Scrappy Summer Page 3

  “Sheila said she was smirking!” Paige said. “I’m sure she was waiting for that to happen.”

  “I can’t believe she’d be so vindictive,” Vera said. She said it in a calm and soothing voice, as if trying to calm the masses.

  Paige spun around and looked at her. “Something is not right about that woman. I’ve had a couple of her kids in school, and believe me, she’s not what she appears. That’s all I can say.”

  “Well, something happened to the pie,” Annie said. “The person who handled it after DeeAnn was Macy. I suggest we start there.”

  “What do you mean? It’s over. Nothing to be done now,” DeeAnn said.

  “I disagree,” Sheila said. “If we can prove she cheated, she’ll be disqualified from the competition. “

  “I just don’t know how comfortable I am with this,” DeeAnn said after a few moments of silence. “Can we just leave it alone?”

  “You just leave it to us,” Annie said.

  “I’ve got to go. I told Eric I’d meet him for dinner. It’s one of the few nights he has off this month,” Vera said and leaned in to hug DeeAnn. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, sweetie.”

  Soon they were all gone, leaving DeeAnn alone in her kitchen. Her husband was out messing with his cars in the garage. She started to peel potatoes for supper that night. Mashed potatoes and fried chicken. As she peeled, tears stung at her eyes. What had she done to make an enemy who would do something like that to her?

  She thought about Macy. They had a history, sure, but nothing that would precipitate such a cruel act. She placed the potatoes in the water and turned on the stove.

  She heard the toilet flush, announcing that Jacob was in the house, not in the garage. Soon he was at the sink, wrapping his arms around her as she rinsed off the chicken.

  “Now, Jacob,” she said with a scolding tone. “I’ve got chicken in my hands.”

  “Just thought you might need a hug,” he said.

  “Do you think someone deliberately ruined my pie?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re a great baker. I don’t know how you’d mess up a pie like that.”

  “But to be so mean!”

  “Hey, some of these women are very serious about their pie. I’ve never seen anything like it. So if you’re asking if one of them might have done something to your pie, well, why not? I could see it,” he said and sat down at the table.

  “The question is, who?” she said, dipping the chicken into the batter, then into the flour, before plopping it into the pan, where it sizzled.

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t know,” he said after a minute.

  “My friends think it was Macy,” she said, fussing with the frying chicken so it was lying just so in the hot oil. The popping and crackling sound of frying chicken filled the kitchen.

  “Lord help Macy, then,” he said and grinned.

  Sometimes when he smiled, still, it made DeeAnn’s heart skip around in her fleshy chest.

  She smiled. “Yeah, I’m a bit worried about what they might do.”

  “You’re the tough one,” he said and laughed, scratching his upper arm, marked by navy tattoos.

  “Well, I know that’s true.” He was referring to her knocking a man down a few years back, when she and her friends were snooping around on Jenkin’s Mountain. She’d never live that down. “They told me to leave it up to them, so I don’t think any strong-arming will happen.”

  “God knows what they are going to do,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I shudder to think. Maybe after they have a good night’s sleep, they will leave it alone. I hope. I mean, I don’t want any trouble.”

  Jacob wrapped his arms around her. “I think you mean you don’t want any more trouble.”

  But trouble was in the air.

  Sheila waited for Annie. Paige and Vera were already seated in her basement. They weren’t scrapbooking; they were waiting for Macy, who was coming to Sheila’s place to pick up her order of scrapbooking supplies—which made it easy to get her cornered for questioning. They had all learned a thing or two about interrogation over the past few years.

  Annie slid open the glass door and walked into Sheila’s basement. “Are we ready?” she said.

  The others nodded in unison.

  “I didn’t think Mike was ever going to get home,” she said. “Sorry I’m a bit late.”

  “She should be here any minute,” Sheila said. “All you have to do is stand by the door, Annie. Try not to let her out.”

  Annie started to say something but appeared to think the better of it and closed her mouth.

  “She’ll be surprised to see us,” Paige said, looking up from her latest Louise Penny mystery novel.

  “I hope so,” Vera mumbled. “I just hope she keeps her mouth shut. Mama would have my hide. She and Macy’s mom go way back.”

  The doorbell rang. Sheila opened the glass sliding door as Annie stepped aside.

  “Well, hello,” she said. “Please come in while I get your things.”

  Macy entered the room and saw the two women sitting at the table and nodded a hello to them. She stood close to the door.

  Annie slipped in front of it, briefly bumping into Macy, who turned, startled. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.” She smiled a tight, nervous smile.

  Annie didn’t respond.

  The room held a nervous tension.

  “Well,” Macy said, “I can’t wait to see that scrapbook paper in person. It looked so lovely in the catalog.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll love it, once I find it,” Sheila said. “It was right here. What did I do with it?”

  “Have a seat, Macy,” Vera said. “It might be a while, you know. Sheila is getting so scatterbrained these days.”

  “No thanks,” Macy said, looking around nervously. “I really need to go. Sheila, when you find my paper, give me a call—”

  “Please sit down, Macy,” Paige said, standing and moving around to the other side of the table. “We insist.”

  “What? What’s this?” Her face reddened, a slight quiver on her chin.

  Paige gently pushed her into the chair. “Have some pie,” she said, and Sheila sat a plate with a slice of DeeAnn’s pie in front of her.

  “Oh no, I couldn’t,” Macy said.

  “Why not?” Paige said, leaning down into her face. Macy backed her face up. “We all know you love pie.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” she said, tight-lipped. “And I’m not hungry.”

  The room quieted.

  “Tell me something, Lacey,” Annie said and sat down beside her.

  “It’s Macy,” she said.

  Annie made a waving gesture. “Okay. Sorry. Macy, how does this competition work? I mean, the contestants bring their pies to the Baptist church, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. They are stored at the church because we have the facilities for it. No other place in town does.”

  Annie handed Macy the fork. “Taste the pie. Tell us what you think.”

  Macy reluctantly took the fork.

  “Then what happens to the pies?” Paige asked.

  “Then they are taken to the fire hall the next day.”

  “Who takes them?” Annie asked.

  “Whoever has a van or a truck. You know, someone with the space. It changes every year,” she said, cutting into the tip of the slice with her fork.

  “Who was it this year?” Paige asked.

  “The Burkholders,” she said, and Paige looked at Sheila with a knowing gleam in her eye.

  Macy took a bite of the pie and promptly spit it back out onto her plate. Her face turned red, and she coughed. Sheila handed her a glass of water and a napkin.

  “Good Lord! Are you trying to kill me?” she squealed.

  “No,” Paige said. “Of course not. We just wanted you to take a bite of the pie you destroyed!”

  “What? Well, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You all are just plain crazy. I’ll show
myself to the door!”

  But Annie beat her to it. “Not so fast, Macy.”

  “What do you want from me?” Macy said, looking up at the tall, dark, and beautiful Annie.

  “We want you to admit what you did.” Paige came up beside Annie.

  Macy crossed her arms. “What are you talking about?”

  “The pie. Admit that you sprinkled it with cumin before giving it to the judges,” Annie said.

  “I did no such thing!”

  “C’mon,” Sheila said. “Admit it. Nothing can be done about it now. DeeAnn’s out of the competition. It won’t matter at this point. How did you do it? Why?”

  “Look. I’d never do such a thing,” she said. “Not that I haven’t been angry with her. I really needed that job, and I am a damned good baker—one that doesn’t mix up her spices, by the way. I don’t need to resort to such tactics. I’m going to win that pie competition, fair and square!”

  She turned to leave, but Annie was still in her way. She shoved her with one big push, and Annie stumbled. In the meantime, Macy escaped to the driveway. Without her scrapbooking supplies.

  “It’s shocking that people take this pie competition so seriously,” Annie said after a few minutes. “This feels kind of surreal to me.”

  “I hope we didn’t scare her too much. She seemed kind of nervous and twitchy,” Vera said. “But you can’t go around sabotaging people’s pie.”

  The evening left the Cumberland Creek croppers scrambling for another plan, all of them gathered in Sheila’s basement. All of them, of course, except for DeeAnn.

  DeeAnn sometimes scrapbooked alone at home. Oh, she enjoyed the weekly crops and so on, but sometimes she didn’t get much done, because she was too busy chitchatting with her friends. So occasionally she sat at her own kitchen table and caught up.

  After the last crop, she’d thought about the things in her life that mattered. Truth was, she was not attached to most things, like Paige was. She had inherited all those old dishes and stories about them. What a fabulous legacy project for Randy to have someday.

  DeeAnn thought of all her scrapbooks as a legacy for her daughters. But when it came to things, precious few items existed in her life. But she did have boxes of their baby things and some precious toys that she couldn’t part with. Jacob had wanted to throw away everything. They’d argued about it over the years. He’d said there was just no room in his garage for all the stuff she wanted to keep.

  “Baloney, Jacob! That’s what garages are for!” she’d told him.

  “Believe it or not, DeeAnn, garages are for cars and tools, not boxes of toys and baby clothes.” But eventually, he’d come around. She was not above using food, blackmail, or sex to get what she wanted from her husband.

  So she had decided to photograph and catalog each item in a scrapbook. The first few photos were of the clothes the girls were both brought home in from the hospital. At the time she had journaled a bit about how she felt during those first few days after she’d brought them home, so she tore out the pages of the journal she’d used and glued them on the scrapbook page, next to the photos of the outfits. Her girls would now know what she had thought about during the first few days of their lives. Talk about a legacy.

  She loved the torn-paper technique. Several places sold items to help you tear the paper, but she liked to tear it herself. So satisfying to rip that paper. It gave it such an interesting edge and texture, which added depth to the page. And she really liked using those original pages that had her own writing on them.

  Each one of the girls had special pillows, which she had photographed. Karen had a Winnie-the-Pooh pillow, and Tracy had a pillow shaped like a duck. Both girls had used the pillows up until they were teenagers.

  She turned the radio on and grabbed a can of diet soda and sat down to work.

  Paige often teased DeeAnn about her kitchen, so immaculate and done in a strawberry theme. Her kitchen curtains, towels, pot holders, and even burner covers had strawberries on them, as did her everyday dishes. Red was her favorite color, and she loved strawberries. Why not decorate her favorite room in the house with bright, cheery strawberries? Paige could laugh all she wanted. As if she were one to talk, with all that dark and flowery Victorian decor in her home.

  DeeAnn switched the station to NPR and listened to Fresh Air. Martin Scorsese spoke about the language of cinema. He was talking about his obsession with it, about light and movement. Pieces of time. The need to capture movement.

  She sat back and looked over her scrapbooking pages, and it struck her that the same held true for scrapbooking. It was an attempt to capture memories, yes, but also to capture who we were. Our essence. The essence of those whom we loved.

  Well, the new scrapbook was coming right along. She was pleased that she’d gotten so many pages done, until she saw what time it was. Eleven o’clock! She needed to get to bed. Bakery hours started at four.

  The next day Sheila spotted Rachel Burkholder at the merry-go-round.

  “Good afternoon, Rachel. How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Just listening to the music and watching the kids. You?”

  It was one of those August days that were so humid that walking felt like swimming.

  “I’m just waiting on Steve. He’s over at the tractor pull again. Will you be at the church tonight?”

  “Yes. I’m there every Wednesday night,” Rachel said. “I’m in charge of the food bank, and we collect on Wednesday nights. If you have a donation, we’d be mighty grateful.”

  “I might have something. I’ll see you later.”

  Some of Sheila’s favorite people were Old Order Mennonites. But some of her least favorite people were also Old Order Mennonites. And Rachel was one of them. She had argued publicly with Sheila once about the sin of photography.

  “The Lord says to be humble in all things,” she’d said to Sheila, who was at a craft fair, trying to sell some scrapbooking supplies.

  “What does that have to do with scrapbooking?” Sheila had asked.

  “It has to do with the photos,” she’d said. “You know how we feel about them. ’Tis a sin.”

  “Well, I think you can believe whatever you want,” Sheila said, trying to be as polite as possible, since a crowd of people was mulling around, looking over her scrapbooking materials. And Rachel was loud.

  “Has nothing to do with what I believe. The Bible says you shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

  “I’m sorry, Rachel. I disagree with your interpretation. Capturing my family’s memories on film and paper doesn’t feel at all like a sin to me. In fact, it feels quite the opposite. It has a lot of meaning to me,” she said, feeling her face heat.

  “Humph. What do you know?” She had then turned and said something in German, waving Sheila off and scaring off a few of her customers.

  And now what did she have against DeeAnn? Why would she put cumin in DeeAnn’s pie? Of course, she still wasn’t certain that Macy was innocent. But if she was, why would Rachel do it, other than she really wanted to win that competition this year—even though she’d won it for the past three years? Talk about mean!

  Sheila dialed Vera’s number.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “And?”

  “She’s going to be at the church tonight.”

  “Okay,” Vera said. “Project Food Bank is on. I’ll alert the others.”

  That evening Sheila, Paige, Vera, and Annie gathered in front of the Cumberland Creek First Mennonite Church, all of them with donations for the food bank.

  “It’s probably just about ready to close,” Vera said.

  “Yes. Let’s go,” Sheila said, picking up her bag of canned goods.

  They went into the church by way of the side door, which entered into a hallway leading to the kitchen, where the donations were taken. A huge metal table overflowed with paper sacks of food: canned goods and boxed food.
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br />   “Just what poor people need,” Annie said. “Cheap macaroni and cheese.”

  “Humph,” Vera said.

  “Hello. Is anybody here?” Sheila yelled.

  “Yes, I’m back here,” Rachel said. “Back in the pantry.”

  They followed the sound of her voice, but only after placing their bags on the table, and not before Sheila whispered, “Perfect.”

  When they entered the tiny room, Sheila was shocked by the piles of food. All of it was neatly organized. Here was the fresh food. Bread. Fruit. Vegetables. Bags of it ready to go.

  The only light coming into the room came from the window, from the setting sun.

  “Oh, you made it, I see.” Rachel looked up at Sheila from her work.

  “Well, I told you I’d try to make it,” Sheila replied.

  “We left our donations on the table. That okay?” Vera said.

  “It’s fine,” she said and went back to her work.

  Annie shut the door.

  “Keep the door open, please,” Rachel said. “I need to hear if anybody else comes in.”

  “Oh, I think they will find you,” Vera said.

  “Just give us a minute,” Sheila said, concentrating on keeping her tone light.

  Rachel looked up at them and set down her marker. “A minute for what? I don’t have time for chitchat.”

  “I think you should make the time,” Vera said, with a note of menace in her voice. Just a note. Vera was way too polite to be too menacing. But she didn’t like Rachel, who had also thought that dancing was a sin.

  Rachel looked at Annie, who was standing in front of the door with her arms crossed. “What’s this about, then?”

  “It’s about DeeAnn’s pie,” Sheila said.

  “Pftt,” she huffed. “What do I know about that, except that it made about half the judges sick?”

  “Someone laced it with cumin,” Vera said.

  “Someone,” Sheila said and crossed her arms.

  Rachel’s stern face cracked into a fake-looking smile. “Are you suggesting that I—”