Tea with Jam and Dread (11 page)

Yoko-san herself had shared the story of her parents’ tragic death in Kobe, when a highway overpass collapsed on their car during the earthquake. Her parents had gone into the big city on a semi-annual shopping trip. I shared with her how my parents were squished to death in a tunnel by a truck carrying running shoes and a tanker filled with milk. My parents were also headed into the big city – Pittsburgh – to shop. After sharing our stories, Yoko-san and I laughed ruefully and called ourselves the ‘shopping trip orphans.’ I also knew that the young Japanese woman lived with her grandfather near the mountains. After all, I had his address down as her home address in my register.

The fact that Cee-Cee really could communicate with bones and hair in my house left me feeling spiritually conflicted and a trifle guilty. The Bible makes it very clear that one is not to communicate with the dead, and when King Saul visited the Witch of Endor and had her conjure up the spirit of Samuel, he was punished for it. Endora – now wouldn’t that be a fitting name for a witch? Ach, but I keep digressing. What I want to say is that despite this biblical injunction not to chat with the dearly departed, I really have had no choice with Granny Yoder.
That
Apparition-American appeared to me in all her gory – pun intended – the night of my eighth birthday, and has stuck to me like white on rice ever since. The harder that I try to ignore her, the more she intrudes into my life, popping up hither, thither and yon like small, sticky handprints when one has a toddler in the house.

‘Earth to Magdalena. Come in, Magdalena.’

‘Huh?’

‘Or do I need to go back to calling you Miss Yoder again to get your attention?’

It is true that I can zone out rather intensely. However, it was quite pleasant to be reined back into the public sphere by the melodious voice of the extraordinarily handsome Toy Graham. On second thought, I might be a menopausal woman but I am not dead, so it may have been his pheromones and not his voice that pulled me back to consciousness. By the way, please allow me to state emphatically that although they are both Southerners, Toy Graham is not even distantly related to Senator Lindsay Graham!

At any rate, I stood and saluted Toy. ‘Magdalena is my name, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.’ Then I bowed and with a sweeping gesture acknowledged my guests. ‘These are my aristocrats
d’jour
. They don’t have royal hinnies so they’re not Royal Highnesses. He’s only an earl, and for some strange reason she’s a countess, and as for the lad, he’s a viscount, but the letter ‘s’ in his title doesn’t count, and neither do any of their titles, as a matter of fact, since they’re over here in the liberated colonies.’

‘Even so,’ Cee-Cee said, ‘you didn’t mention that I have a title.’

‘You’re quite right, dear,’ I said. ‘This cherubic-faced youngster is the lovely Lady Celia.’

‘Oh, blimey,’ the girl said. Unlike Agnes, I can’t tell the difference between Downstairs and Upstairs speech, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say that this was the former.

Toy remained as cool as macaroni salad. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said.

‘Humph,’ I said. ‘Now, allow me to introduce you to the rest of the Grimsley-Snodgrass family.’

Toy extended an impeccably groomed hand to Aubrey. ‘Welcome to the United States of America, and to Hernia, Mrs Grimsley-Snodgrass.’

Aubrey wilted like an overcooked asparagus spear. ‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ she chirped in a register I’d yet to hear her use.

Peregrine, on the other hand, was slow to extend
his
hand in return. ‘I say there, young fellow, judging by your uniform you are either a bobby or a constable. In either case you are woefully ignorant of the proper protocol exercised upon greeting visiting dignitaries. I am not
Mr
Grimsley-Snodgrass. Since you are a foreigner, I suppose that some allowance should be made. Therefore I am acquiescing to a previous arrangement with the innkeeper: if you
must
address me personally, you may call me by my Christian name: Peregrine.’

Sometimes I just can’t help myself: the Devil whispers in my ear and my tongue slips. ‘I was mistaken about having no royal visitors,’ I said. ‘Peregrine is the Prince of Pomposity. He keeps forgetting that
he
is the foreigner here.’

Toy is a consummate Southern gentleman. His ability to placate with prevaricating platitudes is unprecedented in my opinion. Frankly, I don’t understand his regionalisms, but when delivered in his charming Southern drawl, even snippets from the telephone directory would soothe this savage beast.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said to Peregrine. ‘Now take two ducks and rub them together, and when ships pass in the night joy cometh in the morning.’ At least that’s what it sounded like to me; our Southern dialect of English has many idioms which an idiot like me can be slow to decipher.

‘Apology accepted,’ Peregrine said with a smile. ‘I think that I’m going to like this chap.’

A gal is allowed to change her mind about soothing snippets. This was the first time that I’d seen the earl’s lips curl in an upward direction and it irked me to no end. Surely the gobbledegook from
this
goose, meaning
moi
, was just as good as the gobbledegook from a gander named Toy.

‘The aubergine wore gabardine and the piglet played Rachmaninoff,’ I said, every bit as soothingly.

Peregrine recoiled in disgust, as if I’d dangled a slice of burnt American toast in his face. ‘What the bloody blazes does that mean?’

Gabe stood and extended his muscular arms out to me in pity. ‘Hon,’ he said softly, ‘it’s been a trying day for you. Perhaps you need to lie down.’

His meddling mother jumped to her feet as well, but given the fact that her legs are the shape and length of upended bowling pins, she gained no height by standing. ‘Dat vun,’ she said, pointing accusingly at me, ‘eez
meshuggeneh
.’ She gave each noble noggin a meaningful nod. ‘Ya know vhat I mean? Crazy, yah?’

‘Ma!’ It was barely more than a whine. My handsome hunk of a hubby, the man who adores me, is tied to his mother by apron strings that have the power to regenerate themselves.

Thank heavens that the younger of the room’s two hunks came to my rescue. ‘Miss Yoder,’ Toy said, sounding very professional. ‘I need to speak with you alone on a matter of police business. The rest of you may be excused to go about your day.’

‘Gut,’ Mother Malaise said. ‘Now vee vill go und dunce nekkid.’

N
either the Babester nor our daughter wanted to see Ida and
her mirthless mob of misanthropes cavort about in the altogether, so they headed into Bedford (an actual town of several thousand people!) to ‘catch a movie.’ This meant that poor Agnes was stuck chaperoning our guests across the road to the pseudo-convent. There she would be forced to watch the heathens shake their hinnies. The woman was going to be humiliated yet again by her two nude octogenarian uncles. It wasn’t simply their nudity that embarrassed Agnes (she grew up living next door to them), it was the total abandonment with which Big Will and Little Will shared their willies with the world (certain attributes being not at all equal between them, if one gets my drift).

Toy, of course, wanted to inspect the corpse, and insisted on climbing out on the roof of the elevator. There he crouched, having donned surgical gloves and a mask, and bearing a torch and magnifying glass. He gave the appearance of a man who actually knew what he was doing. Admittedly, this surprised me a wee bit, as I had hired him fresh out of the police academy down in Charlotte.

However, in what seemed to me to be a somewhat cursory investigation, Toy shone the bright beam of his torch on the ceiling of the elevator shaft. Had the shaft been empty at that point, one could have heard a pin hit the bottom if dropped from the second floor.

‘You see that?’ said Toy. ‘There you have an almost perfect imprint of her body left on the ceiling by her bodily fluids – how shall I say this delicately – as she expanded and shrank during the process of decomposition. To put it bluntly, Miss Yoko-san was pressed up into the ceiling, rather like a panini, where she remained stuck for some time. It never occurred to anyone to search for her up there. Then, at some point, which forensics can determine, gravity claimed her desiccated corpse and it came to rest solely in the roof of the elevator.’ Without further ado, Toy hopped down and stripped off his gloves.

‘Toy,’ I said, ‘that was very impressive work. But before you go any further with the investigation, it’s only fair that I tell you that this corpse is haunted.’

The chief glanced back at where he’d just been. ‘Haunted? In what way?’

I leaned in close to him so that I could whisper. He had the heady scent of a virile man in his twenties – one who’d recently showered but who had not covered up his own smell with manufactured odours. I’m not confessing to any sinful thoughts, like a desire to jump his bones or anything like that, but one should be ever vigilant lest the Devil gain entrance through the back door during a sneak attack. I’m just saying.

‘Apparently this corpse is able to talk,’ I said while maintaining a businesslike tone.

‘
What?
’

‘Just like Grandma Yoder talked to you,’ I said.

‘I told you later that I was just playing along with you in order to keep you calm. Of course I did
not
see your great-grandmother’s ghost; I don’t believe in that nonsense.’

‘We Mennonites do not believe that violence solves anything either, but it still exists.’

‘Apples and oranges,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Yoko-san was something of an expert on apples, remember?’

‘Yeah,’ Toy said. ‘Her grandfather was famous for a sweet variety that he grew in the foothills of the Japanese Alps.’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘What’s this apple business all about?’

‘Yoko-san mentioned it to my youngest guest – a girl, age seventeen.’

As Toy absorbed this new information, he began to nod. ‘Magdalena, you mean that she related this information to your guest several years ago.’

‘No. The conversation took place this
morning
.’

Toy backed against the wall. I might as well have told him that I had a new type of plague.

‘You’re creeping me out, Magdalena.’

‘How do you think that I feel?’ I wailed.

‘But please tell me that you didn’t hear the voice as well,’ he said.

‘No, dear, I’m merely wacky; I’m not a whackadoodle. Cee-Cee, on the other hand, knew everything about Yoko-san’s family: about her parents dying in the earthquake, about her living with her grandfather who hybridized apples. Tell me, where would a seventeen-year-old girl, visiting from England, get that information?’

‘From your files? Kids own the internet – if you know what I mean.’

I wagged my head in a kindly, motherly fashion. ‘You poor, misinformed,
enfant effete
. Why on earth would I risk having my records shared with the world – thanks to some hackist – when a trusty yellow pad of paper and a No. 2 pencil is all that I need? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the New Testament was written with a No. 2 pencil.’

That wasn’t meant as a joke, but Toy laughed anyway. ‘Good one,’ he said. ‘Please don’t take offense, however, when I tell you that the correct word is hack
er
, not hack
ist
.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear; offense was indeed taken. In my day, we wouldn’t have dreamed of correcting our elders. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, I was about to divulge the location of my private files. Do I have your solemn word as a gentleman that you will never disclose their whereabouts to anyone else?’

Toy held up one hand as if he were in a courtroom and about to take an oath. ‘I solemnly swear,’ he said.

‘For the record, a simple “yes” would have sufficed, given that the Bible forbids us to swear. But seeing that you are a lapsed Episcopalian, which is merely a transplanted Anglican, and barely one step away from Rome, I shall let it slide – for now. So come on, follow me down my evil – I mean, impossibly steep – stairs. Just don’t follow me too closely on account of I’m as scrawny as a half-stuffed scarecrow and my bones break more easily than those of tinned salmon.’

‘I have an idea,’ Toy said bravely. ‘I’ll go first, and then if you fall you can land across my broad shoulders and feel my rippling back muscles and then my tight buns as they bring you gently, and lovingly, to a stop. However, if I hear you begin to stumble before you start toppling, I shall whip around, catch you in my bulging biceps and pull you in close, to hold you next to my washboard abs.’

Now, to be utterly truthful, I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing Toy’s words. Perhaps a good deal. Maybe as much as ninety per cent. Suffice it to say, I followed him down to the main floor and then led him into the parlour, where I proceeded to roll back the corner of a suitably threadbare carpet: that is to say one of sufficient shabbiness as to warrant its place in a pseudo-authentic Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse that had been converted into an inn. My Amish ancestors would have held that even a pretend Persian was too prideful, insisting that nothing but plain wood floors would do. I, however, am not Amish but Old Order Mennonite, and being on the liberal side of that spectrum, have taken liberties to keep my tootsies warm. Yes, I could have chosen a plain brown or even a fancy grey rug in various shades of that colour.

But God could have chosen to make the peacock brown, or fifty shades of grey – which He most certainly did not! I am convinced that if it was the Creator’s wish that we live a life of drabness He would not have given us peacocks, sunsets, flowers and the sapphire blue of the Babester’s eyes.

‘Holy Cannoli!’ Toy said upon viewing my cleverly hidden trapdoor. ‘To think of all the times that I’ve been in this room and I never suspected that there was anything under this ratty old rug.’

‘I beg your pardon!’

‘I meant no offense, Magdalena. I’m sure, just judging by the wear on this relic, that it was that crazy old granny of yours who bought it – when she was
alive
, ha, ha.’

The ambient temperature of the room plummeted even as the temperature under my collar rose. ‘I’ll have you know that Granny Yoder may have been as tart as a peck of crab apples, but she wasn’t crazy. She had a mind like a steel trap and the focus of a falcon at a brush fire. You would do well not to speak ill of her in this room, the very place where she holds court.’

‘Oh, phooey,’ Toy scoffed. With his false bravado he expelled enough air to raise a disturbingly dense cloud of dust. It is my philosophy that dusting one’s house, just like combing one’s hair, is a grand waste of time, as it is an activity which will invariably need to be repeated. For the record, I do comb my hair, because I ‘must.’ Mama drilled this lesson into me on my behind with my hairbrush. This rule, along with brushing my teeth three times a day and making my bed, are what I call the Rules of
Must
erbation. Dusting is an option that I offer to my guests; for fifty extra dollars a day they may dust the room of their choice. Unfortunately, the Grimsley-Snodgrasses had thus far proved to be a lazy bunch and had signed on for very few of my – ahem – admittedly pricey options.

‘Phooey yourself,’ a somewhat reedy, disembodied voice said. Honestly, it did not emanate from me.

‘What the devil!’ Toy ejaculated. Of course I mean that in the most genteel sense of the word.

‘I will not tolerate swearing in my house!’ Granny Yoder said, her voice growing stronger.

‘Holy smoke!’ Toy turned as white as your average American’s teeth, ones that have been brushed three times a day and also periodically subjected to expensive bleach strips.

‘Turn around,’ I said. ‘Now look over there – in the rocking chair. What do you see?’

Without a doubt, the young Chief of Police saw Granny Yoder. If I was a betting woman – which I am not, because gambling is a sin – I would have bet the PennDutch Inn
and
my twenty-five acres of woods and pasture that Hernia’s Chief of Police was staring at my resident spectre. Of course, the staring only commenced
after
he’d stepped back into the shoes he’d jumped out of, and had slicked down his hair which had stood on end.

Toy took forever to answer. ‘I don’t see anything,’ he finally said. ‘Well, except a ton of dust motes illuminated by those light rays that somehow manage to filter through your filthy curtains. Really, Magdalena, no offense but I’m a better housekeeper, and I’m a bachelor.’

‘Yeah? Well, you don’t run a business, plus have two little boys and a teenager to care for now, do you?’

‘You don’t either,’ Toy said. ‘You only have one little boy and that’s Little Jacob.’

‘Harrumph,’ I said. ‘Are you forgetting that when I married Gabriel, the famous heart surgeon from New York, his mother still cut his meat for him?’

Toy shivered and managed to laugh at the same time. ‘That is pretty ironic: a man who cuts into the body’s most vital organ has to have his mama cut his steak for him. At least she doesn’t do
that
anymore.’

‘That’s right, dear,’ I said, ‘but only because
I
cut his meat for him. The woman who spent thirty-three agonizing hours bringing him into this world – “oy, oy, such pain you wouldn’t believe” – was over here Tuesday night and wanted to cut up his ground beef casserole for him.’

‘And?’

‘I sent her back to the convent with a mashed turnip and turkey liver pie.’

‘Yuck,’ Toy said. ‘
You
made that?’

‘Bite your tongue, dear. We had a dessert exchange at church and I ended up being the loser for the eighth year in a row. Anyway, make nice with Granny now so we can get on with our business.’

Toy cleared his throat loudly and squared his shoulders. ‘Again, Magdalena, I don’t see your granny. Frankly, and I don’t mean any disrespect, neither do you. Ghosts don’t exist; they are just figments of overactive imaginations.’

‘Bullfinches!’ Granny said.

If Toy hadn’t been so startled by the force of Granny Yoder’s outburst, I might have jumped into his strong, sinewy arms and have him hold me next to his sculpted body for protection. As it was, I thought the young man was going down for the count, and
I
was going to have to scrape
him
off my cheap facsimile of an Oriental carpet. After that I would clasp him tightly with my stick-like appendages, pressing him against my bony carapace until he got his second wind and demanded that I release him.

‘Stop it, Magdalena,’ Toy said angrily when he could at last speak. ‘Stop it with this ghost nonsense. I don’t know how you’re managing to pull off these illusions or that bit when you threw your voice just now. This is not the time for parlour tricks – no pun intended.’

My temperature had started to climb but premenopausal hormones had nothing to do with it. ‘Don’t toy with my temper, Toy. I may exaggerate but I don’t fabricate out of whole fabric, not when it’s official police business.’

‘Listen,’ said Toy, ‘I’ll take your word for it that you keep your files in some hole under your living-room floor—’

‘
Hole
, shmole!’ I said. ‘
That
is a proper cellar with head clearance even for yours truly, she who stands five foot ten in her thick cotton stockings. My ancestor who built the original house was one of the Hochstetlers who survived the Northkill Amish massacre. The family managed to survive the night in the cellar of their burning log cabin by splashing cider on the wood ceiling. Although attacks from the Delaware Indians had ceased by the time the family moved here, their memory had not. Think of this as the prototype of a “safe room.”’

‘Hmm,’ said Toy, ‘it seems more like a death trap with a trapdoor to me.’

‘Ignorance may be bliss for some, but in this case it’s a wide miss.
This
cellar has an escape tunnel, which was originally built by my ancestors who had survived massacres in the eastern part of Pennsylvania. But the other trapdoor opens above a so-called “safe-room,” which the Babester insisted that we build – never mind, I have said too much. I shouldn’t have even mentioned the existence of the second safe room. The fact that one is safer than the other—’ I slapped both cheeks. ‘For further penance, I shall chew a mouthful of thumb tacks and wear lipstick to church.’