by Tamar Myers
“Miss Yoder, it’s only you.”
“Yes, Ibrahim. But this time I’m big as life and twice as ugly.”
“You look the same as before.” He made no move to invite me inside.
“Who is it, Ibrahim?” The dulcet tones of Dr. Faya Rashid were comforting.
“It’s only Miss Yoder,” I said.
She appeared at the door, slipping beneath her husband’s arm. She was breathtakingly beautiful in a cornflower blue silk ensemble that complemented her olive skin. Her raven hair was swept off her neck, displaying to its full advantage a pair of diamond chandelier earrings. Never one to even contemplate a romantic liaison with someone of my own gender... well, never you mind.
“Come in, Miss Yoder,” she said.
Her husband stiffened. “But, Faya, we are eating dinner.”
“Where is your hospitality bone, Ibrahim? There is plenty of food.”
“Perhaps our guest,” he said, his words sagging with sarcasm, “has already eaten. This is late, even for us. And I don’t know if she cares for lamb. Most Americans don’t, you know.”
Faya grabbed my free hand. “Do you like lamb, Miss Yoder?”
“It’s not ba-a-ad.”
“You see, Ibrahim?” She pulled me inside. “Come, you must eat with us.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, peeling off my coat. “Excuse, please, while I make the place set.” She scurried off, her flowing silk ensemble following a nanosecond behind.
“What’s this all about?” Ibrahim growled when we were alone.
“I was hoping you’d tell me. My sources say that you paid a visit to Agnes Mishler’s house today.”
“I’m sorry—whom did you say?”
“Agnes Mishler, the town gossip. About this tall”—I gestured—“shaped like a five-hundred-pound bag of potatoes. I’m not being judgmental, you understand. I’m merely stating the facts.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the woman.”
I looked at him with cold beady eyes. It’s a look I’ve honed over the years by practicing daily in a mirror. Believe me, given my normally sunny disposition, it hasn’t been easy.
“They probably don’t serve lamb in the hoosegow.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“And thank goodness most prisons these days issue orange jumpsuits, or scrubs, instead of those horrible stripes. With your physique, I’m afraid you’d look like a lopsided barber pole. I mean that charitably, of course.”
He leaned so close I could smell cloves on his breath. “What’s with this prison nonsense?”
“It’s no nonsense, dear. The state pen is where you could end up if you obstruct this investigation. Your wife is so beautiful; a girlfriend named Mike would just not be the same.”
“Okay,” he growled, “I went to see Miss Mishler, but I didn’t harm a hair on her head. I just told her that I would appreciate it if she kept her darn mouth shut. Faya is having a hard enough time adjusting to life in America without the town gossip implicating us in a murder.”
Before I could growl back at Ibrahim, the lovely Faya swept back into the room. “Everything is ready. I shall spread the food now, okay?”
“Spread away,” I cried with forced gaiety. The truth is, however, that I believed Ibrahim. Call it instinct, if you will. I didn’t especially care for the man, but that was another issue altogether. What was called for now was an attitude adjustment on my part, and Riya’s spread might well be what the doctor ordered.
And quite the spread it was. There was the aforementioned lamb in a yogurt sauce; rice cooked with plump golden raisins; okra stewed with tomatoes; cucumber, tomato, and onion salad; hummus and freshly baked pita bread; and for dessert baklava so sweet it made my teeth ache just to look at it.
The sumptuous meal was followed by coffee served black in thimble-size cups. The scalding liquid was so thick it plugged the cavities created by the baklava. Fortunately, the concentrated caffeine packed quite a punch, revitalizing me. Three more cups and I was raring to go.
I have been called impulsive. It is one of the nicer things folks have said about me. It seems that I just can’t help jumping to conclusions and immediately acting on them. I can only conclude that I must be right most of the time, or I wouldn’t find this behavior beneficial. In the paraphrased words of my good pal Dr. Phil, it must be paying off.
At any rate, instead of heading back to the PennDutch Inn to interact with my guests, or back to the Babester’s house to react to my future mother-in-law, I rather stupidly got it into my head to pay a home visit to Hiram Stutzman. Perhaps the stupidest part was that I didn’t take the time to inform anyone of my intentions. If Hiram really was guilty of killing two women, I could be the charming third.
There appeared to be only one light on in the Stutzman home, emanating faintly through a back bedroom window. How horrible it must be to live by oneself in a home that had once been brimming with life. If I were Hiram, I would consider turning the house into a thriving bed and breakfast ... He better not dare! The nerve of that man.
The Stutzman house has a perfectly functioning doorbell, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, he had an ill-fitting storm door that, when rapped sharply with walnut-hard knuckles, made more noise than a horde of Hell’s Angels on muffler-deprived choppers. After several minutes of gratifying din, Hiram flipped on the porch light and peered through a front window. He had his hand over his lust-inducing eyes, presumably to help him see beyond the glare of the glass. I gave him a jaunty salute.
After a few seconds the front door jerked open, and then the storm door. “I know better than not to invite you in. I’m surprised there aren’t helicopters already circling overhead.”
I had to squeeze past him to gain entrance. “They’re waiting for my distress signal. Would you mind speaking closer to my purse?”
“As a matter of fact, I would. Magdalena, you’re wasting your time and mine.”
“Ah, but I’m wired by Levantine coffee—although it could have been merely Colombian—just prepared by a beautiful young woman from Lebanon. Have you ever had lamb cooked in yogurt?”
“Spill it, Magdalena. You didn’t come here to talk about food.”
“You’re quite right.” I looked around. The house looked remarkably clean for one run by a man living alone. Frankly, that was a bit worrisome. In my experience, it’s the neat freaks who are wound the tightest If a house doesn’t have at least one dust bunny hiding under the sofa, run for the hills. “My, what a pretty couch that is. Did it come in other color combinations?”
“Say what?”
I stooped and tapped on one of the wooden legs. “Maple?”
“Magdalena, what are you doing?”
I stooped farther and thanks to the protection offered by my sturdy Christian underwear was able to thrust my bony behind high in the air. If Hiram Stutzman thought I was trying to entice him, he had another guess coming. However, as I eventually discovered—once I got my patooty higher than my shoulders—there was no need to worry: a dust bunny the size of Wisconsin greeted me.
“Definitely not maple,” I said. It took me a full minute to straighten into an upright position. “I’m here to ask about your whereabouts today.”
“Is that all? Why didn’t you just phone?”
“Phone, shmone. I much prefer to interface with people.” “You much prefer to interfere in people’s lives. If you must know, I drove into Bedford to buy some socks.”
“Socks?”
“Do you know a place in Hernia that sells socks?”
“Proceed.”
“I did a couple of other errands as well—filled up on gas, picked up a few groceries. On the way home I swung by Grape Expectations. I hadn’t been out there since Ed sold his farm. I wanted to see what there was—and yes, get a feel for where the murder had been.
“The first thing I saw was a sign advertising the winery that was to be built. Magdalena, I couldn’t help myself. I got out my hunting rifle and shot the dot ri
ght off the ‘I.’ Then I came back here, milked and fed the cows, finished cleaning up the dairy room—the health inspector is coming out tomorrow—and then finally sat down with a TV dinner in my bedroom. And since I know you’re going to ask, I do have a permit to carry my rifle in my pickup.” “Choose your words wisely,” the great Chinese sage Ming Dalina once said, “because you may have to eat them, and not all of them taste good.” Heeding Ming Dalina’s superb advice, I actually thought before I spoke. “Hiram, did you run into Agnes Mishler today?”
“Was she in Bedford? I didn’t know that was her. All I know is that a woman cut right in front of me, barely missing my car by an inch. So yes, I leaned on the horn. It was the driver beside me who flipped her the bird.”
“What bird?”
“Half of a victory sign.”
I made a victory sign and then folded my middle finger. “I don’t get it.”
“That’s to your credit, Magdalena.”
I taxed my brain and thought again. Either Hiram was diabolically clever, placing Agnes in Bedford rather than Hernia, or his response was one of confused innocence. But Agnes had distinctly said Hiram had gotten out of his car at the construction site, a gun in his hands—and then bang.
What might Agnes have said if that knife hadn’t stopped her? But that was it! It was a knife, not a bullet. Agnes Mishler might well have been telling me the story of Hiram shooting the sign when she was stabbed from behind. As for the loud noise, could that possibly have been her hitting the floor?
When all was said and done, what really happened was something only the killer knew, and even then it was quite possible he—or she—hadn’t been in the room long enough to hear Agnes’s prelude. The important question for me was: did I believe Hiram Stutzman? Again, it was time to defer to the wisdom of the great Ming Dalina. “Trust your gut feeling,” she is purported to have said, “especially if you have just eaten at a questionable restaurant.”
Call me a fool, or a sucker for Hiram’s hangdog expression, but what I now felt in my gut was that he was incapable of murder. A lifelong Mennonite, Hiram was not raised in an eye-for-an-eye culture. The death penalty, whether right or wrong, was an anathema to him. It was clear to everyone who knew him—except suspicious folks like me—that Hiram had externalized the deaths of his family. Yes, he was a broken, disturbed man. He was not, however, a walking time bomb like I’d imagined earlier.
“Hiram, when you stopped to shoot at the Grape Expectations sign, did you not notice anyone else around?”
“There was no one else around.”
“Actually, there was. Agnes Mishler was there to release the soul of Mrs. Bacchustelli.”
“What?”
“My sentiments exactly. Apparently, Agnes was a pseudo-Buddhist—or something like that. Anyway, she called me to say she saw you get out of your pickup with your gun.”
“And then what?”
“That’s it. Those were the last words she said.”
“Did you call her back?”
“Yes, but I got a busy signal. As it turns out, she’s dead.” The shock on his face wasn’t just my imagination. It was the same look Mama had on her face when Cora Beth Nuenswander stood up in church and started speaking in tongues. We Mennonites don’t go in for that practice by the way, unless we’re talking to foreigners. No, what shocked Mama—as well as the older half of the congregation—is that Cora Beth was speaking in Pennsylvania Dutch, a language she hadn’t bothered to learn from her parents, and what she was saying was abominably filthy. At any rate, Mama’s look had been one of utter disbelief, as was Hiram’s.
“What do you mean, dead?”
“How many meanings are there? She was dead—like a dead flower, a dead animal, a dead person.”
“Did she have a heart attack?”
I had one more test for him. “Yes.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Carrying around all that weight had to be hard on her heart.”
I nodded and then ambushed him with my next question. “So, whose knife was it?”
“What? Magdalena, you may not know this, but over the years I’ve come to your defense when people have said you’re crazy.”
“They what?”
“Some people have even given you a nickname.”
“The great Ming Dalina?”
“No, but that’s close. Magnuteia. That’s what they call you.”
“Who? When? How dare they?”
“And now that you’re engaged to this Jewish fellow from New York, they’ve come up with a new name—Bonkers for Yonkers.”
“He’s not from Yonkers; he’s from Manhattan!”
“Magdalena, take it from someone who has been there: a good therapist can do wonders.”
“Why, I never,” I said, and without uttering a word of farewell, stormed out of the house.
The nerve of that man! Who was he to talk? It was him the populace feared—him, and Wanda Hemphopple’s tower of doom. And who else had the nerve to call me psychologically challenged? Not Agnes Mishler, that’s for sure. And not her naughty nude uncles. If the good citizens of Hernia wanted to see walking, talking nut cases, they best hightail their highfalutin hinnies down to Charleston, South Carolina. Trust me, I’ve been there. But at least those folks have the good manners to call their whackos eccentric—not hurtful things like Magnuttia.
Tires squealed and gravel pinged as I barreled out of Hiram’s driveway. Once on the highway I pressed the pedal to the metal, and by the time I reached Dead Man’s Curve I was traveling at a speed appropriate only for the salt flats of Utah. Heaven help the pair of eyes I saw staring at me from the middle of the road. Heaven help me.
37
These were not cat eyes, nor did they belong to a wild animal. They were human eyes, about three feet above the highway, and they belonged to Hiram’s youngest child, Eliza. She was dressed in her Sunday best, holding her doll Amy with her left arm, and sucking on her right thumb. She was both substantial and ethereal; she looked three-dimensional, yet my headlights seemed to pass right through her.
I’d heard many tales of Eliza sightings since her tragic death at that very spot, but of course I hadn’t believed them. It’s not that I don’t believe in ghosts—it is not a commonly held Mennonite belief, mind you—because I have seen Granny Yoder’s ghost a number of times. But bearers of these tales have most often been teenagers given to wild imaginings, or adults whose grip on reality has been noticeably and publicly slipping.
There was no time to ponder what that said about me. All I could do was close my eyes before impact—it indeed, impact even applied here. Which it didn’t. I sailed right through the spectral being without feeling the slightest bump. When I glanced in the rearview mirror a second later, Eliza Stutzman was still there, but she had turned and was watching me drive away.
As I approached Slave Creek I slowed considerably, as the bridge across it has been needing repairs as of late. Along with the deceleration, my blood pressure came down considerably, and by the time I reached the PennDutch I was my same old self.
By now Freni had finished the evening’s dishes and gone home. My guests, tired from their excursion into Bedford, had already gone to their rooms, with the exception of the woman from West Virginia. She’d fallen asleep at the quilting stand I keep in the dining room. Taking great care not to wake her, I removed my comfortable clodhoppers and tiptoed into the parlor. There I proceeded to roll up the carpet and search for the envelope that Ed Gingerich had purportedly left for me.
It wasn’t there. Neither was it under the furniture. It was, of course, possible that one of the guests had discovered it and helped his, or her, self It was also possible that Alison—and I shuddered to think this—had stumbled across the check and not told me. It was, however, impossible for Freni to have found the money while cleaning and not to have shared her discovery with me. My cousin is so honest she once made her husband, Mose, hitch up the buggy and drive the twelve miles into Bedford so that she could return
an extra dollar she had received as change at Pat’s I.G.A.
At any rate, there were the two aforementioned possibilities, neither of which seemed as likely as the possibility that Ed Gingerich had been lying. If he wasn’t lying about leaving the money, he was at least lying about the amount. A sum that would have impressed me, like he claimed, would have sent a guest packing with glee or Alison into orbit on her way to a mall. And if Ed was lying about the money—well, you can see where I was going, can’t you? Right back to my car, which, thankfully, was still toasty warm inside.
I spent the drive to Belinda’s mulling over my various theories and their respective suspects. Of all of them, what made the most sense was the one I’d already formed about Ed. Here was a man who’d taken a bite out of the forbidden apple, regretted the consequences, and then in an attempt to undo what couldn’t be undone, had chopped down the apple tree and chucked it from the garden altogether. Too bad for him, some of the apples had been knocked loose and were rolling back in.
Yes, like Hiram, Ed had been born and raised a pacifist, but the mere fact that he had been greedy enough to sell his farm to grape growers meant that he was already outside the Mennonite mold. Ed, I concluded, might well be capable of murder.
Belinda answered the door in a pink chenille bathrobe and curlers in her hair. I couldn’t recall seeing curlers on anyone for the past twenty years, thank heavens, and recoded in surprise.
“You didn’t think it was naturally curly, did you, Magdalena?”
“Well, uh—aren’t they hard to sleep in?”
“They’re torture. But a little hardship is good for the soul, right?”
“Absolutely. I’ve got a hair shirt, size eight, you can borrow, but my bed of nails is already spoken for.”
“You’re teasing, aren’t you?”
“Possibly. May I come in?”
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?”