Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth

by Tamar Myers

  “You sure that this Jumbo Jim’s chicken place was the same number that was on her registration form?”

  “As sure as you’re a Stoltzfus.”

  “And how much did you say a bucket of extra crispy cost?”

  “I didn’t, Melvin.”

  “Was this Miss Brown all you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “No. I also want to report an attempted murder out at my place.”

  “Apparently you haven’t been listening, Magdalena. The coroner’s report still is not in. It may be negligence on your part that we’re looking at, not murder. You should be talking to Alvin, not me.”

  Alvin, Melvin, shmelvin. I’ve raised chickens with higher I.Q.s. “I’m not talking about Miss Brown anymore,” I said, with perhaps a slight note of exasperation in my voice. “What I mean is, today somebody tried to kill me.”

  “I see.” He pulled some forms out of a drawer, picked up a ballpoint, and sat poised like he was getting ready to take a timed exam.

  “Don’t you want to hear the details?”

  He smiled placidly. The skin on the left side of his face was pulled tight and there appeared to be an indentation just inside his hairline. Perhaps that’s where he had been kicked in the head. “Before we get into the details, I need some background information on you.”

  “What information? Melvin, you’ve known me all my life.”

  “Name?”

  “You already know that!”

  Melvin was as persistent as a sweat fly in August.

  “Name?”

  “Oh, all right. Magdalena Yoder.”

  “Middle name?”

  “Won’t an initial do?” It’s bad enough that my mother named me after a packet of flower seeds. She could at least have nixed the Latin.

  “Middle name?”

  “Portulaca. But breathe that to a single soul and—”

  “Age?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “Age?”

  “Forty-three. But what does this have to do with my being shot at?”

  “Sex?”

  “Never! I mean it’s none of your business.”

  “Sex?”

  After Melvin had garnered all my personal statistics, except for my bra and shoe size (which are not the same, no matter what Freni says), he finally let me tell him about the incident.

  “You don’t allow hunting on your land, do you?” he interrupted me at one point.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then that couldn’t have been a hunter on your land.”

  “How’s that?”

  Melvin was on a roll. “And you don’t know why anyone would want to kill you, do you?”

  “To spare me these questions?”

  He began to rub his hands together rhythmically. “If you don’t know why someone would want to kill you, then there probably wasn’t anyone trying to kill you. And we know it wasn’t a hunter. So, either you are mistaken about being shot at or you are lying to me, Magdalena, and just wasting my time.” He rolled his huge eyes into position and gazed up at me like a monstrous mantis. “And I know you don’t lie, Magdalena Yoder. Do you?”

  “You forgot Portulaca.”

  “Do you?”

  There was no stopping such persistence. I decided to get out of there before he devoured me. “I don’t suppose you know the name of the hotel Chief Myers is staying at in Niagara Falls, do you?”

  Melvin turned his head slowly to an impossible angle. Quite possibly he was trying to point with his chin. “The sign on this desk says ‘Melvin Stoltzfus.’ That’s me. I’m in charge while the Chiefs away. Got any more questions?”

  “No, so in that case I guess I’ll just be going. Thanks for everything.”

  The bulging blue-gray eyes seemed to have focused on me before his head had fully turned back into position. “It’s quite all right, Magdalena, but next time try not to let your imagination get the best of you.”

  “Bull!” I said. That said it all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Susannah and Shnookums were in the kitchen when I returned. I didn’t actually see Shnookums, but since he is never a dog’s breath away from her, I knew he was there. Susannah, at least, appeared to be making toast and coffee.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t sleep anymore?” I asked pleasantly enough.

  Susannah rolled her eyes, which for her is a fairly tolerant gesture. “I am not the lazy thing you think I am, Mags. I’ve been up for at least forty-five minutes, doing my nails.”

  A quick glance at the wall clock told me it was seven minutes till one. Just as I’d thought. Only sinners are capable of sleeping past noon.

  “And besides which,” she continued, “I’m working right now. I’m making lunch for Her Highness.”

  “What? Is Jeanette back already?”

  “Not that Her Highness. Mrs. Ream.”

  “Lydia came back already?”

  Susannah opened the fridge and got out some cottage cheese and hard-boiled eggs. “She never left in the first place. Scared me to death when I saw her. I was coming downstairs for a Pepsi and Little Debbies when I ran into her on the stairs. We both nearly fell down those damned stairs and broke our necks we were so frightened.”

  “Susannah!”

  “Well, do you want to hear the juicy details, or what?”

  I sold out my principles for the juicy details. “Do tell.”

  Susannah talked while she fixed Lydia’s plate. “I asked Mrs. Ream why she was back already and she told me she’d never left. Said she hadn’t been feeling so well after breakfast, a stomach thing, and thought she should stick close to the house. She also said she’d started to feel a little better and had gone out for a short walk. Just to look at the barn and stuff. Only I don’t think that’s the whole truth.”

  “What do you mean?” I have to hand it to Susannah. She attracts interesting bits of news like black wool attracts lint.

  “Well, for one thing, there’s that fight she had with her husband this morning. I think it’s Garrett, not diarrhea, that kept her home. Although, how can you tell the difference?”

  “Susannah?”

  “Well, you know what I mean.” She poured coffee from the percolator into a small serving pot. “Anyway, after I recovered from shock on the stairs, I noticed there were some pine needles caught in her hair.” Susannah paused and waited for me to say something.

  Eventually I obliged. “So?”

  “So! Mags, the only pine trees we’ve got on the farm are back in the woods. It’s all maples up by the house, and there aren’t any trees by the barn. So don’t you think the woods is a wee bit far to go if you’ve got the runs?”

  “You’ve got a point,” I said excitedly. “And if Lydia was in the woods, she might have seen someone, or at least could verify that shots had been fired.”

  Susannah put a little pot of homemade boysenberry jam and a salt and pepper set on the tray. “Except that she came back from her walk several hours after you claimed you were shot at.”

  “Not claimed—was!”

  “All right, was. My point is that she couldn’t have heard the shots or seen anyone, because she wasn’t even in the woods then.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Say, you’re not the only one with news. Guess who I saw in town?”

  “Your old boyfriend, Sam?” Susannah pointed to the bags of produce that I still had not bothered to put away. After all, there was no hurry. How limp can Sam’s bok choy get?

  “That’s not who I mean. I saw”—I paused for dramatic effect—“Melvin Stoltzfus!”

  “Our new acting Police Chief.”

  “You knew?”

  “It was in the paper, Mags. You really ought to get more in touch with the world.”

  “That’s not fair! I read.”

  “Yeah, books. But not important stuff. Isn’t Melvin cute?”

  “Cute? You think Melvin Stoltzfus is cute?”

  ‘You’re always too hard on people, Magdalena. You’
re far too picky. Even Mama used to say so. Melvin’s got the most adorable eyes. You know—bedroom eyes they call them.”

  “I wouldn’t think there’d be room for his eyes in my bed,” I said, perhaps cruelly.

  “There you go! Running people down. That’s why there’s never been anybody in your bed, Magdalena. And probably never will be.”

  “That’s not true at all. I don’t sleep with men because I’m not married. It’s as simple as that. And even if I were to throw my morals to the wind and be a slut, like some people I know, I wouldn’t go to bed with someone who has to use his fingers to count to ten.”

  Susannah slammed some silverware down on the tray. “Melvin never got kicked by any damned cow. That story was just made up by Sarah Berkey because he jilted her.”

  “Bull.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, just take the tray up to Lydia.” It’s a hard lesson for me to learn, but if I bite my tongue hard enough, and think of Mama turning over in her grave, I can sometimes extricate myself from our arguments before it’s too late.

  “I’m gone!” shouted Susannah. Then, too studied to be an afterthought, she turned with the tray and gave me what I suppose she thought was a coy wink. “I almost forgot to tell you, Mags, but you had a phone call.”

  “I did not switch the prices on Sam’s salad dressings,” I said, perhaps a bit too defensively.

  “Not Sam. This was from a man, a Jim something. Big Jim, I think it was. Anyway, he wouldn’t leave a message, except that he’d call back sometime. And he called you doll!”

  Susannah laughed like a blithering idiot and ran upstairs with the tray containing hot coffee. How is it that she managed to negotiate those impossibly steep stairs at high speed and not even spill a drop of java, whereas poor little Miss Brown ended up like a sack of potatoes at their foot? A sack of mashed potatoes.

  I decided not to dwell on that morbid subject any longer, nor did I particularly want to think about Jumbo Jim’s call. My brief conversation with him had been far too much fun. If it involves a man, and is fun, it has got to be wrong, or so Mama always told me. When your mind starts to get too busy, or filled with unwelcome thoughts, the only way to clear it is to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Dirty hands, you can always wash. A dirty mind, however, is a first-class ticket to hell.

  I left the groceries where they were and went out back to help Mose shovel out the henhouse. We do it twice a year, when the weather’s not too cold, but cold enough so that it moderates the fumes from the acrid droppings. The fall rakings, which include a lot of straw, are spread over the vegetable patch, and come spring, it’s tame enough to make a lovely fertilizer. The spring rakings go on the compost heap. By late summer they’ve mellowed enough to assist the fall crop.

  Our chickens are range fed, which means they don’t spend a lot of time in the henhouse, except at night, or to lay. Often there’s no one at home when we shovel. There’s something therapeutic, almost religious, about shoveling excrement in an empty henhouse twice a year. It’s not only humbling, but in addition to cleaning the joint, I usually feel like my soul has been somehow cleansed as well. Of course, it may be just the fumes.

  “Say, Mose,” I began, once the job was done, “did you see Mrs. Ream, the Congressman’s wife, taking a walk this morning?”

  Mose shook his head. “I didn’t see any of the English this morning.”

  “Well, that’s strange, because Mrs. Ream told Susannah she went out for a walk by the barn after breakfast.”

  Mose took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve. “I didn’t see any of the English,” he repeated, “but there was someone out by the barn.”

  “You heard someone?”

  “No. Matilda did.” Matilda Holsteincoo is one of our two remaining cows. To hear Mose talk, you’d think they were the daughters he never had.

  “What do you mean Matilda did?”

  “She wouldn’t let down her milk for the longest time. It makes her nervous, you know, if someone else is there.”

  “What about Bertha? Was she nervous too?”

  Mose knew I was teasing him, but as usual he never let on. “Bertha knows no shame. She gave even more than usual.”

  “That hussy!”

  Mose smiled despite himself. Then his face darkened. “Magdalena, which one of the English does that car belong to?” He pointed to the asphalt-gray jalopy once owned by the deceased Miss Brown.

  “Ah, that belonged to the woman who accidentally fell down our stairs. Heather Brown. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know much about cars, Magdalena, but that one’s broken in back. Where you put stuff. I think it happened here.”

  “You mean the trunk?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  We walked over to the car to take a closer look. Sure enough, the trunk lid was open. The evidence suggested that it had been forced. There were scratch marks around the keyhole, and along the bottom of the trunk lid there was a series of indentations. It would have been obvious even to Melvin’s mother that someone had used a crowbar to force it open.

  “What makes you think it happened here?”

  “It didn’t look like that yesterday.”

  “You sure?”

  I thought I saw Mose blush. “I’m sure. I had my eye on that one. If Freni and I were ever to get a car, it would be one like that, I think. Not too worldly. Of course, we would paint it black.”

  “Of course.”

  I peered into the trunk. It was empty. If there had been something worth the trouble to force it open, it was no longer there. The floor of the trunk was carpeted, gray of course, and, as I would have expected from Miss Brown, must have been recently vacuumed. But then, just as I was turning away, something caught my eye. Just inside the trunk, almost hidden by the curve of metal that formed the rear lip, was a single sunflower seed. Once I saw it, it was as obvious as a diamond on a coal heap.

  Mose saw it too. “The Englishman. The tall, skinny Englishman. He eats seeds like that.”

  For some reason I felt immediately defensive of young Joel Teitlebaum. “One swallow does not a summer make,” I countered. “And besides, Mose, does he seem like the type who could jimmy this open with a crowbar?”

  “Freni could.”

  I politely rolled my eyes by turning my head away first. “Freni could do anything, Mose. She was born on a farm. I doubt if Joel could even open one of Freni’s jars of pickled watermelon rinds. I think it was someone else, trying to make it look like Joel. It seems too obvious to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told Mose about the fire escape door being left open, and the trail of sunflower seed shells.

  Mose pointed to the gravel at our feet. “Well, whoever it was, they chewed tobacco too.”

  Then I noticed the glob of still-damp spittle containing tobacco fragments. Hernia is filled with tobacco chewers, not to mention consummate spitters of all kinds.

  “It was an outsider,” I said. It had to be. I couldn’t imagine the Congressman, or Delbert, chawing down on a wad. And Joel was far too much of a health freak to do such a thing. Billy Dee came the closest to fitting the profile of a chaw chomper, but he was too much of a gentleman to break into anyone’s car trunk. Especially a woman’s.

  “Maybe you should call the Chief,” suggested Mose.

  I shook my head and practically stamped my feet. “The Chiefs off in Canada catching fish and saving his wife from going over Niagara Falls. Melvin Stoltzfus is his replacement.”

  “The Melvin Stoltzfus?” asked Mose incredulously.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I heard that old bull he tried to milk will never be the same. He moos in falsetto now.”

  Old Mose didn’t even have a twinkle in his eye, so clearly he believed the story. Of course I didn’t. “Mose, I think we should just try and wire the trunk lid shut the best we can and say nothing. Who knows why an outsider would want to break into Miss
Brown’s trunk, but Melvin sure isn’t going to know either. So why borrow trouble, right?”

  “Melvin is trouble. I’ll see if I can tie down the trunk. But, Magdalena, I need to ask you a question.”

  “Ask away, Mose.”

  “Can Freni have her job back? You know how she is when she’s not working.”

  “Can it be any worse than when she is working?” I tried to laugh pleasantly. “Okay, I suppose so, Mose.” His face lit up. “You aren’t too mad at Freni, Magdalena?”

  “Of course I’m mad, but I’ll get over it. I always do.”

  “Good. You are like the daughter she never had. She is very fond of you, Magdalena. She doesn’t really mean what she says. She just has trouble with her temper.”

  “Like me?”

  He flushed. “I didn’t say that.”

  I looked over at the field where Matilda and Bertha were peacefully grazing. “Tell her she’s welcome back anytime. All she has to do is apologize.”

  Mose shook his head ruefully and headed silently for the barn. We both knew it would be a sweet-smelling day in the henhouse before Freni Hostetler said “sorry” to me.

  I had just put away the last of the groceries when the first of the guests returned. The first one I saw, anyway, was Billy Dee, who came bounding into the kitchen in search of something cold to drink. Having been in the woods definitely seemed to agree with him.

  “I take it their protest was not successful then?” I asked, as I handed him a glass of Bertha’s milk. Or was it the shy Matilda’s?

  “Heck no, Miss Yoder. We didn’t see hide nor hair of them folks the whole day.”

  “Which, of course, was none of your doing.”

  “Exactly. It weren’t my fault we got lost twice on our way to the game lands, even if I was leading the way, and it certainly weren’t my fault we parked on the opposite side of the ridge from the Congressman. And when we did go into the woods for just a bit, someone took a potshot at Jeanette.” He laughed heartily. “That really weren’t my fault.”

  “Someone shot at Jeanette?”

  He was still laughing. “Maybe it was a bear hunter! She sure don’t look like a deer to me!”

  “Mr. Grizzle! You of all people!”