As the World Churns (31 page)

    My team was on the ball. Agnes successfully relayed my message to the sheriff, who, like Chief Ackerman, openly scoffed at the idea of cow owners rustling humans. His APB, he said, was effectively cancelled, due to the fact that one of his deputies had just returned from a hunting trip to
Maryland
via Route 12, and no cars had been encountered coming the other way. He’d keep a watch on the interstates, but I shouldn’t expect any dramatic news. Alison, he assured Agnes, was a runaway who would surface safe and sound at the time and location of her choosing. Ever a faithful friend, Agnes wished a pox upon his house and his descendants down to the fifth generation. (Fortunately, although the sheriff is married, his wife, like me, is past the breeding age.)

    Wanda came through with boxes of dried cereal, bags of dried fruit, ultraviolet-treated milk, a couple dozen sticks of beef jerky, and oodles of bottled water. She also produced AAA maps of
Pennsylvania
,
Maryland
, and
West Virginia
. Perhaps just as important, she thought to bring along several rolls of toilet paper from her supply room.

    Ida, bless her heart, honored my request and managed to stay out of trouble. She even helped Wanda carry the supplies out to my car. Taking into consideration that her son was missing, I tried not to be critical. But if the road to you-know-where is paved with good intentions, then I am a first-class highway engineer.

    “Ida, dear,” I said sweetly, “why on earth are you carrying that cute little television?”

    “You vant dat I should miss
Yeopardy
?”

    “It’s battery powered,” Wanda said, “if that’s your concern, Magdalena.”

    “My concern is that we don’t get distracted from the task at hand.”

    “
Nu,
” Ida said. “You vant dat I should drive?”

    
“No thanks, dear.”

    “Maybe you should let her,” Agnes said. “That will free the rest of us up for sleuthing.”

    “She doesn’t have a license,” I said.

    It wouldn’t have mattered if she had. I’d seen Ida drive. In order to reach the pedals, she has to slide so far down in the seat that she can’t see over the dashboard. This doesn’t stop her. Every so often she hurls herself into the air to get a quick look-see of the road.

    So far, she’s miraculously avoided hitting anyone or anything of consequence-although some of our more worldly Hernia teenagers have taken to mimicking her technique for fun. “Doing the American Ida,” they call it. Since the craze began, there have been three serious wrecks, one involving an Amish buggy, which sent three children to the hospital, and which resulted in the horse having to be put down. At any rate, on the plus side, the day Mat-tie Taylor saw a “driverless” car barreling down
Hertzler Road
is the day she gave up drinking.

    At last, the four of us piled into my Ford and set off on our rescue mission. Once we passed the blinking lights of Hernia, the road quickly grew dark and even more winding. If my vertically challenged mother-in-law had been at the wheel, at the first sharp turn, we would undoubtedly have sailed right off the road, perhaps even landing in the trees. In the autumn, some unlucky deer hunters would discover four skeletons-one clutching a pint-size TV. We would become the stuff of urban legend: the four ghosts of Route 96 that lay in wait for teenagers on weekend nights. “Earth to Magdalena,” Agnes said through cupped hands.

    “Come in, Magdalena.”

    “What?” I snapped, although not altogether unpleasantly. “You almost drove off the road at that last curve.”

    “I most certainly did not.” Truth
be
told, I couldn’t recall what the last curve looked like. “Speaking of flying off the road, where is it that you had your accident?”

    Wanda must have forgotten that I have the hearing of a bat. “Magdalena almost died in a tree,” she whispered to Ida. “And she had to wear a tampon on her forehead.”

    “Is she meshugah, or vhat?”

    “Or what,” I said. “My point,” Wanda said, “is that you drive way too fast. I, for one, am not ready to meet my maker.”

    “Why, Wanda Hemphopple,” Agnes said, “and you’re always getting after me for no longer being a Mennonite.”

    “I would be one, if it wasn’t for Magdalena.”

    “
What?”
I said. “What?” Agnes said.
“Vhat?”
Ida said. “Tag,” Wanda said. “I guess I’m it. You see, ladies, Mrs.

    Rosen-née Yoder-and I have a long history.”

    
“You vere lovers?”
Ida said. She sounded hopeful. “No,” Wanda said, “but the possibility did cross my mind once. Anyway, we’ve been feuding since we were
kids,
and then-”

    “Since
high
school,” I said. “It wasn’t like we were toddlers when it all began.”

    “Actually, we were,” Wanda said. “According to my mother, we were playing together in a sandbox, and you hit me over the head with a bucket.”

    “You mean that I had discerning taste all the way back then?”

    
“Very funny.”

    “And what’s this about you having a thing for me? Or were you just pulling my leg?”

    “A very shapely leg, Magdalena-now stop trying to distract me. The senior Mrs. Rosen would like to know why I’m not ready to die just yet.
Or, for that matter, to welcome the Second Coming.”

    
“Vas dere a first?”

    “Good one, Ida,” Agnes said.

    “She’s not joking,” I said.

    “As I was about to say,” Wanda growled, “before I was so rudely interrupted, I don’t want to die just yet because I’m not through hating Magdalena.”

    It was a cool evening, so I had the windows closed. When the three of us gasped, we literally depleted the car of oxygen. Perhaps that explains why I felt momentarily giddy.

    “You
really
hate me that much?”

    “I despise you. That’s why I have all those life-size posters of you on my office walls.”

    “The ones on which you’ve drawn arrows going through my head and daggers into my heart. Don’t you think that’s a bit of overkill? Pun quite intended.”

    “This doesn’t make any sense,” Agnes said. “After all, you let Magdalena eat in your restaurant all the time.”

    “That’s because I have to, or she’d call the police. She has them in her pocket, you know. Plus, her money is just as good as anyone else’s.”

    “You know vhat surprised me vhen I moved to dis country,” Ida said apropos nothing.

    Agnes, always kind and considerate, took the bait. “What?”

    “Dat dey use the same money here dat we used in
New York
.”

    “Wait a minute,” Agnes said, “I must be confused. Which country uses the same currency as
New York
?”

    “Oy, is dis von slow, or vhat?”

    “The place she is referring to,” I said, “is the
Commonwealth
of
Pennsylvania
. She thinks it’s a foreign country.”

    Ida clucked like a hen being robbed of her eggs. “Von must get a new license to drive, yah?
Und
pay new taxes.
In Europe, vee called dat another country.”

    “I see,” Agnes said, although she clearly didn’t. “Magdalena, you don’t seem at all upset that Wanda hates you. Do you hate her back?”

    “That wouldn’t be Christian, dear. I will, however, admit to intensely disliking her. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not proud of the way I feel, and I pray for a change of attitude.” There was nothing to be served by adding that my prayers to feel better about Wanda are intermittent at best.

    Agnes sighed loudly. “What a fine kettle of fish we are. I’m two hundred pounds overweight and so neurotic that my only friend is Magdalena; Ida believes we’re in a foreign country; and you other two hate-or at least, intensely dislike-each other. What if there really are
kidnappers,
and we catch up with them? What are we supposed to do? Baffle them into submission?”

    No one said anything for a long time.

    
“Vas dat a historical question?”
Ida finally said.

    “Yes,” I said.

    
“
Gut
.
Den I vill go to sleep.”

    One by one, all three of my passengers succumbed to the sandman. That was fine with me. Although I was tired, I wasn’t a bit sleepy.
Route 12 through southern
Pennsylvania
twists and turns like a stubborn garden hose, requiring one’s full attention.
As if the topography isn’t enough to keep one occupied, there is the constant possibility-maybe even a probability-
that
a deer will leap into the roadway and be blinded by one’s headlights. Throw in the good chance that my missing loved ones might be in grave danger, and I had all the adrenaline I needed to make sure that my peepers stayed wide open.

    But to be absolutely honest, I was thinking more about Wanda Hemphopple than anything else. Her words stung my soul; I could feel the pain just as surely as if I’d been slapped in the face with
a latex
glove-not that I’ve had a lot of experience with such things. What had I ever done to her that was so awful that she would risk hellfire rather than forgive me? Okay, so maybe I did whack her on the bean with a bucket, dip her braids in my inkwell, put gum on her desk chair, sit on her paper-bag lunch, encourage her to copy the wrong answers from my paper during a math test, drop a hot dog into her beehive hairdo, spread a few rumors about her high school love life-but I was just a kid then, for crying out loud. Believe me, I have an even longer list of Wanda’s sins against me, and I’ve managed to forgive her.

    Perhaps it has little to do with what I’ve done, but a lot to do with who I am. Scientists have suggested that people have an inborn negative response to approximately one fifth of the general population. This response is visceral, and based on such cues as scent and physiognomy. It supposedly serves some evolutionary purpose-although, of course, there is no such thing as evolution.

    I remember Mama saying that, in the 1930s, there was a woman living in Hernia named Barbara Peters, who always had it in for her. For as long as Mama could remember, Barbara Peters was mean to her. Mama never could figure out what she’d done to get on Barbara’s bad side. One day, Mama could no longer stand it and wrote Miss Peters a note asking the woman to please explain what it was that she had done to deserve such treatment. Barbara’s answer was cryptic to the extreme: “I’ve
never
liked you.” Mama was actually so afraid that Miss Peters might have used poisoned ink in her reply that, after reading the note, Mama scrubbed her hands until they bled.

    So preoccupied was I in pondering the enigma of Wanda’s hatred toward me that I almost missed seeing the truck and trailer parked in a picnic area a few miles north of the border. Fortunately my passengers were buckled in. Nonetheless, there followed shrieks of genuine fear and enough blue language to color the Pacific Ocean. I waited patiently for the latter to end before addressing the woman with the mouth of a sailor.