Puddin' on the Blitz

by Tamar Myers

  ‘Why, you snake!’ I cried happily. ‘Why, you evil dog!’ Then I slapped my mouth for having uttered such terrible expressions, but I slapped it gently. After all, it behoves no one if the punishment exceeds the crime.

  Sam grinned. ‘You know, either these women forgot that I speak the dialect – which I speak on a daily basis with some of them in the store – or else they didn’t care. Magdalena, you’ve never seen a gossipier group of ladies. Or more convincing arguments about who Miss Conway’s killer is.’

  I swatted away another fly. ‘And that would be me, of course.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mags. There’s only one person who’s accusing you of this dastardly deed. Even her myopic minions aren’t spewing her poisonous rhetoric.’

  I swatted at that ding-dang fly again, missing him by just a wing length. ‘You’re undoubtedly referring to Mother Malaise. So who else are we talking about?’

  ‘Whom do you think?’

  ‘Not Barbara!’ It came out more as a loud whinge, than a wail. ‘Why must poor Barbara always be the butt of everyone’s suspicion, everyone’s joke, just because she came from somewhere else? You know, Sam, I don’t think that most of us Christians realize this, but the most repeated commandment in the Bible is to love and care for the stranger in our midst, for we were once strangers ourselves. Gabe says that this commandment occurs thirty-nine times in the Torah, which is the first five books of our Old Testament.’

  ‘Huh. Well, I don’t think that applies to illegal immigrants.’

  ‘I didn’t bring that up to start a political debate, Sam; I’m speaking only about Barbara. It seems that she constantly rubs people the wrong way, but I just don’t see it. I don’t find her abrasive at all. Do you, Sam?’

  Sam cleared his throat, and suddenly appeared interested in the beginnings of some liver spots that were forming on his ruddy hands. Even though he was a shopkeeper, he was also a ginger, who spent Sunday afternoons soaking up the sun.

  ‘Let’s just say that she’s more direct than the local Amish.’ He cleared his throat again and began pushing the cuticle back from his left index finger. ‘Rather like you – but that’s not a bad thing. You’re my favourite relative, you know.’

  I swallowed my irritation yet again. Incidentally, it is a scientific fact that irritation contains not a single calorie. Given that I am forced to swallow so much irritation on a daily basis (hence I never feel hungry), perhaps that is the reason my physique is somewhat on the bony side.

  ‘Sam, dear, through our ancestor Jacob Hochstetler who arrived on the Charming Nancy in 1738, we are related to approximately eighty percent of the Amish and Mennonite families in Pennsylvania. Tell me, have you seen Barbara’s so-called doppelgänger?’

  Sam stood, and stretched, holding his hands up as if cradling the sun before sitting again. ‘You mean Barbara’s mother?’

  ‘She is not!’ I said.

  ‘That’s what the buzz on the Amish phone line says.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘They haven’t even seen her – have they?’

  ‘No, but you have two cooks with Amish connections other than Barbara,’ Sam said.

  ‘Chef Marigold Flanagan, and assistant chef, Lydia Burkholder,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you know how I hate to gossip,’ Sam said, ‘but it was Flanagan who started the rumour that the deceased Miss Conway was Barbara Hostetler’s mother. Really, Mags, you can’t trust a woman who is born into a decent God-fearing Amish family, and then runs off to India and prays to elephants.’

  ‘They don’t pray to elephants,’ I snapped. ‘Sam, don’t you ever read?’

  ‘I read TV Guide,’ he said. ‘My point is that she took up Hinduism when she discovered an age spot on her forehead, then went back to being Presbyterian when the spot vanished after she started using a lightening cream. That woman is as flaky as one of Freni’s pie crusts.’

  I reached over and patted his heavily freckled arm. ‘Yes, you do hate to gossip, dear. That’s always been one of your worst faults.’

  Sam moved his arm just out of reach. ‘You’re mocking me, but that’s all right, because I know how you hate to mock, and how uttering your hurtful words to me right now hurt you even more than they did me.’ He winked. ‘So, shall I continue, or shall I take my toys and go home?’

  ‘Stay and play!’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll be nice-er. I promise.’

  ‘OK then,’ Sam said, ‘let’s talk about Agnes.’

  I recoiled in genuine surprise. ‘Agnes? What has she been saying?’

  ‘I don’t mean what she’s been saying; I mean her. I mean Agnes as our murder suspect.’

  I leaned over and gave Sam a light push. After unloading food trucks for thirty years, Sam doesn’t budge easily.

  ‘Sam, this isn’t a time for joking.’

  ‘I’m not joking, Mags.’

  I might be nonviolent, but I gave his arm a somewhat playful smack. ‘Agnes is my best friend, for crying out loud. What are you saying? That she somehow set me up to take a murder – uh – rap? By sneaking poison into the same food that Gabe just happened to bring home from the restaurant?’

  ‘Yup. Where did Gabe go to pick up the food when he got there? I presume that he called the order in first, so that he didn’t have to wait. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Agnes had it all packaged up and waiting for him behind the hostess stand – no, wait! That doesn’t mean anything. Marigold or Lydia could just as easily have poisoned the food, or even Barbara, for that matter. The toxicology report isn’t even back in yet. All we know is that Sarah Conway was poisoned, and that she died at The PennDutch Inn. But we still don’t know what the poison was, or how fast it acted, or in what form it was delivered. This is all premature speculation.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ Sam said. ‘Except that you, my cousin, my very dear, dear friend – and I am hurt that you didn’t say that I was your best friend – have to keep your eyes open and consider all possibilities. Everyone in your life has to be a suspect.’

  I snorted nervously. ‘Even Little Jacob?’

  ‘No, not wee Little Jacob, and not Alison either. Tell me, how is she coping with this? With the prospect of her mother being behind bars? Having a girlfriend in jail named Brunhilde, etc.’

  ‘Brunhilde was taken by another inmate, Sam. I had to go it alone. But Alison’s a trooper. She’s more upset about the rift her grandmother is causing between her father and me.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sam said, ‘so again I ask, if Dorothy and I were ever to—’

  ‘Shut up, Sam,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘Don’t flirt with me, Mags. Tell me, where do you plan to go from here?’

  ‘To get Freni. I need a reliable childminder if I’m going to do some serious sleuthing.’

  Sam laughed. ‘Childminder? Have you suddenly turned into a Brit?’

  ‘Alison is fourteen, for goodness’ sake. Somehow referring to Freni as a babysitter just doesn’t seem right, even though she’s going to be there for both of my children.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Sam said. ‘What makes you think she’ll make herself available? Didn’t you ruffle her feathers a bit when you hired Barbara as your chef?’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But I’m counting on the fact that Freni will find it easier to forgive me than the thought of spending more time with Barbara, now that the restaurant has to stay closed for the duration of the investigation.’

  ‘Hey,’ Sam said, ‘you’re going to think I’m crazy, but remember what I said about keeping an open mind about everyone.’

  ‘Even you?’ It was meant to be a joke, but I sounded like a startled blue jay. That’s because I knew where he was going with the conversation, and I didn’t like it.

  ‘On that high note,’ Sam said, ‘I bid you adieu.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Ach,’ said Freni, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘It’s you, too, dear,’ I said sweetly. ‘And you look fit as a fiddle, Freni. Although why fi
ddles should look fit, or a healthy person look like a fiddle, is beyond me. Legend has it that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Nero wasn’t very fit, even if his fiddle was, and since that’s neither here nor there, I won’t fiddle around anymore, but get right down to the point. May we please continue our conversation on the porch? Your plethora of progeny are provoking my penchant to prevaricate.’

  ‘Always with the riddles, Magdalena.’ Freni virtually pushed me over the threshold and back on to the front doormat. ‘But my answer is “yah”.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I said.

  ‘You came to ask me back? Good. Now we go, yah?’

  ‘Just like that?’ I said.

  ‘So,’ Freni said, ‘what shall we wait for? Christmas?’

  I’ve always been afraid to look a gift horse in the mouth, lest I find myself gazing fondly in my bathroom mirror. Ergo I was quite happy to hoof it down the walk with Freni and hustle her into my car before we got struck by lightning, or the earth opened up and swallowed us like it did sinners in Old Testament days.

  I reckoned the calamity zone to have about a mile radius, with Barbara’s house being the epicentre, and once we were free of that, I pulled to the side of the road alongside a field of corn. That’s when I noticed a small sign advertising that this crop had been genetically modified, which as everyone hereabouts knows is a sin, on the grounds that modification is akin to evolution. Therefore, I had no choice but to drive on a bit until we reached an area where cow pastures flanked both sides of the country lane.

  ‘Is your car making trouble?’ Freni said, as we stopped the second time.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I wanted to talk to you about something important before we got home, and this seems like a better place.’

  No sooner did the words come out of my mouth than a small herd of Jersey cows rounded the top of the rise to my left. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Jersey cows are the most beautiful dairy breed there is, and their high yields of milk are exceptionally rich in butterfat. My beef with them is that they most certainly are not biblical. I started moving the car again.

  ‘Ach,’ said Freni, ‘we stop, or I get the whiplash.’

  ‘But they’re Jerseys!’

  ‘So, this matters how?’

  ‘Freni, when God created the world, what kind of cow did he create? Holsteins, or Jerseys?’

  Freni stared at me through her bottle thick lenses. ‘This is a serious question?’

  ‘Come on, Freni, answer. Don’t think about it. He only created one kind, so it had to be either Holstein cows, or Jersey cows.’

  Freni stuck her left index finger under her black travelling bonnet, at a spot near her temple, and scratched vigorously for a few seconds. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘when you were a little girl, I read to you from a children’s Bible story book with pictures. This story is about Creation, and Adam and Eve are naming the animals. In the picture Eve has her arms around a Holstein calf, so that is my answer.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘My point, exactly. Both hybrid corn and Jersey cows—’

  ‘I think that now you are knitting with only one needle, Magdalena.’

  ‘What?’ I demanded.

  ‘Maybe you are a few eggs less than a dozen, yah?’

  ‘Are you saying that I’m—?’

  ‘In a rowboat with only one oar in the water.’

  ‘Why, I never!’

  ‘Then maybe now you should, yah?’

  ‘Should do what? I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much!’

  ‘Maybe now you ask for professional help, yah?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  That’s when Freni, my double second cousin once removed, overcame five centuries of inbred Amish and Mennonite reserve, to reach across the seat and gently pat my arm. In order to deviate a similar distance from her comfort zone, an English woman would have to chat up strangers in an American accent, whilst wearing a clown suit, and riding the tube during rush hour.

  ‘Magdalena,’ she said, ‘I think maybe you have the nervous disease like your mama.’ Freni tried to pat me again, but I pulled away. Her effusive display of affection was making my head spin.

  ‘Freni, yes, Mama had a nervous breakdown, but I’m adopted. Remember?’

  ‘Yah,’ Freni said, ‘but your other mama had the nervous breaks too. There are many in our family with this disease.’

  ‘Freni I did not kill that woman; I did not kill Sarah Conway. Do you believe me?’

  She stared at me, wordlessly inscrutable behind her thick glass lenses. Outside the gorgeous Jersey cows were now crowding the fence, craning their tawny necks to get a good look at me. Was this the Devil’s way of mocking me? Or was I really having a nervous breakdown? Maybe it was just the mega-amount of stress I’d been under, what with being arrested and thrown into the slammer, and having my Dearly Beloved driving off angrily. Not to mention having to come to grips with my teenage daughter’s fascination with magic. What is the difference between a so-called ‘break-down’, and a stress overload?

  ‘Freni dear, I asked you a question. Do you think I’m a murderer?’

  I honestly don’t think that I’m a paranoid person. But Freni continued to stare at me on one side, and the Jersey cows on the other. As far as I can tell, not one of the cows was wearing glasses. Their big black eyes seemed to say, You have judged us harshly. That children’s book with the picture of Eve’s arms around a Holstein calf was just some artist’s opinion. You are a judgmental woman, Magdalena.

  ‘But I’m not!’ I said vehemently.

  Finally, Freni spoke. ‘Yah, you cannot kill a person, Magdalena. This I truly believe, because you cannot kill a chicken. Always Mose or I must kill the hen for the stewing pot, for to make the dumplings.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say so sooner, instead of just staring at me?’

  ‘Because I cannot believe that you ask me such a question,’ Freni said. ‘Even if you are having the nervous breaks, I do not think you can kill a person. Not even a very bad person.’

  I put the car into gear. ‘In that case my “nervous breaks” is over – well, at least halfway over. The sooner we get to The PennDutch, so you can watch the kids, the sooner I can put the screws to a few more suspects.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Freni said. Since it was a word that wasn’t part of her lexicon, I felt compelled to follow up on it.

  ‘Hmm, what?’

  ‘What about Thelma Bontrager?’

  ‘Oops.’ I’d completely forgotten that Thelma, who’d been hired to cook for me after Freni had quit in a snit, was scheduled to work today.

  ‘No prob, Bob,’ I said, repeating one of Gabe’s worn-out phrases. ‘Thelma can do the cooking and cleaning, and all you need to do is enjoy the children. You know how much they love their Cousin Freni.’

  Freni did her best to nod in agreement. With little neck to speak of, she tried to engage her torso in the action, but found her shoulder harness constraining. It looked more like she was attempting to scratch her back – then again, maybe she was.

  Nevertheless, by the time I got back to The PennDutch Inn Thelma was already making lunch for Gordon Gaiters and Alison. To my astonishment the two of them were in the dining room bonding over a game of Scrabble. I wasn’t surprised, however, to see that my daughter – she of the horrible grammar – was beating the pants off the old geezer. When she was in fifth grade, Alison came fourth in the Bedford County Spelling Bee. As for my bouncing bundle of joy, he’d already been fed, and was in his high chair happily singing to himself. Never mind that he was wearing a plastic bowl on his head, and had apple sauce oozing down into his eyes.

  ‘Ach,’ said Freni and immediately bustled over to her second cousin twice removed and gathered him up in her grandmotherly arms. Little Jacob squealed with delight, and it’s a fact that Freni squealed with delight right back at him.

  Quite satisfied that my children were in good hands, and that my beloved Freni was happy to be where she was for the moment, I felt my confiden
ce returning. With the help of the Good Lord, of course, I was going to put the brakes on the ‘nervous breaks’. And I certainly wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself, just because my handsome husband was who knows where, and I still had to prove that I was not a murderess.

  Yes, I know it is not politically correct to use that ‘ess’ ending anymore on nouns, as it is considered sexist. However, if I was going to be convicted of that heinous crime, and had to spend a life behind bars, perhaps with some girlfriend named Heather or Courtney, I would at least want to be referred to as a murderess, not a murderer. At least not the way we Americans say it by pronouncing the final ‘r’. But if being a murderess is no longer possible, and if I ever did kill someone, which I would never, ever do, I’d do it in Great Britain, where I would be a murder-uh. Of course, I would never take the life of another human being – only God has that right – I’m just saying.

  At any rate, as I walked from my kitchen to my car, I suddenly felt like I was moving under water. It took effort just to open the car door and close it again. All I wanted to do was lie down on the back seat and go to sleep, but in order to do that, I’d have to get out of the car, and then climb back in. That was way too much trouble. Or, I could clamber over the console, and sort of launch myself into the rear seat. That was way more effort than I was willing to expend.

  But the thing is, when one has the ‘nervous breaks’ one doesn’t necessarily have control over one’s emotions. One minute I was sitting in my car, feeling so defeated by life that I could barely breathe, and the next minute I was bawling like Little Jacob when Alison takes his binky away because she decides that he’s too old for it. Soon I couldn’t breathe through my nose, unless I blew it. Although I keep a box of tissues in the car, who wants to be seen with a bright red nose, and have people think that you’ve been drinking? Especially when one has spent her life being a teetotaller?