by Tamar Myers
Table of Contents
Cover
A Selection of Titles by Tamar Myers
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
A Selection of Titles by Tamar Myers
The Pennsylvania Dutch Mysteries
TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH
PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY AND CRIME
NO USE DYING OVER SPILLED MILK
JUST PLAIN PICKLED TO DEATH
BETWEEN A WOK AND A HARD PLACE
EAT, DRINK AND BE WARY
PLAY IT AGAIN, SPAM
THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE LADLE
THE CREPES OF WRATH
GRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT
CUSTARD’S LAST STAND
THOU SHALT NOT GRILL
ASSAULT AND PEPPER
GRAPE EXPECTATIONS
HELL HATH NO CURRY
AS THE WORLD CHUMS
BATTER OFF DEAD
BUTTER SAFE THAN SORRY
THE DEATH OF PIE *
* available from Severn House
THE DEATH OF PIE
Tamar Myers
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which is was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicably copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2014 by Tamar Myers
The right of Tamar Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
Myers, Tamar
The death of pie.
1. Yoder, Magdalena (Fictitious character)–Fiction.
2. Novelists–Death–Fiction. 3. Murder–Investigation–
Fiction. 4. Mennonites–Fiction. 5. Pennsylvania Dutch
County (Pa.)–Fiction. 6. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title
813.6-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8381-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-512-4 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-531-4 (ePub)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
This book is dedicated to the love of my life, Jeffrey C. Myers.
I met him when I was just fifteen years old, and for me,
it was love at first sight. That was half a century ago!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my three office assistants, to whom I am deeply indebted for their many hours of hard work. First, I would like to thank my office manager of eleven years, Miss Pagan Myers. Pagan is a basenji dog, whose chief tasks consist of guarding my second-story window whilst napping on her very own chair, all the while serenading me with her snores.
Next, I must give credit to my in-house copy-editor, Mr Kasha Myers, a ten-year-old Bengal cat, who can open doors with his paws, and has been taught to call me ‘Ma-Ma.’ Kasha’s style of editing is to stroll across my keyboard, all the while whipping me in the face with his tail. When he is through making his changes, they are scarcely any clearer than the ones suggested by my actual publisher.
Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful for the enpurragement of Mr Dumpster Boy Myers, my faithful secretary of ten years. Dumpster Boy is an orange tabby who began life in a kitchen dumpster behind a restaurant, hence his name. He now weighs twenty pounds. Every morning he follows me up the stairs to my office, plops down just outside and purrs until lunchtime. At that hour he sees it as his duty to accompany me back down the stairs where – poof – suddenly he disappears, not to be seen or heard from again until after supper. His routine varies only on those days that Dumpster Boy decides that he needs to use the copy machine. Having learned where the ‘start’ button is located, Dumpster Boy will push this button and then hop on the machine to watch the paper emerge. Usually this thrill will not suffice, and he will try to ‘help’ the paper along with one of his giant orange paws. If I’ve been away, I can always tell if my secretary has been hard at work at the copy machine by the mountain of crumpled paper balls I find.
ONE
If it is true that only the good die young, I will live to a ripe old age. Indeed, I am a wicked woman. Well, perhaps I exaggerate just a wee bit, although in one way or another, I have broken nine of the Ten Commandments. Of course, none of this is anyone’s business but my own. However, given that I do have a rather crucial point to prove, and that there is a certain method to my madness, I hereby go public with this list of all my worst sins.
For starters, I have never even seen an idol, much less had occasion to bow down to one. However, our idols can be things other than the images carved from stone or wood, things that are more important to us than God with the capital G. In my case, I got sucked into sin one Sunday morning as I lollygagged in my Jacuzzi bathtub, the one with the thirty-two jets, the one I have named Big Bertha. One moment I was soaking lazily, the next I was shouting Bertha’s name at the top of my lungs and thrashing about like a great white shark. I was so ashamed, I tell you, that I never even made it to church that day.
My second huge sin is that I often use the Lord’s name in vain. Why, just last week when somebody cut me off in traffic, nearly sending me up a telephone pole, I heard myself say ‘jam and cheese!’ Using someone’s initials is the same thing as using that person’s name.
Now, about honoring the Sabbath Day in order to keep it holy: I always thought that I did this until I acquired a Jewish husband and learned that the word ‘Sabbath’ is derived from the Hebrew word Shabbat, which refers to Saturday. It was the Emperor Constantine who declared, ex cathedra, that Sunday was suddenly our new Sabbath. Given that God trumps emperor – at least in the heavenly hierarchy – I had never once honored the actual Sabbath Day.
Some commandments are easier to follow than others; that said, it is virtually impossible for any American child to honor their parents by being obedient one hundred percent of the time. Children in the Bible had trouble obeying their folks as well, or else it wouldn’t be necessary to address the topic of honoring one’s parents in the Big Ten.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a rotten kid, and if I did mouth off, Mama wasn’t above slapping my ‘sassy trap,’ as she called it. But when I got to be a teenager I learned tha
t most parents really don’t want to hassle their kids. They don’t want a ‘situation.’ Therefore, if they forbid you to go to Joshua Stahly’s barn dance, they probably have a good reason. But how was I to know that Joshua would somehow manage to sneak in a keg of beer, and that Marlene Deitlemeyer, who had all the morals of a basset hound in heat, would kick over a lantern in the hay loft, whilst having a roll in the same?
Alas, when my parents picked me up at the police station I was forced to tell them that I had not been drinking – so as not to disappoint them, of course – and it was because of the contents of Joshua’s keg that I felt compelled to ‘borrow’ some gum from Marlene’s purse while she was pulling up her stockings. Crash! Boom! Down went more commandments, the ones forbidding lying and stealing. But lest I be judged too harshly, surely one must take into consideration that I was only trying to honor my parents by preserving their image of me? And anyway, I still think that if they hadn’t been quite so strict I wouldn’t have had to lie or steal, and thus those commandments might still be intact. Might.
Don’t think for a minute that I’ve glossed over the Fifth and Sixth Commandants. I shall begin with the Sixth Commandment, the one concerning adultery. Is my elderly cousin, Freni, correct when she claims that one can commit adultery with a Jacuzzi bathtub equipped with thirty-two jets? If so, then I must confess to having a torrid affair with Big Bertha. Oh, the shame of it all, for I am a happily married woman who finds herself torn between two lovers and feeling like a – well, a jerk. But then again, how can something so wrong feel so right? For now I comfort myself with the knowledge that this love affair (if indeed that’s what this was) wasn’t a dirty one. Not that it would have made a difference anyway; I am still an adulteress – if only an inadvertent one.
You see, I was once inadvertently married to a very handsome man named Aaron Miller. He was a smooth-talking bigamist with a wife stashed up in Iowa, and I was a country bumpkin who sincerely believed that the first marriage proposal to come my way would be my last.
The Ninth and Tenth Commandments are sort of one and the same. Here you will find a long list of things not to covet. A lot of that stuff, like menservants and maidservants, are hard to come by in our village of Hernia, Pennsylvania, but I will hereby fess up to coveting a good ass. For instance, my neighbor two farms down the road, Donald Hooley, has an exceptionally fine ass. No sooner did I set eyes on it than I begin to maneuver myself into a position to get my hands on it. I have always wanted a donkey – make that a pair of them – to pull me around in a wagon. Once, when I was a little girl, I saw a family of Amish children horsing around with a pair of asses and a wagon, and I immediately began to covet what they had. In fact, that is the first time I can remember ever really wanting something badly.
All right, that does leave the Fifth Commandment: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’ I have saved it for last because it is the only one of the Big Ten that I have not committed – to my knowledge. I qualified that statement, but only because I can’t be sure that one of my teachers wasn’t driven mad by my presence in her classroom and subsequently did herself in. Ours is a small village, and although every other teacher can be accounted for, my kindergarten teacher, Miss Kuhnberger (who screamed, ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ before moving to LA), has not been heard from since.
From the above I hope I have made it abundantly clear that I have never killed anyone in the literal sense. I have never shot, stabbed, struck or poisoned a human being. Sometimes I slap at mosquitoes, and I have set out cockroach bait. But allow me to reiterate, to make this point perfectly clear: I am not a killer. I am most definitely not a murderer. It was not me who murdered that despicable purveyor of pulp fiction, Ms Ramat Sreym.
Having said that, perhaps I should introduce myself. My full name is Magdalena Portulacca Yoder Rosen. Because I was married rather late in life and because my maiden name, Yoder, is ubiquitous in these parts, Yoder – Miss Yoder – is what I go by in my everyday dealings. Portulacca, in case you’re wondering, is the name of a gorgeous flower that thrives in bright sunshine. This leads me to believe that my mother suffered from a rare flash of optimism.
I am five foot ten inches tall and skinny as a fence post. Each of my feet is as large as the state of Florida and, if I was ever truly destitute, I could hire my chest out as a billiards table. Fortunately, due to my God-given business acumen, the odds of rock-hard balls larger than my bosoms rolling hither, thither, and yon across my barren ribcage are entirely miniscule. I am, you see, a millionaire many times over.
My parents were simple Mennonite dairy farmers whose ancestors were Amish immigrants from Switzerland. Both the Amish and the Mennonites are religious sects – similar to Protestantism, but with some key defining differences. Chief amongst these is the fact that their members adhere to strict pacifism. Neither a Mennonite nor an Amish person will lift a hand against another human being – even to save the life of one’s own child. There are many degrees of strictness, with some groups of Amish being the strictest, and some groups of Mennonite being the most liberal. For now, suffice it to say that the Amish are generally the ones you might see driving around in horse-drawn buggies, the men wearing straw hats, and beards with no moustaches, and the women decked out in their black travel bonnets and fetching black aprons worn modestly over their ankle-length dresses.
My, but I do get lost in my head! What I meant to tell you right off was that my beloved parents died early. Being liberal Mennonites, they were permitted to drive, but Pennsylvania where we live is a mountainous state with an exceedingly long tunnel. One fine spring day, when I was a mere lass of twenty, and my flat chest was palpitating with the sort of dreams that only the young – or stupid – dare entertain, my parents were squished like a bug in that tunnel when a truck carrying milk rear-ended their car, thrusting them forward into a semi-trailer loaded to the gills with state-of-the-art running shoes. Or was it the other way around? It doesn’t matter – shoes, milk and parent parts were everywhere. It was unspeakably awful, and my younger sister, Susannah, literally did not speak for the next three years.
Now, I do not mean to say this unkindly – only with true Christian love – but Susannah, who was eighteen at the time, did more than just hold her tongue. She began dealing with her pain by driving into Bedford, the nearest city, and hanging out at its bars where she managed to convince evil men that she was of legal drinking age, and they indulged her. She soon descended into the world of— Hmm, how can I put this gently? The life of a harlot wearing scarlet, or perhaps a tart with a broken heart, or maybe even a floozy ever so boozy? I’m sure you get the picture. I have no doubt that our parents rolled over in their graves with such rapidity that they supplied our village of Hernia with enough electricity to see us into the twenty-second century.
This left me with no choice; I had to support both of us. Believe me, back in those days I would have much rather indulged myself by a day spent sitting on a lightly padded straight-backed chair, reading the Holy Scriptures, with the occasional break to refresh my energy by eating a slice of bread with jam. But pampering myself like that was not about to pay Papa’s mortgage on the farm. Although our elderly Amish cousins, Mose and Freni, agreed to stay on to help with the farm work, it soon became apparent that I was not cut out for the life of a dairy farmer.
Fortunately our dear parents had the foresight to leave everything to me in their will, with the provision that I care for my sister in perpetuity, or as long as it took her to get on her feet financially – on her own. At that time I was to make some sort of just redistribution of property. At any rate, in the meantime, the farm was mine – all mine, to do with how I pleased. What pleased me was to turn my traditional farmhouse, with its authentic barn (and perhaps just two dairy cows) into a charming bed and breakfast. And since it was nestled in the western portion of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, a state famous for its Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ culture, I named it The PennDutch Inn. For the record, the Pennsylvania Dutch have nothing to do
with Holland and windmills. The people referenced are descended from Swiss and German immigrants, and the ‘Dutch’ they speak is laced with English.
Unfortunately, bed and breakfast inns are a dime a dozen, so in order to succeed, my establishment had to have a particular twist. To put it frankly, the angle I chose was abuse. Hold your horses, please, because I know that sounds bad. But consider this: when one travels to a foreign country, one where men can be seen urinating in public, albeit against a wall, is that not a form of visual abuse? When one must bravely attempt to sleep upon a pallet of lumps, and a pillow of buckwheat or straw, instead of a proper pillow-top mattress and an eider down pillow like the Good Lord intended, is that not a form of abuse as well? Likewise, when a humble soul, such as myself, enters a shop and blurts out a cheery ‘good morning, my dear sir, and where do you keep the laxatives?’ and the proprietor turns up his nose, having taken deep offense just because I speak what is now considered to be the International Language, and I don’t know any words of that man’s language, which was once the lingua franca of the world, I ask you, isn’t that abuse? So there you have it! People are prepared to pay outrageous sums of money for abuse just as long as they can view it as a cultural experience.
‘Voila!’ I shouted when this thought occurred to me. I devised a system called the ALPO plan, an anagram for a popular dog food in the United States – there being no connection, of course. My initials stand for Amish Lifestyle Plan Option. The Amish are mostly farmers, and as such very hard workers. By signing up for my system guests can pay up to three times the normal rate by performing chores. For an extra one hundred dollars they get to clean their own rooms; two hundred dollars more allows them the privilege of scrubbing toilets. Three hundred bucks gets one into the chicken house, along with the right to rake droppings onto the compost heap. Four hundred dollars buys guests the opportunity to muck out the cow barn, and then there is the once-a-year ten thousand dollar grand prize raffle (guests have to be present to win) which is draining and relining the cesspool.