My first victim was James Neufenbakker. I’ve known Jimmy since I was a mere lass in pigtails and flour-sack dresses, except that back then he was known to me as
Mr.
Neufenbakker, the little kids’ Sunday school teacher. During the week Jimmy worked as a coal miner, a grueling job that he held for forty years, but somehow he still managed to outlive two wives. Jimmy has been retired for the past ten years or so, and although he no longer teaches Sunday school, he’s very active in the brotherhood. Oh, and for what it’s worth, I currently teach the adult Sunday school class that Jimmy attends.
One can be kind to a fault when describing someone,
or
one can choose to be honest. That said, to put it kindly, Jimmy Neufenbakker looked very much like the male sea lion I once saw at the Pittsburgh Zoo. His small bald head featured watery brown eyes, and his upper lip sprouted bristles that were too sparse to be called a mustache. He appeared to lack shoulders (although he did have functioning arms), and his body expanded exponentially to an enormous rear end—even by Mennonite standards. Alas, I cannot claim that he had flippers instead of legs, but he did walk with a shuffle, and his feet were exceptionally wide.
Because of the mass he had to move, and his peculiar gait, it took Jimmy a good two minutes to answer his doorbell. Meanwhile, I waited patiently, tapping my foot whilst singing children’s hymns to keep Little Jacob quiet in his car seat.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, suddenly opening the door. “I thought it was that pair of feral cats that’s been hanging out under my front porch lately. They screech and holler just like that before they get down to mating, and then they start right back up again. I’ve tried everything in the book to get rid of them: hosing them down, borrowing a neighbor’s dog overnight—I even bought a bottle of wolf urine off the Internet. Seeing as how you know just about everything—or think you do—what would you suggest?”
“But I don’t know everything: there are two mountain dialects of Laotian that I’m struggling with, and the concept of string theory is still a little frayed in my thinking.”
“Humph. But you’re still a smarty-pants, Magdalena.” He slipped a pair of spectacles out of the breast pocket of a dingy white shirt and perched them on an almost nonexistent nose. “What’s that you’ve got balanced on your hip? A basket of some kind?”
“It’s a car seat, and inside is the cutest baby ever born in Hernia.”
“Ha! That’s a mighty provocative statement. I was born in Hernia, you know.”
“I know, Jimmy, and I was thinking about that on my drive over here. You see, it’s a scientific fact that babies have been getting progressively cuter over the years—some sort of biological necessity predicated on the Cold War and then it’s subsidence—but of course in nature there are always exceptions. So I got to thinking about you, and how handsome you are. That’s how I came to the conclusion that you must have been an exceptionally cute baby—no, undoubtedly the cutest of your generation, that so-called, misnamed, Greatest Generation. If only Tom Brokaw had been ten years younger, he might have seen that it was the leading edge of the baby boomers who marched for civil rights and fought to end racism and sexism in the workplace—but I digress. My point is that you have been officially dubbed by
moi
, mayor of Greater Hernia, as our second cutest baby.”
“Magdalena, you’re full of baloney, just like you’ve always been. But as long as you’re going to flap your gums, you may as well come on in. No use exposing that baby to the elements and who knows what all those wild cats carry.”
At the second mention of uninoculated cats, I couldn’t get Little Jacob indoors fast enough. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to shuffle in behind him. Once inside, I remembered with a sinking heart something I’d heard another brotherhood member say: “I’d rather hold our meetings out at the dump than in Jimmy Neufenbakker’s house.”
There are folks whose houses are merely messy, and folks with relatively neat houses where dust bunnies multiply at the same rate as their mammalian namesakes. Then, of course, some houses combine both forms of slovenliness, whilst others add food and grime to the mix. Poor Jimmy’s house, bless his heart, had both the smell and look of an exploded garbage truck—not that I’ve had a whole lot of experience with those, mind you.
“Have a seat,” he said as he gestured to a caved-in easy chair.
The crater was almost filled with a mix of pulverized crumbs and lint, so, theoretically at least, one could almost sit on it. The only other option was a sagging sofa, but it was piled high with dirty clothes, empty milk containers, and newspapers, all topped by a three-foot-long stuffed toy lion with one eye missing. There was certainly no place I would be willing to set the car seat down, not even at gun point.
“Silly me,” I said, my desperation mounting by the second, “I forgot to lock my car.”
“It would be silly if you did; no one locks their car in Hernia.”
“Yes, but times are changing. I mean, if we can have murders in Hernia, can car theft be far behind?”
“So that’s why you’re here! I should have surmised as much. You have me pegged as a suspect in the Minerva J. Jay murder. Well, let me tell you something, girlie. I don’t much care for one of my former students—and may I add, a very hardheaded, obstreperous student—accusing me of breaking one of the most important of the big ten. So take that little runt of yours and get out of my house. I don’t have to answer even one of your questions, seeing as how you’re not even a real policewoman, but a busybody. That’s what you are: a busybody.”
I was too shocked to say anything for a good minute and a half, much less move one of my comely, but admittedly oversize feet. Little Jacob was certainly not a runt! Virtually everyone who saw him—murder suspects excluded—invariably commented on what a healthy-looking baby he was. As the shock wore off, I had the almost overpowering urge to respond to that verbal attack on my progeny, yet at the same time the rational side of me began to mobilize with what might be a more useful rejoinder.
“How very interesting,” I said as I edged backward toward the door, “but I never said that Minerva was murdered.”
Jimmy shuffled toward me at the same rate. “Oh, come on. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. Yes, at first I thought you might have come to see how I was getting along. As you well know, I do a lot for the church, Magdalena, and a logical person might think that in turn the church would care about me. Someone might even ask if I need a ride into Pittsburgh to see my cardiologist, now that turnpike driving is getting to be somewhat scary for me.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Remember that I had a quadruple bypass in ’ninety-four? That I have a pacemaker? That I suffer from emphysema? But that I still volunteer at things like the pancake breakfast, standing on my feet for hours, just to raise a little money for new hymnals?”
My heart went out to him, of course, but that didn’t mean I found him any less threatening. I fumbled for the doorknob, which was both clammy and greasy. Once I turned it, I pushed the door open with my posterior cheeks.
“Jimmy, I honestly didn’t come here to accuse you of anything. I merely wanted to ask you if you thought Minerva might have enemies. You see—and you must keep this confidential—if indeed Minerva was murdered, her killer could have been anyone who was there that morning; not just the kitchen crew.”
Shame, shame, triple shame on me for thinking that Jimmy sounded like a barking sea lion when he laughed. Where was my compassion? Surely a man with that many ailments deserved a huge dose of human kindness, and here all I could think of was how much he resembled a marine mammal.
“Magdalena, you haven’t changed a bit since the third grade, have you? Where is the information in what you just said? What am I supposed to keep confidential? That a
possible
murder could have been committed by
anyone
?”
My left foot found the porch floor and was quickly followed by my right. “There you go; you just answered your own questions. And really, dear, there’s no need to see me out. I can do a follow-up on Minerva over the phone.”
Jimmy’s watery brown eyes seemed to crystallize into obsidian. His normally pallid complexion turned blotchy in front of my eyes, and he began to quiver with rage. His sudden mood swing put me right back in the third grade when he was
Mr.
Neufenbakker and had the right to smack me with a ruler if I so much as squirmed during my Bible lesson.
Perhaps it was his declining health, or perhaps it was the way he’d always been, but Jimmy Neufenbakker was as emotionally stable as a two-legged giraffe on roller skates. I needed to get out of there before he lost his balance completely, and took Little Jacob and me with him. Alas, I was too late.
13
“Stop!” he roared.
What is it about the adult-child relationship that never quite changes? Or could it be that because Jimmy had been physically abusive to me, that he once had the power to order me around, I felt that I still needed to obey him? Whatever the reason, I stopped and did my own quivering—not from rage, but from fear.
“Minerva!” he roared again. “So you really want to know what I thought of her, do you? Then I’ll tell you: that woman was a
t-r-o-l-l
—” He checked himself abruptly as he inclined his small bald head toward the infant seat I cradled. “No, I probably shouldn’t even spell that in front of him.”
“Who? The little runt? Trust me, he can take it.”
The red blotches shriveled before my eyes. “Yes, but it isn’t a Christian thing to say. And it was wrong enough of me to call you a smarty-pants.”
“Pants, shmants. I’ve already forgotten about that. Now, were you saying that Minerva was a troll, like the kind that lived under the bridge when Billy Goat Gruff came trotting along? Because honestly, dear—”
“No, you idiot, that’s only a children’s story! Now look what you made me say.”
I took five steps backward and felt for the first step that led down to the walk. “Ah, she was a trolley off her tracks! Well, personally I couldn’t agree more. But in what way did she strike you as being—well, nertz to Mertz?”
“Magdalena, you’re certifiable, you know that?”
“Yes, but a padded cell with documentation is better than one without,
n’est-ce pas
?”
“She was a trollop, you numbskull!”
“
Oy vey
. Little Jacob, cover your ears.” Of course the fruit of my womb was unable to do anything more than gurgle a response to my directive, so I took the time out of my escape to tuck his blanket up around his ears. “Please, Jimmy,” I begged, “no more of that vulgar language.”
“I’m sorry,” he said at once, “but you really do have a thick skull.”
“Not the N word; the T word.”
“Oh, come off it, Magdalena. That little fella was not the product of a virgin birth, and just saying the T word in front of him is not going to turn him into some sort of deviant.”
“Well, I never! Okay, so perhaps I did, but it’s none of your business. Besides, now who’s not answering questions?”
Jimmy Neufenbakker snorted. “If a simple answer is what you want, then I suggest you ask the Zug twins.”
With that he shuffled backward until he could slam the door. Not a second latter a feral cat yowled from beneath the porch. Almost immediately its loud, mournful cry of distress was drowned out by Little Jacob exercising his lungs. Clearly it was time to make a hasty exit, even if I had to leave my dignity behind.
Little Jacob, we soon learned, found riding in automobiles to be very soothing. Sometimes it was the only way we could get him to fall asleep. Thus it was that after leaving the somewhat temperamental Jimmy Neufenbakker, I took the tyke on a rather extensive tour of historic Hernia.
Although many tourists are initially drawn to our town by its predominantly Mennonite and Amish culture, a goodly number now come just to gaze at our plethora of Victorian-era homes. To be absolutely honest about it, the most spectacular of these houses were built by our nonpacifist brethren: the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. At any rate, for me it is always a pleasure to drive, or even walk, through this neighborhood, and Little Jacob immediately proved that he was a chip off the old block.
I had just turned down Crabapple Street when I noticed Frankie Schwartzentruber out in her yard. She appeared to be bending over to examine something in her flower bed, but since the dear old lady suffers from such severe osteoporosis, it is difficult to tell when in fact she is standing erect. Frankie has been a de facto member of the Beechy Grove Mennonite Church Brotherhood ever since her husband, Simon Schwartzentruber, was killed during a brotherhood game of horseshoes thirty-five years ago.
Of course it was a freak accident; Simon wasn’t even in the game, but a bystander, watching from the other end of the pit. The game might have proceeded without a hitch, had not Magnus Amstutz, a veritable giant of a man, but a novice player, thrown a pitch so hard that it sailed a good six yards past the stake and slipped around Simon’s long, slim neck instead. Simon was pronounced dead at the scene. As for poor Magnus, he was so traumatized by the event that he quit Beechy Grove Mennonite Church and moved to Washington, D.C., to become a lobbyist for one of the tobacco companies. “If I’m going to kill people,” he is quoted as saying, “I may as well make money from it.”
Now, where was I? Oh yes, I was about to put the screws to Frankie Schwartzentruber. The woman may be an elderly widow, and as short as a third grader, but may I remind you that it is said that the Devil can take many forms. Since her back was to the street, and she didn’t appear to have heard either my car engine, or the doors slamming, or the clack of my heels on the pavement, I cleared my throat loudly.
“Expel sputum on this sidewalk, Magdalena, and you’ll get down on your hands and knees to clean it up.”
I recoiled in surprise. “Frankie, who knew that
you
knew the S word?”