Tea with Jam and Dread (25 page)

My doctor husband has seen to it that the space is stocked with enough food and water to last for a month, that it is well ventilated, that there are battery-powered lights for reading, some medical supplies and four cots. He even has a name for this shelter: the Rabbit Hole
–
although Alison, with her incomprehensible teenage mind, refers to it as the Hernia House of Horrors.

When the need arises, my long, knobby fingers can morph into fearsome talons, and thus I was able to grasp Joyce by
both
elbows. Then, holding her in front of me, like I might a dining room chair, I rushed her out of the bath and into the master closet before she had time to say ‘Bob’s your uncle’ which, for the record, he is not. In the meantime, the Son of Satan continued to rake his fingernails up, down and across my poor, innocent bedroom door.

‘I’m waiting, Magdalena. First I’m going to huff, then I’ll puff, and then I’ll blow your door down with this hand grenade which I have in my pocket.’

‘I don’t want to die!’ Joyce sobbed.

‘Shh, dear,’ I said. ‘Sob softer, if you can. With any luck the Mantis will blow himself up. But even if he doesn’t, I have a plan. It may sound far-fetched, but we are grasping at straws here.’

She nodded.

‘Now, step outside, dear. You’re standing on the better mousetrap – er, rattrap.’ I shoved the gal gently, and when she was clear of the hardwood closet floor, I whisked up a beige area rug that had been positioned in the middle of the space. Then I pressed a spot on the wooden slats and a trapdoor popped open to reveal a gap that was four feet square. Because I had yet to turn on the closet light, what Joyce could see was only a void as black as Melvin’s heart. I’m sure that she couldn’t see the ladder that was firmly screwed to a floor joist.

‘Holy guacamole,’ she said softly. ‘You want me to go down there?’

There was no time to be annoyed. ‘You’re not the rat, dear; he is. Drastic times call for measures, so listen closely. This hole drops straight down: ten feet into a tornado shelter. Melvin doesn’t know that it exists. What you’re going to do is go right back into the bathroom and lock the door. I’m going to turn off the light in the bedroom, then I’m going to let him in and I’ll race back here. At the last second, I’ll duck in, step aside, and he’ll—’

‘You can’t,’ Joyce whispered.

Actually, Joyce might even have been shouting for all I know. Melvin was pounding so loudly on the door with his hard little fists that I couldn’t hear a thing. At any moment that freakishly oversized insect was going to break through my cheap plywood door and do what the
female
praying mantis usually does to her mate.

‘Just go,’ I said to Joyce, and gave her a mighty shove toward the bathroom, even as I threw myself at the bedroom door. Fortunately, the light switch was located adjacent to it and I managed to flip it off unhindered. My once colourful boudoir turned fifty shades of grey, but being the owner, I would have known my way around the room while wearing a blindfold. However, I had to engage in some knuckle abuse of my own in order to get Melvin’s attention. Then it was in for the penny, in for the pound.

‘Oh, Mely-kins,’ I purred, ‘this is Magdalena, the woman whom you hate most in the entire world; I’m the person responsible for your sweet Susannah serving time in a state penitentiary. Who knows, she could be assigned to hard labour. She might even break a fingernail or put a ladder in her stockings, and all because of me. Think about that, you measly little weasel. OK? Right, so I’m going to open the door now and let you do whatever you want to me. Of course, you have to catch me first.’

My half-brother snorted like a horse trying to rid its nostrils free of flies. ‘I’m not a complete idiot, Yoder. I could see the light go off under the door when you turned it off. I know that you won’t touch guns but you’re going to hit me with something, aren’t you?’

‘Nope. We’re just going to play hide and seek, like we did when we were kids. That’s all. Correction: when you and your sweet Susannah were kids and I got stuck with babysitting yinz.’

‘
Yinz?
’ The incomplete idiot chuckled.

‘Yes, yinz – the two of yinz.’ The word in question is a colloquialism used in Pittsburgh, and much of Southwestern Pennsylvania, for ‘y’all,’ or ‘youse,’ or ‘you,’ second-person plural. In this case, it was a ploy to make Melvin feel like we could bond over culture and bad grammar.

If the resulting pause had indeed been pregnant, it might have produced two sets of twins, but at length I heard a long sigh. ‘OK,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll play hide and seek in the dark, just like old times, but if I catch either one of yinz I get to do whatever I want with her – even if it is
you
, Magdalena. But you can't tell my sweet little Susannah-kins if we do any grown-up stuff. Agreed?’

Wow! On the plus side, if I wasn’t to tell my sister, that meant he planned to keep me alive. On the negative side, if I wasn’t supposed to tell his sweet, innocent wife, then that meant that her husband intended to do sexual acts with whomever he caught, including me. Never mind that my baby sister was anything but innocent (she is, after all, a
divorced
Presbyterian!).

True to my word, I yanked open the door and, thanks to the grace of God, who gave me the arms of a gibbon, I was able to jump safely back from the serial killer’s reach. So far, so good. Then it wasn’t. What I’d forgotten to take into account was that Melvin’s eyes bobbed in his head like ice cubes in a pitcher of gently shaken lemonade. They never worked together. Whereas his dominant left eye was supposed to follow me into the closet, his right eye caught a glimpse of light as Joyce closed the bathroom door behind her.

Ding-dang that right eye of Melvin’s! It may as well have been a pruning hook embedded in his brain and pulling him forward, for he lurched along behind it, even though he couldn’t have seen where he was going now that the room was dark.

‘Yoo-hoo, Sweetykins,’ I said in a perfect imitation of my sister Susannah. ‘My Mighty Muscled Love Machine, my Mel Cakes, my Basket of Love!’ I am ashamed to admit that many is the time I’ve stooped to cover for her and call in sick at her places of employment while she’s been off cavorting with the halfwit who now wanted to murder Joyce and me. And believe me, I wanted to retch when I repeated my sister’s names of endearment for Melvin Stoltzfus.

I could hear Melvin clomp to a stop. ‘Is that really you, Baby Doll, sweet little Susannah of my heart’s desire?’

‘C
ooc
hie-coochie-coo, Loveykins.’ Strictly speaking, it isn’t lying if one says sweet nothings instead of answering a question directly.

Unfortunately, Melvin is merely dull-witted and only occasionally delusional. I say that charitably, but frankly a serial-killer can hardly be classified as sane. Still, Melvin had moments when one and one could add up to two, and that’s when he really becomes dangerous.

‘Wait a
bleeping
minute!’ he screeched. Take it from me – a pigeon-chested mantis is incapable of roaring despite any amount of rage he might be feeling. ‘How can Susannah be here when she’s locked up in the state penitentiary because of her blabbermouth, turncoat and disloyal sister? That’s you, Magdalena! And that’s why I’m here! I’ve come to kill you, and that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m going to do it now.’

Then Melvin did something I had
not
anticipated. He started spraying the room with bullets! That son of a gun had an automatic weapon. Who ever heard of such a thing? An ex-Mennonite acting like a gangster? There are those who won’t believe me, but I say that it was a miracle that Little Jacob and I weren’t hit until I had a chance to drop to the floor. Given my exceedingly great height, that took longer than it would have the average person.

Once on the floor, I cradled Little Jacob under my body while I crawled toward the closet on my hands and knees, all the while praying really hard that God would forgive me for being so judgmental about the airplane survivors and spare me.

When I reached the door, I crouched to one side and called out to my nemesis. ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ I shouted above the hail of bullets.

The shooting stopped.

‘That’s what the chaplain will say before your execution,’ I said.

‘They’re not going to catch me,’ he said as he stumbled forward in my direction.

‘What if I told you that you’ve already been caught, because this house is surrounded by State Troopers, and that any minute now they’ll come crashing through the door?’

‘Ha! I’d say that you’re lying again, Yoder. I’m paying that idiot clown you knew as Rupert big bucks to guard the patio door, and he’s keeping a lookout. He would have warned—’

To say that Melvin screamed like a little girl when he fell through the trapdoor opening would be an insult to my sex. He emitted a shriek that could only be duplicated electronically using the high-pitched buzz of cicadas as a starting point. It would have been very Christian of me to have felt sympathy for him when I heard him moaning in pain at the bottom of the hole. Instead, I felt nothing but immense relief.

I immediately slammed the trapdoor shut and screamed for Joyce’s help. Then I stood on it, cradling my child close, until Joyce appeared and helped me push a heavy dresser over the trapdoor. Then we both fled into the kitchen.

It was my responsibility to call Toy and Sheriff Stodgewiggle, which I did. In the meantime, Joyce called Agnes over at the Convent of Perpetual Apathy where, of course, nobody cared about our situation except for Agnes and assorted members of my family. Within minutes my son and I were safely in my husband’s arms, and we both had our arms around Alison, making it a family huddle. Alas, the stubby arms of my mother-in-law, the supposedly apathetic Mother Malaise, tried to envelop me in an embrace empty of empathy, but her enormous bosoms extended beyond her stubby arms and left her frustrated but, sadly, not beyond words.

‘
Nu?
’ she said. ‘Und dis eez de tanks dat I get for making dee classy velcome for Heez und Her Royal Highnesses?’

Quite frankly, her self-centred comment rather peeved me. I had not invited her into our intimate circle, her ‘velcome’ had not been classy, and she was kvetching while poor, traumatized Joyce was sobbing her heart out to Agnes in the adjoining dining room. If pity was what Ida Rosen wanted, then she could take the ‘a’s’ out of ‘apathy’ and insert an ‘i.’ I disentangled myself from the heap of love, leaving Little Jacob safe in his father’s strong arms. Despite the fact that Toy, or the County Sheriff, could burst into the room at any second, I pulled off my long, cotton flannel nightgown.

‘Oy!’ Mother Malaise leaned forward on the bed, her eyes as large as latkes. ‘Vas eez dis? A strip show?’

‘No. But look at my nightgown and my sturdy brasserie. You can see where one of the maniac’s bullets grazed me – right here along the left side of the bra cup. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I wear sturdy Christian underwear to bed, well—’

‘Oh, hon,’ the Babester said as he squeezed me tighter in his loving arms, which were still holding our youngest, mind you. ‘If you’d been standing just two inches over he’d have hit you in the heart.’

‘Oh, mom,’ Alison cried, ‘I don’t want to ever lose you!’

‘Oh, daughter-in-law,’ Mother Malaise said in perfectly unaccented English. ‘I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter of my own.’

‘At last we agree on something,’ I said.

Her pudgy hands shoved my balled up nightgown in my face. ‘But geet dressed again, yah? You look like a hoosey.’

‘A
what
?’

‘She means hussy,’ Alison said with a giggle.

‘Ida Rosen,’ I hissed through clenched teeth, proving that Papa was wrong and that I could have been a ventriloquist, with just the slightest bit of encouragement. ‘Unhand me now, you
hypocrite
, and go back to the nudist colony that you run under the guise of a pseudo-religious establishment for tax purposes.’

‘But hon, pretty
please
,’ the Babester said, using his sad voice and flashing his long, dark lashes at me in sad little boy fashion. ‘She’s an old helpless woman.’

‘So was the Wicked Witch of the West. Go, Ida, go. You can come back during visiting hours.’

‘Yah? Vhen eez dat?’

‘We’ll let you know.’

‘But who’ll cut my meat for me?’ my husband said when his mother was gone.

‘You’re a surgeon, dear,’ I said, not unkindly. ‘Maybe you can figure it out for yourself.’

‘Daddy, I can help you,’ Alison said.

‘My, what a generous offer,’ I said, ‘but Daddy needs to do it for himself or he won’t get his allowance.’

‘Daddy still gets an allowance?’ the dear child asked.

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘That’s what made your little brother possible.’

I couldn’t believe my ear pans when Sheriff Stodgewiggle returned to the kitchen and reported that the Rabbit Hole was empty. Police Chief Toy was quick to back him up. That information did not compute; the floor might as well have been up and the ceiling down.

By that time Agnes and Joyce had joined our number, which, as it turned out, was quite fortunate for me. I’d been waiting closer to the bedroom door, slightly in front of the anxious Agnes, and when I heard the perplexing news I fainted dead away. Shame on me for ever having judged my friend’s prodigious appetite, for it was her pillowing plenitude that saved my noggin from a possible concussion.

Sheathed in that noggin is a fair-to-middling brain, but that brain houses a will that makes it impossible to keep me ‘out’ for as long as it takes to count to three. In fact, Alison is convinced that I missed my calling and that I should have been a boxer. With my exceptionally long and spindly arms, rather like an octopus’s tentacles (without the suction cups, mind you) I could weave in and out of my opponent’s reach. If I was ever knocked down I could pop up again, much like a weighted punching bag.

Thus it was on that occasion. ‘What happened?’ I gasped. ‘What did I miss?’

‘Almost nothing,’ Agnes said as she propped me back up. ‘And
nothing
is what they found. Are you sure that murderous Melvin fell down your so-called Rabbit Hole?’

‘It’s
the
Rabbit Hole,’ I said. ‘And I’m positive. I heard him scream as he fell. Then I immediately slammed the trapdoor shut. After that, Joyce and I pushed the dresser over it to keep him from escaping. There’s no way he could have gotten out.’

Sheriff Stodgewiggle cleared his throat. It was not a straightforward process. He thrust out his three chins, and opened wide a cavernous maw lined with teeth no larger than grains of millet. Then we were treated to the sounds one might expect from a tiger throwing up a hairball. The ritual turned his face the colour of rancid, pickled beets. I, for one, dared not breathe again until he shook his massive wattles to signify that, at last, actual words were forthcoming.

‘
While
one is under great stress,’ he drawled, in a West Virginia accent, ‘it is possible for even the sharpest
among
us to hallucinate.’

Agnes patted my arm as if I were her child rather than her best friend. ‘Mags, at least you have to give the sheriff props for using words like “while,” and “among,” even if he did prove that you’ve been acting a little bizarre lately.’

Boy, that did it! That hiked my hackles until they practically caught in the hooks of my sturdy Christian brassiere. ‘I was not hallucinating, I was not acting bizarrely. Melvin Sticklegoober Stoltzfus really
has
been pretending to be an English earl.’

Alison giggled. ‘Sticklegoober. Come on, Mom. Can’tcha come up with a better name than that?’

‘Hush,’ her father said. ‘I happen to know that you had a grandmother by that name.’

‘Oops,’ Alison said. ‘Strike that.’

I was gobsmacked, then, when Joyce walked around the kitchen island and put a slender arm around me. ‘This kind of talk angers me,’ she said. ‘What all of you are really doing is calling Magdalena and me liars. Magdalena did not hallucinate; neither did I. And yes, Melvin did impersonate an English Lord.’

‘But how could he?’ Agnes protested. ‘That man has always been so – well, so
very
incompetent.’

‘He’s managed to impersonate a human being,’ I said.

‘Way to score, Mom,’ Alison said.

The Babester frowned. The dear man isn’t necessarily ‘holier than thou,’ but he is definitely holier than
me
, and he hates it when I am judgemental, even when the man I am mocking is a serial killer.

Joyce clapped her hands as if calling a class to order. ‘Look, you
knew
me as a somewhat ditzy, telepathic Lady Celia, a teenager. But I’m really twenty-five and I’m a graduate of Julliard. I’m originally from Chillicothe, Ohio and I’m as American as grass lawns, oversized food portions and Christmas music in September. But I had nothing against this Melvin Sticklebooger until today. Not one thing – until he started shooting at us.’

Even Sheriff Stodgewiggle laughed when Joyce Toestubber said Sticklebooger, which, if you ask me, is skating on pretty thin ice. Fortunately, Joyce didn’t take the laughter personally, and she was able to pick up her tale in a minute. She told our little group everything that she’d told me, but also added a few details that she thought might be pertinent.

‘The man whom you call Melvin worked very hard on his accent. By the time he caught up with us in West Virginia and asked us to work with him, he’d already watched all of the
Downton Abbey
TV shows. He had taped every episode, and was always referring to this one or that whenever we rehearsed. If he’d had his way, we would have shown up here as an aristocratic English family from the twenties.’

Sheriff Stodgewiggle sighed deeply, sending ripples through his jowls and down through the many layers of flesh contained in his ever-expanding neck. It was a fascinating and truly wondrous sight; the sort of thing one ought to thank the Good Lord for having had the chance of witnessing. Our neighbour, Marnie, went to Nova Scotia once and saw a whale breach in the Bay of Fundy. She said it was a moment which she’d never forget. I’d like to think that my moment with the sheriff’s jowls was akin to that.

At any rate, miracle of miracles, Joyce was able to describe her theatre troop’s training period with Melvin in such agonizing albeit hilarious detail that anyone who knew him really well could not doubt that her story was indeed true. Of course I had already fainted, so my quota of acting out various points had already been met. That meant that I could only bite my lip and roll my eyes as she took centre stage and regaled them with story after story about the time that she spent training to be one of the family of Grimsley-Snodgrasses.

‘What I still don’t understand,’ Sheriff Stodgewiggle said at last, bringing us all back to earth, ‘is what was to be gained by having the viscount disappear over the edge of Lover’s Leap? That was just a major distraction for everyone, and it had to be an enormous headache for you, Magdalena.’

‘That was it, exactly!’ Joyce said. ‘In fact, I overheard Melvin offering Michael a thousand-dollar bonus if he could pull off a decent job of disappearing. I got a measly two hundred extra for claiming to have seen Rupert being pushed. But anyway, the whole point was to cause Magdalena grief. The fact that the townspeople trampled the field – that’s what Melvin was hoping for.’

‘And you were
OK
with this?’

‘No one is perfect, Magdalena,’ Joyce had the temerity to say.

It was time for me to clap my hands – either that, or I was going to wring Joyce’s neck; a decidedly unchristian activity.

‘Listen up, folks,’ I said. ‘We can stand here all day, admiring the way that Melvin, that wicked weasel, nearly pulled the wool over our eyes and turned me into hamburger meat, tenderized by a gazillion bullets, or one of us can actually go down into the Rabbit Hole and take a close look-see. Just sticking one’s head in there and calling out his name – what does that prove? There is a sofa in there, for pity’s sake. The man weighs about three stone, naked. He could be lying flat under the cushions and you wouldn’t see a bump. There is a mini-fridge down there as well, for crying out loud. He could probably fit in that if he curled up. There are oodles of possibilities – that’s all I’m saying. Why hasn’t anyone gone down there?’

Then, to my embarrassment, it dawned on me why not. It was, in fact, as plain as the ring around Sheriff Stodgewiggle’s collar. The good man was not going to be able to fit through the opening, not unless we stuffed him down the hole like sausage in a casing. As for Toy, he’d already made it painfully clear that he could barely tolerate sleeping under a sheet, so severe was his case of claustrophobia.