by Tamar Myers
“Does she have any enemies?”
“Do you?”
“Touché, dear. But I mean real enemies, somebody who might want to do away with her—never mind, I get your point. Just tell me this, did Old Irma have any plans for today? Anybody expected to drop by—maybe pick her up and take her shopping someplace? Or to the doctor?”
“How should I know? I’m not her social secretary.”
“Indeed, you’re not, but you are her pastor’s wife. You might have overheard some conversation that might give a clue as to her whereabouts.”
“Well, I didn’t. Why the sudden interest in Old Irma?”
“It isn’t sudden, dear. You know good and well I sometimes pick her up for church.”
“Magdalena Portulacca Yoder, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re not dealing with an amateur, here, Magdalena. I know you want information on Old Irma, but I can’t be of any help unless you get to the point.”
“Okay! Old Irma is missing, and so is one of my guests, and there’s blood on the sink and the water was running, and since you’re the nosiest woman in the county, I thought if anyone would know anything, it would be you.”
I would not have been surprised if Lodema had chosen that moment to shatter my eardrum. Instead she was remarkably cooperative, which made me highly suspicious. Perhaps the reverend hadn’t gone fishing after all, but merely around the bend. Perhaps he had a gun pointed at his wife’s dyed head and was forcing her to be nice for a change.
“Old Irma is not who you think she is, Magdalena,” Lodema said without a trace of sarcasm.
“Give me a break, dear. I don’t believe for one second that tired old rumor that Old Irma Yoder is really Milton Berle.”
“Well, you must admit that was rather creative of me. Remember those old TV shows with Uncle Miltie?”
“I don’t watch television, dear, and as the pastor’s wife, neither should you.”
“The reverend says that nature shows are a testimonial to the Creator.”
“Can we please get back to Old Irma?” I wailed.
“Ah, yes, the mystery woman. Well, for starters, she’s not one hundred and two.”
“Yes, she is—”
“She’s one hundred and three. I checked her baptismal record. It’s on file in the church office.”
“Well, the nerve of the woman!”
“Exactly. But oh, Magdalena, there’s much more. And I mean really juicy stuff.”
“How juicy?”
“This will knock your socks off, as the young people say.”
Always a cooperative soul, I slipped off my shoes. “Sock it to me, babe.”
Fifteen
Hearty SPAM® Breakfast Skillet
2 cups frozen diced or shredded potatoes
1 cup chopped onion
l medium green bell pepper, cut into 1-inch thin strips
l medium red or yellow pepper, cut into 1-inch thin strips
2 teaspoons oil
1 (12-ounce) can SPAM® Luncheon Meat, cut into julienne strips
1 (8-ounce) carton frozen fat-free egg product, thawed, or 4 eggs
1 teaspoon dried basil
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
6 drops hot pepper sauce
l cup shredded Cheddar cheese
In large nonstick skillet, cook potatoes, onion, and peppers in oil over medium-high heat 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add SPAM®; cook and stir 5 minutes. In small bowl, combine egg product, basil, salt, pepper, and hot pepper sauce; blend well. Pour over mixture in skillet. Cover. Cook over medium-low heat 8 to 12 minutes or until set. Sprinkle with cheese; remove from heat.
Serves 6.
NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION PER SERVING:
Calories 294; Protein 17g; Carbohydrate 17g; Fat 18g; Cholesterol 50mg; Sodium 725mg.
Sixteen
Is it a sin to salivate at the mere promise of juicy gossip? If so, call me the Whore of Babylon. You may even call me Lucifer, if you must, because I was drooling like a three-month-old baby with a tooth coming in.
I have tried to be a good Christian neighbor to Old Irma, the Good Lord knows I have. But the woman is impossible to like. Even Papa, who had the soul of a saint, prayed daily for charitable feelings toward the old crone.
There is no way getting around it; Irma Yoder is mean. True, it was Lodema Schrock who spread the word about the breakup of my pseudo-marriage with Aaron, and who tried to drum me out of the Mennonite Women’s Sewing Circle, but it was Irma who stood in the doorway of Beechy Grove Mennonite Church and whacked me with her cane.
“You sitting down, Magdalena?” Lodema asked.
“Yes, and I’m bracing myself against the check-in counter. Let me have it.”
“Well, you’re never going to believe this, and I promised the reverend that I would never repeat confidences he shares with me, but this one I overheard by accident, so strictly speaking, I’m not obligated to keep it to myself, am I?”
“Spit it out, dear!”
“Okay, hold your horses. I just want to do the right thing.” Lodema sounded dangerously hesitant. “I mean, this is the right thing, isn’t it?”
I refrained from telling Lodema to have her tongue surgically removed. “The right thing is to find the old gal and make sure nothing has happened to her. Who knows what information might be useful?”
“That’s what I thought. So, here goes. Old Irma, when she was not so old, was once a cabaret singer in Paris.”
“Get out of town!”
“I beg your pardon? You said you wanted to hear everything.”
I am constantly reminded that, thanks to a worldly clientele, I am far hipper than your average Hernian. “That’s just an expression, dear. Is this on the level?”
“I heard her tell the reverend myself. You see, sometimes I do secretarial work for him—the church doesn’t have a secretary you know, even though Elm Hill Mennonite has a full-time paid secretary, and they’re only half our size—”
“Get back to your story, dear. Please,” I was careful to add. Lodema wouldn’t hesitate to hang up on God.
“Well, the wall between the reverend’s study and that little closet I get stuck in is only made of plywood. You can hear everything through it. So anyway, there I am, typing away on the Sunday bulletin, and I hear Irma Yoder tell the reverend that back in the early 1930s she worked in Paris. He asks what kind of work she did—maybe she was a missionary or something because you know, the French are Catholics and in need of salvation—but oh no, she says she worked as a dancer in something called the ‘follies’ and then when her legs started looking old, she switched over to singing. Sang in what they call a cabaret. Sort of smoky nightclub, I guess, where they had variety acts. You ever been to any kind of show, Magdalena?”
“Is this a trap?”
“Oh, come on, you can tell me!”
“No, I haven’t,” I said honestly and quite emphatically. “Have you?”
“Once. I wasn’t born a Mennonite, you know. My folks were Methodists.”
I gasped. That was certainly news to me. Methodists were just spitting distance from Presbyterians who, everyone knows, are practically Unitarians except that they believe in the Trinity.
Lodema sighed, ruffling my arm hairs again. “I was eighteen. For my high-school graduation present my folks took me into New York City—to a Broadway play! West Side Story, can you imagine that? There was dancing and even a little swearing!”
“Any nudity?”
She sighed again. “No. But there were some awfully tight jeans.”
I was torn between begging her for details and getting on with my business. Reluctantly I decided that Lodema’s sordid past would have to take a back seat to Irma’s.
“How did Irma Yoder get on that slippery road to you-know-where? You did say she was born a Mennonite, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, but when she was still very young she was jilted
by her fiance. He literally left her standing at the altar. Walked out during the middle of the ceremony.
“The very next day Irma left Hernia and went to Pittsburgh, where she got a job as a waitress. Then one day a customer heard her singing and offered her a job at a nightclub. Well, we all know that the road to hell is wide and slippery, and Irma Yoder slid straight from Pittsburgh to Paris. I saw an old newspaper story on her once. It said she was really quite good. Not only could she sing, but she played some sort of horn. A trumpet, I think. Some kind of brass instrument, at any rate.”
“Imagine that, a Mennonite girl in Paris.”
“Well! She was no longer a proper Mennonite by then, was she? Lydia Shoemaker says she heard from Veronica Rickenbach who heard from Anna Lichty that Irma took lovers.”
“Get out of town!”
“Why, Magdalena, I thought—“
“It’s just an expression!” I wailed. “I already told you that. Now get on with your story.”
“Well, if you insist. Where was I?”
“Lovers,” I hissed. This was not prurient interest, mind you—well, maybe it was, but I was properly appalled as well. Still, the very word lovers intrigued me. Except for Melvin, Susannah had never had any lovers—just boyfriends and what she called one-night stands; the dregs of society gleaned from rest areas along the interstate and cafes where the flies piled on the windowsills with each passing year. I need not tell you that I had never had a lover. A lover was—well, it was almost literary. But still a sin, of course.
“Ah yes, Irma Yoder’s lovers. Aristocrats, most of them. Men with titles, or important government positions. She was a great beauty, you know—in the worldly sense of the word. Anyway, it is even rumored that she was Charles DeGaulle’s mistress for a while. Supposedly he dumped her because—well, there really is no decent word for it, Magdalena.”
“Say it anyway!”
“Uh—okay, but I’m only repeating what I heard. Irma was insatiable.”
“A strumpet with a trumpet!”
“Of course that rumor is pretty tame compared to some of the others.”
Lodema paused. Whether for dramatic effect, or to catch her breath, it doesn’t matter. While she paused, I prayed. If the Good Lord didn’t strike me dead or smite me with a plague for being on the receiving end of such juicy gossip, I would donate an extra thousand dollars to the foreign missions fund for each additional rumor Lodema shared. That way some impoverished missionary in Africa could benefit from my penchant for the prurient.
“Tell me the other rumors,” I begged. I owed it to the missionaries, after all.
“Well, there was the rumor she had an affair with one of the German high command during the early days of Vichy France.”
I gasped. “Irma did the nasty with a Nazi?”
“Apparently, she was very much in love with him, but not he with her.”
“That seems to be the story of her life. Tell me more about the floozy with the flugelhorn,” I said, helping to spread God’s word in Africa.
“Well, I haven’t even got to the best part. They say she had a baby by the Nazi. Actually, some folks say she had two babies—twins. A boy and a girl.”
“Oh, my.” Fornicating with the devil was one thing, but having his litter quite another. The missionaries were going to make out like bandits.
“Well, how do you like them apples?” Lodema’s voice rose with every syllable. No doubt the woman was high on hearsay.
I swallowed hard. Sin might be tasty, but it has a putrid aftertaste. “I must say, dear, that this is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever heard. A horny hornist from Hernia as Hitler’s harlot—m”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Magdalena. It wasn’t Hitler—it was some other high muckety-muck. Franz something, I think his name was.”
“Even so, I’ve known Irma Yoder all my life, and she doesn’t have any children.”
“They say she gave the baby—or babies, as the case may be—up for adoption. One story says they were placed in a French orphanage, another that they were brought back here and adopted by a Mennonite family.”
It took me only a few seconds to do the math. I wasn’t born until well after WWII, and I didn’t have a brother—that I knew of. Still, I’ve always had the feeling I was adopted. Never mind that I’m the spitting image of Mama when she was my age. Surely my real mama would have relented and allowed me to go to the senior prom, even if there was dancing.
“Why is it Mennonites are not allowed to have sex standing up?” I asked bitterly.
Lodema cleared her throat. “They’re not?”
“Of course not,” I snapped, “it might lead to dancing.”
“Must you always be so tawdry, Magdalena?”
“Mel You’re the one who started yapping about a tuba-tooting tootsie who did the hootchy-cootchy with half of France.”
“Well, she did, and like I said, I think it was a trumpet.”
“Trumpet, crumpet, it just doesn’t seem like her. She may have a tongue that can dice dairy, but other than that, the Irma Yoder I know is the most devout member of Beechy Grove Mennonite Church, present company excepted.”
“Thank you, Magdalena—“
“I mean me.”
“Always putting yourself first, aren’t you, Magdalena? Well, just remember that you lived with a married man who was not your lawfully married husband.”
I gasped, and had to spit out a mouthful of Lodema’s hair. “That is so unfair of you! I didn’t know Aaron was married.”
“Well, that’s what you say, at any rate.”
“Let’s not forget Formula number twelve!” I screamed. “And you know what? I think you made all that stuff up about Irma Yoder. I mean, what did she do, suddenly have a religious conversion?”
“Exactly,” Lodema said, cowed by my threat.
“I still think that’s ridiculous. I know people can change, dear, but that much?”
“Converts can. They’re twice as zealous as everyone else.”
“You should know, dear. Didn’t you just say you were once a Methodist?”
Of course, I deserved to get the receiver slammed in my ear, but to be absolutely honest, it should have happened earlier in the conversation. No doubt Lodema was genuinely worried about her missing husband, which would explain why she was off her stride. At any rate, I could feel that someone was watching me so I casually laid my receiver back in its cradle. Trust me, a face-saving gesture is not the same as a lie.
***
I scowled at young Marjorie Frost. Contrary to what Susannah says, one cannot plant corn in my creases. “Doesn’t a gal deserve a little privacy?”
The earnest hazel eyes met my gaze without blinking. “You told us to gather here at eight-thirty, and it’s eight- thirty-two. I thought you valued punctuality.”
“Don’t get fresh with me, dear,” I said sternly. Frankly, I admired the child. I wouldn’t have dared be that forthright at her age. It wasn’t until my thirtieth birthday, when I realized I had nothing left to lose, that I began to be candid. I said as much to Marjorie.
“I was a real woose,” I added.
“That’s wuss,” she said with a faint smile. “Miss Yoder, I’m afraid my husband won’t be joining us on the search.”
“What do you mean your husband won’t be joining us on the search?”
“Frank says he has some business in town.”
“Which town? Hernia?”
Maijorie shrugged. “My husband is a busy man.”
“Well, I hate to burst your bubble, dear, but there is no one in Hernia to do business with, except Sam the grocer and those folks over at the feed store.”
“Then maybe it was that other town.”
“Bedford?”
“Look, Miss Yoder, I happen to trust my husband. He’s not like that horrible Mr. Hart.”
“Did I hear my name spoken in vain, little lady?” Bob was standing in the door between the parlor and the lobby, and, much to my relief, he
was alone.
“Indeed you did, dear. It seems that your little band of followers is deserting me.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, young Marjorie here tells me that her husband has backed out of the search party.”
“Don’t call me young Marjorie,” she snapped.
I nodded. “Sorry, dear.” I turned to Bob. “Is it true you’re a master tracker?”
Black bushy brows lifted in surprise and then settled on a happy face. Flattery, I have finally learned, will get you just about anywhere you want to go. At least with me. Tell me I’m beautiful, and I’ll let you ride in my BMW for free. And although, in some cases, flattery might well be a distant cousin of deceit, it doesn’t have to be a flat-out lie.
“As a matter of fact, Miss Yoder, I am a good tracker—if you mean it in the sense I think you do. I do a lot of hunting back home. Shot me a buck with a record rack last year.”
“Perfect! We could use a good tracker.”
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Oh, not for deer or anything like that. I mean people.”
“Well, ma’am, I don’t know as how I’d be so good at that. That professor fellow disappeared yesterday, didn’t he? Them footprints might be pretty messed up by now. But now my daddy, he coulda done it. His mama was a full-blooded Cherokee. Only Daddy’s dead now, you see. Died twenty years ago in a terrible accident. Happened right here in Pennsylvania, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, ma’am. In that long tunnel between here and a town called Somerset. Two trucks boxed a car in and, well, the driver of the one truck pushed the car into the back of the first, and the car just sort of folded up. Like an accordion, they say. Anyway, my daddy was a trucker, and he was way past retirement age. That was supposed to be his last haul, you know.”
Every hair on my head stood up—well, tried to. Fortunately, I was wearing it in a bun, but the bun became as hard as yesterday’s roll.
“When exactly did this happen?”
“It was exactly twenty years ago August thirteenth.”
“Which truck was your daddy driving?”