Death by Tart Attack Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also 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

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Recipe For Mini Tarts

  Also by Tamar Myers

  The Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries

  THOU SHALT NOT GRILL

  ASSAULT AND PEPPER

  GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

  HELL HATH NO CURRY

  AS THE WORLD CHURNS

  BATTER OFF DEAD

  BUTTER SAFE THAN SORRY

  THE DEATH OF PIE *

  TEA WITH JAM AND DREAD *

  PUDDIN’ ON THE BLITZ *

  DEATH BY TART ATTACK*

  * available from Severn House

  DEATH BY TART ATTACK

  Tamar Myers

  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 it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable 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 world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Tamar Myers, 2022

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. 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.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5035-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0891-0 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0892-7 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. 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 actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  This book is dedicated to Ellie Schwartzberg, the wisest woman I have ever known.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my publisher, Kate Lyall Grant, at Severn House for the opportunity to write this book. I would also like to thank my editor Sara Porter for her wisdom and skilful guidance. I also wish to acknowledge my copyeditor Anna Harrison for a bang-up job, and of course, the art department for a scrummy cover.

  In addition, I am very grateful to my literary agent of twenty-eight years, Nancy Yost, of Nancy Yost Literary Agency. I want to give a shout-out to the entire team there, most especially Sarah, Natanya, Cheryl, and Christina.

  Lastly, I would like to acknowledge my full-time secretary, Alex. He is totally incompetent. He is utterly incapable of typing a single word, no matter how vigorously he pecks at the keyboard. Then again, it’s perhaps understandable, given that he is a three-ounce parakeet. However, he does cheer me on all day by saying ‘I love you, sweetheart’ and ‘I’m a happy bird’.

  ONE

  I am a hoarder. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hoard stuff; I hoard memories. My mind is so cluttered with memories, both good and bad, that it is hard for me to be in the present. There are times when I live in my head so much that I forget that I have feet and lose my balance – both literally and metaphorically. Frankly, it’s the unpleasant memories that I tend to fixate on the most. It has taken me a long time to come to grips with my status as a memory hoarder, but now that I have, the next bad memory that pops into my head, I vow to promptly pitch from my psyche. But that’s easier said than done. Bad memories tend to recirculate, like unclaimed luggage on an airport conveyor belt.

  As if that’s not bad enough, there are the times that an awful memory will appear in the flesh and knock one for a loop. That’s what happened the September that I turned sixty, and my ten-year-old started high school. My worst nightmare rode into town with the sound of thunder, toting hellfire and brimstone, and my family dynamics were irrevocably altered.

  But now, I’ve gotten way ahead of myself: so far ahead, in fact, that most of the story has been left behind. Usually, the only thing that gets this far out in front of me is my extraordinarily long, narrow nose. Fortunately, my probing proboscis does come in handy for stabbing pickles in the bottom of a jar.

  This story begins the day that I heard a racket coming from Hertzler Road that was even louder than my husband’s snoring. Given that it was one o’clock in the morning, I was in bed, clad in my long, cotton, flannel nightgown (the sexy number that had a small pink bow attached to the zipper pull at the neckline). I threw on my long, cotton chenille robe, crammed my tootsies into my skillet-sized, fuzzy, polyester slippers, and ran to the dining-room window to see what in tarnation was going on.

  Now, I am not waxing hyperbolic when I say that what my eyes beheld, my mind simply could not believe. I’m sure such a phenomenon has happened to you before, hasn’t it? At any rate, I did the logical thing, which was to close my eyes, and then open them again for confirmation. Unless one is a masochist, pinching oneself should never be one’s go-to option.

  Unfortunately, what I beheld the second time was the same as the first. A seemingly endless line of heavy earth-moving equipment was rumbling slowly down the rural route that fronts my farm. The Amish here use horses to pull their farm machinery, and the Mennonites use tractors, but these machines were of the type and scale that I have only seen in cities when skyscrapers are built. I ran back to our bedroom as fast as my rubbery legs could take me.

  ‘Aaron,’ I shouted. ‘Wake up!’

  My sweet husband, Gabriel Rosen, turned on his reading light. ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘Barren,’ I said. ‘As in, I was barren as the Gobi Desert until your periwinkle pollinated my hollyhock.’

  The dear man sighed. ‘Mags,’ he said, ‘you called me by your first husband’
s name again, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but bear in mind that he tricked me into marrying him, and since he was already married, technically he never was my husband.’

  ‘In that case the two of you were just shacking up.’

  ‘Oh pot, quit calling thyself black,’ I said. ‘Your sister told me all about your college conquests. Romeo Rosen is what everyone called you. Now hie thee to yon dining-room window and tell me what you see.’

  My long-suffering, and forgiving, husband crawled out of bed and lumbered into the dining room. For a moment he stood at the window rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded. ‘What on earth do you think is going on?’

  ‘We’re either both imagining things, hon, or the world as we know it is about to end. There’s only one way to find out!’ He ducked into the kitchen and grabbed a massive, high-powered torch from a pantry shelf. ‘Come on, let’s go find out.’

  That said, Dr Gabriel Rosen, the love of my life, and a well-respected member of the Village of Hernia, Pennsylvania, charged outdoors and down the driveway. Moi, ever the dutiful wife, followed faithfully in his stead. Although we may be rubes and country bumpkins, we are not without a minimum of technology. In this case, our appearance caused two exceedingly bright security lights to click on. It was only then that I remembered that while I, a conservative Mennonite woman, was properly clad from head to toe, the Babester was only wearing the same set of nightclothes in which he had been born.

  TWO

  It was a given that the men in the slowing, passing vehicles would notice my husband’s baby-making equipment. It is, after all, considerable. The drivers blasted their horns, and their passengers leaned out the windows and shouted obscenities. Meanwhile, Gabe stood there, transfixed and gobsmacked, in his altogether, until the taillights of the last of the vehicles disappeared into the early morning mist a quarter mile down the road. When he turned to me, he didn’t seem at all upset or embarrassed. He was excited.

  ‘While I’m getting dressed, you run and ask Freni to watch Little Jacob. Then I’ll get the car started. We’re following those folks.’

  Follow them we did, all the way to Hernia, population, 2,172. That figure, incidentally, would be much higher if one took into account the fact that more than a few of our citizens are two-faced. At any rate, the route that these behemoth earthmovers took had them come to a full stop, approximately four miles south of my place. At that point they turned right and inched their way across the two-hundred-year-old stone bridge that spans Slave Creek.

  This historic landmark was built back in the days of oxcarts and isn’t meant to carry such heavy loads. All vehicles over two tonnes are required to enter town from the opposite side of the village. Not only were the drivers of these machines going to be heavily fined, but they were also going to be the recipients of a first-class Magdalena Yoder tongue-lashing (of course, one delivered in my usual mild-mannered Mennonite fashion).

  ‘If they so much as harm one stone on our bridge, there will be all hectare to pay,’ I said.

  Gabe laughed. ‘Oh hon, I’m sure that it’s not a sin to say “heck”.’

  ‘Tell that to the bar of soap that Mama made me eat.’

  ‘What? She made you eat a bar of soap for saying one word? And what happened to just washing your mouth out with the soap?’

  ‘She made me eat a sliver of soap every time I said a bad word.’ I shrugged. ‘So I guess I must have been a very naughty girl.’

  ‘Me like,’ Gabe said. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘It’s not funny, Gabe. Every time I got the soap treatment, Granny whacked me with her hairbrush as well. Still, that didn’t stop me. Either I was a slow learner, or the Devil really had his hooks into me.’

  ‘You were just being a kid rebelling against a strict upbringing. Tell me some more of your so-called swear words.’

  ‘No! That would be wrong now, just like it was then.’

  ‘Not if you’re trying to educate me – your heathen husband.’

  Although I knew that Gabe was teasing me about the way I was raised, it felt good to talk about it with someone whose perspective differed from the norms of my Amish-Mennonite Community. All these decades after the fact, I still felt that I had been unfairly punished.

  ‘I said the “D” word,’ I said. ‘Not the one that holds back water, but the word that describes mending socks. It got me two slivers of soap and three whacks with the hairbrush.’

  ‘Tsk, tsk, why look at you, Satan’s little sidekick,’ Gabe said. ‘I’ve never been prouder of you than right now.’

  I hung my large horsey head. ‘But dear, it gets much worse. One day when nothing was going right for me at school, I shouted out “cheese and crackers”. The whole class heard me. Miss Entwhistle, my third-grade teacher, got the vapours and was sent home for the rest of the day. Of course, this resulted in our class being sent home as well, and the entire village learning that one Magdalena Portulacca Yoder, was a nine-year-old blasphemer.

  ‘For this transgression Papa took me out to the barn and gave me a couple of gentle flicks with the buggy whip. I mean really soft – like this.’ I tapped his sleeve to demonstrate. ‘Then Papa snapped that whip in the air so that it cracked like lightning, and told me to holler bloody murder. Granny Yoder took pity on my afflicted flesh and spared me her hairbrush, but Mama guessed what her husband had done, and made me eat half a bar of that dreaded soap. I went to bed with a stomach ache, and the next morning, and for the next three days, I defecated bubbles.’

  We were just one vehicle from the bridge by then, and Gabe laughed so hard that he nearly ran into a stone wall along the passenger side of the car. If it weren’t for my long, gangly left arm, and the keen vision in my pale, watery-blue eyes, I might have had to give my Dearly Beloved a tongue-lashing. But as soon as I wrenched the wheel from his hand and straightened our trajectory, he slammed on the brakes. Now I don’t mind being face down in my dearly beloved’s lap, mind you, but normally it takes a bit of coaxing.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ the Babester said. ‘That flatbed in front of us doesn’t have any brake lights.’

  The offending truck was transporting a crane, of all things. Now if idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, then surely a building crane is the Devil’s favourite tool. In my opinion no structure needs to be more than two stories tall, given that being a crane operator is one of the most dangerous jobs that there is, and we’ve all seen photos of fallen cranes which, on their way down, have sliced through buildings like a knife through a sponge cake. Not only that, but aren’t skyscrapers an affront to the Almighty? Just look what happened to the Tower of Babel. Those folks tried building their way up to Heaven too, and God smashed that tower to smithereens.

  Apparently, the Good Lord didn’t want this idolatrous piece of machinery to even enter our peaceful village. After an interminable series of stops and starts, it became obvious the driver couldn’t manage the sharp right turn onto our narrow bridge. The road ahead led steeply uphill, and there was not a spot within ten miles that came to mind where a rig that long could turn around safely. The best way out of this predicament was for a skilled driver to straighten this monstrous truck, and then back it up as far as the intersection of Hertzler Road and Bontrager Road, where his chances were better. Although both roads are paved, they are also flanked by drainage ditches.

  ‘Wait here,’ I said to the Babester, and then hopped out of the car before he could stop me.

  While I may have a face like a mare’s, and my chest is a carpenter’s dream (flat as a board), the Good Lord had seen fit to bless me with a pair of long legs and sturdy ankles. The fact that they blend into each other seamlessly, from calve to ankle, is why this phenomena is sometimes referred to as ‘cankles’. At any rate, I hitched up my modest skirt (which fell to mid-calf), loped over to the cab of the truck, reached up with one of my long and gangly, but strong, farm gal arms to grab the vehicle’s side mirror, and hoisted myself up onto i
ts running board. Upon peering into the cab’s open window, I gasped with disbelief.

  ‘Why, you’re just a baby!’ I said.

  ‘I am not,’ the boy said. ‘I’m sixteen.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Then I’m almost sixteen,’ he said, and bit his lip.

  ‘Try again, dear, before I call the police.’

  ‘I’ll be fourteen next week?’ With his rising inflection, he could have been a secret Canadian.

  ‘Good heavens, I’ve got sturdy Christian underwear that are older than you.’

  ‘Gross.’

  ‘You do know that it’s illegal for you to be driving this monstrosity.’

  The boy burst into tears. ‘My d-d-ad m-made d-d-o it. D-d-don’t you think that I’d rather be home in bed? But he said that if I d-d-idn’t d-d-rive for him tonight, he wouldn’t give me this awesome summer job with his construction company.’

  There are times when I can literally feel the tentacles of an evil presence starting to close in on me. Not that this kid was evil, but he was only a few steps away from Satan Himself.

  ‘Tell me about this awesome summer job,’ I said. Meanwhile the Babester, a.k.a. Dr Gabriel Rosen, was desperately flashing our car’s lights in a failed attempt to get me to run back to him with a report. Instead of doing my husband’s bidding, I did the best I could for the kid, which was to give him a ‘thumbs up’, and a lopsided, horsey-faced grin.

  The boy, whose name was Rodney, wiped his runny nose on his pink and blue T-shirt. ‘D-dad is the CEO of this, like, massively awesome amusement park that is going to be built over there.’ He sniffed, and pointed with his chin in the direction of my beloved Hernia. ‘It’s gonna be the largest amusement park in the world, and it’s gonna be Christian. All of it straight from the Bible. And I get to be the water boy.’

  At that the Devil showed up to dance a long, slow number with me. He whispered in my ear that He planned to strangle me, by enveloping me in a web of microscopic roots that eventually squeezed all the oxygen from my lungs. Already I found it difficult to breathe, and I had yet to ask the name of this impending amusement park.