Hell Hath No Curry Read online

  I’ve known Agnes for years but have only recently become friends with her. Apparently our newfound bond was not built on communication.

  “Agnes, dear, we couldn’t possibly be talking about the same person.”

  She frowned. “Short, squat, with a nose like a radish? A sex addict, if there ever was one.”

  “Ach,” Freni squawked and made a beeline to a side table where she had a bowl of bread dough rising. Without further comment she raised the dish towel covering the bowl, pinched off two wads of the sticky stuff, and crammed them into her ears.

  “What is that all about?” Agnes asked.

  “She must have thought you were describing her. Who were you describing, by the way? It certainly wasn’t the chief.”

  “The chief?” Agnes managed to stretch one syllable over the span of a full octave.

  “Uh—ah—just a minute, there is something in my throat.” That wasn’t a lie; that something was my heart. It was suddenly clear to me that the queen of gossip hadn’t a clue about the chief’s indiscretion. And to think I’d nearly blown it! On the other hand, it was obvious that Agnes was still in possession of a juicy morsel of hearsay. Although it had nothing to do with Cornelius’s death, it was important that I be privy to this bit of information. Important to me.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your throat, Magdalena. You’re stalling, aren’t you?”

  “Moi? Why on the earth would I do that? No, I was just thinking how the woman Cornelius was cheating with was doomed from the start, having been given that horrible name by her parents.”

  “Alice is a horrible name? Really, Magdalena, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

  Ding, dang, dong, I swore to myself. Normally I don’t allow myself to think such foul language, but Alice wasn’t much of a clue. In Hernia it was practically a throwaway.

  “Yes,” I said, “Alice is a horrible name when you combine it with her last name. What were her parents thinking?”

  Agnes pushed herself clear from the table. “I’ll be sure to tell Ned and Frieda that next time I see them.”

  “Troyer?” Of course, the radish nose was as good a clue as the Yoder nose on my face. My probing proboscis is also shaped like a root vegetable: a carrot. Only not quite as orange.

  “Tsk, tsk, Magdalena, you were toying with me like a cat with a mouse. Cornelius was multitasking, wasn’t he?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sowing his seed in more rows than one. You know what I mean. Now it’s your turn to spill the beans.”

  “All this talk of comestibles is making me hungry. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a bite of something? There’s some shoofly pie left over from supper last night—my guests found it too sweet—and the cookie jar is almost full of fresh gingersnaps.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are so. Magdalena, I thought you wanted to be friends.”

  “I do. But my hands are tied. With the chief having to distance herself from this case—”

  “Oh, my aching liver spots! Cornelius was sleeping with Chief Hornsby-Anderson, am I right? I am! And then she killed him!”

  “She most certainly did not!”

  “Then why did you call it a case?”

  “I did?”

  “Magdalena, I can see by your face that I’ve struck gold. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are such a good friend.” She heaved herself into a standing position, planted a kiss on my cheek, and then barreled for the door. A team of draft horses wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

  The rumor spread like head lice in an overcrowded schoolroom. The chief, bless her cheating heart, holed up in her house behind locked doors, while the paparazzi camped on her front lawn. And although he was furious with me, young Sergeant Ackerman relied on me more than ever. Thus it was that I was able to convince him to order an autopsy on Cornelius. “Tout de suite,” I said, almost exhausting my French vocabulary. I called in a few favors, canceled a few loan obligations, and within twenty-four hours I received the news that Hernia’s most eligible bachelor had died of a heart attack. Given that it was common knowledge that Cornelius suffered from a temperamental heart, this was no surprise.

  But the report went on to say that a major contributor to the heart attack had been the ingestion of an usually large amount of amitriptyline. This is a drug, sold under the brand name Elavil, that is often prescribed for depression and can be used as a pain reliever. At my direction the young sergeant had Cornelius’s medical records subpoenaed, and they, in turn, revealed that at no time had he been prescribed amitriptyline. Since this is not a drug that delivers a “buzz,” we deduced that Cornelius either had accidentally consumed it or, more likely, had been tricked into taking it. And because the odds of a competent adult accidentally ingesting a prescription drug like Elavil were slim to none, it was evident that someone, knowing Cornelius’s history of heart disease, had taken the fate of his faltering ticker into her own tiny hands. In other words, Hernia’s version of a playboy had been murdered.

  Could it have been Chief Olivia Hornsby-Anderson who committed the dastardly deed? When it comes to human behavior, anything is possible. But if the chief had, for some reason, administered a prescription drug to her lover, she wouldn’t have been so stupid as to report his death to anyone, especially Sergeant Ackerman. I am not a betting woman, but had I been, I would have put my money on one of Cornelius’s lovers, starting with Priscilla Livingood, his fiancée.

  Priscilla has been obsessed with her appearance ever since I’ve known her, which has been virtually our entire lives. The woman is my contemporary, and therefore a good ten years older than her deceased fiancé. Upon occasion folks have remarked that I am well preserved for my age, but Priscilla is way out of my league. I can remember back in high school when she played the trumpet for the sole reason that it gave her pouty lips. Those lips, I hate to recall, got her dates with anyone she pleased, including the one boy I ever truly desired in that shameful, carnal way—Jimmy Skinner.

  Not many people would argue that Priscilla was, and will probably always be, a beautiful woman by Hollywood standards. But upon meeting the well-endowed receptionist, who works in nearby Bedford, savvy folks will immediately recognize the telltale signs of excessive plastic surgery: her endowments are unnaturally large for her petite frame, and project abruptly from her chest, like two halves of a cantaloupe, her nose is pinched at the tip, her cheekbones too sculpted, and her chin a mite too pert. In other words, Miss Livingood has more store-bought parts than a John Deere tractor. It has been said—if only by yours truly—that over the years her nips and tucks, and implants, have produced a face so tight that when Priscilla opens her mouth, her eyes snap shut, and vice versa. Alas, somewhere along the way her eyebrows migrated to the middle of her forehead, where they hover like the disjointed wings of a bat. Despite all this, men still find the woman attractive. Go figure.

  I received the coroner’s report early on a Tuesday morning, and rather than wait until she got off work, I decided to visit Miss Livingood at her place of employment. I might be a fool, but I am not a masochist. You can be sure I primped as much as possible without slipping into the valley of the vain. I wound my bun extra tight, and used twice as many hairpins to secure it as I normally do. The prayer cap was new, crisp, and white. Over my sturdy Christian underwear I donned a freshly ironed navy blue broadcloth dress that had a shockingly short hem, one that barely fell below the knees. Practically daring the Devil to embrace me, I slipped my stocking-clad size elevens into sandals, instead of my usual brown brogans. Apropos of nothing, just about every article of clothing I owned had recently shrunk, except for my shoes.

  Then, throwing caution to the wind, I rummaged through my foster daughter’s things until I found a tube of peppermint-flavored lip balm that promised to deliver a translucent pink. After having applied the gunk, I discovered, to my dismay, that the manufacturer and I had decidedly different views on w
hat defined translucent, because quite frankly, even the Whore of Babylon would have been embarrassed to go out with lips the color of mine. I scrubbed the balm off with soap and warm water but was unable to remove it completely. To be completely honest, this pleased me. A faint tinge of palest pink was admittedly more alluring than my natural color, which approaches that of boiled liver. Needless to say, I felt quite racy as stepped out to face the world of Priscilla Livingood.

  3

  I knew that Priscilla worked for a Dr. J. P. Skinner, but I had no idea that her boss was a plastic surgeon. The riddle of how this medical receptionist was able to afford so many procedures was finally solved. But, silly me, I had neglected to call first and so discovered, to my irritation, that the office was not officially open to business until ten o’clock. It was just now only a quarter till the hour. The woman who informed me of this, through a cubbyhole too small to admit a cat, sounded just as put out as I did.

  “Miss Livingood isn’t here yet, so you’re just going to have to wait like everyone else.”

  I glanced around at a room full of swollen and bandaged faces. Priscilla, the trumpet-playing strumpet, must have gone through a lot of pain to get where she is. For a second she had my admiration. Then the door to the examining wing opened and in strode a man in a white lab coat. By the arrogant way he moved, I knew without being told that he was a doctor. He walked right past me and disappeared through a door that led to a room, or rooms, behind the receptionist station.

  With nothing else to do but fume, I plunked my patooty down on a chair with stained upholstery and grabbed a dog-eared magazine off a side table: Lift Magazine: True Stories of People Who Have Improved Their Lives by Going Under the Knife. I thumbed through the pages until I saw a headline that was so salacious, it nearly stopped my heart. I looked again at the cover. Then back at the article. I couldn’t believe the smut before my eyes. If I were to describe this moment in a novel, I would warn my gentle readers to skip to the next paragraph so as to protect their souls from unnecessary sin. It was about a woman’s quest for the perfect breast size, and her final realization that there was no such thing—although Dr. J. P. Skinner’s work had certainly added to the quality of her life. Yes, the story had some merit, but the title, “A Tale of Two Titties,” was uncalled for.

  What if I’d brought a child with me? What if I’d been someone with less life experience? Both the child and I would have been damaged irreparably by the T word. There is nothing so energizing as righteous indignation. I leaped to my feet just as the aforementioned doctor strode back into the packed waiting room.

  “Hold it right there, buster,” I bellowed.

  He stopped and turned. “Are you talking to me?”

  “None other.” I advanced until I was well within speaking distance. “This”—I tapped the offending page—“has no business being in a public waiting room.”

  “It’s my waiting room; it isn’t public. And I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “This titillating language—well, you get my drift.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  There was something vaguely familiar about the man. Perhaps I’d seen him over at Pat’s IGA, or had gotten a glimpse of him on the golf course as I drove along it in and out of the city of Bedford. The way he was looking intently at me made me think we’d met formally at a fund-raiser of some sort, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what that would have been. To be sure, Dr. Skinner and I did not move in the same circles.

  A smile played at the edges of his mouth. “Magdalena, could that possibly be you?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “That all depends on where, and how, we met.”

  “Try just about every day in sixth grade. My parents decided to try life in Hernia for a year, but gave it up when they realized they were about to drop dead from boredom.”

  “Jimmy? Is that you?”

  “Skinny Jimmy Skinner,” he said, and then, much to my surprise, threw his arms around me in an unscripted hug.

  My people are Swiss-German. We don’t hug. At best we place our arms gingerly around blood relatives and pat them on the back. We slap hard if we really like a person, although in almost any situation, a handshake will suffice. But I’d been dating a Jewish man from New York for the past year, and had learned that it is possible to survive a full, gentle embrace—at least from someone you know. And Skinny Jimmy was no stranger.

  I shot up like a weed the summer between fifth and sixth grades. When school started that fall I was five foot eight and towered over everyone in the classroom including our teacher, Miss Thumbernickel. Puberty brought with it a whiff of maturity, so to speak, but Mama would not hear of an eleven-year-old wearing deodorant. In no time at all I was dubbed Yoder with the Odor, then just Odor, which edged out Stretch and Pole only because of the rhyme. It would have been an even more horrible year, had not the skinniest boy on the planet moved to Hernia.

  At first our friendship was based solely on the fact that we were the oddballs, the butts of most of the juvenile jokes thought up by our insensitive classmates. Eventually, however, I grew rather fond of Skinny, and was practically heartbroken when he moved back to Bedford a year later. We vowed to stay in touch forever, which lasted for almost two whole months. To be frank, I’d rarely thought of him over the years, and when I did, it was never even with enough curiosity to look for him in the phone book.

  “Jimmy,” I said, giving him the once-, twice-, and thrice-over, “you aren’t skinny anymore.” I spoke the truth. He was wearing an expensive sports jacket, but it couldn’t hide a weightlifter’s physique.

  He pretended to sniff the air. “And you no longer smell. How about that?”

  “Yes, how about that. Say, Jimmy, back to the smut in this magazine—”

  “You ever think about modeling, Magdalena?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not only are you tall, but you have the perfect face and figure for the job. Of course, you’d have to do catalog modeling, as opposed to runway modeling, now that you’ve reached a certain age.”

  “How is life on Mars, Jimmy?”

  “You think I’m joking, don’t you? Magdalena, I know that you’ve been occupied building up a thriving, successful business, but it’s time to smell the roses—no odor reference intended. I know some catalog people in the modeling division. I could help you get started.”

  “Enough is enough! How can you be so cruel?”

  Jimmy must have known someone in the acting profession as well, because he appeared genuinely surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

  “And what gall you have! Your patients are staring at us, for crying out loud. Does that give you the jollies? Stick-thin Magdalena with a nose deserving of its own zip code—who are you to make fun of skinny people, by the way?”

  Jimmy grabbed my hand, and even though I protested, he succeeded in dragging me into one of his consulting rooms. Although I was seething, he gripped my wrists tightly and forced me to look into a mirror.

  “What do you see?”

  “Steam coming out of my ears.”

  “What else?”

  “A beaked scarecrow in a clean broadcloth dress and surprisingly sturdy sandals.”

  “Take a better look,” he growled.

  “Well, I see you, someone who has somehow managed to grow into a hunk—I mean a hunky-dory-sort-of-looking person.”

  “I’ll tell you what I see. I see a woman who has a body most of my patients would kill for. I also see a woman whose striking good looks should be the envy of every woman in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

  “Since you’re not wearing glasses, I’d have to say it’s your contacts that need changing.”

  “So, what are you, Magdalena? A full B cup? Almost C?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your bra size. I’m a doctor; I think I can handle it.”

  “For your information, although I wear a B cup, it’s only so that when I stuff it with tissues, m
y bosom looks almost normal. Once I even had room for a pussycat in there.”

  He smiled. “And now?”

  “Now the darn thing—oops, pardon my swearing—has shrunk.”

  “Has your dress shrunk as well? It seems to be hugging your hips a bit snugly.”

  “It’s the funniest thing; everything I own has shrunk. I don’t do anything different with the laundry, except that I got rid of the washer with the wobbly leg. The loads always ended up being unbalanced, so I had to sit on it, which led down a path of sin—uh, never mind.”

  “Magdalena, have you ever heard of body dysmorphic disorder?”

  “I don’t listen to rock and roll.”

  He grinned. “It’s when one’s body image doesn’t match up to reality. It can go both ways, but usually it involves a man or a woman thinking that they’re ugly, or have some very unattractive feature, when virtually everyone else sees them quite differently. Some very beautiful women, as well as handsome men, think they’re ugly.”

  “Like in the Ugly Duckling?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why, that’s just silly. If I was a beautiful woman, you can bet I’d have no trouble seeing that.”

  “Oh, but you do.”

  “What?”

  “When is the last time you looked in a mirror—I mean really looked in the mirror. With an open mind.”

  “This morning.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “An extremely tall, skinny woman with a horsey face. Neigh-hhhhh! When the Good Lord made me, he put a saddle on my back and hollered giddyap.”

  “That isn’t funny. You’re a damn—now it’s your turn to pardon my swearing—good-looking woman, Magdalena. Honestly, you have a classical face and a killer bod.”

  “But my nose—”

  “You’ve grown into your nose, Magdalena. It is in perfect proportion to your face. Everything about you is in perfect proportion. Trust me, I’m a plastic surgeon. I try to make people look like you for a living. A mighty good living at that. I redo what God has done, but only when I honestly think the patient could use some improvement. If you came to me requesting any procedure—more extensive than removing a bunion—I’d throw you out of my office. No, I’d kick you to the nearest psychiatrist, that’s what I’d do. Come to think of it, I should do that anyway.”