Batter Off Dead (7 page)

“I see.” I began counting silently, knowing that I wouldn’t get past four—oops, I only made it to three.

“I need your help, Miss Yoder.”

“With what?”

“Don’t play coy, please. This woman’s killer has had eight days to get a head start and cover his tracks.”

“What makes you think it’s a man?”

Then young Chris did the nearly unforgivable; he grabbed my biceps and squeezed it tightly. The message he sent was loud and clear: he was the boss, and all I had to do was to listen to him. Needless to say, I yanked my arm away to let him know that no one was the boss of me. Especially not a man half my age.

“Miss Yoder, the lab tests show that the drugs had been cooked into the pancakes, thereby altering their chemical states somewhat. Weren’t all the cooks that morning men?”

I took a tissue out of the pocket of my blue broadcloth dress and pretended to blow my nose. I honked as loud as a Canada goose and moved that wad of paper hither, thither, and yon, just so young Chris wouldn’t see the smirk that was impossible for me to corral and squash into submission.

“Actually, dear,” I mumbled, “Frankie Schwartzentruber is a woman.”

“Frankie only comes up to my chest on account of she’s all hunched over. She has her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, and she wears a lot of beige and brown, so she’s easy to miss.”

“Oh, you mean that elderly Asian woman who belongs to your church? I didn’t see her on pancake day.”

“She’s not Asian, dear. Frankie’s had five plastic surgeries more than Joan Rivers ever dreamed of. Her last facelift was performed in Bangkok by a surgeon who has self-esteem issues and uses her own face as a template. But the procedures are very inexpensive, I hear.”

Young Chris grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, Miss Yoder, as usual, because these are your people and you know their ways, I’d like to count on your help.”

I cocked an ear to the other side of the cavernous barn. To the best of my knowledge, my little precious was not even mewling. Then again, he might have been bawling his head off and I wouldn’t have heard him, thanks to the masticating jaws of hundreds of apparently starving people chowing down on the traditional Jewish delicacies provided by Shmoe’s Deli out of Pittsburgh. (You would have thought we’d invited locusts, not people, to the bris.)

“Look,” I said, “in the past I’ve been more than happy to use my not inconsiderable brainpower—and I say that with all humility—as well as my above-average people skills—ditto on the humble thing—to solve most, if not all, of Hernia’s baffling crimes. But, as my sister is wont to say, that was then, and this is now. Then I had just myself to consider—well, and sometimes a hunky man—but now I have a
little
man to consider, one that is totally dependent on me. Forgive me, therefore, if I don’t feel like putting my life in jeopardy once again.”

“Harrumph.”

“You can’t say that, dear. Nobody says
harrumph
in real life, and most especially not a man your age.”

“What am I supposed to do, then? Swear?”

“You’ve got a point, but I’m still not going to do it.”

Defeated, he hung his handsome blond head. “Well, I guess this means I’m going to have to go with Plan B.”

“I guess it does—wait one Mennonite minute. What is Plan B?”

“Sheriff Hughes said that since we’re understaffed so bad, and he’s actually got a surplus of rookies this year, I could have one of them. On loan, you know. Just for this case. The kid grew up in Hernia and knows everyone in town, and we wouldn’t have to pay him on account of—”

I couldn’t believe my ears, which, by the way, were flapping like those of an elephant about to charge. “Do you perchance mean Percival Prendergast the Third?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Nix on the knave,” I cried. “The boy is a charlatan! He wasn’t raised in Hernia; he only spent his last two years of high school here because the coach was tired of having a losing football team. Yes, he may have been a football star, but he roomed and boarded with a family of transplants who moved here from Chicago. He’s as much of a Hernian as Oprah Winfrey—who, by the way,
would
have made an excellent vice president.”

“Harrumph again. Let’s face it, Miss Yoder, when it comes to local knowledge, you have no equal.”

I hung my head as the rules of modesty dictated, mock or otherwise. “Well, I wouldn’t say that exactly—”

“But more important, when it comes to sleuthing, it’s like you’re a natural-born prodigy or something.”

“Chris, dear, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck.”

“Huh?”

“What I mean is that flattery won’t get you anywhere. I’ve made up my mind, and the answer is no.”

“Yeah, I got that. But I’m just saying that not one of those detectives on TV could compete with you. If you were, like, in my Methods of Detecting class back in California, you would have wiped the floor with the rest of the cadets. The instructor too.”

“Like the time you solved that livestock-mutilation case and proved to Silas Marner that it wasn’t aliens killing his sheep—that was brilliant. Even the sheriff said so.”

“He did, didn’t he?”

“The sheriff really respects you, Magdalena. And that’s the thing: the entire community of Hernia respects you.”

“They
do
?”

“You ought to hear what they say behind your back. ‘There goes the smartest and best-informed woman in town.’ Why do you think you got elected mayor?”

“Because I’m rich and pay a lot of the town’s bills.”

“Yeah, but is Donald Trump mayor of New York City?”

Do you see what flattery can do? To my knowledge, the Donald has never run for public office, and Mayor Bloomberg, who
is
the mayor, is super-rich, but young Chris had managed to pull the wool over my eyes like a backward burnoose.

“Hernians elected me because they respect me?” I asked.

Chief Ackerman’s beautifully coiffed blond hair fell into his eyes as he nodded vigorously. “Uniquely qualified: that’s you. Nobody else could possibly interview the seven people who volunteered in the kitchen that day and get the same excellent results. But”—he shrugged as he forced back what might well have been a bogus tear—“since you’re not going to do it, I guess that’s just not going to happen the way it should.”

It must have been the Devil standing next to me that caused what happened next. My mouth opened of its own volition and the words just poured out like water from a suddenly unplugged gutter.

“Hold your horses, young man! Don’t you
dare
tell me what I’m
not
going to do, because I
am
going to investigate this case, and that’s that. Case settled.” I slapped my hands against each other to drive the point home. “
However
, this investigation is going to have to wait a couple of weeks until I can at least walk like a normal human being, and sit down without the aid of a doughnut ring. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am, but—”

“There’s no need to worry your pretty head, Chris; the killer isn’t going anywhere. His—or her—objective was to get rid of Minerva, and now, as our erstwhile president infamously said, ‘mission accomplished.’ ”

“Oh, Miss Yoder, I can’t thank you enough. Like I said—”

“No offense, dear, but put a zip on the lips.”

Do you see what the Devil made me say? And that was mild compared to what was to come.

Shame on me. I put on my gumshoes that very afternoon. I’d just fed the little one, and even though I was still so sore I had to sit on a foam doughnut, and had all the energy of a teenager come six o’clock Monday morning, mentally I was itching to get back in the game.

My reentry strategy was simple. Minerva lives—well, she
lived
—in a remodeled farmhouse about eight miles south of Hernia on Thousand Caves Road. She bought the house in the late 1980s, and I remember the event well, because she made a big flap about it. She was pursuing a life as a real estate agent at the time and was promoting the Thousand Caves area as the new retirement utopia for the fresh-air crowd. There were woods to roam, streams in which to trout fish, a lake with paddleboats, and, of course, spelunking in the myriad caves and sinkholes that gave the region its name. Lots could be had in one- to three-acre sizes and for a fraction of what one would pay anywhere else.

What Minerva didn’t tell the retirees is that the 183 acres that comprised Thousand Caves Retirement Village had been purchased from a struggling Amish farmer, who couldn’t make a go of it because that particular patch of Pennsylvania was so riddled with caves and sinkholes that the surface of cleared land resembled Swiss cheese. Even if he could manage to get his horse and plow to safely turn over a field, come a heavy rain, half the crop would disappear underground.

Then there too was the matter of her sales brochure. The photos were taken somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and depicted towering Douglas firs, and a sparkling lake with water so blue that one couldn’t help but think of Aaron Miller’s eyes (the man whom I
believed
I was married to, and who is the scum beneath the slime beneath the sludge beneath the ooze beneath the mud at the bottom of the pond, and I am
not
bitter, thank you very much). In reality, it was a pockmarked landscape studded with miniature trees, and the so-called lake was a man-made brown puddle that kept disappearing into an underlying cavern.

And although the farmhouse that Minerva bought had been built on a solid chunk of land, the same could not be said for the other potential lots. Of the dozen lots sold, only two were viable as home sites. Minerva had advertised that county utilities were available, but she didn’t say when, and didn’t say where. When the two brave couples who had bought into Minerva’s grand scheme learned that she had her own generator and pumped her water from an underground stream, they sued and won the right to back out of their contracts.

Today Thousand Caves Retirement Village consists of the loneliest house on planet Earth. If I had an imagination—which, sadly, I don’t, or a sense of irony—I could probably envision a murder mystery being set in this strange landscape of seemingly bottomless pits and elfin tress. One could, theoretically of course, toss a body into one of these black gaping holes and it would never be found, because even a thousand and one detectives from Dalmatia, each with their own Dalmatian, would not be enough to scour each and every man-size opening in the porous limestone that underlies the thin layer of topsoil.

I’d been to Minerva’s house only once before, and that was many years prior, when she, uncharacteristically, hosted the Mennonite Ladies Sewing Circle. Perhaps I just spoke too harshly, but I also remember that everyone was surprised when Minerva volunteered to do so, and that virtually everyone in the group attended because we were all curious to see what living out there was like. But I, for one, was so “freaked-out”—as Susannah would say—by what I saw that when I got home that night I fell on my knees and thanked the Good Lord that I lived in a bustling community like Hernia.

After all, not a day goes by that I don’t hear the clip-clop of a horse pulling an Amish buggy—sometimes even twice or more a day—out on Hertzler Road, and once a family of Parisian tourists rapped on the kitchen door and demanded that I tell them how to get to Rio de Janeiro. (I told them that the most direct way was to continue on down Route 96 to Cumberland, Maryland, then head east until they caught I-95, which they should follow all the way to Miami. After that they should swim like mad until they got to the coast of Brazil, from whence they could get further directions.)

Now, where was I? Oh yes. I hadn’t been out to Thousand Caves Road for many years, but nothing seemed to have changed—at least not for the better. There was no sign of the two homes that had been started, and Minerva’s solitary house looked just as lonely and out of place as a petunia in an onion patch. Still, it was a very nice house, so Minerva’s finances must have been halfway decent.

The house was set close to the road, because there wouldn’t have been much point to a lawn in this earth-eating landscape. Even from a hundred yards away I could see the brightly colored bands of crime scene tape that crisscrossed the front door, forbidding entry to the curious—of which we have plenty hereabouts, I assure you. Anticipating that very thing, I’d brought along a pair of scissors and a roll of duct tape (I fear that one day this marvelous invention may be our only means of repairing the fractured world we live in). Before getting out of the car I checked to make sure that my cell phone was charged; it was. Then I hoofed it to the porch and snipped away.

The key I’d purloined from the chief’s desk drawer fit the front door perfectly. I’d been almost positive that it would. What I found odd was that it had now been eight days since Minerva’s death, and the chief had yet to mention anything about the envelope being tampered with, or that Miss Jay had left him with yet another puzzle to solve. Perhaps he really didn’t care if he solved it, and that was why he’d been so eager to fob it off on me, the untrained amateur. Curious, isn’t it, that
fob
should mean two very different things. Land O’ Goshen, there I go again, interrupting the narrative flow, which is something a real novelist would never do; thank heavens that I am merely an innkeeper with a phenomenal memory. (This is a fact, so it is by no means meant to be braggadocio.)

Even a house that has been shut up for only eight days takes on a musty odor, but Minerva’s house was as fresh as one might expect a house out in the wilds of weirdom to smell. I concluded, therefore, that someone, probably Chris, had been there recently, also looking for clues. And since jumping to conclusions is what I do best, I outdid myself that afternoon and got in a great deal of exercise.

Could it be, I reasoned, that the chief had been shown the key before it was sealed in the envelope, and that he’d agreed to fetch me the milk on the day of Minerva’s death because he
knew
I’d snoop around? Perhaps he still hadn’t mentioned it because his search of her house had revealed nothing that shed light on her case, and he was actually hoping that I would break and enter. Well, if the latter was true, I didn’t know of what use my piddly detecting abilities were going to be, because once I noticed that the house didn’t smell particularly bad, the second thing I noticed was that it was in total disarray.