The Chocolate Raccoon Rigmarole

by JoAnna Carl

  Then Hogan’s chief of police car pulled in and threw a little gravel as he made a quick stop beside my van. He walked over to us, opened the passenger’s door, gallantly gave Aunt Nettie a kiss on the cheek, and then moved her to the backseat of the van.

  When I offered him Watt’s keys, he shook his head. “Mike had a set Jerry was able to pick up,” he said.

  He sat in the passenger’s seat and interrogated me. This process caught me by surprise. I was beginning to feel pretty silly about my fear out at Watt’s house. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing.

  But Hogan seemed to take my feelings seriously. He had me go over our visit to the cabin step-by-step, and I described its neatness, its loneliness, its silence. But now that I was out of the woods—yuk, yuk—there was very little that had specifically been threatening.

  “See, Hogan,” I said, “everything in the atmosphere out there combined to feel soupy—I mean, spooky! But nothing happened. I’ve acted like an idiot and dragged you out here over nothing.”

  Hogan ignored that and asked me another question. “Tell me again about how the shed’s door moved.”

  “Just barely! It only moved slightly. Maybe it was my imagination. Or if it did move, maybe the motion was caused by something else. The wind, maybe. Or, you know, just the fact that Aunt Nettie and I were touching the shed might have made it wiggle.”

  Aunt Nettie leaned forward. “But we weren’t touching it, Lee. I had taken a step back to examine the keys, and you never touched the shed. You stood behind me, and you would have had to reach around me to put your hand on any part of the shed. I would have noticed. I’m sure you never touched the building.”

  Hogan frowned, staring into space. “I’m sorry I let you two go out there alone.”

  His remark surprised me. “Why? Last night neither you nor Joe had any problem with our going out there to do Watt a favor. Why should you expect something to frighten us?”

  There was a long pause before Hogan answered. “After the doctor examined Watt this morning, he called me. It seems most peculiar, but he thinks one of the likeliest reasons for Watt’s mental fog is that he was drugged.”

  Drugged? I couldn’t take in the meaning of the word. “What are you saying, Hogan?”

  “I’m saying that either Watt used some sort of drug voluntarily, or—”

  “No! Oh, golly, Hogan!” I said. “I can’t believe that. Or maybe I don’t want to believe it.”

  Hogan kept on talking. “Or maybe someone drugged his food or drink, Lee. And Mike says in all the time he’s known Watt, he’s never known him to use drugs. Except alcohol. I think he may have had a problem with that at one time. And apparently Mike and Watt have known each other a lot longer than they’ve been admitting.”

  I clutched the steering wheel and clamped my mouth shut. I wanted to explain to Hogan that his idea about Watt taking drugs deliberately was totally wrong. But, heck—I didn’t know Watt all that well.

  My head was spinning. What was happening? Did Hogan know anything else? If he did, would he tell me? I had to ask.

  “Was Mike affected?” I asked. “Was he drugged?”

  “No. But all that means is that Watt ate or drank something that Mike didn’t.”

  “Does this make Mike a suspect?”

  “Not to anybody who knows him. Out of context, it might make Mike look guilty, but he’s smarter than that. What Mike is guilty of,” Hogan said, “is not taking the whole situation seriously. He took Watt out to the lonely cottage last night, supposedly to keep him safe. But he barely remembered to lock the door. When I went out there this morning, for example, he had left all the windows open, ‘for air.’ Anybody could have gotten in. Anybody could have put drugs in any of the food or drink in the place. And maybe somebody did.”

  The three of us sat silently for a minute. Then Hogan’s two-way radio crackled. Hogan answered. “Jerry?”

  We could all hear Jerry Cherry’s reply. “Hogan, did Lee and Nettie say Watt’s place was ultra-neat?”

  “Yah. They were both quite impressed.”

  “They might not be impressed now. It looks to me as if somebody tossed it.”

  Aunt Nettie gasped, and I yelled, “Oh no!”

  Hogan jumped out of my van and into his own car. All of us took off east again, headed for the deep woods.

  Looking back, I have no idea why Aunt Nettie and I followed Hogan. We were not law officers. If something had happened to Watt’s house, she and I were not going to be any help. But Hogan could have called my cell phone and told us to stay put, even while we were driving, and he didn’t. So we tore down the gravel road, headed for the tiny cabin in the woods.

  After we got there, naturally, Hogan and Jerry wouldn’t even let us pull onto the property. We sat on the county road while three carloads of police—city, county, and state—arrived to look over a building about large enough to hold three of Santa’s elves.

  But no one told us to go home, so we waited, watching the important law enforcement business going on. It felt like hours. I sighed deeply and looked at my watch; we’d been there all of twenty minutes. When I reported this to Aunt Nettie, we both laughed.

  Shortly after that, the Michigan State Police mobile lab showed up, and we got a better idea of why nothing was going on. They’d been waiting for the lab guys to show, indicating that Hogan thought there might be evidence to be found in the little house.

  About ten minutes after the lab techs showed up, Hogan came to collect Aunt Nettie and me. We put protective booties over our shoes and were escorted to the cabin. I probably strutted toward it; I felt quite important to be part of an investigation.

  Until Hogan spoke. “Don’t touch anything,” he said sternly. “Not a single thing.”

  Aunt Nettie and I nodded meekly.

  “All we want is for the two of you to confirm that the room doesn’t look like it did when you left.”

  We nodded. Then he opened the door.

  Aunt Nettie stepped inside. She gasped loudly. I stepped in. I yelped. “This place looks like a tornado hit!”

  Gone was the neat little room with clean dishes stacked on open shelves, silverware in orderly rows on a tray, a tidy bed with a sleeping bag cover. In its place were stacks of papers thrown any which way, dishes smashed everywhere, bedding tossed on the floor, and silverware scrambled into heaps.

  I was mystified. “Were they searching for something?”

  Aunt Nettie was wringing her hands, and I put my arm around her shoulders. “Oh, Lee,” she said. “It looks like a devil got loose in here. Were the intruders just angry?” Her voice was distressed.

  “You’re right. The room looks as if a child had a tantrum in here.”

  I tried to sound practical. “Well, let’s look it over and see what’s different. Maybe we can tell Hogan what’s gone.”

  I got a notepad from my purse, and we began to look over the scene.

  One of the first things we looked at was the mysterious shed, and we found it standing open and completely empty. I was disappointed.

  “What a letdown!” I said. “I guess I really did imagine the whole shed scare.”

  But Hogan came up behind us and cleared his throat. After Aunt Nettie and I had jumped several feet high, he spoke. “It wasn’t your imagination. Look at the floor.”

  The dirt floor was covered with footprints.

  I gave a gasp that made Aunt Nettie grab my arm. “Lee,” she said. “There was somebody there!”

  I pointed out that the prints might have been there from an earlier visit by someone, but Hogan ignored me.

  Hogan shooed the two of us back into the house. Aunt Nettie stopped just inside the door.

  “Isn’t it odd,” Aunt Nettie said, “that the drawers haven’t been dumped?”

  “That’s right. All of this mess came off the shelves. There aren’t
many cupboards or drawers, true, but the intruders seemed more interested in breaking things than in looking at them. Why would they toss things around like that?”

  “Were they simply throwing things because they were mad?”

  “I just realized one thing that isn’t here,” I said. “There was junk mail in the wastebaskets, which we emptied. But there’s no ‘real’ mail either. No bills, no letters, no personal mail!”

  Aunt Nettie nodded. “Of course, Watt said he had a postal box.”

  “Yes, and all this junk mail is addressed to it. Watt apparently brought that mail home and threw it out. Or threw out unwanted mail at the post office. But there should be mail he would keep. Letters from home, birthday cards, notices of a class reunion, credit card bills.”

  Aunt Nettie’s voice was sad. “Doesn’t Watt have any friends or relatives?”

  German Chocolate Cake—Yum, Yum!

  (The Chocolate Snowman Murders)

  No recipe included here, but you can find it on the back of the German’s Sweet Chocolate package. And I found this cake’s history fascinating.

  One of America’s favorite desserts—Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate Cake—is neither “Baker’s” nor “German.”

  Commonly known as German chocolate cake, this is a delicately flavored light chocolate cake made with a particular brand of sweetened cooking chocolate. Between each of its three layers and on top is a caramel icing packed with pecans and coconut.

  Baker’s Chocolate is not, as you might think, called that because it was formulated for the exclusive use of bakers; it was simply the utterly appropriate family name of the chocolate company’s founder.

  And Baker’s popular product, German’s Sweet Chocolate, was named after Samuel German, a Baker’s employee who came up with the sweet cooking chocolate in 1852.

  At that time most chocolate was still used for making beverages, but in 1870 Baker’s published a twelve-page booklet of baking recipes. But we’re not there yet—German chocolate cake was not in that booklet.

  German chocolate cake was apparently invented almost ninety years later by a Texas woman who submitted the recipe to a Dallas newspaper in 1957. She named her creation German’s Chocolate Cake after the chocolate she used to make it. The recipe swept the nation (and lost its apostrophe somewhere along the way, thus creating the widespread impression that German immigrants had brought the dessert to America).

  And now, June 11th is National German Chocolate Cake Day!

  Chapter 18

  Hogan let us wander around for a few minutes, then he firmly led us back to my van. He assigned Jerry Cherry to escort us back to Warner Pier and sent us away.

  “Don’t talk about this lack of personal mail,” he said. “I don’t want Watt to hear about it before I can question him. He may have tossed it himself. Maybe he deliberately broke all contact with family and friends.”

  I guess his instructions were one reason we speculated about the mail all the way back to the office.

  Aunt Nettie seemed really puzzled. “Why would the burglars make such a mess? And apparently not take anything else? Unless they took some papers. And they may not have. Maybe Watt simply hadn’t collected his mail for a month!”

  “Or maybe they did take something else. We didn’t take an inventory.”

  “If we missed something, it wasn’t anything very large.”

  Our speculations, of course, were more annoying than helpful to both of us. I think we were both pleased to get back to a parking spot in our alley so we couldn’t talk about this incident anymore.

  Jerry Cherry was still following us, and we both waved good-bye to him with pleasure. He had barely turned the corner when we heard a loud voice from farther up the alley. Looking around, we saw Alex Gold waving at us from the porch of his own shop.

  “Hey, Lee and Nettie! Hang on a minute before you go inside. I have a special invitation for you both.”

  We stood on our porch, waiting while he walked quickly down the alley toward us. Alex was beaming happily. “Ladies, I’m having a party.”

  Aunt Nettie smiled. “Just what we need, Alex. Things have been pretty dismal lately.”

  “This is going to be a great party! And it is a party. I’m asking all the downtown merchants over for a champagne breakfast tomorrow at the new shop. And bring your husbands and wives, and your girlfriends and boyfriends, and your sweethearts and pals!”

  “Is the shop ready to open?” Aunt Nettie asked. “I didn’t think it was finished.”

  “It’s not. This is a preopening event. Come and go. Eight to ten a.m. It’s the secret kickoff of the real thing.”

  “But, Alex,” I said, “what good is a ‘secret’ kickoff? A kickoff event is supposed to draw in customers. If nobody knows about it, it’s a waste of time.”

  Alex beamed ever more broadly. “It’s a preview of something that’s going to knock Warner Pier onto its backside with excitement! I can hardly wait to see your reactions!”

  He turned around, chortling. “You’re going to be really impressed. Eight o’clock tomorrow morning. At the store. You’re going to love it! And Herrera’s is doing the food.”

  “Yum! Yum!” Aunt Nettie said. “We’ll be there.”

  I shook my head as we watched him trot up the alley. “What do you suppose he’s up to?”

  “Some special jewelry that’s too expensive for most ordinary tourists to buy,” Aunt Nettie said. “I don’t know Alex as well as you and Joe do, but he always seems excited about something.”

  “At least we get breakfast,” I said.

  Then we opened the back door to TenHuis Chocolade and found a madhouse. No real disasters, I suppose. But when two of three bosses—one of us chocolate and the other money—were three hours late to work, and the third boss, Dolly, wasn’t coming in at all, the morning was destined for trouble.

  It took a while, but we got it straightened out. Aunt Nettie got the chocolate schedule back on track, and I returned calls and took orders that the clients swore were desperate emergencies. By one o’clock we had all the serious challenges handled, and I told Aunt Nettie I was ready for lunch.

  “Me, too,” Aunt Nettie said. “Bunny is back from her lunch break. I suppose that the two of us could dash down to the corner for twenty minutes and get something to eat.”

  “Terrific idea,” I said. “And while we’re waiting for our sandwiches, maybe I’ll call Wildflower Hill and see if she knows another raccoon trapper. I’m afraid Watt is simply not going to be able to get the job done. Not while Hogan is trying to keep him undercover. And Mike is unavailable.”

  About half the time, I hate my cell phone, because it always rings when it’s in the bottom of my purse in the back bedroom. The rest of the time, I can’t live without it. The call to Wildflower fulfilled both situations.

  First, she wanted to hear all about the excitement at Watt’s house. And, of course, I wasn’t supposed to tell her anything.

  “Huh,” I said. “How did you hear about it? Hogan told us to keep the whole innocent—I mean, incident! The whole incident under wraps. He threatened us with a good scolding if we told anybody anything.”

  “Hogan’s smart enough to know that plan won’t work in a neighborhood like mine.”

  I was having trouble picturing the deep, dark forest where Wildflower and Watt lived as a “neighborhood,” so I apparently didn’t answer her question as quickly as she expected. She prodded me for a reaction. “Well, Lee? What’s going on?”

  Could I tell her an abbreviated version and satisfy both Hogan and Wildflower? I had to try.

  “Watt had to go back to the hospital,” I said. “He asked Aunt Nettie and me to go out to his house and make sure there was nothing in his fridge that would spoil. When we got there, we felt—well, afraid. We were afraid that somebody had been prowling around. Things seemed disturbed. Since
we’d never been to Watt’s house before, we weren’t sure. When we told Hogan about our fears, he sent somebody out there to double-check. And the person he sent could tell that there had definitely been an intruder.”

  “Did that really call for six patrol cars?”

  “Six? Were there six?”

  “That’s the gossip. Three from Warner Pier—and we’re outside the city limits—plus one from the county, and two state cops. Naturally, the neighbors all gathered around to stare, too. Plus, later on, the state cops went house-to-house asking if any of us had seen anything. I guess they talked to everybody.”

  “Did you? See anything?”

  “What would I see?”

  “Oh, a strange car, a strange person—you know, anything out of the ordinary. Strange.”

  She sighed. “You know, Lee, I know you don’t like the deep woods, but our area isn’t really that remote. We’re not strange; we just like cheap places to live.”

  “I know, I know, you told me! You back up to the Fox Creek Nature Preserve. It has hiking trails. People walk by all the time.”

  My sarcasm didn’t amuse Wildflower. “That’s right. But nobody walked by this morning. Not that I saw. The only thing unusual—and it’s not even that out of the ordinary—was the chopper.”

  “Chopper? As in helicopter?”

  “Yes, the forestry service patrols an area near here.” Then she spoke darkly. “Or that’s what they claim. It comes by about once a week. Watt says he’d like a ride ‘for old times’ sake.’ ”

  “Wildflower—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, she took a sudden, deep breath. “Gotta go!”

  “She hung up on me!” I said with a groan of annoyance.

  “I see the waitress coming with our lunch,” Aunt Nettie said. “Eat first, call back later.”

  “But I didn’t get to ask her about a raccoon trapper.”

  “She’ll probably just recommend Mike.”

  “I don’t think Hogan would like that idea. He certainly doesn’t want Mike fooling around in an area that seems remote anymore. Not until this situation is resolved.”