The Death of Pie

Table of Contents

Cover

A Selection of Titles by Tamar Myers

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Pennsylvania Dutch Mysteries

TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH

PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY AND CRIME

NO USE DYING OVER SPILLED MILK

JUST PLAIN PICKLED TO DEATH

BETWEEN A WOK AND A HARD PLACE

EAT, DRINK AND BE WARY

PLAY IT AGAIN, SPAM

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE LADLE

THE CREPES OF WRATH

GRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT

CUSTARD'S LAST STAND

THOU SHALT NOT GRILL

ASSAULT AND PEPPER

GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

HELL HATH NO CURRY

AS THE WORLD CHUMS

BATTER OFF DEAD

BUTTER SAFE THAN SORRY

THE DEATH OF PIE *

*
available from Severn House

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which is was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicably copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2014 by Tamar Myers

The right of Tamar Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

Myers, Tamar

The death of pie.

1. Yoder, Magdalena (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

2. Novelists–Death–Fiction. 3. Murder–Investigation–

Fiction. 4. Mennonites–Fiction. 5. Pennsylvania Dutch

County (Pa.)–Fiction. 6. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title

813.6-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8381-0 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-512-4 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-531-4 (ePub)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

This book is dedicated to the love of my life, Jeffrey C. Myers.
I met him when I was just fifteen years old, and for me,
it was love at first sight. That was half a century ago!

I would like to thank my three office assistants, to whom I am deeply indebted for their many hours of hard work. First, I would like to thank my office manager of eleven years, Miss Pagan Myers. Pagan is a basenji dog, whose chief tasks consist of guarding my second-story window whilst napping on her very own chair, all the while serenading me with her snores.

Next, I must give credit to my in-house copy-editor, Mr Kasha Myers, a ten-year-old Bengal cat, who can open doors with his paws, and has been taught to call me ‘Ma-Ma.' Kasha's style of editing is to stroll across my keyboard, all the while whipping me in the face with his tail. When he is through making his changes, they are scarcely any clearer than the ones suggested by my actual publisher.

Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful for the en
purr
agement of Mr Dumpster Boy Myers, my faithful secretary of ten years. Dumpster Boy is an orange tabby who began life in a kitchen dumpster behind a restaurant, hence his name. He now weighs twenty pounds. Every morning he follows me up the stairs to my office, plops down just outside and purrs until lunchtime. At that hour he sees it as his duty to accompany me back down the stairs where –
poof
– suddenly he disappears, not to be seen or heard from again until after supper. His routine varies only on those days that Dumpster Boy decides that he needs to use the copy machine. Having learned where the ‘start' button is located, Dumpster Boy will push this button and then hop on the machine to watch the paper emerge. Usually this thrill will not suffice, and he will try to ‘help' the paper along with one of his giant orange paws. If I've been away, I can always tell if my secretary has been hard at work at the copy machine by the mountain of crumpled paper balls I find.

I
f it is true that only the good die young, I will live to a ripe old age. Indeed, I am a wicked woman. Well, perhaps I exaggerate just a wee bit, although in one way or another, I have broken nine of the Ten Commandments. Of course, none of this is anyone's business but my own. However, given that I do have a rather crucial point to prove, and that there is a certain method to my madness, I hereby go public with this list of all my worst sins.

For starters, I have never even seen an idol, much less had occasion to bow down to one. However, our idols can be things other than the images carved from stone or wood, things that are more important to us than God with the capital G. In my case, I got sucked into sin one Sunday morning as I lollygagged in my Jacuzzi bathtub, the one with the thirty-two jets, the one I have named Big Bertha. One moment I was soaking lazily, the next I was shouting Bertha's name at the top of my lungs and thrashing about like a great white shark. I was so ashamed, I tell you, that I never even made it to church that day.

My second huge sin is that I often use the Lord's name in vain. Why, just last week when somebody cut me off in traffic, nearly sending me up a telephone pole, I heard myself say ‘jam and cheese!' Using someone's initials is the same thing as using that person's name.

Now, about honoring the Sabbath Day in order to keep it holy: I always thought that I did this until I acquired a Jewish husband and learned that the word ‘Sabbath' is derived from the Hebrew word
Shabbat
, which refers to Saturday. It was the Emperor Constantine who declared,
ex cathedra,
that Sunday was suddenly our new Sabbath. Given that God trumps emperor – at least in the heavenly hierarchy – I had never once honored the actual Sabbath Day.

Some commandments are easier to follow than others; that said, it is virtually impossible for any American child to honor their parents by being obedient one hundred percent of the time. Children in the Bible had trouble obeying their folks as well, or else it wouldn't be necessary to address the topic of honoring one's parents in the Big Ten.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a rotten kid, and if I did mouth off, Mama wasn't above slapping my ‘sassy trap,' as she called it. But when I got to be a teenager I learned that most parents really don't want to hassle their kids. They don't want a ‘situation.' Therefore, if they forbid you to go to Joshua Stahly's barn dance, they probably have a good reason. But how was I to know that Joshua would somehow manage to sneak in a keg of beer, and that Marlene Deitlemeyer, who had all the morals of a basset hound in heat, would kick over a lantern in the hay loft, whilst having a roll in the same?

Alas, when my parents picked me up at the police station I was forced to tell them that I had
not
been drinking – so as not to disappoint them, of course – and it was because of the contents of Joshua's keg that I felt compelled to ‘borrow' some gum from Marlene's purse while she was pulling up her stockings. Crash! Boom! Down went more commandments, the ones forbidding lying and stealing. But lest I be judged too harshly, surely one must take into consideration that I was only trying to honor my parents by preserving their image of me? And anyway, I still think that if they hadn't been quite so strict I wouldn't have had to lie or steal, and thus those commandments might still be intact.
Might.

Don't think for a minute that I've glossed over the Fifth and Sixth Commandants. I shall begin with the Sixth Commandment, the one concerning adultery. Is my elderly cousin, Freni, correct when she claims that one can commit adultery with a Jacuzzi bathtub equipped with thirty-two jets? If so, then I must confess to having a torrid affair with Big Bertha. Oh, the shame of it all, for I am a happily married woman who finds herself torn between two lovers and feeling like a – well, a jerk. But then again, how can something so wrong feel so right? For now I comfort myself with the knowledge that this love affair (if indeed that's what this was) wasn't a dirty one. Not that it would have made a difference anyway; I am still an adulteress – if only an inadvertent one.

You see, I was once inadvertently married to a very handsome man named Aaron Miller. He was a smooth-talking bigamist with a wife stashed up in Iowa, and I was a country bumpkin who sincerely believed that the first marriage proposal to come my way would be my last.

The Ninth and Tenth Commandments are sort of one and the same. Here you will find a long list of things not to covet. A lot of that stuff, like menservants and maidservants, are hard to come by in our village of Hernia, Pennsylvania, but I will hereby fess up to coveting a good ass. For instance, my neighbor two farms down the road, Donald Hooley, has an exceptionally fine ass. No sooner did I set eyes on it than I begin to maneuver myself into a position to get my hands on it. I have always wanted a donkey – make that a pair of them – to pull me around in a wagon. Once, when I was a little girl, I saw a family of Amish children horsing around with a pair of asses and a wagon, and I immediately began to covet what they had. In fact, that is the first time I can remember ever really wanting something badly.

All right, that does leave the Fifth Commandment: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.' I have saved it for last because it is the only one of the Big Ten that I have not committed – to my knowledge. I qualified that statement, but only because I can't be sure that one of my teachers wasn't driven mad by my presence in her classroom and subsequently did herself in. Ours is a small village, and although every other teacher can be accounted for, my kindergarten teacher, Miss Kuhnberger (who screamed, ‘I can't take it anymore!' before moving to LA), has not been heard from since.

From the above I hope I have made it abundantly clear that I have never killed anyone in the literal sense. I have never shot, stabbed, struck or poisoned a human being. Sometimes I slap at mosquitoes, and I have set out cockroach bait. But allow me to reiterate, to make this point perfectly clear: I am not a killer. I am most definitely
not
a murderer. It was not me who murdered that despicable purveyor of pulp fiction, Ms Ramat Sreym.

Having said that, perhaps I should introduce myself. My full name is Magdalena Portulacca Yoder Rosen. Because I was married rather late in life and because my maiden name, Yoder, is ubiquitous in these parts, Yoder – Miss Yoder – is what I go by in my everyday dealings. Portulacca, in case you're wondering, is the name of a gorgeous flower that thrives in bright sunshine. This leads me to believe that my mother suffered from a rare flash of optimism.