by Tamar Myers
That was an outrageous lie. The only food-related death at my inn was caused by a vengeful guest, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Freni.
I looked slowly around the room, glaring at each eavesdropper in turn. “That’s slander, Melvin, and you know it. You take that back, or I’m going straight to your mama and telling her what you did in the seventh grade.”
Melvin’s left eye locked on me, his right swiveled in Susannah’s direction. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, wouldn’t I?” The truth is, I had nothing to tell—nothing new, at any rate—but Melvin had been a real stinker as a kid. There were undoubtedly more secrets in his past than there were in the Clinton White House.
“Okay, so maybe Freni didn’t intentionally poison Mr. Anderson, but he ate something that nearly put him in a coma. We’ll find out just what that is when the lab tests come back.”
“I might know the answer to that now,” Susannah said.
“You do, Sugar Dumpling?”
“Yeah, Lamb Pie, but you might get mad.”
Melvin’s left focused on his precious pastry. “No, I won’t, Sugar Dumpling.”
“You sure, Lamb Pie?”
I wanted to retch. I never called Aaron Pooky Bear in public. Terms of endearment, like hand-holding and osculation, are strictly private things.
“Positive, Sugar—”
“Out with it,” I snapped. “You’re making me hungry, and the hospital cafeteria doesn’t open for another hour.”
“Well,” Susannah said, glancing nervously at me, “it wasn’t really a date, you see. He just asked me to show him around, so we went for a ride.”
“Who are you talking about?” Lamb Pie asked.
“Mr. Anderson, of course.”
“You went out on a date with someone else? I mean, someone here in Hernia?”
Funny, but Melvin either doesn’t stop to think what his Sugar Dumpling might be up to during her protracted absences, or else it’s only local dates with other men to which he objects.
“I said it wasn’t a date, Lamb Pie. We just drove up to Stucky Ridge to see the sunset. And then we took in a movie.”
Melvin’s crustaceous countenance crumbled. I hate to admit it, but I didn’t blame the poor guy. Stucky Ridge may be the highest point around, but it is notorious as Hernia’s parking spot, and by that I don’t mean it’s a good place to leave an unattended car. Things go on up there that would make the Whore of Babylon blush.
“Stucky Ridge?”
“Don’t be silly, Lamb Pie, we didn’t do anything.” It was time to hurry things along, and maybe cut off a tiff at the pass.
“I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Freni.”
Susannah turned gratefully to me. “Well, we missed dinner, see. And the popcorn at the movie was stale, so by the time we got back, we were starved.”
“You must be on time, to dine,” I said, quoting a sign I keep posted in the dining room. “It serves you right.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t Jimmy’s fault he didn’t know the rules.”
“Jimmy?” Melvin croaked.
Susannah tapped a long, narrow foot. “Well, nobody calls him James except his business associates. So, do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”
“Hit it, Paul!” I brayed.
“So, anyway, when we got back I suggested we raid the fridge.” She looked at me long enough to roll her eyes. “I know, I know, it’s supposed to be off limits to anyone but you and Freni.”
“Then you deserved to eat what you did. What was it, something in an unmarked jar? Because if it was, it may be older than some of your boyfriends—present company excluded. You know how Freni is about throwing things out.”
Her foot tapped faster. When it starts to blur, stand back.
“It was bread pudding,” she said.
Chapter Seven
“Bread pudding? Why, that Freni! She told me that was all gone!”
“There was a whole pan of it. Still warm from the oven. Jimmy ate almost half.”
“Whipped cream?”
“No, no whipped cream. But Jimmy didn’t seem to mind.”
“You, of course, did.”
“You know how I feel about bread pudding.” She made a face that required more elasticity than a spandex bathing suit. “But the tuna casserole was delicious.”
“Blue and white Pyrex dish?”
She nodded.
“That wasn’t tuna casserole, dear. Freni’s son, John, has been working on a new starter mash for the piglets he’s weaning. That’s ground corn and sow’s milk. He made too much in that batch, and asked if I could keep some of the stuff at the inn overnight.” Susannah turned green around the gills, staggered, and sat heavily on a molded plastic chair.
Melvin was unmoved. “Jimmy? You’ve been seeing this Jimmy?”
My sister took a deep cleansing breath. Actually she took several. Weaning mash is a hard thing to purge from one’s system.
“You don’t own me, Lamb Pie. It’s not like we’re married yet.”
“We’re engaged, aren’t we, Sugar Dumpling?”
“I don’t have a ring yet.”
She had a good point. I know this is going to sound shallow, but never commit your body or your soul to a man unless you get a sizable rock first. Then make sure you take that rock to a competent jeweler A.S.A.P. Aaron bought the ring he gave me for $12.99 in a Philadelphia novelty shop. Had I known how much he valued me at the time, I would have been saved a lot of heartache.
“You’re damn right I don’t own you, you two-bit tramp,” Melvin snarled. “What’s more, I don’t want to marry you. The engagement is off.”
To his credit, Melvin had shown commendable restraint. Perhaps it was all the Yoders in the waiting room—the Good Lord knows we can be intimidating—but without another word, not even another snarl of derision, Melvin Stoltzfus turned and walked through the automatic doors of Bedford County Memorial Hospital. As the doors whooshed shut behind him, Susannah burst into tears.
I plunked my weary body down beside my sobbing sister. “Don’t worry, dear, your Lamb Chop will be back.”
“That’s Lamb Pie!” she wailed.
In a rare gesture of tenderness, I clasped her bony chest to mine. “Whatever you say, dear. My point is—”
My point, however, was drowned out by an ear-piercing squeal. I released Susannah just in time. A second later a black ball of fur burst from her blouse and streaked across the room.
“It’s a rat!” somebody shouted.
Before I could react, half the folks in the room were standing on their chairs. A few folks were standing in their wheelchairs.
“Shnookums!” Susannah screamed and took off after the miserable mutt, who was now headed past the reception desk and down Bedford Memorial’s main hall.
I joined her in pursuit of her pitiful pooch. Much to my surprise, it was actually rather fun. Chasing the hound from hell down a hospital hall is certainly more entertaining than listening to some famous guest yammering about his or her latest tax shelter, or examining Cher’s backside for cellulite (although, confidentially, this one was a close tie).
Of course there were one or two crotchety souls who were not amused by our antics. If pressed, I would accuse Nurse Dudley of being the most difficult. The surly woman has been a fixture at Bedford Memorial since Florence Nightingale died—give or take a few decades. She has, and I say this with all Christian charity, a heart of stone. I have seen sides of beef at the locker plant handled with more sensitivity than Nurse Dudley handles her patients.
What’s more, Nurse Dudley is curiously obsessed with cleansing the colons of the victims assigned to her ward. In all fairness, she’s very good at what she does. I was in the hospital once for reasons totally unrelated to my digestive tract and, quite against my will, Nurse Dudley gave me a thorough house-cleaning—so to speak. I left Bedford County Memorial as hollow as a piece of macaroni. We all have our callings, but leave it to an anal-retentive woman to
devote her life to giving enemas.
“This is a hospital!” Nurse Dudley roared as we ducked past her in mad pursuit of Shnookums.
“We know!” I shouted over my shoulder.
By then, Susannah’s bundle of joy had rounded the corner and was headed down another corridor. We might have caught the dinky dog had not Dr. Rosenkrantz rounded that very corner and blocked our way. And I mean that literally.
Dr. Rosenkrantz is an enormous man with a matching ego. While he prefers to see himself as God, I see him as the sun. There are always an intern or two, and a handful of orderlies, caught in Dr. Rosenkrantz’s orbit, and that day was no exception.
The bad news is that Susannah ran smack into young Dr. Balu Nagpur, an intern, toppling the rather slight man. The worse news is that it was Dr. Rosenkrantz’s prodigious paunch upon which I came to rest. Dr. Nagpur, who was not in any way hurt, had the grace to laugh it off. Dr. Rosenkrantz, who claimed a cracked coccyx, was not amused.
I tried to help him to his feet, but it took a pair of orbiting orderlies to do the job.
“Are you all right?” I asked kindly.
That’s when Dr. Rosenkrantz accused me of breaking his bottom. He also said a few things I cannot repeat and which, until my pseudo-marriage with Aaron, I never would have thought possible.
“Why, I never, in all my born days! You, sir, have a mouth like a hog wallow.” I said it to his back as he limped away, supported by several satellites.
“He is being irritable because he is being in pain,” Dr. Nagpur said gently.
“But that is no way to talk to a lady!”
Nurse Dudley had the temerity to grab me by the arm. “You’re not a lady. You’re a menace. I want you and your sister out of here this minute!”
“Get your filthy hands off me,” I snarled, “or it will be more than your backside that needs mending.” The earth shook as twenty generations of pacifists turned over in their graves.
Nurse Dudley released her grip. “Out!” she shrieked. “Get out this minute!”
“But we can’t leave until we find my baby,” Susannah wailed.
The kindly Dr. Nagpur put his hands together in a gesture of peace. “You are losing a baby in this hospital?”
“It’s not a baby,” Nurse Dudley panted, her rage escalating, “it’s a monkey.”
Dr. Nagpur’s eyes widened. “You are owning a pet monkey? Oh, how delightful! In India we are having many monkeys.”
“He’s not a monkey,” Susannah shrieked, “he’s a dog.”
Nurse Dudley recoiled in horror. “A dog! That’s even worse than a monkey!”
“He’s a seeing-eye dog,” I said quickly. “A very little seeing-eye dog, to be sure, but she’s had him ever since she was a child.”
Nurse Dudley pounced on Susannah. “I’ve seen you before, and you’re not blind.”
“It comes and goes,” Susannah said without missing a beat.
I gave Dr. Nagpur a discreet, but guiding kick. He grunted, and then nodded solemnly.
“Ah, it is true. This intermittent ocular interruptus is indeed a rare disease, but we are seeing more and more of it among white women over forty.”
“I’m thirty-three,” my ungrateful sister whined.
“Thirty-five, dear.”
“And she claims to have had it since she was a child,” Nurse Dudley huffed.
“Ah, that is true, and you both are being correct. It is particularly prevalent among women in their thirties, but we are seeing more of it in the women over forty, because there are more women in this category these days. Of course some women are not knowing they have this disease, but this is a very lucky woman who has been knowing it since she is a child.” He paused and scratched his head. “Am I making myself clear?”
“As clear as Freni’s ham and bean soup,” I said, and patted his arm gratefully. I faced Nurse Dudley. “The law says she is permitted to take her seeing-eye dog into public places, and this is a public hospital.”
“Seeing-eye dog, my ass,” Nurse Dudley hissed, but she made no attempt to stop us from searching further.
We found Shnookums whimpering in a hamper. Mother and child enjoyed a warm reunion, and then we hightailed it back to the inn. We returned not a minute too soon.
The first thing I noticed was that the mysterious Mr. Mitchell had returned. Both he and his rental car were in the driveway. The next thing I noticed is that, wherever he’d been, he’d left the twinkle behind.
“Ms. Yoder! Where the devil were you?”
Susannah breezed on past us.
“Me? Where were you?”
“I drove into Bedford to get in some jogging. You don’t have a gym.”
Nor would I ever have one. Folks who need to exercise are not doing a full day’s work.
“Did you consider milking the cows and sweeping the barn?” I asked, a bit miffed.
“No, but—”
“Or feeding the chickens and gathering eggs?”
“Chickens?”
“And even though I sold most of the farm after Papa died, there’s still three and a half acres of pasture you could have jogged in. There was no need to go all the way into Bedford.”
For some reason the twinkle returned. “You actually milk your own cows?”
“Not me, Freni’s husband, Mose, does the milking. You’re welcome to help him anytime you want. He does it twice a day. About six-thirty in the morning, and five in the afternoon.”
“I just might do that. But now I’d like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind?”
“About cows?”
His eyes danced. “No, they’re about my employee, James Anderson. I understand that he was rushed to the hospital this morning.”
I needed to go inside. A cold November wind was whipping around my stocking-clad legs. Just for the record I do not wear pants. Amish women always wear skirts, and even though I am a Mennonite, and somewhat more liberal, I refuse to wear trousers of any kind. You can blame it on Mama.
There was a time when I dearly wanted a pair of pale pink pedal pushers, but Mama said no. Pants were men’s clothes, she said, and cross-dressing was a sin. Then, less than ten years later, when Susannah wanted to wear blue jeans, not only did Mama change her mind, she changed her clothes. But that figures—Susannah had Mama wrapped around her little finger from the day she was born.
At any rate, I’ll never forget the day that Beechy Grove Mennonite Church held their annual covered-dish dinner up on Stucky Ridge. Mama and Susannah showed up in pants, and pranced around that picnic like a pathetic pair of pagans. You could be sure tongues wagged. When Mama cut her braids and started wearing lipstick, Amish and Mennonite tongues were a blur. I don’t mind telling you, the faster tongues wagged, the happier I became. Finally, it was Mama and Susannah who were committing some of the sins in our family, not just me.
Mama never came right out and said it, but I know it irked her that I never joined the pants parade. I’m sure it irks her still. And while my resistance to trousers may be partly out of spite, I do not, as Aaron insisted, have a lot of issues I need to work through.
But perhaps I’ve digressed enough. My point is, it was too cold to continue even a short conversation on the front porch.
“Come on inside. I could use a cup of hot chocolate about now.”
“With marshmallows?”
“Big ones. Not those microscopic ones that melt too soon.”
“Ah, a woman after my own heart.”
He followed me in, and after getting our cocoa, we settled ourselves into the most comfortable chairs in the parlor. When I inherited this place all of the furniture was wood. Hard, gleaming, much-polished wood. My forbears looked down their long noses at relaxation. Idle hands were the work of the devil, and busybodies did not need to be pampered with padding. Frankly I’m surprised that given her revolution, Mama hadn’t started on a softening binge. Undoubtedly she would have in time. Susannah couldn’t stand straight if you taped her to a railway tie.
“Now, tell me about Jim.”
“There’s not much to tell. My sister found him on the floor of his room, passed out. We called 911, and had him taken to the hospital. The doctor thinks it’s food poisoning.”
“I see.”
I swallowed too quickly, burning the back of my throat. “But it wasn’t anything he ate here, of course. You knew he was out most of last night, didn’t you?”
“With your sister, I take it.”
“How did you know that?”
“Jim has an eye for women, and your sister is very attractive.”
“She is?” Just between you and me, Susannah is the plainer of us. What I mean is, if you stood the two of us side by side—without all that makeup and gunk—and spotted me a few points for age, I’d be the more attractive sister. At least that’s what Aaron said when we were courting. Then again, the man didn’t tell me he had a wife stashed up in Minnesota.
He nodded, but didn’t seem inclined to elaborate.
It was just as well. I had some important business to broach, and flattery and money do not mix. Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible does not label money the root of all evil. It says that the love of money is the root of all evil. I, for one, do not love money; I merely enjoy its benefits. To put it simply, money has been good to me.
Flattery, on the other hand, got me into a bogus marriage that made me the laughingstock of the county. It almost cost me membership in my church. And Lord only knows how many times it’s gotten Susannah to do the horizontal hokeypokey, as she so crudely puts it.
“Well,” I said, after a decent interval, “I suppose you’ll be canceling the contest. That’s understandable, of course, but I’m not going to be able to give you a full refund. In fact, I can’t even give you a prorated refund, because you’ll be leaving me with empty rooms for the rest of the week. You see, I had to cancel some very important guests to squeeze you in. But—” I spread my hands magnanimously—“how does fifty percent sound?”
He shook his head.
“Look buster, I had Bill and Hillary coming, not to mention Roach Clip.”
“The Roach Clip?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“My secretary loves his music—to use the term loosely,” he said. “And you don’t need to bother with a refund, because I’m not going to cancel.”