by Tamar Myers
“Now you’re going to make me cry,” I said, “and I’m a really ugly crier. Once Bigfoot looked in the window and saw me bawling, and he’s never been seen in Bedford County again.”
Apparently that was the wrong thing to say; Freni let loose enough tears to float Noah’s ark.
“Just so you know, dear, there really isn’t such a thing as Bigfoot, but if you think there is, I can try and get him to pay you a visit—although frankly, I would think that your six- foot daughter-in-law would satisfy that itch.”
Freni was supposed to laugh, but instead she put her stubby hands on her broad hips and glowered at me beneath her pushed-up glasses. “Have you no respect, Magdalena?”
“Uh—well, of course, I do. You know that I respect you. I was only making a joke.”
“Ach, not about the big feet! I shed maybe some tears, but they are for the children of Mary Berkey.”
“Yes, it is very sad how the community treats their mother.” It was not a personal indictment, because Freni is one of the few Amish in Hernia who has always given Mary the benefit of the doubt.
Freni paled. “Then you do not know?”
“Of course the rumors: suicide, murder—it happened so long ago, I don’t see why folks can’t let it go. The kids, for sure, didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Ach, not the father, Magdalena.” Freni moved toward me, and her short arms encircled my waist as the smell of chopped onions and bell peppers filled my nostrils. “It is Mary now who has gone to meet the Lord.”
I pulled loose. “Excuse me?”
“Yah, she was run over by a tractor this morning.”
“An accident, then. How awful! Forgive me, but which one of the children was responsible?”
Freni’s eyes flashed. “The children were all in school, and the babies were in the house. It was the mailman who discovered Mary lying under the tractor.”
“Then it was an accident!”
“Yah, maybe, but there were three sets of tracks on the body. The tractor very much wanted her dead.”
I gasped as I groped for a chair. “Or somebody else did—somebody with the initials MS.”
Freni shook her head solemnly. “Meryl Streep is a fine woman. When she stayed here, she had only good things to say about my cooking. She would make an Amish man a good wife.”
“Oh, please. She’s such a good actress that you’ll believe everything that she says—whether it’s accurate or not.”
“Harrumph,” Freni said, giving it a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. It’s one of her favorite new words.
I smiled, happy for just a couple of seconds of diversion. Speaking with Freni of death in the kitchen was becoming an all-too-frequent pastime. Just a month before this, Freni and I had been standing in the exact same spots that we were now, discussing the recent passing of Silas Coldfelter, our town’s most accomplished builder of multiple-passenger buggies, when all of a sudden Little Jacob walked in from the dining room.
“Hi, Mama,” he’d said, almost blithely. “Hi, Aunt Freni.”
I’d hugged and kissed him, and Freni had patted his head affectionately and offered him a gingerbread man with a glass of milk. Being the fruit of my loins, he’d accepted the snack gratefully, but had demanded a piece of fruit as well.
“It will spoil your lunch,” I’d said.
“Mama, what happens when you die?”
“Uh—well—remember that baby sparrow we found underneath the barn eaves yesterday morning?”
He’d taken a big bite of milk-softened cookie before posing his next question. “Mama, we’re not birds. What happens to people?”
“Well, their souls go to be with Jesus, but their bodies are put into the ground.” There is no use trying to shield a child from death in a farming community. It would be like trying to keep an ice-cream cone from melting on a hot August day.
“I know that stuff about Jesus and the ground,” said my precocious four-year-old, “but what happens to them?”
“Them who, dear?”
“The people who died,” he’d cried impatiently. “You know, the them part!”
“Ach, he asks an ex- intentional question,” Freni had said reverently. Sometimes she is in awe of the little tyke and sometimes it is understandably so.
“Maybe the ‘them’ part is the soul,” I’d said. “Little Jacob, will you still love your mama when you’re all grown- up and can think circles around her?”
My darling son had thrown himself at me and locked his little arms around my neck. “Don’t be silly, Mama. I’ll always love you.”
“And don’t be cheeky, and call your mother silly,” I said, before kissing his eyelids until he begged me to stop.
“Earth to Magdalena,” Freni said, bringing me back to the present. “So now will you tell me who really killed poor Mary Berkey?”
“Only if you promise not to use idioms from the eighties that were annoying even then,” I said.
The expression Freni assumed made her look like a sheep that had been asked to solve the national debt. “Yah, whatever. I promise.”
“And quit being a teenager as well. It doesn’t become a seventy-nine-year-old Amish woman.”
“Oy veys mere.”
“Who pretends to be Jewish when it suits her.”
“Ach!”
“Now where was I? Oh, yes—I believe that Amy and Mary were both murdered by Melvin Stoltzfus.”
“Our Melvin Stoltzfus?” Freni’s hands flew to her throat as she fought for her breath.
“One and the same. Like I’ve always said, the man is evil personified.”
Freni staggered over to the nearest straight chair and dropped heavily on it like a sack of spuds. “Does his mama know?”
His mama. She was my mama too—that was the kicker. Elvina Stoltzfus was my birth mother. Given the circumstances surrounding my conception, and the social climate of the time, I don’t blame her. I do, however, blame her for the way she continues to treat Melvin, even after he’s been convicted of first-degree murder, as if he were a prince, deserving of every consideration. No doubt Elvina has broken every law in the book, aiding and abetting that son of a gun-toting, hunting, deceased husband of hers. If there’s any justice in this world—but I’m beginning to doubt that there is—Elvina will end up in the slammer as well.
“Freni,” I said, “this is just my theory. Susannah warned me that he was back and would try something. How these two deaths are connected, I don’t know—but I intend to find out. And believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”
Police Chief Jerry Memmer was polite as he could be. He listened to everything I had to say and took reams of notes, in addition to recording our conversation. But when it was all said and done, there was really nothing anyone could do but sit and wait.
Aside from the tractor prints, Melvin had left no tracks at the scene of the crime. Yes, Elizabeth Gastelli had seen a tractor driving along Ebenezer Road, but she couldn’t remember exactly when. Besides, trying to identify a tractor in Hernia was like looking for a drunk in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston.
Amy’s death also remained a mystery. I wasn’t supposed to know the facts, but Chief Memmer filled me in anyway, given that I used to be mayor of his new hometown and was still its unofficial crime solver. At any rate, the young woman had been strangled to death by a bubble gum pink pashmina, which is a kind of scarf, I’m told. There’d been no prints left behind, and no signs of forced entry. The supposition was that whoever had so brutally murdered the girl had either been an acquaintance or in possession of a gilded tongue. The second idea made perfect sense to me: young women that age are easily flattered by the hairier sex into believing that they alone are the special one, and that said relationship will inevitably lead to the altar.
I had just stepped outside into the street, in front of Hernia’s police station, when my cell phone rang. I have chosen as my ringtone the dulcet sounds of Pachelbel’s Canon, so you see, it really is not at all obnoxious. In fa
ct, I have been known to hold up my phone in public places when it rings so that others may be blessed by hearing this classic. It is my fond hope that one day, at the Monroeville Mall, a rapper will fall to his knees in awe and forsake his base ways.
Because there was no one else about at this particular moment, I answered after the first ring. “Yoder ’s House of Fun and Frolic, the owner herself speaking.”
“I need your help,” a desperate voice said.
27
“And a gracious hello to you too, Agnes,” I said. “The answer to eighteen down is ‘fubsy.’ According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, it means ‘chubby and somewhat squat.’ ”
“I’m through with the crossword, Magdalena. This is about my uncles; they’re running amok.”
“Yes, I know. Ida was over here yesterday and I jokingly told her to start a nudist colony.”
“Which she did.”
“She didn’t!”
“Oh, but she did. Just before this morning’s meditation—which was supposed to be on the meaningfulness of mediocrity—ten of the sisters assumed the lotus position au naturel!”
“Look on the bright side, dear: the lotus is a beautiful flower that—”
“That means that they sat with their legs crossed so that their feet were tucked up against the opposing knee. You can imagine what happened next.”
“If I do, I’ll have to perform my own lobotomy, and that can be a laborious process when one is using a number two pencil—or so I’ve heard.”
“This isn’t funny, Magdalena. After the meditation ended, these ten sisters decided to spread the Gospel of Physical Freedom—that’s what they’re calling it—to the good folks of Hernia.”
“Uh-oh. Exactly what does that mean?”
“They’re following Hertzler Road into town as we speak. They plan to go door to door, in pairs, kind of like Mormon missionaries. You’ve got to do something to stop them.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m right here at the station, so I’ll alert the chief—”
“No, you can’t!”
I could practically feel the vehemence in her voice coming through the airwaves. “What do you mean by ‘you can’t’?”
“I mean you can’t tell Chief Memmer what’s happening because if my uncles get arrested, they’ll get locked up for a year—minimum. That was the deal they cut with the judge last time. So give me a chance to talk to them first. Someone put them up to this missionary business. I just know that’s the case.”
“That could be, but in the meantime a whole lot of Herniaites are going to have to ruin their number two pencils, and that’s just not fair. Some of these folks have led really sheltered lives. Why Edith Wharton confessed to me on her deathbed that she had never even gotten a look at her own nether region, much less anyone else’s. That was her one big regret in life,”
“Edith Wharton—wasn’t she like ninety-eight years old when she died?”
“Ninety-three. Still, despite what she said, I don’t think she could have handled an impromptu visit from one of these loonies—Oops, I’m not referring to your uncles, of course.”
“Yes, you are. And you’re absolutely right. We both know that they’re as nutty as a Payday bar, but they’re all I’ve got—except for you.”
“Aw,” I said quite seriously. “I’m touched.”
“I mean it; you are the best friend I’ve ever had. Ever.”
“Thanks, but although I’m touched, I’m not ‘teched.’ I know you’re trying to butter me up, and I can’t promise you that your uncles are going to get off scot-free. In any case, you’re going to need to find a home for them—maybe on a ranch out in Montana where the deer and the antelope play.”
“But it gets cold in Montana; they’ll freeze their little whatsits off.”
“Well, when that happens, their nudity will no longer be so much of an issue. In the meantime, how do we prepare the good citizens of Hernia for an invasion of cellulite and varicose veins—not to mention whatsits of every size and description?”
Agnes is a quick thinker; you have to give her that much. “Who are Hernia’s biggest gossips?”
“Present company excepted?”
“Ha-ha.”
“Well, that would have to be Marlene Reenkle, Catherine Ayebagg, Estelle Waystrohl and Naomi Bakkphat.”
“Good. We call them and tell them that the IRS is on their way to do surprise audits on anyone that they find at home. That should send everyone to their basements. Hopefully we’ll get the nudes rounded up before our terrified citizenry has the nerve to venture back upstairs.”
“Like I keep saying, Agnes, you should have worked for the state department.”
“Oh, I spotted one of the uncles!” She hung up.
The invasion of unfettered flesh might have been far more time-consuming for me, and traumatic for most Herniaites, had it not been Fred and Alice Rosenthal. The couple are retirees, refugees from the Big Apple, who’ve sought out small-town living because of our clean air and quaint old- fashioned ways. Imagine their surprise to look up from their New York Times and spot a horde of pasty white bodies running down the road in their direction, whoosits and whatsits flopping joyously, just as freely as the ears on a cocker spaniel.
But instead of being scandalized, the Rosenthals went out on their porch, where they commenced laughing. And laughing. And laughing. By the time I got there, poor Fred had practically laughed himself sick, and Alice, bless her heart, found that she needed to change her designer blue jeans.
The nude missionaries, however, were not amused. The laughing duo offended them so much that they stopped in their tracks to argue, the whole bunch of them. Then along came a buggy, driven by Amish teenagers. The occupants hooted and jeered at the escapees with the Haight- Ashbury frame of mind. One by one the nudists hung their heads in shame, and that was how another cult bit the dust.
It wasn’t until I got home and saw the ship’s clock on the parlor mantel that I realized just how time- consuming it was to have the Sisters of Perpetual Apathy directly across the road from the PennDutch Inn. If it wasn’t nude nuns, then it was plumbing issues—either Ida’s own or her establishment’s—but there was always something coming along that demanded the full attention of either Gabriel or myself.
I slumped onto a hard, unforgiving Victorian chair. Following my great-granny Yoder’s example, I kept the furniture in my sitting room as uncomfortable as I could and still have it appear cozy. Great-Granny believed that a body should rest only after death; I merely see the value in keeping guests from congregating. Heaven forefend they should collect in numbers and conduct a full-scale revolt over some imagined mistreatment at my hand.
At any rate, I was so upset by that time, I didn’t see Olivia Zambezi enter the room from the other direction. In my defense I shall hasten to explain that the woman favored pastel dresses that hung nearly to the floor. Today it was pale gray, with darker gray crosshatches. Her hair was steel gray and, frankly, so was her complexion. While I’m hardly a proponent of makeup, if one is going to wear it, one should at least pick a flattering tone, shouldn’t one? In short, Mrs. Zambezi resembled the battleships I’d once seen while on a cruise of Norfolk Harbor more than she did a flesh-and-blood woman her age.
Not that I’m a fashion icon, to be sure. However, one can never go wrong with a modestly cut navy blue broadcloth dress, and one’s hair—it is after all, a woman’s crowning glory—braided and then swept securely into a bun, over which is pinned a white organza prayer cap. This simple way of dressing flatters every body type, and women of every walk of life and religious persuasion could do worse than adopt it as their daily uniform.
Now where was I? Oh yes, in my understandably self-absorbed state of mind, I got up from my chair and ran smack into Olivia Zambezi with enough force to knock Arnold Schwarzenegger on his keester.
“Dang you, Yoder,” she swore in a shockingly deep voice.
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Zambezi.”
I would have asked her if she was all right, but I didn’t want to plant any suggestions in that old gray head.
And speaking of her old gray head, I seemed to have knocked it a bit askew. That is to say, her noggin was no longer sitting directly on top of its pedestal—No wait, silly me—of course! Olivia Zambezi wore a wig, and I had knocked the dang thing practically off her head. Suddenly she no longer resembled Olivia from New Jersey at all. Still, she was very, very familiar.
But what to do? What to do? The poor woman seemed entirely oblivious to the hair- raising situation at hand. Perhaps her face stung too much from slamming into mine. Should I say something to her, or just reach out and give the rug a tug—taking care not to burn my hand on her whiskers. Her whiskers! Land o’ Goshen! Olivia Zambezi was sporting five o’clock shadow, and here it was only six minutes past three—give or take a minute.
I’ve known some hirsute women in my time—Gloria Crab-tree comes to mind—but none quite as hairy as the one I beheld. Then again, her face was missing a swath of pancake makeup an inch thick where mine had swiped it, which meant that half of me undoubtedly resembled a Kabuki performer. I pulled the collar of my shirtdress out to where I could see it.
“Oh Fudgsicles,” I cried. “Now see what you’ve done!”
“Me?” Olivia boomed. “Yoder, it was you who ran into me.”
It was the way “she” said Yoder that tipped me off. The person masquerading as Olivia Zambezi managed to make my maiden name sound like a curse. Factor in her large feet, large hands, odd stance, and eyes like those of a lobster on steroids, and even a heavily sedated zombie would be able to tell that I was face- to-face with none other than the maniacal Melvin Stoltzfus.
28
My blood froze. I know that’s just a figure of speech, and I have a tendency to embroider mine at times, but I’m not exaggerating now—well, sort of almost not. It really did feel like I had icicles in my veins. But at the same time, my frozen limbs were anything but stiff; my legs, for instance, felt like they’d been sculpted from whipped butter. (Although, to be honest, it’s very hard to determine whether or not these feelings are accurate. I have never actually had even one leg sculpted from whipped butter, and seldom, if ever, do I insert icicles in my veins.)
