The Chocolate Cupid Killings

by JoAnna Carl

  “I never needed this corkscrew before,” Joe said.

  “What do you need it for now?”

  “I could use a drink. If we get out of here, my next project will be to put in some wine racks.”

  I chuckled appreciatively and quietly. If I was going to be imprisoned in a Michigan basement, it was good to have a fellow prisoner who tried to keep my spirits up.

  Joe kept digging at the wood of the window frame. We could both see that it would take days to make any headway with only a pocketknife and a one-inch pipe. Plus the window frame was screwed to the foundation. Even with the piece of iron pipe from the bed frame, we weren’t getting out of that window anytime soon. We couldn’t tear the window out quietly. And if Patricia Youngman heard us, she’d be down that stairway in a second, spraying bullets in all directions.

  In the meantime, Joe was standing on one leg, his head back at an awkward angle, working at a task that was higher than his head. He had to be in agony.

  I moved close to him. “Can I take a turn?”

  “Maybe later. Look around down here and see if you can find any other useful objects.”

  I blinked away a couple of tears. I knew Joe was merely giving me a job to keep me busy. We were at Patricia Youngman’s mercy. I moved over to the old storage shelves, partly because turning away kept Joe from seeing that I was crying.

  The shelves were nearly empty. Aunt Nettie and I had cleared out the TenHuis collection of china cups with no handles, a dog dish for a long-ago pet, an electric percolator with a frayed cord, and other junk. We’d actually dusted the shelves. To prove it, we’d left the dust rag.

  Dust rag was the right name for the old towel I saw on the bottom shelf. The fabric was permeated with dust and stained with grease. Gross. I shoved the rag aside.

  And under it was a roll of duct tape.

  I picked it up. They say duct tape can do anything, but I didn’t see how it could get that window frame out without making any noise.

  Joe was speaking softly. “It would be a snap to get this window out, if we just didn’t have to be quiet.”

  “How?”

  “Break the glass.”

  “What about the frames that hold the panes in place?”

  “Those are flimsy. I could yank those out in a heartbeat—if it weren’t for the glass. But if I take this iron bar to the glass, the television isn’t going to hide the noise when it breaks. Besides, we’d have glass all over the place.”

  I looked again at the duct tape. I found the end and scratched at it with my fingernail. What if the tape had been there twenty years and was completely dried up?

  I got hold of the end and pulled the tape back. It came loose with a satisfying rasp. I nearly forgot to whisper. “Joe!”

  Joe whirled toward me. He stared at the duct tape. He breathed hard; then he hobbled the two steps it took to reach me, and he threw his arms around me. We stood there hugging each other.

  His lips were near my ear. “Where did you find that?”

  “On the bottom shelf. Under a rag.”

  “I lost that roll of duct tape when we were working down here last summer. I looked everywhere and finally went out to the truck and got a new roll. And all the time it was lurking here, waiting to save our lives.”

  He hopped back to the window and in three minutes he had each pane of the window plastered with two layers of duct tape.

  “Now,” he said. “We have to pray that breaking the window doesn’t make so much noise that Patricia Youngman comes down here.”

  “How about if I make a commotion? Bang on the door.”

  “Too dangerous. If she fires through the door . . .”

  “If we can unscrew the rest of that bed frame, I can throw bed knobs at the door.”

  I dragged the bed frame over, both head and foot, and Joe and I unscrewed the sixteen iron knobs somebody had thought were ornamental.

  Then I positioned myself at the bottom of the stairs. Joe took his place beside the duct-taped window. We counted three. I began to throw the bed knobs at the door at the top of the stairs, two or three at a time, and Joe began to hit the window with the metal rod. Between us, we made a horrible din.

  “Help!” I yelled as loudly as I could. “Help! Call an ambulance! Please! He’s dying!”

  I heard Patricia Youngman’s footsteps overhead. She was running through the dining room, into the kitchen. When she reached the back hall—thank God our old house amplifies every sound made in it—I ran around behind the chimney.

  When I peeked at Joe, I saw that he had stopped hitting the windows.

  Bam! Bam! Two shots plowed through the door. I didn’t want to know where they hit.

  “Shut up!” Patricia Youngman screamed the words. “I’ll be leaving soon. If you stay quiet, I’ll slide the bolt open before I go. If you keep yelling, I’ll leave you to starve.”

  She didn’t seem to expect an answer. She tromped back through the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room. She didn’t turn the television off. I’ll swear I heard the couch creak when she sat back down.

  Joe was pulling the glass out of the window. As he’d hoped, the duct tape had held it together. Only one or two pieces fell to the floor. I picked them up.

  He knocked the glass out around the edges, then used the metal bar to break out the small strips of wood that had held the panes in place.

  “Now all we have to do is dig out through three feet of snow,” he said.

  “I can do that. You sit down.”

  “I’ll make you a shovel.”

  Joe used his pocket knife to dig two or three nails out of one of the flimsy storage shelves. When I again urged him to sit down, he didn’t argue. He went back to the stairs and sat down on one of the lower steps.

  We were a long way from out of there. At least three feet of snow was piled up on the west side of the house.

  I used the board to drag snow into the basement. Luckily, I had gloves in my coat pocket. But I couldn’t reach very far outside the window—I may be nearly six feet tall, but that window was even higher than my head. And there was nothing to stand on.

  Or was there?

  I eyed the wonderful bed frame again. I dragged the headboard—does an iron bedstead have a headboard? Whatever it was called, it would have been at the head of the bed. I pulled it over and propped it against the wall, sideways. Like a ladder.

  I looked around to see Joe silently applauding.

  By standing on the headboard as if it were a ladder, I was able to reach farther outside the window and drag more snow inside. In a few minutes Joe came over and insisted on taking a turn. In about fifteen minutes the board pushed through to the outside.

  Silently, we did a high five.

  I got back up on our improvised ladder and enlarged the hole in the snow. By then it was dark outside. I didn’t know if that was good or not. If Patricia Youngman looked out a west window, she might be less likely to see us. But there was snow everywhere. Moving figures would be hard to miss against all that white in daytime or at night.

  Joe checked the opening. Then he stepped down. “Out you go. But look around carefully before you get out. Then run straight to the trees. Don’t get curious and look in a window to see what Patricia’s doing.”

  “No way! All I want is to get away from here. But you go first. It’ll be harder for you to get away because of your knee.”

  “No. I don’t want to be a male chauvinist, but my upper body strength is better than yours. I can pull myself out. You’ll get out faster if I give you a boost.”

  “But—”

  He put his arms around me. “I promise, Lee. I’ll be right out. Come on. We’ll have to use your jacket to pad the frame. There’s still some glass.”

  I climbed up, took off my jacket, and laid it across the bottom of the window frame. I climbed up the bedstead ladder and put my head and shoulder through. Joe boosted me up, then gave a terrific push on my bottom. Before I could realize what was happeni
ng, I was rolling in the snow underneath our bedroom windows. As instructed, I got to my feet and ran across the lawn to the trees. Once among them, I huddled behind a large evergreen and looked back.

  Sure enough, Joe’s head emerged—more slowly than mine had. He pulled himself out on the lawn. He twisted around and stuck his head back down the tunnel that led to the window. For a moment I thought he was going back inside. Then he was on his feet, waving my jacket in one hand. He staggered through the snow.

  He’d almost reached the trees when headlights turned into our lane.

  Talk about heart palpitations. Mine was racing with the same irregular rhythm of Joe’s limping run.

  Patricia Youngman had obviously been waiting for something or someone. This car had to be her appointment.

  I didn’t even care who it was. I was only afraid that Joe would get caught in the headlights.

  Joe obviously saw the danger. If you can stagger and run, he did it. By the time the lights reached the lawn, he was nearly to the trees. He fell down on my jacket and lay still. He told me later he was trying to visualize himself as a log.

  Apparently his effort worked, because the vehicle drove slowly by. Of course, it had so far been only a set of headlights to me, but as it drew up opposite our front door, the porch light abruptly came on.

  Now I could see the vehicle. It was a white Cadillac Escalade.

  Rhett?

  The Escalade stopped, and a window went down. Sure enough, after Patricia Youngman said something indistinguishable, Rhett’s voice came wafting over the snow. “Around to the side? Okay.”

  He drove on. I plunged out from behind my bush and helped Joe to his feet. I tugged at him, trying to get him into the trees.

  “Not so fast,” he whispered. “I nearly did my knee in with that belly flop.”

  He got into the trees somehow. I found a log and dusted the snow off of it. Then I draped my jacket around his shoulders and tried to get him to sit on the log.

  But Joe was fumbling in his pocket. “Here.” He thrust his cell phone into my hand.

  “You had a cell phone all the time?” My whisper was angry.

  “Yes. I tried using it as soon as I fell down the steps. No service.”

  “Oh.”

  “It didn’t seem tactful to bring it up when we couldn’t use it.”

  Shielding the phone from the house—I didn’t want Patricia to look out and see suspicious lights in the woods—I checked. Still no service. I silently cursed our cell phone carrier. Our phones worked reliably only from the second floor. Why, oh, why hadn’t Patricia Youngman locked us upstairs?

  I whispered again. “Can you walk over to the Baileys’ house?”

  “Not the Baileys’. That’s the wrong direction. We’d have to pass the living room windows. You’d probably better go without me. Go to the Garretts’ house. If they’re not home and the cell phone won’t work there, Dick told me there’s a key wired to that little holly bush by the step.”

  “But—”

  “When you get to a phone, call the cops. Then call this number.” He repeated it twice.

  I parroted it back. “Who’s that?”

  “It’s the FBI.”

  “Joe, how did you just happen to know the FBI’s phone number?”

  “I’ll tell you later. The faster you can get the cops here, the sooner we’ll be safe. I’ll follow you, but I can’t hurry. You’ve got to do it.”

  I did it. I left the shelter of the trees, and I ran alongside them until I got to the drive. Then I ran down the drive—or I tiptoed beside the drive. It had been plowed, but there were still icy patches. A bad fall could be deadly.

  I got to Lake Shore Drive, crossed it, and did my tiptoe act down the Garretts’ drive. It was longer than ours. And darker. And just as slippery. There are streetlights here and there in our part of Warner Pier, but the darn trees keep the light from reaching the ground, even in the winter, when most of the trees are bare.

  Periodically, I checked Joe’s phone. There was still no service.

  The Garretts have a security light in their drive, and the snow around their Craftsman-style bungalow sparkled like diamonds in its glare. Their walk had been cleared, and their porch swept. There was a light in the living room.

  But no one answered the door.

  I pounded on it three times, but no one came to greet me. No one moved across the living room.

  The holly bush. I turned to it, but before I tackled searching it for a wired-on key, I tried Joe’s phone one more time. There was one bar of service.

  If only I were a little higher up.

  I jumped off the porch and went racing around the house, plunging through the snow. When Garnet and Dick Garrett took over her family’s summer cottage, they remodeled it. One addition was a second-story deck on the back of the house, a deck that was higher than the trees blocking their view of Lake Michigan. Joe and I had attended the party they held to inaugurate that deck.

  There was snow on the steps, but I was able to brush it off and climb up. I checked the phone one more time. Oh, glory! Three bars.

  I called the Warner Pier police dispatcher. After five o’clock, 9-1-1 calls were handled by the county sheriff’s office, thirty miles away. But I stayed on the line until I was sure the dispatcher grasped the situation, and until I was sure she understood that I was asking that no sirens be used.

  “We want to catch these people,” I said. “Not let them get away.”

  “Right. Now, stay on the line.”

  “No. I have to make another call.”

  The FBI. Joe had told me to call the FBI. I didn’t understand why. But he had even known the number.

  I called it.

  The voice that answered was curt. “Yes.”

  “This is Lee Woodyard,” I said. “Joe Woodyard’s wife. He told me to call.”

  “Yes?”

  “Patricia Youngman is in our house. Joe and I managed to get out. Joe is hurt. Youngman is meeting with Rhett Spivey. He just drove up.”

  “What are—”

  “I can’t talk anymore. The cops are on the way. You’re invited, too. No sirens! I’ve got to get back to Joe.”

  I punched the phone off and started back down the snowy steps of the deck. I skidded down the Garretts’ road, across Lake Shore Drive, and back down our drive. I kept a close eye for a vehicle coming toward me—whether it was a Cadillac Escalade or my van or Joe’s truck, I didn’t want to get caught on that drive.

  When I got to our lawn, I took off through the snow, following my own tracks back to the spot where I’d left Joe. I wasn’t surprised when he wasn’t there. After all, he had said he would follow me as quickly as his knee would allow.

  Feeling like an Indian tracker, I tried to figure out which way he had gone by looking at footprints in the snow.

  I didn’t think Joe would have gone through the woods. The terrain was simply too rough for that to be practical. So I looked in the snow between the trees and the house. For one thing, the porch light and what little light there was from the sky gave me a slight amount of visibility there.

  And sure enough, I saw Joe’s tracks coming out of the trees. I expected them to turn toward the drive, basically taking the same route I had taken.

  But they didn’t. They went straight across the yard and back to the house.

  At first I thought I was imagining that. It seemed ludicrous. But I kept looking. There was my set of tracks, running from the house with toes pointed toward the trees. There were Joe’s tracks, following the same route. And there was another set of Joe’s tracks, headed back to the house.

  Nose to ground like a bloodhound, I moved across the yard. Joe’s second set of tracks led right to that window he and I had used to escape. Light was pouring out of it, logically enough, since we hadn’t turned out the ceiling bulb when we climbed out.

  My jacket was back on the window frame. I flopped down and looked inside.

  I could see Joe on the other side of the base
ment. Joe had gone back inside.

  Why had he done that? I could have wrung his neck.

  Well, I wasn’t going to find out lying on my stomach out in the snow. I turned around and scooted into the window feet-first.

  Finding the bedstead we’d used as a ladder wasn’t too easy, but I managed to get my feet on it without knocking it over with a clang.

  I turned to see Joe at the other end of the cellar, glaring at me and motioning me back outside. I ignored his actions. I tiptoed toward him. He made the universal signal for silence, putting his finger to his lips. Then he pointed above his head. And I heard Patricia Youngman’s voice.

  I realized Joe had come back inside the cellar so he could eavesdrop on Patricia and Rhett.

  Chapter 20

  But the voice I heard wasn’t Patricia’s. It wasn’t Rhett’s either.

  It was a gruff, angry voice. It took me a moment to identify it as the voice that had answered the mysterious number someone had called from TenHuis Chocolade, the long distance number I’d never been able to identify.

  I looked at Joe. Maybe he knew who that person was. I’d given the mysterious phone number to Hogan, telling him I suspected that Pamela—now revealed in her true identity as Patricia Youngman—had called it. He’d never told me what he found out.

  “And just how many copies of it have you made?” the gruff voice said.

  “None. I’m dealing openly here.” That was Patricia Youngman.

  “Sure you are.” The words were sarcastic.

  “We’ll just have to trust each other.”

  The gruff voice gave a gruff laugh.

  “Why shouldn’t we trust each other?” Patricia sounded completely calm. “We did for years.”

  “Until you stabbed me in the back.”

  “Until I discovered I had been picked as the one to be thrown to the feds. When I was the only one who hadn’t gotten a slice of the pie.”

  Patricia’s voice had grown angry, but she stopped and when she spoke again she seemed to have regained control of herself. “But now you realize just how much I know. And that I can prove it. Do you want the records or not?”