The Hand That Rocks the Ladle

by Tamar Myers

  “Of course, they don’t really apply to you,” I said quickly, “seeing as how you’re a fake blonde and everything.”

  “Don’t you ever shut up?”

  “Not if I can help it, dear.”

  “This will help you,” she said, and undid her seat belt. The next thing I knew the cold barrel of the pistol was pressed against my forehead. “One more word out of you and I’ll blow your head off.”

  There is simply no need to shock you with her choice of adjectives.

  “She means business,” Donald said quietly.

  I prayed like I’d never prayed before. I prayed for what some may think to be the biggest miracle of them all; I prayed that the Good Lord would keep my big mouth shut. Yes, I know, God shut the lions’ mouths on Daniel’s behalf, but a Yoder mouth is even a taller order.

  My prayers were heard. Although I wanted to ask Nurse Hemingway, or whatever her real name was, if she’d heard the one about the blonde who spent twenty minutes staring at an orange juice carton because it said “concentrate,” I couldn’t as much as move my lips. In fact, I became downright fearful that I was paralyzed. I even tried communicating that with my eyes, but I couldn’t get them to roll.

  It occurred to me that perhaps the Almighty had turned me into a chunk of salt—like Lot’s wife—just to protect me from myself. This was an exciting, if somewhat disconcerting thought. What if the Good Lord forgot to desalinize me when the threat of danger had passed? While I firmly believe that my soul will return to my Maker, and have no qualms about my earthly body pushing up daisies—at the appropriate time—it had never occurred to me that I might end up in somebody’s water softener. Or worse yet, sprinkled on sidewalks to melt snow.

  At least my ears still worked. “She’s scared stiff,” Gloria chortled, before finally turning away.

  Maybe that was it. I prayed that it was. I prayed that when the time was right, I’d get full use of my faculties back. And if that was not to be, if I really was a chunk of salt, I asked that I might be broken down into smaller pieces, like kosher salt, and used in an ice cream churn. An electric ice cream churn. I’d always wanted one of those, but for some reason, I’ve never gotten around to springing for one. Well, if I got out of this scrape alive, I was going to make a trip into Pittsburgh and buy the finest electric ice cream maker on the market. And I was going to buy a size twenty shift and proceed to eat so much of my homemade ice cream that I filled out the dress. I’d make vanilla, of course, and strawberry, and in peach season...

  I discovered I was licking my lips, and they weren’t the least bit salty. I tried moving my tongue, quietly, and within the confines of my mouth. It seemed to work quite well. Meanwhile, Donald and Gloria had involved themselves in a nasty argument.

  “I say we pull over at the next picnic area and kill her.” Gloria had a somewhat nasal voice and it was beginning to get on my nerves. How I could have pegged her for Hoosier is beyond me.

  Donald, however, still sounded Midwestern. “Then what?”

  “Then we toss her in the woods. Look at all these damn trees. Have you ever seen so many in your life?” Donald thumped the steering wheel with the ball of his left hand. “It’s night. We don’t know how deep these woods go. There could be a house anywhere. Someone might see us.”

  “If there were houses, there would be lights,” Gloria snapped. “What do you suggest we do, lug her all the way back to New Jersey? Maybe put cement boots on her and throw her into the Hudson?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of the Delaware River. Or better yet, since we’ll be cutting up on 81, why not take her up to the top of Delaware Water Gap, and throw her off? I bet lots of people have fallen there. Even jumped.”

  “Yeah? Well, why would someone jump from a cliff high enough to kill them?”

  Even I knew the answer to that. No doubt if you gave Nurse Hemingway a penny for her intelligence, you’d get back change.

  Donald didn’t answer his wife’s question. Instead he pointed to a sign.

  “Town coming up. I told you.”

  “Well, we could have killed her back there. I’m beginning to think you’re chicken.”

  “The hell I am!”

  “Buc-buc-brack!” The imitation blonde did a horrible imitation of a chicken.

  “Bitch!”

  That, believe it or not, was one of the nicer names they called each other. It went downhill from there. They used words I’ve never even heard of, and I thought Aaron had taught me everything there was to know about the mindless world of profanity. Folks who swear do so because they lack the wit to express themselves. Of that I’m sure.

  At any rate, the couple in the front seat got so caught up in their childish fight that I was forced to face the window, lest they see the smile plastered across my face. We were now passing through the city of Carlisle, and on a rather well-lit stretch of the turnpike, and that’s how I happened to notice the little girl in the car next to us. She was staring at me. No doubt she found my Amish getup fascinating.

  I stared back.

  She waved.

  Then it occurred to me that perhaps she was the answer to my prayers. “Help!” I mouthed.

  She stuck out her tongue.

  “Help! Get the police!”

  The girl was a lousy lip-reader. She stuck two fingers in either side of her mouth and made a horrible grimacing face.

  “They’re babynappers! They’re going to kill me. Help!”

  I mouthed my words carefully, but she still didn’t get the point. She stuck her entire fist in her mouth and crossed her eyes. In the meantime, the car she was in started to pull ahead.

  In foolish desperation, I slid my shackled hands over the seat and retrieved the binky. To my surprise, and hers, I popped the pacifier in my mouth. At this point Donald and Gloria were practically coming to blows, and my action, bold as it was, went mercifully unnoticed by them.

  The little girl laughed and pointed at me. Then she poked her mother in the front seat. The mother turned, at first obviously annoyed, and then amused.

  I spit the binky out. “Help!” I mouthed again. “Help! Call the police!”

  Thank heavens her mother was a better lip-reader.

  Thirty-two

  “And that’s where I come in, right?” Susannah had taken a huge bite of freshly churned peach ice cream and it oozed from the corners of her mouth as she spoke.

  “Take it away!” I cried. “It’s all yours.” I’d been trying to stifle my sister for the last fifteen minutes by keeping her mouth full, but of course to no avail. It had merely been a waste of ice cream. She is a Yoder after all, and nothing but a pistol could tie her tongue.

  “So you see,” Susannah said, “if it hadn’t been for me, when the little girl’s parents called the police, they might have dismissed it as a prank call.”

  “Ach, what did I miss?” Freni had been changing a diaper during the first part of the story, and apparently Little Mose was adept at what baby boys do best. When Freni returned from the bedroom she was still wiping her face.

  “You must have missed the most important part,” Susannah said, ignoring my glare. “It was me who got the A.P.B. out on Mags’s kidnapping.”

  Freni blinked behind bottle-thick glasses. “A.P.B.?”

  “All points bulletin. Of course, Melvin actually called it in, but it was me who noticed that nose.”

  I tried to cover my proboscis with one hand. It took two.

  “Can we skip that part?” I whined.

  “But it’s the best part.” Susannah turned to her audience for confirmation. Besides Freni and me, the audience included Barbara, Jonathan, and Gabe. We were, incidentally, sitting on the front porch of the Hostetler homestead. It was the first day home for all three babies, and now with Little Mose changed and dry, it looked as if all three were finally asleep.

  “Yah, it was a good part,” Jonathan said.

  Barbara nodded her agreement.

  I glared at each in turn. “Go on,” I wailed
to Susannah, “but don’t exaggerate.”

  Susannah rolled her eyes. “Please, I don’t have to. So anyway, after I discovered Dr. Pierce’s body, Mags dropped me off at the Material Girl, that fabric store in Bedford. And guess what? They gave me a job.”

  “How much does it pay?” Barbara asked. From what I could gather, Freni was even more interfering as a grandmother than she was as a mother-in-law.

  “It’s just minimum wage,” Susannah said with surprising patience, “but I can buy from the bolt at half off.”

  Barbara nodded. “These little ones will need lots of clothes.”

  “Right. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah—so I don’t have a ride home, you see, and it must have been a bad hair day or something, because I wasn’t getting any offers. So I was standing by the road when Naughty Eddy got off work. He owns a hair salon right next door to Material Girl. Anyway, Naughty Eddy offered me a ride, and of course I accepted. He isn’t really that naughty, you know. I mean, it’s all a bluff. He says it’s because of a war injury, but I heard he was born that way, with only—”

  “Ach!” Freni squawked. “The nose! Tell us about the nose.”

  “Okay, okay, but don’t rush me. So, we were coming down Route 96, and we’re almost to Hernia, when we pass this car coming the other way. I happen to look over and there’s Mags, sitting in the backseat, all decked out like an Amish woman. Man, did I do a double take.”

  “How did you know it was her?” Freni asked. If you ask me, it was not an innocent question. “Because of the nose!” everyone chorused.

  “Very funny,” I humphed. “Lots of Amish women have big noses.”

  “I think it’s a great nose,” Gabe said. “Noble even.” Susannah smirked. “No offense, sis, but none of the Amish women have noses so big they require their own zip code.”

  Everyone laughed, Gabe included.

  “Anyway, I made Naughty Eddy turn around and pass you guys so I could get a better look, and sure enough it was you. I waved and honked, but you were sleeping or something.”

  “I was unconscious, dear.”

  “Yeah, whatever. So then we turned around and went back to Hernia, and Naughty Eddy dropped me off—boy, did Melvin blow a gasket when he saw him. It took me forever to calm him down, but then after he’d rolled over and gone to sleep, I got to thinking about Mags again. She does a lot of weird stuff, but I’ve never seen her dress like an Amish woman before—except for that one time in Ohio, when she had to, and that was just to save her life.

  “So I called the PennDutch and this crabby English woman answers and says that Mags isn’t there, and her dreamy boyfriend doesn’t know where she is either”—Susannah looked meaningfully at Gabe—“and that’s when I started thinking that something was wrong in a major way. So, I woke Melvin up, and made him issue the A.P.B. He didn’t want to at first, but I made him.”

  “And how did you do that?” Gabe winked at me. “We don’t want to know,” I said. “The point is the Carlisle police caught up with us—only by then we’d left the city limits, so they notified the sheriff. After a two-county car chase, the Redigers—and believe it or not, that is their real name—were apprehended, and yours truly survived basically unharmed. Well, except for the ten years that wild ride took off my life.” Freni nodded solemnly. “Yah, you look older.” “But not ten years, sis,” Susannah said loyally. “More like five.”

  “That was just an expression, dear,” I said to Freni. “I think I look pretty good considering everything I went through, if I must say so myself.”

  That was a hint, if ever I’ve given one. Unfortunately, Gabe allowed the opportunity to pass him by.

  “That Dr. Bauer just ticks me off,” he said. “A bad apple like that can really besmirch the name of the entire medical community.”

  “Yah, I hear he was a drug dealer,” Jonathan said in hushed tones.

  “From Colombia,” Barbara said.

  It was time to step in with some facts. “He wasn’t a dealer, dears. He was a user. A heroin addict. I should have known when I caught him drowning his pancakes in syrup. Anyway, that service area was supposed to be a rendezvous, but they got into an argument and Dr. Bauer went berserk and started shooting. The cops got him right away. But like I said, I should have known when I saw the syrup that he was no diabetic.”

  “You can’t keep track of everything,” Gabe said kindly. “And this was a slick bunch of characters. Renting that apartment next to your sister and a room at PennDutch—now that was a stroke of genius.” Sometimes it is I who cannot leave well enough alone. “Yes, but I should have known that Nurse Hemingway and Gloria Rediger were one and the same person. They both reminded me of someone, and besides, I had a pair of twins staying right there at the inn who showed me what a huge difference a hairstyle can make.”

  Gabe eased his long lean legs off his rocker, sauntered over to me, and took my ice cream bowl gently out of my hands. Then much to Freni’s amusement— and Susannah’s envy—he refilled it. The ice cream, incidentally, had been churned in an old-time crank machine. I still had not been to Pittsburgh to pick up my electric version, or my size twenty dress.

  “But all’s well that ends right, right?” He chuckled. Despite the cold bowl, my fingers burned where his had touched me. “Right. I’m just glad Donald broke down and told the sheriff everything.”

  “Yah, and now we have our baby back,” Freni said. She was still patting her face with her apron.

  “And three other babies,” I reminded her. The Redigers and Dr. Bauer were not the only members of the New Jersey-based babynapping ring in the area. Donald ratted out a pair of cohorts in Bedford who ran a baby “clearinghouse.” Baby Hostetler was among the four newborns discovered there. Thank heavens all four infants were in good health.

  “Baby this, baby that,” Susannah said, rolling her eyes. “You still haven’t chosen a name for her, have you?”

  Freni’s eyes glistened. “Of course.”

  Jonathan rose and put a hand tenderly on his mother’s shoulder. “Yah, Mama, but it isn’t what you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Barbara looked directly at me, and I could tell she was purposefully avoiding her mother-in-law.

  “Mama, we owe so much to Magdalena—”

  “Yah?”

  Jonathan swallowed hard. “Mama, Barbara and I agree that we should name our little girl Magdalena.” Freni swayed, and without Jonathan’s restraining hand, might well have fallen off her rocker. "Magdalena?” she croaked.

  “Yah, Mama. Magdalena Veronica Hostetler.”

  “Freni is the diminutive of Veronica,” I said for Gabe’s edification.

  “Oh, Mags, that is so neat!” Susannah, with no thought to my full bowl of ice cream, threw herself into my arms.

  I should not have worried about spilled cream, not when I still had secrets to disclose. To everyone’s astonishment, except for mine and Gabe’s, my chest hissed at Susannah. To no one’s astonishment, her bra barked back. My chest hissed again.

  “Ach,” Freni wailed, “and now she makes with these games!”

  “To the contrary, dear.” I dug deep and hauled out a blinking Siamese kitten.

  Susannah backed up, knocking over the ice cream churn. “What the heck?”

  “Look what I’ve got,” I said, beaming. “You’re not the only one who can lug a pet around in her lingerie.”

  Susannah righted the overturned churn. There was a new respect in her eyes.

  “Oh, Mags, he’s precious. Where did you get him?”

  “It’s a she, dear, and she’s a present from Gabe.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Little Freni,” I said, and then clamped a hand over my mouth. I really wouldn’t hurt my friend for all the world.

  And although she’ll deny it until the cows come home, Big Freni smiled.

  I said good night to Gabe on the front porch. It is in clear view of Hertzler Road and thus eliminates a lot of temptation. Besides, all we di
d was talk. I asked Gabe if he wanted to affiliate with Hernia Hospital— as a consultant only—but he firmly refused. He didn’t have time, he said, to write the great novel and heal broken hearts. Unless that heart was mine, I thought, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

  Inside the empty inn, I took stock of the remainder of the week’s events. The Moregold twins had made remarkable comebacks when they learned I would not be waiting on them hand and foot. When they left for Disney World, courtesy of Yours Truly, we were on good terms. Not so the vamp Vivian and her boy-toy Sandy. They bailed out the night of my capture, and without paying the balance of their bill. But I had her credit card imprint, and besides, to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t been the best of hostesses.

  As for the mystery guest in Room 6, well, that was a riddle still waiting to be solved. I’d pushed a note under his door that very morning, telling him to vacate. I had a full contingent of guests scheduled to arrive the next day.

  “Well, shall we go up and see if he’s gone?” I asked Little Freni.

  She meowed in agreement.

  We took the elevator up. There is no point in risking my neck needlessly on those impossibly steep stairs. Not when there is no one around to come to my aid.

  The door to Room 6 was ajar, and it appeared to be empty, but I knocked anyway. “Hello? Hello?”

  There was no answer.

  I stepped inside. “What a mess,” I clucked. “Just look at that, will you? Dirty plates all over the place, half-eaten food—somebody’s going to pay to clean this up.” I picked up one of Mama’s Sunday dishes. “Yuck, what is this stuff? Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches?”

  Little Freni plaintively asked to be let down. I set her gently on the bed.

  “Don’t eat any of this stuff, dear,” I warned. “It’s liable to make you sick.”

  Little Freni ignored me, sniffed one of the plates, and gave it a cautious lick. Then she literally turned up her nose and bounced away. Something else had caught her attention.

  “What on earth is that?” I demanded. Little Freni was batting at something, some kind of a wire. I picked up the shiny object. “Why, it’s just a broken guitar string,” I said.