by Tamar Myers
“Did you get a good look at the driver?”
“Only a glimpse. He was wearing a hat-like a baseball cap. And he was real short. Or maybe he was slumping. So even if he’d been driving slowly, there wouldn’t have been anything to see.”
“What time was this? I need to know exactly.”
“Sometime between eleven thirty and twelve.”
“And then after you told the Chief what you saw, he told you about Elias?”
“Not right away. First he had a good cry in booth eight. Then I served him a piece of cinnamon apple pie à la mode, and then he told me about Mr. Whitmore. He said it would be on the news anyway the next day, so what was the point of holding back? Nice boy, that chief. If I was ten years younger-no, make that fifteen-”
“You’re married, Wanda, and Chris bats for a different team. Besides, aren’t you having an affair?”
“Oh, right, my affair with Mr. Sudoku. Unlike Miss Fecund at forty-eight, here, I’m already going through menopause, and I’m only forty-seven. A lot of nights I have trouble sleeping, so I sit up and amuse myself with Sudoku. I’ve gotten really hooked.”
“You’re seeing a Japanese gentleman?”
“Why, Magdalena, you sound almost jealous.”
“Curious, that’s all. Where did you meet this gentleman?”
Wanda and Agnes both laughed. I could tell that it was at my expense, so I decided to laugh along with them. In fact, I may have outdone them, because not only did I get several dogs to howl, but the Bontragers’ donkey began to bray.
“That ass has always had a thing for me,” I said.
“He’s probably smarter than you,” Wanda said. “Sudoku isn’t a person; it’s a type of puzzle. Sort of like a crossword, but with numbers.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I’ve seen those books for sale at Pat’s IGA. Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Ladies,” Agnes hissed, “let’s get back to Mr. Whitmore’s murder.”
“Indeed,” I said. “But frankly, Agnes, I fail to see why you called me over. I already knew that a steamroller was involved, and since Wanda couldn’t identify the driver of the flatbed…” I let my voice trail off.
“The driver was a woman,” Wanda snarled.
“Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere; my ellipse was eclipsed by an assertion! On what do you base that, Wanda?”
“Because what I didn’t tell you was that I barely made it to the garbage cans in time. There was a family of raccoons crossing the road, single file, just as that flatbed roared by. They were all in the opposite lane by then, except for the last little cub. Whoever was driving that flatbed swerved just the tiniest bit, to keep from hitting it. A woman would have done that.”
Agnes gasped. “Wanda, now I’m surprised. That’s very sexist of you. Are you saying a man would have hit the cub?”
“No, I’m only saying that a woman would not have hit it. We’re nurturers. Why, even Magdalena has a maternal side.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Do you really believe that a woman, on her way to squash a man with a steamroller, would swerve to avoid hitting a raccoon?”
“It was a baby. It was cute. And it’s called compartmentalization, Miss Smarty Pants. Besides, she screamed something out the window as well. It was a woman’s voice, so there!”
“Agnes,” I said, “aren’t there times when you just want to take Wanda and shake some sense into her?”
“Boy, I’ll say. Wanda, did you recognize the voice?”
“No. Don’t you think I would have told you that?”
And then just like that, I had all the pieces to the puzzle. “Ladies-and naked gents hovering in the distance-I must bid adieu, for duty calls.”
“What?” Wanda said. “You know I don’t speak Spanish.”
Despite her size, Agnes could move with lightning speed, and she managed to grab my arm before I could hoof it back to my car. “Not so fast, Magdalena. You’re on to something, and we demand to know to what.”
“Yeah,” Wanda said. “After what you put us through last time, we have a right to know.”
“More than that,” Agnes said, gripping my arm even tighter, “we have a right to come along.”
“And what exactly do you mean?” I said.
“We were your Ethel Mertzes in your last shenanigans: when you hoisted your mother-in-law onto a cow and sent it crashing off through the woods. You put our lives on the line that night-chasing down an armed couple-but I must say, it was the single most thrilling thing that ever happened to me.”
“Who is Ethel Mertz?” I asked, and quite reasonably, I may add. My parents, Old Order Mennonites both, never watched a single television program in their lives. I, however, have yielded to temptation and viewed a few of the older comedies, the one referenced among them. I must say, however, that the finest show ever produced was Green Acres.
“Uh, Magdalena,” Wanda grunted, “you’re helplessly conservative. There’s no sin in watching old TV shows such as I Love Lucy.”
“That wouldn’t be Lucifer, would it?”
“She’s trying to stall,” Agnes said. “If she can succeed in making you blow your stack, then maybe you won’t want to come with her.”
“Ha! In that case she’s out of luck. I bought that book The Impatient Person’s Guide to Meditation back when it made the New York Times bestseller list, and I read most of it. I can become very tranquil if I set my mind to it.”
“Then for the love of scrapple,” Agnes panted, “set your mind to it now.”
“Ohmmmmmmmm.”
Life’s many twists and turns are supposed to be what keeps it interesting, but a peaceful Wanda? Now, that takes the cake! This I had to see.
“Okay,” I said, “but I can’t guarantee your safety, and you have to do exactly as I order.”
“Listen here, Magdalena. I don’t take orders!”
“Yes, she does.” Agnes let go of my arm and enclosed Wanda in her bulk. “Say it again, Wanda. Ohmmmmmmmm.”
Wanda’s eyes narrowed but she complied, and so we three musketless dears set off to catch a killer.
Just as I thought, there was a cab with an attached flatbed trailer parked in the turnaround in front of Minerva J. Jay’s house. Not being the total fool that some folks think I am, as soon as I caught a glimpse of this, I backed up for a good quarter of a mile.
“What gives?” Wanda demanded. “Are you losing your nerve?”
“No, dear, although you seem to have lost your ohmniscience.”
“They were two-minute exercises, Magdalena, and there were only three in the book. It took us a lot longer than that to get all the way out here. Where are we, by the way?”
“Thousand Caves Retirement Village,” Agnes said. “I brought my uncles out here to look at plots. Minerva assured them that there would be a nudist section, but they chickened out. You see, Uncle Remus is afraid of gaping holes.”
“That’s nice, dear. Okay, everyone out.”
“Out?” They both sounded terrified.
“We can’t sneak up on them in a car, ladies, can we?”
“No,” Agnes said, “but we can call the sheriff.”
“We can tell him that there’s a flatbed truck out here, so what? You don’t see a steamroller, do you? We need to get close enough to get some hard evidence. Besides, you can’t get cell phone reception here; I’ve tried once before.”
“Do you have a gun?” Wanda said.
“No! I’m a proper Mennonite, for goodness’ sake, not a liberal one, like you.” Oops, perhaps I had gone too far. Wanda belongs to the First Mennonite Church, not Beechy Grove, and they are indeed a different breed, but they are still ostensibly pacifist.
“Magdalena has her keen mind,” Agnes said loyally.
“Ha,” Wanda snorted. “If she’s so smart, then why did she marry a bigamist?”
I took a deep breath and composed what I believed to be a beatific smile. “Wanda, dear, if you’re afraid, then by all means remain in the
car. Just don’t play the radio, because we can’t come back to a dead battery. If you get really bored, there’s last year’s Farmer’s Almanac under the passenger-side front seat. Be sure to lock the doors, of course, and whatever you do, don’t open the door if you hear something scraping against it. They say that the tourist from Harrisburg died of a heart attack, but what the paper didn’t mention was the hook that was found hanging from the door handle.” I flashed her my beatific smile again.
“Don’t be ridiculous; of course I’m coming. You’re going to need my brain to make yours a whole wit. But first, don’t you have to use the bushes?”
I glanced around. “For what?”
“To relieve yourself, dummy. Isn’t that what you were grimacing about?”
“Why, I never!”
“You do too; you always look constipated.”
“Why, so help me, Wanda, I’m going to huff, and then I’ll puff-”
“Stop it,” Agnes hissed. “Both of you. You’re getting louder by the second.” She paused just long enough to catch a breath. “Look! Over there to the left. Isn’t that smoke? And I hear something; something other than yinz excessive chatter. It sounds kind of like an engine. You don’t suppose she-or he-could have hidden the bulldozer underground, do you?”
“The smoke is coming out of a flat expanse of rock,” Wanda snapped. “You’re starting to sound as crazy as Magdalena.”
“Au contraire,” I cried. “Agnes, you’re on to something!”
32
Wanda was every bit as much afraid of gaping holes as was Agnes’s nude uncle, Uncle Remus. Although she’d lived her entire life within an easy drive of Thousand Caves Road, and the weird limestone formations, she’d never even been tempted to mosey on out and take a peek, not even during the height of the development scandal. Once, when Wanda was a junior in high school, her parents dragged her on a family vacation to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. A terrified Wanda took only a couple of steps outside the car, threw up, and then spent the rest of the day sobbing in the backseat.
A control freak with a phobia is not a pleasant creature. Although she refused, at first, to set foot off the road, neither would she consent to being left behind. Wanda mumbled and grumbled, and uttered some words that even a liberal Mennonite had no business knowing.
Meanwhile, Agnes moved like a hound to the scent. Of course the trail of a rumbling, smoke-belching steamroller is not exactly hard to follow, even if it has been dumped in a large sinkhole.
About ten yards from the cavernous opening, Wanda stopped abruptly. “I’m not going any farther.”
“Fine,” I said. “Just wait here.”
We were in an open area of flat, smooth limestone that crowned the rise of a low hill. The only trees were stunted pines that grew in places where, eons ago, eddies of water had carved out pockets, which were now filled with soil, but drought and infestation of foreign beetles had killed more than half of the pines, eventually turning them into bleached skeletons. With a sigh of relief Wanda sat shakily on one of these fallen trunks that had long since shed its bark.
Agnes, however, was as unstoppable as a bulldozer. Had I grabbed one of her pants legs (the poor misguided soul is a Methodist) and hung on tightly, I could have gotten a free ride. As it was, I had to trot to keep up, and I weigh a full one hundred pounds less than she does.
Still, the woman has to be admired. She didn’t stop until she was standing on the rim of the abyss, staring down into the blackness, from whence came the sound and the smell of a crashed bulldozer. But then, instead of recoiling due to a bout of dizziness (like any normal woman), Agnes got down on her knees and peered into Satan’s domain. Clearly, she was a woman possessed.
“Magdalena, come quick!”
“Don’t rush me; I’m coming as fast as I can.”
“But somebody’s down there.”
“What? Who?”
Agnes wouldn’t say another word until I dropped to all fours beside her. “Look, Magdalena; what do you see?”
“An upside-down bulldozer with smoke pouring out of the engine.”
“Not that, silly. There, to the left.”
“Oh that: that’s Frankie Schwartzentruber, our one female member of the Beechy Grove Mennonite Church Brotherhood.”
“You don’t seem surprised to see her!”
“I’m not; in fact, she’s why we came out here. I just didn’t expect to find her holed up in a-allow me to say it, please-a hole.”
“Wasn’t she the one who drove the bulldozer over that young, and extraordinarily handsome, Elias Whitmore?”
“Indeed.” I reared back just enough to cup my hands to my mouth. “Oh, Frankie! Frankie, dear.”
Although the roar of the bulldozer’s engine drowned any echo, I was nonetheless heard, and the murderess looked up for the first time. It was obvious from where we knelt that the sinkhole extended a couple of feet beneath the ground, at least on one side, but Frankie did not seem interested in hiding. Instead she waved her arms and jumped up and down.
“It looks like she’s glad to see us,” Agnes declared happily.
“Can you hear what she’s saying?”
Agnes cocked her head. “She’s saying ‘It will blow.’ ”
“Does a bulldozer have a whistle, Magdalena? I would have thought it had a horn.”
It took a few seconds for my thoughts to catch up with my cranium. “Oh, my stars,” I croaked. “She means the engine is going to explode; it must be leaking fuel.”
“In that case, Frankie should climb out of that hole.”
For a fraction of a millisecond I wanted to push Agnes into the hole for stating something so obvious. Instead, I took a deep breath and shouted down to Frankie.
“How can we help?”
“Don’t be a dolt, Magdalena; I need a rope.”
I gazed at the walls of the sinkhole. They were almost as smooth as the Babester’s chest that time he waxed it as a joke and got a terrible rash for the effort. There was one narrow ledge, a calcified swirl of limestone that began almost directly below us and followed the curve of the wall, widening as it descended, until it melded with the floor. An ancient whirlpool (not more than five thousand years old, of course) had carved this sinkhole and left an impression that looked for all the world like a giant scoop of soft-serve ice cream. Well, then again, we nursing mothers can never get too much to eat.
“Frankie,” I bellowed, “can you climb up on that shelf?”
“It’s too narrow! I keep falling off.”
“You need something to steady yourself with.”
“I need a ding-dang rope!”
“With language that blue, dear, you’ll not being having a white Christmas next year.”
“Magdalena, you’re the biggest boob to ever walk the earth. If you don’t shut up and get me out of here, we’re all going to blow.”
“Okay, but there’s no need to get nasty. Where can I find some rope? In your truck?”
“Like I said, you’re an idiot,” she screamed. “It’s going to blow any second. I need some rope now!”
“Let’s take off our clothes,” Agnes said calmly, “and tie them together in a knot chain. I saw that once in a movie.”
“Did it work?” I said.
“Yes, until one of the sleeves ripped, and the hero plunged to his death.”
“This is impossible, then. We’ll just have to wait until help comes.” I do have one foot in the twenty-first century; maybe one hand as well. I was wearing my cell phone in a flowered pouch dangling from my dress belt, and as I spoke I got it out and speed-dialed 911, even though I knew it was hopeless.
“I already tried that,” Agnes said. “You were right; there’s no service out here. This place is like the Twilight Zone.”
Meanwhile, Frankie’s cries for help were getting louder and more desperate. Something had to be done, even if it was drastic and full of risks.
“Oh, Lord,” I prayed aloud, “give me clarity of vision and the wi
sdom of Solomon.” I paused to tuck a wayward strand of hair back behind a clip. “If a clothes rope is the way to go-” The annoying strand slipped right out, forcing me to pause again.
“If you don’t quit fussing with your hair,” Agnes said, “any answer to your prayer will be a moot point.”
Hair! That was it! Does not the Lord work in mysterious ways?
“Agnes,” I cried, “how strong is human hair?”
“That depends on the human. There are many types, you know; straight, curly, fine, thick, black, blond-”
This was no time to update the encyclopedia. I raced back to Wanda. The restaurateur was lying in a heap, her face buried in her arms, and panting like a woman in the advanced stages of labor. Clearly she needed a project to take her mind off herself.
“Wanda, how long is your hair?”
“What?” she gasped.
“Your hair, dear. This is a matter of life and death. If you undid that beautiful mound, how long would your hair extend?”
She looked at me, color creeping back into her cheeks as her suspicions rose. “It’s twelve feet, three inches,” she hissed. “What about it?”
Agnes caught up with me. “How do you feel about saving somebody’s life?”
As Wanda’s head swiveled, her enormous bun teetered precariously. “Whose life? How?”
“Frankie Swartzentruber is down that sinkhole,” I said. “The only way for her to get out is to climb up a very narrow ledge with nothing to hold on to. We-she needs you to let down your long hair so that she can keep her balance.”
“Like Rapunzel,” Agnes said.
“What?” Wanda snapped. “You want her to climb up my hair?”
“Absolutely not, dear,” I said soothingly. “She merely needs to steady herself.”