The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery

by JoAnna Carl

  “Not a lot. Andy wasn’t as tall as Joe is, and his hair was lighter. Medium brown, not dark like Joe’s. Joe gets his dark hair from Mercy. Her hair was almost black before she decided to go blond. But Joe’s face is shaped like Andy’s was, and Andy had blue eyes, too.” She turned toward the living room, tossing her final comment back over her shoulder. “Joe’s smile is a lot like Andy’s.”

  Her words made my stomach do a somersault. It was the stranger’s smile that had reminded me of Joe.

  I forced myself to act calm. I picked up the platter of cold cuts in one hand and a bowl of lettuce in the other. I’d just turned toward the dining room when the phone rang.

  Gina was standing right beside it, and she jumped about a foot off the floor. Her face became a picture of terror.

  “Oh, honey!” she said. “That startled me.”

  She didn’t look startled. She looked terrified. I stared at her, trying to understand why an ordinary noise like a telephone would frighten her.

  The phone rang again. I gestured with the cold cuts and lettuce, pointing out that my hands were full. “Would you mind getting that, Gina?”

  “No, no! Lee, honey, I can’t answer the phone! No one must know I’m here.”

  I turned around and put the cold cuts and lettuce down on the cabinet. I tried not to glare at Gina as I picked up the phone.

  “Lee, is that you?”

  I recognized the rather creaky voice of Joe’s grandmother, so I turned toward Gina, ready to hand her the phone. “Hello, Grandma Ida. How are you?”

  Gina’s reaction was so unexpected that I missed Grandma Ida’s next remark.

  Gina shook her head vigorously. “No! No!” she whispered. “Don’t tell her I’m here!” Then she ran out of the kitchen. Her high heels went up the stairs with a fast clomp-clomp.

  “I’m sorry, Grandma Ida,” I said. “I didn’t hear what you said. Something wrong with the line, I guess.”

  “I said, have you heard from Regina?”

  Should I lie for Gina? Or make her talk to her mother? I had less than a second to make up my mind. I took the coward’s way out and asked a new question instead of answering the old one. “Was she going to call us?”

  “She’s gone someplace, and she didn’t tell me where. I was hoping she let somebody in the family know where she is.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma Ida. I can’t help you. Do you have a product? I mean, do you have a problem?”

  “Oh, no, Lee. Things are fine. It just made me nervous—Regina taking off like that. If you hear from her, let me know.”

  “I’ll tell you anything I can,” I said, hating myself some and hating Gina a lot.

  Grandma Ida and I talked a few more minutes. I told her Joe was busy, but fine, and that married life was great. I didn’t mention that it was also crowded and completely lacking in privacy. I’m not sure my comments made much sense. I was racking my brain for an explanation of why Gina would turn her back on her life as a dutiful daughter and refuse even to talk to her mother.

  As soon as I hung up, I started for the stairs. But the mantel clock in the living room read twelve.

  I groaned. I had only forty minutes before I had to leave for TenHuis Chocolade, and if I was going to stop for Gina’s library books, I had only thirty minutes. I plunked the cold cuts and lettuce in the middle of the table, and then grabbed a package of cookies and a box of TenHuis chocolates and put them out. The group would simply have to settle for an indoor, build-your-own-sandwich picnic.

  I turned on the column fan we keep in the dining room, went to the back door and yelled, “Darrell!” right into the face of our fifth houseguest.

  Pete Falconer had appeared on the back porch like a bird suddenly swooping down from one of the hundred-foot tall maples that surround the house. I hadn’t heard his SUV pull in.

  I guessed Pete’s age as around forty, but he had thick, shiny, prematurely gray hair. The sun was making that hair glint almost white, and his shiny black eyes sent out piercing rays from either side of his generous aquiline nose. Yes, his nose looked like an eagle’s beak. Add the broad shoulders and the arms always held slightly flexed from his sides, and Pete became “Eagleman.” He’d have been a perfect model for a flying superhero, in case some comic strip artist wanted to base one on a bird. Pete might not have feathers, but he always looked as if he were ready to take off into the stratosphere.

  Which was a silly idea, I reminded myself. A six-foot-five-inch guy carrying over two hundred pounds of solid muscle would be too heavy to fly unless he were equipped with a jet engine. All Pete had was an olive green bush hat.

  “Whoops!” I said. “Sorry I yelled right in your face, Pete. I didn’t see your comet. I mean, coming! I didn’t see you coming.”

  Pete got that sly smile that my slips of the tongue always give him, and I mentally cursed myself. “You’re just in time for lunch,” I said.

  “Great,” Pete said. He gestured toward the back hall. “Is it primping time for the little ladies?”

  “The bathroom is free.”

  He went past me, throwing off sparks of testosterone.

  Brenda and Tracy have a nickname for Pete, as well as for Darrell and Aunt Gina. To them he’s “Mr. Macho.” My nickname for him, one I’d never say out loud, is “Pete the Pig.” Pig as in male chauvinist pig. The way he’d asked about the girls and the bathroom was typical. He could have said, “Is the bathroom in use?” But no, he used the question to create a picture of “little ladies” selfishly occupying the bathroom.

  I could see Darrell climbing out the back of his camper, so I called upstairs to alert Brenda, Tracy, and Gina. Then I went to the table, sat down at one end, and began to make myself a sandwich. I’d promised this bunch food, but they’d have to do without gracious living.

  The only thing gracious about the lunch I’d put on the table was the TenHuis chocolates—six Mocha Pyramids (“Milky coffee interior in a dark chocolate pyramid”), five Raspberry Creams (“Red raspberry puree in a white chocolate cream interior, coated in dark chocolate”), and a dozen pieces of molded chocolate. The molded chocolates were from Aunt Nettie’s summer special. She was following the theme of jewels, and each tablet of chocolate was embellished with a representation of a piece of jewelry: a string of pearls in white chocolate, a diamond ring in milk chocolate, a dark chocolate spray of flowers representing a Victorian brooch. Each piece was wrapped in jewel-toned foils—silver, gold, ruby red, sapphire blue, or emerald green.

  The chocolate jewels we sold at the shop could be bought in boxes also made of chocolate, but the ones I’d put on the table were in a regular white cardboard box with the TenHuis logo on top. All these chocolates were seconds. Because of our heat wave and the shop’s air-conditioning problems, they’d developed bloom, a haze of white that strikes horror into the hearts of chocolatiers. But the taste was up to Aunt Nettie’s standards, and I hadn’t had to pay for them.

  Brenda and Tracy thumped down from upstairs. They had put on their brown shirts and khaki Bermuda shorts, the uniform for TenHuis Chocolade counter help. I was wearing my own brown shirt and khaki pants, so we looked like a chorus line.

  Gina managed to arrange for her path to intersect with Pete’s as he entered from the kitchen. She smiled sweetly, and Pete held her chair and sat beside her.

  He preened, and I watched with renewed astonishment.

  I don’t know how Gina does it. She’s somewhere past fifty years old, and her appearance is anything but sexy, but she’s still got “it,” whatever “it” is. All the men love her. She doesn’t even seem to flirt. I don’t get it. I especially didn’t understand why she wanted to conquer Pete.

  Pete and I got off on the wrong foot from the first. I meant to ask him where he and Joe had known each other, and it came out, “Did you meet Joe in detention? I mean, Detroit! Did you know Joe when he worked in Detroit?”

  The slip of the tongue had made it obvious that I thought Pete could have been, like Darrell, one of the g
uys Joe had represented in a criminal case. Pete had laughed at me, and I hadn’t been able to say a straight sentence to him since; being nervous makes my speech problem worse.

  Then I overheard (there are no secrets in the 1904 house) Pete telling Joe he approved of me. But his opinion wasn’t exactly a compliment.

  “That first gal you married, she had brains,” Pete had said. “This one’s gonna believe any damn thing you tell her.”

  “Don’t let Lee fool you,” Joe said. “She doesn’t miss anything.”

  “Hey, it’s okay!” Pete said. “Every man should marry once for love and once for money. Brains are a side issue.” At least he was giving me credit for being Joe’s love interest; Joe’s first wife was the one with money. But I had disliked Pete from then on.

  Darrell came in last, stopping in the dining room doorway and looking around uneasily. “I’ll just make a sandwich and take it out to the truck,” he said.

  Gina patted the chair on the other side of her. “Now, Darrell. You join us.”

  “Yeah, Darrell,” Pete said. “Don’t leave me at the mercy of all these pretty girls.”

  Brenda and Tracy giggled, and Pete winked at them. They giggled harder.

  Darrell sat down at the other end of the table and gave a secretive smile. “You can handle them, Pete,” he said.

  He was right. Pete was the most dangerous kind of male chauvinist pig; the kind women loved. The testosterone I’d caught a whiff of as he went through the kitchen oozed from his pores.

  He didn’t fit the clichéd picture of a bird-watcher. But a bird-watcher was what Pete claimed to be and what Joe swore he actually was.

  Pete had shown up two days after Gina had, telling Joe he’d just dropped by to say hi and to meet me. He’d been planning to stay near Warner Pier for a week, camping and watching birds, he said, but his camping place had proved to be closed, so he was going back to Detroit. Before I could say, “But we’ve already got a houseful of people,” Joe had said he could stay with us—as long as he didn’t mind tossing his sleeping bag on our screened-in porch.

  When I got Joe alone, I quizzed him about who Pete was and what he was doing in our house. But Joe had proved uncommunicative. In fact, for the past week I’d barely seen Joe. He was working late at the boat shop, or he’d had to make a quick trip to Lansing on city business, or he’d even spent an evening closeted with his mother on some vague family matter neither of them would talk about. Finding time alone with him hadn’t been easy, especially when I was doing a lot more cooking than usual, plus the shopping and planning required to feed seven people three meals a day.

  I savagely cut my sandwich in half—pretending the slice of braunschweiger on it was a hunk of Joe’s hide—and watched as Gina wrapped Pete around her finger and Pete wrapped Gina around his. They were a perfect match: a woman who was a man magnet, and a man women slobbered over. The wonder was that they hadn’t hated each other on sight.

  Gina was asking Pete about his morning’s bird-watching. He replied by producing a digital camera and showing her a picture of an owl. After she’d oohed and aahed, he passed the camera around to the rest of us. And yes, the picture of a great horned owl taking off from a red tile roof was impressive.

  Gina moved closer and closer to him, and I got madder and madder. Gina was an independent woman who ran her own business. Why didn’t she see Pete the way I did, as the classic male chauvinist?

  I realized that Pete and Gina were the only two people having a conversation. Darrell was looking miserable. We’d forced him to join us at the lunch table, but none of us was talking to him.

  “Darrell,” I said, “Joe says you’re really good at carpentry—and you know that’s a skill he values highly. How did you learn that?” Then I was afraid I’d asked a tactless question. What if Darrell had learned carpentry in prison?

  But he answered in his barely audible voice. “High school vo-tech. I had a good teacher.”

  A few more questions—about the teacher and the class projects—and Darrell opened up a bit. I could actually hear his voice. Tracy and Brenda talked a little about vo-tech classes in their high schools. Brenda had taken VICA, I learned. Pete and Gina stopped talking only to each other. Pete threw in a funny memory from his own high school shop class.

  After twenty minutes of conversation, half a sandwich, a handful of chips, and one Mocha Pyramid, I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to run,” I said. “Gina, if I stop at the library, do you want more of the same?”

  Gina loved the “innocent” romances. I thought they were all alike and all nauseating. “Each to his own taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow.” That was another of my grandmother’s sayings.

  “Oh, thanks, hon.” Gina jumped to her feet. “I’ll get the books that are ready to go back.”

  “I’ll just check the mail,” I said. “Then I’m leaving. Tracy and Brenda, you’re putting up the leftovers and doing dishes, right? And Joe’s responsible for dinner.”

  The girls nodded, mouths full. I went out the front door and down the sandy drive to the mailbox. I gathered up a handful of junk mail and was looking it over as I came back. When I reached the front walk, I realized that Pete was in the screened-in section of the porch, the section where his sleeping bag and his canvas carryall were stowed, kneeling beside his belongings.

  I stepped onto the porch, still looking at the mail in my hand. The Democratic National Committee? How did I get on that mailing list? I studied the envelope. Then I looked up.

  I found myself staring into the screened-in porch, my eyes focused on whatever Pete was doing with his carryall.

  It took me a second to realize he was tucking a pistol inside.

  Chapter 4

  At that moment I was so astonished that I could easily have gasped and fallen into a swoon with the back of my hand to my head, like the heroine of one of Gina’s romantic novels. But apparently I didn’t. I think I quickly dropped my eyes back to my mail and pretended I hadn’t noticed the pistol. I almost acted as if I’d accidentally caught Pete with his pants down and was trying not to embarrass either of us.

  I went on into the house, put the mail on the mantelpiece where Joe would see it, took the stack of books from Gina, thanked Brenda and Tracy for cleaning up, and went back out the front door. Joe and I had borrowed extra parking space from the Baileys—they were visiting a new grandchild in California—so my van was in their carport, and I had to walk down a little sandy road that led through a patch of woods to get to my transportation.

  Pete was standing on the screened-in porch, holding his binoculars. He looked at me challengingly as I went past. I had decided that I didn’t expect Pete to shoot the place up, and I didn’t feel that I could question Joe’s friend. So I went by him with nothing more to say than, “See you later.”

  I might not want to talk to Pete, but I sure was piling up things to talk to Joe about—if I ever found him.

  As I came out at the Baileys’ house, I heard the yip of a dog. Our newish neighbor, Harold Glick, and Alice, his blond mutt, were walking toward me along the Baileys’ drive. Harold was leasing Inez Deacon’s house, about a quarter of a mile south on Lake Shore Drive. Inez, an old friend of Aunt Nettie’s and of mine, was now living in a retirement center, but she wasn’t quite ready to sell her house, so her daughter had found her a renter. Harold had moved there in February.

  Harold seemed to be a pleasant enough guy. He wasn’t old enough for retiree activities, though he didn’t work, and he didn’t have enough friends and family to keep him occupied. He seemed lonesome, and I tried to be neighborly to him, but he was the most boring man I’d ever met. I guessed his age at around fifty. He was a short scrawny guy with thin gray hair.

  He spent a lot of time with Alice. When I got a minute to walk on the beach, it was likely that I’d meet the two of them there, but this was the first time I’d seen him on our road. His presence raised my eyebrows. Our road isn’t really public.

  The Baileys’ dr
ive exits onto Eighty-eighth Street, a side road that turns east off of Lake Shore Drive. The lane we share with the Baileys—as I say, we’re in a semirural part of Warner Pier—is actually our drive plus the Baileys’ drive linked by an extra bit of sandy roadway Uncle Phil and Charlie Bailey put in. It sometimes makes a convenient way to come and go, in case a truck is blocking one of the driveways, for example. But it’s private property, not a Warner Pier street.

  Alice barked again, and Harold shushed her. Then he spoke. “Hi, Lee. Is it hot enough for you?”

  “Much too hot for me, Harold.”

  “But you’re a Texan. I guess you’re used to heat.”

  “Texas is air-conditioned! We don’t put up with this kind of heat without a fight. And we certainly don’t try to live with this kind of humidity without doing something about it.”

  Before I could point out that Harold was on private property, he spoke again. “Did you hear the latest on our crime wave?”

  “Another burglary?”

  Harold nodded. He’d been hit by burglars the week he moved in, and he took any crime along the lakeshore personally.

  “You started quite a fad, Harold. Who’s been hit this time?”

  “That big white house down by the little cemetery. Terrill? Is that the name?”

  “Do you mean Tarleton? There’s a gazebo on the lawn? And a sign that says, ‘The Lake House’?”

  “That’s the one. The family came up yesterday for the first time this season and discovered a bunch of stuff missing.”

  “More antiques?”

  Harold shrugged. “I guess so. Were the Tarleton antiques well-known?”

  “Not to me. We don’t own antiques. Just secondhand furniture.” I decided that this was a good moment to point out tactfully that he and Alice were on private property. “Were you coming to see us?”

  “No, I’m just trying to get oriented. All these little roads are confusing.”

  “This drive goes only to our house and the Baileys’. It’s not a city street.”