The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle

by Joanna (Chocolate series 04) Carl

  How had she learned to write? “If I have a talent, it’s simply a God-given gift,” Maia said. “I simply tune in to the eternal. My characters speak to me. Sometimes I feel that I am simply channeling their words, their hopes, and their longings.”

  Chuck pressed her on how her skills were developed, asking if she had taken writing classes. “Oh, no!” Maia said. “Inspiration can not be regimented! Writing to please a professor would smother the creative impulse.”

  It made me glad I’m an accountant. We learn our professional skills from people who have already figured out standard ways to perform our required chores. We don’t have to start from scratch and teach ourselves—with or without “creative impulse.”

  But the interview also made me doubt the news Dolly had given me about Maia’s publisher. Dolly had been sure that the publishing house did nothing but vanity publications. Maia, however, gave Chuck a whole paragraph about how she had submitted her manuscript to the editor, how she had waited with bated breath, praying that it would be accepted, and how she had greeted the news with ecstasy.

  “When I heard from them, I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry,” she said. “I danced all around the house!”

  That didn’t sound as if the editor’s acceptance had included a bill for several thousand dollars. Maybe Dolly was wrong.

  Maybe that should be checked out. I had Aunt Nettie call the chief. Luckily she had the number of his cell phone. After she handed the phone to me, I quickly sketched Dolly’s belief that the publisher of Maia’s book only did vanity publishing, contrasting this with Maia’s account of selling her book.

  “It may not have anything to do with anything,” I said, “but it’s a little discrepancy, and that’s what you said you were interested in.”

  “Joe’s working for me full time,” Hogan said. “I’ll get him to check it out.”

  Aunt Nettie again spent the morning answering phone calls from concerned friends. The chief still had a Warner Pier patrolman stationed in the driveway to keep people from approaching the house, but the phone rang and rang. Aunt Nettie brought me a sandwich at noon, and I kept reading. By then I was back more than a year—like I said, once I learned which articles to check, I could go through a Gazette pretty fast.

  I made sure I looked through the obituaries and checked the names of survivors. The Snows and Ensmingers had faced another family funeral, I learned, when a cousin had died a little more than a year ago. She’d lived at South Haven, but the Gazette ran the obituary because she was originally from Warner Pier. Or I guess that was the reason. Tracy Roderick had lost a relative, too—her grandfather. Her mother was listed among the survivors of a “leading Warner County fruit farmer” six months earlier. Tracy herself had been in the paper a lot, because of her class activities. Most students at WPHS were.

  Another source of local names, I discovered, was activities of the various planning commissions in the county. I remembered that the Baileys had tried to build a rental unit on their property. The commission said no.

  Actually, the two square miles I was studying had come before the township or village planning and zoning bodies fairly often. Property values in the area had skyrocketed in recent years, and developers were trying to buy up property and put in whole additions. Mostly the commissions hadn’t agreed to this, though one new addition with about twenty-five lots had been approved. I already knew this; when the wind was from the east, I could hear the dirt-moving equipment from my bedroom.

  By then I was two years back, to a time before I moved to Warner Pier. Another developer, I learned from the Gazettes, had applied for permission to develop forty acres closer to Aunt Nettie’s house. I checked the location, and it was right next to the Grundy cottage. Hmmm, I thought, Silas could have sold another piece of property—just the way he’d sold the one farther south—and made a bundle.

  I was surprised when I read that he had opposed the addition. In fact, he’d not only come before the township commission to speak against it, he’d stated that he was refusing an offer from the developer.

  “That land’s been in my family for more than a hundred years,” Silas told the commission. “It’s good orchard land. It would be an out-and-out crime to cut down those trees and wreck that farmland. I won’t go along with it.”

  Silas’s refusal to sell forced the developer to limit the size of the project, and the commission turned the deal down, saying they didn’t want the area developed piecemeal.

  This episode seemed weird. Silas hadn’t objected to development a mile south. Why had he sabotaged it there? I turned to the map again.

  The plot the developer had tried to subdivide was just south of the Grundy cottage. He must have wanted to buy the cottage and the orchard behind it, where the rifleman had hidden and shot at Aubrey.

  I gnawed a knuckle and thought about the Grundy cottage. Why wouldn’t Silas sell it? He didn’t rent it out. He could have torn it down and added the lot to his orchards, but he hadn’t done that, either. He just let it sit. That didn’t seem like wise use of his resources, but he had the reputation of being a sharp businessman. I wondered idly just what Vernon and Maia would do with it.

  Aunt Nettie had been not only answering the phone but also entertaining Monte. Now he came lumbering into the room on his big puppy feet, looking for a little attention from me. I got up, found an old sock, and played tug of war with him for a little bit. When he tired I gave him the sock to chew on, sat down, and ate my leftover from lunch—a mocha pyramid bonbon (“Milky coffee interior in a dark chocolate pyramid.”).

  That chocolate, I remembered, was Maggie McNutt’s favorite. I decided to skip ahead in the Gazette s, back to the September she and Ken were hired. In a town the size of Warner Pier, new teachers are always profiled. It took me only a few minutes to find the headline: FIVE NEW TEACHERS JOIN WP FACULTY RANKS.

  Chuck hadn’t been editor in those days, but the story was strictly routine, obviously taken from the resumes of all the new teachers.

  Ken, I learned, had received a bachelor’s in math from Kalamazoo College, then had gotten a master’s in education at the University of Michigan. He’d been a member of the mathematics honorary society and the Young Conservatives. Throughout the first paragraph, his background seemed as nerdy as Ken looked and acted.

  Then I came to the second paragraph. “Before attending college,” the article said, “McNutt served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps.”

  The marine corps? I was stunned. Ken looked as if a twenty-mile hike would do him in. How had he managed the marine corps?

  The article concluded with a list of Ken’s marine corps experiences. He’d served in the artillery section of the marines, and he’d been stationed in the Mideast, as well as several places in the United States. He’d even earned medals.

  And one of them was for marksmanship.

  Wow. Not only was Ken a much tougher guy than he looked, he was certified as a rifle shot.

  Of the people I’d been looking over, two took part in activities involving rifles. Vernon was an avid deer hunter—even writing letters to the editor about the sport—and Ken a former marine who had earned medals for marksmanship.

  And Ken had been near the Grundy cottage the afternoon when someone shot at Aubrey.

  But my stomach went into two knots. I liked Ken. I didn’t want him to be involved in all this mess—Silas’s death, Aubrey’s disappearance, the attack on me.

  I got so excited that I jumped to my feet and paced up and down. This convinced Monte that I was ready to play again. Maybe I was. A little exercise with a rolled-up sock got me calmed down, but it made Monte whimper and head for the back door. Aunt Nettie took him for a walk around the yard, and I went back to my reading. Having learned the scoop on Ken, I was eager to find out about Maggie.

  But I didn’t learn much more than I already knew. She and I were pretty good friends. In fact, I would have sworn that Maggie’s life was an open book. She was ready to talk about anything—her
family, her college years, her time in California. I would have thought I knew all there was to know about her.

  Then she’d told me about that threat from Aubrey, his warning that he could blackmail her if she told anybody about him. I still hadn’t figured that one out.

  But the story in the Gazette simply recapped things I already knew. Maggie had studied drama at Northwestern. She had worked in California for seven years. She had returned to the University of Michigan to earn her master’s degree. Her hobbies were birding, decorating, and baking bread.

  While in California, Maggie had worked at the Pasadena Playhouse and had roles in several films. A list of the films followed.

  And one of them was a western. I’d seen it. It was about a wagon train of women, left alone by the men of their party, who withstood an Indian attack. It had been a real shoot-’em-up.

  Did that mean Maggie had learned to shoot a rifle?

  Well, so what? I had fired a twenty-two myself. My Texas cousin, thrilled with the rifle he’d gotten for his sixteenth birthday, had taken me out to show me his prowess at knocking cans off fence posts. He condescendingly gave me a turn. He wasn’t a bit pleased when I could destroy tin cans as well as he could.

  I paced the bedroom floor again. I liked Ken. I liked Maggie. I considered them close friends. I did not want close friends involved. I wanted the villain to be Aubrey or some unknown cohort he had brought to Warner Pier. I wanted this crime wave to be the fault of outsiders, not hometown folks.

  But just after I had found Silas Snow’s body, I had almost run into the red Volkswagen with a WPHS sticker in the back window. There was a ninety percent chance that that car had been driven by either Ken or Maggie.

  I just had to ask Maggie if she had been out there or not.

  I walked into the next room, checked my purse for Maggie’s cell phone number, then punched it in. I was so intent on reaching Maggie that someone answered the phone before I remembered I was supposed to be dead.

  Chapter 17

  To make things worse, the person who answered the phone was Tracy Roderick.

  I made some sound—half snort and half gasp—and hung up.

  Whew. That was a narrow escape. Tracy would have recognized my voice after one syllable.

  But I did want to talk to Maggie. Did I have to run it through Chief Jones? Or could I simply get Aunt Nettie to summon Maggie and Ken to the house and question them for me? Besides, wasn’t it time I was found, safe? Being a missing person was beginning to give me a severe case of cabin fever.

  I was still standing there with my hand on the telephone when it rang again. I jumped a mile. After climbing down from the ceiling, I realized I had picked up the receiver, since I had it my hand when I jumped and it was still there when I came down. Luckily, I hadn’t made a noise, and I had the presence of mind to keep quiet while Aunt Nettie answered the kitchen phone.

  Her voice was cautious. “Hello.”

  “Oh, Mrs. TenHuis! Have they found Lee?” The voice was Tracy’s.

  “I don’t know anything new, Tracy. I’m sorry.”

  “I just had the weirdest experience, Mrs. TenHuis. I’m at play rehearsal—”

  “At the high school?”

  “Yes. I’m at play rehearsal, and I was sitting beside Mrs. McNutt’s cell phone, and it just rang. And whoever it was didn’t say anything. They just hung up. But it was so weird!”

  “Why? It must have been a wrong number.”

  “I know it’s crazy, but . . . you know that little noise Lee makes sometimes? Like when her computer acts up? A kind of a disgusted sniffle?”

  “I think I know what you mean, Tracy.”

  “Whoever called made exactly that noise! Mrs. TenHuis, I just know it meant something! You know! I just feel sure it meant Lee’s all right!”

  I stood there holding the telephone, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt awful because I was fooling Tracy, making her worry because she thought I was missing in very suspicious circumstances. At the same time, her gushing conclusions about the “message” my snort had given were hilarious. I covered the receiver and shook all over, trying to stifle my laughter.

  Tracy was talking again. “Mrs. TenHuis, I said a prayer for Lee. I just know the Lord will help you find her.”

  Aunt Nettie’s voice was kind. “Tracy, I really appreciate that. You’re a lovely young woman, and your prayers are really important.”

  “Well, Lee really makes working at TenHuis Chocolade fun. And I appreciated her helping me with my hair. But it’s just so weird. First Mr. Armstrong disappears. Then Lee. It’s as if there’s some mal . . . mal . . . mal-violent force at work.”

  Tracy’s spin on “malevolent” made me feel better about my own twisted tongue.

  After a few more soothing words from Aunt Nettie, Tracy hung up. I was still standing there with the receiver in my hand when Aunt Nettie also hung up. But I had stopped laughing. I was crying. I just had to be found alive—quick. From the chief’s standpoint, my disappearance might be helping solve the case. But it was making all my friends dreadfully unhappy.

  And I was just beginning to realize how many friends I had.

  I sat down on my unmade bed, found a tissue in the box on the bedside table, wiped my eyes, and blew my nose. I heard Aunt Nettie coming up the stairs, and I didn’t even jump up and make the bed. I just left it unmade, the tumbled sheets and blankets clearly showing it had been occupied by two people.

  Aunt Nettie poked her head into the room. “Did you hear Tracy?”

  “Yes. I feel terrible. We’ve got to tell Hogan that this disappearance isn’t working. It’s just too hard on people.”

  “He’s supposed to come by later. We can carry on until then, I guess. Did you call Maggie?”

  “Yes. Like an idiot.”

  “It’s lucky you didn’t say something, instead of just sniffing.”

  “I know! Poor Tracy would have known my voice in a minute. She would have thought I was a voice from the beyond and planned a seance.”

  “Why did you call?”

  “I thought of something I wanted to ask Maggie, and I just automatically picked up the phone. I completely forgot I was on the missing list.”

  “Why did you want to talk to Maggie?”

  “About her alibi, I guess.”

  “Alibi? For what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll figure another way to approach it. I guess I’d better get back to my Gazettes.”

  “And I’ll get back to Monte. I think he wants to go out and play. Again.”

  Aunt Nettie went back downstairs. For a moment I envied her. It was a beautiful day, though the wind seemed to be turning to the north. At least she got to go outside. I was cooped up in a room with heavy blankets on the windows. And I was itching to talk to Maggie.

  I began to make the bed, and I found dark hair on one of the pillows. Which naturally brought me a few fond memories of Joe.

  “Joe!” I said aloud. “Joe could call Maggie for me.”

  There was one catch in that. I couldn’t ask Joe to question Maggie without telling him why I thought it would be important to find out if Maggie had been near Silas’s fruit stand at the time the old man was killed. I couldn’t ask him to question her without revealing that Maggie had a link with Aubrey. And I’d promised Maggie I wouldn’t tell anybody—anybody —that he was threatening to blackmail her.

  The whole thing was a mess, and I’d walked right into it on my own two feet by trying to protect Maggie and Ken.

  When Ken had driven by in the red Volkswagen, I could have immediately said, “Gee, I think that’s the car I nearly ran into near Silas’s fruit stand right after I found his body.” If I had, then Hogan Jones could have called Maggie and Ken as a matter of routine and asked if they’d been out near the fruit stand. But if I brought it up now, the chief was going to want to know why I hadn’t mentioned it earlier. I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t wanted to link Maggie to Aubrey in even a remote way.
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  “Why?” he’d ask. “Why didn’t you tell me you saw that Volkswagen near Silas’s fruit stand?”

  I’d answer, “Until I saw Ken out at the Grundy cottage in the red VW, I didn’t realize that’s who I’d seen.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me after you saw Ken in the red Volkswagen?”

  “Because right after I saw him, before I had a chance to tell anybody anything, someone took a shot at Aubrey.”

  “So?”

  “Well.” I pictured myself fumbling around for an answer. “Because I didn’t want you to know there was any link between Maggie and Aubrey.”

  “And why shouldn’t I know that?”

  And the only good answer I could have would be, “Because Aubrey was blackmailing her, and that makes it look as if she had a motive for doing him harm.”

  Maggie did have a motive to wishing Aubrey harm, and therefore Ken did, too. Maybe it was time I let Maggie answer for herself. And let Ken answer for himself. I couldn’t imagine what either of them could have had to do with Silas Snow.

  In fact, I couldn’t picture Maggie doing anything to hurt anyone. But I wasn’t so sure about Ken, at least since I discovered he had been a marine. Ken had enough training to know how to kill someone. And I was beginning to suspect Ken might have a lot of hidden depths.

  I had boxed myself in. I couldn’t avoid telling the chief about Maggie’s link to Aubrey, though I didn’t have the faintest idea of how that could link to Silas, and a link to Silas seemed to be part of the mix.

  I gave up. This was too confusing for me. I was simply going to have to turn it over to Chief Jones. I went downstairs and asked Aunt Nettie to call him.

  Her eyes got wide. “What’s wrong?”