Even Melvin Stoltzfus hadn't been so stupid as to not check Susannah for blood. And she had come up clean. Anyway, it seemed to me that the killer was not on the set that afternoon, or else was an expert at masking emotions.
"What else would you expect?" asked Doc that evening over another piece of green-tomato pie. The pie, incidentally, came on the heels of two bowls each of Grandma Yoder's Secret Corn Chowder, which I had cooked.
"I don't get you, Doc."
"Well, they're actors, aren't they, Magdalena? Even Art, the producer, used to be an actor, and I bet that Bugsy fellow has had a few drama classes too. Anyway, my point is, they're trained to wear masks. To show emotions on their faces that they're not actually feeling."
"It's hopeless, then, I guess."
Doc laughed and shoved the pie dish toward me. "Have another piece, and don't be so quick to give up. Look, you can't prove anything anyway by the look on somebody's face. You need concrete evidence."
"How do I look for evidence, and how do I know it when I see it?"
"Well, for starters, quit looking on the outside of people, and start looking on the inside. Look for motive. Ask yourself who has the strongest motive, and then, once you've got motive, you can start looking for physical clues."
"I believe they call that method acting."
"Hunh. Whatever. The thing is, Magdalena, most people don't go around killing unless they feel they have a good reason." Doc paused and played with his pie for a few seconds. "Well, at least that's the way it used to be. Nowadays, if you can believe what you hear on the news, people kill each other for the damnedest reasons. None that makes any sense to me."
"Or me."
"But that's exactly my point, isn't it? It has to make sense only to them, not us. You and I probably wouldn't kill for any reason, but there are a lot of reasons out there why people kill, and you need to come up with the most likely one in this case."
"How about the mob, Doc? A reporter told me Don Manley owed a lot to the mob."
"Maybe," said Doc, but he didn't sound interested in that theory. "If I were you, I'd look closer to home. Find someone this Manley guy stepped on in an unforgivable sort of way. That type of thing. It's just a thought, Magdalena, but that's what I'd look for."
"Thanks, Doc."
"Say, you still planning to meet that chicken fryer from Baltimore on Saturday?"
"Jim? Yeah, Doc. We're going to have dinner at Ed's Steak House. What of it?"
Doc looked away, but not before I caught the look in his eyes. "Just you be careful, Magdalena. Those Maryland folks are a tough lot, and the ones from Baltimore in particular. You want me to go along? Just in case, I mean."
I patted old Doc's hand. I was genuinely warmed inside by his consideration. Or was it his jealousy? It didn't matter. As long as it didn't get out of hand, whatever Doc was feeling flattered me. "That's okay, Doc, I'm sure I can handle Jim just fine." At least I was looking forward to trying.
That night I dreamed about my upcoming date with Jim. In my dream, Jim was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his mid-forties. I suppose he had a handsome face, but all I remember were his cold blue eyes.
"Hi, I'm Magdalena," I said in my dream.
"My name is Parsley," said the man with the cold blue eyes. "Elvis Parsley." He laughed, the kind of laugh that sends shivers down your spine.
"But I thought you were Jim," I said. We had been standing outside Ed's Steak House, but suddenly it had become my henhouse. Neither of us seemed to care about the change of setting.
"My name was Jim," said the man, "but now it's Parsley. Can't you ever get anything right, Magdalena?"
"Yes, of course," I started to protest. Then the man with the cold blue eyes, who I had thought was Jim, turned into my mother. Mercifully I woke up at that point.
-9-
About four in the morning, I woke up with a full bladder. Mama used to call that hour of the morning the deathwatch. She claimed that more people died at four in the morning than at any other time. When Grandma Yoder died, it was precisely 4:03. I know, because I was awakened by what I thought was Grandma's voice saying good-bye. I remember glancing at my bedside clock, and telling myself that it was all a dream and I should go back to sleep. But then, before I could as much as close my eyes, I heard Mama crying because, as I learned later, Grandma had just died. Mama had been holding her hand when it happened.
Anyway, after I used the toilet, I couldn't go back to sleep again. It wasn't that I sensed someone had just died, but because my mind was racing with thoughts about who had killed Don Manley. It might even have been the spirit of Don Manley who was putting those thoughts in my mind, but of course I would never suggest such a thing to anyone. We Amish-Mennonites firmly do not believe in ghosts, even if they stare us sometimes in the face.
About five o'clock I gave up on going back to sleep and got dressed. In the summertime that's just when the first birds began to twitter, and it's almost impossible to go back to sleep then under the best of circumstances. When I got outside, the sky had lightened enough so that I could see the com tassels in the field behind the six-seater and the chicken coop. Without exactly meaning to, I found myself skirting these two buildings and heading for the barn.
Just before the main entrance to the barn is the Dutch door that leads to the cowshed. The top half was open and I poked my head in. Matilda, ever the shy one, mooed softly in the comer, but Bessie ambled over to me and snuffled my hair. "Be good girls and give Mose a lot of milk this morning," I urged them.
I walked over to the main door. It was open about eighteen inches, which surprised me. Normally, either Mose or I close it at night. But with the camera, light, and sound equipment it now contained, we did more than close it. I specifically remembered Mose telling me that he had locked the door with a padlock at Art's request. The padlock was missing.
I have always been a confronter, rushing headlong into difficult situations. I hate being held hostage by my own fear, preferring to act rashly than wait in agony. So, acting rashly, I slipped into the barn and felt for the light switch. Back in the days when my people were Amish, there had been no light in the barn, but my grandparents had joined the Mennonite church and were allowed electricity. It was Grandpa Yoder who had wired the barn, and he'd done a bang-up job. Then Papa improved on it by replacing Grand- pa's incandescent bulbs with fluorescent fixtures. When I flipped the switch just inside the door, the barn was flooded in light, from the pigeon-filled rafters to the bloodstained floor.
It was at that instant of revelation that I caught my glimpse of someone, or something, slipping out through the small side door that locks only from the inside. Foolishly, I called out and ran to investigate. But there was nothing revealing for me to see. On that side of the barn the woods creep up close, and who or whatever I'd seen, had presumably been swallowed up by them.
"You should have called me first," said Melvin both before and after a futile hike in the woods to look for clues.
"I'm sorry, Melvin. I acted without thinking. I bet you'd have done the same thing if you were me." I meant it as a sort of compliment.
Melvin's left eye began to wander in its orbit. "I hardly think so. What you did was to interfere with police business. And it could have gotten you killed, Yoder."
I looked away from Melvin so as to avoid the temptation to be critical. He can't help it if he looks like a praying mantis and has the intelligence of a moth. It is unchristian of me to dislike him so.
"Melvin, isn't there any way you can get fingerprints from the doors?"
"Ever hear of gloves, Yoder?"
"There's a pair I keep for milking in the cowshed," I said cruelly.
"Very funny, Yoder. I don't suppose it occurred to you that the trespasser was wearing gloves when he handled the doors."
"Or she."
"What?"
"I mean that the trespasser, as you call it, might well have been a woman."
Melvin laughed, either that or a cicada sounded its mating call. "A woman! You're a barrel of laughs, Yoder. Not that it's occurred to you, but the trespasser and the perpetrator may well be one and the same. And no woman, Yoder, despite your fancy women's lib, could pin a man to a beam with a pitchfork."
It was my turn to laugh, and this time with relief. "I guess that leaves me out of it. I'm no longer your suspecto numero uno, then, am I?"
Melvin's left eye scanned my face, while his right one seemed to be studying my shoes. "Have you gone mad, Yoder?"
"I've been close, but so far not nearly as close as you. Why?"
"Because you most certainly are still my suspecto numero uno. But with an accomplice, of course."
"A what?"
"An accomplice. Come on, Yoder. Even Lee Harvey Oswald didn't assassinate Kennedy by himself. The question is, who is your co-conspirator?"
Had I been handed a pitchfork just then, I might well have made a gelding out of Melvin. "For your information, Melvin Stoltzfus, there is a word for people who see plots and conspiracies everywhere. The word is paranoid. Read my lips, Melvin, I do not have a co-conspirator."
"Ah-ha! So you admit that you killed Don Manley by yourself."
"I admit no such thing. I couldn't have killed him by myself, remember? I'm just a woman."
"Exactly," Melvin agreed. "I've been trying to tell you that all along. No woman, even you, Magdalena, is strong enough to drive a pitchfork through a man's gut and pin him to a beam."
"Would that we were," I said dangerously. "What?"
"Nothing. Except that you're barking up the wrong tree, Melvin. In fact, you're not even in the right woods. And as for your statement that the murderer could not possibly have been a woman, you're full of - " I didn't finish my sentence, but kicked discreetly at a pile of pigeon droppings.
"And anyway," said Melvin as if he hadn't heard a thing I'd just said, "it's a fact that most women murder their victims through less violent means. You know, poison and such."
"Lizzie Borden took an ax," I reminded him.
"That theory has been challenged," he said smugly.
I started to rack my brain for another example of female brutality, and then, realizing how absurd it all was, stifled a laugh of my own. There was nothing to gain by convincing Melvin that the trespasser had been a woman, and there was quite possibly something to lose from it. In the convoluted paths of Melvin's mind, such a suggestion might well come home to rest at my feet. That the trespasser had been a woman I was becoming increasingly sure, although I could not pinpoint anything specific I had seen to back up my hunch. A hunch was all it was at the time, but a woman's hunch, as Grandma used to say, is worth two facts from a man.
I was in one scene that morning. It was the one where DarIa Strutt, having first fallen in love with the mad Amishman, Yost Yoder, and 'then been betrayed by that love, is tied to a beam and forked through the middle. I played Yost Yoder's mother, Anna, who lives in a world of denial and cannot admit her son's condition. So, you see, it wasn't as bad as the original script, where Freddy the mad Amishman rapes women in the bathtub and then cuts their throats, but still, it was enough to keep Mama turning in her grave.
I had exactly eighteen words to say: "Ah, my darling son, what have you done now? But perhaps it isn't as bad as it seems." I practiced saying them over and over, making them come out slightly different each time.
"Imagine Meryl Streep saying them," Susannah suggested.
Unfortunately I have never been to a movie. However, I had played the part of Pocahontas in the eighth grade, so that's what I based my delivery on for the camera.
"Cut!" snapped Steven. We were still in rehearsal, and the cameras weren't even rolling.
"Shall I start over fresh?" I asked cooperatively.
Steven smirked. "Two sticks of dynamite and a bulldozer couldn't give you a fresh enough start, Yoder."
I prayed for patience. "I mean, do you want me to start over at the beginning of my lines."
Steven stared at me.
"Well, should I start over again, or not?"
Steven steadfastly refused to answer. I think he was willing me to shrink to near nothing in size and fall between the cracks in the barn floor. Clearly it was time for me to take my destiny in my own two hands, which are, after all, quite lovely. So I repeated my lines one more time, but this time I said them as I, Magdalena Yoder, would say them - if I were the mother of a mad Amishman who had just pinned his paramour to a barn beam.
"Brava!" someone shouted. "Brava!" I nearly fainted when I discovered it was Art Lapata.
"So you do have a voice," I said when he took me aside.
