Just Plain Pickled to Death (21 page)

“Bye-bye, Yoder,” he said, as if I were a child.

“Don’t forget that the funeral is this afternoon at three, dear,” I graciously reminded him.

For a split second I had a glimpse of the vulnerable Melvin, the one who had known and cared about Sarah Weaver. Then, like that little metal door at the ATM machine, a shield came down and blocked off his emotions. His good emotions, I mean.

“I can charge you with loitering,” he said, “so I suggest you wait outside for your boyfriend.”

I smiled. “And while I’m waiting, I hope you have fun looking for the limerick I carved into the wall. It’s all about you and Susannah.”

“You didn’t!”

I hadn’t, But I found out later that Susannah had, and in a place I would never have thought to look. But that’s another story.

Chapter Twenty-three

“What?”

“Get in,” Unde Elias said. “Aaron couldn’t make it.”

“But I just spoke to him. Minutes ago. He said he’d be here in a flash.”

“Well, something came up. An emergency. So I volunteered.” He patted the passenger seat. “Are you just going to stand there, or what?”

I climbed in. “What kind of emergency? It isn’t Freni, is it? That dear old woman came out to see me last night—”

“It isn’t Freni. Last I saw of her she was giving Leah what for. Vonnie too. No, this didn’t seem to be of the medical type. There was a phone call from Reverend Schrock, and then young Aaron just said he had to go. Said he might be gone a long time and not to hold lunch. He took big Aaron with him.”

“Merciful heavens, it’s the wedding, then! If that whippersnapper decided to cancel the wedding and take off fishing, I’ll see to it that he’s disrobed—defrocked—you know what I mean. Just because I’m a jailbird doesn’t mean I can’t marry Aaron. Does it?” I wailed.

Uncle Elias chuckled. “I don’t think you qualify as a jailbird, Magdalena, and anyway, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t have to do with the wedding. It’s about the funeral. Something about the grave.”

I leaned back and gasped for air. “Well, in that case let’s head straight for the church. The gravesite is out back in the Weaver family plot.”

Just then Melvin came racing up behind us in Hernia’s only police car, his lights flashing, and his siren whining. Uncle Elias obligingly started to pull over, but Melvin went zipping around us and sped off down the road. He didn’t appear to be interested in us in the least. I slid down low in my seat anyway.

“Crime must be rampant in Hernia lately,” Uncle Elias joked. “And speaking of which, I did a little breaking and entering myself last night and found something rather interesting.”

I had to push my heart back into my chest a few times before I could talk. “You went over and checked out Pops’s barn liked I suggested?”

“Bingo.”

“You found Rebecca?”

He chuckled again. “I’m not superman. I don’t have X-ray vision, and I couldn’t very well dig in the dark. We have to wait until the time is right—until nobody’s there and we can see what we’re doing. Like now, don’t you think?”

“Now?”

“It may be our only chance if you want to get this settled by Saturday. Think about it—it’s perfect. Aaron and his father will be gone for quite a while, and anyway you can stand guard and warn me if they come back before I’m done.”

“What will I tell them?” I wailed.

“That’s what you get to think up while you’re standing guard.”

“But what about Freni and the others? Won’t they think it’s odd if you don’t bring me right home?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s the beauty of it. Aaron, his dad, and I were alone in the lobby when you called. Reverend Schrock called the second you hung up. Nobody else knows a thing.”

“Well, we’ll need tools, won’t we? And they’re back at the PennDutch, so we’ll have to stop there first. Someone’s bound to see us.”

He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Got the tools. Grabbed them from your tool shed on my way out. You’ve got quite a setup.”

“They were my father’s,” I said glumly.

There was nothing I could do but acquiesce. After all, searching the barn had been my idea. If standing guard on my own fiance’s farm while an elderly uncle dug around for a skeleton was going to expedite closure of the grim situation, then so be it. First jailbird, and then gang lookout—well, somebody had to do it.

We fought our way through a sea of cats and into the barn. Fortunately Cyrus, the cat that had gotten amorous on my lap, had found herself a tom she liked and was busy doing unspeakable things, but at least not on me. The barn looked the same to me as it had the last time, benign and empty, and for a fleeting and shameful second, I began to doubt Uncle Elias’s intentions.

“I’m spoken for, you know,” I said as he led me to a far corner.

He stared at me blankly for a moment and then burst into loud guffaws. “You? You and me? Get serious!”

“Well, I never!”

“Exactly. I have no interest in a colt that hasn’t been broken in. Give me a mare that can take it to the finish every time.”

“You better be meaning Auntie Magdalena,” I said.

“You’re damn right I do. That woman is all the woman I will ever need, and then some. Yesiree, she’s a real thoroughbred. First around the track half the time, and then, like as not, takes an extra lap or two.”

His fidelity pleased me, but his frankness shocked me. If he meant what I thought he meant, then drab, whimpering Auntie Magdalena was just like Cyrus the cat. I was profoundly embarrassed and silently resolved to think of a way to avoid direct eye contact with either of the Fikes ever again. Yet in a strange way—and this is strictly confidential—I was happy that my namesake could not only make it around the track but come in first. I’d been worrying that I might not even have what it takes to get out of the starting gate and that the pope, or someone like him, would have to annul my marriage. Susannah would never let me live that down.

“Well, show me what you’ve got,” I said briskly, and then realizing my double entendre, did a thorough turn.

Uncle Elias didn’t even seem to notice. He dropped the tools on the floor with a loud thunk.

“Look over there,” he said, pointing to the comer.

I looked. “Yes?”

“Those floorboards. They’re different from the others, see? They’re a different kind of wood, and they’re narrower.”

“So?”

“I think maybe it’s a trapdoor.” He got down on his hands and knees and began blowing the dust away from the area where the two wood types adjoined. “Yep, here’s where the hinges are. You can barely see them because they’re on the other side. Pretty clever. Hand me the crowbar, will you?”

I picked up the crowbar he had just thrown down. I am not mechanically minded, but since I was the oldest daughter, and for a long time the only child, Papa had made sure I had a working familiarity with your basic garden-variety tools.

Uncle Elias slid the beveled prongs of the crowbar along the line of his so-called trapdoor, gently testing it now and then for give. It didn’t budge.

“There must be a hidden catch somewhere that I’m missing. Here, you try it.”

“Shouldn’t I be standing guard?” I asked nervously.

Even as I was still speaking I heard a faint click and the door—for, indeed, that’s what it was— opened a crack. I pried it higher, got both sets of fingers in there, and hoisted it aloft. It was heavy, and I got a snootful of dust, but we had hit pay dirt. So to speak.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Uncle Elias said, leaning over the edge. “It’s a little cellar of some kind.”

It certainly was, if you were a dwarf. It was impossible to even kneel in the little space, much less stand. And although there was a pair of wooden steps going down, they led to nothing.

“Apparently when Snow White moved out, she took everything with her,” I said bitterly. “What on earth do we do now?”

Uncle Elias sat down on the edge of the hole and dangled his feet. Even as short as he was, they almost touched the bottom.

“Well, now, let me think.”

While he thought, I trotted over to the bam door and peered out. Aaron’s truck wasn’t back. I had half expected to see it.

“Silly me,” I chided myself. “If he was back he would have seen my car, and not finding me in it, or around the yard, he just might have tried the barn. There he would have found me with Uncle Elias and a bunch of tools, tearing up the floor. What was I thinking?”

“You say something?” Uncle Elias called.

Instead of answering right away, I dashed out and peered around the comer of the barn. The Miller drive was empty and there were no cars at all on Hertzler Lane. I sprinted back to the scene of the crime.

“We have to go,” I cried. “If my Pooky Bear finds me here like this, how will I ever explain it? Please, we have to go!”

Uncle Elias ignored my passionate pleas for sanity. He got up and tested the first step. It held up, but it wouldn’t have made much difference if it hadn’t. How bad can you hurt yourself by falling two feet?

“Hand me the shovel,” he ordered. “The one with the pointed mouth.”

I passed him the tool. “You think there’s a body in there? Why would someone bury a body and then go to all the trouble of building a trapdoor? Wouldn’t it make more sense to seal up the floor permanently?”

He began scraping the top layer of dirt gently aside. “It would make perfect sense if you planned to bury more than one body, and at different times.”

“You don’t mean it?” I plopped down at the edge of the hole. My toes would have touched the bottom, but I was careful not to let them.

“Yep,” Uncle Elias said. “I read about something just like this in the St. Louis papers. Only it involved an attic. The killer was a woman and all her victims were men. Postmen. She killed off four or five of them, one by one, over a period of years, and somehow managed to drag them up a folding stairway and stash them in the attic.”

“She must have been a big woman,” I said.

“My Magdalena could do it, that’s for damn sure. Why once in the throes of passion—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” I clamped my hands tightly over my ears.

Uncle Elias had to dig in silence, which was just as well. I had decided to listen, rather than look, for Aaron’s truck. If and when I heard it, we would throw the rest of the tools in the pit and close the trapdoor. If questioned about my whereabouts or activities. I would tell my Pooky Bear that I had decided to give him a motorcycle for his wedding present and had come over to check out his bam as a place to store it until after the ceremony. After all, I figured, he spent more time at the inn than he did at home, and weren’t gifts displayed right under one’s nose always the last ones discovered? It was a lame excuse, but it was all I could manage on an empty stomach. Melvin had refused to invest any of the county’s money in a prisoner who was being released so early in the morning. As for Uncle Elias’s excuse for being there, that was his problem.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Uncle Elias said loudly.

I took my hands off my ears. “Now what? You find Dopey?”

“Maybe. Just maybe I have!”

I leaned forward. Uncle Elias had uncovered a piece of burlap and was very gently scraping dirt from it with the point of the shovel. Shivers ran up my spine.

“You don’t think that’s Rebecca, do you?”

Uncle Elias was concentrating too intently to answer. But I already knew the answer, so it didn’t matter. Of course it was Rebecca down there. At least her killer had considerately wrapped her in a burlap shroud and buried her in out of the rain. No doubt he would have buried Sarah there too, but something unexpected must have come up and he had been forced to stash her hastily in the barrel of kraut.

But how could the killer get away with installing a trapdoor in Pops’s barn unless—the killer was Pops! It had to be. He was the only logical choice. He might even have built the trapdoor and secret compartment well in advance of that anniversary week. Sure, the space beneath the floor was shallow, but it was a big door, at least six feet square. Depending on whether or not he intended to stack his victims beneath the soil, Pops Miller could have done away with any number of his guests that fateful summer, the Beeftrust included.

But his own sisters? Well, that’s what Rebecca was to him. And Sarah was his niece. Apparently blood meant nothing to the man. And he had the nerve to all but invite himself to come and live with me. I would have to check my barn for trapdoors now that he’d been spending so much time over there with Aaron.

It was a horrible revelation. Too gruesome to contemplate for more than a few seconds, but it made perfect sense now. No wonder Pops was so upset about having to sell his farm. He was afraid that his earthen death pit would be discovered. Or was he? Maybe it was all an act. Maybe he was looking forward to its discovery. After all, he had been the one to send over the barrel of sauerkraut for my wedding. Maybe he was away that morning in hopes that it would be discovered. Maybe he had doubled back and was gleefully watching us at that very moment. Undoubtedly we were intended to be his next victims. Pops the psychopath!

Of course, that was silly since Pops was with his son, Aaron, and it had been Aaron who had gotten the phone call from Rev. Schrock demanding his presence. That would only work if—

“Oh, no!” I wailed. “Not my Pooky Bear!”

“Hot damn, would you look at that!”

I shook myself free from my morbid reverie, but I refused to look. I am not a rubbemecker. If there is nothing I can do to help at the scene of an accident, I will drive right past it without looking. Garnering stimulation from other folks’ misery is just plain wrong. I had absolutely no desire to look at the remains of Rebecca Weaver. Anyway, seeing her daughter, Sarah, in a sauerkraut barrel was quite enough. I was sure the sight of Rebecca couldn’t hold a candle to that.

“Uh-oh! I see you’ve found it,” I heard someone say. Someone other than Uncle Elias, that is.

I scrabbled around, grabbing at the tools, but it was too late. Both of the Miller men were framed against the barn door. They were in silhouette, so I couldn’t see their expressions, but no doubt their faces were twisted in rage.