Puddin' on the Blitz

by Tamar Myers

  So after about five minutes of boo-hooing, I managed to talk myself into calling it quits. After all, the tissue box was beginning to run low, and I was getting a sore spot at the base of my nose from wiping it so much. Besides, what good is it to throw yourself a pity party, if no one comes?

  Get a grip on it just long enough to drive out to Agnes’s, I told myself. She’s your best friend, but she’s also on your list of suspects. Agnes is the perfect person to see right now. She will either comfort you with her loving words of friendship, or become so indignant at your leading questions that you’ll become angry, maybe even suspicious in return. Love, anger, suspicion – feeling any one of those three emotions was a sight better than despair and self-recrimination. One thing was for certain: Agnes was not going to blame me for taking a stand against Ida’s interference in my marriage.

  Although Agnes had never had a mother-in-law, due to Doc’s advanced age when they married, she had never been a fan of Mother Malaise. When Agnes’s two dotty, elderly uncles sold their neighbouring farm and joined the Convent of Perpetual Apathy as its only male postulants, Agnes was horrified. When she learned that her uncles had signed their assets over to the convent, she was livid and attempted to sue on her uncles’ behalf. Most unfortunately, thanks to a court-appointed psychiatrist, the dotty nudists were deemed merely eccentric, still quite capable of making their decisions.

  As soon as I pulled on to the lane that leads to Agnes’s farm, I stopped and called Freni to let her know where I was. Heaven forfend that I should cause her the worry that Gabe was causing me. Trust me, one can be furious with a husband, whilst still loving him with a passion.

  Having made that important call, I kept a sharp eye out for the billy goat and was quite relieved when I saw that he was back in his pasture. Then came a complete surprise; there was a vehicle other than Agnes’s parked up by the house. Moreover, it had a logo stencilled on the side that read: Armageddonland, Inc. The van was black, but the letters, which were bright red and composed of tongues of flames, were painted on a pale-yellow background in the shape of a long, narrow oval. My first thought was that this was yet another sick joke foisted on us, the community of believers, by some of those more militant, left-leaning liberals. You know, like the ones who affix the Christian symbol of a fish to the rear of their car, except that their fish sports legs, which indicates that they believe in evolution.

  Imagine, then, that when I got inside her house, I found my dear friend engaged in a serious conversation with a young man named Lawrence, who really did work for a company called Armageddonland Inc. Lawrence’s mission was to purchase forty thousand acres of farmland in Bedford County for use as the future home of the greatest and most important theme park that the world had ever seen.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘OK, I’ll bite,’ Agnes said. ‘What is going to make yours the greatest and most important theme park in the world? But first tell me, have you ever been to Disneyworld?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ the young man said. ‘To be perfectly honest, I found it very entertaining. But I was a child then, and I thought like a child.’

  ‘How old are you now, Larry?’ I said.

  ‘My name is Lawrence,’ he said, with a flip of his blond bangs. ‘Only my parents call me Larry.’

  ‘Gotcha, dear,’ I said, borrowing from teenagers’ lingo. ‘So then, how old are you, Lawrence, now that you are no longer a child?’

  ‘How old are you, ma’am?’

  Agnes chortled. ‘He’s gotcha there, Magdalena.’

  ‘I’m seventeen, Lawrence,’ I said.

  Lawrence snorted. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I might prevaricate from time to time, but I don’t tell boldface lies. I am indeed seventeen years old, as well as eighteen, and thirty, all the way up to fifty-one. That’s my upper limit. What’s your upper limit, Lawrence?’

  Lawrence tossed his head again, but not a hair moved out of place. ‘Frankly, Magdalena, that’s none of your business.’

  ‘Ooh,’ Agnes said, ‘this is going to be interesting.’

  ‘Tut, tut, Lawrence,’ I said calmly, ‘only my friends call me Magdalena. Everyone else addresses me as Miss Yoder.’

  ‘Or Mrs Rosen,’ Agnes said, who never shied from poking the bear.

  So far, we’d all been standing in Agnes’s large country kitchen, which was good, because young Lawrence had room to recoil without causing any damage. There’s not much harm one can do by stepping back against a refrigerator, except for knocking a handful of magnets askew, and sending some recipes and newspaper clippings fluttering to the floor.

  ‘By any chance are you that Magdalena Yoder?’ Lawrence finally managed to say.

  ‘As big as life, and twice as ugly,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘One of my guests said it once, and I thought it rather suited me. It’s an affirmative answer to your question, dear.’

  ‘Forgive me, ma’am,’ Lawrence said. ‘I didn’t mean to be so rude. I thought you were just – well, just a regular somebody.’ He held out his hand for me to shake. On the outside of his wrist was the tattoo of a tiny blue flower with a bright yellow centre. It was incongruously sweet, given the vibe that I was picking up from this young man. Somehow I could tell that he could be one of those guys who would break practically every bone in my long slim fingers, and then shake my damaged digits until my arm separated from my bony shoulder. Seeing as how my fingers were my most attractive physical attribute, I was not about to let Lawrence have his way with them.

  ‘Sorry, Lawrence, but I don’t shake hands. Given that I still don’t know your age, for all I know you still might be in elementary school. Who knows, you might have cooties or something. So thanks, but no thanks.’

  Lawrence smiled. ‘Gotcha. But for the record, I’m twenty-two.’

  ‘Are you single?’ Agnes said. ‘Would you like something to drink? I only have soft drinks, but I also have three kinds of juice. And coffee. I could put on a pot real quick. And tea. The kettle’s right here.’

  ‘Down girl,’ I said to Agnes, who in turn shot me an underserved dirty look. Lawrence was twenty-nine years younger than her, for crying out loud.

  Lawrence didn’t respond to Agnes’s beverage offer. ‘Miss Yoder, you’re the owner of Amish Sinsations, yes?’

  ‘I own sixty percent. Why?’

  ‘Because I’m about to make you an offer you can’t refuse.’

  Agnes giggled. ‘She doesn’t watch movies. She’s certainly never seen The Godfather.’

  Lawrence cocked his head. He was clearly amused. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a rube and a country bumpkin,’ I said. ‘A cultural philistine. I wouldn’t know the Louvre from a loo. What of it?’

  ‘Mags, this is serious,’ Agnes said. ‘You wouldn’t believe what he just offered me for my forty acres.’

  ‘What?’ I said. I have nothing against acquiring information.

  ‘A quarter of a million,’ Agnes said.

  ‘Rubles?’ I said. I wasn’t being serious, of course.

  ‘Is she always like this?’ Lawrence asked.

  ‘Yes, unfortunately she is,’ Agnes said. ‘Go ahead and tell her what your company is doing. It’s right up her alley, so I’m sure she’ll hop right up on board.’

  Given my prominent, probing, Yoder proboscis, I can smell a conman a mile away, and although young Lawrence didn’t reek of deception, I already knew that I would hate his proposal. I would have bolted for the door, had I not so desperately needed to speak to Agnes privately after the cheeky youth’s departure.

  ‘Please make your spiel quick,’ I said to Lawrence, ‘or else we need to go somewhere so that I might sit. As it is, I’m too tired to hop on board anything. The best that you can hope for is that Agnes pushes from behind, and you pull to get me on board. But by no means do you get to push my behind. Capiche?’

  ‘OK, Miss Yoder,’ Lawrence began, speaking agreeably
fast, ‘Armageddonland, which is scheduled to open in the next five years, will be the largest amusement park in the world. But more importantly, it will be entirely Bible based, primarily on the Book of Revelation, of course. You see, so many young people these days are drifting away from the Church. Generations ago, church services were your Sunday entertainment. Now it’s your phones, social networking, video games, and movies, anything but church.

  ‘Not only that, many people find Christ’s promise to return quickly disheartening after more than two millennia. Telling them that “God’s time” is different from our time just doesn’t ring true anymore. But we at Armageddonland have thought of how to make people excited about the end times once more.

  ‘Our park will include terrifying, and glorifying, passages from the Book of Revelation brought to life inside the largest covered dome anywhere on the planet. Our state-of-the-art holograms are so realistic, for instance, that they’re guaranteed to give you nightmares unless you’ve been saved. Take for instance, the horse-size locusts described in Revelation 9:7, with women’s hair and lion’s teeth. Their awesome wings sounded like chariots being pulled into battle by many horses. And they had giant scorpion tails which, if they stung you, hurt for five months.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  But Lawrence wasn’t through with his pitch. ‘You get to role play too. You know, slay demons, and watch sinners die by the tens of thousands while God’s holy wrath gets poured down upon them. And there will be plenty of rides, like an unbelievably real lake of fire your train will pass over, and you get to hear the unrepentant screaming in perpetual agony which, of course, they will have deserved by then.’

  ‘Will it be called Lake Schadenfreude?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Lawrence said.

  ‘She’s being facetious,’ Agnes said.

  ‘What does that even mean?’ Lawrence said. ‘Is that Pennsylvania Dutch as well?’

  ‘It means that I think Armageddonland is a horrible idea. Do you know that many Christians believe that the Book of Revelation was either John’s dream, or allegorical?’

  ‘Then they’re not true Christians,’ Lawrence said.

  ‘Tread carefully,’ Agnes said, ‘or you might not get what you came for. Remember that she holds the lynchpin.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said to Agnes. ‘What’s this about a lynchpin?’

  Lawrence literally stepped in front of Agnes. ‘Miss Yoder, it’s safe to say that as an eating establishment, your restaurant is history. No one is going to feel safe dining at a place where the food killed someone.’

  ‘She didn’t die there,’ I said. ‘She died at my inn.’

  ‘Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,’ the young squirt said. ‘The food came from there, all the same. No matter how thoroughly you clean that joint of yours, you’re never going to convince people that you’ve gotten every speck of ricin out of every nook and crack.’

  ‘Cranny,’ Agnes said.

  ‘What?’ Lawrence said.

  ‘The phrase is “nook and cranny”, not “nook and crack”.’

  ‘Ricin?’ I said. ‘What makes you think it was ricin?’

  ‘Because that’s the substance the previous owner put in her pie when she murdered that famous author two years ago. It astounds me that your restaurant did remarkably well after all that, but then again, your genius is legendary. But let’s be realistic, Miss Yoder, the public has a strong will to live, so I doubt if they’re going to want to take their chances a second time. That’s why I’m here to offer you a fair market price for a cramped lot on a busy highway, so close to the Turnpike that the roar of traffic practically has diners holding their hands over their ears, rather than clutching their eating utensils.’

  ‘Oh, those poor dears,’ I said. ‘And to think that all this time I was abusing their ears, as well as their wallets, completely unaware of the torture that I was inflicting on them. I was, in fact, double-tasking.’

  ‘Stop it, Mags,’ Agnes snapped. She turned to Lawrence and wrung her hands. Figuratively. ‘What you’ve just witnessed is Miss Yoder’s unique brand of sarcastic humour. Trust me, she can be quite amusing at times once you get to know her – or so I’ve been told. Anyway, it’s probably time for you to cut straight to the chase and tell her how much she plans to profit by selling that worthless pile of bricks and mortar formerly known as Amish Sinsations.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’ Lawrence said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Agnes said.

  Lawrence scowled. ‘It’s common knowledge that women are incapable of being funny. As for sarcasm, that’s not in their nature; that’s not the way God created them.’

  Agnes slapped her forehead. ‘Oh my gracious! And to think that all these years my best friend might have been besting me with her beastly sense of non-existent humour.’

  ‘And now I know that you’re joking,’ Lawrence said. ‘And at my expense.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘As a woman, she’s incapable of joking.’

  ‘Ineffectual attempts at humour, and actually being funny are not the same thing,’ Lawrence said. He showed himself to the door. ‘The two of you are going to be sorry, mark my words.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Geez Louise,’ Agnes moaned before the door was finished slamming behind him. ‘I sure could have used that quarter million dollars.’

  ‘Agnes, setting aside that hideous venture for a moment, Armageddonland was taking advantage of you. Sure, that’s a lot of money for just forty acres, but you’re not factoring in this historic farmhouse, a large barn in tip-top shape, and the building that Old Doc used for his veterinary practice. If your goal was simply to buy a cosy cottage in town, I’m sure that you could find a young, horse-loving couple, with a growing family, who would gladly pay you that same quarter mil. They’d be winners, and you’d be a winner, knowing that your town wasn’t destroyed by millions of stampeding tourists.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. And if I wasn’t the emotionally stunted woman whom you know me to be, I’d throw my long gangly arms around you in a warm embrace as added assurance.’

  Agnes laughed. ‘If you did, you’d have to pat me on the back like you were burping a baby. That’s the way we were raised, as if human backs were too hot to touch for more than a millisecond.’

  ‘It’s too bad we weren’t born English,’ I said. ‘At least then we wouldn’t be so repressed.’

  Agnes laughed harder, which was my goal because I had a few very important, dicey questions to ask. But first I steered her into the living room and got her seated in Doc’s comfortable old recliner. Then I smiled pleasantly which, alas, may not have been the right move.

  ‘Mags,’ Agnes said, ‘do you think that you can hold it in until you get home? I haven’t had the energy to clean any of the bathrooms since Doc died and, well – they’re in a sorry state.’

  ‘I’m fine, dear. Agnes, tell me, did you think that Sarah Conway was a dead ringer for Barbara Hostetler?’

  Agnes’ plump little mouth formed a perfect ‘o’. ‘What kind of macabre joke was that? Frankly, Mags, that kind of humour is beneath you.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘I wasn’t joking. Did they look alike? That’s all I want to know.’

  ‘Oops, sorry. I thought the “dead ringer” part was intentional. But no, I didn’t see a resemblance. Did you?’

  I scratched my head. ‘Not just a resemblance, but Sarah was Barbara’s doppelgänger. She was like a carbon copy – no, a Xerox copy, or copy on a 3D printer. Same face, same hair, same body, same height, same everything.’

  ‘Same height? Mags, no way! Sarah Conway was at least four inches shorter than Barbara. Maybe six.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s not possible. I stood right next to her, and she towered over me, just like Barbara does.’

  ‘Was she wearing heels?’

  ‘Heels?’ I said.

  ‘High heels,’ Agnes said. ‘Stiletto shoes. Of the sort you like to make fun of
.’

  ‘Harrumph,’ I said. ‘That’s embarrassing. I don’t suppose that you have any cracks large enough for me to crawl into.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure this old house has plenty of cracks that will need patching before I put it on the market, but none which can accommodate a giantess like you. However, I can’t believe you didn’t notice her shoes. The minute she walked into the restaurant, I was worried that she might fall off those things, and then we would have a huge lawsuit on our hands.’

  ‘Ding, dang, dong,’ I said.

  ‘Magdalena, you potty mouth!’

  ‘Sorry dear for getting carried away with my swearing. I can’t believe I missed that. I mean, I saw her shoes – I just didn’t figure them into her height. I must be losing it. So nothing else about her made you think of Barbara?’

  ‘Nope,’ Agnes said.

  I took a deep breath as I prayed for guidance. ‘Agnes, do you ever find it difficult to be my friend?’

  I was pleased to see that my question startled Agnes. However, I immediately wished that I hadn’t asked it.

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes said without a second’s hesitation.

  ‘You do? Why? How?’

  ‘The same reasons that everybody else does, of course.’

  ‘What? I can’t think of anyone else who might be so envious of my success that they might want to sabotage one of my businesses, even if I do own just a sixty percent share.’

  It is plum amazing just how fast a sphere-shaped woman can pop to her teeny-weeny tootsies and stick a landing like the Olympic gymnasts I’ve seen on Gabe’s massive flat-screen television. My right foot is the size of England, and my left foot the size of Scotland, and I have the body mass of a bean pole, yet I would pitch forward and land on my significant Yoder nose if I tried a move like that.

  ‘Out, Magdalena,’ Agnes shouted. ‘Get out now.’

  ‘Whatever for, dear? I thought we were making progress?’

  ‘Progress? On what? You came here for the express purpose of interrogating me, didn’t you? I’m one of your suspects, and don’t you deny it. I can tell when you’re lying, Magdalena. We’ve been friends our entire lives, best friends even – until now.’