Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth

by Tamar Myers

  “I’d love to travel,” I couldn’t help saying. Not that anybody heard me. As soon as I opened my mouth, Jeanette opened hers and began to sputter. “There is chicken fat in this broth!”

  I turned around to look at Freni, but both she and Mose had disappeared. “There couldn’t be,” I said, then, “Are you sure?”

  “There are globlets of fat glistening on my plate. What would you call that?” demanded Jeanette.

  “Gross,” shuddered Linda.

  Just then Shnookums, who had been hidden somewhere within Susannah’s billowing costume, began to yip pitifully. Of course nobody else there, with the exception of Billy Dee, had the slightest clue what was going on.

  “You may be excused,” I said sharply to Susannah. “A little bicarbonate, and you should be as good as new by tomorrow.”

  My glare must have been as withering as I had intended it to be, because Susannah got up and left without another word.

  “Well?” Jeanette persisted.

  “Pass me the tureen,” I said as calmly as I could. When it arrived, I examined and sampled its contents as objectively as I could. Frankly, the supposedly meatless dish was less tasty than the one that I knew contained chicken. This confirmed my belief that there was indeed a difference between the two dishes. On the other hand, there definitely were little golden bubbles of something floating in the broth and clinging to the dumplings and stewed vegetables.

  “Well?” demanded Jeanette.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” said Joel. His face had taken on the same rutabaga green as Jeanette’s clothes.

  “It’s probably just corn oil,” said Lydia soothingly. “Even Julia cooks with corn oil.”

  I beamed at her. I didn’t know who Julia was, and I was sure Lydia had never seen the inside of a kitchen herself, but I was grateful for her help. Encouraged, I rang the little brass bell again.

  Freni misunderstood and when she reappeared she was carrying an apple pie in each hand. I quickly took the pies from her. “Freni,” I kept my voice low, “didn’t you follow my instructions?”

  Freni looked as if I had slapped her. “You told me to serve one with meat, and one without meat in it, Magdalena, and that’s exactly what you got.”

  “There, you see!” I said triumphantly, turning to the others, who had undoubtedly heard our conversation anyway. “That tureen is entirely vegetarian.”

  “Tastes good, too,” said Billy Dee, who had helped himself to a sample dumpling. “Mighty fine cooking.”

  Freni beamed. “This vegetarian cooking isn’t so hard after all,” she confessed. “Just cook like regular, and then rinse off the stuff that you want to be vegetarian.” Joel immediately covered his mouth with his napkin and fled from the room.

  Jeanette Parker uprooted herself from her chair and stood. I hadn’t realized how tall she was. From where I sat she seemed to tower over the table like a pale green monolith. “This is a breach of contract, Ms. Yoder,” she shouted. “When word gets out—and it will—of your duplicity in this matter, you can kiss your cozy little inn good-bye. And you,” she said, pointing a long and heavily ringed finger at Freni, “are a menace and disgrace to your profession. What were you trying to do, kill me with animal toxins?” She pushed her chair roughly aside and strode from the room.

  “She didn’t really mean that,” said Linda softly, and scurried after her mentor.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Yoder,” said Lydia Ream kindly. “You are under no obligation to meet the dietary needs of your guests. Just to supply them with ample food. Isn’t that right?” She turned to the two men on her side of the table for confirmation.

  “Yes, dear,” said the Congressman, but it was obvious he didn’t want to get involved.

  “Mrs. Ream is absolutely right,” said Delbert James a little more kindly.

  That made me feel a bit better, but still I was fit to be tied. I had to take out my frustration on someone. “Freni,” I said through clenched teeth, “you’re fired.” Then quickly I recanted, lest Freni take me seriously. There were just too many guests to go it on my own.

  But it was too late. “I quit anyway,” she snapped, before stomping from the room.

  Now before you get too upset, I have to mention that Freni had already been fired more than once, and in fact she quits on the average of once every other week. Still, if I had been slower to anger that last day before deer-hunting season, there might not have been a corpse clutching Mama’s dresden plate quilt. Then again, there might well have been anyway.

  Chapter Five

  Freni Hostetler’s Chicken And Dumpling Recipe

  Serves 8

  2 chickens (year-old hens preferred)

  1 ½ teaspoons salt

  Dash black pepper 6 medium-size potatoes (quartered)

  3 large carrots (sliced)

  1 large onion (chopped)

  4 tablespoons chopped parsley

  3 cups flour

  1 teaspoon salt

  3 teaspoons baking powder

  Dash ground nutmeg

  3 eggs, beaten

  ½ cup cream

  Clean and pluck the hens. Give head, entrails, and feet to barn cats. Do what you want with the liver, stomach, and gizzard. Cut the hens into serving pieces and put them into a large, cast-iron pot. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and cover with water. Cook slowly until almost tender. Then skim off excess fat and foam that has formed on top. Add vegetables and cook 20 minutes more. Then spoon dumpling batter on top of boiling broth and meat. Cover kettle tightly and cook 10 more minutes. Do not open the kettle until ready to serve.

  To make dumplings, sift the dry ingredients together. Then add the beaten eggs and enough cream to make a batter stiff enough to drop from a spoon.

  Chapter Six

  With Freni gone, it meant that I had to wash the supper dishes by myself—since I had banished Susannah to her room. Not that I minded. I find that immersing my hands in hot water is soothing whenever I, myself, am metaphorically in hot water. If my hands can stand it, so can I.

  I surely did not expect company at the kitchen sink, and would almost have preferred not to have it. But it never pays to be rude to paying guests. Especially when they are trying to be kind.

  “Where do you keep the dish towels?” asked Lydia merrily. She had changed out of her ball gown and into a casual, pink cashmere sweater and natural linen slacks.

  I opened a drawer and took out a stack of neatly folded towels. “I may have to charge you extra for the privilege,” I said, only half-seriously.

  “Slumming it, are we?” asked Delbert James, appearing in the doorway. He too had changed, or at least shed the tie and coat.

  Lydia seemed to light up like a well-trimmed wick touched to flame. “I was hoping it was going to be just us girls,” she practically cooed. It was embarrassingly obvious she was hoping anything but that.

  I swallowed my surprise for the third time and handed them each a towel. “Stack the dried dishes on that counter. I’ll put them away myself. But you can hang the pots on those pegs over there.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” said Delbert. Without the tie, or maybe it was without the Congressman, he was a different person altogether.

  “I suppose this is a first for both of you,” I teased. Well, maybe probed.

  Delbert chuckled. “Not for me. Not by a long shot. I put myself through Northwestern washing dishes. Four years of journalism paid for with dishpan hands.”

  “You’re a journalist by training?”

  “Speech writer, actually.”

  “That’s very interesting. My sister, Susannah, has always wanted to be a writer. But fiction, not speeches.”

  “Is there a difference?” asked Lydia.

  We all laughed. “What exactly does a Congressman’s aide do?” I asked.

  “Besides speech writing,” said Delbert, “just about everything. On this trip, I even act as gun-bearer.”

  “So only the Congressman hunts?”

  “I hunt,” said
Lydia. There seemed to be pride in her voice. “Daddy took me with him on safari in Africa when I was just a little girl. Of course, that was back in the old days, before we gave much thought to conservation.” She paused and gave me a slightly challenging look. “Deer hunting in Pennsylvania is a different story altogether.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. I did understand. There are many more deer in the state now than there were when the first white settlers showed up. Every year over a thousand deer are killed by cars on our county’s highways alone. Not that I could ever kill one intentionally myself, although I have had the urge from time to time when I find them in my garden.

  “Lydia, I mean, Mrs. Ream, is a first-class shot,” said Delbert. He lowered his voice. “She can outshoot the Congressman any day.”

  Lydia laughed and flicked Delbert playfully with her towel. I looked discreetly away. I generally try to ignore my guests’ shenanigans, which doesn’t mean, of course, that I approve of them. It’s just that I have all I can handle in Susannah. “I aim to bag the biggest buck around,” she said, imitating Billy Dee’s accent.

  “Does it bother you that we have A.P.E.S. staying at the inn?” I asked. It was more of a warning than a question. I genuinely liked Lydia and didn’t want to see her tackled by the likes of Jeanette Parker.

  “What?”

  “She means,” said Delbert, solemnly folding his dish towel, “that Billy Dee and the rest all belong to an organization called the Animal Parity Endowment Society. They’re philosophically and morally opposed to the taking of any animal’s life. They are especially against hunting for sport.”

  Lydia’s face suddenly lost its animation. Where just a moment before, she had appeared relaxed and surprisingly youthful, now it was as if she had just donned a mask of well-bred inscrutability. It did not suit her nearly as well. “I see,” she said. Even her diction had changed. “And how long have you known this, Delbert?”

  Delbert cleared his throat before answering. “The Congressman and I both recognized Ms. Parker and Ms. McMahon when we entered the dining room tonight. Both of them have been up on the Hill a number of times lobbying for their cause.”

  "And the other two? Mr. Grizzle and the sculptor from Philadelphia?”

  “Garrett,” he looked at me, “I mean, the Congressman, suspected they might be part of the organization as well. That’s why he asked those questions about hunting at supper. A quick call afterward confirmed it. Mr. Grizzle has been a member for three years. Mr. Teitlebaum, the sculptor, for almost seven. They’re all here together, and as far as we know they intend to disrupt our plans for tomorrow.”

  “You knew about this?” asked Lydia. The question was directed to me, and sounded stingingly like an accusation.

  The most valuable lesson I ever learned from Papa was to stick up for myself with confidence. Especially if I had done nothing wrong. We Mennonites may be pacifists, but we’re not pushovers. “Everyone has to use the six-seater,” Papa used to say, “and it all ends up in the same big hole.” The six-seater was our outhouse, and most of our family’s quality-time was spent around that one big hole. Of course, we now have indoor plumbing, along with telephones in every room. Incidentally, our six-seater is still the biggest outhouse in the county.

  “I most certainly did not know about this. Not when I booked this week’s reservations. It wasn’t until Billy Dee arrived, and he was the last one, I might add, that I found out. He told me himself.”

  Lydia’s mask was still tightly in place. “And how long were you going to keep this information to yourself? Until after the reporters got involved and you got yourself some more coverage for the inn?”

  That raised even my pacifist hackles. The Penn- Dutch does not need any additional coverage. Certainly not coverage of confrontation over controversial causes. “And just how long were your husband and his aide going to keep their discovery from you? I am, after all, the one who clued you in, not them.”

  The mask slipped a trifle. “I’m sorry, Miss Yoder. I apologize. You do have a point.”

  Never miss out on an opportunity to kick a dead horse; it is, after all, a form of exercise. I was tempted to tell Lydia there already was a reporter on the premises, and I had yet to spill one solitary bean of information to her. Wisely, though, I concluded that rubbing Lydia’s nose in my discretion would be more trouble than it was worth. Instead, I decided to accept her apology. People hate it when you forgive them.

  “I forgive you,” I said.

  Lydia’s face assumed the color of one of Freni’s pickled beets. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some matters to take care of.” She carefully put down her dish towel, and then, with the regal bearing of a queen, departed my humble kitchen. Delbert immediately chased after her, like a faithful dog. Of course he was of a breed much larger and quieter than Shnookums’s.

  I finished up the dishes by myself. The hot water was as therapeutic as ever. When I pulled the plug and watched the last of the water swirling down the drain, I imagined my troubles were the food particles caught up in the vortex. Starting with Jeanette Parker, and ending up with Lydia Johns Ream, the whole shebang of them, Susannah and her mutt included, swirled out of sight, and temporarily out of mind. Very temporarily. I was still wiping out the sink when the Congressman himself paid me a visit.

  “Miss Yoder!”

  I whirled, clutching my wet towel defensively to my bosom. Not since Crazy Maynard Miller exposed himself at my window one night have I felt so frightened. Or so guilty.

  “Yes!”

  The Congressman had been standing right behind me, and when I turned, he nearly poked me in the eye with his righteously extended forefinger. Seeing him so close, I yelped involuntarily. Unfortunately there was no room for me to back up. I flattened my buttocks against the still-warm sink.

  “Miss Yoder,” he said through clenched teeth, “I am a patient man. A tolerant man. But I will not have people meddling in my business. Is that clear?”

  I felt like I had when Mr. Lichty, my sixth-grade teacher, caught me doodling during long division. Although Garrett Ream and I were approximately the same age, the fact that he was a United States Congressman, an Episcopalian at that, and I a mere Mennonite innkeeper, made me feel about as equal to him as Shnookums must have felt to me. “Yes, sir. I understand,” I said. But of course I didn’t. What I said to his wife was my business, not his.

  "It’s bad enough that you booked those people during my hunting trip. But you had no right to scare Mrs. Ream with unnecessary information.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare her. Just inform her.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “To keep her from having to tangle with Jeanette Parker. It hasn’t happened here yet, but I’ve read accounts of animal rights activists hassling hunters in other counties.”

  “I can take care of my own wife, thank you. And Ms. Parker.”

  “Well, excuuuuse me for caring,” I said. It was the exact tone Susannah uses when she means anything but. I guess I’d had enough. Garrett Ream might have been a Congressman, but he had to use the six-seater just as often as the rest of us.

  He backed away slightly, but I kept my fanny pressed up against the sink.

  “Well, this wasn’t the only thing I came down here to talk about,” he said. He was decidedly less belligerent, so, in addition to onion on his breath, I could smell a favor coming on.

  I said nothing. It was the first sense of power I’d felt all evening.

  “You see,” he hastened to explain, “in order for us to avoid any kind of confrontation with this group, we need to leave the hotel very early.”

  “That makes sense. Provided they don’t follow you.” I was sorely tempted to tell him that there was a reporter sacked out upstairs.

  “You won’t tell, will you?” It was more of an order than a question.

  “I’m not the fool you take me for.”

  He smiled in an apparent attempt to smooth things over. “You are far from anybody’s fool, M
iss Yoder. If I had you on my staff, I’m sure the team would get a lot more done.”

  I didn’t smile back. “I’m not looking for a job, Congressman. What is it exactly that you want?”

  He sighed, a fake-sounding sigh of defeat, and ran his fingers through his thick, dark hair. “Just breakfast. An early breakfast—say fiveish, and box lunches for the three of us. And feel free to use meat.” Then he laughed at his own little joke.

  “Bacon and eggs for five at three—I mean, three at five. And ham and lettuce sandwiches to go. Anything else?”

  “That you not tell my wife we had this little conversation.”

  “As you wish.”

  He left abruptly, without even as much as a thank you. As I watched him go, I realized that Congressman Garrett Ream no longer seemed so handsome as when he had checked in. His features may have been regular, maybe even classical in shape, but he was ugly just the same.

  “Please close the door!” I called after him.

  Of course he didn’t. Wearily I started to make and pack the lunches he’d requested. As tired as I was, I’d be even more tired at five in the morning. That I knew.

  Chapter Seven

  I stuck my head in the dining room before going off to bed. Guests are forever leaving lights on. A recent survey, conducted by yours truly, revealed that people use eight and a half times more electricity and water when staying at places other than their own homes. It is no coincidence, for example, that most of New York City’s blackouts occur in the summertime, when the city is full of tourists.

  Anyway, I stuck more than just my head into the dining room. At first I couldn’t believe what I saw. There, sewing contentedly away on the stretched quilt, were Linda McMahon and Billy Dee Grizzle. It was like finding a cat and a mouse gnawing away at the same piece of cheese.

  I approached them quietly, not stealthily. At five feet ten, and one hundred and fifty pounds, I am too big-boned to do anything stealthily. Still, I got close enough to discern Linda’s soft, almost girlish voice.