Just Plain Pickled to Death

by Tamar Myers

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Diane was plainly shaken by the news. It was a good thing she was sitting on the toilet. Unfortunately, she had misunderstood my invitation and was using the damn thing, an intimacy I am not accustomed to, I assure you. I kept my back turned until she flushed.

  “That’s all I know,” I said. “Aaron’s going to try and talk some sense into Jonas, but you know him.”

  “Yes, and the man’s a monster.” She began to cry. “Someone ought to do to him what he did to my Becca and her little Sarah.”

  “Well, if we can prove his guilt, the state will do it, and even if we can’t, he’ll get his just reward someday.”

  “Don’t give me that crap,” she sobbed. “I don’t believe in religious mumbo jumbo.”

  I suppose we are all entitled to our own beliefs— or the lack thereof—but for someone who tried to pass herself off as both a nun and King Tut, she was in need of a little spiritual guidance.

  “Read your Bible, dear. There is going to be a day of reckoning, and whoever killed these two is going to have to answer to God.”

  She grabbed a hand towel, without washing her hands, and dabbed at her face. Apparently she hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

  “Jonas Weaver is not going to get away with this,” she said through gritted teeth. “That man is going to pay.”

  “Wash your hands,” I said gently. “Cleanliness is next to godliness, and on both counts you seem to be way out in the north pasture.”

  She did what she was told, which was fortunate, because, without being invited, she stayed for lunch.

  Lunch began as a disaster and I would rather not go into all the details. Suffice it to say, Freni might not have recognized the infamous Diane Lefcourt after all these years, but the other women sure did. They carried on like hens when a fox has invaded the coop. Aaron and Pops had not shown up, so presumably they were still trying to talk sense into Jonas. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Freni’s wilted dandelion salad slipped by them not only undetected but much appreciated, I would have fled back to my tub.

  Auntie Vonnie seemed especially fond of the greens. “Endive this good can come from only one place. The Giant Eagle in Fox Chapel, right?”

  I nodded, which isn’t the same as lying, because in some cultures it means no.

  “Ach, no,” said Freni, who had come in to refill the bowl. “Those are dandelions from the yard. Frankly, it’s a little late in the year, and some of the leaves are a little tough if you ask me.”

  I flashed daggers at her, but the woman has all the sensitivity of sandstone.

  “They would look better, too, but something seems to have stepped on them. Maybe one of the cows got loose last night. I’ll have to ask Mose.”

  While I prayed that the good Lord would get me safely out of that one, I stabbed at the ice in my water glass. Freni insists on filling glasses with the ice already in them, which is the surest way of making those damn cubes stick together.

  Apparently the Lord heard my silent prayers for deliverance because the two Aarons appeared suddenly in the door. All eyes turned to them.

  The younger Aaron shook his handsome head. “That man is as stubborn as—as—”

  “As sin,” I said. I passed the serving bowls down to their places while they took their seats.

  Instead of picking up his fork, my Pooky Bear slammed his fist down on the table. “He just won’t listen to reason! Legally he might be Auntie Rebecca’s next of kin, but he isn’t the only kin she had. There’s all of you.”

  “And you,” I pointed out.

  “That’s right,” Pops said. “We’re her family too. More so than Jonas, if you ask me. Becca was my baby sister, my flesh and blood.”

  “But Sarah was his flesh and blood,” Auntie Lizzie said, her loyalties perfectly obvious.

  I bit my tongue and cast Diane a warning look. The water was choppy enough. We certainly didn’t need any boat rocking.

  She spoke up nonetheless. “Well, you could have your own service. Not a funeral maybe, but a memorial service. For the two of them. I mean, you do have the church reserved for three this afternoon.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone else turned and stared at her.

  Frankly, I thought it was a brilliant idea. Face it, what did it really matter if the Weaver women’s remains were not actually there at the service? They wouldn’t care. They weren’t inhabiting those bones any longer. A memorial service was intended for the living, and with the exception of one stubborn old man, all the living relatives were gathered around my dining room table. Susannah, of course, was at work, but she had scheduled to take off at two and was planning to show up at the church.

  “It’s a great idea,” I said.

  “It has some merit,” Auntie Vonnie said, much to my surprise.

  Uncle Rudy just rudely got up from the table, without being excused, and wandered off.

  Uncle Elias gave the thumbs-up sign, while Auntie Magdalena whimpered her consent.

  Auntie Leah boomed her approval and Uncle Sol, not to be outdone, bellowed his. I was almost surprised to hear he had a voice.

  Only Auntie Lizzie and Uncle Manasses remained holdouts.

  “Jonas was a part of this family long before you were even born,” she said, looking at me as if the whole situation were somehow my fault. “And you’re not even part of the family yet.”

  “Well, I’ve been a part of this family longer than any of you,” Aunt Vonnie snapped, “and I say we go ahead and have the service. Put it all behind us, except for the actual interment, of course. It’s time we get on with things.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Freni must have mixed some jimsonweed in with the dandelion leaves. Either Auntie Vonnie was suffering from delirium or I was.

  “I guess that settles it, then,” said my Aaron. Although he was the youngest blood relative there, he seemed the one most capable of making decisions. I was immensely proud of him.

  “Three o’clock it is,” Pops said. You could hear the sadness in his voice. “You know, it’s really too bad that Jonas has to act this way. And after what I did for him today too.”

  “What did you do for him, Pops?” I asked gently. “Take him some liquid refreshment?”

  It just slipped out, honest. I would never rat on my soon-to-be-father-in-law. Not with my Pooky Bear present. I didn’t deserve the looks that both Aarons cast my way. Uncle Elias too, come to think of it.

  “Well, what did you do?” Diane Lefcourt was like a dog, worrying at all the bones I left in my wake.

  Pops rubbed at the condensation on his water glass with a pumice-like thumb. “When Aaron and I went to see him, I dropped off some old letters I’d been keeping.”

  “What kind of letters?” I beat King Tut to the punch.

  “Letters from Becca, to my Catherine. I thought it might soften him up a bit.”

  “Pops keeps everything,” Aaron said quickly. “You should see his attic.”

  He was right, and it wasn’t just the attic. The Miller house gave a new definition to the word clutter. Pops saved everything. Even soap slivers. True, his compulsion did save on housework—it was impossible to clean in there—but it made for a bizarre lifestyle. It was no wonder that the man sent over a barrel of sauerkraut twenty years old. Whatever Pops planned to do with all his stuff...

  I recoiled in horror. “Two small suitcases and a garment bag,” I said firmly. “And when the soap gets thin enough to see through, out it goes.”

  Before Pops could agree, Diane the dog picked up another one of my bones. “What was in those letters, Aaron?”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I even ever read them. I saw them the other day along with some of my Catherine’s things.” He looked around at the group, a spark igniting in his eyes. “I wouldn’t have given them to that fool, except that I thought it might help.”

  My Pooky Bear reached over and lovingly patted his father’s arm. “Don’t worry, Pop
s. I’m sure you did the right thing. You did what Mama would have wanted.”

  There was a chorus of concurring voices, but other than that we finished our meal in silence. We were all undoubtedly deep into our own little worlds. I know I was.

  I told Freni to stack the dishes and take the rest of the day off. She reminded me that she had been planning to do just that anyway. After all, she had known Auntie Rebecca all her life, living just down the road as she did, and she had been the one to discover Sarah in the barrel of kraut. She had fully intended to be at the funeral and still intended to be present at the memorial service. Mose would be there as well.

  Taking care not to be seen by anyone, I dashed off to my room to change my dress. Black is the only appropriate color for a funeral—or memorial service—if you ask me. All right, dark gray will do, but only if it’s so dark you can’t find a pencil lead in your lap. Last summer, at Millie Neubrander’s funeral, some woman from Philadelphia (an Episcopalian!) showed up wearing a bright-red sleeveless dress. It was an open-casket funeral, and there were those sitting in the front row who claim that Millie sat up in her coffin, a look of abject horror on her face. Of course I don’t believe that, but even from where I was sitting I could see the coffin shudder. I know I did.

  Anyway, I hurriedly dressed and then carefully sneaked out of my room and out of the inn. I had a very important errand to perform. Before we laid Sarah and her mother to rest in our hearts, there was something equally as important that needed to be laid to rest.

  Some way or another, I was going to make that horrid little Jonas Weaver confess to what he had done. That he was guilty I had no doubt. It was plain as day what had happened. When that slimy snake— who had only been shooting blanks, as Diane said— found out many years after the fact that his wife had cheated on him, he killed her. Then, when he learned that Sarah—who was not his biological daughter— had witnessed the heinous crime, he killed her too.

  While it was not in my province to mete out justice to Jonas, I was fully within my rights to see that he owned up to his crimes. He had single-handedly ruined my wedding week and caused me immeasurable grief.

  Of course the paring knife I’d smuggled out of the kitchen was intended only for my protection. The pocket-size tape recorder, however, I planned to use. By hook or by crook, I would trap that spawn of Satan into making a confession. By Saturday morning Jonas Weaver was going to be behind bars.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Delores lives on the kind of street Norman Rockwell liked to paint. Granted, hers is a rooming house, but the rest of the homes are single-family abodes, many of them decked out in genuine Victorian gingerbread. Huge maples line both sides of the street, and in just about every other yard stands a majestic Colorado blue spruce. Wherever enough sunlight gets through, someone has scratched out a flower bed. It is a street of shady solitude, where the only discordant sound is the occasional whine of electric hedge shears.

  It was precisely 1:16 when I parked my car. I am positive of the time because I purposely looked at my watch. Being late to a funeral—or a memorial service—is almost as bad as wearing red. If the dead can make it there on time, why can’t the mourners?

  Of course I wasn’t dumb enough to park right in front of Delores’s rooming house. I might not know everyone in Hernia, but it’s a sure bet everyone knows me. On the off-chance that some disgruntled soul would recognize my car and pop in to settle an old score during my tete-a-tete, I parked all the way on the other side of the block. It took me six minutes to walk to Delores’s, and I will confess that I was slightly out of breath when I rang the bell.

  Although Delores’s car was in her driveway, she didn’t answer. I know for a fact that the woman, on account of her hearing problem, has lights in strategic rooms that come on whenever her doorbell is activated. I also know that she is as stubborn as a knot in a wet shoelace and is quite capable of just ignoring the world when it suits her to do so. Undoubtedly she was somewhere inside, peeking through the curtains and having herself a good laugh at my expense. It was also quite possible that Jonas was there as well and the two of them were busily engaged in doing the hootchie-cootchie—as Susannah so crudely puts it.

  There was nothing left for me to do but to try the front door. It was locked. Ditto for the back door. But as they say, the third time is the charm—the side door that opens onto the breezeway and the garage was not locked. I slipped in quietly. Let me assure you that the purpose of my stealth at that point was to catch Jonas alone if possible. If I had been up to nefarious purposes I certainly would not have rung the doorbell.

  A short flight of steps led up from the side door to the back hall, and I had just mounted the last one when the lights went out. I’m not talking about the hall light either, but the light in my head. It was as if someone had flipped a switch or pulled a chain. One minute I could see relatively fine (Delores is a tightwad and uses low-wattage bulbs); the next thing I knew, everything was as black as sin.

  When the light in my head came on again, it brought a rush of intense pain. I can only describe it as hitting your head hard up against a wall while suffering a migraine and listening to rap music full blast on a boom box. And I’ll throw in an off-key opera singer, a couple of mating cats, and some fingernails scraping across a chalkboard just to make sure I haven’t understated the discomfort. If I could have gotten up and walked away from my head at that moment, I would have. Unfortunately, it was still firmly connected to my body.

  For the first few minutes after the lights came on, there was no picture. Just sound. Gradually I got a fuzzy picture, then some double images, and finally what might pass for normal vision, except that every movement I observed was somehow connected to sound. The reverse seemed to be true as well.

  “Magdalena, are you all right?”

  The lights flickered on and off with every word, but I recognized Diane Lefcourt. She was sitting across from me in a chair. She appeared to be tied to it. I was likewise sitting, but at the moment I couldn’t feel anything but my head. I may have been tied as well.

  “No, I am not all right!” Each word was like hitting myself on the head with a hammer.

  “Just sit real still then and keep your eyes closed.”

  Given my condition, that was easier done than said, and so I did it. I closed my eyes and sat there, willing the pain to go away. I have been told that I am a woman of strong character, but the truth is, it’s my constitution that is remarkable. It is all in my genes. If Mama and Papa hadn’t met an untimely end between the milk tanker and the shoe truck, chances are they would have survived well into their nineties. Neither of them ever had the patience to be sick, and I seem to have followed in their footsteps.

  Perhaps five minutes had passed when I opened my eyes again. I felt much better. I could see quite clearly now, and the rap music and screeching soprano had been replaced by nothing more than a slight buzzing in my ears and a world-class headache.

  I looked around the room. We were in a small back bedroom on the second floor. No, make that a tiny bedroom on the third floor, front side, up under the eaves. Through the one small window I could see the top levels of the maples that lined the street. The cubicle was furnished with a double bed, which took up most of the room, and a chair. I was sitting sideways on the bed, which had no headboard, and my hands were tied behind me. My feet, which were also tied together, stuck straight out in front of me. There was a rope around my waist, and behind me I could feel the sharp, cold metal ribs of an old-fashioned steam radiator. It was a good thing it was summer and the heat wasn’t on.

  Diane sat on a chair facing the bed. It had four legs, but one of them was much shorter than the other, and the slightest movement caused her to tip forward. Fortunately her center of gravity was well to the back of the chair, so she was in no danger of falling over. But the near constant jarring of that short leg against the floor, and her pitiful yelps and gasps were most annoying. She was undoubtedly responsible for some of the sounds I had hea
rd in my altered state.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” I was finally able to ask, with only minimal pain.

  She rocked forward, gasping needlessly. “I came to see Jonas, which is undoubtedly what you did.”

  I nodded, which was stupid of me and very painful. “How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t know. I left right after lunch, so I guess I arrived about twenty minutes before you did.”

  “It took me a good bit more than twenty minutes to wash the dishes and change my dress, dear,” I said, perhaps a bit crossly.

  “Well, okay, then,” she snapped. “I stopped off at a store. I had some shopping to do.”

  “In Hernia?”

  “Miller’s Feed Store. Look Magdalena, you and I both came here for the same reason, right? So let’s stop playing games and lay our cards on the table. How were you planning to do him in?”

  “What?”

  “I thought of shooting him, but I don’t have a gun, and that waiting period is just ridiculous, if you ask me. Of course I couldn’t poison him, not unless I had him over to dinner, and the Sisters of the Broken Heart would never allow that. Not even a male pheromone is allowed past that gate. So I took a cue from you.”

  “What?”

  “You know, at lunch you were stabbing at that clump of ice in your glass, and I got to thinking, what better way than an ice pick? I mean, it is summer, and everyone has an ice pick, right? I could stab Jonas with the pick—a couple of times if I needed to—wash it off good, and throw it along the roadside on my way home. They could never trace something that common back to me. So, I made a quick detour to Miller’s Feed Store and—”

  “Feed stores carry ice picks?”

  She laughed and the chair rocked precariously. “Industrial-strength ice picks. One jab would have done it. Right in the eyeball.”

  I shuddered, which didn’t do my headache any good. “That’s horrible. I can’t believe you were going to do that.”

  “And you, Little Miss Perfect? What were you going to do? From what I heard, you got caught with a tape recorder and a butcher knife. What were you going to do, carve him up and record his screams?”