Mean and Shellfish

by Tamar Myers

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tamar Myers

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Recipes

  Also by Tamar Myers

  The Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries

  THOU SHALT NOT GRILL

  ASSAULT AND PEPPER

  GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

  HELL HATH NO CURRY

  AS THE WORLD CHURNS

  BATTER OFF DEAD

  BUTTER SAFE THAN SORRY

  THE DEATH OF PIE *

  TEA WITH JAM AND DREAD *

  PUDDIN’ ON THE BLITZ *

  * available from Severn House

  MEAN AND SHELLFISH

  Tamar Myers

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Tamar Myers, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Tamar Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8929-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-772-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0510-0 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  This book is dedicated to Rich and Terri Keffert

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my publisher, Kate Lyall Grant, at Severn House for the opportunity to write this book. I would also like to thank my editor Sara Porter for her wisdom and skilful guidance.

  In addition, I am very grateful to my literary agent of twenty-eight years, Nancy Yost, of Nancy Yost Literary Agency. I want to give a shout-out to the entire team there, most especially Sarah, Natanya and Cheryl.

  Last, but not least, I would like to thank Barbara Savage for her recipe. I met Barbara in Thailand twenty-five years ago, when our families booked the same package tour of the River Kwai and environs. Part of the tour included an elephant-back ride through the jungle. Because only three passengers were permitted to ride in each howdah, and Barbara had two children, my husband and I agreed to let her young son Daniel ride with us. We have been friends ever since. As I see it, allowing a stranger to ride along in one’s howdah can be the foundation of a lasting friendship.

  ONE

  A woman’s hunch is worth two facts from a man. That’s just a fact, and it’s something that I know from ten years of experience helping local law enforcement solve murder cases in and around our bucolic village of Hernia, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the majority of these untimely demises have occurred at my bed and breakfast, The PennDutch Inn. One local wag went so far as to suggest that I rename my otherwise charming establishment Cabot’s Cove, a reference that went totally over my extraordinarily large, horsey head.

  Please bear with me while I introduce myself more fully. My name is Magdalena Portulacca Yoder. I am currently happily married to Dr Gabriel Rosen, a retired cardiac surgeon from New York City (that has not always been the case – the happy part, that is). The reason that I have not adopted my husband’s surname is that I made the mistake of doing that when I was married the first time. To a bigamist. That is when I became Hernia’s first official inadvertent adulteress. That is to say, I had absolutely no idea that Aaron Miller was married when I promised to be his wedded wife to death do us part. The trauma of our wedding night, and the subsequent nightmares in which I was assaulted by a turkey neck, were all in vain. Well, I guess if I am being completely honest, they did prepare me for wedding night number two.

  At any rate, I am a Conservative Mennonite woman. Both sets of my grandparents were Amish, and I am related by blood to approximately eighty percent of them. My dear husband, on the other hand, is Jewish. We are, as the Bible states, ‘unevenly yoked’. Given that the original prohibition was against pairing an ox with a donkey, and my husband is quite a bit larger than I am, that leaves me playing the part of the ass.

  We have two wonderful but very disobedient children. Gabe claims that their contrariness is due in part to that fact that they are very clever and are being raised to be independent thinkers. Our adopted daughter Alison is nineteen, a pre-med student at the University of Pittsburgh, and her brother Little Jacob, age five, is being home-schooled by his father. It was either that, or let him start high school, as he had already mastered all the other requisite work in-between.

  Just so you know, I take absolutely no credit for Little Jacob’s inordinate amount of brains. Gabe shouldn’t take credit for them either. Little Jacob’s smarts are a God-given gift. If either of us starts taking credit for what is good in our children’s lives, then we will have to take credit for the bad as well. That’s a conclusion I came to when my younger sister Susannah fell in love with a truly wicked man by the name of Melvin Stoltzfus, and then finally ended up serving time in the state penitentiary for aiding and abetting an accused murderer.

  I won’t bore you with the long history of the PennDutch Inn. Just believe me when I say that folks with enormous amounts of money like to get a little abuse when they dish out their dole. I’m not referring to physical or verbal abuse – or, heaven forfend, sexual abuse. What I mean is that every now and then, the uber-wealthy enjoy ‘roughing’ it a bit. This enables them
to once again appreciate the luxuries to which they’d become inured. This is especially true when their abuse of choice contains an element of education, something about which they can elaborate upon ad nausea at their next dinner table.

  At the PennDutch Inn one gets the privilege of toting in one’s own valises and then lugging them up my impossibly steep stairs. (By the way, whinging is penalized by a penalty of fifty dollars per complaint.) For a mere one hundred bucks more than the standard room rate, one may opt for the thrill of cleaning one’s own en-suite room. For a fee of just fifty dollars more than that, a guest may select a room that doesn’t have its own bath, and clean it, as well as the public bath. There are additional fees for privileges of mucking out the barn, cleaning the chicken coop, plucking butchered chickens, and ironing bedsheets with flat irons heated on a wood-burning stove.

  The point of all this is to give our guests a genuine Amish experience in this corner of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The fact that we aren’t Amish doesn’t matter; my grandparents were Amish, and I am quite capable of replicating their lifestyle here at the PennDutch Inn. Of course, in this spirit, all cell phones will have been confiscated at my front door. Not that they would have been much good to their owners for long, as there are no electric outlets in the guest rooms for recharging the dang things. Neither are there any electric lights. Guests are given oil lamps when they retire at night. Also, I’ve seen to it that the upstairs radiators don’t work – Amish rely on heat from wood-burning stoves downstairs to rise up through the floor and supply sufficient heat to keep their large families from freezing. Gabe believes that this is the reason the Amish are really into making quilts.

  Any rational person might conclude that my business model was insane. Who would squander their precious leisure time to work their manicured fingers to the bone, while staying at an establishment where so many guests have been stabbed, poisoned, or merely shot? Surely even the report of just one such incident would be one too many, never mind a baker’s dozen. But au contraire. Like moths to the flame, folks vie for reservations, usually requesting to stay in specific rooms from their understanding of the crimes having occurred therein. Often guests arrive clutching yellowed newspaper clippings of their favourite atrocities, or stories printed from the internet.

  So my business has thrived, and I have become a prosperous woman. Scripture instructs us to give freely to those who are not as well off. Actually, it goes a mite further than that. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the rich man that in order to get into Heaven he needs to sell everything that he has and give the money away to the poor. The rich man walked away from the deal.

  Now that is a hard teaching which only a small minority of Christians follow. I certainly don’t, because scripture also states that the key ingredient to one’s salvation is faith, not poverty. Not that my finances are anyone’s business except for the government’s, but I donate a great deal of money to charities scattered throughout the county, the country, and even abroad. I also single-handedly support the Hernia Police Department, the Hernia Lending Library, and our small but fascinating Museum of Local History and Peculiarities.

  I wasn’t bragging, mind you – merely stating the obvious: I can afford to retire whenever I choose. In fact, I was mere weeks from doing just that when the Babester begged me to put off the day when we’d have the inn and children all to ourselves again. ‘Babester’ is what I sometimes call my handsome hunk of a husband. Those occasions are more frequent now that I’ve at last managed to snip the apron strings of steel that wired him to his mama. And to think that all it finally took was bringing his older sister to town and suggesting to his mother that she might prefer to live with her daughter rather than with me.

  Anyway, we had just started getting dressed one morning – the Babester in blue jeans and a denim shirt, and me in a fake Amish outfit to go with my fake Amish accent, suitable for greeting new guests – when he casually brought up the issue. At first, his request went flying over my head, despite me being five feet, ten inches tall.

  ‘Hon,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind working just an extra week or two, my cousin Miriam Blumfield texted and said that she wants to stay with us until the Billy Goat Gruff Festival.’

  ‘What? She’s coming all the way from Australia for some silly parade?’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Gabe said, an edge creeping into his voice with every word, ‘you’re the one who thought up this silly parade. Ma can’t help it that she was elected Citizen of the Year and gets to be pulled across the bridge in the goat cart.’

  ‘When does your cousin plan to arrive?’

  ‘Um – well, today.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Calm down, Mags. You’ll hardly know she’s here. She’ll be so busy hanging out with Ma and me, you’ll barely get a chance to greet her.’

  ‘I can’t believe this! You having the chutzpah to foist your cousin on me at the last minute, and after what your mother did to ruin our town’s annual fiesta.’

  ‘What did Ma do?’

  ‘Your mother stole that election,’ I said, ‘and you know that. Everyone in the village of Hernia knows that.’

  I didn’t need to look at my husband to know that he was glaring at me. When Gabe glares, his dark brown eyes function like a heat lamp.

  ‘You just don’t like my mother,’ he said. ‘You’ve always hated her, and without cause. What you refuse to see is that she is a warm and caring woman, who has made countless friends since moving here.’

  Ida Rosen warm and caring? That was akin to describing a boa constrictor as a creature fond of giving hugs. Gabe was wrong, I didn’t dislike his mother; I hated her. Yes, I know, as a Christian, I am supposed to love her, and believe me, I have tried. And tried. But that woman is impossible to love. I do know that is what the Good Lord expects me to do, but please bear in mind that neither Jesus nor the Apostle Paul had mothers-in-law. I’m just saying.

  I struggled to say something that was at least not terribly offensive. ‘But why does your cousin have to stay with us? Your sister’s house has plenty of room, and that’s where your mother lives, for crying out loud.’

  ‘Mags, it only makes sense that she should stay here. We own an inn, for crying out loud.’

  Nobody likes to be mocked, least of all me. But I was proud of Gabe for keeping business and family concerns separated. Not too long ago, he never would have even considered steering a cousin to my inn.

  ‘How much of a family discount should we offer her?’ I asked agreeably.

  ‘What? You can’t be serious, Mags! Miriam’s my cousin. We grew up together. We’re not going to charge her a single penny.’

  I swallowed hard, for I was already beginning to drown in regret for yet unspoken words. ‘Um … OK. But the Billy Goat Gruff Festival and the parade are a full week away. Why does she have to stay here the entire time? You have heard that saying about company and fish both beginning to smell after three days, haven’t you?’

  Gabe shot me his wounded, little boy look. Despite the fact that my husband is in his early fifties, his dark, soulful eyes, rimmed by long black lashes, are easily turned into powerful, guilt-inducing weapons.

  ‘Mags, try to keep in mind that the ways of the world are a little more complex than they are here in bucolic Hernia, Pennsylvania. Miriam said that in order to get the best ticket price, she had to book it as part of a tour.’ He chuckled. ‘She’ll be ditching the tour group as soon as she lands stateside, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. Who was I to judge this unscrupulous cousin of my husband?

  ‘Besides, this will give Miriam and me a chance to get reacquainted. As adults. We used to fight all the time when we were kids.’

  ‘That’s nice, dear,’ I said as I pulled heavy cotton tights up and over the bottom half of my sturdy Christian underwear.

  ‘I’m sure I’ve mentioned that she’s my only living relative on Ma’s side of the family, but that the two of them haven’t spoken for thirty-five years, when
she was only twenty-one. That’s when I last saw her.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ I said, as I struggled into the top half of my sturdy Christian underwear. The Babester refers to this piece as my ‘over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder’. Trust me, that’s wishful thinking on his part. Either that, or my dear husband has periodic flashbacks to a past life wherein he lived as an ordinary citizen of Lilliput.

  ‘Of course, you remember why Cousin Miriam and Ma parted ways, don’t you?’

  ‘Unh-huh, but why don’t you refresh my memory, dear.’ My atrophying brain didn’t actually need any refreshing. His beloved ‘Ma’ was the reason.

  Miriam and her parents had decided to take one last family trip over the Christmas break of Miriam’s senior year of college. They chose scuba diving on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Tragically, on the last day of their vacation, Miriam’s parents never resurfaced, and their bodies were never recovered.

  Miriam refused to give up on searching for her lost parents and is said to have spent an enormous portion of her inheritance chasing down every rumour of people, alive or dead, who were said to have shown up on remote strands of coral, or islets that were hitherto uninhabited by humans. Meanwhile, Ida Rosen, her deceased mother’s sister, pleaded with the young woman to return to America to finish the school year and graduate with her class. Miriam was due to enter Harvard Medical School in the fall along with her cousin Gabriel Rosen (even then known as the Babester).

  But Miriam would not listen to her aunt. In fact, she eventually grew so annoyed with Ida’s incessant nagging, that she gave her aunt a sexual directive that was anatomically impossible. Ida never contacted her again.

  While Gabe had been ‘refreshing’ me on his version of why poor Miriam had turned on her only remaining maternal relative, I had quietly continued to dress. Now, looking in my mirror (a luxury that true Amish don’t have) I saw a reasonable facsimile of one of our local Amish women. Any minute the doorbell would ring, and our first guest would arrive, and their experience would start off in high gear.