The Chocolate Bridal Bash

by JoAnna Carl

  I supposed that was possible, but I doubted it. My mom wasn’t fanatically either prochoice or prolife, but I didn’t think she would have had an abortion. And she couldn’t have started airline school that next fall if she were carrying a baby, even one she gave up for adoption. Or I didn’t think she could have.

  But how did Sheriff Van Hoosier get into the act, anyway?

  That night I talked to Aunt Nettie about the situation, and she was as confused as I was. I continued to think about the sheriff’s lie from every angle for twenty-four hours, but it still didn’t make sense. How could the ex-sheriff—crooked or not—fit into a picture that included Bill Dykstra’s suicide and my mom fleeing from Warner Pier?

  Even after my run-in with Lovie and my twenty-four hours of thinking, I might have stayed out of my mom’s past if it hadn’t been for the Way Back When column of the Warner Pier Gazette.

  Most small-town newspapers, and even a few bigcity ones, have that column. Some poor reporter is assigned to look at the microfilm of the newspaper from a hundred years earlier and to select a few items to edify the modern reader. In the Gazette’s case, they pick items not only from 100 years ago, but also from 150, from 50, and from 25. I never miss the column. You never know what it will disclose: the date some local building came to be constructed, a tell-all about the “pound the preacher” party given by members of the Methodist church in the early 1900s, or an insight into some other Michigan custom from the past. Once it had even described the up-to-the-minute service station and garage being built by a young World War II veteran, Henry TenHuis, who some years later became my grandfather.

  This particular week, the 150-years-ago bit was a tirade on some forgotten politician, the 100 years ago described a big fire at the fruit basket factory, and the 50 years ago told about a big snow storm. It was the twenty-five-years-ago item that caught my eye.

  “Kemper Swartz is appointed Warner County Sheriff,” it read. “He was selected to complete the term of Carl Van Hoosier, who resigned amid accusations of malfeasance in office.”

  So Van Hoosier’s misdeeds had eventually caught up with him—eight years after my mom ran away from Warner Pier and her fiancé committed suicide.

  But Joe’s mom had said that Van Hoosier was never actually charged with anything. She could be right. “Accusations,” the Way Back When column said. Not

  “convictions.” Maybe Van Hoosier had dodged the bullet, had avoided charges. Maybe the case against him wasn’t strong enough.

  I studied that last phase. “Malfeasance in office.” What did that mean, anyway?

  Suddenly, I simply had to know. No matter what I’d told Rollie Taylor, I was going to find out more about Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier and what he had been up to twenty-five years earlier. And eight years before that.

  Chapter 7

  The first thing I did was call Chuck O’Riley, editor of the Warner Pier Gazette. The Gazette concentrates strictly on Warner Pier events and people, leaving the main county news to the Dorinda Daily News, published in our county seat.

  It’s always struck me as odd that almost nobody in Warner Pier subscribes to the Dorinda Daily News. You’d think we’d want to keep up on our county. But the Lake Michigan shore communities are so focused on the lake, art colonies, and tourism that we don’t seem to be part of Warner County. If Warner Pier people read a newspaper other than the Gazette, it’s likely to come from Holland, Grand Rapids, or Chicago.

  The Dorinda Daily News owns the Gazette, so the News publisher is Chuck’s boss. I’d found out earlier that Chuck has his own collection of archives, if you can call loose clippings in manila file folders archives. But he does have some microfilm.

  Chuck told me to come by his office around three and he’d help me dig through the Gazette files. I was right on time. Chuck set me up with his microfilm reader, and I found the story that had inspired the item in the twenty-five-years-ago category.

  It added very little to what the Way Back When column said. The headline might as well have been “Old Boys’ Network Lets Sheriff Escape Justice.”

  The county commissioners had had an agenda item on unspecified charges against Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier. When the item came up, the head commissioner opened the discussion by announcing that Van Hoosier had tendered his resignation. The person making the charges, identified only as a county official, had agreed to let the matter drop. No hint of what the charges had been appeared in the Warner Pier Gazette . And Chuck assured me the Gazette story was the same one that had run in the News.

  Only one phrase hinted at what Van Hoosier’s sins had been. “I’m just an old-fashioned lawman,” the sheriff said. “I’m not a bookkeeper. So I guess it’s time for me to hand in my badge. Today’s law enforcement is all paperwork and very little catching of criminals.”

  Sure.

  The commissioners named Van Hoosier’s chief deputy as acting sheriff, and the whole matter was swept under the rug without leaving a single lump. A check of commissioners’ meetings for a month before the resignation and a month afterward didn’t find any mention of the sheriff’s office at all.

  I left the microfilm viewer and stuck my head into Chuck’s office. “Hey,” I said. “Have you got a file on the sheriff himself? Carl Van Hoosier?”

  “Nope,” Chuck said. “I already checked. I never heard of the guy until that item showed up in the Way Back When.”

  Chuck is as broad as he is tall, with dark eyes that seem to be soaking up everything around him.

  “Every Gazette editor has had his own system for keeping files—or not keeping them,” he said. “Van Hoosier was long before my time. It would be pure luck if we had anything on him.”

  “Rats! I can’t even find out if he’s dead or alive.”

  “Maybe I can help you there. The News has part of its archives online. Eventually they’ll get the Gazette on the system, too. But we can access the News obits back to the dawn of time.”

  Chuck turned to his computer and called up the files of his parent newspaper. It took him quite a while to go through the “Vans” in the obituaries, since this is western Michigan, but in about ten minutes he looked at me and gestured toward the screen. “There are a dozen Van Hoosiers, but Carl is not among them. I guess he’s still alive.”

  “That’s hard to believe. He’d be really old.”

  “Let me call up the News county government file. Maybe it has something about him.”

  Chuck gave the computer more commands, then stood up. “Here, Lee, you take a look.”

  I sat down in Chuck’s place, looked the system over, and figured out where to type in the keywords. Before an hour was up I had found out quite a bit from old stories about county government.

  Van Hoosier had been in office nearly fifteen years when my mom abruptly left home. He wasn’t from our end of the county; he lived about thirty miles east of Warner Pier. There were no major complaints about him in the early 1970s, but one headline for a county commissioners meeting did read, “Citizens Complain about Lack of Patrols.” The story said that lakeside property owners were unhappy because of erratic scheduling of patrols on Lake Shore Drive near the public access areas. The story didn’t surprise me. That situation had still been a concern to Lake Shore Drive people when I worked for TenHuis Chocolade as a teenager. It was one of the reasons that Aunt Nettie’s neighborhood voted to annex themselves to Warner Pier. Now the Warner Pier PD patrolled our area, and the situation was slightly better.

  By the time Chuck started making noises about closing his office, I was strongly into research mode. So I grabbed a sandwich at the Sidewalk Café, moved my base of operations to the Warner Pier Public Library, and started on their microfilm. I didn’t mess with the Gazette. I went to the Dorinda Daily News files. And I went straight to the year my mom had graduated from high school and run away from home. I started in January. The News issues of those days ran only eight to twelve pages, and I figured I could skip the classified pages, so I hoped to get through it by the tim
e the library closed.

  It was a momentous year. The Vietnam War was winding down, but antiwar demonstrations were still going on. Editorial columns looked at the events at Wounded Knee, Roe v. Wade, the end of the military draft, and the Equal Rights Amendment, which had just recently been OK’d by the U.S. Senate and sent on for the consideration of the state legislatures.

  In local news, it was interesting to see what was written about the founding of TenHuis Chocolade. The story in the Warner Pier Gazette had been bigger, of course. Aunt Nettie had a framed copy of that one in our break room. But there had been a nice writeup in the News, on their once-a-week business page.

  Warner Pier city government had barely been mentioned, but I did learn that Lindy’s grandfather had been a city councilman in those days. And my grandfather had served on the park board. That explained why there was a Henry TenHuis Memorial Nature Trail in one of the parks that ran along the Warner River. I’d known it was there, but I’d never known what my grandfather did to deserve it. Apparently he laid the trail out.

  Crime continued, both nationally and locally. In Warner Pier news, there was a lot of talk about drug sales, hippies, and attendant evils. Warner Pier had always depended on the tourist dollar; rowdy young counterculture types were not the sort of tourists the town liked. On the white-collar front, the cashier of the First National Bank of Dorinda was charged with embezzlement, and the records of the city clerk at Canton, a village north of Warner Pier, were found to be extremely irregular. There were no murders in the county that year, but several assault cases were filed. Most of the accused had Spanish surnames. I guess the hometown guys had been getting away with more than these newcomers were, thirty-three years ago.

  The national crime front had been pretty interesting. There was a major robbery at a jewelry exchange in New York, and some inventive thief put up a false night deposit box outside a bank in Cleveland. At least a dozen merchants plunked their day’s take inside before the thieves loaded the box into a stolen truck and carried it away.

  That was also the year of the famous Quinn McKay kidnapping, in which the son of industrialist Benson McKay III was snatched in Chicago and held for ransom by a group that wanted money to fund their radical social agenda. He was released after several months by kidnappers he described as anonymous guys in ski masks. I’d read about the case in some historical article; the kidnappers had never been caught. We still heard about that around Warner Pier because the McKay family owned a cottage just south of Warner Pier. A Mrs. McKay—of the middle-aged-but-not-admitting-it type—came in for chocolate now and then. But not her stepson, Quinn McKay.

  I couldn’t help checking out the wedding stories, too, of course, since I had weddings on the brain. The most popular bridal gowns had Empire waistlines and puffy lace sleeves, like the one my mother had left behind. But the muslin dresses with cotton lace—the style she had worn when she married my dad—apparently didn’t become fashionable until later.

  The clothing ads showed teased hair and shirt-dresses with A-line skirts that stopped just above the knee. The fabric stores had specials on polyester knits. Shoes had big clunky heels.

  The News obituaries included my grandfather’s, of course. And later a brief notice about the death of Bill Dykstra.

  Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier didn’t get a lot of attention that year. One irate lakeshore resident had gone so far as to appear before the county commissioners, saying he wanted to complain about the sheriff. But when he was told he’d have to state his complaint in an open meeting, he backed off.

  Van Hoosier had investigated the rural crimes, of course, and he’d been the law officer who took the erring cashier into custody. He’d announced that he was going to run for office again, and his supporters had held a fund-raiser for him in July.

  There was nothing that seemed to tie in with my mom’s aborted wedding, her fiancé’s death, and her flight from Warner Pier. Information about that was more likely to be found in the Warner Pier Gazette.

  I looked at my watch. The library was going to close in a few minutes. I didn’t have time to look at the fifty-two Gazettes that would have been published that year. But maybe I could look at Bill Dykstra’s local obituary.

  I rewound the News files, replaced them in their drawer, and found the Gazette files for August. Bill’s suicide had rated a news story on page one. His obituary had run a week later, discreetly omitting the cause of death listed openly in the earlier story.

  I learned nothing new about Bill’s life. I already knew the names of his parents, and I had an outline of his educational career. What else is there to know about a twenty-year-old guy? The only surprise came in the list of bearers, the traditional six friends picked to escort the casket to the grave. These were still listed in Warner Pier obituaries in the early 1970s.

  Three names I’d never heard before led the list. Either I didn’t know them, or they had moved away from Warner Pier. I wrote them down. One of today’s local businessmen came next—Thomas Hilton from the Garden Shop. Then there were two whose identities surprised me. Rollie Taylor and Jason Foster.

  Hmmm. Rollie, of course, would have worked with Bill’s mother. So maybe he was a fairly logical choice as a bearer, though he would have been older than Bill.

  But Jason Foster? How did he get in the lineup?

  Jason is a fairly close friend of mine, a fellow foodie and a great guy. He had worked for years as a waiter, bartender, and restaurant manager for Mike Herrera, Warner Pier’s mayor. He had recently severed ties with Mike and had submitted the winning bid to lease a restaurant on property owned by the Village of Warner Pier. This restaurant was located in the enormous house that Joe’s ex-wife had built, on the property Joe had given to the city to be developed as a conference center.

  The thing that made Jason a surprising choice as a bearer—thirty years ago—was that Jason is openly gay. Now, Warner Pier has a sizable gay community, but thirty years ago he might have been an outcast, unless he was keeping the closet door firmly shut.

  I’d known Jason several years, and he’d never mentioned that he’d known my mother’s fiancé. He was probably being tactful.

  But how had Jason wound up as a bearer at Bill Dykstra’s funeral? Were they family friends? Heck, they could be related. I didn’t know the family tree for everybody in Warner Pier. Even nearly three years in the town, I was continually being surprised to learn that people I knew were related—sometimes after I’d made a comment about one of them to the other. It’s never safe to talk about anybody in a small town.

  But I could sure ask Jason about Bill Dykstra.

  The librarian made her closing-time announcement, and I put the microfilm back in the cabinet and left. I put calling Jason at the top of my mental to do list for the next morning.

  Then I drove by Joe’s apartment to see if there was a light in the window. Nope. But on down the street I saw that there were cars at City Hall, so apparently the city council meeting hadn’t adjourned yet. On an impulse, I parked my van at the curb and went inside.

  Warner Pier’s City Hall is in yet another of the town’s classic Victorian structures, and the council chamber is up a steep flight of stairs. I tried to slip in quietly, but the swinging door to the chamber made a soft noise not unlike an elephant trumpeting in the distance, and every head in the room swung toward me. Joe grinned—he looked happy to see me, bless him—and our mayor, Mike Herrera, gave me a wave. I drew nods from Rollie, who was speaking, and most of the other seven council members as I sat down in a folding chair in the back row.

  I tried to look intelligent while Rollie described a grant that was being awarded to Warner Pier, a grant that would mean the summer recreation program could continue at the current level. It had faced cutbacks, Rollie said, but the grant from the McKay Foundation would allow the continuation of nature walks and beach activities.

  Mike Herrera heard Rollie’s announcement with a complacent smile. He’d obviously known about it and was allowing Rollie to clai
m the credit.

  “These grants from the McKay Foundation continue to amaze me,” Mike said.

  “Quinn McKay may not come to Warner Pier often anymore,” Rollie said, “but he spent all his childhood summers here.”

  Mike shook his head. “That time we went to Chicago to meet with him—when we asked for a million for the conference center—he said he was unlikely to ever be back. So, Rollie, I want to know—just what do you have on the McKay Foundation? You used to cite them as one of the worst polluters on the Great Lakes.”

  “That was in the old days, when Benson McKay the Third was in charge,” Rollie said. “Since Quinn took over, they’ve become good corporate citizens.”

  “Well, they never turn you down.”

  Rollie grinned. “I’m just lucky with money, you know, because of my initials.”

  “R.T.?”

  “My middle initial is A, Mike. You know that if your initials spell a word, you’ll get money. And my initials spell a word both ways.”

  Mike laughed. “Rat and Tar,” he said. “Some words. But you’ve done a lot for the city, Rollie, by getting this grant and the others you’ve obtained from the McKay Foundation, and we appreciate it.”

  Mike led a round of applause, then called for a vote on the consent agenda, the routine items. Unless there were some question about one of those, the council was on its final vote. This gave me only a moment to feel guilty about the way I’d snapped at Rollie Taylor the last time I’d seen him—a week earlier at the library. Did I owe him an apology? I couldn’t decide.

  There were no questions. Within three minutes Mike Herrera gave a sharp rap with his gavel and declared the meeting adjourned. I stayed where I was, waiting for Joe to finish any final bits of discussion with the council or the city clerk and still considering whether or not I’d been rude to Rollie.

  Joe was still up front, talking to Mike Herrera, when Rollie came down the aisle. “Hi, Lee,” he said. “Did you know that if Dolly Parton married Salvador Dalí, she’d be Dolly Dalí?”