Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth

by Tamar Myers

  I put on my slippers and threw on my heavy corduroy robe, which doesn’t at all compromise my modesty, and set out to investigate. The scream seemed to have come from upstairs, possibly from the new wing, above the new dining room. As soon as I had negotiated the impossibly steep stairs, it was immediately clear that I was on the right track. Joel and all three members of the Ream party were standing in the hallway looking toward the new wing.

  “What the—” began the Congressman, but I cut him off.

  “It’s okay, folks, I’ll take care of this.” I mean, what’s the point of standing around and scratching your head when all you have to do is check something out?

  The scream, a sort of garbled “help,” was emitted one more time, and then I immediately knew where it came from. I headed straight for Susannah’s old room, with Joel at my heels.

  The door was open, and the reading lamps on either side of the bed were turned on. Centered in the bed, but with her back pressed up against the headboard, was Linda McMahon. She seemed to be staring fixedly at something on the quilt that covered her legs.

  “Linda!” Joel pushed past me and raced to the bed.

  “Help!” she screamed one more time. So intently was she staring at whatever it was, she didn’t seem to be aware of our presence.

  I went around to the other side of the bed and tried to follow the angle of her gaze. She was staring at something just below her knees, at some point in a strip of blue and red calico. Then I saw it too, but, I’m ashamed to say, I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Joel.

  “It’s only this.” I took off one of my slippers and laid it gently on the quilt, atop Linda’s shins. When I removed it a minute later, there was a little brown, eight-legged creature clinging to it. “A little itsy-bitsy, teensie-weensie spider.”

  Joel recoiled as if I was waving a snake at him, and Linda somewhat ironically began to open and close her mouth like a baby bird begging to be fed.

  “Come on, folks, get a grip on it,” I said in my best Susannah imitation. “This is a harmless little house spider, just out to get himself a midnight snack. And I don’t mean you,” I hastened to assure Linda.

  “Where did he come from?” Joel had backed far enough away from the bed so that I was having to lean way over it just to allow him to get a good look.

  “Probably from up there,” I said, pointing to the ceiling. “He really is harmless, I can assure you. He eats things too small to even see. In fact, some folks consider them to be lucky spiders.” I wasn’t really lying. Susannah did consider it lucky when I didn’t make her sweep down all the cobwebs that eventually collected in her room.

  “Well, I consider it a health hazard and a menace,” said the Congressman, who had apparently been standing in the doorway for some time. “You will, of course, be calling an exterminator in the morning.” It was a directive, not a question.

  I simply stared at the Congressman in his peacock-blue silk robe, not quite sure what to say. At last the lovely Lydia intervened by slipping her arm through her husband’s and pulling him gently away. “Come on, dear,” I heard her say as she led him down the hall, “you’ve got to get some sleep if you’re going to bag that eight-point buck in the morning.” Wordlessly, their loyal aide trotted after them.

  “What are you going to do about him?” asked Joel.

  “Ignore him, I guess.”

  “No, I mean him.” He pointed to the spider, which was still clinging to my slipper.

  I glanced down at the little critter, which by then was crawling up the slipper toward my hand. “Open the window, please!”

  “Oh, no,” cried Joel. “You can’t do that! It’s November. Arachnids can’t take freezing weather.”

  I headed resolutely for the bathroom.

  “Not that, either, Miss Yoder.” He took a couple of deep breaths and seemed to calm down a little. “I mean, please. Can’t we release him someplace safe and warm?”

  I practically thrust the slipper at him. “Here, you release him. Try the cellar—through the kitchen, but before the porch.”

  Joel took the slipper, handling it as gingerly as Susannah handles the poop-scoop on those rare occasions when she stoops to clean up after Shnookums. But once it was in his possession, he took off at a sprint.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed to attend to young Linda. She had ceased gaping like a hungry fledgling and was by this time gasping like a dying fish. I patted her shoulder and tried to look sympathetic. Admittedly, nurturing is not my forte.

  “There, there,” I said somewhat lamely, “it’ll be all right.”

  “But he might die down there,” she finally managed to say.

  “Don’t worry,” I hastened to assure her, “there are plenty more where that one came from.”

  Linda began gasping and gaping again, and it took me a couple of minutes to get her coherent. “Not the spider! Joel!”

  I patted her a little harder. “Joel will be just fine. The cellar stairs aren’t that much steeper than these, and Mose promised me he would fix both the loose steps.”

  “You idiot!” said Linda rudely. I must have looked shocked, because she almost immediately apologized. “But don’t you see,” she added, “poor Joel could get bitten by that horrible thing and die?”

  I smiled kindly. “Absolutely not. That little spider couldn’t even kill a fly. I’ve been bitten by them oodles of times. Of course it hurts, but all that happens is that you get a little lump that goes away in a couple of hours. Joel will be just fine.”

  As if on cue, Joel popped back into the room with my slipper in hand. “All’s well that ends well,” he said, perhaps a little out of breath.

  “Thanks, Joel.”

  “No problem, Miss Yoder.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Joel.” Linda seemed to be breathing normally again.

  I figured it was a good time for me to leave. “Well, good night, then.”

  “Good night, Miss Yoder. I’ll stay with her for a while.”

  Linda smiled appreciatively up at Joel. Perhaps I had been wrong about some of my early assumptions. “When you assume,” Papa used to say, “you make an ass out of u and me.”

  I said my good nights and had just started down the hall when something occurred to me. I turned back. Both young people were just as I had left them. “Say,” I said hesitantly, “isn’t it a little odd that with all the commotion, Ms. Parker doesn’t seem to have awakened?”

  “Not at all,” answered Linda. She sounded just a wee bit smug. “She usually takes a ‘chill pill.’ ”

  “A what?”

  “A tranquilizer,” translated Joel. He looked to Linda for confirmation.

  She nodded. “Jeanette, I mean Ms. Parker, has a chronic back problem. It’s exacerbated by stress. A Xanax now and then relaxes her and helps her get to sleep.”

  “I see,” I said, but of course I didn’t. I generally disapprove of any kind of medication. Oh, not on religious grounds, I assure you. It’s just that Granny Yoder was a hypochondriac. At one time I counted thirty-seven different bottles of pills and vitamins in her medicine chest. If the old lady had simply let nature take its course, she might have left the planet years earlier and spared us all a lot of grief.

  I was coming out of Linda’s room when I noticed that the fire escape door at the end of the new wing, right next to Miss Brown’s room, was slightly ajar. My first thought was that the reclusive Miss Brown had slipped out for a breath of fresh night air. After all, moths are most active at night. But then I noticed a thin trail of sunflower seeds and concluded that young Joel was the insomniac I’d suspected him to be. I made a mental note to talk to him in the morning. If Crazy Maynard got in and showed young Linda what he showed me, she might scream for days.

  On the way back to my bedroom, I tripped and nearly tumbled down the impossibly steep stairs. I was thinking about Susannah, and how Ms. Parker had nothing on me when it came to stress and back pain. So it wasn’t until I’d crawled back into
bed that I remembered two other people hadn’t turned out in response to Linda’s arachnophobic screams.

  Chapter Nine

  Hardly more than an hour had passed when I was partially awakened by a loud pounding noise.

  “Be still, my heart,” I murmured, and turned over to go back to sleep. It wasn’t my fault, and therefore not a sin, that I had been dreaming about the not-unattractive Billy Dee Grizzle.

  The pounding persisted, and eventually it became clear to my sleep-deprived brain that someone was hanging on the door and shouting. In my dreams, Billy Dee had only grunted.

  I flung on my modest terry robe and staggered to the door. When I opened it, Joel Teitlebaum nearly knocked me over.

  “There’s a dead woman on the stairs!” he shouted.

  “Grannie Yoder?” I cried happily. Not that I was glad the old woman was haunting the place again, but I was relieved finally to have a confirmation of my sightings. Ever since the first time I saw Grannie Yoder’s ghost, Susannah has accused me of being as loony as a lake in Maine. The nerve of that girl!

  “Whatever her name is, there’s a dead woman on the stairs,” repeated Joel. He was still very agitated, and his eyes looked as if they just might pop out of his face.

  I grabbed one of his flailing arms. “Calm down, dear. It’s only the ghost of my dear, departed grandma. She was far more dangerous in life, believe you me.”

  Joel wrenched his arm from my restraining grip. “This is not a ghost, Miss Yoder! This is a real live woman! Uh, I mean a real dead woman.”

  I must have flung Joel’s spindly frame out of the way, because the next thing I knew I was at the bottom of our impossibly steep stairs. Sure enough, in a heap, not unlike a burlap bag of potatoes, lay the crumpled form of Miss Brown. Not even the Chinese acrobats I’d seen at the circus in Somerset could assume a position like this. I leaned over for a closer look, but I didn’t touch her. Mama had made us kiss Grannie Yoder after she was dead, and I’d had nightmares afterward for weeks.

  “Are you sure she’s dead?”

  Joel nodded. “She’s still slightly warm, but I can’t find a pulse anywhere. Who the hell is she?”

  I felt a stabbing pain run through my gut. Sheer terror, I’m sure. “One of my guests. She checked in early yesterday, and then I never saw her again.”

  “Better call the police,” said Joel, who had calmed down significantly. “And, I suppose, an ambulance. Just to be on the safe side.”

  I called both. At the risk of making myself seem like I have a heart made out of dumplings, I will admit that at this point I was hoping not only that Miss Brown was dead, but that all her relatives were dead as well. What with those stairs being so steep, I was clearly liable. To settle a suit of this magnitude, not only would I have to sell off the PennDutch, but Susannah and I would be indentured servants for the rest of our lives. Even that obnoxious little Shnookums would have to be pawed off for a few pennies. Come to think of it, even the darkest clouds have silver linings.

  Jeff Myers is our Chief of Police, and as nice a man as you could hope to meet. We were in grade school together, and he was the one boy whom I didn’t mind spitting paper wads at me. Of course he’s married now. Anyway, he showed up in no time flat and handled everything as smoothly as Freni does her shoofly pie dough. In less than an hour he had Miss Brown shipped off to the county morgue, for she was indeed dead. And in that time he had managed to interview everyone in the inn, except for myself. That he did over a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

  “May as well,” he said, when I offered it to him. “We were planning to leave on vacation in three hours anyway. No use trying to hit the sack now. I’ll just let Tammy do the driving.”

  “Where are you off to?” I asked. Tammy Myers, his wife, is a nice-enough woman, but dingier than a mailbox on a gravel road. They have three children, Sarah, David, and Dafna, who are almost grown. That the woman never misplaced them when they were infants is nothing short of a miracle. If his wife was going to do the driving while Jeff slept, somebody sane needed to know their destination.

  “We’re going to Niagara Falls,” said Jeff, “then camping up in Canada for two weeks. I’ll be leaving my assistant in charge.”

  “Keep her away from the edge,” I advised sagely.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Now, Mags, about this Brown woman, you say you never saw her again after you showed her to her room? Until Mr. Teitlebaum found her, I mean.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t see a sign of her. Of course, she wasn’t easy to see, if you know what I mean.” “Uh-huh. Apparently none of the other guests saw or heard her either, at least not while she was alive. Neither did anyone hear a scream when she fell down the stairs, although one man, let’s see,” he briefly consulted his notes, “a Mr. Grizzle, said he thought he heard a thump. Of course, that might have been Mr. Teitlebaum pounding on your door.”

  “Probably. And what about Joel Teitlebaum? What was he doing up, anyway? I mean, he seems like a nice kid and all, but shouldn’t he have a bedtime?” Mama had made me go to bed by nine every night until the day she died.

  Chief of Police Myers glanced at his notes again. "Mr. Teitlebaum claims to have been in your parlor, deeply engrossed in one of your books. Something about Amish rabbis I think. Anyway, according to him, after that spider incident with young Linda McMahon, he couldn’t get back to sleep, so he went back down to the parlor. He heard a thump also, but no scream. He said he read another paragraph or two of that damned book—oh, sorry, Mags—before he got up to investigate.”

  “Maybe she was too drunk to scream,” I suggested hopefully. If it was a drunk who fell down your stairs, even though they were impossibly steep, didn’t that absolve you of at least some of the liability?

  “Maybe,” said Chief Myers, “but personally I don’t think that’s the case. Drunks seldom hurt themselves when they fall. All that booze makes them too flexible. Read about this guy out in San Francisco who fell seventeen stories down an empty elevator shaft. Dead drunk, of course. Hardly got hurt at all.”

  Suddenly I remembered why I didn’t like Jeff so much. He had an annoying habit of always letting logic get in the way. “Well, okay, what if she wasn’t drunk then, and somebody pushed her. Then it still wouldn’t be my fault, would it?"

  Chief Myers’s sinfully blue eyes danced in amusement. "You would rather it was murder than face a lawsuit?”

  I tried to swallow a huge lump that had somehow lodged in my throat. Perhaps Freni’s dumplings weren’t as fluffy as I had always believed. “Murder? Who said anything about murder?”

  Jeff Myers chuckled. “Ah, you mean it might have been only a friendly sort of push?”

  It was time to retreat, and fast. A verdict of murder, it seemed then, would be just as ruinous to the inn as a lawsuit. “Maybe she fell while sleepwalking, or maybe she decided to come downstairs without turning the hall light on first.”

  “Maybe,” said the Chief. “Then again, maybe not. I think your murder theory has its points.”

  “My theory?” You see how things always get twisted around, then put back on me? “And what points are those?”

  The Chief yawned. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this stuff, but what the hell. This Miss Brown took a pretty bad fall, but it wasn’t the fall that put those marks on her face.”

  “What marks?” I hadn’t seen any marks. Then again, I hadn’t looked at her face all that closely. It might have been Yasir Arafat lying there, for all I really knew. “Marks,” said the Chief tiredly. “Kind of like bruises.

  Fresh bruises that haven’t had a chance to darken. Sort of in a fingerprint pattern.”

  I swallowed another one of Freni’s dumplings. “She might have had those marks before she even checked in,” I pointed out hastily. “She might have been covering them up with makeup, and then taken it off when she went to bed. Most women take off their makeup at night, you know.” At least I assumed they did. I never wore any ma
keup, and as for Susannah, if she took off her makeup at this point, her face might shatter.

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” said the Chief. He yawned again, in spite of my coffee. “But whatever the reason for those marks, we’re not going to find out tonight. Nor are we going to find out why or how she fell. We’re just going to have to wait out the coroner’s report. In the meantime, I’m having that room sealed off. Might still be a clue or two in there we’ll need if this turns out to be foul play. Now, I’ve got a couple of big pike up in Canada with my name on them, so I’m outta here. Don’t worry, Mags, my Assistant Chief is as good as they come.” He stood up and stretched—a most immodest act on his part. “If there is any sort of legal trouble, you can always give Alvin a call.”

  “Not as long as Chip and Dale are around,” I said. Alvin Hostetler, another distant cousin, must have attended law school somewhere on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. His nickname around these parts is Jaws, and it was his mother who bestowed it on him after he took her to court to sue for back allowance. He was eighteen at the time. The case was thrown out of court, of course, but it gives you an idea of Alvin’s character. I would sooner dance naked on Hernia’s main street than do business with a shark like that.

  Still, if it did come down to losing the PennDutch, I might have to give in to rubbing fins with Alvin.

  Chief Myers bid me a sleepy good night. Before I went back to bed I searched our spidery cellar for the bottle of brandy I knew was hidden there. “For snakebite,” Papa told me once. We have very few poisonous snakes in Pennsylvania, but Papa, who was outdoors a lot, always believed in being prepared. Once or twice a month, unbeknownst to anyone but me, Papa would force himself to go down into the cellar and practice sipping that horrible-tasting brandy, so that if the time ever came when he was bitten by a snake, he’d be able to drink enough to withstand the pain. I found Papa’s bottle, or one of its descendants, and, after brushing the cobwebs off, tried a swig myself. Of course it tasted awful. But I braved it out, like Papa, and after a couple more swigs I adjusted to the taste. I felt much more inclined to sleep after that.