26

I stared enviously at the briefcase full of one-hundred-dollar bills. Why couldn’t I have found it first? Now John was going to get credit for preventing yet another crime by Pernicious Yoder III. I say “another” because, even though I believe that betting is a sin, I’d almost be willing to bet my dining room table that it was this distant cousin who had snuffed out the life of his pretty young cashier.

My dining room table, by the way, is the only possession that I hold dear. It was built by my ancestor Jacob the Strong Yoder in the early 1800s. It is the only thing to have survived the great tornado of 1998-the one that picked me up, sent me flying through the air like a sliver of barnyard straw, and then just as quickly, and capriciously, dropped me facedown in a pie of cow doo-doo (a technical term I recently learned from Little Jacob).

It is possible that I’ve digressed. The point I was intending to make was that John and his brother, Bill, were destined to become Bedford heroes. This wasn’t just my assessment, either. Both the chief of police and the county sheriff agreed. What’s more, they both agreed to sign a letter that was to be distributed to the board of trustees of the First Farmer’s Bank recommending that the Ashton brothers be given a reward-perhaps even as much as ten percent of the amount that Pernicious had stolen.

After that serving of crow, I didn’t have much room for humble pie, so as soon as I could-without appearing to be ungracious-I made tracks, as they say, back to Hernia. At least there I was somebody, even when I was a nobody. Besides, it was one thing for law enforcement officials to come up with a story for the papers on how the Ashton brothers happened to be snooping around in a banker ’s house, but quite another if they had to explain the presence of a faux-Amish woman.

But while I fully expected to find the inn in a hubbub and Gabe frustrated to the point of pulling out his beautiful dark curls, I could not have dreamed up the scenario that greeted my world-weary eyes.

“Freni!” I cried. “What on earth are you doing here? You quit, remember?”

She shrugged, which of course took a great deal of effort. “The sun sets, but it also rises, yah?”

“That sounds like it would make a great book title.”

“The English and their riddles,” Freni said. That’s her way of explaining anything and everything enigmatic about the outside world and we strange folk who inhabit it.

“That could probably be another book title,” I said pleasantly. “But seriously, why are you back?”

Freni glowered through glasses that needed a cleaning when Mary Magdalene was a little girl. “That one-she gets on my nerve, yah?”

“And which nerve would that be?” Okay, so I was being mean, but it irritates me that Freni so dislikes her daughter- in-law. I find Barbara Hostetler to be utterly delightful-all six feet of her-even if she is from Iowa.

“On the nerve that would break down if I stayed home,” Freni said, without missing a beat. “This morning she tells me that times have changed and that it is no longer the Grossmudder ’s place to punish the child.”

“Indeed.”

“So you agree?”

“Well-I guess it all depends. If Ida-aka Mother Malaise-were ever to hit Little Jacob, I’d be tempted to hit her back. And I’m a dyed- in-the-wool pacifist like you. But if she was living with us, and told him that he wouldn’t get dessert until he finished his veggies, well, then I’d back her.”

Freni nodded vigorously, which took even more effort than shrugging. Those of us blessed with necks would do well to ponder the plight of the neckless, especially those of that ilk who must bear the double whammy of sporting enormous bosoms. After all, there is always the danger of hurting oneself whilst expressing vigorous agreement.

“Yah,” she said, “it is exactly this kind of thing!”

“Hmm. The thing that matters is that you’re back. Little Jacob will be so happy to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Across the road with her.” That he was still on the butter farm was a fib told only to save my son’s life. So you see, they were wholesome words, just told incorrectly, so as maintain the secrecy of my son’s location. If you ask me, the occasional misstatement of fact, like fresh dairy products, often gets a bad rap.

A sly smile spread slowly across Freni’s lips, leading me to consider the possibility that being Amish does not exempt one from the fleeting, but very real, pleasure one derives from schadenfreude. I smiled sweetly back at her.

“It’s not quite the same, dear. You see, in this paradigm I’m Barbara and you’re Ida.”

“More riddles,” Freni said, and turned to stir the homemade butterscotch pudding.

“Freni, have I ever told you that I love you?”

“Ach!” Tears welled in my elderly kinswoman’s eyes, and when she attempted to wipe them away with the corner of her apron, she knocked her glasses up onto her forehead in the most endearing way.

Truly, I had so much for which to be thankful, most especially the love of someone like Freni. I kvelled mit goyishe naches. At the same time, the centuries of inbreeding amongst austere, pietistic ancestors had left me incapable of appreciating the moment without making some sort of deflecting wisecrack.

“Now you’re going to make me cry,” I said, “and I’m a really ugly crier. Once Bigfoot looked in the window and saw me bawling, and he’s never been seen in Bedford County again.”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say; Freni let loose enough tears to float Noah’s ark.

“Just so you know, dear, there really isn’t such a thing as Bigfoot, but if you think there is, I can try and get him to pay you a visit-although frankly, I would think that your six- foot daughter-in-law would satisfy that itch.”

Freni was supposed to laugh, but instead she put her stubby hands on her broad hips and glowered at me beneath her pushed-up glasses. “Have you no respect, Magdalena?”

“Uh-well, of course, I do. You know that I respect you. I was only making a joke.”

“Ach, not about the big feet! I shed maybe some tears, but they are for the children of Mary Berkey.”

“Yes, it is very sad how the community treats their mother.” It was not a personal indictment, because Freni is one of the few Amish in Hernia who has always given Mary the benefit of the doubt.

Freni paled. “Then you do not know?”

“Of course the rumors: suicide, murder-it happened so long ago, I don’t see why folks can’t let it go. The kids, for sure, didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Ach, not the father, Magdalena.” Freni moved toward me, and her short arms encircled my waist as the smell of chopped onions and bell peppers filled my nostrils. “It is Mary now who has gone to meet the Lord.”

I pulled loose. “Excuse me?”

“Yah, she was run over by a tractor this morning.”

“An accident, then. How awful! Forgive me, but which one of the children was responsible?”

Freni’s eyes flashed. “The children were all in school, and the babies were in the house. It was the mailman who discovered Mary lying under the tractor.”

“Then it was an accident!”

“Yah, maybe, but there were three sets of tracks on the body. The tractor very much wanted her dead.”

I gasped as I groped for a chair. “Or somebody else did-somebody with the initials MS.”

Freni shook her head solemnly. “Meryl Streep is a fine woman. When she stayed here, she had only good things to say about my cooking. She would make an Amish man a good wife.”

“Oh, please. She’s such a good actress that you’ll believe everything that she says-whether it’s accurate or not.”

“Harrumph,” Freni said, giving it a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. It’s one of her favorite new words.

I smiled, happy for just a couple of seconds of diversion. Speaking with Freni of death in the kitchen was becoming an all-too-frequent pastime. Just a month before this, Freni and I had been standing in the exact same spots that we were now, discussing the recent passing of Silas Coldfelter, our town’s most accomplished builder of multiple-passenger buggies, when all of a sudden Little Jacob walked in from the dining room.

“Hi, Mama,” he’d said, almost blithely. “Hi, Aunt Freni.”

I’d hugged and kissed him, and Freni had patted his head affectionately and offered him a gingerbread man with a glass of milk. Being the fruit of my loins, he’d accepted the snack gratefully, but had demanded a piece of fruit as well.

“It will spoil your lunch,” I’d said.

“Mama, what happens when you die?”

“Uh-well-remember that baby sparrow we found underneath the barn eaves yesterday morning?”

He’d taken a big bite of milk-softened cookie before posing his next question. “Mama, we’re not birds. What happens to people?”

“Well, their souls go to be with Jesus, but their bodies are put into the ground.” There is no use trying to shield a child from death in a farming community. It would be like trying to keep an ice-cream cone from melting on a hot August day.

“I know that stuff about Jesus and the ground,” said my precocious four-year-old, “but what happens to them?”

“Them who, dear?”

“The people who died,” he’d cried impatiently. “You know, the them part!”

“Ach, he asks an ex- intentional question,” Freni had said reverently. Sometimes she is in awe of the little tyke and sometimes it is understandably so.

“Maybe the ‘them’ part is the soul,” I’d said. “Little Jacob, will you still love your mama when you’re all grown- up and can think circles around her?”

My darling son had thrown himself at me and locked his little arms around my neck. “Don’t be silly, Mama. I’ll always love you.”

“And don’t be cheeky, and call your mother silly,” I said, before kissing his eyelids until he begged me to stop.

“Earth to Magdalena,” Freni said, bringing me back to the present. “So now will you tell me who really killed poor Mary Berkey?”

“Only if you promise not to use idioms from the eighties that were annoying even then,” I said.

The expression Freni assumed made her look like a sheep that had been asked to solve the national debt. “Yah, whatever. I promise.”

“And quit being a teenager as well. It doesn’t become a seventy-nine-year-old Amish woman.”

“Oy veys mere.”

“Who pretends to be Jewish when it suits her.”

“Ach!”

“Now where was I? Oh, yes-I believe that Amy and Mary were both murdered by Melvin Stoltzfus.”

“Our Melvin Stoltzfus?” Freni’s hands flew to her throat as she fought for her breath.

“One and the same. Like I’ve always said, the man is evil personified.”

Freni staggered over to the nearest straight chair and dropped heavily on it like a sack of spuds. “Does his mama know?”

His mama. She was my mama too-that was the kicker. Elvina Stoltzfus was my birth mother. Given the circumstances surrounding my conception, and the social climate of the time, I don’t blame her. I do, however, blame her for the way she continues to treat Melvin, even after he’s been convicted of first-degree murder, as if he were a prince, deserving of every consideration. No doubt Elvina has broken every law in the book, aiding and abetting that son of a gun-toting, hunting, deceased husband of hers. If there’s any justice in this world-but I’m beginning to doubt that there is-Elvina will end up in the slammer as well.

“Freni,” I said, “this is just my theory. Susannah warned me that he was back and would try something. How these two deaths are connected, I don’t know-but I intend to find out. And believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”