“It was a baby. It was cute. And it’s called compartmentalization, Miss Smarty Pants. Besides, she screamed something out the window as well. It was a woman’s voice, so there!”

“Agnes,” I said, “aren’t there times when you just want to take Wanda and shake some sense into her?”

“Boy, I’ll say. Wanda, did you recognize the voice?”

“No. Don’t you think I would have told you that?”

And then just like that, I had all the pieces to the puzzle. “Ladies-and naked gents hovering in the distance-I must bid adieu, for duty calls.”

“What?” Wanda said. “You know I don’t speak Spanish.”

Despite her size, Agnes could move with lightning speed, and she managed to grab my arm before I could hoof it back to my car. “Not so fast, Magdalena. You’re on to something, and we demand to know to what.”

“Yeah,” Wanda said. “After what you put us through last time, we have a right to know.”

“More than that,” Agnes said, gripping my arm even tighter, “we have a right to come along.”

“And what exactly do you mean?” I said.

“We were your Ethel Mertzes in your last shenanigans: when you hoisted your mother-in-law onto a cow and sent it crashing off through the woods. You put our lives on the line that night-chasing down an armed couple-but I must say, it was the single most thrilling thing that ever happened to me.”

“Who is Ethel Mertz?” I asked, and quite reasonably, I may add. My parents, Old Order Mennonites both, never watched a single television program in their lives. I, however, have yielded to temptation and viewed a few of the older comedies, the one referenced among them. I must say, however, that the finest show ever produced was Green Acres.

“Uh, Magdalena,” Wanda grunted, “you’re helplessly conservative. There’s no sin in watching old TV shows such as I Love Lucy.”

“That wouldn’t be Lucifer, would it?”

“She’s trying to stall,” Agnes said. “If she can succeed in making you blow your stack, then maybe you won’t want to come with her.”

“Ha! In that case she’s out of luck. I bought that book The Impatient Person’s Guide to Meditation back when it made the New York Times bestseller list, and I read most of it. I can become very tranquil if I set my mind to it.”

“Then for the love of scrapple,” Agnes panted, “set your mind to it now.”

“Ohmmmmmmmm.”

Life’s many twists and turns are supposed to be what keeps it interesting, but a peaceful Wanda? Now, that takes the cake! This I had to see.

“Okay,” I said, “but I can’t guarantee your safety, and you have to do exactly as I order.”

“Listen here, Magdalena. I don’t take orders!”

“Yes, she does.” Agnes let go of my arm and enclosed Wanda in her bulk. “Say it again, Wanda. Ohmmmmmmmm.”

Wanda’s eyes narrowed but she complied, and so we three musketless dears set off to catch a killer.

Just as I thought, there was a cab with an attached flatbed trailer parked in the turnaround in front of Minerva J. Jay’s house. Not being the total fool that some folks think I am, as soon as I caught a glimpse of this, I backed up for a good quarter of a mile.

“What gives?” Wanda demanded. “Are you losing your nerve?”

“No, dear, although you seem to have lost your ohmniscience.”

“They were two-minute exercises, Magdalena, and there were only three in the book. It took us a lot longer than that to get all the way out here. Where are we, by the way?”

“Thousand Caves Retirement Village,” Agnes said. “I brought my uncles out here to look at plots. Minerva assured them that there would be a nudist section, but they chickened out. You see, Uncle Remus is afraid of gaping holes.”

“That’s nice, dear. Okay, everyone out.”

“Out?” They both sounded terrified.

“We can’t sneak up on them in a car, ladies, can we?”

“No,” Agnes said, “but we can call the sheriff.”

“We can tell him that there’s a flatbed truck out here, so what? You don’t see a steamroller, do you? We need to get close enough to get some hard evidence. Besides, you can’t get cell phone reception here; I’ve tried once before.”

“Do you have a gun?” Wanda said.

“No! I’m a proper Mennonite, for goodness’ sake, not a liberal one, like you.” Oops, perhaps I had gone too far. Wanda belongs to the First Mennonite Church, not Beechy Grove, and they are indeed a different breed, but they are still ostensibly pacifist.

“Magdalena has her keen mind,” Agnes said loyally.

“Ha,” Wanda snorted. “If she’s so smart, then why did she marry a bigamist?”

I took a deep breath and composed what I believed to be a beatific smile. “Wanda, dear, if you’re afraid, then by all means remain in the car. Just don’t play the radio, because we can’t come back to a dead battery. If you get really bored, there’s last year’s Farmer’s Almanac under the passenger-side front seat. Be sure to lock the doors, of course, and whatever you do, don’t open the door if you hear something scraping against it. They say that the tourist from Harrisburg died of a heart attack, but what the paper didn’t mention was the hook that was found hanging from the door handle.” I flashed her my beatific smile again.

“Don’t be ridiculous; of course I’m coming. You’re going to need my brain to make yours a whole wit. But first, don’t you have to use the bushes?”

I glanced around. “For what?”

“To relieve yourself, dummy. Isn’t that what you were grimacing about?”

“Why, I never!”

“You do too; you always look constipated.”

“Why, so help me, Wanda, I’m going to huff, and then I’ll puff-”

“Stop it,” Agnes hissed. “Both of you. You’re getting louder by the second.” She paused just long enough to catch a breath. “Look! Over there to the left. Isn’t that smoke? And I hear something; something other than yinz excessive chatter. It sounds kind of like an engine. You don’t suppose she-or he-could have hidden the bulldozer underground, do you?”

“The smoke is coming out of a flat expanse of rock,” Wanda snapped. “You’re starting to sound as crazy as Magdalena.”

“Au contraire,” I cried. “Agnes, you’re on to something!”

32

Wanda was every bit as much afraid of gaping holes as was Agnes’s nude uncle, Uncle Remus. Although she’d lived her entire life within an easy drive of Thousand Caves Road, and the weird limestone formations, she’d never even been tempted to mosey on out and take a peek, not even during the height of the development scandal. Once, when Wanda was a junior in high school, her parents dragged her on a family vacation to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. A terrified Wanda took only a couple of steps outside the car, threw up, and then spent the rest of the day sobbing in the backseat.

A control freak with a phobia is not a pleasant creature. Although she refused, at first, to set foot off the road, neither would she consent to being left behind. Wanda mumbled and grumbled, and uttered some words that even a liberal Mennonite had no business knowing.

Meanwhile, Agnes moved like a hound to the scent. Of course the trail of a rumbling, smoke-belching steamroller is not exactly hard to follow, even if it has been dumped in a large sinkhole.

About ten yards from the cavernous opening, Wanda stopped abruptly. “I’m not going any farther.”

“Fine,” I said. “Just wait here.”

We were in an open area of flat, smooth limestone that crowned the rise of a low hill. The only trees were stunted pines that grew in places where, eons ago, eddies of water had carved out pockets, which were now filled with soil, but drought and infestation of foreign beetles had killed more than half of the pines, eventually turning them into bleached skeletons. With a sigh of relief Wanda sat shakily on one of these fallen trunks that had long since shed its bark.