Just Plain Pickled to Death

by Tamar Myers

  “Even guiltier,” the pervert purred.

  I hung up without telling him there wasn’t such a place.

  It wasn’t until the sixth and last call that I reached a cantankerous old man with a scratchy voice. I knew instinctively that I had struck pay dirt. Through a series of snarls he informed me that I was the first person from Hernia to speak to him in almost twenty years.

  “Then I’m sorry, Mr. Weaver, but I have some bad news for you from home.”

  “Yeah? First, how’d you find me?”

  “I called directory information.”

  “Yeah?” He thought about that for a few minutes, no doubt marveling all the while. Most people either don’t know such a service exists or else they’re too cheap to pay the paltry sum it costs to use it. The PennDutch Inn is listed in the Bedford County phone book, but you’d be surprised how many folks say they can’t find my number—especially when their business with me involves a cancellation.

  “You there, Mr. Weaver?”

  “All right, so you found me. Now, what’s the bad news?”

  “It’s about your daughter, sir.”

  “I don’t have a daughter, so don’t give me that crap.”

  “Sarah!” I shouted, before he could hang up. “She’s been found.”

  “What?”

  “Your daughter Sarah’s body has finally been found.”

  I expected the silence, but I didn’t expect the tears. One more weeper and I was going to call it quits for the day. Still, I waited patiently as the minutes ticked by on my phone bill.

  “Where?”

  “On Aaron Miller’s farm. The funeral—”

  “Where on the farm?”

  “The root cellar.”

  “Buried under the floor?”

  It was a reasonable possibility, I suppose, but something that hadn’t occurred to me.

  “No, sir. It isn’t very pleasant, I’m afraid.”

  “Death seldom is.”

  I breathed deeply. “She was in a barrel of sauerkraut.”

  “My God,” he said quietly.

  “Mr. Weaver, if you come home for the funeral, you’re welcome to stay with me. I own an inn right across from the Miller farm.”

  “Who’d you say you were again? Because there isn’t any inn across from that farm.”

  I outlined who I was and how the inn came about. He seemed satisfied. At least satisfied enough for me to ask him a few more questions.

  “You had to be awfully sure, Mr. Weaver, that your wife and daughter were dead. I mean, in order to cut yourself off like that for so long. If you don’t mind my asking, how could you be so sure?”

  The ensuing silence was so long I thought he’d hung up. “Hello? Hello?”

  “I’m here.” It was barely a whisper.

  “Mr. Weaver, I assure you that you can trust me. I won’t tell a soul, if that’s what you want.”

  “I have your word?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Because of her diary,” he blurted.

  “Whose diary? Rebecca’s?”

  “Sarah’s. I read it after she disappeared. She wrote in it that she had seen her mother killed. She knew that the killer saw her, and she believed she was going to be next.”

  It was my turn to practice that elusive virtue. “You did tell the police about this,” I said at last.

  “No, I did not.”

  I felt like I was dealing with a wily, feral animal that I had taken it upon myself to tame. At any moment it could bolt back into the woods and I might never see it again.

  “I’m sure the police would have been able to solve the murders if they had seen the diary.” I said it kindly, I really did.

  “I couldn’t show it to them.” It was like he was wanting me to draw him further out of the woods.

  “Why not?”

  “I just couldn’t.” The animal had coyly taken one step backward.

  I thought about Susannah’s diary, which she keeps locked and under a pile of blankets in a locked chest. No doubt some of the things written in there would curl the hair on even Satan’s head.

  “Were there things written in there that were private?” I asked delicately.

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

  “So private that it was more important to keep them secret than to find your wife and daughter’s killer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you still have the diary, Mr. Weaver?”

  He hesitated. “I think so.”

  “Then I’d like to make a suggestion, if I might. Please reread your daughter’s diary. A lot of things have changed in the last twenty years. Maybe the things in there aren’t so—”

  “Morality never changes,” he said.

  “True, but people judge things less harshly now.”

  He said nothing.

  “I could make sure that the Hernia police look only at the parts that pertain to the murder.”

  “How can you do that?” The animal had stepped boldly out into the open. It was up to me to coax it to my hand.

  “Because the current chief of police is my dear cousin. We go back a long ways.”

  There was at least a kernel of truth in that, and it was for a good cause. And even though Melvin wouldn’t cross the street to acknowledge our kinship, I had ways to make him sing and dance on cue. After all, Melvin had made the gross mistake of dating my sister. If Jonas Weaver thought his daughter’s diary was revealing, just wait till he and the world got a look at Susannah’s.

  “Well, I will think about it,” he said.

  “You are at least coming to the funeral, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I would like to do that.”

  “I mean, she was your daughter. Feel free to make any or all of the arrangements.”

  “No, I’d rather somebody else did that. Would you do that? Please?”

  “Of course.” The fact was, I already had—everything except for the exact time. “And will you agree to stay at the inn?”

  “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

  “Good. In fact, why don’t you just come on ahead as soon as you can? Give me a call when you’ve booked a flight, and I’ll send Aaron Junior out to the Pittsburgh airport to get you.”

  He agreed that’s what he’d do and we said our goodbyes.

  I must have slept for hours, because the shadows were long outside my windows when I woke up. Unfortunately I had broken one of my cardinal rules about napping, because my head ached, my eyes hurt, and I felt as crabby as a constipated hen. Just lying there was agony enough, but the persistent knocking on my door bordered on excruciating.

  “Go away!”

  The door opened. “Aha! I thought you were in there.”

  It was my Pooky Bear, bearing a tray of supper. I should have been delighted.

  “Ugh.” I shielded my eyes with my arm as Aaron turned on the light.

  “Same back at you,” he said cheerily. “Look what I brought. Here we have some chicken salad, a little cottage cheese, some spinach—”

  “Please, Aaron. I feel like I’ve been run over by a combine.”

  “Well, you don’t look like it. You look just as beautiful as ever to me. Even more so.”

  “I do?”

  “You look like a dream come true to me.”

  I sat up and surreptitiously smoothed the hair back from my face. Of course I was dressed, I just didn’t have my shoes on.

  “Why, Aaron Miller, how sweet you can be.”

  “And this is just the beginning.”

  I inspected the tray closer. Suddenly I was ravenous. Even the bearded irises Aaron had stuck in a juice glass looked delicious.

  “Go on and eat,” Aaron said, “while I tell you just how much I adore you.”

  I did his bidding. Who says I’m not a cooperative person? “Never pass up a free meal,” Mama always said. Of course, this wasn’t a free meal, coming as it did straight out of my kitchen, but Mama had never been lavished with sweet sentiments or she would have given advic
e on accepting those as well.

  “I just can’t thank you enough for what you did,” my Pooky Bear said.

  I swallowed a bite of chicken salad that may have been just a trifle too large. “What did I do? Tell me, and I’ll do it again.”

  He laughed heartily. “As if you didn’t know! Well, that’s my Magdalena for you. Always cracking jokes.”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Pops adores you too, you know that? It’s going to do him a world of good to move out of that big old house and in with us.”

  “Oh, he told you that?”

  “I never would have asked you, you know. I would have hated to live with my in-laws. Theoretically, of course. I’m sure your folks would have been very pleasant to be around.”

  “Just don’t bet on it. What all did your father say?”

  Aaron shook his head. “I still can’t get over it. That whole flat tire thing was all a setup for my big surprise.”

  “And were you?”

  “Yeah, but I shouldn’t have been. I should have known how sweet you are. Asking Pops to move in with us—no, begging him, he said.”

  “Oh, he did?”

  “And then asking him if it was all right to call him Pops!”

  “Well.” I shrugged magnanimously.

  “And then the icing on the cake!”

  “There’s cake too?” I pushed the iris arrangement aside but found no such thing.

  “As if you didn’t know! Promising to name our son Aaron Weaver the Third was the biggest gift you could have given to a man his age.”

  I dropped my fork. “Our son?”

  “Our son. You do want children, don’t you?”

  “Aaron, I’m forty-four!”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Forty-four,” I wailed.

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “So—this is the nineteen-nineties. Women your age are always having babies.”

  “But a first baby?”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” he said blithely.

  “Then have it yourself,” I almost said. Instead, I picked the supper tray clean. After all, according to Aaron, I was soon going to be eating for two.

  Chapter Twelve

  I have never been a big fan of Mondays. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the week starts a downward plunge around noon on Sunday and doesn’t begin its next ascent until noon on Friday. Today, however, I had the memory of my Pooky Bear’s adoration to sustain me.

  Aaron and Pops, as I shall hereafter refer to him, had left early for the Pittsburgh airport to collect Jonas Weaver. Jonas had called late the night before, accepting my invitation and announcing a ten o’clock arrival. Since it is two and a half hours from the airport to Hernia, I didn’t expect them back until after lunch. As for the Beeftrust and their consorts, they had decided, en masse, to pay a sentimental visit to old Hernia High and then have a picnic up on Stucky Ridge. I told Freni to take the morning off, and I let Susannah sleep. It was time to get down to some serious business.

  Hernia, Pennsylvania, population 1,528, is a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there. As Susannah says, the only thing to do is watch moss grow and pick your toes. Actually, Susannah’s is a cruder version, but you get my drift. At any rate, our police force, which was recently upgraded to three (two full-time, one part) doesn’t get a lot of business on Monday mornings. Therefore, I expected to get their full attention, if not cooperation. I knew from experience that Chief of Police Melvin Stoltzfus was usually on duty Monday mornings. Foolishly I decided to take my chances and not call first. And as usual, Melvin, the manic mantis, tried my patience sorely.

  “I’m off duty,” he said, speaking to me from behind his desk.

  “But you’re here.”

  “So are you, Yoder, and you’re not on duty.”

  “But this is your office, and you’re in.”

  “And since this is my office, Yoder, I don’t have to explain my actions.”

  “Who is on duty, then?”

  “No one. Not until ten.”

  “Come on, Melvin, this is very important.”

  He rotated an eye to the clock on the wall. “Come back in an hour. We’ll talk then.”

  “What will I do for an hour, Melvin? I don’t want to drive home and back.”

  “Shop,” he said.

  With that, Melvin propped his feet up on his desk, clasped his bony hands over the tiniest of potbellies, and was out like a light. I decided to take him at his word. I would be back in precisely an hour. At that time we would talk, even if it meant having to throw a pitcher of ice water in his face first.

  Hernia has two stores: Yoder’s Corner Market and Miller’s Feed Store. The former is overpriced and understocked, and the latter caters to stock—livestock, that is.

  I own two dairy cows, Matilda and Bessie. In the spring they need very little from the feed store, so I decided to while away my hour at Yoder’s Corner Market. But unless I chanced upon an exceptional bargain, I wouldn’t buy anything. Sam Yoder, the proprietor, is my father’s first cousin once removed, but I still have to pay full price. Even Sam’s seventy- three-year-old mother has to pay full price, and he lives with her!

  Sam was the closest thing I had to a suitor in high school, and if it hadn’t been for my pining over Aaron and he over Dorothy Gillman (a Methodist!) we might have ended up life partners. I, of course, do not regret the way things turned out, but I don’t think the same thing can be said for Sam. To please Dorothy, Sam became a Methodist, but it has not been a happy marriage. What mixed marriage is? Dorothy is far too worldly to suit Sam, and loose with the change besides. I hear she once spent over a hundred dollars buying curtains at the Kmart in Bedford, when she could have made them herself! Sam almost divorced her over that, which would have been wrong but certainly understandable.

  “Hi, Sam, what’s up?”

  Sam glowered at me. “Your beefy relatives just swept through here like a herd of buffalo. Messed everything up and bought almost nothing. Claimed my prices were too high.”

  “They are.”

  “Well, they’re not going to find anything else to picnic on in Hernia.”

  “Not unless they try the feed store.”

  We both laughed. “Sam, how well do you remember Sarah Weaver?”

  His face darkened again. “Jonas and Rebecca’s daughter?”

  “The one. I suppose by now you’ve heard.”

  “It’s all over town, Magdalena. A terrible way to die—drowning in a barrel of cider.”

  “It was sauerkraut. And I don’t think she drowned. I think she was dead before she went in.”

  “Still, what a tragic waste.”

  I left that line alone. Sam is too closely related to have meant it in the morally correct way.

  “Did you know her well, Sam?”

  A dreamy look crept across his face. “No, not Sarah. Too young. But I remember her mother.”

  “Oh?” I asked cautiously.

  “Yeah, all the guys remember her. She was—uh—”

  “Pretty?”

  “Built like a brick shithouse.”

  “Shame on you, Sam Yoder! A Methodist tongue!” I chided him gently. “So, she was easy on your eyes. What else do you remember?”

  “She wore very short skirts and tight sweaters.”

  “She was a Mennonite, Sam. I’m sure she did no such thing.”

  “Ask any man our age. Mrs. Weaver was what you wished all your dates looked like.”

  I would have slapped Sam, but dozens of generations of pacifist forebears have left their genetic imprint on me. Besides, I had just spotted a hickory- smoked ham that had been mispriced to my advantage. Sam does not have a scanner, and if I kept him distracted—in a non-combative way—the ham could be mine for a song.

  “That’s very interesting,” I said pleasantly. “I mean, the Beeftrust are not exactly drop-dead gorgeous. And I mean that in the nicest way.”

  “No argument there. But Mrs. Weave
r wasn’t like the others. She was the youngest, I think. Kept herself in good shape. Could really turn heads.”

  I let Sam ring up the twenty-dollar ham for two dollars. Then, not feeling the least bit guilty, I deposited a quarter in the charity box by the register. If I knew Sam, the two bits would never reach the big-eyed children with the sunken cheeks. As soon as I got home, however, I would mail them half of my eighteen-dollar profit.

  “Well, from what I hear, her sister Lizzie was quite a looker too.”

  Sam made the same face Susannah makes when she tastes Freni’s homemade liverwurst. “I don’t know much about her. She was older. Grown-up-looking, you know.”

  “Did you and your drooling cronies ever make a pass at Sarah’s mother?”

  He blanched white as bleached cake flour. “Naw, I mean, we were just kids, and she was a grown-up too. She just didn’t look like the rest. Besides, her husband wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Oh?” For talkers like Sam, an arched eyebrow and a rounded mouth are all they need for fuel.

  “That man was downright weird. Real quiet all the time. Too quiet. Like a snake, if you know what I mean.”

  I nodded, the “oh” and the arch still in place.

  “He used to come into this store a lot when it was my daddy’s. I’d see him then. He gave me the heebie-jeebies. He was always staring at you, with eyes that never blinked. Like I said, he reminded me of a snake.”

  A customer came in then. Norah Hall is the nosiest woman this side of the Delaware. She also has it in for me. Something about it being my fault her pudgy prepubescent daughter didn’t get to be a movie star that time a Hollywood company rented my inn for a few weeks. At any rate, Norah was sure to peek into my bag, see the mispriced ham, and squeal on me. Sam then would ban me from his store for life, depriving me of one of my few pleasures, and the big-eyed waifs would go hungry.

  “That is such a flattering color on you,” I said to Norah and fled. Always compliment your enemies before fleeing. It throws them off track every time.

  Melvin was still asleep when I returned. I didn’t have a pitcher of ice water at my disposal, but it was a simple matter to push his feet off the desk. The silly man jumped up and saluted me.