The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery

by JoAnna Carl

  The River Villa had a gravel parking lot near the house, and a meandering dirt road looped through the site. Pete’s SUV was not in the main parking lot, so I started along the drive. I drove slowly, partly because the road was full of potholes.

  I had swung around the property and was headed back to the main gate when I saw a glint down a road that looked as if it might lead to a garbage pit. And there, behind a bush, was a forest green SUV, its color camouflaging it from casual glances.

  I stopped the van and walked over to the SUV. A peek through the front window and I was sure. Pete’s wide-brimmed bush hat was in the front seat. I’d found his ride.

  But where was Pete? I looked all around. No sign of him.

  Why had he parked in this hidden spot? The River Villa renters didn’t seem to be concerned about trespassers. If Pete wanted to walk around the property and look at birds, why not park in the official parking area?

  There were two obvious answers. The first was, Pete didn’t want someone to know he was there. The second was, he was looking at something close to this particular spot, and he wanted to be able to get back to his car in a hurry.

  I went back to my van, found a pad and pencil in my purse, and wrote a note telling Pete he was needed quickly at the Warner Pier PD. Bring Darrell an alibi for Saturday night, I wrote. I walked back to his SUV and stuck the note under a windshield wiper.

  Then I took another look around. I couldn’t believe Pete wasn’t close by. I called his name: “Pete!” But somehow I didn’t want to yell it out loudly.

  I was turning to leave when I saw a path. It didn’t look exactly well traveled, but it led downhill, toward the river. I hesitated only a moment before I followed it.

  I was immediately sorry. Mosquitoes and deer flies the size of pigeons descended. All I had for protective gear was a chocolate brown polo shirt and a pair of khaki slacks. I pulled the neckline of the shirt up over my head, pretending it was a hood. This left a strip of my back in peril. I almost turned around. But then I saw a footprint that looked a lot like it might be Pete’s, and I couldn’t resist going on.

  After running the gauntlet of mosquitoes and flies through thick woods for about fifty feet, I came to an area where the trees abruptly cleared. I left the woods and found myself on the bank of the Warner River. Actually, I nearly found myself in the river. The last few feet were steep, and I slid down the path rather dramatically, giving a loud yelp as my feet went out from under me and I sat down harder than I really like to sit. When I stopped sliding my feet were just a foot from the water.

  The path continued upstream. I stood up, taking in my surroundings.

  And the first surrounding I noticed was two guys in a boat, laughing at me.

  One of them, a plump type, hollered, “You okay?”

  I waved feebly. “Just surprised!”

  I walked along the path, trying not to stare at the boat, but it had surprised me as much as my sudden slide had. It surprised me because it was so close.

  The town of Warner Pier was built where the river deepens before it enters the lake, at a spot where it is possible to load cargo boats. Upstream the river tends to become wide and swampy. But at this spot it was narrower and deeper than I’d expected. So the two men in the boat were only fifty feet or so away.

  They were tying up a very ordinary fiberglass boat at a ramshackle dock. Joe, the expert on antique wooden boats, would have sneered at theirs. The cottage behind it was a real fixer-upper, and a very ordinary blue pickup sat beside it.

  I had no idea anything as tumbledown as that cottage remained on the Warner River. Property values for anything with a view of the water—whether lake or river—had gone through the roof; if people couldn’t afford to keep their property up, they sold it and lived off the proceeds.

  But I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the men, their boat, or the cottage behind them. I simply walked on up the path along the river, looking into the woods for a glimpse of Pete. After a hundred feet or so I hadn’t seen him, and the bugs were still bombarding me, so I turned around and started back.

  From this direction I could see the two men with the boat without turning my head, so I took a good look at them. Somehow they seemed familiar. One was tall, and the other was short. Then I saw them eyeing me the way I was eyeing them, and I quickly began to examine the woods again. I refrained from calling out Pete’s name, however.

  A tall guy and a short guy. Lofty and Shorty. The same combination as the two men who had held us at gunpoint.

  Then I told myself I was seeing bad guys everywhere, and I kept walking.

  Finding where the path started up the bank didn’t prove to be too easy, but I spotted it. I slipped and slid up the slope, whacking at insects like a windmill, keeping my head down to make sure I didn’t fall again and this time sprain an ankle.

  I was still looking at the ground when I reached the road, and a voice growled. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  After I’d jumped as high as the trees that arched over us, I realized that Pete, the missing bird-watcher himself, was leaning against his SUV. His binoculars were hanging around his neck, and he was scowling like an eagle who’s just lost a rotten fish to a loon. And I was the loon.

  “Pete! You didn’t have to scare the sacks—I mean, the socks! You didn’t have to startle me like that!”

  “I wish I could scare you! How did you know where to find me?”

  “Just a guess. That picture of an owl you showed us included a red roof, so I figured the River Villa was one place you’d been looking at birds. When I saw your SUV . . .”

  “You just naturally went down to the river and nearly fell in.”

  “You saw me? Why didn’t you say something?” I was getting mad.

  “What’s to say? What are you doing here?”

  I stabbed my forefinger toward his windshield. “An emergency came up. Joe needs to find you. You didn’t answer your phone.”

  Pete snatched the note from the windshield. “And you leave information just lying around where anybody in the world could find it!”

  “Look! If you want to communicate with us by cider—I mean, by cipher! If you want secret messages, you’re going to have to give me a codebook. Good-bye!”

  I shoved past Pete and headed for my van, but he grabbed my arm. He swung me around. His binoculars were digging into my chest. Suddenly we were nose-to-nose again, just as we had been under the tarp a day earlier. And the same thing happened. We stood there staring at each other.

  I shoved Pete’s hand off my arm. “I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m late getting to the office because I was trying to find you. Joe and I would appreciate it if you’d go by the Warner Pier PD and tell the cops whether or not you can say where Darrell was during that robbery at the Garretts’.”

  I guess I had the last word. Anyway, Pete didn’t answer me. I got into the van and drove away.

  Pete was the most arrogant jerk I’d ever been around. And what the heck was he up to out at the River Villa? He definitely was not watching birds.

  I hadn’t been at my desk long when Joe called. “Hey, Lee,” he said. “Underwood found out that an Andrew Woodyard had been registered at the Holiday Inn Express in Holland for the past week. He checked out Wednesday.”

  I had to pull my mind back to what Joe and I had been talking about an hour earlier. “The motels? The ones Gina called? Andrew Woodyard? Someone was using your dad’s name? That’s spooky.”

  “I know. Underwood’s sending one of his men over there with a picture of the dead man.”

  “But we already know the dead man was claiming to be Andrew Woodyard! What we don’t know is who he really was.”

  “Yeah. And getting the motel to ID him isn’t going to get closer to that.”

  I told Joe I’d found Pete, but I didn’t tell him the circumstances. Then I tried to work the rest of my shift. Joe called at six o’clock to say that Pete had shown up to alibi Darrell, and the state police were letti
ng Darrell go. The three of them were going out to dinner, he said. He invited me to join them, but his invitation didn’t sound real enthusiastic. I told him I’d eat at my desk. Brenda went down to the corner for sandwiches for herself, Tracy, and me, and the three of us—the entire staff of TenHuis Chocolade after five thirty—concentrated on getting everything done so we could leave early. Not that it worked. The tourists kept coming in to suck up our air-conditioning until the moment I locked the door at nine p.m.

  Brenda, Tracy, and I celebrated with chocolate. My Crème de Menthe Bonbon (“the formal after-dinner mint”) had a bit of bloom, but I found it reviving. Then we got busy, and we finished with the cleanup and money balancing by nine twenty. The boyfriends were going to some guy thing that night, so Brenda and Tracy were free, but they decided to stop by some teenage hangout on the way home. I told the girls I’d see them later and drove home, dreading the stag party I’d find there.

  But the house was dark. It stays light until nearly ten o’clock in our part of Michigan in July. If Pete, Joe, and Darrell had come in since dinner, it had still been light when they left again. In fact, I felt sure they hadn’t come in; Joe would have left the porch light on for me.

  I was so tired that I forgot where I’d been putting my car. I had parked in my own driveway before I remembered Joe and I had been leaving our cars at the Baileys’ house.

  I was too tired to care. I decided somebody else could park at the Baileys’ that night. I got out of the car, slammed the door hard, and tromped to the back door. I unlocked it, went inside, and turned on the kitchen and dining room lights. The dining room light shone into the living room, and I could see there was no mail on the mantel, the designated spot for it. That meant that no one had even walked down to the road and picked it up. I wasn’t going to do it either, I decided. I threw my purse down on the dining table in disgust, then kicked off the rubber-soled loafers I usually wear to the office.

  If I was alone in the house at least I could use the bathroom without wondering if someone was pacing back and forth outside the door. Barefoot, I started to that room by way of the back hall.

  But I never made it. I’d barely entered the back hall when someone knocked on the front door.

  The knock only added to my annoyance. Who the heck could that be? With my luck it would be Harold and his darn dog, Alice, dropping by to pass on some useless information.

  That back hall had four doors off it. The one I’d just passed through led to the kitchen. The one to its left, always kept closed, led to the basement. The one on the right led to the bathroom. The one in front of me led into the downstairs bedroom—the bedroom I shared with Joe. And a door at the other end of that room led to the living room and the front door.

  Still angry, I veered toward the bedroom, the most direct route to the front door.

  When I entered the bedroom, all the curtains and the windows were open. Since there are lots of windows in that room, I could see out on the south side, which overlooks the front porch, and on the west side, which overlooks the side yard.

  I wasn’t surprised to see a dark figure on the porch. Someone had just knocked on the front door, after all.

  But I was surprised to see a second dark figure going past the windows on the west.

  Someone was walking through the side yard. It was someone tall. What was he doing there?

  I looked back at the porch. The man out there was short.

  A short guy and a tall guy. The two robbers in the wet suits. And the two guys in the boat, the ones who had laughed when I slid down the bank.

  And Pete had been “watching birds” in their vicinity.

  I realized the guys in the boat must have been the same guys who had been in the snapshots Pete had shown me. The guys whom he had photographed at Beech Tree Public Access Area.

  A tall guy and a short guy. Lofty and Shorty.

  The fellow on the front porch knocked again.

  He could knock all night, I decided. There was no way I was opening that door.

  Chapter 16

  Our old house was easy to break into. Even when it was locked up, anybody with a rock could get in through one of our casement windows. Plus, at that moment the back door and all the downstairs windows were standing wide open because of the heat wave.

  And some guy I thought was a crook was knocking at the one locked door, and a man I assumed was his pal was heading around the house.

  What was I going to do?

  I could run out the back.

  No, that wouldn’t work. The tall guy was obviously getting in position to cut off my escape that way.

  I could run upstairs.

  That wouldn’t do a lot of good either. There was a phone there, true, but I’d have to go through the living room to get to the stairs, and I’d turned on the dining room light, so the living room wasn’t dark. Again, all the curtains and blinds were open. If I went into the living room, one of the guys outside—either the tall one at the back of the house or the short one on the porch—would see me go. They’d know I was trapped up there.

  I could climb out the bedroom window.

  No, the windows were open, but I’d have to push the screen off. I knew from experience that those screens needed a good noisy bang before they came out of the frame. The bad guys would hear that and be outside to meet me.

  I couldn’t go out the front, out the back, out the side, or upstairs.

  I had to go down.

  I edged into the back hall. The kitchen light crossed only one corner of it, and I was able to slip around and get to the door that led to the basement.

  The basement might turn out to be as much a trap as the upstairs could be—maybe more. Upstairs I at least could climb out onto the roof and start yelling. But I thought I could sneak into the basement without being seen.

  I opened the basement door. Joe had recently gone through the house and oiled all the hinges, so it didn’t make a sound. I stepped onto the top step and silently closed the door behind myself.

  It was dark.

  The old TenHuis house has a feature common in houses built around the turn of the twentieth century in our part of the country: a Michigan basement.

  I’ve never been able to discover why a Michigan basement is named for our state. Surely they are found in Minnesota, Indiana, and Wisconsin, too. Are they known as Michigan basements in other states? Or does the owner of a house with a similar feature outside South Bend describe it as “an Indiana basement”?

  A Michigan basement has stone or concrete walls, but a sand floor. It’s a far cry from a suburban basement with a paneled recreation room. It’s more like a root cellar. In Texas we have storm cellars, and the old-fashioned ones are a lot like Michigan basements, except that they’re found outdoors, not under the house.

  A Michigan basement may be the scariest place in the world. Aunt Nettie is reasonably neat, but a Michigan basement is used only for storage of nonperishable items and as a haven for spiders and, probably, for mice. Nothing in the world short of two bad guys breaking in upstairs would have forced me down there barefoot, in the dark, with no flashlight.

  By then I was hearing footsteps in the house. Then quiet voices. The intruders didn’t know that there were no secrets in that house. Every movement, every word spoken could be heard upstairs and down. Even in the basement.

  The back door guy had apparently let the front door guy in. Their voices came from the living room.

  “Where’d she go?”

  “I’ll look in the bedroom.”

  “She’s probably in the bathroom.”

  “Without a light?”

  Very shortly one of them was going to go into that back hall and open all four doors that led off of it. And I was frozen halfway down the basement steps. When the door above me opened, I’d be in plain view.

  I moved down another step, and as I groped along, my hand closed around a pole. I realized it was the handle of the mop, which should have been in the kitchen closet. Brenda had mopped
the kitchen two nights earlier, and she’d left the mop on the stairs to dry. At the time I’d been annoyed. That wasn’t a good place for a mop, but I never got around to moving it to the right place. Now I gripped it—not as a weapon, but maybe as a distraction.

  In another common architectural practice, the stairs to the second floor of our house are directly above the stairs to the basement. The two sets of steps run parallel, one on top of the other.

  I grabbed hold of that mop and turned it around, sponge side up. Then I held it up over my head and aimed it at the ceiling over the door I’d come in. That would be the location of the bottom side of one of the steps that led to the second floor. I hoped.

  Gently I bumped the bottom of the step. It made a small sound.

  I wanted the two intruders to think I was sneaking up the stairs.

  Immediately, I heard steps going into the living room. “She’s going upstairs!” The guys weren’t even trying to be quiet now. They began thumping up the stairs over my head.

  Still clutching the mop, I slid my bare foot down another step. Now that my eyes were adjusted to the darkness, I could see a bit from the faint light coming in around the door. And I knew where there was a box of matches in that basement. All I had to do was find it without stepping on something sharp or cracking my head on a rafter. Or making noise by knocking something over.

  I carefully felt for the next step down, then for another. But I had to hurry. The tall guy and the short guy wouldn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t upstairs. Then they’d start on the downstairs again, and the basement wouldn’t be far behind.

  It seemed an eternity before I stepped onto sand, and I knew I’d reached the bottom. I turned sharply right and put one hand out in front of me. I walked straight ahead until my hand came in contact with bricks. I’d come up against the base of the chimney.

  Now, looking to my right, I could see a blue flicker. The hot-water tank sat on a special little square of concrete, and light from the burner was leaking out underneath it. I knew that on top of that hot-water tank there was a box of matches.