The Chocolate Bridal Bash

by JoAnna Carl

  The battle over the reception was beginning to wear me down.

  CHOCOLATE CHAT

  CHILDHOOD CHOCOLATE—PART II

  My husband, David Sandstrom, grew up in the big city, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

  Right near the Fanny Farmer chocolate factory.

  Talk about bliss.

  “My biggest chocolate memory,” he says, “is walking down the hill to the subway station and passing within two blocks of the Fanny Farmer Factory. When the wind was from the north—wow! You didn’t care what kind of chocolate it was—soft-center, hard-center, or caramel—if you could just smell Fanny Farmer.”

  Dave also remembers with zest the machine on the subway platform that dispensed a tiny Hershey’s bar. For a penny.

  Talk about the good old days.

  Chapter 13

  Joe called then and asked me to meet him for lunch. I dumped the responsibility for TenHuis Chocolade’s retail sales on Dolly Jolly and left. I was tired of answering questions. Joe already knew how we’d happened to stumble across a dead body the previous afternoon, and he had a pretty good idea of how I felt about it, so we could talk about something different.

  Unless he’d managed to ask Rollie about Bill Dykstra. But he hadn’t done that yet, Joe told me. I was relieved.

  After an hour of talking with Joe about topics such as Mike Herrera insisting on buying champagne for our reception, I felt refreshed and reenergized and headed back to work. And I did work. The phone did not ring, the front door did not open, and I accomplished quite a bit.

  By four thirty, when the front door did open again, I was feeling triumphant. I looked up to see a stranger, the second stranger who’d been in that day. This one was also shrouded in Michigan winter wear, although instead of a stocking cap he had the hood of his parka pulled down over his face.

  I got up and went to the counter. “May I help you?”

  “Hi, Ms. McKinney,” the man said. He shoved the hood back and revealed a completely bald head.

  Then I did know him. It was Elmer Priddy, RN, the man who had confirmed the death of Carl Van Hoosier twenty-four hours earlier.

  “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  “I heard you tell the deputy you worked here. I get over to Warner Pier on my days off. Look at an art gallery, eat in a good restaurant. Get a little culture with a capital K.”

  “You’ll have to include chocolate.” I gestured at the display counter. “Pick a sample.”

  This called for a bit of discussion, of course. I defy anyone to simply pick a TenHuis bonbon or truffle without debating between the round coconut-covered one and the dark chocolate square with one dot of milk chocolate in the center. But after a couple of minutes Priddy was munching a dark chocolate square, known to TenHuis fans as a lemon canache bonbon (“tangy lemon interior with dark chocolate coating”). Canache—pronounced “ca-nosh”—is a type of filling, sort of a soft jelly. We don’t make hard-jellied centers.

  As Priddy rolled his eyes in bliss, I brought up the unpleasant events of the previous afternoon. “I don’t suppose there’s an official report on what killed Van Hoosier.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Joe and I were a little surprised that you agreed with him about Van Hoosier’s death being suspicious.”

  “Your fiancé identified the main thing right away. The red dots in the conjunctivae, the inside of the eyelid. It’s hard to miss. And Van Hoosier had that lump on the side of his head; I could tell that easily. So when the doctor agreed . . .” He shrugged.

  “Did the blow kill him?”

  “Oh, no. In fact”—he leaned across the counter—“there was a pillow—I think the killer tried to smother him, but Van Hoosier was feistier than he’d expected. When he fought back, the killer must have hit him. Stunned him. Then used the pillow.”

  I shuddered. “Van Hoosier doesn’t sound like he was a very nice man, but that’s awful! Do the police have any suspects?”

  “They wouldn’t be telling me. But dozens of people go up and down that hall every day. Residents, staff, visitors—heck, the florist comes by. And the dry cleaner.”

  “Do you have any idea how long he’d been dead?”

  “That’s for the experts to figure out. But the doctor took his temp, and judging by that, I’d guess at least two hours.”

  I gave a chuckle that didn’t sound funny even to me. “I guess that clears Joe and me then. We’d only been at Pleasant Creek an hour.”

  Priddy’s chuckle sounded genuinely amused. “And you didn’t have any motive for killing him, right?”

  “None at all. In fact, we wanted to meet him, and he died before we got a chance.” Then I added quickly. “Not that there could be any conjunction. I mean, connection!”

  Priddy was nice enough to ignore my twisted tongue. “You didn’t know him at all?”

  “No, I’d only heard of him.”

  “That’s odd.” The bald man looked puzzled.

  “Why?”

  He leaned across the counter, frowning. “This is TenHuis Chocolade, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But your name is Lee McKinney. Is there a TenHuis in the business?”

  “My Aunt Nettie.” I reached into the counter and, using the tiny tongs we use to serve chocolates, I began to neaten up the rows of mocha pyramids. “Actually, she’s Jeannette TenHuis. But she’s a TenHuis by marriage, not birth.”

  Priddy looked more puzzled. “Is there a Sally TenHuis?”

  I jumped so hard my tongs sent a couple of pyramids flying into the glass front of the case. I know I gave Priddy a wild-eyed look.

  “Sally is my motive,” I said. “I mean, my mother! My mother—of course, she’s Sally McKinney now—was a TenHuis. But she was never assorted—I mean, associated! She was never associated with TenHuis Chocolade. How did you hear of her?”

  “Oh, Van Hoosier used to mutter about her.”

  “Van Hoosier! Why? What did he have to say about my mother?”

  Priddy gave a major shrug. “I never could understand. He’d gotten awfully vague mentally, you know. He hadn’t been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or anything. But his mind wandered.”

  “Did you talk to him a lot?”

  “Maybe more than I talk to some of the other residents. He could get around by himself, but he took a lot of medication, and he had to be supervised. He was one of those who would pretend to swallow, then spit his pills in the trash. That wing is my responsibility five afternoons a week. Besides, Van Hoosier was lonely. He didn’t have any family. He’d never married. I guess the nearest thing he had to friends was the McDonald’s retiree coffee klatch, and those guys didn’t exactly come around to visit all the time.”

  I mentally contrasted Van Hoosier with Mac McKay—Mac with his committees, close family, church friends, and comfortable home. Mac was healthier than Van Hoosier had been, of course, but the differences weren’t all a matter of health. Mac would never be alone because he had invested himself in friends, family, and community while he was active. Instead of leaving his hometown for the Florida Intracoastal Waterway when he retired, he stayed around and served on the library board.

  Van Hoosier apparently hadn’t bothered to develop friendships. The rich people whom he’d done favors for weren’t interested in Van Hoosier once he wasn’t in a position to help them out.

  Van Hoosier might have had a lot more money than Mac, but Mac was much richer.

  That didn’t explain why Van Hoosier would have talked about my mother. “I don’t understand why Van Hoosier would have been interested in my mom,” I said. I tried to laugh. “As far as I know she was always law-abiding.”

  “I don’t know that he wanted to arrest her,” Priddy said. “He’d just mutter her name and something about kidnapping. Was she ever kidnapped?”

  “What? Absolutely not!”

  Priddy shrugged again. “I just moved to Warner County ten years ago. Was there a famous kidnapping here?”

&nb
sp; “Not that I ever heard of. There was the McKay kidnapping. The McKays have a cottage here, but the kidnapping happened in Chicago.”

  Priddy shrugged. “Well, like I said, Van Hoosier’s mind had been wandering for as long as I’d known him.”

  We left it at that. Priddy stood around a few more minutes, and I asked him get-acquainted questions. Where was he from? The Detroit area, he said. How long had he worked at the Pleasant Creek Center? Nearly a year. Did he like his job? Yes. He hadn’t earned his nursing degree until he was past forty, but he found it a very rewarding profession.

  Priddy bought a half-pound box of chocolates, insisting on all coffee-flavored ones—coffee truffles and mocha pyramids. Then he went out into the late afternoon gloom, leaving me confused and curious.

  All these years, I gathered, my mom had feared Sheriff Van Hoosier. And all these years Van Hoosier had wondered what became of her. Maybe they should have gotten together while Van Hoosier was still alive.

  But obviously Mom had gone to great lengths to avoid him. Besides, if Van Hoosier had actually wanted to find her, I told myself, he could merely have come to Uncle Phil’s funeral. Or he could have come by TenHuis Chocolade. Aunt Nettie would have been willing to forward a letter to her.

  Heck, since the advent of the Internet, it’s easy to find anybody anywhere. Even if Van Hoosier wasn’t computer literate, he could have asked the Dorinda librarian to look Mom up for him. But Van Hoosier hadn’t done that. He had apparently only gotten interested in Mom at the end of his life, after his thought processes had become unclear.

  And what was this about a kidnapping? I’d read all the newspapers for the year my mom ran away, and the most serious crime committed in Warner County was drug dealing. In fact, that had been a real problem when Van Hoosier was sheriff.

  The only kidnappings in the news had been Patty Hearst—she’d been kidnapped a year earlier in California—and Quinn McKay. I toyed with the idea that the McKay kidnapping had some link to Warner County. But Quinn McKay had been kidnapped in Chicago and released in southern Illinois. And Aunt Nettie thought that nobody but his stepmother used the Warner Pier cottage. Quinn never came up himself.

  The whole thing was nuts. I resolved to forget it until Mom arrived Saturday.

  That was easy to resolve, but hard to accomplish. Warner Pier is such a small town. Even as I was resolving to forget the whole thing until Mom arrived, I glanced up and saw the Hilton Garden Shop truck go by. I could barely make the logo out in the dim light, but it reminded me that Tom Hilton had also been a bearer at Bill Dykstra’s funeral. Everywhere I looked something reminded me of the questions I had about the whole situation.

  I was also reminded that I had snapped at Tom Hilton the last time I talked to him. I’d been in a rush to catch the UPS man, and I hadn’t wanted to discuss my mom. I hadn’t taken time to be polite.

  I decided to stop by the garden shop on my way home and apologize. Maybe I could ask Tom about Bill Dykstra at the same time. And I could buy Aunt Nettie a fifty-pound bag of sunflower seeds. I looked at the clock. Nearly closing time for us and for the Garden Shop. I headed out.

  When I got to the shop, I found Tom standing on a ladder, arranging an elaborate display of bird feeders. He was using fishing line to hang each feeder from a frame suspended from the ceiling. The bird feeders were beautifully crafted. There was a miniature lighthouse, a Victorian mansion, a sailing boat, a fairy-tale castle. The feeders were obviously designed as yard art, rather than mere bird attractors. I wondered if Aunt Nettie’s flat wooden tray wouldn’t draw more birds.

  Tom greeted me with a friendly grin and brushed off my apology. He smiled at me from the top of his ladder. “I understand trying to catch the UPS man,” he said. “Besides, you’ve got a lot to do, planning a wedding.”

  “We’re trying to keep it small, but the thing keeps growing. I had one question for you, Tom. I just found out that you knew Bill Dykstra, the guy Mom almost married.”

  Tom gave me a sharp look. “What about it?”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “My mom took me to kindergarten, and there he was. Bill and I went through thirteen years of school together. We were in Cub Scouts together. Played basketball in high school. Worked together picking apples. I knew him my whole life, Lee.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Why?” Tom asked curtly.

  I told the truth. “I’m just curious, Tom. My mom never told me anything about him or about the wedding that didn’t come off. And neither did anybody here in Warner Pier.”

  “I guess we all thought you knew.”

  “I suppose that’s why. Anyway, I know now, and it’s such a stunning part of my mom’s life that I’m trying to understand how such a thing could happen.”

  “That’s easy. Sally and Bill were young. Too young. They realized it and called the whole thing off. Sally was embarrassed and left town. End of story.”

  “You’re leaving out Bill Dykstra’s suicide.”

  Tom’s stepped down one step on his ladder. I saw where he was looking and handed him a bird feeder that was still on the floor, this one shaped like a red barn. He hung it in place before he spoke.

  “I wish I could leave Bill’s suicide out,” he said. “I’ve spent more than thirty years trying to understand it.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question, Tom. What kind of guy was Bill?”

  Tom looked down, and this time I handed him a bird feeder shaped like an old-fashioned schoolhouse. He hung it carefully. Then he turned to me and spoke directly and firmly. “A peacemaker,” he said. “Bill was a peacemaker. Even when we were little kids, he was always the one who was trying to stop fights. He would never take sides, never gang up on other kids the way boys do. He was the one who suggested taking turns. The one who was willing to share first place rather than hurt someone else’s feelings.”

  I could see that Tom was blinking back tears, but he kept talking. “The only time I ever saw Bill mad was when some guys were making fun of another kid—bullying him. Bill waded into them. And he did the same thing when Rollie Taylor came to town.”

  “Rollie? But Rollie came here as a teacher.”

  “Right. But he was a squirrelly kind of guy in those days. Hair too long, belly too big, soft-looking. Inexperienced. He wanted to be a pal to the students, didn’t keep a firm hand on discipline. So the guys in his classes gave him hell.”

  “Bill stood up for him?”

  “Yeah. Rollie was a friend of Bill’s mother. She asked Bill to look after him. Bill did. It was that simple. And Bill was popular enough that when he said to lay off Mr. Taylor, the guys laid off. Then Mrs. Dykstra took Rollie in hand, taught him the tricks of keeping an orderly classroom. Between the two of them they turned him into a pretty good teacher.”

  “Bill sounds like a nice guy. I bet he let Mom lead him around by the nose.”

  Tom laughed. “She thought she did! But when it came down to it, ol’ Bill held his own. He just never raised his voice while he was doing it.”

  “How’d he get along with his family?”

  “Ed Jr. broke his heart.”

  “His brother? How?”

  “All that demonstrating stuff. It was all right with Lovie—Mrs. Dykstra. But Mr. Dykstra—man, he didn’t like it. It split the family.”

  “And Bill blamed his brother?”

  “Yeah. He found out Ed had feet of clay. See, Bill had always idolized Ed. Ed protected Bill—he protected me, too. He was an Eagle Scout. He could tramp through the woods, dive from the high board at the beach, build a set of stilts, fix a bicycle, play marbles. Ed taught Bill and me all that stuff. Then Ed went off the tracks.”

  “I heard that Ed was even into drugs.”

  “I’m afraid that’s right. Bill was—well, crushed—crushed by Ed’s . . . rebellion. If that’s the right word. Bill’s idol had fallen. With a crash. Landed in Canada. Bill didn’t understand how Ed could do such a thing.”

/>   “Bill didn’t have sympathy for the antiwar movement?”

  “Bill was a by-the-books, obey-the-rules kind of guy. If his country had called, he would have gone. And Ed had been that way, too. When we were growing up.”

  “Apparently both Bill and Ed changed in the way they looked at the world.”

  “The changes were too abrupt. At least Bill’s last action was abrupt. I guess that’s why I had such a hard time accepting Bill’s suicide. It wasn’t a by-the-rules way to act.”

  Tom got down from his ladder and stared up at the hanging bird feeders. He seemed to consider them seriously. Then he turned to me, and I saw that he was still blinking back tears.

  “I hated the idea of Bill’s suicide so much that for years I tried to convince myself he had been murdered,” he said.

  Chapter 14

  Murder. In all the talking I’d done about Bill Dykstra’s death, this was the first time anyone had suggested it could have been anything but suicide.

  But I didn’t comment as I paid Tom Hilton for the birdseed or as he loaded it into the van for me. I left the garden shop. I let the idea roll around in my little brain while I started the van and moved to the exit of Tom’s parking lot. I allowed it to seep in while I stopped to let a small SUV go by; I even noted that the face I saw through the side window was that of Elmer Priddy. His bald head was unmistakable with his hood pushed back for driving. And I kept Tom’s idea on simmer while a ramshackle truck followed him: Lovie Dykstra with her usual load of cans. Tourists and locals: business as usual in Warner Pier. I didn’t let the two vehicles interrupt my contemplation of what Tom Hilton had said.

  I didn’t find the idea of murder as shocking as it might have been. I’d read enough mystery novels to know that fictional murderers often tried to fake suicides. But could they do it successfully in real life?

  I knew how to find out.

  I headed home. Aunt Nettie had mentioned that she had invited Hogan Jones over for dinner that evening. I was going out with Joe, but I could put off our departure until after Hogan arrived. And Hogan was not only Aunt Nettie’s boyfriend—if a “boy” can be in his sixties—he was also Warner Pier Police Chief. And before he’d been Warner Pier chief, he’d been a detective in the Cincinnati Police Department. He’d know if it were possible to fake a suicide and get away with it. Get away with it for thirty-three years.