Read Just Plain Pickled to Death Online
Authors: Tamar Myers
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Just Plain Pickled to Death
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Magdalena Yoder’s Wedding Feast, from Soup to Nuts
Great-Granny Yoder’s Onion Cheese Soup
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Magdalena Yoder’s Wedding Feast, from Soup to Nuts
Freni Hostetler’s Wilted Dandelion Salad
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Magdalena Yoder’s Wedding Feast, from Soup to Nuts
Auntie Leah’s Pork Chops with Sauerkraut und Apples
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Magdalena Yoder’s Wedding Feast, from Soup to Nuts
Auntie Magdalena’s Potato Dumplings
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-five
Magdalena Yoder’s Wedding Feast, from Soup to Nuts
Auntie Lizzie’s Mushroom and Pea Casserole
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Magdalena Yoder’s Wedding Feast, from Soup to Nuts
Barbara Hostetler’s Save-the-Day Pecan Pies
Discover Tamar Myers
About the Author
Just Plain Pickled to Death
An Amish Bed and Breakfast Mystery with Recipes #4
Tamar Myers
Copyright
This e-book is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.
This e-book may not be sold, shared, or given away.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Just Plain Pickled to Death
Copyright © Tamar Myers, 1997
Ebook ISBN: 9781625173355
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
NYLA Publishing
350 7
th
Avenue, Suite 2003, NY 10001, New York.
Dedication
For Joseph Pittman, Senior Editor at Dutton Signet
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Eben Weiss, Assistant Editor at Dutton Signet, as well as the behind-the-scenes players there who are an in-valuable part of the team. Special thanks goes to Tom Longshaw of Rock Hill, who helped me when I was in a pickle. In addition, I would like to thank the Blue Stocking Club of Pittsburgh (“younz” are great), and the Blue Stocking Book Club of Rock Hill, South Carolina (thanks, y’all for the support).
Chapter One
Sarah Weaver was found dead in a barrel of pickled sauerkraut. On my back porch. Freni, who found her, screamed, fainted, and then screamed again. I merely fainted.
Aaron Miller, my fiance, slapped me gently back to consciousness.
“It’s okay,” he said. ‘‘Susannah is calling the police.”
I raised up on one elbow and eyed the barrel balefully. “It’s not okay,” I wailed. “It’s horrible!”
“What I meant is that the authorities have been called. It’s still horrible about the body.”
What I meant was that a perfectly good barrel of sauerkraut had been ruined, and I would be hard-pressed to find a replacement in time for my wedding supper just a week away. That was my gut reaction, but of course I didn’t say that. Please don’t get me wrong, it was horrible about the woman in the barrel too, but she was obviously very dead and there was nothing to be done about that now. Besides which, if that was who I thought it was, she had been missing for almost twenty years.
“Ooooh,” Freni moaned. “Ooooh.”
Aaron left my side to attend to my elderly cousin.
I got up on all fours, then on my knees, and took another quick peek at the woman I thought was Sarah Weaver. It was a morbid thing to do, but I felt strangely compelled. Besides which, somebody needed to make a positive identification.
As far as I could tell, it was her all right. Same long blond hair, same cheap plastic hair bands, same awful paisley dress. Still, pickling is not kind to one’s features, and an autopsy was no doubt in order just to be a hundred percent sure.
A wave of nausea hit me like a ton of bricks, and I lay back down again and closed my eyes. I tried focusing on my special spot, which is a pond just across the road from my farm. That worked for a while, and although I could still hear Aaron’s calm voice as he tried to soothe Freni, I was at least able to shut the picture of Sarah with sauerkraut in her hair out of my mind. At least until my sister, Susannah, came back.
“I called Melvin,” she said, sounding just as normal as could be. “He and Zelda will be right over. He said not to touch anything. Especially not to eat any of the kraut, on account it might not be good anymore.”
A second wave of nausea hit me. “Call Doc Shafor,” I managed to say through clenched teeth.
“Ah, do I have to?”
I pounded the porch floor with a fist, which Susannah correctly interpreted as a command. She left whining, and I lay still for a few minutes before crawling off into the house to collect my thoughts. That took several minutes more.
Sarah Weaver, I remembered, was not the only member of her family to go missing for two decades.
Her mother, Rebecca Weaver, had disappeared approximately a month before her daughter had. Perhaps she was in that barrel as well. I forced myself to glance at the barrel again. No, Sarah’s mother couldn’t possibly be sharing the same slatted coffin. There simply wasn’t enough room. At least she hadn’t shown up on my back porch the week of my wedding.
I started to breathe a sigh of relief, and then I remembered something else. It was obvious that Aaron hadn’t recognized Sarah. Perhaps he should have. Aaron and Sarah were first cousins, after all. Sarah’s mother, Rebecca—the first to go missing—was Aaron’s aunt, his father’s sister. But in all fairness, Aaron had left Hernia, Pennsylvania, when his cousin was only nine or ten.
I’m afraid that now is the time to confess that the reason my fiance left home was to join the army. That was in 1972, and the Vietnam War was still in progress. The very fact that Aaron volunteered to fight in a war literally broke his parents’ hearts. His mother actually died the following year.
You see, Aaron and Sarah, like my sister, Susannah, and I, were raised Amish-Mennonites. Our pacifist roots go back to 1536, to a man named Menno Simons (from whom we get the word “Mennonite”). They were slightly modified in 1693 by a man named Jakob Amman (from whom we get the word “Amish”) and brought to this country in 1738 by our ancestor Jacob Hochstetler and his contemporaries. My particular branch of the family tree curved back on itself and became Mennonite again, while other closely related branches remained staunchly Amish.
From this brief description of my ancestors you may extrapolate two things. The first is that despite their resistance to military service, the Mennonites, Amish, and Amish-Mennonites are longtime Americans and loyal to the core. The second is that my forebears are more interbred than pedigreed poodles, and only slightly less interbred than the royal families of Europe. To put it bluntly, I am my own cousin. Several times over.
The upshot is that Aaron and I are somehow cousins, but not so closely related that we can’t be legally married. Of course, Sarah Weaver—the unfortunate young woman in the sauerkraut barrel—was some sort of a cousin to me as well, but she was Aaron’s first cousin. I was going to have to tell him that, since he obviously didn’t remember her.
Aaron would undoubtedly be stunned at first, but he hadn’t known his cousin well enough to be grief-stricken. Susannah had. Sarah and Susannah had been best girlhood friends until that tragic day—it was around the Fourth of July, if I remember right— when Sarah Weaver disappeared. Her disappearance had rocked the town of Hernia and, indeed, a large portion of the state. A massive hunt, involving dogs and even the FBI, ensued, but of course the girl had never been found. For some reason my sister’s mind had been unable to cope with the loss of her best friend, and so she simply didn’t. That’s what it seemed like, at any rate. One day Sarah and Susannah were giggling about boys, and the next day Susannah was giggling alone. It was as if Sarah had never existed.
Mennonites of our ilk don’t put much stock in psychotherapy—we rely on the Bible instead—but even that wasn’t enough to make Susannah face reality.
Unfortunately, my poor sister might have to face the truth in just a matter of minutes because Melvin, our chief of police, had all the sensitivity of a bull in heat, and Melvin would undoubtedly recognize Sarah. The two of them had once dated in high school.
I found Susannah waiting on the front porch for Melvin and Zelda to show up. Susannah had dated Melvin too—much more recently, in fact—but even though she no longer cared an owl’s hoot for him, she couldn’t stand to see him “in the clutches of Zelda.”
“You all right?” I asked, sitting down next to her, on an Adirondack rocker.
“Fine,” Susannah said impatiently, “but when that damn bitch gets here, I’m going to give her what for. Last time I saw her she was wearing a sweater I left in Melvin’s car.”
I hoped the sweater was cardigan and meant to be shed. My sister, despite her strict upbringing, has all the morals of the aforementioned bull in heat. She is ten years my junior, and when our parents died an untimely death in the Allegheny Tunnel, they inadvertently heaped a lot on my plate. Not only was I suddenly responsible for a very irresponsible sibling, but I was the owner of a farm as well. I was good at managing neither, and my sister ended up marrying and then divorcing a Presbyterian! The farm was downsized considerably and eventually became a very successful inn—the PennDutch—with a list of highfalutin clients like you wouldn’t believe. Some of them are so highfalutin, in fact, that they have only first names.
“Susannah, dear,” I said patiently, despite the fact that I don’t tolerate swearing in my presence, “there is something I need to tell you before Melvin and Zelda get here.”
“If you mean that story going around about the two of them getting married this fall, well, don’t believe it. Melvin would rather read a book than marry her.”
That described Melvin perfectly. The man would have you believe he’s an animated version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but the only covers he’s cracked are the ones on his bed. His arrogance is surpassed only by his stupidity. I know, it is unkind of me to talk this way, but how else can I describe a grown man who once mailed a gallon of ice cream—by UPS—to a favorite relative in another state?
