by JoAnna Carl
Oh. As an attorney with a busy practice, Webb always had lots of minor odd jobs he needed help with. He’d asked Joe for help before, but Joe had always declined. I put the whole thing out of my mind. I sent greetings to Webb’s wife, and we promised to get together soon. Then I hung up.
I hadn’t forgotten Pamela, even if I couldn’t talk to Joe about her.
Apparently Pamela—whoever she really was—had convinced the abused women’s rescue group that she was Christina Meachum and was badly in need of help escaping her dangerous ex-husband. But if Pamela wasn’t Christina, why had Harold Belcher shown up in Warner Pier, demanding that Aunt Nettie and I tell him where she was?
And where was the real Christina?
I stared at the wall. My discoveries were beginning to sink in. I knew I had to find Hogan and tell him that I didn’t think our Pamela was Christina Meachum Belcher.
I took my time doing it. I put on my ski jacket, boots, and hat. I went out of the shop and locked the door behind myself. I walked slowly down the street and over a block to City Hall. I sauntered around the building and into the police department, steeling myself to talk to Hogan.
He wasn’t there.
The office was empty except for the secretarydispatcher, a woman named Judy VanRynn. “You just missed them,” she said. “Hogan and Lieutenant Underwood left about ten minutes ago. They went over to the Lake Michigan Inn to quiz that O’Sullivan guy.”
For a moment I couldn’t remember who in the world O’Sullivan was. I guess I looked as blank as I felt, because Judy explained.
“That other Atlanta private eye.”
“O’Sullivan! Oh! Did he come back to Warner Pier?”
“Yah.” Judy answered with that western Michigan version of “yeah” that sounds almost like the “Ja” of the original Dutch settlers. She picked up a pink message pad. “Can I tell Hogan what you need?”
“Yes. It’s a message for either Hogan or Lieutenant Underwood.”
“Okay.”
I knelt beside her desk and lowered my voice, almost to a whisper, even though only the two of us were in the office. “Tell them I don’t think Pamela is Christina.”
Now it was Judy’s turn to look blank. “You don’t think Pamela is Christina? What the heck does that mean?”
She spoke without lowering her voice. The words just bounced around all over the police department, followed by a giant silence as I tried to think how to explain.
But the silence didn’t last. It was broken by a huge roar.
“Not Christina? Then where the hell is my wife?”
Chocolate Chat Making Chocolate Chocolate
From bean to bar, producing chocolate for eating is a complicated process.
Fat—cocoa butter—is removed to make it a dry powder. It may be treated with alkalines, or “Dutched.” This powder is the basis of cocoa.
Fat is then returned to the cocoa, and sugar is added, as well as other flavorings, such as vanilla. For milk chocolate, of course, milk is added—either powdered, condensed, or in small clumps.
The resulting mass is then “conched.” This is a grinding and mixing process that may go on for days and produces the velvety texture of good chocolate. The earliest conching machines used grinding stones shaped like conch shells.
“Tempering” is a process used to keep chocolate from developing “bloom.” Bloom is those white spots found on chocolate that has become too warm or too damp. It doesn’t hurt the chocolate for eating, but is not considered attractive.
Happily, chocolate that gets “out of temper” can be melted and tempered again.
Chapter 17
Harold Belcher was coming out of the hall that led to the men’s room, and he seemed to be in attack mode.
He roared again. “What do you mean, Pamela isn’t Christina?”
“I don’t know!” I blurted out the words, so scared that I nearly left a puddle on the floor. “Everybody said she was Christina, but I looked at her pictures, and I can’t see it!”
He glared at me. I fought the impulse to hide under Judy’s desk and forced myself to glare back. Then I heard my voice again. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Judy had jumped to her feet and was making some effort at controlling her office. “Just calm down!”
Harold ignored her and answered my question. “I came in to talk to your blankety-blank police chief! Everybody kept telling me to check with the authorities, so I thought I’d do it. Now you say you’ve lost Christina!”
“I never had Christina!” That was me.
“Calm down! Everybody stop yelling!” That was Judy.
“Where the hell is my wife?”
“Ex-wife!”
“Calm down!”
Either Judy prevailed, or Harold and I ran out of things to yell at each other. Anyway, Harold didn’t seem to have a meat cleaver or any other weapon, and his fists were not balled into clubs. I threw myself down in one of the visitor’s chairs. “Judy, you’d better get Hogan over here pinto! I mean, pronto! I’ll wait for him!”
Harold growled and sat down in a chair that faced mine. We both folded our arms and glared at each other.
“Yeah,” Harold said. “Get the chief over here. And that state cop. Let’s figure this out.”
Judy punched buttons on the radio. “Hogan, you better come back to the office,” she said. “I’ve got a minor riot going on over here. Harold Belcher came in, and he was waiting to see you. Then Lee Woodyard showed up, and she says she has some new information. They’re not getting along.”
There was a pause. Then Judy broke off the radio connection. “Hogan and Lieutenant Underwood will be here right away. You two just sit there and stay calm.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. The truth was that I felt fairly safe inside the police department—even with no uniformed officers present. It didn’t seem likely that Harold Belcher would go into his butcher act right in the police station. I had no idea what he would do if I left and he followed me outside, and I didn’t want to find out. I probably wasn’t thinking rationally. But I stayed put.
Judy must have convinced Hogan of the seriousness of the situation, because he and Lieutenant Underwood were there within five minutes. Then real calm prevailed, replacing the armed camp that the police department office had been for Harold Belcher, Judy, and me.
First, Hogan and Underwood took me into Hogan’s office, and closed the door firmly, leaving Harold in the outer office. I explained my research and the reasons why I had concluded that the “Pamela” Aunt Nettie and I had given sanctuary was not Christina Belcher—even though Sarajane and Myrl had believed that she was.
Hogan asked the first question. “Did this woman—let’s keep calling her Pamela—ever tell you she was Christina Meachum Belcher?”
“No. I never learned who she was supposed to be until after she had left. Aunt Nettie and Sarajane just told me that she was in desperate danger from her ex-husband. When I learned she was supposed to be Christina Belcher, I could see why they thought so.”
“But you don’t think she looks like the pictures of Christina Belcher?”
“At first I did. Remember that I was told that she’d been brutally beaten. The pictures I found of Christina were taken before her injuries, so I didn’t expect her to look exactly like them. Pamela’s face is misshapen, for example. And she had dyed her hair. But the eyes have a real close resemblance. At first I felt sure it was the same person. It’s only within the past half hour that I realized that Pamela’s ears and hairline were different from Christina’s.”
Hogan looked at Underwood. “Then who is this Pamela? Besides being the main suspect in at least one murder.”
Neither of them had an answer. They told me I could go. But as I got up, Hogan spoke. “Pamela spent the night at your house?”
“Yes.”
“Have you cleaned the room yet?”
“I stripped the bed and washed the sheets, but I haven’t swept. And I haven’t touched th
e bathroom she used.”
“Don’t. Leave everything. We may want to send the crime scene crew out there.”
“I guess you might find fingerprints. Or a hair or something you could use to check the DNA.”
Underwood sighed. “I hope we figure it out sooner than that.”
Hogan had told me the state lab was backed up for months with DNA checks. So I nodded and left, being careful not to look at Harold Belcher as I went out the door.
I hadn’t walked more than half a block when I realized that I had not told Hogan and Underwood about one thing. When they asked if I had cleaned Pamela’s room, I forgot to mention finding the class ring, the man’s class ring on a chain. The one marked FSC, with a fierce cat of some sort silhouetted on the blue stone.
I immediately turned around and went back to add that information. But I was too late. The two of them were closeted with Harold Belcher. Judy wasn’t willing to call Hogan on the phone, and I certainly wasn’t willing to knock on the door. So I wrote a note about the ring, and I left it with Judy. Then I went back to the office, feeling that I’d done all I could.
But, naturally, I was still curious. So I got out my New York Times World Almanac and looked at the “Colleges and Universities” list. While there were state universities listed beginning with F—Florida State, for example, and Fort Hays State in Kansas—there were only three “state colleges” that began with that letter. Farwell State College, Farwell, Oklahoma; Fitchburg State College, Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and Framingham State College, Framingham, Massachusetts.
Hmm. Pamela pronounced her R’s, so I didn’t see her as having a New England background. I checked the Internet for Farwell State in Farwell, Oklahoma. Naturally the school had a Web site.
Farwell State had been founded more than a hundred years ago as a teachers’ college, the Web site said. That left me unsurprised. I knew the colleges in western states—like Oklahoma and my old home, Texas—had been established for that reason. The churches had established colleges to train ministers, and the states had set up colleges to train teachers. Other professions and fields of knowledge had come later.
The Farwell State mascot was the Cougar, and its colors were gold and blue. That went along with the color and mascot on the class ring. The college Web site had plenty of “Cougar Spirit.” It bragged about the college’s accomplishments. It didn’t just list athletic successes, either. There was a whole section on academic honors, and another on alumni who had made it big.
I could tell the Web site hadn’t been updated recently. The athletic section was over a year old. The actress they listed as nominated for an Academy Award had since won, but that news wasn’t there. Farwell State needed to hire a new webmaster.
But the mascot and the color of the stone in the class ring made me willing to bet that whoever the woman we knew as Pamela was, she had had some connection to the Oklahoma college.
I was curious enough that I looked through the list of prominent alumni in more detail. And there, under the “Business” category, I found an interesting name.
“Patricia Youngman.” She had graduated exactly twenty years earlier. For a moment I couldn’t place the name, though it sounded familiar. Then I read the description of her job.
“Chief of Staff to Marson Endicott, CEO of the Prodigal Corporation.”
“Golly!” I breathed the word.
Patricia Youngman—the woman Potty Mouth had cursed on the television. The woman who had fled the country with the Prodigal Corporation records. The woman both Marson Endicott and—supposedly—federal investigators were trying to find.
But Patricia Youngman couldn’t be in Warner Pier, Michigan. She was in Africa, in some country that had no extradition treaty with the United States. I’d seen her on CNN.
Hadn’t I?
I pictured the woman I’d seen on the news report. She had a blond pageboy, a floppy hat, and big sunglasses. Heck, she could have been anybody.
Could Pamela be Patricia Youngman?
Nah.
But I decided to check. I Googled her name and pulled up ten thousand-plus references to the famous fugitive.
And the very first one showed a good clear picture of a woman with a broad, square forehead.
It didn’t seem possible. But that forehead was like the one Pamela had kept carefully covered by heavy bangs until she forgot and pushed her hair back.
This time I didn’t hesitate. I reached for the phone and called Hogan.
He still wasn’t available, and Judy VanRynn was getting tired of taking messages from me. He and Lieutenant Underwood had, she said, disposed of Harold Belcher and gone back to the Lake Michigan Inn to deal with O’Sullivan.
What the heck, I decided, I’d go to the motel and try to find him. I put on coat, scarf, and hat, then headed out.
The Lake Michigan Inn is the lodging place most lacking in character of any lodging place in Warner Pier. We have quaint Victorian bed-and-breakfast inns out the kazoo, we have two old motels that have been remodeled into suites, we have a 1920s-era hotel that’s been seriously renovated, but the Lake Michigan Inn is the only ordinary, plain vanilla motel in town.
Its owner lives there, so I guess it’s cheap to operate. I mean, he’s not turning the utilities off for the winter, so he keeps it open all year.
As I drove into the parking lot, it was almost empty. There were no law enforcement cars, either Warner Pier PD or Michigan State Police. There were only two private cars. One was a nondescript sedan with an Illinois license plate—the one I’d speculated belonged to the two guys in city overcoats I’d seen in Hogan’s office. The second was a tan sedan with a Georgia license plate. That would belong to O’Sullivan. I didn’t want to talk to him.
O’Sullivan was parked in the slot where I’d seen Rhett-the-butler’s Cadillac Escalade the previous evening. The memory made me smile, and once again I wondered if Rhett had found local companionship, or if he had imported a girlfriend. Or maybe a guy friend. With a man who sometimes wore a pinkie ring, I wouldn’t want to guess.
I paused in the parking lot and considered Rhett’s pinkie ring. It had had a blue stone with some sort of black design imposed on it. Had it been a class ring?
Surely it couldn’t have been a ring matching the one Pamela had lost in our spare bedroom.
Ridiculous.
But Farwell State College could tell us. The college was sure to have an alumni relations office, and if it was anything like my alma mater—the University of Texas Dallas—they never lost track of an alumnus, at least not of one who had a paying job. They might not tell a plain old citizen like me where those alumni were, but they’d tell a detective. It wasn’t privileged information. It had probably been printed in the FSC alumni magazine.
My heart began to pound as I remembered something else. Rhett had known Patricia Youngman. When Joe asked him about her, he answered, “She hired me.”
And Patricia Youngman had a broad, square forehead like Pamela’s.
“They’re going steady?” I spoke aloud. Of course the idea was silly. High school kids exchanged class rings, not fortyish adults.
But still . . .
I decided it was time for me to hand my speculations over to Hogan and Lieutenant Underwood. And I’d hand the class ring over at the same time. I put the van in drive and headed for the house, where that ring ought to be in a pottery catchall vase on the mantelpiece.
As I drove the two miles to the house, I felt smug. I’d made some deductions that sounded good to me, and now, virtuously, I was going to turn them over to the proper authorities.
The main thing that bothered me was Joe’s whereabouts. It was simply strange for him to disappear without a word to anyone. So I was greatly relieved when I saw his truck sitting in the driveway.
I jumped out of the van and rushed into the house, calling out his name. “Joe! Joe, where have you been? I was beginning to get worried.”
I heard a movement in the living room, so I hurried toward the sound
. “Joe? I talked to Webb, he’s been trying to find you. So has your mom. Where were you?”
I tried to come to a stop as I went through the dining room, but I stumbled over my heavy boots, and I nearly went flying. I caught myself on the door frame and stopped, astonished by the figure standing by the fireplace.
It wasn’t Joe. It was a redheaded woman holding a pistol. She had it pointed at me.
Chapter 18
The broad forehead told me who she was.
I was facing Patricia Youngman, one of the mostwanted fugitives in the world, and she had a gun.
She certainly looked different from the way she had when disguised as Pamela. Her eye makeup was tasteful and restrained, and her face was symmetrical. Her eyes were blue instead of brown.
But Patricia couldn’t possibly be aware that I had figured out who she was. I hoped she didn’t even know that Myrl’s body had been found.
Was I clever enough to hide my knowledge of her identity? Or would hiding it be clever? Should I simply admit I recognized her?
And if so, who was she? Or who did she want me to think she was? Pamela? Christina? Patricia?
At least she hadn’t shot me yet.
I eyed the pistol, took a deep breath, and jumped off the dock into deep water. “Pamela! Your hair! I like it short. And the color’s great. But I thought you would be far, far away by now! What are you doing here?”
Pamela kept the pistol pointed at me. “I hadn’t finished my business in Warner Pier.”
“Your business?” I tried to look confused. Pamela’s business had been a routine job at a chocolate company. “Oh. Well, if there’s any way I can help you, let me know.”
I looked vacantly around the room. “Where’s Joe?”
“He went somewhere.”
“Without his truck? I guess he hasn’t gone far.”
Pamela—I tried to make myself think of her as Pamela—smirked. It was the same expression she’d had three days earlier when I told her Derrick Valentine had showed me a picture of her.