Tea with Jam and Dread

Cover

A Selection of Titles by Tamar Myers

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Pennsylvania Dutch Mysteries

THOU SHALT NOT GRILL

ASSAULT AND PEPPER

GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

HELL HATH NO CURRY

AS THE WORLD CHUMS

BATTER OFF DEAD

BUTTER SAFE THAN SORRY

THE DEATH OF PIE *TEA WITH JAM AND DREAD *

* available from Severn House

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

This first world edition published 2016

in Great Britain and the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

Trade paperback edition first published

in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2016 by Tamar Myers.

The right of Tamar Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Myers, Tamar author.

Tea with jam and dread. – (The Pennsylvania Dutch

mysteries)

1. Yoder, Magdalena (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

2. Nobility–Great Britain–Fiction. 3. English–United

States–Fiction. 4. Murder–Investigation–Fiction.

5. Mennonites–Fiction. 6. Pennsylvania Dutch Country

(Pa.)–Fiction. 7. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title II. Series

813.6-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8589-0 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-692-3 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-752-3 (e-book)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

Stirlingshire, Scotland.

This book is dedicated to Kate Lyall Grant. Her keen editorial eye and her brilliant observations were much appreciated.

M
y name is Magdalena Portulac
ca Yoder Rosen and I have a heart full of Christian joy, but I am not a happy woman. This may seem like a paradox, but please allow me to explain. The joy comes from the certainty that my sins are forgiven, and that I will, for a fact, be going to Heaven, but how can I be happy when my only sister faces a twenty-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting a convicted serial killer? Even more damaging to my psyche is the fact that the serial murderer, Melvin Stoltzfus, our erstwhile Police Chief, is not only my brother-in-law – he is my biological half-brother!

No one would guess that we are related just by looking at us, because I resemble an upright mare, although with pinned-back ears and somewhat larger teeth, whereas Melvin is the spitting image of a praying mantis. At any rate, through some inexplicable means, Melvin was able to cast an evil spell on just about everyone he met. The result was a bizarre cult known as Melvinism. Its adherents worshipped him as if he were a deity. Someone ‘discovered’ a complete set of scriptures called
The Book of Melvin
, and a second volume titled
Sacred Hymns to Melvin
, both wrapped in a feed sack and tucked away in the far reaches of a hayloft of a long-abandoned barn. The book’s contents were nothing more than a bunch of fairy tales in which my bug-eyed, bobble-headed brother performed a series of outrageous miracles – stuff impossible to believe. However, that didn’t stop the local yokels from falling for it. Not only did they fall for this claptrap hook, line and sinker, they proselytized others as if tomorrow was the end of the world. In a way, it
was
the end of my world, because when Melvin turned into a killer his cult followers protected him wherever he went.

Truly, my tale of Melvin is tragic enough to sadden any good woman, but my unhappiness did not begin then. Even now my face burns with shame as I confess that some years ago I became what
I
refer to as an ‘inadvertent adulteress.’ Yes, I know, there are others who will always call me just plain
adulteress
, and I suppose that is their right to do so, but it is also my right to suppose that they are just plain
envious
. Anyway, it happened like this.

I was a young woman and a virgin. I had no idea what a naked man looked like, supposing that they all looked similar to Michelangelo’s Statue of David, a photo of which I’d chanced to come upon in a travel magazine. You can imagine then, that when I did espy the real thing on my wedding night, as it wobbled straight at me like a headless turkey neck, that I screamed and dived under the covers. After that traumatic night I could never look at a real turkey without blushing, and Christmas dinner was forever ruined.

But wait, if only the horror of my tale ended there, it would at least remain
my
private nightmare. Alas, that was not to be. Just as the ex-virgin (that would be me), now the newly wedded and bedded, freshly minted matron, was on the verge of experiencing marital bliss, her husband, Aaron Miller, blurted out the name of his
first
wife. That’s right: his
first
wife, a woman to whom he was still married!

‘I signed the divorce papers,’ he whined. ‘How was I supposed to know I needed to show up in court? It was my first divorce.’

We all make mistakes, and I might even have been able to stick by Aaron through all of this debacle – I had promised ‘till death do us part’ – except that within a matter of days he confessed that there was a child involved, a daughter by the name of Alison.

Long story short: my marriage to Aaron was annulled and I met and married Dr Gabriel Rosen, whom I call the Babester. Several years ago, Gabriel and I ended up formally adopting Alison, now age fourteen, because it turned out that neither Aaron, nor his first wife, really wanted her. One year ago, at age forty-nine, I gave Alison a younger brother, delivered in quite the more usual way.

There you have it, if only in a rather large nutshell: the history of my unhappiness. Given the extent of my suffering, please indulge me by permitting me one last observation: a woman with two husbands is an adulteress, whereas a man with two wives is merely a bigamist! Why, you might ask? It’s because all three of the biblical patriarchs were
poly
gamists. Forsooth, being an inadvertent adulteress, I was the victim of
rape
. My maidenhood was stolen from me by an act of deception; there, that's putting it plain and simple enough, is it not?

One would think that I had done enough suffering to make Swedes in winter as giddy as schoolgirls in comparison, but that didn’t stop the Good Lord from testing me further. Despite the fact that my younger sister, Susannah, was in prison for aiding and abetting a man wanted for murder, I was finally getting the hang of the one skill that happy folks of all mindsets must finally get around to mastering, that of
compartmen‌talization
.

So what if my half-brother, who resembled a giant praying mantis, was the alleged murderer, and that I’d witnessed him skipping town dressed in a nun’s habit, riding in a bus full of fake nuns? And so what if my sister, who had too many bad habits to list, was also wearing a nun’s habit when she was caught by the long arm of the law, and that, as per usual, there was a tiny, but vociferous, odoriferous, and vicious Yorkshire terrier nestled in the right cup of her oversized brassiere? It’s my contention that just about every family has at least one psychopath, if not two, clinging to the limbs of its ancestral tree. What sets my family apart is that the dearly demented sit next to each other on the same branch.

So there I was, on the verge of becoming happy once more, when Sheriff Felonious Stodgewiggle, our county law enforcement official, paid a surprise visit to the PennDutch Inn. It was early summer and I was shelling green peas whilst sitting in an Adirondacks-style rocking chair on the front veranda in the cool of the afternoon. My hunky husband, Gabe, the Babester, was at that moment driving our teenager, Alison, over to spend the night at a friend’s house. Gabe had taken our infant son, Little Jacob, with him.

Our village has its own police department, so the sheriff’s people normally just do ‘drive bys.’ So when I saw the car turn up the gravel lane in my direction, I instinctively knew it was trouble. When I saw that it was Felonious who was driving, I knew it was
big
trouble.

‘Whatever it is, Felonious,’ I said as he got out of the car, ‘I’m going to have to take a rain check.’ I glanced at my wristwatch. ‘How about, say, two o’clock on the Twelfth of Never?’

Poor Felonious Stodgewiggle. His were the shaggiest eyebrows I have ever seen. Truly, they are like a pair of black Persian kittens that someone has glued to the skin of an otherwise baby-smooth face. His so-called five o’clock shadow would be the envy of any Hollywood actor’s weeklong attempt at growing facial stubble. The thatch that manages to escape from the slight V at his throat hints at grave but marvellous consequences for any woman fortunate enough to undo another button. Oops, perhaps I have said far too much for a married woman who has promised to remain faithful to her husband, even in her mind, to the bitter end.

Being all man, Sheriff Stodgewiggle doesn’t possess a shred of humour. He is the kind of man who would hit a woman over the head with a club and drag her back to his cave – if he were a Neanderthal. Of course, I’m only joking, because Neanderthals never existed, given that God created Adam as a white man with a prominent jaw and a straight forehead, and that was around five thousand years ago, not hundreds of thousands of years ago, or whatever. And we certainly didn’t evolve from apes, or even a common ancestor of apes, which is what my husband, Gabe, believes. I know for a fact that the sheriff doesn’t believe in this scientific nonsense.

At any rate, since Felonious is humourless, and neither is he a Mennonite like myself, nor married to a secular music lover like my husband, he was stumped by my answer. He scratched beneath his voluminous chin with his thick, broken nails and sniffed the air, as if those actions might bring clarity.

‘Uh, is that one of youse Mennonite holidays?’ he asked.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I was being facetious.’

‘Yeah.’

I set my bowl of peas aside, along with my attitude and my bad manners. ‘Would you care to take a seat, Sheriff? These rocking chairs are actually more comfortable than they look.’

Sheriff Stodgewiggle settled into his proffered chair with a smile. ‘Yeah, this is nice. I’ve been wondering what to put on my porch ever since Ma broke the hammock. Her doc’s been after her to stay under three hundred pounds, but you know how she loves her sweets.’

‘When I offered you a seat, dear, I didn’t mean that you could actually
keep
the chair. It belongs to my husband.’

‘Oh. I knew that; you bet I did. Magdalena, I’m here because I have some bad news.’

My heart leapt into my throat which, given that I am vertically enhanced, meant that it had a long way to travel. ‘It’s my sister, Susannah, isn’t it? What did she do now? Try to sneak out of prison in a laundry bag? Dig her way out with a teaspoon? Feign death so well that she was taken to the prison morgue? Because she’s done all of those twice already, except that last one—’

It was only then that Felonious raised a hairy paw to signal me to stop blithering and to start listening. ‘I got an email today from a woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, by the name of Maggie Peerless.’

‘Hmm,’ I mused, ‘Maggie. Do you suppose that is short for Magdalena? Sadly, there aren’t that many parents naming their daughters Magdalena these days – at least not out in the general population. It’s still pretty popular among the Amish, though.’

Felonious shook his thick salt-and-pepper mane and roared like a lion. ‘Magdalena, I swear I don’t know how your husband puts up with you.’

‘Why I never!’ I said.

‘This woman’s name wasn’t the point,’ he growled. ‘I thought that you might want to know what her message said.’

I could feel my hands grow cold and clammy as my throat constricted with dryness. ‘Well, since you drove all the way out here from Bedford it must be something rather important. So yes, I do want to know. I very much want to know.’

Sheriff Felonious Stodgewiggle knew by then that he had me hook, line and sinker. The satisfaction showed in his eyes and what little bare skin he had on his face, but I didn’t care; I was his for the telling.

‘She claims to have spotted Melvin Stoltzfus on television doing a commercial,’ he said. ‘It was an advertisement for Adorhim: those pills that are supposed to stimulate the female libido. The adverts feature handsome, bare-chested men lounging next to a pool. They’re speaking directly to the TV screen and their message is that all a woman needs to do, in order to get her engine racing again, is to start swallowing those pills.’

I burst out laughing, which was like jabbing the lion with a white-hot poker. When the beast had calmed down enough to pay attention to my words, I managed to spit out a few of them.

‘Did you ever meet Melvin?’

‘No,’ Felonious said, sounding deeply regretful. ‘His crime spree here ended just before I took the job. I moved here from Toledo, Ohio, if you’ll remember.’

‘I didn’t think there was another Toledo,’ I said, ‘except for in Spain. Anyway, Melvin is a dead ringer for a praying mantis. A giant version, of course. He has a tiny head, huge eyes that swivel in all directions and his limbs are toothpick thin. The only part of the analogy that doesn’t hold up to this image is that no giant female praying mantis could stand to eat Melvin Stoltzfus.’

The black Persian kittens on the sheriff’s forehead leapt in unison. ‘So what you’re really saying is that you can’t stand your brother—’

‘
Half
-brother!’ I said vehemently.

‘But brother-in-law as well, correct?’

‘Yes, I was adopted. Susannah is not related to that scum— Forgive me, it is not in my nature to call someone names.’

‘Well, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that he’d been spotted,’ Sheriff Felonious Stodgewiggle said as he rose stiffly to his feet. ‘And now I can be certain that you won’t be aiding and abetting this fellow in the event that he does show up in these parts.’

‘Likewise, I’m sure. Correct?’

‘
I beg your pardon?
’ he said.

‘If you had done any homework, you would have discovered that the name Magdalena Yoder is synonymous with law and order here in Hernia. Our village could not afford a police department were it not for my largesse. My reputation as sleuth has spread even beyond the borders of our county – I dare say even beyond the borders of our fair state, given that I once solved a crime in the dairy industry in the State of Ohio. There was no use crying over spilled milk when I was done with that.’

Sheriff Felonious Stodgewiggle denied me the satisfaction of even a sarcastic response. Without further ado he turned and barrelled down my steps like a man who had somehow been deeply offended. But by what? I wondered. Oh, well, it presently being summer, I closed my mouth in order to limit the number of flies that sought entry and went back to shelling peas.