Tea with Jam and Dread (10 page)

P
erhaps I should be more forthc
oming; it was, after all, my elevator – but it was not my ‘lift’, as the Grimsley-Snodgrasses insisted on calling it. ‘Lifts’ are pads that short men put in the heels of their shoes to make them appear taller, or sometimes the word is used to describe a short ride in one’s automobile given as a favour – all right; this is a difficult subject for me to broach. I had been very fond of the young Japanese girl who went missing from my inn, and the second that I laid eyes on this desiccated corpse I knew it was her. Compounding my problem was the fact that Cee-Cee had arrived at the same conclusion.

‘Copulating excrement!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s her! Mummy, it’s that Japanese tourist, Yoko-san.’

To be sure, those were not the young lady’s exact words, nor was she being a proper lady for saying them. Nonetheless, I felt the thumping of webbed feet and heard the familiar honking as a gaggle of geese tromped over my grave – and me not yet buried. How on God’s green earth did the cheeky, chai-sipping Cee-Cee know that the young Japanese woman had been named Yoko?

Yes, Yoko is a common enough name in Japan, and virtually everyone on the planet must have heard of Yoko Ono, given that I already had. But Cee-Cee wasn’t
everyone
: Cee-Cee was a teenager. Besides, I had raised my sister, Susannah, who was a master manipulator, and who should have been awarded a doctorate in hysteria. I knew when someone was faking it. Believe me, Cee-Cee was not putting us on.

I grabbed Gabe’s arm for support. ‘My dear,’ I said to Cee-Cee, ‘how do you know her name?’

By then Cee-Cee’s face had turned the colour of feta cheese, a look which did not become her aristocratic features. ‘She told me.’

‘
Granny Yoder?
’ I asked incredulously. The small landing was packed with bodies, now that Agnes and Freni had huffed and puffed their way up my impossibly steep stairs to investigate the hullabaloo.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Cee-Cee said. ‘You don’t see that old lady anywhere, do you?’

‘No, but—’

‘Yoko-san told me herself.’

‘Now hold your horses, young lady,’ the Babester said. ‘First off, don’t you be calling my wife daft. You
will
respect her. And second, are you saying that a dried-up, desiccated corpse spoke to you?’

English eyes roll with American accents – or is it vice versa? If Cee-Cee had been my child I would have confined her to her room, what with all the eye-rolling, sighing, lower-lip protrusion that kid produced during her stay with me. Why, one day when she was pouting, a family of eight could have dined al fresco on her bottom lip, it stuck out so far.

Now where was I? Oh, yes, when Gabe demanded that aristocrat brat with the attitude treat me with respect, she actually did – for at least a little while.

‘Yes,’ Cee-Cee said emphatically, but without a trace of nastiness. ‘Yoko-san told me her name, and she is speaking now.’ The pretty girl, dressed in a Sunday frock, edged closer to the open shaft and cupped a dainty hand behind her right ear. ‘What is that you say, Yoko-san? No, I reckon that they won’t believe me, but I’ll tell them anything that you want me to.’

Of course, I wouldn’t believe her, but that didn’t stop me from edging closer to the elevator shaft and admonishing everyone to ‘shush,’ so that Cee-Cee could hear every word. After several minutes, during which Cee-Cee alternated between making comforting noises and asking questions of the corpse, she finally turned away from the shaft whilst covering her face with her sleeve. I’m sure that Cee-Cee did so in order to hide the fact that she’d been weeping, for the Brits abhor any public display of emotion. One tear too many and there goes the starch from a stiff upper lip!

Therefore I allowed the poor child sufficient time to regain her composure by ushering everyone back downstairs and into the dining room. Once there, I made them take their proper places at my expansive table (built by my ancestor Jacob the Strong). The expression ‘it was like trying to herd cats’ was far too generous to use in describing the effort required to manoeuvre this group, despite the fact that my impossibly steep staircase is rather narrow and thus does not allow many escape options. I would, instead, compare the act of getting this motley crew downstairs in a timely manner to that of trying to dress a six-legged cat in a pair of four-legged tights – not that I’ve had much experience with the latter, mind you. At any rate, when Cee-Cee did begin to speak on behalf of the dead woman, the others had grown so silent that one could have heard a frog fart from as far away as my neighbour’s farm pond.

‘Yoko-san has been dreadfully lonely,’ Cee-Cee said. ‘It’s been three years since that awful lift pinned her up against the ceiling, pressing her there like a flower that has been placed between the pages of a book to dry. She says that not once have you paid her a visit. It’s not like she would have blamed you, even though the accident was your fault – what with the terrible state of repair your lift was in. And when her weak cries for assistance went unanswered – for she didn’t die immediately – well, she was even willing to overlook that. But when you began complaining of the stench from her decomposing body, blaming it on a family of mice that had died behind the wallboard – that was just too much for her to bear.’

‘Ahem,’ Gabriel said, ‘corpses do not have emotions – ergo, they cannot be said to find things unbearable.’

‘Ahem, yourself,’ Agnes said. ‘This is far better than
Downton Abbey
! This will be excellent for business, Magdalena, because zombies are really big right now – which is, of course, how we’ll explain our so-called talking corpse. You don’t suppose that we could laminate her and keep her where she is, do you?’

‘What in Satan’s Home?’ Gabe roared. He actually said a much worse word, which I will not repeat. ‘The “
her
” to which you are referring, Agnes, happens to be a girl. She is not your driver’s licence!’

‘Honestly, Gabe,’ my bestie said, her lower lip quivering, ‘you don’t have to be so rude.’

I am quite certain that Cee-Cee gave my Beloved and I each a smug look before opening her big yap again. ‘Poor Yoko-san. She says that the big hairy
gaijin
roars like a drunken sumo wrestler, and this prevents her passing from being a peaceful one. Mrs – uh – Maga – Mrs Yoder—’

‘You may call me Magdalena, dear, although normally one has to be older than my sturdy Christian underwear in order to do that.’

‘Well then, Magdalena,’ said Rupert in his leering, aristocratic drawl, ‘you’ve been holding back on us, have you? Do tell us everything about your
dirty
Christian underwear.’

‘I said
sturdy
, not dirty, you id— I mean, dear. You see, a proper Christian wears thick, hefty undergarments that cover all the shameful parts. A really good Christian woman – and I’m not judging here, mind you – always wears a skirt, and a nice full petticoat, and of course her unmentionables, which should have enough white cotton fabric in them to supply a schooner with sails.’

‘Puh-
leez
, Mom,’ groaned Alison, ‘ya ain’t gonna bore us with that story again, are ya, just when Cee-Cee’s about to tell us more about what the dead lady said?’

‘Forsooth, I am,’ I said. ‘It happened up there on Stucky Ridge, that very mountain over yonder.’ I waved a gangly arm. ‘I was doing detective work, as is my wont from time to time, and on this particular occasion I came to the startling conclusion that the murderer was, in fact, our very own police chief, Melvin Stoltzfus. I confronted him with my theory and it was all downhill from there for me – literally. The chief, who was the meanest, craziest cretin that ever walked the face of the earth, immediately pushed me off a sheer cliff. As I plunged hundreds of feet to my death, I asked the Good Lord to forgive not only my sins but the sins of that nut job as well.’ I took a deep breath and paused for dramatic effect.

‘Und den vhat?’ Mother Malaise demanded. ‘Did you live?’

Ding, dang, dong! To my credit, I kept my swear words to myself. But really, how could I be blamed for thinking them? My diminutive but top-heavy nemesis had somehow managed to dodge the occasional horse that clops along Hertzler Road and infiltrate my perfect example of an English breakfast. For the record, I know that it was perfect because it was all Agnes’s bailiwick. When that gal gets a bee in her bonnet, even the Kremlin puts in orders for honey.

‘Und did you live?’ Ida persisted.

I smiled broadly. ‘Yes! I lived, and all because of my sturdy Christian underwear. My petticoat caught the breeze, opened up like a parachute and lowered me gently into the outstretched arms of a giant oak tree. Then, since my God-given life was still at stake, I threw both caution and modesty to the wind, slipped out of my enormous white cotton bloomers and hung them from two branches. There my unmentionables flapped in the breeze rather like an enormous flag. In all honesty, that breeze felt pretty good you-know-where.’

‘You go girl!’ Mother Malaise cried triumphantly.

‘Rally, Magdalena,’ Peregrine said with surprising gentleness, ‘as interesting as your tales are, I do think that your daughter has a point: it would be disrespectful
not
to listen to what the young Japanese woman has to say. While it is true that she does not have eyes, ears, and a mouth in the traditional sense, she has crossed over a threshold that separates the omniscient from the merely aware. Since the creature has given my daughter the ability to communicate with those who have passed ahead, as she has put it so eloquently, it would be an affront to Him not to avail ourselves of this opportunity.’

‘
I
said all that?’ Alison asked. ‘About a
front
and a
veil
, and all that kinda stuff?’

Gabe winked. ‘All my women say deep things.’

Mother Malaise blushed with pride and patted her wimple. ‘Ya, Gabeleh, und even me?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

My mother-in-law lacks a neck. This is only conjecture, mind you, as I have not yet attempted to wring it. Whatever the case may be, Ida Rosen, aka Mother Malaise, can swivel her head 360 degrees and with the speed of a ceiling fan set on high when she feels threatened.

‘Ha, Magdalena,’ she said. ‘Und you said dat I vas only as deep as my shadow. Mebbe you aren’t such a schmarty pants after all. Who knows, mebbe I’m schmarter den you!’

Just as a tart retort was forming on the launching pad that is my tongue, I spied our Chief of Police, Toy Graham, standing in the doorway to the lobby. Heaven only knows how long he’d been there. If he’d only just arrived, perhaps I still stood a chance of giving him the impression that I was somewhat in control.

I smiled benevolently at Ida. ‘Yes, Mother Mayonnaise, whatever you say.’ I turned to Cee-Cee. ‘Carry on, dear.’

Cee-Cee didn’t waste a second. ‘Yoko-san wants to go home,’ she said.

‘
Home?
’ Aubrey said. ‘You mean, to England?’

That was too much even for a rabid anglophile like Agnes. ‘Not
everyone
stranded on foreign shores identifies with England as home,’ she said rather curtly.

Aubrey coloured slightly but nonetheless stood her ground. ‘Yes, but I’ve heard that many people amongst the second, and even third generations of Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans of English descent, speak fondly of England as “home.” We were once a mighty power, you know, and our strong moral compass and impeccable manners were the gifts of civilization that we so generously spread throughout the heathen world.’

‘Along with venereal disease and a God who punishes his victims for all eternity,’ Gabriel said.

‘I beg your pardon!’ Peregrine boomed. ‘You, sir, will apologize to the Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass at once.’

Knowing that Gabe would not apologize, I jumped in to diffuse the situation. ‘Actually, I’m pretty sure that my husband knows what he’s talking about, because he’s a doctor and he knows that venereal disease was spread by seaman – uh, no pun intended. As for the punishment part, he’s pretty accurate about that too. You see, Gabe is Jewish, and in Judaism God’s punishments don’t last longer than eleven months, but in Christianity – well, if one doesn’t accept Christ’s free gift of salvation then one suffers forever in the place called Hell.’

‘True that,’ Alison said. ‘Yinz can see why I picked my dad’s religion.’

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Peregrine said. ‘If we’re ever going to get to the nude dancing we’d best finish this séance in a timely manner.’

‘It’s
not
a séance,’ Cee-Cee said emphatically. ‘It’s a
reading
. And what Yoko-san has been so patiently waiting to tell us is that her home is on the Island of Honshu in a city called Kakogawa in Hyogo Prefecture. Although her city is on the coast, it has a steel mill so it isn’t very attractive, but the mountains behind the city are beautiful. Yoko-san said that her parents both died in the Kobe earthquake of nineteen ninety-five. But her grandfather is an apple grower on an ancestral plot of land at the back edge of the city towards the mountains. The variety of apples that he grew was known as the sweetest in all of Japan. She wants to return home to him and have a proper Shinto burial ceremony. But first you must cremate her remains.’

Upon finishing this rather lengthy narration, Cee-Cee closed her eyes and slid down in her chair until she all but disappeared beneath the massive oak table. By all appearances, acting as a medium had left her deeply exhausted.

‘Oh, darling,’ Aubrey said and patted her daughter’s slumped shoulder. This was the English equivalent of Aubrey crying out in alarm and then clasping Cee-Cee tightly to her bosom whilst rocking her to and fro.

Truth be told, I was gobsmacked by what I had just heard and seen. For one thing, Cee-Cee’s tone and diction had been much improved during her recitation. It certainly hadn’t sounded like a teenager’s voice and it wasn’t her normal highfalutin accent. Nor was it Yoko-san’s voice. But the thing that I found to be the most shocking was that the information it conveyed was all true.