Play It Again, Spam (Pennsylvania Dutch Mystery)

by Tamar Myers

  Sam was nodding vigorously.

  “She really dyes her hair?”

  “She comes in here religiously—no pun intended—and buys Lady Marion hair color, formula number twelve. Peach Bark, it’s called.”

  “Thank you, Lord!” I said, my hands clasped together, my eyes tightly closed. One should always give thanks, should one not?

  Sam laughed. “Magdalena, what are you going to do with this information?”

  I opened my eyes. “File it, dear. One never knows how and when it might come in very useful.”

  “Glad to be of service. Now, are you going to take it easy on Susannah?”

  “As easy as threading a needle in the dark, dear.” I snatched the precious bag of luncheon meat out of Sam’s hand, and was out the door and in my car in the time it takes a cat to yawn. I may be tall and gangly, but I sure can run.

  “Ach, there you are!”

  “Please, Freni, not now.” I thrust the heavy bag at her.

  “But she’s been crying, that one.”

  “It’s just pre-wedding jitters, dear.” Although frankly, Susannah had nothing to be jittery about—if you know what I mean. I, on the other hand, was terrified on my wedding night. I was even more terrified the morning after, when I suddenly realized it was not just a one-time thing.

  “Ach, not Susannah! The little one from Pittsburgh.”

  I shook my head to clear it of sane thoughts. “You mean Samantha Burk?”

  “Yah, that’s the one.”

  As if on cue the diminutive pianist pushed through the swinging door from the dining room. Then again, as small as she was, she may have been pushing on it for some time.

  “Miss Yoder, you’re back!”

  “Either that, or I have a twin sister who is a ventriloquist.”

  Freni gave me a warning frown and then scuttled over to the stove where a pot was merrily boiling over.

  “Sorry, dear. Sometimes my tongue gets in the way of my brain. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  I motioned Samantha to a high wooden stool, while I took a ladderback chair. When we were eye to eye for the first time I could see that Freni was right; the woman had been weeping.

  “I’m all ears, dear.”

  Samantha looked down at petite, but exquisite hands. “John is missing.”

  “Have you checked the barn, dear? A lot of guests find my cows fascinating.”

  She shook her head. “Our car is gone.”

  “There you have it, dear. He’s gone for a ride in the country.”

  “Miss Yoder, I’m afraid you don’t understand. We had a fight.”

  I glanced over at Freni, who was quietly stirring the air above the bubbling pot. If her ears got any bigger, she could loan them to Prince Charles.

  “All married couples have their little tiffs, dear,” I said, finally able to speak from experience. “I’m sure he’ll be back before supper.”

  She shook her head again, this time more vigorously. “John has a hot temper, but he cools off quickly. We were arguing about—well, it was something trivial—and he stormed out with the car keys. He does that a lot, you know. But he always comes back ten or twenty minutes later and apologizes.”

  “So how long has he been gone this time?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Almost an hour and a half.”

  “Count your blessings, dear.” I clamped a hand over my mouth, and counted to ten before removing it. “What I mean is, the people around here are very friendly, and everyone knows who I am. If he’s lost, he just has to mention my name, or the inn, and folks will point the way back.”

  “John never gets lost.”

  “Honey, men are born lost. They don’t know which way is up without stopping to ask for directions—which, of course, they refuse to do. That’s why God gave them each an arrow that points to the ground.”

  She smiled weakly. “John seldom even makes it out of the drive when he storms off like that. Usually he just sits there and pounds on the steering wheel until he’s got it cleared out of his system.”

  There was no need to ask her what the it was that needed clearing out. It was hot air, of course, a curious byproduct of the male thought process. Aaron was forever clearing out his system, too, only he blamed it on beans.

  “Would you like me to drive around and look for him? You could come with me, of course.”

  “That would be very nice, but shouldn’t we call the police first?”

  I rolled my eyes discreetly behind partially closed lids. “You’ll have to wait forty-eight hours to file a missing-person report, unless you have evidence to support foul play. Besides, he probably just stopped to pick you some wildflowers.”

  “Ach,” Freni muttered, “it’s too early for anything but dandelions.”

  I glared at my kinswoman. “There are lilacs blooming down by Slave Creek. I saw them myself just a few minutes ago.”

  “Did you see a blue Saturn in the area?”

  “No. Sorry.” Frankly, since I bought my red BMW last year, I haven’t noticed any other cars. “The Devil’s carriage,” as Freni calls it, was Aaron’s idea—his only good idea, outside of jacking up my room prices again.

  Samantha quickly wiped away an escaping tear. “I’d like to ride with you, Miss Yoder. Can we get started right away?”

  “As soon as I make a necessary pit stop, dear.”

  Being the true Yoder that I am, we were out on the road in thirty seconds flat.

  Seven

  I tried to distract Samantha with a running commentary on the community.

  “That’s Sam and Amanda Berkey’s farm. Well, she’s dead now. Her father was the Amish bishop in his day— the land used to be his. There’s an old grist mill back in the woods that supplied all of Bedford County in the early 1800s.”

  “Really?” She sounded every bit as interested as Susannah does when I recount the Sunday sermon for her.

  “Now over there on your right is what remains of the Mishler farm. The Mishler brothers both outlived their wives, retired to the family homestead, and then began selling bits and pieces off, a few acres at a time. Both men are just as sweet as shoo-fly pie, but you’ll want to stay well away during hunting season. They’re blind as bats, you see, but they insist on hunting. They shoot at anything that moves—or moos.” I chuckled pleasantly.

  “You don’t say.”

  “See that bit of pink roof through the trees?”

  She nodded absently.

  “That’s the Williams’ house. They bought a couple of acres from the Mishler brothers a couple of years back. Dinky and Flora Williams are urban refugees from Philadelphia. They’re both nudists, if you can believe that. Of course they’re English—I mean, they’re not related to me in any way.

  “And that’s Irma Yoder’s house over there. She’s a Mennonite widow woman, one hundred and two, believe it or not, and she lives by herself. But she’s far from helpless, I assure you. Physically she’s as strong as an ox, and has a tongue that can cut cheese.”

  “How interesting.”

  “Just up ahead there, on the left, is Hernia’s newest subdivision. Norah and Ed Hall live there. They’re English, too. Methodist, I think. Norah thinks she’s better than the rest of us because her daughter Sherri got picked to be in a margarine commercial. I haven’t seen it—because I don’t watch television—but from what I hear, little Sherri is dressed up to look like a tub of low-fat spread. Supposedly Norah got real upset when she learned the country wasn’t even going to see her daughter’s face on TV.” I glanced over my shoulder, and not seeing my guardian angel, continued. “The truth is, little Sherri is not all that little and looks pretty much the same, in or out of her margarine tub costume.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’ve seen the commercial?”

  “Miss Yoder, please. How far is it to the river?”

  “Slave Creek, and it’s only another half a mile.”

  We rode in silence until
we got to the creek, which really isn’t much to look at, aside from its charming stone bridge. On the south side of the road was a single lilac bush planted in honor of Gloria Schuyler, Hernia’s first female mayor. Gloria has since left our fair town to seek her fortune in Pittsburgh. Last I heard she was living up to her potential, working in a ceramics factory that specialized in salt and pepper shakers. At any rate, just as I said, there were several clusters of scented blooms on the spindly shrub. There was, however, no blue Saturn.

  “Maybe we just missed him.” Samantha’s tone barely bordered on the accusatory. She was a classy lady, after all.

  “Maybe, but this is the only road from my place to here. We didn’t pass a blue Saturn, did we?”

  She sighed. “No. I’m just worried, that’s all. Like I said before, this isn’t like him.”

  “People change.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, uh—take me, for instance. I used to be really opinionated and headstrong. Some folks even called me grumpy, hard to get along with. But all that’s changed in the last year, thanks to my bogus marriage and subsequent breakup. Since then I’ve been a far more compassionate person.”

  She cocked her tiny head, indicating interest, so I obligingly pulled alongside the lilac and turned off the engine.

  “I married a very handsome, charming man who just happened to be a bigamist.”

  “Oh, my!”

  I smiled bravely. “Barely a month after our marriage he sprang the bad news on me. He did it over the phone, no less. At any rate, I thought my heart would break—maybe it did. Maybe when the two halves grew back together, a new Magdalena was formed.”

  “Miss Yoder, do you mind if I smoke? I know you have a no-smoking rule at the inn, and I usually don’t smoke anyway, but I find that when I’m really upset…” She fumbled in her purse.

  “Light up and die, toots.”

  “I know smoking causes cancer, but like I said, I very seldom do it.”

  “I didn’t mean the cigarettes would kill you, dear. No one smokes in this car, not even my sister Susannah.”

  She stopped fumbling. “Very well, I can do without. But I want you to know, Miss Yoder, that my husband is not cheating on me. And John is definitely not a bigamist.”

  I suppressed a sigh of pity. “Appearances can be deceiving, dear. I don’t mean to scare you, but there is a potential bigamist lurking in every woman’s bush.”

  “John has no interest in other women.”

  “You mean—?”

  “He has no interest in sex, period. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but John lost interest as soon as we were married. Not just in sex, but in me as a person. I’m not even sure that he loves me anymore.”

  I restrained myself from asking if John had an available twin brother. It would be nice if a man loved me, of course, but the horizontal mambo, as Susannah so crudely calls it, is strictly for the birds.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Forty-nine years.”

  “Wow. Any children?”

  She smiled. “No children. I met John at a New Year’s Eve party, and we were married on Valentine’s Day. He was already teaching at Duquesne, and I was headed for New York to do an engagement at Carnegie Hall. We’ve been busy ever since with our own lives—children never even were considered. Not in the beginning. Then my arthritis started acting up, and John was forced to retire and—well, it’s now that we regret not having a family. People like us sort of deserve the lives we’ve built for ourselves, don’t we?”

  My face stung. I am not childless by choice. I would love to have married and had a child—a house full of children, for that matter—but that just wasn’t in God’s plan. I couldn’t very well have a child outside the bounds of holy matrimony, now could I? And until very recently—here in Hernia, at least—if a single woman adopted a child, she’d have the morals police down on her faster than a hen on a June bug. Boy, would Lodema Schrock ever love to get her meddling mitts on a woman that foolish!

  “I would have loved to have been a mother,” I croaked.

  “Oh, Miss Yoder, I didn’t mean you. Honest, I didn’t.” She seemed so genuinely distressed at my distress that I decided to forgive her. Of course, she needed to be taught a mild lesson first.

  “That’s all right, dear. Now tell me something. If you and John are trapped in this loveless, sexless marriage—well, why don’t you just get a divorce? Not that I approve of divorce, you understand. But it does seem to be the thing to do these days.”

  It was my turn to feel like a worm. The poor dear looked as pitiful as Susannah did the day I told her Santa Claus didn’t really exist. Trust me, due to that one slip of my tongue, last Christmas was downright miserable. “But I can’t divorce John! If I did, I’d be all alone.”

  “Don’t you have other family?”

  “I’m an only child, and my parents are dead.”

  “Cousins?” I asked hopefully. Surely everyone has a cousin somewhere, don’t they? Of course, with me being my own cousin, it’s something I’d never thought about.

  She shook her head. “Everyone’s dead now.”

  “Friends?”

  “My concert schedule kept me on the road too much. You see, Miss Yoder, that’s why I need John. That’s why I must find him.” She fumbled in her purse again, saw my stern look, and thought better of it. “And John needs me too.”

  I nodded, although between you and me, I was beginning to doubt that men needed anything that couldn’t be bought at Walmart. “I’m sure he does, dear.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you? Well, it’s true. I’m all that John has as well. His family is gone too, and he’s always found it hard to make friends.”

  “Even at work? In the history department?”

  “Even there. He’s never had what you might call a zingy personality. But he was more fun to be with when he was young.” I said nothing. The scars on my tongue prove it. “Really, he was. He made me laugh sometimes.”

  “If you say so, dear.”

  She said nothing for several minutes.

  “Well,” I said at last, “we could drive around some more—maybe head over toward Bedford. Maybe he’s at Walmart.”

  “Let’s go back to the inn,” she said quietly. “I’ll wait for him there.”

  ***

  I put my sanity on the line and called my sister’s fiance, Melvin Stoltzfus. I used my private line, which can only be accessed from my bedroom.

  “Hernia police,” a cheery voice said. It clearly did not belong to Melvin.

  My sigh of relief rustled the leaves in downtown Pittsburgh. “Zelda, dear, this is Magdalena. I need some help locating the whereabouts of one of my guests.”

  “Have you lost someone again, Magdalena?”

  “No, and I didn’t lose my fifth-grade Sunday-school class. They put sleeping pills in my coffee and sneaked out through the window. And it’s not my fault—I told Reverend Schrock to put bars on it!”

  “Oh. Well, who is missing this time?”

  “A guest of mine. Dr. John Burk. Actually, he’s not a real doctor—he’s a fud.”

  “What did you say?”

  “He’s a Ph.D., dear.”

  “Oh. Well, how long has this fud been missing?”

  “Uh—well, only a couple of hours, but his wife is really worried. Isn’t there anything you can do to help?”

  “Magdalena, you know I’d like to help, but Melvin has his rules.”

  “Yes, but he’s not on duty today, is he?”

  “Actually, he is. He just ran over to Sam’s to buy some band aids. He got a nasty paper cut.”

  “Making airplanes again?”

  “Judge not, Magdalena. Isn’t that what the Bible says?”

  I sighed. It is so hard to be charitable when the world is filled with idiots.

  “Zelda, I’m not asking that you issue an all-points bulletin or contact the F.B.I. I just want you to help me keep an eye out for
this Burk fellow.”

  It was Zelda’s turn to sigh. A self-confessed agnostic, she is a much better Christian than I.

  “Okay. Give me a brief description.”

  “Six feet, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, mostly bald, and has a cumulus cloud crowning his cranium.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind dear. Just put down that he always looks troubled.”

  “Gotcha. Now I can’t promise—just a minute.” She put me on hold for the entire length of “Muskrat Love” by Captain and Tenille. Just when I was about to confess my sins and plead to be removed from hell, she got back on the line. “Sorry, they were stuck again.”

  “Those crippled bats you wear?”

  “They’re not crippled bats, Magdalena, they’re eyelashes. These are the new Tammy Faye Ultralites. They’re not supposed to stick like that. Now, where was Mr. Burk last seen?”

  “The PennDutch. He stormed off after a tiff with his wife and drove off in a new blue Saturn.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Zelda, what is it?”

  “Are you sitting down, Magdalena?”

  “Yes.” Actually, I was lying comfortably on my bed, my feet propped on a pile of pillows.

  “Do you think he might have run off with Susannah?”

  “What? You haven’t been using that bourbon-based eyeliner again, have you?”

  “That was blush, and the color was called bourbon. Look, Magdalena, I’m trying to be helpful.”

  “Then what’s this stuff about Susannah running off with a geriatric Pittsburgher, for crying out loud? She’s marrying Melvin the day after tomorrow!”

  I heard the receiver on the other end thud against Zelda’s desk, strike something else, and then land on the floor with a loud crack. Only then did I remember that Zelda was hopelessly, and inexplicably, in love with her boss.