The Chocolate Bridal Bash

by JoAnna Carl

  Then Lovie came scuttling past, headed for her beat-up old truck. So I didn’t hesitate. I climbed into the passenger side without asking permission. Lovie barely gave me a glance. She just started the truck, threw it in reverse and shot out of her parking place.

  I started to call Joe to tell him what had happened, and I realized that I didn’t have my purse. I’d left it in the police department, on the floor under my chair. So I didn’t even have my cell phone.

  I was riding with the town’s crazy woman, nobody knew where I was, and I had no way to contact anybody who might want to know. I considered asking Lovie to let me out, but she was heading in the direction I wanted to go, so I kept quiet.

  Hogan’s siren was rapidly fading into the distance, but Lovie’s old truck was noisy, so I had to yell at her. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  She shook her head, but she didn’t look toward me.

  I fastened my seat belt. I could only assume Lovie was headed to Aunt Nettie’s house.

  Lovie seemed to be a good driver, though she was ignoring the speed limit. She went tearing down Peach Street, turned onto Dock Street, then crossed the Orchard Street Bridge. After she swerved onto Lake Shore Drive, I could see the spinning lights on top of Hogan’s car a quarter of a mile ahead of us, and we could hear his siren. As long as we were following Hogan, I wouldn’t feel threatened.

  Hogan slowed and turned into Aunt Nettie’s lane. I assumed Lovie would turn in after him. But Lovie went right by.

  I grabbed her arm. “We needed to turn there!”

  She shook her head so hard the red pom-pom on her hat bounced like an apple on a McIntosh tree hit by a strong wind. “We’ve got to save Sally!” she said. She drove on, looking straight ahead, completely intent on the road.

  The siren had stopped, and I tried yelling over the truck’s noise again. “Where are you going?”

  “To get Sally away from those awful men!”

  “Which awful men!”

  “That Quinn McKay!”

  “Quinn McKay?” I gulped that one down. It didn’t come as a big surprise. I was convinced my mom had seen Quinn McKay at his family home—walking around free at a time when he was supposed to be a hostage—and she’d heard at least two other men talking. I didn’t stop to wonder who the third might have been.

  Lovie was muttering. What was I doing, barreling along Lake Shore Drive in a truck driven by a crazy woman?

  “Yes, Quinn McKay was in it,” she said. “And Ratso.”

  “Ratso?”

  “Ratso! The one I thought was my friend. The one I trusted.”

  Lovie seemed to be grinding her teeth. She sounded crazier than ever. “The one I should have told on years ago. But I had to protect Ed.”

  Who could she mean?

  I yelled again. “Where are we going?”

  “Where they’ve taken Sally. Pray that we’re not too late. They’ve already killed two people. She’s got to be there!”

  “Where?” I yelled out the question, and Lovie turned her head toward me for half a second. “Why, the McKay house,” she said. Her tone implied that I must be a complete idiot not to know.

  I sat back. If Quinn McKay was one of my mom’s kidnappers, I supposed that taking my mom to his family cottage had some logic. But Lovie wasn’t making sense, and I was sorry that I’d ever got in her truck.

  “Oh, it’s all my fault!” Lovie was still muttering. “I got them into it. Ed and Ratso! I thought it was a good idea.”

  “You thought what was a good idea?”

  “The protests. But it turned out to be a bad mistake. Ratso ramped up the whole deal. I told them it was stupid. I thought I’d talked them out of it! Then they killed my son!”

  “Did they kidnap Quinn McKay, too?”

  “Kidnap? Ha!” Lovie was slowing now. I could see the hulk of the old white house, the McKay place, back in the woods. Was she going to turn in?

  “Mrs. Dykstra! Lovie! We should go to the police! Turn around and go to Aunt Nettie’s house.”

  “No,” Lovie said. Her voice was quiet, but firm. “No, I’ve got to go here. I’ve got to face them down, make them turn Sally loose.”

  She swung into a lane marked by a mailbox with a cheerful red cardinal painted on it. Then she stopped, blocking the drive.

  “We get out here,” she said. “You can go back to your aunt’s house. It’s best if I go on alone.”

  She got out of the truck and started slogging on up the drive.

  I gaped a minute, then I slogged after her. If my mom was being held at the McKay house—a claim I didn’t accept—it was the last place in the world for a crazy old lady.

  “Lovie—Mrs. Dykstra! Let’s go back to the truck. Let’s call the police. If the kidnappers are there, the police should deal with it.”

  “No! I should deal with it. It’s all my fault.”

  Lovie slogged on, head down, picking her way through really nasty snow—snow that had melted and refrozen a dozen times on a driveway that had not been plowed all year.

  I didn’t know what to do. Should I slog after her? Slog back to Lake Shore Drive and find a phone? Lots of the houses along there were closed for the winter. It wouldn’t be easy to find one. I might have to hitchhike. But would I dare accept a ride, with kidnappers on the loose? I might have to slip and slide for more than a mile—clear back to Aunt Nettie’s house.

  I obviously should have run down to pick up the van instead of jumping into Lovie’s truck. Time spent running two blocks on Warner Pier’s cleared sidewalks would have saved me time that I needed more now.

  But I simply couldn’t let a crazy old lady go off to a deserted house in the Michigan winter by herself. I told myself that Hogan was looking for my mother. As worried as I might be about her, I couldn’t really do anything at Aunt Nettie’s house. And I might be able to persuade Lovie to get back in her truck and give up this trek to the McKay house.

  Because I considered her story about the kidnappers being there completely ridiculous.

  So I followed her up the long drive that led to the McKay house, listening to her mutter about everything being her fault. I talked, too, but our conversation wasn’t logical.

  “I believed we could change things,” Lovie said. “But not this way. Not this way!”

  “Come back to Aunt Nettie’s with me, Mrs. Dykstra! We’ll let the police handle this.”

  “I should have spoken out years ago, but it might have meant Ed’s life! I couldn’t bear to lose both my sons.”

  “Please come back with me, Mrs. Dykstra.”

  “I thought Sally was safe, as long as she didn’t come back!” She turned to me and spoke angrily. “Why did you make her come back?”

  “I didn’t! I—”

  But she grabbed my arm and gave a mighty “Shh!” We’d come around a line of evergreens and were within sight of the house.

  “Be quiet!” Her voice was an order. “They mustn’t hear us.”

  I whispered, but I pleaded with her. “Mrs. Dykstra, come away. You can see that the house is deserted. All the shutters are up. There’s no one here. If you think the house should be investigated, we’ll ask Hogan Jones to do it.”

  I was wasting my breath. Lovie walked on toward the house, and I trailed helplessly in her wake, like a dinghy being pulled along by a scow.

  This was the first time I’d ever seen the house clearly, since it was completely hidden by foliage nine months out of the year and was only a ghostly shape in the bare woods in the winter. It wasn’t a showplace, as so many of the summer homes along the lakeshore are. It looked more like a big, roomy farmhouse. It was surrounded by an acre of snow and had evergreens as a background, but the heavy shutters nailed over each window kept the house from looking like a Christmas card. It didn’t look welcoming; it looked cold and ominous.

  The snow around it was unbroken by human tracks. The porch was covered with drifts, and the cellar door was so snowed in that I could barely see what it was. As we approached th
e house, the only unshuttered opening I could see was a side door that led onto an extension to the porch—a sort of deck. I realized that that must be the door to the bedroom, the one my mom had fled through thirty-three years earlier.

  Lovie hadn’t let go of my arm. She clutched it and motioned toward the north side of the house. She was still whispering. “We can get in through the kitchen.”

  “Lovie! We can’t go into the McKay house! We’re trespassing already.”

  I might as well have kept my mouth shut. She kept her grip on my arm and slogged forward.

  Now we were off the drive, fighting our way through unbroken snow, rounding the big square white house. I gave up the argument. We didn’t have a key to the house, so we couldn’t get in without smashing the back door. When Lovie saw that no one was at the house, she’d surely agree to go back to Aunt Nettie’s with me.

  But as we reached the north side of the house, I got another surprise. Lovie hitched up her ski jacket and reached into the pocket of her flannel-lined jeans. She pulled out a key. A key that had been discolored by age.

  Lovie gave a guttural laugh. “Ed Sr. always told Ben he needed to change the locks on this place,” she said. “Neither he nor this fancy-pants wife who inherited ever got around to it.”

  Using a finger to caution me to silence, she stepped onto a broad back porch. As I followed her, I looked down to make sure where the step was.

  That’s when I saw the footprints.

  They led around the other side of the house, up the steps, and onto the back porch. My eyes popped. I could see two sets of larger tracks—men’s boots, I’d guess. Then there were marks that showed skidding and sliding.

  And there was one clear print of a woman’s shoe.

  Had the kidnappers brought my mom here?

  While I’d been gaping at the tracks, Lovie had silently crossed to what must have been the kitchen door. She tried the handle, then put the key in her jacket pocket.

  The door was already unlocked. As Lovie opened it, I could hear voices.

  Lovie was right. The kidnappers had taken my mom to the old McKay house. She had been fighting, trying to get away, as they dragged her to the back door. But she’d been alive. That one clear track showed she’d reached the back door on her own two feet.

  As soon as I reached that conclusion, I questioned it. After all, the McKay house wasn’t at the end of the earth. It was only a mile and a half away from Aunt Nettie’s, in a civilized—if lonely—neighborhood. And even though the house had been closed for the season, that simply meant the heat wasn’t on, the water had been cut off, and there were shutters on the windows. As Lovie had just demonstrated, it was possible to go in and out at will, and there was no reason members of the McKay family wouldn’t do that anytime they wanted. I couldn’t identify the track of my mother’s shoe; the track on the back porch might have been made by a McKay wife, daughter, or girlfriend.

  I slipped in the back door behind Lovie and stood in the kitchen, still doubtful.

  But then I heard a voice, and it shattered any idea I had that Lovie and I had walked in on an innocent gathering.

  “Look at the candles flicker!” a raspy voice said. “Somebody came in!”

  Another man laughed jovially. “Don’t be stupid! Nobody could know we brought Sally here.”

  And I knew who Ratso was.

  Chapter 22

  “My initials spell a word,” he’d said at the council meeting. “That means I’m lucky with money.”

  Raleigh A. Taylor. Retired teacher, city councilman, tightwad, and all-around civic volunteer with a strange smile.

  It made perfect sense. Rollie had known Lovie; they’d been student activists at Western Michigan. He’d known Ed Dykstra—also a student activist—through Ed’s mother. Ed had been at the University of Michigan, and so had Quinn McKay. And Quinn and Ed had been childhood friends.

  And if Ed, Quinn, and Rollie decided to fake a kidnapping, either to raise funds to fight pollution or just to fight their own poverty, Benson McKay III—head of a company they regarded as a major polluter—would have been a logical person to cough up the ransom.

  And they couldn’t have found a better hideout than the McKay cottage, closed for the summer because Quinn’s dad and stepmother were in Europe. Quinn would have had a key, and Ed would have known how to get hold of his father’s key, plus he’d have been familiar with his father’s routine for checking on the cottage.

  All this flashed through my mind, and it must have left me as limp as an old sock, because when Lovie put her hand on my shoulder and gently shoved, I knelt on the spot. Obeying her gesture, I ducked down beside a large kitchen range.

  I thought she wanted both of us to hide, but Lovie didn’t get down with me. And I was barely on my knees when the light changed, and I realized a door must be opening.

  Because of the shutters, it was dark in that kitchen, but I could see that a candle was being poked into the room. It cast weird shadows on the face of the man who held it.

  I pulled my head farther back behind the range, something like a turtle retiring into its shell, but I could still see Lovie, standing close to me, in front of the stove.

  A gruff voice spoke. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I knew you had to be here when I heard that you’d taken Sally,” Lovie said. “Where is she?”

  “Sally’s not hurt. But how did you know where we were?”

  “Ed told me.”

  “Ed? But he’s gone.”

  “Ed’s come back! He didn’t know you’d killed his brother!”

  “I didn’t kill him!”

  Lovie spoke right over him. “Ed didn’t even know Sally had run away! And Sally doesn’t know anything! Or she didn’t! Why did you take her?”

  “We can’t take chances.”

  “You’re being silly, Quinn!” Lovie raised her hand, then slapped it on top of the range, rattling it as she emphasized her words. “Let Sally go!”

  The door swung open wider—I could see the top of it—and a different man spoke. “Well, if it isn’t the one who taught us the three Rs,” he said. “Rioting, rallies, and revolution.”

  If I hadn’t already figured out who it was, I would have recognized the dumb joke. The second man was Rollie Taylor.

  Lovie spoke again. “I didn’t teach you kidnapping and murder. You got into that for your own reasons.”

  “Yeah, and your precious Ed got into it, too.” This came from the man with the big nose—was he really Quinn McKay?

  “Ed had nothing to do with murder,” Lovie said. “And Sally had nothing to do with anything. She knows nothing that can threaten you. Let her go. Where is she?”

  Rollie laughed. “Sally liked that fancy cathouse bedroom so well—back when she was almost a bride—that we put her in there again. But this time we made sure she couldn’t get to the outside door.”

  I could see the top of the door move again. “Come on in the living room,” Rollie said. “We’ve got a little fire. We need to know about Ed. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Lovie said.

  The candle was withdrawn, Lovie went with Rollie and Quinn, and the door closed. I was in the dark, stuck behind the kitchen stove. But Rollie and Quinn didn’t know I was there. Now all I had to do was call the cops, rescue my mom, and escape.

  Ha.

  Thanks to the shutters on the windows, the kitchen was pitch-black. The kidnappers were in the next room, and nothing but an old-fashioned swinging kitchen door separated me from them. If I made a noise, they’d hear me. The back door was unlocked, but if I went through it, the draft would make the door swing and the candles flicker, just as it had when Lovie and I came in. So if I went out that way, I’d have to run like heck, through deep snow, on a bright, sunny afternoon. I could almost guarantee that Quinn and Rollie could run me down before I could get to the road. Unless they had a gun. That would make it even easier for them.

  Lovie had kept Quinn and Rollie from knowi
ng I was there, but she’d also left me in an impossible position. I had to get out of that kitchen and it wasn’t going to be easy.

  I stood up slowly. The bad guys’ candle, which had almost seemed to glare while Quinn was sticking it through the door, had dazzled me. Now my eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness, and I realized that it wasn’t as complete as I’d first thought.

  There was a soft glow around that swinging door, for one thing. And one of the shutters didn’t fit exactly right. A line of light showed down the side.

  If only that light would shine on a telephone.

  I realized that a kitchen might well have a telephone. And I knew that most people who had summer cottages didn’t bother to disconnect the telephone for the winter; they’d simply have to pay to hook it up again in the spring. I began to look around. Was there a phone sitting on the counter? A phone hanging on the wall?

  I spotted it. It was a vague shape on the wall, near the swinging door. I moved across the kitchen floor slowly, carefully, praying that my wet boots wouldn’t squeak. Lovie was haranguing Quinn and Rollie loudly. I realized she must be trying to cover any noise I might make.

  I reached the phone. Oh, wonderful instrument. It could connect me with Aunt Nettie, with Hogan, with rescue. I eyed it hungrily.

  It was a portable phone.

  Damn. While the standard, old-fashioned phone is independent of the source of electrical power, this one wouldn’t be. It relied on electricity. And the electricity had been off in this blankety-blank cottage for months. There was no point in even picking that phone up.

  I turned around in disgust and headed back toward the stove, still creeping along slowly, carefully. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom now, and as I got to the range, I saw something on its top.

  A key. It was the key Lovie had produced, the one she’d planned to use to get in the back door. When she’d whopped her hand on the top of the stove, she must have left that key.

  That was nice of her. But what the heck good would it do me? I didn’t want to lock anybody inside the darn cottage. And the back door was already unlocked. I could go out any time I was willing to cause a draft.