear.” I meant it, of course, but I kept my fingers crossed behind my back just to be on the safe side. They say that all is fair in love and you-know-what, and that being the case, I didn’t want to put my soul in jeopardy in case an even smarter player decided to grease my palms with the color of nature.

  Alas, no one offered to even touch my palms, much less grease them. Perhaps they thought the grease Sam served up with breakfast was enough. The man should have stuck to his menu and served SPAM® as the only meat, but oh no, in a grandstanding effort to secure Freni’s job for himself, my busy-bee butler plied my guests with platters of thick slabs of bacon, sausage patties, sausage links, and generous slabs of fried scrapple.

  “Hey, what’s this stuff?” Frizzy-haired Sandy Hart jabbed a wedge of scrapple with a fork that had already been licked.

  “That’s scrapple, dear.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s ground liver pudding cooked with corn meal and flour and then fried.”

  “Yuck. And you have the nerve to charge us big bucks for that?”

  I groaned behind the privacy of my napkin. Now I had a manic on my hands. If she didn’t put a lid on it real soon, one of us was going to be very depressed.

  “It’s authentic, dear. The Amish eat it all the time.”

  “Big deal. I don’t want to do everything the Amish do, just the fun stuff.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Go to barn-raisings and quilting bees. That kind of thing.”

  “You just missed a barn-raising, dear.” Much to my surprise, my eyes had filled with tears. The old barn had seen many good times—a couple of murders and an ill-fated wedding notwithstanding.

  “And buggy rides. The brochure you sent had a buggy on the front, but you don’t even have one, do you? Now that’s false advertising, if you ask me.”

  “Nobody did, hon,” Bob said gently.

  Sandy turned on her husband like a pit bull on its handler. “Hey, whose side are you on?”

  “Yours, hon.”

  “No, you’re not. I can tell by the way you look at her that you’ve got a thing for her, don’t you!”

  “Sandy!”

  “Well, you do! And don’t lie about this one, Robert. I know all
about that bimbo of yours back in Tulsa.”

  “Bimbo? What bimbo?”

  “Megan. You know, your so-called ex-secretary. The one who worked for you for fifteen years in the dealership. The one you called your teammate.”

  Teammate? I made a quick dab at my eyes with a corner of my napkin. One of the advantages of not wearing makeup is that there’s nothing to run or smear. Unfortunately, when I wake up in the morning, that’s as good as I’ll look all day.

  I jabbed at Bob with my fork. Of course, I was careful not to actually touch him, because I had yet to complete my meal.

  “You have a lot of nerve to suggest we’d make good teammates.”

  Sandy’s eyes assumed the size of Sam’s flapjacks. “He did?”

  “He did.”

  Surely the swill that Sandy swore would have made a sailor swoon. I did my Christian duty and jabbed at her. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the distance, and a tip of one tine brushed her sleeve.

  Sandy shrieked, and swore again. This time the word lawsuit reared its ugly head.

  “Sorry, dear, it was an accident.”

  She turned to the others. “Y’all are my witnesses. This crazy woman stabbed me.”

  “Don’t be calling the kettle black, dear,” I said calmly. “And besides, it’s him you’re mad at, not me.”

  “Nah, my little Bobby’s bimbos don’t really bother me, but this”—she rubbed her elbow—“really hurts.” There are times when it pays to have a sister like Susannah. Some of my best strategies come from my ethically-challenged sibling. I’m not saying it is any less wrong of me to copy her, but sometimes a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. Besides, a few of Susannah’s tricks—like divert and conquer—are not wrong, they’re just highly effective ways to manipulate adults that every teenager knows, and most adults have forgotten.

  “Did you say bimbos, dear?” I asked pleasantly. “Is there more than one tart on the Hart plate?”

  “Sandy!” Bob barked.

  She smirked and turned to me. “Well, it’s true. Bob likes them young, and Megan is getting a little long in the tooth now. Lord knows, she must be nearing your age.”

  “Which is a good twenty years younger than your age, dear,” I said, remaining calm. I’ll take an insult over a lawsuit any day.