by JoAnna Carl
CHOCOLATE BOOKS
The True History of Chocolate
by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
(THAMES & HUDSON)
The Coes’ book has just about everything you ever wanted to know about the history of chocolate.
Based on years of research, it starts with pre-Columbian lore and a written history of chocolate and ends with today’s attempts to encourage the revival of historic Mayan cacao trees.
This book tells who actually brought chocolate from Spain to France. (Spanish monks apparently sent some as medicine to the Cardinal of Lyon, and he gave a taste to his brother, the fabled Cardinal Richelieu.) It tells how many cacao beans the Aztecs charged for a rabbit. (They used chocolate for money.) It outlines the reasons why in 1675 England’s King Charles II tried to outlaw coffeehouses, which also served chocolate. (Hint: These were popular hangouts for men who liked to argue about politics.)
The book also gives a broad overview of chocolate through the ages, describes techniques of processing and serving chocolate in various eras, and recognizes advances in chocolate technology.
Chapter 13
I went straight to the boat shop, of course. I had to share this with Joe.
He immediately tried to share it with Larry Underwood. Underwood, however, wasn’t at the Warner Pier PD, and the dispatcher said he wasn’t answering his cell phone.
So it was a bit anticlimactic. I stood around the boat shop until my heart quit thumping—though I tried to tell myself I hadn’t shown my excitement when Harold dropped the white van with an orange sign on me—then I got in my own van again. And this time I actually went to the grocery store.
The Superette is the only place to buy food in Warner Pier, and its name describes it. It’s a minisuper-market. They stock meat, vegetables, bread, and even booze, but it’s small. That doesn’t mean the selections are limited. It means they’re odd. The store caters to summer visitors, so some departments seem skewed. They carry a dozen brands of extra-virgin olive oil, for example, and the cheese counter rivals anything I’ve seen in Dallas. They have plenty of high-priced steaks—ideal for grilling on the deck of a yacht—but pot roast and stew meat are not always available. Ground round is in greater supply than regular hamburger, and it’s easier to find whole-bean coffee than a can of Folgers. Most Warner Pier locals go to a bigger supermarket in Holland to buy staples, but I didn’t have time for that.
The biggest drawback to the Superette is its druggist. Greg Glossop is the root and the main stem of the Warner Pier grapevine. I’ve been known to pluck some information from that grapevine on occasion, so I shouldn’t be critical of Mr. Gossip—I mean, Glossop. But on that day I didn’t want to see him. I knew he’d be trying to pull information about the holdup out of me, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to tell him.
Sure enough, as soon as I came in the door I saw Glossop in his glass-fronted nest—the pharmacy sits up higher than the rest of the store—and he saw me. His eyes lit up, and he put aside whatever he was working on. A moment later he was out the door of the pharmacy, and we were on a collision course, both aimed for the meat counter.
Faced with a direct confrontation, I decided to attack before Glossop could. Luckily I was able to come up with a harmless topic.
“Mr. Glossop,” I said. “What’s this I hear about the sale of Warner Pier Wine Shop?”
Glossop’s face screwed up. I could see his inner turmoil. He was not as interested in the sale of the wine shop as he was in getting me to talk about the theft of the Double Diamond jewelry, but he did want to know what I’d heard.
He fell for it. “The wine shop? Who bought it?”
“I was hoping you’d know. All the downtown merchants are curious. The word is that it’s someone from Chicago, someone who owns a cottage here.” I leaned toward him and dropped my voice. “Have you heard anything?”
“Not a word. Since the VanHulens left town . . .” We both raised our eyebrows. The VanHulens were apparently getting a divorce, and the wine business she’d run seemed to be caught up in the legal proceedings. Everybody in town had already hashed that situation over thoroughly.
“If you hear anything,” I said, “I’d sure like to know who our new neighbors are.”
Darn. I’d said a word that brought Glossop back to his original purpose.
“Neighbors,” he said. “I guess your new neighbors out on the lakeshore gave you an exciting evening.” He grinned avidly.
I turned to examine the ground round closely. “The holdup?” I said. “It was a very unpleasant experience.”
Glossop was practically drooling. “Just what happened?”
“The police asked me not to discuss it.”
“I heard that one of the robbers drowned while trying to swim away.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” No, the man I’d been asked to identify had supposedly been stabbed, not drowned, but I didn’t know anything.
Glossop went on. “Everyone’s talking about strange cars seen at the beach and—”
“At the beach? That’s nothing to get excited about. There are all sorts of strange cars there every day.” I gave a smile I hoped looked nervous. “And I’ve got to rush. I’ll see you later.”
I grabbed up two packages of ground round and whirled my cart toward the produce aisle. Even Glossop didn’t have the nerve to follow me.
But his comment about the strange cars had caught my attention. Surely he hadn’t heard about the white van with the orange sign on the door. Of course, if Harold had dropped by for a sack of dog food, it was entirely possible that he’d mentioned the white van to Glossop. The two of them were kindred souls.
If the white van with an orange sign was still around Warner Pier, it ought to be easy to find. White vans were everywhere, true, but this apparently was a commercial van with a painted sign on its door. An orange sign. A vehicle that noticeable wasn’t going to be hard to track down. Not that there was a central registry for vehicles entering Warner Pier.
Or was there? I stared at a bunch of broccoli. Maybe there was such a list. As soon as I finished my shopping, I headed for the Warner Pier High School parking lot to check.
In a summer resort like Warner Pier, the population quadruples, maybe even quintuples or octuples, during the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Tourists and summer people are drawn to Warner Pier because of our quaint houses and the narrow streets that give the illusion they’ve returned to the small-town life of the early 1900s. So they all drive into town, and those quaint narrow streets become so clogged that it’s almost impossible to drive on them.
In other words, parking is a perpetual problem during the summer in Warner Pier. So the town has come up with several attempts to solve the problem. One of them is that every summer the city leases the school parking lot. High school and college students are hired to staff it, collecting money and allotting slots. Then other students are hired to drive small buses, ferrying drivers the few blocks to the Dock Street Park or to the shops on Peach Street to help them spend their money in Warner Pier.
That summer the head parking lot attendant was Will VanKlompen, Warner Pier High graduate and a sophomore at Michigan State University. Nobody in Warner Pier saw more cars than Will, and he was dating my stepsister, Brenda.
I drove by the parking lot slowly, making sure Will was on duty. As head attendant, Will made up the schedule, and he tended to work the same shifts Brenda worked at the chocolate shop. Funny how that worked out.
Sure enough, Will’s big frame was lolling in a lawn chair under a big beach umbrella at the entrance to the parking lot. His hair, sandy in the winter, was now bleached almost white by the sun, and his tan would have given a dermatologist nightmares.
Will wore khaki shorts like all the Warner Pier employers seemed to ask their employees to wear, and the City of Warner Pier’s purple-and-gold logo adorned the upper left-hand side of his white polo shirt.
Will was never going to be a handsome guy, but even at nin
eteen he had a rugged look that was attractive to girls. At the moment he was reading a book and sweating.
I pulled into the drive, stopping beside the wooden A-frame sign that said, LOT FULL in two-foot-high letters.
“Sorry, we’re full up,” Will hollered first; then he looked up, saw who it was, and came over to my window. “Hi, Lee. What are you up to?”
“I wanted to challenge your observation skills, Will. I’ll move on around if somebody needs to come in or go out.”
“It’s too early for anybody to leave. What did you want me to observe?”
“A white van, commercial type, with an orange sign painted on the door.”
“That’s an odd combination, but I think there’s one here at the moment.”
My yell almost deafened Will. “Where?”
“On the back row. It came in this morning. Why did you want to know?”
I didn’t answer. “Mind if I take a look at it?”
“It’s a public lot.” Will came around the van and got in on the passenger side. “I’ll soak up a little AC, as long as you’re here. Drive around to the right. Why are you interested in this van?”
“I assume Brenda told you Joe’s aunt was staying with us?” Will nodded, and I quickly sketched Gina’s unexpected and reclusive stay, then sudden departure. I left out the part about the running footprints. But I told him she’d called to say she was all right.
“Anyway,” I said, “we can’t figure out where she went, and one of the neighbors said he saw a woman with dyed-black hair getting into a big white van with an orange sign on the door.”
Will frowned, and I went on. “Now, I know you don’t take license numbers or anything. . . .”
“And a lot of tourists don’t park in this lot.”
“Right. But you still see more cars than nearly anybody else does. So I thought I’d ask. Do you remember who drove this van in?”
Will shook his head. “Sorry. I wasn’t on duty. But I doubt anybody remembers who brought it in. The tourists’ faces all become a blur.”
By then I had reached the back row, and I stopped in front of a blocky white vehicle.
“Did your neighbor say whether it had windows in the back or was enclosed?” Will said.
“No, and I didn’t want to ask. What does the sign on the door say?”
We had to get out and walk up next to the van to find out. It was a GMC van, a big one, with windows all around. The sign proved to be a block of orange with white lettering. Frankly, its brightness made it almost impossible to make out.
“‘Orangeman’s Electric Service,’” Will read. “‘Residential and Commercial. South Bend.‘”
“That’s a really odd business name,” I said. “At least, if it’s located in South Bend, Indiana.”
“Why?”
“Because South Bend is the location of Notre Dame University, Will. The Fighting Irish. Anything orange is anathema to them.”
Will looked blank. “They don’t like orange?”
“Orange is the color of Protestant Ireland. Notre Dame is associated with Catholic Ireland, and its team color is green.”
We thoroughly looked the white van over. I noted a couple of scratches, then wrote down the license number. It had an Indiana license plate. When I peeked through the windows, I saw nothing of interest. No papers, no empty cans that had once held exotic brands of beer, no photographs. There wasn’t even a beach towel. Not very typical of a vacationer’s vehicle.
“I’ll be on duty here until eight,” Will said. “I’ll check on whoever picks it up.”
“No!” The memory of the dead man flashed into my mind. “I’ll call the state police. They’ll know whether or not they need to investigate this vehicle. The owner may be someone completely unconnected with the van our neighbor saw.”
He frowned, and I tapped him on the arm. “I’m serious, Will. The people with the van may be dangerous. Or they may be mere tourists. If it’s the first, you could endanger yourself if you show too much interest. If it’s the second, you could endanger your job for rudeness to visitors!”
Will grinned. “I don’t want that to happen,” he said. “But if I see any more white vans with orange signs, I’ll write their license numbers down.”
“Surreptitiously,” I said in a stern voice.
“Right. Surreptitiously. Can you lend me a piece of paper?”
On the way home I called Joe and told him about the van. Then I called Underwood. This time the dispatcher tracked the detective down, and in a few minutes he called me back.
I told Underwood what Harold Glick had said and about finding the big white GMC van in the Warner Pier High School parking lot. Underwood didn’t act too excited, but he said he’d look into who owned the van in the parking lot.
His reaction was so offhand that I was tempted to do what Will had threatened to do—try to find out who picked up the white van. However, common sense won out, and I started chopping onions for meat loaf.
I did call the shop. Tracy answered the phone, lowered her voice, and told me Dolly was still trying hard to keep chocolate from melting.
“It’s not too hot up front in the shop,” Tracy said. “I wish we could push some of the cool air back to the workroom—use a fan or something. But Dolly says no.”
“I think she’s right, Tracy. The chocolate on the shelves in the shop is ready for sale. You can’t risk letting it get warm.”
I also wanted to know if the girls were coming home to eat. They were. So even with Gina gone, I was still planning on six for dinner, supposing Pete was going to show up.
The answer to that one came at five thirty p.m., when Pete pulled into the drive at almost the same moment Joe and Darrell came in from the boat shop, both completely sweat-soaked. Pete tactfully had brought beer, and the three guys sat on the porch with the box fan blowing on them and drank it. As soon as Brenda and Tracy showed up, I tossed the salad together and told everyone dinner was on the table.
The evening went along routinely, but I was on pins and needles. I wanted to know about that white van in the Warner Pier High School parking lot. I could hardly wait for Will to call.
I’d done the dishes—Joe dried—and Darrell and Pete had announced they were going to go over to the boat shop for showers. That was a smart move.
I was sitting in the living room, with a fan blowing directly on me, when the phone finally rang. I ran for the kitchen and snatched it up.
“Hi, Lee. It’s Will.”
“Hi. What happened with the van?”
“Nothing! I’m bummed about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I watched it all afternoon. The state cops watched it. But nothing ever happened.”
“Nothing?”
“No! The darn thing’s still there. Whoever parked it never came back for it. It’s a dead end.”
Chapter 14
I didn’t laugh.
“Will,” I said, “what’s your major?”
“Electrical engineering. Why?”
“Just wondered.” I didn’t tell Will it was a good thing he wasn’t majoring in law enforcement. He’d never make a detective. “What are the state police doing?”
“They told me to go home.”
“Probably a good idea. Unless you and Brenda are going out.”
“Maybe down to the Dockster for a while. We won’t be late!”
I assured Will I was merely Brenda’s landlady, not her chaperone, and I called her to the phone. Then I did laugh. Will, bless his heart, hadn’t seen how suspicious the abandonment of the van was. But I thought Underwood had caught on.
I took a cool shower and got ready for bed. Joe came in about ten thirty, but it was too darn hot for either of us to be more than mildly affectionate. I was also aware that I had the noon-to-nine p.m. shift the next day. And if the air-conditioning people hadn’t performed miracles during the morning, I’d have to spend an important part of my time hassling them. Hassling them sweetly. I didn’t dare make
them mad.
I still had the white GMC van—and the air-conditioning—on my mind when I got up at seven thirty the next morning. Pete was already gone, but he had made coffee and left a cereal bowl in the sink. The girls were still asleep, Joe was beginning to move around, and Darrell hadn’t come in. My brain was barely percolating.
Then Underwood’s unmarked car parked in the drive.
I called out the dining room window, “Hi! I hear the white van was never claimed last night.”
Underwood nodded.
“Did anybody pick it up after the lot closed?”
He shook his head.
“Come on in. The coffee’s made.”
Underwood shook his head again. Odd that he wasn’t saying anything. And he wasn’t coming to the house either. He had another detective with him, and they were walking toward Darrell’s camper.
I watched as they stood on either side of the door; then the second detective rapped sharply on the aluminum. “Open up! Police!”
I ran for the bedroom. “Joe! Underwood’s arresting Darrell!”
“Huh?” Joe’s voice came from the bathroom behind me. He opened the door, holding his toothbrush and with foam on his lips.
“Hurry! Underwood and another detective are banging on Darrell’s door. I think they’re arresting him!”
“Surely not.” Joe sounded calm.
I ran through the kitchen, then out onto the back porch. Darrell was standing in the door of his camper, wearing boxers and looking bleary-eyed. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t mind talking to you. Mind if I get some clothes on?”
Before Darrell came out again, Joe was going toward the back door. I was still feeling panicky, but he patted my hand. “Don’t say anything,” he said. “It looks like it’s just routine. They must have found out that Darrell was once charged with home invasion.”
“But he was exonerated!”
“No, Lee. He was exonerated on a murder charge. He never denied he and a buddy had entered a drug dealer’s home at gunpoint. We were able to prove—finally—that the drug dealer was still alive when they left. Darrell was never prosecuted for the home invasion, but he was charged.”