The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery

by JoAnna Carl

  While I was waiting, I did one last circuit of the downstairs, and when I looked at the screened-in porch I saw Pete’s sleeping bag and canvas carryall piled out there.

  Where was Pete? If we all left, the police wouldn’t keep a continuous check on the house. Did Pete have anything that might be valuable?

  How about his pistol?

  I called Joe to ask his advice on what to do with his buddy’s belongings. Joe’s phone was still out of service. I’d have to use my own judgment. I squared my shoulders, went out onto the screened-in porch, opened the carryall, and began to look through Pete’s stuff.

  I was very pleased not to find the pistol. Pete must have taken it with him. It wasn’t in my house, so it wasn’t my responsibility.

  Pete’s camera was there, however, and his laptop. I stuck the camera into my purse and zipped the laptop into its carrying case. The girls finally came downstairs with their stuff, and we got into our respective vehicles and left.

  I think the next two hours were the worst part of the whole thing. I wasn’t being guarded, but I had to promise not to leave Mercy’s house. Joe didn’t call. Underwood didn’t call. I was too distracted to read or watch television. All I could do was pace the floor and gnaw my fingernails.

  When the phone finally rang, I could feel my heart lurch. I saw a familiar number on Mercy’s caller ID, and I snatched up the receiver.

  “Joe! What’s going on?”

  He sighed. “I have good news and bad news. And I hear you do, too.”

  “If you mean finding Gina. Yes, that was good. Have you seen her?”

  He had seen Gina, but hadn’t talked to her. I recapped her story as fast as possible. “So the good news is, she’s safe,” I said. “The bad news is that she might be charged as some sort of accomplice in these burglaries.”

  “If she tells everything she knows now, that probably won’t happen.”

  “I hope not. Now, what’s your news?”

  “I’ll start with the good. The state police have picked up the tall guy and the short guy.”

  “The ones who were at the house last night?”

  “The ones we think were at the house last night. Anyway, they were in a blue truck registered as belonging to Art Atkins. Since Gina has identified the murder victim as Art, that’s enough to hold them on right there.”

  “Good! Because I’m not sure I could swear they were the two in the house.”

  “You won’t have to. They’re also suspects in the disappearance of Pete.”

  “He hasn’t turned up? But Pete’s so . . . competent. It’s hard to believe that something has happened to him.”

  “I know. I’ve been telling myself that since last night.”

  “And you said they found his SUV.”

  “They did. But there’s no sign of him anywhere near it.”

  “No tracks or anything?”

  “It’s on a gravel road. Little possibility of tracks.”

  “Are they looking for this Haney?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s one family named Haney in Warner County. The dad teaches English at Dorinda High, and the mom is a secretary at the Dorinda Reformed Church. The children are preschoolers. All of them have loads of alibis. That seems to be a dead end.”

  Joe and I were both quiet for a long time before I spoke. “Can I go to work?”

  “It’s probably all right. Just don’t go roaming around, okay?”

  “I’m not really dumb, Joe.”

  “I know. But you’re real important to me. Until we know who this Haney is, don’t take any chances.”

  We hung up, but I didn’t feel a lot better. Where could Pete be? I’d found him a day earlier, but that had been a fluke—a deduction from one of his photographs.

  Photographs! I realized that I had Pete’s camera in my purse. If I looked at the photos stored in it, maybe I’d get a clue as to where Pete had been hanging out. Maybe there’d be some other place I could identify, someplace besides the River Villa with its distinctive red roof.

  I dumped the contents of my purse out on the kitchen table and grabbed the camera.

  Chapter 20

  Until I got used to the darn camera, I thought I’d go blind. And even then, the tiny digital images didn’t tell me a lot. Or perhaps, at first, they didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already figured out.

  Pete was definitely more than a bird-watcher. There were a lot more pictures of houses, of people, and of vehicles than of birds. And a lot of the photos were like the ones Pete had shown me earlier of the men on the beach—pictures he’d obviously taken surreptitiously. Whoever Pete was, he’d been spying on the people of Warner Pier.

  There were all sorts of pictures of the tall guy and the short guy, the men I’d nicknamed Lofty and Shorty. They were pictured with the blue truck, with the white van, with their boat. But rarely was the background of the shots identifiable. It was simply a lot of trees, with a few water views tossed in. But I’d known that Pete had been watching the two men, so that wasn’t new news.

  The camera was loaded to capacity. I ran through dozens of pictures, and not one of them told me anything. Then I went back to zero and started over. This time I paid attention to something I’d skimmed over on the first view-through. There was a date and time at the bottom of each picture.

  I felt a jolt of surprise when I looked at the earliest date and realized that Pete had been at our house for less than a week. In fact, Darrell had been there only two weeks, Tracy only ten days, and Gina only a week. Brenda had been there a month, true, but it only seemed as if we’d had houseguests forever. I shook my head and went back to Pete’s photos.

  Looking at the pictures with the dates in mind, I made a little more sense of the situation.

  First, I found the pictures Pete had shown me earlier, the ones of the guys on the beach. When he’d first shown them to me, I hadn’t recognized them. Now I realized that Pete had snapped the two guys casing Double Diamond.

  If he’d realized they were going to hold up the Garretts and had let Joe and me go to dinner there anyway . . . he’d better stay disappeared, I thought. Because when I got hold of him, I’d murder him. That had been a darn frightening experience.

  But I remembered that Pete had seemed concerned and upset the night of the holdup, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had probably known the two guys were up to something, but I couldn’t believe he’d known they were going to steal the Double Diamond jewels that evening. Surely he would have done something about it.

  Unless he was in it with them.

  I stuffed that thought back into my subconscious and continued to work slowly through the pictures, looking at each one carefully. I found the ones that showed the River Villa’s red tile roof. Those were close beside a set showing the ramshackle cottage where I’d seen Lofty and Shorty. Their boat was clearly visible.

  I kept looking at pictures. Pete actually had taken lots of bird pictures, and some of them were amazingly good. But the bird pictures were interspersed among what I was calling the “spy” pictures.

  But what I needed to know was where the photos had been taken, and I wasn’t picking up many clues about that. Some had been taken at the cottage on the river, and some at the beach. I knew that the state police were aware of Pete’s interest in the ramshackle cottage on the river—I’d told them myself about seeing the two guys there, and they’d actually arrested them. So I felt confident that they’d searched that area looking for Pete. And Pete obviously wasn’t at the Beech Tree Public Access Area. It was a public beach, for heaven’s sake.

  I was discouraged, but I kept looking at the pictures. I’d have to call Underwood and give him the camera. Maybe the state police would have somebody with X-ray eyes, someone who could decipher the pictures and link them to their location. And maybe if they did, it still wouldn’t help. Pete could be anyplace.

  It wasn’t until I came to the final three pictures—pictures that were dated only the day before—that I got a clue,
a clue in the form of a lilac bush.

  It wasn’t blooming, of course. Lilacs bloom in the spring, not at midsummer. But I still recognized it, mainly because of its similarity to our own lilac bush, a huge thing that practically engulfs the east side of our garage.

  The lilac in Pete’s photo was as large as ours, probably twelve feet high and twenty feet wide. It wasn’t all one bush, of course. It had spread in the long years since it had been planted. The lower part was thin, with flimsy little branches and stems that looked as if they didn’t get enough sun, but the upper and outer branches were full of graceful leaves, oval at the top and pointed at the bottom. They’d always reminded me of the symbol for a spade on a deck of cards.

  In the first picture, Pete had focused the camera on a cardinal’s nest in the lilac bush. The mother cardinal had been sitting on her eggs, and she was so well camouflaged that I almost didn’t see her. In the second photo, her nest was out of focus. At first I thought Pete had simply goofed, had taken a bad photo.

  Then I realized the focus had been on something in the background. Something blue. He’d been using the lilac bush for cover while he took a picture of something a long way behind it.

  Something blue. Unfortunately, I could see only a corner of the blue object. I couldn’t tell what it was. And what was the dilapidated building behind it? The third picture showed more of the building.

  On my first run-through I had thought that the ramshackle building was merely the one where I’d seen Lofty and Shorty. But the lilac bush had told me different.

  That was a lilac bush I knew personally.

  Or was it? On second thought, I wasn’t sure.

  The family story—passed on years ago by Uncle Phil—is that my great-grandmother planted our lilac bush back when the TenHuis cottage was a brand-new summer place. At the same time, she gave a lilac bush to a friend who had a cottage a little way south on Lake Shore Drive. They had a friendly rivalry over their lilacs. Every spring they took snapshots of them, measured them, and compared whose bush had the most glorious blooms.

  Time went by. My great-grandmother and her friend both died. My grandfather turned the TenHuis summer cottage into a year-round house. The friend’s family sold their cottage. It was torn down, and a year-round house was built on that site. Aunt Nettie and Uncle Phil moved into the TenHuis cottage. They became friends with the new neighbor, who now owned the lilac bush that was a cousin of ours.

  The new neighbor’s name was Inez Deacon. Inez had moved to a retirement center a few years earlier, and her house was now occupied by—ta-da!—Harold Glick and his little dog, Alice.

  Had Pete been spying on Harold Glick? Harold the lonely guy? Harold the dog lover? Harold the harmless pain in the neck?

  I snorted. Impossible. We all avoided Harold as hard as we could. Oh, I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t want to hang out with him. The idea of Pete the macho male keeping an eye on Harold’s place was simply too silly.

  But the lilac bush sure did look familiar. And there was an old shed on Inez’s property, a barn of some sort. She hadn’t used it in years, and it was barely visible from the road, at least in summer, because Inez’s house was set in among a lot of trees and low, shrubby growth.

  House on a busy street. Barn out of sight of the road. Actually, it sounded like the ideal layout for a burglary ring.

  And that something blue. Surely it wasn’t the truck Lofty and Shorty had been driving when they were arrested?

  Ridiculous. It couldn’t be.

  But I reached for the phone. I’d turn the matter over to Detective Underwood of the Michigan State Police.

  Or I would have if he’d been available. He’d been using the Warner Pier Police Station as his local headquarters, but again the only person there was the department’s secretary. Everyone—including my husband—was out, she said. And Underwood was definitely unavailable. He’d gone to the state police facility south of Warner Pier to question Lofty and Shorty.

  I told the secretary—I knew her, of course—that I had Pete’s digital camera, and that it might help in the search for him. “I’ll bring it by the station on my way to work,” I said. “But I’m at Joe’s mom’s house if anyone wants it sooner.” I didn’t describe the lilac bush. The whole thing simply seemed too far-fetched.

  The dispatcher assured me she’d tell either Joe or Underwood about the camera as soon as she could.

  I hung up the phone, feeling virtuous, and began to get dressed for work. I admit that I was terribly curious about that lilac bush, but I would have resisted the temptation to take a look at it if I had had the right shoes.

  One of the rules for working at TenHuis Chocolade is that rubber-soled, nonskid shoes must be worn by all employees. That’s to avoid falls on the hard and occasionally slick floors of our commercial kitchen. Even though I spend most of my time sitting at a desk, I try not to bend the rules. I usually wear sandals or loafers, rather than the tennis shoes worn by the skilled workers who actually make the truffles and bonbons, but the soles of my shoes are of nonskid material.

  When I’d picked up clothes at the house that morning, I’d grabbed up a shoe box with the name of my standard work loafers on the end. That box, I now discovered, did not contain my standard work loafers. It held a pair of high-heeled sandals I’d taken on my honeymoon, a honeymoon that had actually included a Broadway show. Joe and I had taken a taxi from the hotel to dinner and another from dinner to the theater. Comfort hadn’t mattered; glamour had. The shoes had a higher heel than even Gina ever thought about, and I’d had to clutch Joe’s arm with every step I took. He hadn’t complained.

  I hate to admit it, but when I opened that shoe box, a thrill passed through my body. I could not possibly wear those shoes to work, and neither could I wear the slippery sandals I’d stepped into earlier.

  I was forced to run by the house and get another pair of shoes.

  That meant I could drive down the interstate for another mile, take a different exit, and approach our house from the south, not from the north, as I usually did.

  That route would give me a look at Inez Deacon’s lilac bush.

  I would not have to stop the car or do anything remotely dangerous. But I might actually be able to identify that lilac bush and give Underwood a strong suggestion of a place he might look for our missing man, Pete.

  There would be no danger at all, I thought smugly.

  I was in the van in less than the time it takes Dolly Jolly to roll a tablespoon of nougat into the filling for a truffle. I flipped on the air-conditioning and headed for the interstate. Just a mile past my usual exit, I turned onto One Hundredth Street. A mile west of that exit I came to Lake Shore Drive and turned north, headed toward home at a leisurely pace that gave me plenty of opportunity to examine the local flora, such as lilac bushes.

  I went past the minimansions that had sprung up south of our hundred-year-old farmhouse in the past few years, mentally admiring some and criticizing others while I decried what they were doing to our property taxes. I passed the Veranda Bed-and-Breakfast, with its private elevator to the beach. I went by what had once been the Lally House, a largely glass structure now renamed Lakeview, and looked away. Not only had I once had a bad experience there, it was also the place where Joe was introduced to his first wife. We tended not to talk about that house.

  Now I was getting near the curve, and just around it was Inez’s house—now rented to Harold Glick. Because of the curve, the side yard of the house was visible from Lake Shore Drive, or it would have been if there hadn’t been so many bushes. But could I see the big lilac? Or the barn?

  I slowed down. And I looked.

  And, yes, back in the woods, there was the big lilac. And beyond it, barely visible because it was July and the woods were fully leafed out, was the old barn.

  And coming out of a small window in the side of the barn was an arm waving a white cloth.

  An arm waving a white cloth?

  I nearly drove by without stopping, so
astonished that I couldn’t figure out how to hit the brakes.

  Then I knew—simply knew—that it had to be a signal, and I stood that van right on its nose.

  Who could be signaling from the barn of a man I suspected of being part of the burglary ring?

  It had to be Pete.

  I pulled off onto the narrow gravel shoulder along Lake Shore Drive, and I jumped out and beat my way through the woods, picking my way around evergreens and maples and through blackberry bushes and probably poison ivy toward the window where that white cloth had been waving.

  Now I could see that the window’s glass had been knocked out. Ugly shards were still sticking up in the top of the frame, and more glass was on the ground outside.

  I stood on my tiptoes and peeked into the window. And I saw the prematurely gray hair and eagle-beak nose of Pete Falconer.

  Pete was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, and at that moment his arm and the white rag were hanging limply. For a wild moment I was afraid he was dead. Then I remembered that his arm had been waving only a few minutes before, and he was still upright.

  “Pete?”

  He opened his eyes. “Lee! Thank God! You can go for help.”

  “Are you locked in?”

  “Yes! And I think I broke my damn leg chasing your crooks.”

  “I’ll get you out!”

  “No! Just go to a safe phone and call the cops. Tell them Harold Glick is George Haney! They can take it from there.”

  I heard a creaking noise coming from the other side of the barn. “What’s that?”

  Pete’s voice became a hiss. “He’s back! Run!”

  He disappeared from the window.

  I decided running would make too much noise. So I ducked. I squatted down under the window and stayed as motionless as I could.