Just Plain Pickled to Death (2 page)

“This has nothing to do with Melvin and Zelda, dear. It has to do with you. You and Sarah Weaver.”

Susan’s face had turned to stone. I knew she could no longer hear me, but I had to continue.

“I think that’s Sarah Weaver back there,” I said gently.

She said nothing. It was time to try another tack.

“You saw the girl in the barrel. Who do you think it is?”

Susannah and her stone face hopped off the porch and disappeared down Hertzler Lane just minutes before Melvin and Zelda arrived. I was tempted to go after her, but I know my sister, and I knew that she would be all right—in a manner of speaking. Sarah Weaver, and the barrel of kraut, had been left far behind.

Chapter Two

I barely had time to tell Aaron that Sarah was his cousin before Melvin and Zelda came screeching up in a pathetic portrayal of proper police procedure. There was no need for them to have the siren wailing and the lights flashing, and there was certainly no need for them to jump out of the car with their guns drawn. Whoever killed Sarah Weaver had long since departed the scene, if not the earth.

“Put those things away,” I chided them, and rightfully so. Both of them are distant kin as well, which means they have Amish forebears and therefore have no business handling weapons of any sort in the first place. Beyond that, anything in Melvin’s hands makes him armed and dangerous. He almost put out his own eye with a weenie-roasting stick when we were kids, and it had a hot dog firmly attached to the end.

“Police business,” Melvin said brusquely and tried to brush me aside.

I blocked his way.

“Just hold your horses, buster. The body in the barrel isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the person who put her there.”

“Oh, yeah? Says who?”

“Says me.”

Melvin’s left eye rotated slowly in its socket until it fixed on the right side of my face.

“Just who the hell do you think you are?”

“Magdalena Portulaca Yoder. I have brown hair, blue eyes, and am on the tall side. My current weight is none of your business. Neither is my age, except that you have it written down somewhere and you always get it wrong. I’m forty-four years old, Melvin, not fifty-four.”

He made another unsuccessful attempt to stare at me. Melvin has bulging eyes that operate independently of each other, only one of several features that make him look like a giant praying mantis. Freni claims that Melvin was kicked in the head by a bull he tried to milk, which would explain one of the concave curves of his face. Others have told me that story as well. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that what you see is what you get. More than once I’ve come real close to pointing a can of Raid at Melvin to see his reaction.

“Move aside, Yoder!”

“Not until you put those awful guns away and hear me out.”

“Aha! So you’re obstructing justice, are you?”

Zelda stepped between the two of us. “We are just trying to do our job, Magdalena.”

I looked over her head to Melvin. Now the right eye had locked in on the left side of my face, which is just as well, because it is my more flattering side.

“I have no interest in obstructing justice, Melvin. In fact, I have some information that may well speed up the process.”

“Is this a confession?”

I prayed silently for patience to deal with Melvin. While I was at it, I prayed that I would win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. So far, neither prayer has been answered.

“I’ll take your silence as a yes,” Melvin sneered. “And don’t think it comes as a surprise. You always were a violent one, Magdalena.”

I took a solid step forward, forcing little Zelda to duck out of the way.

“You take that back, buster!”

I don’t remember actually touching Melvin. I concede that I may have given him a gentle rap or two on the chest with my knuckles, but I certainly didn’t mean him any bodily harm.

“Aha! Now it’s assault!”

I stepped back. “What?”

There was a triumphant gleam in his eyes. Well, the right one, at any rate.

“You just added ‘assaulting an officer’ to the charges.”

“What!”

“And you needn’t shout, unless you want ‘disturbing the peace’ added to the list.”

“It’s Sarah Weaver,” I screamed. “She’s the one Freni found in the barrel of kraut on my back porch, and by the look of things, she’s been in there an awfully long time. Probably since the day she went missing!”

Melvin’s eyes jerked into temporary alignment. “My Sarah Weaver? The one I dated in high school?”

“The very one. And it was only one date, dear,” I pointed out kindly. To have heard Sarah back then, it was one date too many.

“Sarah was never good enough for you anyway,” Zelda muttered. To be truthful, I couldn’t hear all the words clearly, but I’m sure that’s the gist of what she said. Zelda Root not only has the hots for her boss, Melvin, but it’s common knowledge that she is intensely jealous of anyone who normally sits down to micturate. No one in the community can convince her that—at least in this case—jealousy is a wasted emotion.

It was the left eye now, fixed on my nose. “You didn’t like Sarah Weaver much, did you, Magdalena?”

“I liked her just fine.” It was the truth. In fact, I probably liked her better than I did my sister back then.

“It’s one thing not to like someone, Magdalena, but murder?”

“I did not murder Sarah Weaver!”

“Well, somebody did.” Zelda had the irritating habit of butting into all my important conversations. “Teenage girls don’t climb into sauerkraut barrels of their own accord.”

“Well, even if this one did, she didn’t do it on my back porch. That barrel was delivered just this morning.”

“Oh?” They both said. They both sounded disappointed as well.

“That’s right. Aaron Miller—my fiance—delivered that this morning. It was a wedding present from his father.”

“Oh?” They were both interested again.

I stamped my foot. If big is beautiful, my feet are gorgeous. I stamped loud enough to scare away a crow that had been eavesdropping on the telephone line.

“See here! My Aaron isn’t guilty, and neither is his father. That barrel had been sitting around in his root cellar since who-knows-when. Twenty years at least. When Aaron Senior heard that I was serving sauerkraut at my wedding supper, he sent it over as a gift.”

Zelda made the kind of face I used to make when Mama fed me castor oil. As for Melvin, it is hard to tell when he makes faces.

“Ugh,” Zelda said. “What kind of present is twenty-year-old sauerkraut?”

I shrugged. She had a point. Good sauerkraut can be made in a couple of months. And frankly, I had been bitterly disappointed when the two Aarons unloaded the barrel that morning. I had been hoping for a new clothes dryer—one of my recent guests had deposited a wad of gum the size of my fist in the inn’s dryer, and I was having an awful time getting it all out.

“Aaron Senior grew up during the Great Depression,” I said, trying to be loyal. “Folks who’ve lived through that don’t throw anything away.”

Zelda nodded. “My grandmother saves all her used tea bags. She claims they make good mulch for roses, only she hasn’t grown roses for as long as I can remember. She must have over a thousand used tea bags in a big canister under the basement stairs.”

Melvin snorted. “Well, I’m not buying this frugal bit. If that barrel came from the Miller farm, I’d say that makes Aaron Senior a prime suspect.”

I forced myself to swallow my rage. If anger had calories, I would have blown up like a balloon. “Look, my Aaron was in Vietnam then, but if his father did it, why would he deposit the incriminating evidence on my back porch?”

“Some people can be awfully stupid,” Melvin had the nerve to say.

I gained a few more imaginary pounds but managed to hold my tongue.

“And there is the issue of familiarity,” Zelda said placidly. “Aaron Senior was Sarah’s uncle, and most murderers know their victims, you know.”

I whirled. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, dear.”

“What?” followed by “What?”

I addressed the soprano exclamation.

“I mean, who was dating Sarah back then? Melvin, right?”

“It was only one date. You said so yourself.”

“One date—that I know of. Maybe there were more. Maybe Melvin tried to put the moves on her. Maybe she resisted. Maybe—”

“That’s ridiculous!”

I glanced at Melvin, who was as white as a sheet got back in the days when Mama used to boil hers in borax.

“Maybe none of us should jump to conclusions,” I said softly.

There were no more accusations that day.

“Call her father, dear,” I said to Aaron after everyone had left.

“Can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I don’t know where he is, that’s why.”

“Then ask your father. He’ll know. He knows—”

“Pops doesn’t know either. Nobody does.”

“What?”

“Uncle Jonas moved out of Hernia the summer following Sarah’s disappearance. He never wrote, and he never called.”

“Not anyone?”

“Not a soul. Uncle Jonas was a strange man, Magdalena, even before that terrible summer. Then his wife disappeared and, only a month after that, their daughter. It put him over the edge.”

I tried to recall a face, but I have trouble keeping track of my own relatives. Undoubtedly one could populate a small nation with lost kinfolk of mine.

“Well, then, turn the job over to Melvin. He might as well do something useful.”

“I already spoke to him about it when you were inside getting cold drinks. He doesn’t think he’ll have any luck either. Says he wants to put Pops down as next of kin.”

I shuddered. Jonas’s absence seemed somehow to add to the horror of the situation. Poor Sarah had been hanging around for twenty years in a barrel of kraut. She had a right to be buried with her father in attendance.

“They’re all coming for the funeral,” Aaron said. “They’ll be here as fast as they can.”

“Who’s coming?” I asked. Whoever it was had better not want any supper. Freni had gone home as soon as the police left, and since there were no guests at the inn—on account of my upcoming wedding—I hadn’t bothered to cook that evening. Neither Aaron nor I was hungry, and Susannah had yet to come home.

“The Beeftrust,” Aaron said.

“Pooky Bear, we’re having ham at the wedding, remember? And ribs to go with the kraut. Sorry, dear. We’ve gone over the menu a million times.”

Aaron laughed. My beloved is breathtakingly handsome, with black hair, bright-blue eyes, and incredibly white teeth. When he laughs you can see every single one of those shiny pearls.

“The Beeftrust is not a meat company. It’s my aunts.”

“Aaron!”

He laughed again. “That’s what they call themselves. You remember how big they are, don’t you?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t seen Aaron’s aunts for years. At one time they had all been neighbors, and then gradually they moved out of Hernia, some of them to different states. In that time a lot of water had passed under my bridge. A lot of dirty water, and a lot of scalding water. Not much of it had been suitable for drinking.

“Well, I’m sure it will all come back to you when you see them. But be prepared, at any rate. Auntie Veronica is six two and two hundred pounds. I think she’s the oldest.”

I gulped. Visions of behemoth Millers were indeed coming back to me. Eveningmares, more than visions. None of the aunties—that I could remember— was fat, but they were all huge. Beefy, I guess, was the perfect way to describe them, although they possessed other physical peculiarities as well.

“Ah, yes, your aunt Veronica. She’s the one with the—uh, uh, preposterous proboscis,” I posed politely.

My Pooky Bear winced, and I felt ashamed. It wasn’t true that Auntie Veronica’s schnoz required its own Zip Code, no matter what folks said.

“Well, tell me about your aunt Leah,” I said by way of deflection.

“Auntie Leah is the next oldest, and she’s the tallest. She’s six four, and she looks just like you.”

“I’m five ten,” I said pleasantly through gritted teeth.

“Oh, I meant her face. You two look enough alike to be related.”

“We probably are related somehow, but let’s hope she looks older.”

“Yes, of course, that’s what I meant. Auntie Lizzie, however, looks nothing like you. People say she looks English.”

“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure what Aaron meant by that. When an Amish man says someone looks English, he means they look worldly. But Aaron, who had seen the world, could have meant anything.

“Auntie Lizzie always had the most incredible skin. Peaches and cream, Mama called it.”

I bit my tongue. It wouldn’t do to snap at my Pooky Bear so close to the wedding.

“Auntie Rebecca is, of course, still missing. She was the shortest of my aunties. Only a scant six feet in her stockings.”

“Wasn’t she the crabby one?”

“No, that’s Auntie Veronica. But you would be crabby too if you had a nose like that,” he added defensively.

It was time to change the subject. Believe it or not, a few of my detractors claim that I am crabby— mean-spirited, they have called me. And while my schnoz wasn’t worthy of its own Zip Code, a P.O. box was not out of the question.