by Tamar Myers
She swung the door open wide. “I’m having myself a little nightcap. Would you care to join me?”
Who knew Belinda was a tippler? “What’s in it?”
“An old nightcap. Pure cotton, of course. I cut it up into tiny pieces, simmered it for six hours, and then ran it through my food processor three times. Then I added a little hot mdk, some artificial sweetener, and a dollop of vanilla extract. You can’t even tell it used to be a nightcap. But it’s got a lot of fiber in it, and you’ll be regular again first thing in the morning.”
“Sounds fascinating, but I think I’ll pass. Is Ed Gingerich here?”
“Actually, he’s out back chopping firewood. You can go through the house if you want or around the side.”
“Thanks. I’ll just go around.” I took three steps and turned. “Oh, one more thing. I’d go easy on the vanilla extract, or you might wake up tomorrow with a killer headache.”
“If I do, I’ll just have a little hair of the dog that bit me.” I shuddered knowing that Belinda had indeed once clipped a poodle that bit her. “Well, toodle-loo, dear,” I said cheerily and without further ado trotted around back to find Ed.
One has to admire the residual strength of elderly farmers. I found Ed swinging that ax with the oomph of two Gabes and the precision of a plastic surgeon. I watched silently for a moment, gratified to see that a life of discipline and hard work paid dividends other than basal cell carcinoma.
When he paused to rest, I purposely stepped on a twig so as not to startle him. “Ed,” I called softly.
He turned. “Magdalena!”
“As big as life and twice as ugly.”
“My wife—may she rest in peace—used to say that. Only in her case it was true.”
“That’s an awful thing to say.”
“Fiona wouldn’t have minded a bit. That woman had a quick wit and a self-deprecating sense of humor.” He sighed. “It’s hard to find that in a woman these days.”
I nodded sympathetically. I certainly didn’t have a funny bone in my body. In fact, the rather odd shape of my elbows confirms that.
“Ed, dear, I checked under the braided rug in my parlor, and there wasn’t anything there.”
He rubbed his chin with a calloused hand. “That’s odd. Do you think someone might have taken it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“That maybe you forgot. I do that all the time, by the way. I intend to do something and somehow skip ahead in my mind and think I’ve already done it.”
“I know what you mean, although I can picture myself lifting up a corner of that rug and tucking the envelope under. Braided from lots of scraps, but predominantly green and blue, right?”
“Correct. Listen, Ed, be a dear, will you, and call your bank in the morning. See if the check has been cashed.”
“Good idea. Thanks for letting me know.”
“No problemo.” I smiled broadly. “Oh, by the way, I called George Sand, of Sand, Hammerhead, and White. I gave him your name by way of introduction. I told him I was in need of a good attorney—you know, on a retainer, just in case one of my guests ever decides to sue me. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Somehow I didn’t think you would. The call was, of course, a waste of my time. He said he’s too busy representing Charlie the Tuna to take on a new client.”
Ed tossed the ax toward the woodpile. It landed in a pile of leaves. “Like I said, they’re the best. I consider myself really lucky to have gotten in with them when I did.”
“You can say that again. After Charlie, they’ll be handling a case for the Little Mermaid, and then Neptune—”
“Okay, so I never filed a suit with them. What does that prove?”
“For one thing, you don’t know anything about sharks. And for another, it confirms that you’re a liar.”
He had the nerve to look me straight in the eye. What’s more, he had the gall to hot say anything further. Believe me, there is nothing quite so defeating as silence. It was time for me to go fishing, and I knew just the bait.
I took a deep breath before casting out my line. “Why Felicia and not Vinny?”
“What did you say?”
“A bullet can kill a man just as easy as it can a woman.”
“Yes, but it was Felicia who refused—” His jaws snapped shut, but the bait was already headed for his gullet.
I took a step back. “Refused what? She seemed like such a sweet girl.” Trust me, the Good Lord has a special category for lies that protect the common good—at least I hope so.
“Sweet? The little witch wouldn’t let me out of the deal. Said ‘over my dead body,’ as a matter of fact. Vinny I could talk to, but not her.”
“It wouldn’t have done you any good, Ed. Even if you’d managed to get your farm back, your reputation is shot.”
“That’s what you think. Not everyone is as unforgiving as you. I was duped, that’s what they’re saying. Or have you been too busy talking to listen? No, what they won’t forgive—if they ever find out—is that I own a third of Grape Expectations.”
My jaw dropped, and I had to waste precious seconds picking it up. “You what?”
“You’re out of farming, Magdalena. You’ve forgotten how dicey it is making a living in this business. Too little rain, too much rain, early frost—there is nothing you can count on. And those government subsidies that everyone thinks we get somehow end up in the hands of the big corporate farms. To make a long story short, I’ve been operating in the red for the last ten years. Heck, I haven’t bought a new pair of shoes in three years.”
“Spare me your sob story and get back to you owning a third of Grape Expectations.”
“It was Felicia’s idea: my land in exchange for my debts being paid off and one third of Grape Expectations. Anyway, she had what she thought was a brilliant marketing plan, combining wine tasting with the Plain People experience. Snobby yuppie gawkers is how she characterized our future customers. People who wanted to combine pretension with cultural awareness. I was to provide the latter. You see, next door to the wine-tasting room we’d have a mock-up of an Amish home with nubile young women dressed in traditional garb selling cheeses, quilts, and homemade furniture. There’d even be a so-called Amish wing of the lodge-Face it, Magdalena, your PennDutch Inn was about to become redundant.”
“Why, I never!”
“But I’m not all bad, you know. I thought about it—the Amish gimmick part—and decided it wasn’t right Not in conjunction with a winery, for heaven’s sake. So I asked them to buy me out, and when they refused—it was mostly Felicia—I told them they could just have my shares.”
“Like Judas trying to return his blood money.”
“Exactly— Hey, I don’t like that remark. Anyway, they wouldn’t take my shares. They said a deal is a deal, and unless I cooperated, they would expose me to the community and say it was all my idea. When I couldn’t think of any other way to stop Grape Expectations—”
“Without more bad press, you mean.”
“I did what I could to save the Amish in this community from commercial exploitation. And don’t jump to conclusions, Magdalena, because I really didn’t intend to kill Felicia Bacchustelli. I only meant to scare her. I used to do a lot of hunting when I was younger, and I was always a pretty good shot. But I miscalculated this time—so you see, it was an accident.”
I was appalled but not shocked by his state of denial. Unfortunately, I’ve been around murderers enough times to know that, for the most part, they feel that they can justify their behavior. There aren’t a whole lot of folks who wake up in the morning, rub their hands together diabolically, and say, “I’m going to commit an evil act today.”
“Ed, did you practice knife-throwing as well?”
“Pardon me?”
“There’s not a whole lot of room in Agnes’s kitchen to toss a knife without hitting her. Are you still going to try to blame that on an
accident?”
He stared at me, pulling the silent treatment again.
“I know it was you, Ed. You may as well come clean.”
“For your information, Magdalena—not that you’ll believe me—my intention was just to sound her out. To learn what she did or didn’t know. Well, she knew too much. In fact, that busybody was on the phone when I got there.”
“Talking to me, in fact.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Magdalena. I had to silence her, but I’d left my gun in the pickup. The knife was hers.”
“So it was her fault you stabbed her?”
“You talk too much, Magdalena.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Chopping wood is a good way to clear your head. I came out here to think, to figure out what to do next, and then you show up. And you don’t stop talking. You’re making me very nervous, so I’m saying things I don’t mean to say. This is your fault, Magdalena.”
“Give it up, Ed. Turn yourself in. You’re only going to dig your hole deeper.”
I saw Ed pick up a heavy stick of firewood. I even saw him pull back his arm. I did not, however, see him throw it.
38
I woke up with a headache the size of Montana, while my body felt like it was lying under the state of Texas. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was at the bottom of a woodpile, and that said pile was in a pickup truck and moving along the highway at considerable speed.
It was also extremely difficult to breathe, what with my face pressed into the bed liner and the weight of a maple tree compressing my lungs. I did not cry out, if only because it took too much energy. It was also futile. But the worst aspect of this horrible situation was that I soon found that I could not move. My arms, as well as my legs, were restrained—not by ropes or handcuffs but by the sheer weight of the wood.
I was raised on Bible stories in which the protagonists prayed for help and, invariably, their prayers were answered. Even some of my own prayers have been answered. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who’ve prayed to be delivered from one problem or another, but whose prayers have appeared to go unanswered—at least in this life. And while I’m on the subject of prayer, let me make it perfectly clear that fervor and a positive outcome do not necessarily go hand in hand. Every now and then I’ll read the testimony of a plane crash survivor who insists that the Good Lord saved him, or her, because they prayed “real hard,” totally ignoring the fact that a hundred other passengers died. Quite likely there were some real hard prayers among the doomed as well.
I’m pretty sure, however, that it doesn’t hurt to pray, and stuck under a cord of wood as I was, there was nothing else I could do. So I prayed, and prayed, and prayed, all the way to, and across, the Maryland border.
Please don’t get me wrong; there might be nothing wrong with some parts of Maryland and even a few of those Marylanders, but the word in Hernia is that it is a wild and desolate place populated by a rough-and-tumble bunch. Forsooth, I could smell the difference as we crossed that imaginary line. You can be sure that, not having brought any provisions with me, I became even more upset.
After about an hour of driving on paved roads—the pavement came as quite a surprise, mind you—Ed turned off on a dirt road. Whatever discomfort I was feeling up until that point was, by comparison, now trivial. The road was like an old-fashioned washboard punctuated by potholes dug by Paul Bunyan. I would have bounced right out of that truck had it not been for all that wood on top of me. The last pothole I remember was so deep that for a few seconds I thought sure I heard the dulcet sounds of Chinese being spoken. Before I could call upon my new Asian friends for assistance, we bounced out of the hole. So high did we bounce that some of the wood actually spilled over the sides of the truck bed. It wasn’t much, I’ll be honest about that, but enough to make the entire pile shift. The next thing I knew I was fighting and clawing my way to the top with all the ferocity and strength of a grizzly bear, thanks to the miracle of adrenaline.
Then I was out! There was no time to assess or attend to my multiple wounds and abrasions. Throwing myself on the mercy of God, His angels, and whatever lay at the side of the road, I leaped over the nearest railing.
You can imagine my relief when my senses reported that I had landed in a thicket of some sort and not on a rock or at the bottom of one of those infamous Maryland abysses. The bushes were actually rather soft, and cradled as I was in their broken stems, I thought it wise to rest a minute before continuing with my escape. What I didn’t count on was the fact that adrenaline rushes are often followed by an intense need to sleep.
The next thing I knew it was morning and I was being prodded by a walking stick. I looked up to see two pairs of human eyes, one obviously rather curious, the other strangely blank. They belonged to a man and a woman, respectively.
“What is it?” the owner of the blank eyes asked.
“A woman in a bush,” her male companion said. “What’s she doing in a bush?”
“I was trying to catch birds,” I said. “There were two in here just a minute ago.”
“Huh?”
“My wife doesn’t understand humor,” the man said. “She used to work for Kirkus.”
I struggled free from the bush’s scratchy embrace. I’d never felt so stiff and bruised in all my bom days. At least I was alive and someplace where English was spoken. “Where am I?”
“Goiter, Maryland.”
“Excuse me?”
“Go ahead, make fun of the name,” the woman said. “Everyone does. At least we don’t sleep in bushes.”
“Where are you from?” the man asked.
“Hernia, Pennsylvania.”
He chuckled. “Good one.”
“I don’t get it,” his wife said.
I forced a smile. “I really am from a town named Hernia, Pennsylvania. You see, I jumped off a truck last night, having just clawed my way through a load of wood—that’s why I was asleep in the bush. Anyway, I’d been taken prisoner by an old Mennonite man who’d killed two women, all because he was greedy. You haven’t seen a strange pickup truck today, have you?”
“No, ma’am. But some fool kept driving back and forth along this road all night. I couldn’t sleep a wink.”
I looked around for the first time. There were about a dozen houses—cabins, really—but no vehicles in sight.
For the first time, I was aware that my purse, which contained my cell phone, was missing. “I need to use a telephone,” I said.
“Sure thing,” Mr. Merry Eyes said. “I think the Bradleys have it.”
“It’s the Jamesons this week,” Mrs. Crabby Face said. “You mean there’s only one phone in this place, and you’re not even sure who has it?”
“We’re on a religious retreat,” Merry Eyes said. “We signed an agreement not to smuggle any phones in. No TVs either. Nothing but peace and quiet. We’re not even allowed to bring our cars in. The organization that runs this place drives us in along with two weeks’ worth of groceries. So you see, there are no excuses not to think, pray, and join in fellowship. And hopefully draw closer to the Lord.”
I smoothed my clothes and straightened my prayer cap, all the while making pleasant conversation. “The no-TV rule I can see, but no phone—why, that’s just plain cruel.”
“I take it you’re a gossip,” Crabby Face said.
“Why, I never!”
“We are allowed walks,” Merry Eyes said. “I find that nature nourishes my soul. My wife here, being a professional writer, finds that it stimulates her imagination.”
I favored Crabby Face with a Christian smile. “My fiance writes mysteries—at least he tries to. He’s really pretty bad. What is it you write?”
“Nonfiction.”
“That’s my kind of writing. If you ask me, anyone can make a story up. Except maybe for Gabe. But writing something real—now, that takes talent.”
“Thank you,” Crabby Face said, looking not quite as crabby. “After I stopped working at Kirkus,
I did a brief stint at PW, and then finally found the strength to do my own writing. Do you mind if I toot my own horn?”
“Toot away!” I cried gaily.
“Today I’m considered the number one copywriter for colonic cleansers in the country.”
“For whatsis?”
“She writes instructions for enemas,” Merry Eyes said. “She’s working on one now called the Big Bang.”
“How utterly fascinating.” I rolled my eyes behind the privacy of my lids and thought desperately how to change the subject. “So, dear,” I said to Merry Eyes, “what is it you do for a living—besides think, pray, and fellowship?”
He laughed. “I’m a Mennonite minister.”
“Get out of town!”
“We did. We’re here on retreat. Although actually, I am searching for a new post. The church I currently serve is looking for a younger man or woman as a draw for the youth of the community. I guess I’m just an old fossil.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-four.”
I gasped in jest. “Ancient beyond description. Say, Reverend, what is your position on intermarriage?”
“I’ve nothing against it. God sees beyond skin color. We are all equal in His eyes.”
“Let me make myself clear. I’m not talking about interracial marriage, I’m talking about a Christian marrying a Jew.”
“Is this a hypothetical case?”
“Let’s pretend that it is.”
“Well, I require all couples to attend at least six premarital counseling sessions. I make them examine everything from finances to child-rearing. If I am convinced that they have thought things through carefully, with eyes as open as possible, I agree to marry them. So far, everyone I’ve married has been a professing Christian, but I see no problem with marrying a Christian and a Jew. The first Christians all had Jewish weddings.”
“You’re hired!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“At double your previous salary—whatever that was.”
“Miss—uh—”
“Yoder. I’m on the search committee for Beechy Grove Mennonite Church in Hernia, Pennsylvania.”