This was no time to update the encyclopedia. I raced back to Wanda. The restaurateur was lying in a heap, her face buried in her arms, and panting like a woman in the advanced stages of labor. Clearly she needed a project to take her mind off herself.
“Wanda, how long is your hair?”
“What?” she gasped.
“Your hair, dear. This is a matter of life and death. If you undid that beautiful mound, how long would your hair extend?”
She looked at me, color creeping back into her cheeks as her suspicions rose. “It’s twelve feet, three inches,” she hissed. “What about it?”
Agnes caught up with me. “How do you feel about saving somebody’s life?”
As Wanda’s head swiveled, her enormous bun teetered precariously. “Whose life? How?”
“Frankie Swartzentruber is down that sinkhole,” I said. “The only way for her to get out is to climb up a very narrow ledge with nothing to hold on to. We-she needs you to let down your long hair so that she can keep her balance.”
“Like Rapunzel,” Agnes said.
“What?” Wanda snapped. “You want her to climb up my hair?”
“Absolutely not, dear,” I said soothingly. “She merely needs to steady herself.”
“In a pig’s eye!”
“Wanda, please,” Agnes pled. “Surely you don’t want her to die.”
“What about Magdalena’s hair? How long is it?”
“Eighteen inches, tops,” I said quickly. “I cut it when I was pregnant.”
“Well, too bad, then, because I’m not going to have someone yanking on my hair. And FYI, I don’t even like Frankie Schwartzentruber.”
I opened my mouth to give Wanda a piece of my mind, but a sequence of misfired synapses contributed to an “aha moment” that got me sidetracked on a more productive tangent. It occurred to me that there is only one thing that can change a Hemphopple mind, once it’s been made up, and that is flattery.
“Wanda, dear,” I said, “how would you like to become a famous hero?”
“Cut the crap, Yoder. I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Yes, save a life. And do you know how many people are saved each year by a beautiful woman who lets her hair down into a limestone washout?”
“None, I bet. So what? I’m still not doing it.”
“Not even to be on the Today show? Take it from me, dear, Matt Lauer is one long, tall drink of water.”
“You don’t even watch TV, Magdalena.”
“He stayed at the inn once.” It was only a small lie; I’m sure that he had once stayed at some inn, somewhere in the world. “As for Meredith Vieira; she’s not my brand of tea, but if she was, I’d drink a full pot, and then some.”
“Do you really think they’d have me on?”
Agnes threw herself into the game. “If not them, then Good Morning America. I bet they’d put you on the evening entertainment shows too. And of course you’d be all over the national news and in every newspaper.”
“How would you feel about People magazine doing a spread?” I said. “I’m sure you could convince them to do several shots showing the Sausage Barn. But oh, my stars, then you’d be rich, and not everyone is cut out to be wealthy; not everyone can handle things the way I can.”
Wanda’s eyes blazed. “You think you’re special, don’t you?”
“Well, you have to admit; I haven’t let my staggeringly large fortune change my standard of living a great deal. Sure, I drove that sinfully red BMW, but that was for a very short time. With the exception of Big Bertha, my whirlpool bath with more heads than Medusa’s snake, I really haven’t splurged at all. I still live in the same old farmhouse-well, a facsimile thereof-dress the same, and eat the same food. One might say that I live the lifestyle of ‘old money,’ rather than that of the nouveaux riches. It’s quite an art, you know.’ ”
“And you think I can’t do that?” Wanda was on her feet and had begun tearing out her hairpins. “Magdalena, I can out-rich you any day of the week.”
“Show that stuck-up Goody Two-Shoes,” Agnes hissed. She was, perhaps, getting too good at this game.
Wanda had no patience for us now. They say that love conquers all, but I do believe that greed and its lesser brother, envy, are both more powerful. Wanda and I have competed since we were both in pigtails, and now that we wore buns, she was determined to prove that hers was made of steel. Despite her fear of gaping apertures, my nemesis ran for the sinkhole, and we practically had to tackle her to keep her from going over the edge.
Once at the edge of the abyss, rather than giving us a hard time, she merely closed her eyes and instructed us to each grab a foot and to hold on tight. That said, she unloosed the final pins, and hair that had not been freed from its mooring in three, maybe four, decades cascaded like a waterfall into the chasm below. Unfortunately-and I had expected this-Wanda’s inverted crown of glory did not quite reach the grasping hands of Frankie Schwartzentruber.
“We’ll have to lower you by your ankles,” I shouted over the roar of the engine.
“What if we drop her?” Agnes said. In all fairness, she had to speak loudly to be heard over the roar of the engine and Frankie’s scream.
“I heard that,” Wanda shouted.
“We won’t drop you,” I shouted back. “Because then how would Frankie get out?”
“Ha-ha, very funny. That woman’s a murderess. And just so you know, I wear panties with the days of the week embroidered on them; my mother-in-law made them for me last year for Christmas. I even wear them on the correct days, except that for some strange reason she forgot to include a pair for Thursday. So that’s when I go au naturel.”
“That’s nice, dear,” I bellowed impatiently. I wasn’t about to get my brains blown out over a prolonged discussion on cute lingerie. “You ready? Because here we go!”
Working smoothly in unison, Agnes and I each grabbed an ankle and propelled Wanda forward. She shrieked like a teenager in a bathtub full of spiders, and like spiders, her hands clung to the walls as we lowered her slowly downward. We jockeyed her forward until we were lying on our stomachs, and Wanda was dangling parallel to the wall, her skirts fallen about her head and shoulders (alas, I had quite forgotten that today was Thursday).
“Can she reach it now?” I could barely hear myself above an engine gone berserk.
There was no immediate answer, but in a few seconds she jerked like a bass on the line; contact had been made.
33
Somehow we managed to get Frankie safely out of the sinkhole, although by that time all four of us were as skinned and bruised as processed chickens. The woman had the nerve to try and make a run for it, but given her age and general state of health, it was easy to apprehend her. When we got to the car, I parked her in the backseat between Wanda and Agnes, since the two of them were every bit as good as handcuffs.
I was just turning around when the earth beneath the car shook, and black and orange clouds billowed out of the ground to the east. Had I not already known the cause of the conflagration, I might well have assumed that the Battle of Armageddon had begun.
“It blew,” Agnes said, stating the obvious.
I executed some fancy steering, whilst pressing the pedal to the metal. “Hang on, ladies. Many of those sinkholes are interconnected by underground streambeds. And some of those caves lead to dead ends where natural gas gets trapped. This whole place could blow up.”
“You witch,” Wanda said. I could only hope that she was speaking to Frankie, not me. “How could you have killed a good-looking young man like that?”
“His looks were not important,” Frankie said.
I switched on the recorder I keep in the console of my car. I am, after all, a mere gatherer of information. Unable-unwilling-to carry a firearm, I carry a big mouth, along with the technology to record what others say in response to it. In this case, I was quite happy to yield the floor to Hernia’s very own Rapunzel.