Custard's Last Stand (An Amish Bed and Breakfast Mystery with Recipes Book 11)

by Tamar Myers

  “Take it easy, up there,” I hollered. “This is a genuine restoration of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse.”

  The noise continued. I threw on my modest terry robe, crammed my size elevens into pink bunny slippers, and thundered up my impossibly steep stairs. I do have an elevator, but it is for timid or incapacitated guests. It is certainly not for the impatient.

  At the top of the stairs I had to wait until my breathing slowed before I could hear the next thump. It was not forthcoming, but there was the sound of voices coming from room 5. It is my best room, and the one where the colonel was killed. There had been official police tape across the door the last time I saw it, and no one but Melvin and his sidekick Zelda, or I, had the right to be in there.

  I flew to the door and flung it open. Mr. Ivan Yetinsky and Miss Anne Thrope stood facing me, looking not the least bit surprised. In fact, they looked like the girl caught with her hand in the cookie jar, who knew her mama was coming but refused to drop the goodie and pretend she was innocent. She deserved that cookie, after all. If her mama hadn’t been so busy doting on the new baby, and fixed the little girl a proper supper—well, I digress. My point is that the guilty couple didn’t look that way.

  “This room is off-limits,” I roared.

  “We’re sorry; we didn’t know.” Ivan Yetinsky hung his massive head so low it was going to take a winch to get it into an upright position again.

  “How could you not know? There’s yellow tape on the door with black letters that quite clearly state this a crime scene, and you are not allowed to enter.”

  “Ha,” Miss Anne Thrope barked. “There isn’t any tape now.”

  “Of course there is.” I turned to double-check. Imagine my consternation when I discovered she was right. “Well, there was! What did you do with it?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Or him. One of you took it down.”

  She produced a smirk worthy of a twelve-year-old girl. “For your information, Miss Yoder, it was your police chief who took it down.”

  “Melvin Stoltzfus?”

  “He’s the one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. What do you take me for, an idiot?”

  For the second time that day my prayer for patience was answered. “Describe him, please,” I heard myself say.

  “Well, let’s see... looks like some kind of an insect. A giant cockroach, I’d say. Has these—”

  “That’s him,” I cried, “but he looks like a mantis, not a roach. Never mind that, though. He’s not working the case—I am.”

  She shrugged and muttered something that I couldn’t hear, but that I am sure was derogatory. Only a minute ago, I would have felt my blood pressure soar. However, now that she’d confirmed my belief that Melvin was indeed an arthropod, I was inclined to feel kindly toward her.

  “This matter of the tape aside, what were you two doing in this room?”

  Ivan, without the benefit of a mechanical device, raised his head to speak. “Miss Yoder, we have a confession to make. We came in here to—”

  “Make love,” Miss Thrope practically shouted.

  I reeled. “What did you say?”

  She grabbed the big galoot’s arm. “We’re married, Ivan and I. It was us that you heard. If we disturbed you, I’m sorry. We’ll try to keep the noise down.”

  I gave them the once-, twice-, and thrice-over. They were both fully clothed, and while Ivan was sweating profusely, neither of them appeared particularly rumpled. Although I would never share details of my personal life—i.e., my ill-fated marriage to the bigamist Aaron—I will say that our marital encounters at least produced a modicum of mess. Why, once even my bun came undone.

  “You—you don’t look like that’s what you’ve been doing,” I stammered. One would think that with feet as big as mine, thinking fast on them would be a breeze.

  “That’s because we like to jump around first. We pretend we’re bonobos.”

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “It’s like a chimpanzee, only slightly smaller. I saw it on the Nature Channel. It’s the most highly sexed primate there is. Members of the group settle all their conflicts that way.”

  Either Miss Thrope was telling the truth, or her brain and her tootsies had a far better connection than did mine. In any case, I didn’t like what I’d heard.

  “Nobody does the mattress mambo in this house unless they’re married.” The sentiment was mine, but the words came straight from my Presbyterian sister’s mouth. She’s a fallen Presbyterian, I might add, for whom the mambo—vertical or horizontal—is not a sin.

  Miss Thrope resurrected her smirk. “We’re not only lovers, but we’re married.”

  “Since when? The colonel said nothing about that.”

  “We’ve been keeping it a secret, haven’t we, Ivan?” The shaggy head swayed from side to side. I took that as a yes.

  “Why a secret, Miss Thrope? Or is your name per chance Yetinsky?”

  “It’s still Thrope,” the cunning cook claimed. “I have to keep it for professional reasons. Anyway, George—the colonel, I mean—had this thing for me. If Ivan and I wanted to keep our jobs, well—we didn’t dare tell him.”

  “Abraham pretended he wasn’t married to Sarah, dear. It caused a great deal of trouble for all concerned.”

  “Sorry about these friends of yours, Miss Yoder, but I can assure you that my marriage to Ivan has nothing to do with the colonel’s murder.”

  “Friends of mine? I was talking about Sarah and Abraham in the Bible, for pity’s sake!”

  A smirk can get only so wide before it bisects the head, threatening decapitation. Miss Thrope’s noggin was only millimeters away from falling on my hardwood floor.

  “I don’t read much,” she said, “except for cookbooks. I’m afraid I don’t have the time.”

  I took a deep breath. I’d really pushed the Good Lord on the patience bit.

  “Speaking of time, dear, it’s time you vamoosed. This is still a crime scene. As for what you claimed you were doing in here”—I shook a bony finger at each in turn— “even if you are married, I don’t want to hear a thing.” Perhaps I was being hypocritical. When Aaron called me a hoot that time, he didn’t mean I was funny; the Good Lord knows I don’t have a funny bone in my body. At any rate, Ivan seemed to regard my admonishment as a dismissal, and he virtually bolted from the room. The snippety Miss Thrope, on the other hand, sashayed past me like she had all the time in the world. Had I not been a good Christian, one with five hundred years of pacifist blood in my veins, I’d have planted one of my black brogans on her beckoning backside.

  Sleep, if it came that night, was fleeting, but I stayed in bed on principle. I got up with the first light and padded into the kitchen for a much-needed cup of tea, only to find the duplicitous duo in the kitchen eating. One might expect servants to be in the habit of rising before their masters, but this was ridiculous. If I was going to have a hot breakfast, I would have to drive the twelve miles into Bedford. Either that or have another go-around with Wanda Hemphopple at the Sausage Barn. I chose the drive.

  But first I had to feed the chickens. I was up with them, after all. Later on in the morning, Mose, Freni’s husband, would stop by to milk my two cows, Matilda and Betsey. I never keep the milk from these two because it is “raw,” but Mose takes it home with him, adds it to his daily output, and ships the shebang off to get pasteurized. Although it has been suggested that I get rid of my cows, which will soon be too old to milk, I hang on to them for sentimental reasons. Papa was a dairy farmer, and I have grown to love the smell of sun-dried manure. Besides, these buxom bovines provide extra cash from time to time. Some of my more adventurous guests—not the likes of the colonel and his crew—are happy to pay a premium for the privilege of tapping teats, or even mucking out the barn.

  As fond as I am of Betsey and Matilda, I enjoy my chickens even more. However, with the exception of Pertelote, my alpha hen, I wouldn’t say I love them.
These fowls have personalities just like people, but when they irritate me too much and put me in a foul mood, they’re likely to end up in a stewpot.

  It pleased me that morning to see that the giant cockerel Gabriel had given me appeared to be getting along well with his harem. In fact, when I entered the pen he was doing the mattress mambo with Mabel, one of my more promiscuous hens. While I do not permit such wanton behavior between my paying guests, I actually encourage it in my livestock. They’re real animals, after all, and the Good Lord has given them blanket compensation.

  After I’d fed the birds and given them fresh water—but not collected the eggs—I climbed into my Toyota Camry and buried the accelerator in the floor. I have been accused of having a lead foot, and I will not deny this, but I never drive so fast that I can’t enjoy the scenery.

  Ours is a beautiful part of the country that has always been, and I hope will always be, underappreciated. Our mountains may not qualify as such to folks hailing from the Rockies, but they are enough to impress visitors from Louisiana and Florida. To get to Bedford one must drive alongside Buffalo Mountain, which is a high, wooded ridge by any account. The road crosses Slave Creek just outside Hernia, and then follows it halfway to town. On the side opposite the creek and ridge are some of the tidiest farms you’ll ever set eyes on, most of them Amish.

  This is not a very wide valley and the farms back up to smaller mountains, the names of which do not appear on the map, but are known to the locals as Scotch Breath, Old Woman, Blue Ball, and my personal favorite, Cuckold’s Knob. It has been suggested that the names for these four landmarks were all drawn from a single historical incident, but I fail to see the connection. At any rate, just after Cuckold’s Knob one passes the church with thirty-two names, the Sausage Barn, and then bingo, one is on the turnpike, where the world is one’s oyster—if one is inclined to eat slimy things. Which I’m not. My destination was the new Waffle House. I’d eaten there before, and must confess a fondness for their scrambled eggs with cheese and buttered raisin toast. Throw in some bacon—not too crisp—and coffee strong enough to revive the dead, and the grub there is every bit as good as Wanda’s.

  But the Waffle House is small, and being a party of one, I was bound to find myself sitting at the counter, perhaps even jammed between two burly truck drivers. This called for a little planning. While a man dining alone is just that, a woman alone in a restaurant is to be either pitied or scorned. Although I prefer scorn to pity, I have discovered that a book or newspaper can help to insulate me from either reaction. In fact a very good book, say one by JoAnna Carl, Nancy Martin, or Edie Claire, is even better than the company of a man. One can’t blame a book for not holding up its half of the conversation, and I’ve never known one to belch.

  Alas, I’d forgotten to bring any reading material with me, so I had no choice but to duck into the Bedford Newsstand. I was hoping to find a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times still available; we in the smaller burgs are quite content to get our news a day or so late. But my search for the Times was aborted the moment I walked in the door. For a second or two I couldn’t believe my peepers.

  18

  There before me, like a nightmare in black and white, were at least a half dozen pictures of my mug. And I’m not talking about still lifes of my favorite coffee cup. These were photos of my face—which was understandably distorted in rage—and they were on the covers of the most insidious gossip rags. Some of the headlines read: BIGFOOT PREGNANT WITH FUTURE CONGRESSMAN’S BABY, MENNONITE MONSTER TERRORIZES HERNIA, SASQUATCH—THE FACE THAT COULD SINK A THOUSAND SHIPS.

  But the worst of the lot was one simply titled, As yet unnamed yoder. “This fearsome creature,” it began, “has been hiding out in a dump called the PennDutch Inn...”

  “A dump!” I bellowed. “How dare they call it that!”

  Unfortunately my ejaculation drew the attention of everyone in the store. Immediately to my left were a pair of teenage girls. What they were doing up at that hour is beyond me. At any rate, they looked at me, then at the row of my likeness, screamed like banshees on steroids, and ran out of the store. Meanwhile, a middle- aged man in an overcoat popped out of the stacks like a jack-in-the-box, took a gander at me, and popped back in again. I could hear him dial his cell phone behind the muscle magazines.

  “You won’t believe what just walked into this store,” he whispered into the device. “And she’s even uglier in person.”

  That did it. That hiked my hackles so high that I gave myself what Susannah would call a wedgie. For a moment I teetered on the threshold of yielding to temptation, that of pushing the entire rack over on the deserving man. But in the end I did the sensible thing and bought every single copy of the gossip rags containing my name or displaying my face. I had to make two trips to the checkout counter, behind which cowered a woman old enough to know better. When I paid for the pile of bile with a check, she had the temerity to ask me for an ID.

  I kept several copies of each rag, figuring they might come handy should I decide to sue, but the rest I hurled into the nearest dumpster. Any sensible person would have headed straight home from there and pulled the covers over her head, remaining in that quilted cocoon for the rest of her natural life. But I had still to eat breakfast, and the Waffle House beckoned. Besides, I’d been made a laughingstock before, and it’s really not all that bad—once one has a chance to calm down a bit. It’s the surprise element that is so distressing. As for my business suffering, the truth is, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

  Holding my much publicized head high, I proceeded to the Waffle House and had a lovely and very peaceful breakfast. I even got a booth. The family that fled left a perfectly good side order of bacon behind, so I got extra with my meal. All I had to do was glare to get the waitress to treat me like royalty. And the cook—now, there was a picture of servitude. Although her knees were knocking the whole time, she came over and asked for an autograph when she was through frying up my order, which, by the way, she delivered. So good was the service that I made a mental note to revive the Bigfoot legend on at least a semiannual basis.

  “If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade,” Granny Yoder used to say. She had apparently had a lot of practice, because she looked like she’d spent her life sucking sour citrus. Nonetheless, hers was a point well-taken.

  Too bad the kids at Hernia High/Middle School didn’t see how noble I was behaving. School had not quite started, and a pair of hooligans hung from the windows like apes and hooted the minute I pulled in front of the school.

  “Hoo, hoo, hoo! There she is! There’s Bigfoot.” “She’s Alison’s mother.”

  “Alison who?”

  “You know, that dorky new kid from Chicago.” “Yeah. Hoo, hoo. Hoo!”

  I stomped one of my trademark feet. “She isn’t from Chicago; she’s from Minnesota.”

  “Minisoda, minisoda,” they mocked. “Don’t you know that here we say pop?”

  Clearly, they’d never heard of the state. I said a quiet word of thanks that Freni had promised to try to get the child into the Amish school for a few days. Then I forged ahead like I own the place, which in a way, I do, as I pay more taxes than anyone else in the district. Out of the comer of my eye I could see the boys leap back through the classroom windows; no doubt they were running for their lives. A gal could get used to the power inherent in a good rumor.

  There was no need to ask where the principal’s office was. Its location hasn’t changed in fifty years, and I spent my fair share of time in that miserable, dark, paneled room. Before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you that I was not a discipline problem. It is not my fault that others perceived me as such. Miss Quiring, in particular, could not stand the fact that I am prone to speak my mind. Many was the time she pulled me out of my seat by an ear and dragged me down the long halls to Mr. Reiger’s office. Mr. Reiger had no compunctions about paddling girls, and when I got home Mama paddled me as well. It’s no wonder I grew up to have a bony butt;
my pleasing feminine fat was spanked off as fast as it could accumulate.

  Thank heavens corporal punishment has long since been outlawed at Hernia High/Middle School. But there are still young people who misbehave, and they still wait their turn outside the principal’s office. Just what their punishment will be, I haven’t the slightest idea. Whatever it is, they wear the same looks of dread we did. One student in particular looked dreadful.

  “Oh gawd!” she said when she saw me, and buried her face in her hands.

  “Alison?”

  My newly acquired daughter peeked through her fingers. “I’m busted, ain’t I?”

  I beckoned to her with a crooked finger. It was a gesture she didn’t resist, especially since I am capable of pulling a loaded semi-truck with said finger when properly motivated. Thank heavens the school secretary was out of the room at the moment. I’d rather face down a panzer division than Miss Odelphia Pringle.

  Alison, who was second in the line for the “door of death,” as we called it in our day, slid off the well-worn chair and sauntered over to me. The other five students in the antechamber watched in wide-eyed fascination, but their eyes were on me, not Alison.

  “She doesn’t smell so bad,” a boy said. I didn’t know his name, but his narrow-set eyes gave him away as a Swartzendruber.

  “You must constantly be shaving,” Roberta Kauffman said. This was a girl I’d known since birth, mind you.

  “The paper said it takes her three hours.” Mary Livingston didn’t have room to talk; she was the only teenage girl I knew with a five-o’clock shadow.

  “I most certainly do not shave,” I shouted, for all the world to hear. And that, if you must know, is the truth. I have been blessed with a paucity of epidermal extensions in all but the cranial zone. I say “blessed” because Mama forbade me to shave what little I had. If the Good Lord wanted it removed, she said, He wouldn’t have put it there in the first place.

  “Of course she shaves,” Alison cried. “She does it all the time. I seen her do it.”