George was obviously not in any hurry to get back. I sat in his chair, in the shade of the willow, waiting patiently to talk to him about Joe. Then I waited impatiently. Finally boredom forced me to pick up one of his brushes, squeeze a bit of brown pigment from a half-rolled tube, and paint the outline of a third turtle on the log. Then, still bored, I took another brush and hid my name in green among the cattails.
By then it was time to boogie on out of there, so I skipped across the remaining pasture to Gabe’s. While skipping may sound like an odd choice of locomotion for a woman in her middle years, it is nonetheless a very good form of aerobic exercise. When I knocked on Gabriel Rosen’s front door, I was breathing rather hard.
“Calm yourself,” he said with a grin. “I know I have that effect on women, but I thought it was lost on you.”
I choked back my gut response. What wasn’t lost on me was the fact that Gabe was wearing only cutoff denim shorts. Short shorts that displayed strong, well-toned thighs. I had never seen his naked torso before— well, not during waking moments—and was, to put it frankly, pleased at what I saw. He was muscular, without being bulky, and he had a patch of dark hair in the middle of his golden chest that ran like a funnel down to his waistband. As far as I could see, he had no more hair on his back than did I.
“Anything wrong, Magdalena?”
“Nothing,” I squeaked.
“Come in.” He ushered me in, and as I squeezed past him, his smell made me every bit as heady as the Hamptons’ champagne. It was times like that when I wished I were a Roman Catholic. Without someone to confess my lust to, guilt was going to stay with me a long, long time.
“Have a seat,” he said. He didn’t seem at all upset with me for standing him up the previous evening. Maybe he had a very generous, forgiving spirit, or maybe he just didn’t care.
I sat on one end of a buttery soft, black leather couch. Gabe sat on the other.
“So what have you been up to?” I asked.
He picked up a book, which had been lying facedown, spine bent, on the heavy wood coffee table in front of us. “I’ve been reading this most fascinating memoir by a woman named Ramat Sreym, which I bought, by the way, at Yoder’s Corner Market. Anyway, Ramat’s parents were missionaries to the Belgian Congo, one of the most remote places on the face of the earth. She was also a well-known mystery writer, but it took her years to find a publisher willing to publish this book.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and his chest muscles rippled. “Who knows? The publishing industry doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Ramat’s memoirs are every bit as riveting as Angela’s Ashes. In the end she had to resort to asking her fans to write her mystery publisher and request the memoirs. Of course she couldn’t do this directly, so she made a veiled reference to it in one of her books.” He put the book back on the table. “So, what have you been up to?”
“Me? Well, you know, business as usual.”
He nodded. “So how did your errand go last night?”
“What?” I prayed that he had selective amnesia. If my prayer was answered, he wouldn’t remember the hours spent awaiting for me atop Stucky Ridge.
“You were in a hurry to get someplace yesterday afternoon. Everything go all right?”
“I’m sorry,” I wailed. “I tried to get there, I really did. But who knew I would have three flat tires in an Amish driveway?”
He put up a quieting hand. “Look, I’m not blaming you. In fact, I should be blaming myself. You should be blaming me.”
“Whatever for?”
His warm brown eyes left my face and focused on Miss Sreym’s book jacket. “Well, because I was a no-show myself.”
“What?”
He grinned and ran long fingers through thick black hair. “I got kind of caught up in the book I’m writing. It was the final scene, you know, where everything gets tied up neatly in a little package. Anyway, when I looked at the clock, it was already a quarter past eight. I know I should have called, Magdalena, but I was just too chicken.”
“Well!” I said with righteous indignation.
He looked back at me, his eyes now dancing with merriment. “Well, indeed. So why didn’t you call?”
“Because—well, because—” I grabbed the book off the coffee table. “Where Jackals Sing. That’s certainly an intriguing title. So it’s a good one, eh?”
“The best. But don’t try and change the subject.”
“Okay,” I wailed, “I was chicken too. And mad. I thought you didn’t care.”
He laughed. “So we’re a pair of chickens.”
“I guess so.”
“You want to try again?”
I blinked. “Try what?”
“This date thing. Our picnic.”
My heart pounded. It hadn’t beat that hard since the day I found Sarah Weaver in a barrel of sauerkraut— and she’d been dead twenty years.
“Sure,” I said through lips as dry as Mrs. Lehman’s coffee cakes.
“Tonight?”
“I can’t,” I said miserably. “I already have plans.”
Gabe’s beautiful brow creased with the merest suggestion of a frown. “My, aren’t we fickle.”
“It’s not a date,” I wailed. “I have to spy on a barn full of Amish teenagers.”
“Always ready with a joke, Magdalena. I don’t know how you do it.”
“I’m not joking!”
“What is this? Some sort of chaperone thing?”
I sighed. “Okay, if you must know, I’m investigating the death of Lizzie Mast.”
“Amish teenagers killed her? Rumor has it she died of an overdose of phencyclidine.”
“Rumor?” I said, startled.
“This is a small town, Magdalena. A very small town. Fewer people live here than on my block in Manhattan. Maybe even fewer than in my apartment building. Five minutes down at Yoder’s Corner Market or Miller’s Feed Store and you get enough information to fill the Times.”
I swallowed hard, praying that it wouldn’t be my lips to sink the ship, in the event that it sank. “But nothing about Amish teenagers, right?”
“Nothing about Amish teenagers and drugs. But this rumschpringe thing. That seems to be the main subject of conversation. It seems to be getting out of hand.”
“You know what that means?”
He nodded. “I have a good idea from the context in which it was used. My grandparents lived with us when I was a little boy, and they spoke only Yiddish. It’s remarkably similar to Pennsylvania Dutch. I can understand about three words out of four.”
That made me just a mite envious. My grandparents, with whom we lived, had spoken only Pennsylvania Dutch at home, but I had studiously ignored them—well, as much as I could. Granny Yoder had been impossible to ignore. Even after death she’s made a couple of appearances back at the PennDutch Inn, which wasn’t an inn in her time, but her domain. Anyway, after Granny died, our conversations were always in English, for my sake as well as Susannah’s. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve regretted losing that integral part of my heritage. I can still understand some “Dutch,” but apparently not as much as my Jewish doctor friend from New York City. Go figure, as he would say.
I sighed. “If my source can be trusted, rumschpringe has definitely got out of hand. The kids are supposedly using drugs.”
“Moonshine? That kind of thing?”
I shook my head.
“Not phencyclidine!”
“That I don’t know. But apparently they were aphrodisiacs.”
He grinned broadly. “You don’t say? One doesn’t normally think of a bunch of teenagers needing sexual stimulants.”
“What?"
“You did say aphrodisiacs, didn’t you?”
“Psychedelics!” I wailed. “They were imagining themselves to be devils and such.”
“Ah, well, now that makes sense. So just what are you going to do, Magdalena? Peek through the barn slats and watch them freak out?”
“Something like that.”
“Then what? Are you going to arrest them?”
“I don’t have the authority,” I said. “But I will eventually report it to Melvin. In the meantime I’m going to try and find the connection between Lizzie’s death and these kids. Assuming what I’ve heard about these kids is true.”
“Who is your source, Magdalena?”
I hesitated for a few seconds. Why did I feel more comfortable confiding in George Hanson, a complete stranger, than in Gabe? It didn’t make a lick of sense. “Joseph Mast,” I said reluctantly. “Lizzie’s widower.”
One of Gabe’s dark brows lifted. “You think ‘Mr. Noah’ could be telling the truth?”
“Mr. Noah?”
“That’s what they call him down at the feed store.” That angered me. I’m a lifelong resident of Hernia, and I keep an ear to the ground, and sometimes to a glass pressed against a wall, and I hadn’t, until yesterday, known just how disturbed Joe Mast really was. How was it that some big-city outsider, who had only been in town a few months, knew more about my town and my people than did I? It couldn’t have been just the language bit either. Gabe the Babe had to be the most inquisitive man this side of the Delaware.
“Joseph Mast,” I said emphatically, “is at times very coherent. In my professional opinion this lead needs following.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“The hell you say. I’m not going to let something potentially horrible happen to you. Kids on drugs can be extremely dangerous.”
I stood. “First of all, I’ll thank you not to swear in front of me. And second, I may be just a simple Mennonite woman from a nowhere town with a somewhat bizarre, if not inappropriate, name, but I have had a lot more experience dealing with criminal types than you.”
His grin looked mocking to me. “I bet you have. Look, I’m just trying to protect you.”
“Bet all you want, buster, but I don’t need your protection. And I’ll thank you to forget we ever had this conversation.”
“But Magdalena—”
I ignored him and walked resolutely toward the door. He jumped to his feet and followed me.
“What about the book? Don’t you want to borrow Ramat Sreym’s memoirs?”
“I have work to do.”
“Okay, so what about our picnic? I know tonight won’t do, but what about tomorrow evening?”
“Maybe,” I said over my shoulder, “or maybe not. I’ll tell Freni my answer, and then you run down to Miller’s Feed Store, or Yoder’s Corner Market, and see how long it takes you to get the scoop.”
“Magdalena, don’t be childish.”
I sailed out of there on the wings of pride. Unfortunately pride has rather flimsy wings, and, as the Bible warns us, is often accompanied by a nasty fall.