by Tamar Myers
‘She’s a head case,’ Toy said. A good Southern boy, born and bred, he tipped his head slightly in my direction. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, ma’am,’ he added.
‘Oh, but I do mind,’ I wailed. ‘I don’t mind you calling me a head case, because the Good Lord Himself knows that I’m nuttier than a five-pound fruitcake, but I do mind you calling me a cold-blooded killer. Ramat Sreym was an atheist – she told me this herself. Unless she had a so-called “death-bed” conversion, that poor woman is going to burn in the fires of Hell for all of Eternity. Have you ever burned your fingers on a match, Toy? Or on the stove?’
‘Yes, ma’am, but—’
‘But nothing, dear. You are a lapsed Episcopalian, are you not? And Episcopalians are the American form of the Church of England, right? You probably explain Hell as nothing more than a spiritual separation from God, but believe you me, it’s much more than that: it’s physical agony. It is flames eating your skin, licking it off your body with red-hot tongues, over and over again while you scream in pain. Like this.’ I threw back my head and screamed like a banshee. ‘So you see, young man, I would never murder an unrepentant heathen, lest the Devil – the real one, with the capital D – escort that poor woman’s soul straight to you-know-where.’
I wasn’t trying to be cruel; my intention was to convey the strength of my conviction. Granted, for a mild-mannered woman I can be bellicose at times, and for the shy, retiring woman that I truly am, I can be verbose upon occasion. However, we are none of us composed of just one trait, and that day, at that time, there was least one person there who believed in me. In this person’s eyes I was not a murderess.
‘Aargh!’ Alison cried, or something similar to that. Her fists were balled and her elbows locked as she ran straight at Chief Toy, taking him by surprise.
Alison was tall for her age, but skinny. She was also very motivated, which counts quite a lot when one is intent on turning oneself into a human battering ram. Being knocked back on his Carolina butt was one thing that Toy had not counted on happening. He gasped as the air left his body, and once on the floor he floundered about like a fish on the end of a line. Clearly, he was going nowhere fast.
‘Come on!’ I shouted, grabbing Alison’s hand. ‘It’s time to make tracks.’ I stopped in the doorway. ‘Sam, call the town council. Tell them that I just fired Toy and have them approve it. Also, notify Sheriff Crabtree. Oh, and you’re a peach, Sam, but don’t be getting any ideas. You’re a first cousin, and in my book that’s still too close for kissing.’
‘But you were adopted, remember?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wasting precious time, ‘but even then, we’re second cousins on one side and third cousins on the other.’
‘Oh, what tangled webs we weave, when Amish-Mennonites conceive,’ Sam muttered disconsolately.
Do you see what I mean by wasting time? By then Toy was groaning and beginning to pat his pockets in search of his phone.
‘Get his phone, Sam!’ I shrieked in farewell, and then Alison and I flew out the door like hawks in search of new prey.
NINETEEN
Take my word for it, when one is the mayor of a village like Hernia, and one has paid for the police cruiser out of one’s own pocket, then one is not stealing it – under any circumstances, am I not correct? If one asks a silly question, then one should expect a silly answer.
Nonetheless, I pressed the pedal to metal and, I say this shamefully, I drove twice the speed limit, all the way to the Sausage Barn. This greasy spoon eatery sits twelve miles north of Hernia, just south of the booming metropolis of Bedford, Pennsylvania (population 3,121). Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against ingesting grease, particularly bacon grease. I firmly believe that while Jews may be the Chosen People, God shows his love to us gentiles by permitting us to eat all manner of delicious pork products. Ham, pork chops, pork roasts delight my soul, but nothing makes my taste buds dance (in an almost sinful way) as plain, ordinary B-A-C-O-N.
That said, the last half mile to the Sausage Barn was so coated in pig grease, thanks to Wanda’s wonky exhaust system, that I had to apply my foot to the brake rather than the gas pedal. That’s normal for the course, and every time we pull up Alison squeals with glee. Gabe, who is a Reform Jew, does not see the need for him to keep kosher in today’s world (I beg to disagree), and neither does Alison, who is, of course, still searching for her religious identity.
‘Wow,’ Alison said as she staggered out of the car and regained her land legs. ‘Now what?’
‘I’m glad that you asked, dear,’ I said. ‘The best way that you can help me in my detective work is to please just make yourself look like the specks on the inside of Wanda’s walls.’
‘Ooh,’ Alison said. ‘Gross! You want me to look like a bunch of dead flies?’
‘Well—’
‘Mom, she swats them things and then leaves them smooshed on the walls until they fall off on their own accord. Once, one of them dead flies even landed on my pancakes.’
‘How nice for you, dear.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s all in one’s perspective, sweetie. We eat cow muscle and call it steak. Folks in other countries eat big fat palm grubs, thicker than your thumb, and are glad for opportunity to do so. For them, the grubs are protein. It’s all in one’s upbringing.’
My daughter gave me what she calls the ‘stink eye.’ ‘You’re weird, mom, ya know that? I ain’t never ate no cow muscle, and I ain’t never gonna, neither!’
‘Ha! Last night you and Dad sat on the couch and each polished off a little tin of cow lips, cow cheeks, cow noses, cow tongues and who knows what else.’
Alison stiffened. Her cheeks drained of blood, and I could swear her hair stood up a smidge under its coating of ‘product.’
‘Whatcha talking about, Mom? We was eating them little Vietnam Sausages; we eat them all the time.’
‘Read the ingredients list sometime. Read the label as well.’ I grabbed her hand and led her around to the back of the restaurant where Wanda kept a vegetable garden. Pennsylvania is a Commonwealth that is overrun by whitetail deer, despite our regular hunting season. Many gardeners believe that growing a few castor bean plants around the periphery will keep not only deer away but other troublesome varmints such as racoons, opossums and voles. The beans themselves contain one of the deadliest chemicals known to mankind – ricin. It is believed that plants give off an odour that wild animals can detect, causing them to keep their distance. In any case, castor bean plants can grow to be seven feet tall in a single season and have large palm-like leaves, making them rather decorative, if nothing else.
‘So,’ Alison said, ‘what are we looking at?’
‘See those tall, gorgeous plants with the big leaves?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘How come we don’t have any around our garden?’
‘Because I’m responsible for guests,’ I said, ‘that’s why. Those plants have seeds that are deadly poisonous. If you chewed and swallowed just two of them, you would die. Those are the same seeds that some people ground into white powder and tried sending to the President and other government officials.’
‘No kidding?’
Oops. I realized that I had perhaps shared too much information with an angst-riddled teenager.
‘The reason I’m showing you this,’ I explained quickly, ‘is because we can see these plants from the road when we approach from the south, now that they’ve gotten this tall. So I got to thinking while we were with Chief Toy—’
‘Which you always do, Mom,’ my cheeky daughter said.
‘Right. What I was about to say is that it is entirely possible that Wanda ground up several beans into a pie and served just Ramat Sreym a slice of the poisoned pie while everyone else was given a slice of a similar pie baked by someone else. She was the only person working back there in the pie-serving tent, cutting up pie and serving slices, so that would have been as—’
‘Easy as pie,’ Alison said. ‘Pun intended,’ she said as she gave
me a light tap on the arm with a loosely balled fist.
Although I was gobsmacked by her flash of linguistic, and possible literary wit, I am not the dullest knife in the drawer. ‘Judy says hello,’ I said, and punched her back.
‘Mom,’ Alison said, ‘you’re weird, but ya know what?’
‘Let me guess: you love me anyway? Well, I love you too, Sugar Doodle.’
‘Cheese and crackers, ya don’t have ta get all mushy on me. I was only going ta say that I like having a weird family. It kinda makes me feel normal.’
‘I didn’t think that we were that weird,’ I said, not unkindly. ‘Now come on, dear, before the woman with the perfidious and pungent pile of pelt atop her noggin gets suspicious.’
It didn’t surprise me to see Wanda Hemphopple, erstwhile owner, waitress and my number one nemesis standing stalwart behind the cash register counter. She was decked out in a red-and-white-checked apron that had seen cheerier days. Although her beehive had been reassembled since we’d last seen her, it now leaned like a certain tower in Pisa. In fact, it would not have surprised me if Wanda’s less-than-lustrous locks had been hastily recoiled around a calzone and then had some dipping sauce poured on them for good measure.
All right, so I judge the woman a mite harshly – and the Bible warns me not to judge, lest I in turn be judged. But I put to you the following: Wanda Hemphopple is always judging me. Always. If I didn’t judge Wanda in return, and give her some of the karma that she so richly deserves, then isn’t it possible that the Good Lord – or God forbid, even the Devil – will come down hard on her in this life instead? The way I see it, my gentle Christian rapprochement of Wanda’s errant ways is, in effect, a blessing in disguise for her. She should be grateful for my criticism; enough said.
‘Hey,’ Wanda barked as we finally made it through her stubborn, sticky door. ‘You’re not wanted here.’
‘Money is always welcome, dear. We’ll be in booth fourteen. Send Swivel Hips to take our orders, because you need to join us – police business – so your company is mandatory. Pronto.’
‘In your dreams,’ Wanda hissed. Trust me; Wanda is such an accomplished hisser that if she ever tired of being a restaurateur she could open an academy for snakes. Before she married a Hemphopple, Wanda was a Sissleswitzer, so hissing is hereditary in her family.
One of the few blessings of having feet the size of kayaks is that I can stop after moving forwards a yard, without having lifted a foot. Thus I was able to lurch to a standstill, whereas poor Alison, who possesses a normal size undercarriage, had to turn around and backtrack. At any rate, what I did next was to put my giant mitts up to my lipless mug – rather like a megaphone. Then at the top of my considerable lungs, I addressed the Sausage Barn customers, as well as the dead in the cemeteries for a radius of at least five miles.
‘Pleasant patrons, puissant pundits, portly pashas, pliable pupils, pork purists, this patron’s patsies all, I beseech thee, lend me thine ears.’
Wanda may be short, but she is an athletic woman, having grown up with five older brothers. She would have tackled me had not Alison stepped adroitly in front of me, her knobby fists raised in a defensive boxer’s position. That was the Queen of Bacon’s fatal mistake – so to speak.
‘This woman’s a liar!’ she shouted. Alas, the phlegmatic diners continued to gnaw away at their sausages, having not even looked up from their plates.
‘Wanda Hemphopple is a cold-blooded murderess!’ I screeched.
Trust me, there has not been a person born with louder lungs than yours truly.
The diners briefly debated whether a free floor show was worth the price of cold pancakes and congealed bacon grease. With few exceptions, their answer was ‘no.’ The mastication of massive amounts of mammal muscle and carbohydrates continued.
As for Wanda Sissleswitzer Hemphopple, did she ever look fit to be tied! Her face was white while her ears and nose were red, and her eyes looked like at any given second they were going to pop out of her skull and sizzle on the floor like a pair of enchiladas dropped in a skillet that contained an inch of hot, melted lard.
‘You win, Yoder!’ Wanda virtually ran down the aisle of her own restaurant, her arms up over her head like she was an already convicted criminal.
Now I ask you, was her bizarre response the result of God whispering her guilt in her ear or what? Truly, there was simply no way that I could go wrong following my gut instinct at this point. If we are to be faithful followers of the Lord then we are to pray for guidance, and then trust the still, small voice inside us. That said, Wanda, who really did look rather fetching in stripes, had her wardrobe all picked out for her until the Angel of Death came along with his pitchfork to show her to more permanent quarters.
As for that still, small voice of guidance, she – it was definitely female – was surprisingly loud, louder even than the GPS on my new Elantra. It supplied me with a plan that was designed to frustrate Wanda to the point of a spontaneous confession – if only Alison didn’t unwittingly sabotage me.
In the meantime, I was exceedingly grateful for whatever placating ingredient pork contains, particularly bacon, which makes folks zone out to events around them, because despite the ruckus we caused, it seemed as if we indeed remained invisible to the greater portion of the portly pacifist purchasers of Wanda’s pungent patties. Once inside booth fourteen, which backs up against the kitchen, we were out of sight from most of the other diners, and since Wanda had neglected to give Swivel Hips any orders, I knew that I had only a few minutes to work my Magdalena Yoder magic. The trick, as one might guess, is to act tough. Be brassy. Don’t let ’em see you sweat.
It might surprise you that such a timid, soft-spoken Mennonite woman as me can pull this off. Well, I can only do it through the help of prayer, and because in all but the hottest weather I wear a wool skirt that comes well below my knees, sturdy Christian underwear which includes a knee-length cotton slip, and thick opaque hosiery. This adds up to three substantial layers of natural fibers between my knees, the result of which is that when they knock together, they do so quietly, and thus do not tip off my adversary to the fact that I am obviously terrified. The English say: ‘Keep calm and carry on,’ whereas Magdalena says: ‘Appear calm and carry on.’
‘I ought to sue you,’ Wanda said. At least she waited until we’d had a chance to maneuver our way over, and around, the grease blobs on the benches of booth fourteen. One learns not to slide in but to claim a spot and then keep it. This technique is helpful when it is time to launder ‘post Sausage-Barn garments.’
‘Sue away, dear,’ I practically sang. ‘Whatever floats your boat. I’m sure that if you’re patient you can even learn to do it yourself; you’re certainly not the stupidest woman I know. Lord only knows, you’ll have plenty of time to earn a law degree in the big house.’
‘What’s the big house?’ asked my wide-eyed protégé, Alison.
‘The state prison,’ I said. ‘I heard that it has a great library, and that they even teach remedial reading to the inmates.’
‘Very funny,’ snarled Wanda.
‘Is it irony when she uses the word “funny” in that context?’ Alison said.
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Alison, why don’t you talk like that all the time? You’re a very intelligent young woman; there’s nothing shameful in letting people know it. And by the way, Wanda was being sarcastic.’
‘Right – that’s it, sarcasm. But Mom, boys don’t like girls that are smarter than them. It threatens their – you know.’
‘Masculinity?’
‘Hey!’ Wanda snapped. ‘Enough of the sickening family chitchat. This is about me, remember?’
I smiled – in a sarcastic sort of way. ‘How could I forget, dear?’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘That fact that it’s all about you is the reason why you murdered Miss Ramat Sreym.’
‘Mom,’ Alison said, ‘nobody says “miss” anymore; everyone says “ms.”’
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br /> ‘I’m not everyone. Now, please be a dear and study the menu.’
‘What menu? We ain’t got no waitress, thanks ta ya yelling bloody murder.’
Alison has excellent, uncorrected vision. Still, there are times when she couldn’t find a missing elephant if it was standing right in front of her – not that this example has been tested often, mind you.
‘Sweetheart,’ I said, while praying for patience, ‘the things that pass for menus here are those greasy, plastic-covered, thingamabobs tucked behind those sticky, syrup pitchers.’
‘Get back to talking about me,’ Wanda snarled.
‘With pleasure,’ I said. ‘Wanda, am I your friend?’
‘Huh? What kind of question is that? What does that have to do with me?’
‘Yes or no?’
‘Both, stupid. You’re my friend, but sometimes I could wring that scrawny chicken neck of yours.’
I recoiled in surprise. I had no doubts about her being Ramat’s killer, but as for wringing my scrawny chicken neck – now that was going too far!
‘The feeling is mutual, pal,’ I said in a huff. ‘However, I do have other friends, and as for your neck – it’s anything but scrawny. In fact, stumpy is more like it. It would take a winch and a thick chain to wring a neck like yours, so I guess that our feelings aren’t so mutual after all.’
‘Well I never!’ Wanda said, crossing her long, muscled arms over her boxy chest. A charitable biographer might someday record that Wanda Sissleswitzer Hemphopple’s proportions were more suitable to an orangutan than to a member of the Homo Sapiens species.
‘As for you, Alison,’ I said pleasantly, ‘why have you reverted to talking like one of the people your Auntie Susannah hangs out with? You know, like thugs, dropouts, thieves, murderers – folks of that ilk?’
‘Aw, Mom,’ Alison said, before delivering a world-class sigh, one so strong that it actually caused ripples to form on the grease layer of our genuine Formica tabletop. ‘Ya gotta quit with the nagging if ya want me talk right all the time. Besides, Auntie Susannah is in prison, so it ain’t fair ta go comparing me ta her.’