Just Plain Pickled to Death (10 page)

“Of course not, dear. Speaking of which, how was it?”

“The roast was dry, the potatoes overdone, and the beans didn’t have any flavor. I know Leah thinks she’s a good cook, but I’ve seldom had worse.”

I smiled charmingly. “Actually, I made the lunch. It only needed to be reheated when we got back from church. But as you can see, I’m just now getting back.”

She looked me up and down. “Our little Aaron doesn’t know what he’s getting into, does he?” she clucked.

“He knows enough. By the way, where is he?”

“Beats me. Neither Aaron was here for lunch.”

Ever the worrier, I felt a twinge of panic. Perhaps Aaron Senior had suffered a heart attack out there on the road by himself. Perhaps at that very moment my Aaron was sitting outside the intensive care unit of Bedford Hospital, blaming it all on me.

“You mean they didn’t make it back from church?”

“Oh, they made it back all right,” she snapped. “Popped in just for a second, though. Just long enough to say that they were skipping lunch because they had a lot to talk about. Imagine that!”

“Actually, I can.”

I tottered past her and through to the dining room. It was deserted. Good Mennonites refrain from quilting on Sundays. Undoubtedly the rest of the Beeftrust were upstairs in their rooms, reading or napping. Whichever it was, they had their privacy, because the uncles—to a man—were sawing wood in the parlor. The faith of my fathers lived on still.

I should have been ravenous, but all I could think of was a long, hot bath. By the time I was through soaking I had probably absorbed enough water through my skin to fill me up. At any rate, as soon as I was dressed I called telephone information.

“For what city, please.”

“Sarasota, Florida.” It was a wild guess. For reasons I know not, Mennonites, and some Amish, are particularly fond of Sarasota.

“Go ahead, please.”

“Yes, I’d like the number of a Jonas Weaver.”

There was a long pause. “Do you have a middle initial, ma’am? I show six listings by that name.”

I took down all six numbers and began with the first given me.

“Weavoh wesidence.” The speaker couldn’t have been more than three years old. “Jonas Weavoh speaking.”

“Hello. Is your mommy home?”

“No, Mama died Fwiday night. Didn’t they tell you that at chuch?”

“No, they didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“Why be sowee? She lived to see huh hundwedth buthday, didn’t she?”

“She did? Say, the Jonas Weaver I’m looking for is originally from Hernia, Pennsylvania, and—”

“I’m not that Jonas,” the pipsqueak squeaked. “Ahm fwum Geoge-uh!”

The second Jonas hailed from Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Did I want to know how the town got its name, he asked? I did not!

Not only was the third time the charm, but the man on the other end of the line was quite charming. “Guilty,” he purred in response to my Hernia question.

“This isn’t a trial, Mr. Weaver. It’s just that I have something very important to tell you.”

“Tell me, then, and please don’t leave out a word. I could listen to you talk for hours.”

Something wasn’t right. So, to put it in terms my Aaron understands, I decided on a lateral pass to the left.

“Did I say the Jonas Weaver I’m looking for is from Hernia? How silly of me. The one I’m looking for lived in Hernia briefly, but he’s really from Truss, Pennsylvania.”

“Even guiltier,” the pervert purred.

I hung up without telling him there wasn’t such a place.

It wasn’t until the sixth and last call that I reached a cantankerous old man with a scratchy voice. I knew instinctively that I had struck pay dirt. Through a series of snarls he informed me that I was the first person from Hernia to speak to him in almost twenty years.

“Then I’m sorry, Mr. Weaver, but I have some bad news for you from home.”

“Yeah? First, how’d you find me?”

“I called directory information.”

“Yeah?” He thought about that for a few minutes, no doubt marveling all the while. Most people either don’t know such a service exists or else they’re too cheap to pay the paltry sum it costs to use it. The PennDutch Inn is listed in the Bedford County phone book, but you’d be surprised how many folks say they can’t find my number—especially when their business with me involves a cancellation.

“You there, Mr. Weaver?”

“All right, so you found me. Now, what’s the bad news?”

“It’s about your daughter, sir.”

“I don’t have a daughter, so don’t give me that crap.”

“Sarah!” I shouted, before he could hang up. “She’s been found.”

“What?”

“Your daughter Sarah’s body has finally been found.”

I expected the silence, but I didn’t expect the tears. One more weeper and I was going to call it quits for the day. Still, I waited patiently as the minutes ticked by on my phone bill.

“Where?”

“On Aaron Miller’s farm. The funeral—”

“Where on the farm?”

“The root cellar.”

“Buried under the floor?”

It was a reasonable possibility, I suppose, but something that hadn’t occurred to me.

“No, sir. It isn’t very pleasant, I’m afraid.”

“Death seldom is.”

I breathed deeply. “She was in a barrel of sauerkraut.”

“My God,” he said quietly.

“Mr. Weaver, if you come home for the funeral, you’re welcome to stay with me. I own an inn right across from the Miller farm.”

“Who’d you say you were again? Because there isn’t any inn across from that farm.”

I outlined who I was and how the inn came about. He seemed satisfied. At least satisfied enough for me to ask him a few more questions.

“You had to be awfully sure, Mr. Weaver, that your wife and daughter were dead. I mean, in order to cut yourself off like that for so long. If you don’t mind my asking, how could you be so sure?”

The ensuing silence was so long I thought he’d hung up. “Hello? Hello?”

“I’m here.” It was barely a whisper.

“Mr. Weaver, I assure you that you can trust me. I won’t tell a soul, if that’s what you want.”

“I have your word?”

“Absolutely.”

“Because of her diary,” he blurted.

“Whose diary? Rebecca’s?”

“Sarah’s. I read it after she disappeared. She wrote in it that she had seen her mother killed. She knew that the killer saw her, and she believed she was going to be next.”

It was my turn to practice that elusive virtue. “You did tell the police about this,” I said at last.

“No, I did not.”

I felt like I was dealing with a wily, feral animal that I had taken it upon myself to tame. At any moment it could bolt back into the woods and I might never see it again.

“I’m sure the police would have been able to solve the murders if they had seen the diary.” I said it kindly, I really did.

“I couldn’t show it to them.” It was like he was wanting me to draw him further out of the woods.

“Why not?”

“I just couldn’t.” The animal had coyly taken one step backward.

I thought about Susannah’s diary, which she keeps locked and under a pile of blankets in a locked chest. No doubt some of the things written in there would curl the hair on even Satan’s head.

“Were there things written in there that were private?” I asked delicately.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

“So private that it was more important to keep them secret than to find your wife and daughter’s killer?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you still have the diary, Mr. Weaver?”

He hesitated. “I think so.”

“Then I’d like to make a suggestion, if I might. Please reread your daughter’s diary. A lot of things have changed in the last twenty years. Maybe the things in there aren’t so—”

“Morality never changes,” he said.

“True, but people judge things less harshly now.”

He said nothing.

“I could make sure that the Hernia police look only at the parts that pertain to the murder.”

“How can you do that?” The animal had stepped boldly out into the open. It was up to me to coax it to my hand.

“Because the current chief of police is my dear cousin. We go back a long ways.”

There was at least a kernel of truth in that, and it was for a good cause. And even though Melvin wouldn’t cross the street to acknowledge our kinship, I had ways to make him sing and dance on cue. After all, Melvin had made the gross mistake of dating my sister. If Jonas Weaver thought his daughter’s diary was revealing, just wait till he and the world got a look at Susannah’s.

“Well, I will think about it,” he said.

“You are at least coming to the funeral, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I would like to do that.”

“I mean, she was your daughter. Feel free to make any or all of the arrangements.”

“No, I’d rather somebody else did that. Would you do that? Please?”

“Of course.” The fact was, I already had—everything except for the exact time. “And will you agree to stay at the inn?”

“Yeah, I’ll stay.”

“Good. In fact, why don’t you just come on ahead as soon as you can? Give me a call when you’ve booked a flight, and I’ll send Aaron Junior out to the Pittsburgh airport to get you.”

He agreed that’s what he’d do and we said our goodbyes.

I must have slept for hours, because the shadows were long outside my windows when I woke up. Unfortunately I had broken one of my cardinal rules about napping, because my head ached, my eyes hurt, and I felt as crabby as a constipated hen. Just lying there was agony enough, but the persistent knocking on my door bordered on excruciating.

“Go away!”

The door opened. “Aha! I thought you were in there.”

It was my Pooky Bear, bearing a tray of supper. I should have been delighted.

“Ugh.” I shielded my eyes with my arm as Aaron turned on the light.

“Same back at you,” he said cheerily. “Look what I brought. Here we have some chicken salad, a little cottage cheese, some spinach—”

“Please, Aaron. I feel like I’ve been run over by a combine.”

“Well, you don’t look like it. You look just as beautiful as ever to me. Even more so.”

“I do?”

“You look like a dream come true to me.”

I sat up and surreptitiously smoothed the hair back from my face. Of course I was dressed, I just didn’t have my shoes on.

“Why, Aaron Miller, how sweet you can be.”

“And this is just the beginning.”

I inspected the tray closer. Suddenly I was ravenous. Even the bearded irises Aaron had stuck in a juice glass looked delicious.

“Go on and eat,” Aaron said, “while I tell you just how much I adore you.”

I did his bidding. Who says I’m not a cooperative person? “Never pass up a free meal,” Mama always said. Of course, this wasn’t a free meal, coming as it did straight out of my kitchen, but Mama had never been lavished with sweet sentiments or she would have given advice on accepting those as well.

“I just can’t thank you enough for what you did,” my Pooky Bear said.

I swallowed a bite of chicken salad that may have been just a trifle too large. “What did I do? Tell me, and I’ll do it again.”

He laughed heartily. “As if you didn’t know! Well, that’s my Magdalena for you. Always cracking jokes.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Pops adores you too, you know that? It’s going to do him a world of good to move out of that big old house and in with us.”

“Oh, he told you that?”

“I never would have asked you, you know. I would have hated to live with my in-laws. Theoretically, of course. I’m sure your folks would have been very pleasant to be around.”

“Just don’t bet on it. What all did your father say?”

Aaron shook his head. “I still can’t get over it. That whole flat tire thing was all a setup for my big surprise.”

“And were you?”

“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have been. I should have known how sweet you are. Asking Pops to move in with us—no, begging him, he said.”

“Oh, he did?”

“And then asking him if it was all right to call him Pops!”

“Well.” I shrugged magnanimously.

“And then the icing on the cake!”

“There’s cake too?” I pushed the iris arrangement aside but found no such thing.

“As if you didn’t know! Promising to name our son Aaron Weaver the Third was the biggest gift you could have given to a man his age.”

I dropped my fork. “Our son?”

“Our son. You do want children, don’t you?”

“Aaron, I’m forty-four!”

“Forty-two.”

“Forty-four,” I wailed.

He shrugged nonchalantly. “So—this is the nineteen-nineties. Women your age are always having babies.”

“But a first baby?”

“There’s a first time for everything,” he said blithely.

“Then have it yourself,” I almost said. Instead, I picked the supper tray clean. After all, according to Aaron, I was soon going to be eating for two.

Chapter Twelve

I have never been a big fan of Mondays. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the week starts a downward plunge around noon on Sunday and doesn’t begin its next ascent until noon on Friday. Today, however, I had the memory of my Pooky Bear’s adoration to sustain me.

Aaron and Pops, as I shall hereafter refer to him, had left early for the Pittsburgh airport to collect Jonas Weaver. Jonas had called late the night before, accepting my invitation and announcing a ten o’clock arrival. Since it is two and a half hours from the airport to Hernia, I didn’t expect them back until after lunch. As for the Beeftrust and their consorts, they had decided, en masse, to pay a sentimental visit to old Hernia High and then have a picnic up on Stucky Ridge. I told Freni to take the morning off, and I let Susannah sleep. It was time to get down to some serious business.

Hernia, Pennsylvania, population 1,528, is a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there. As Susannah says, the only thing to do is watch moss grow and pick your toes. Actually, Susannah’s is a cruder version, but you get my drift. At any rate, our police force, which was recently upgraded to three (two full-time, one part) doesn’t get a lot of business on Monday mornings. Therefore, I expected to get their full attention, if not cooperation. I knew from experience that Chief of Police Melvin Stoltzfus was usually on duty Monday mornings. Foolishly I decided to take my chances and not call first. And as usual, Melvin, the manic mantis, tried my patience sorely.