The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix)

by JoAnna Carl

  I went back out to the kitchen, emptied the kitchen trash into the big garbage bag and went out the back door to put the bag in the Dumpster at the back of the parking lot.

  I was lifting the Dumpster’s heavy lid when a man’s voice startled me.

  “Are you Patsy Raymond?”

  I jumped, almost dropping the lid, and whirled toward his voice. My heart was pounding.

  The late-spring sun was almost behind the two-story house next door, and its glare hid his face. All I could make out was a blue shirt.

  He didn’t look threatening. He wasn’t very large, and he was just standing there. He wasn’t pointing a knife or holding a club or reaching toward a shoulder holster.

  So I tried to react in a calm way. “Patsy Raymond is inside,” I said. “Did you want to see her?”

  “Yes, I’d like that.”

  He was polite, too. Another good sign. As I walked back to the kitchen door, he followed—a husky, dark-haired man in his early thirties, non-threatening, wearing khakis and a knit shirt.

  I remembered Patsy’s safety rules when we reached the porch. “Wait here,” I said.

  But when I opened the screen door, the man took it out of my hand and followed me in. He was still smiling politely.

  “Wait on the porch, please,” I said.

  “I’d rather come in,” he said.

  “Sorry!” I deliberately raised my voice. “The shelter rules say you have to wait outside.”

  He didn’t say no, but he kept coming in.

  “Please, sir! Wait outside!” I tried to push the inside door between us, but he shoved me aside.

  It was time to call for backup. “Mike! Patsy!”

  The man and I scuffled, shoving the door back and forth, and I heard running footsteps. They were too light to be Mike’s.

  Patsy burst into the kitchen.

  “Get out!” She ran across the room and began to help me shove at the door.

  But the man slipped inside and grabbed at Patsy with his right arm. And, suddenly, as if it had grown there, his left hand held a large hunting knife.

  I imagine I screamed. He kicked the door back, and I nearly landed flat on my back. Patsy jumped away and dodged his clutch.

  “Mike!” I know I screamed that time. “He’s got a knife!”

  The man ignored me and headed for Patsy. He didn’t run, he just came steadily. She retreated across the kitchen, but she backed into the refrigerator. Before she could dodge sideways, he was on her.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” I didn’t know where Mike’s voice came from, but it didn’t slow the guy down. He grabbed Patsy’s wrist. She yanked her arm, keeping as far away from him as she could. The thin guy pulled the knife back. The point was aimed at Patsy’s belly.

  A loud boom filled the kitchen.

  And the guy in the blue shirt fell heavily, pulling Patsy down with him.

  Blood seemed to be everywhere.

  Read on for an excerpt from JoAnna Carl’s latest Chocoholic mystery

  THE CHOCOLATE BOOK BANDIT

  Available now from New American Library

  Every native-born citizen of Warner Pier, Michigan, can diagram sentences. At least those over the age of twenty.

  This is due to the untiring efforts of the two Miss Ann Vanderklomps—aunt and niece—who between them taught English at Warner Pier High School over a period of sixty years. As a result of their work, everybody—everybody—who went to WPHS during that time period knows what it is to parse and how to do it.

  This ability is not confined to those who have a literary bent. It also is held by people such as Tony Herrera, who has worked as a machinist ever since he finished high school, and whom I’ve never seen read a book. Tony has been one of my husband’s best friends since their days on the WPHS wrestling team. Then around two years ago Tony’s dad married my mother-in-law, so he and Joe—my husband—are now officially brothers.

  Tony is intelligent, with a wonderful personality and top-notch mechanical skills, but when it comes to books, he waits for the movie version.

  I was thinking this as Tony stood in the center of our living room. He held his nose, giving his voice a nasal tone, and at the same time he made that voice deep and dramatic. “The misplaced phrase is a bugaboo of the English language,” he said. “Be ever on guard against it. Why, only last week there was a reference in the newspaper—the newspaper!—to a dog who—and I quote—‘returned to the inn where he and his master had been staying before going cross-country skiing.’”

  Tony rolled his eyes dramatically and adjusted imaginary bra straps. Then he picked up his bottle of Labatt Blue beer and pretended to use a straw to drink from it, slurping loudly. His audience—all five of us—laughed loudly.

  “That prepositional phrase is completely misplaced,” Tony said, putting the beer down. “It should have been at the beginning of the sentence. That would make it clear”—he shook his right forefinger, but pinched his nose with his left hand—“it was the dog, not his master, who went cross-country skiing.”

  We all continued laughing as Tony released his grip on his nose. He spoke in his normal baritone. “Lee, you’re gonna love getting to know Miss Vanderklomp.” Then he dropped back into his seat on our couch and took a normal swig of Labatt Blue. “And don’t let that water bottle she carries everywhere fool you. It’s not water. It’s Pepsi. She’d kill a kid who brought a soda to class, but she’s never without her Pepsi.”

  The six of us, all early thirty-ish, were having dinner at our house on a late September evening. Three of the group—Joe, Tony, and Tony’s wife Lindy—had grown up in this small Lake Michigan resort town and were Warner Pier High School grads. Two others, Maggie and Ken McNutt, had moved to Warner Pier five years earlier and both taught at that high school. I’m Lee Woodyard, and I came to Warner Pier from my native Texas to become business manager for TenHuis Chocolade, the luxury chocolate shop my aunt Nettie owns.

  All six of us are firmly entrenched in the life of our little town and Lindy, Tony, Joe, and I have a complicated series of interconnected relationships. Mike Herrera, Tony’s dad and Joe’s step-father, owns two Warner Pier restaurants, plus a catering service, and has served as mayor of Warner Pier (Population: 2,500) for three terms. Not only have Joe and Tony been pals since high school, but Lindy and I worked in the retail shop at TenHuis Chocolade when we were both sixteen. Several years ago Tony’s dad, Mayor Mike, hired Joe as city attorney. Then Joe’s mom married Mike, and Joe quit his city job to avoid any appearance of nepotism. And Lindy works for her father-in-law’s company, managing one of his restaurants and running the catering operation.

  When you throw in the fact that my aunt—who, as owner of TenHuis Chocolade, is my boss—married the Warner Pier police chief—well, a normal mind would be boggled. If you drew a diagram of our relationships, it would look like a genealogy of some European royal family in which cousins routinely marry cousins.

  Maggie and Ken were the only normal people present.

  Tony’s imitation of the fabled Miss Vanderklomp had been inspired by my mentioning that I’d been asked to serve on the Warner Pier library board. Miss Vanderklomp was active with that group.

  “Aw, c’mon,” I said. “I’ve never actually met her but I’m sure Miss Vanderklomp can’t be that bad. She’s funny-looking, true, since she does her hair like a Dutch boy, and she’s got that husky Dutch-boy build. She can’t help looking as if she’s ready to plug a finger in a dike.” “It’s not anything to do with Miss Vanderklomp’s appearance,” Tony said. “She’s just a character. Unforgetable. And unstoppable. You’ll learn! Once she tells the board what the library is supposed to do, you might as well vote yea. She’s going to get her own way.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “That’s the way she taught English, and that’s the way she runs the library board.”

  “She can’t run the board,” I said. “She’s not even a member. She doesn’t have a vote.”

  At that point I heard the timer go
off in the kitchen. I stood up. “Dinner is ready. Joe, you see if anybody needs a drink refill, and I’ll get the chicken Tetrazzini.”

  Lindy followed me into the kitchen. “Anyway, Lee, you’re going on the library board at an interesting time.”

  “Because of the new building, you mean?”

  “Yes, and the new director. I met him Tuesday, and I don’t think he’s going to kowtow to Miss Vanderklomp and her buddies on the board. You may be in a fight over the selection of books pretty quick.”

  “A fight? Over the books? I don’t plan on that. When they ask an accountant to join a board, they usually want somebody to look at the finances. Look, Lindy, I just went off the Chamber of Commerce board, so I said I’d think about accepting a new chore. The only complication is that I also got asked to join the tourism committee at the Chamber, and I don’t want to take two new jobs at the same time. But you know the drill. If you’re going to live in a town like Warner Pier, you have to do what you can to keep the community functioning.”

  “True. We’re not large enough to have a village idiot . . .” Lindy let her voice trail off, and I finished her sentence.

  “So we all have to take turns.”

  We both grinned at the old joke. I took the chicken Tetrazzini out of the oven. Lindy grabbed the beet salad, and we served up dinner. I forgot about Lindy’s warning.

  Or maybe I didn’t. Something I can’t explain made me delay accepting the appointment to the library board. I decided I’d attend a meeting before I agreed to join the body.

  Finding a body? That never crossed my mind.

  The library board meetings were held at seven o’clock on the second Monday of the month in the meeting room at the library. The October meeting was to be the final one held in the “old” library. And believe me, “old” was an accurate word for that building.

  In fact, the library building was one of the oldest in Warner Pier, and Warner Pier was founded in the 1840s. The structure’s history had been traced in a recent article in The Warner Pier Weekly Gazette, and the information was fresh in my mind.

  The library was housed in a two-story frame building that originally had held a store downstairs and living quarters for the store’s owner upstairs. A man named Andreas Vanderklomp built the building, and generations of Vanderklomps ran the store and lived above it.

  But the Vanderklomps had a tradition that was more than commercial. From the earliest days, according to the article, at least one daughter in each generation had become a teacher.

  The early-day Miss Vanderklomps had taught in one-room schoolhouses, of course. After Warner Pier opened a high school, the Miss Vanderklomps had taught there. Miss Emily Vanderklomp had taught mathematics beginning in 1928. And in 1945, the first Miss Ann Vanderklomp had been hired to teach English. In 1975 she had been joined by a niece, another Miss Ann Vanderklomp, who also taught English. For ten years they overlapped, and any confusion was avoided by the use of initials. The older Miss Vanderklomp was “N. Ann Vanderklomp,” and the younger one—the one who now haunted the library board—was “G. Ann Vanderklomp.”

  Around about 1950, the Vanderklomp store closed. In fact, I think that the Miss Vanderklomp Tony had parodied is today the last member of the family living in Warner Pier. And when the store closed, the owners—the brother of Miss N. Ann and the parents of Miss G. Ann—donated the building to the city for use as a library. They also donated the family’s book collection, and when browsing the shelves of the Warner Pier Public Library today it’s still possible to run across a 1944 Book of the Month Club selection with a Vanderklomp bookplate inside the front cover.

  Gradually the old building deteriorated. Today the upstairs floor sags, and the whole building needs to be rewired. Just after I moved to Warner Pier four years ago, a bond election approved construction of a new library. That building, near Warner Pier High School, was now nearly completed and was scheduled to open in a month. As Lindy had mentioned, the library also had a new director, a man named Henry Cassidy. His nickname, or so I’d read in the Gazette, was “Butch,” and he was forty-two. I hadn’t met him yet.

  Like all meetings of city committees, the library board meetings are open to the public unless certain subjects are being discussed. So I trailed into the library about ten to seven on the appointed day without a specific invitation. The library closes at seven on Mondays, so the few patrons left were lining up to check out their selections. A plump, middle-aged woman was staffing the front desk—her name plate read Betty Blake, Assistant Librarian—and she stopped checking out books long enough to direct me to the meeting and tell me to feel free to look around.

  Following her instructions, I walked a long way down a narrow passage between towering shelves; the library is one of those buildings that seem to go on forever. I passed the broad public stairs that lead to the second floor, where the reference and nonfiction sections are. A narrower set of stairs, or so I’d been told, was available at the back of the building. I went past the rolling ladders along the walls, now tied down for safety reasons, and I identified the inconspicuous door—marked “Staff Only”—that led to the workroom. I looked inside and found a typical cluttered space. Next came another door. Looking inside, I discovered a tiny hall with access to the back door leading to the alley and to the back stairs leading up, as well as to the basement stairs going down.

  Near that door was a little room with a beat-up metal table in the middle. A dozen folding chairs with lightly padded seats were lined up along the walls. I’d found the meeting room.

  When I entered the tiny room, one person was already there: Dr. Albert Cornwall, a retired history professor I had met a few times. Dr. Cornwall’s friends called him Corny. I called him Dr. Cornwall.

  Dr. Cornwall was sitting in the corner, with his chair tipped back against the wall in a pose that looked quite precarious. I was tempted to clap my hands, whistle, or make some other startling noise, to see if he’d fall over. Of course, I resisted that impulse. If Dr. Cornwall fell over, he’d probably break a hip. I guessed his age at early 80s; maybe late 80s.

  Dr. Cornwall was dozing. Dr. Cornwall was often dozing these days.

  I picked up an agenda from a stack at the end of the meeting table and sat down quietly, since I didn’t want to be the one who disturbed him. I’d barely seated myself when we were joined by Rhonda Ringer-Riley, the board chair. Mrs. Ringer-Riley was sixty-ish, with blond hair in one of the tones considered suitable for older ladies. She wore a coordinated sportswear outfit, and she carried a large flowered tote bag.

  Rhonda, I knew, was a local. As a resort town, Warner Pier has three classes of society: tourists, summer people, and locals. Locals, like Rhonda and me, live here year-round; tourists stay only a few days, and summer people own or lease property and spend longer periods of time here, but vote elsewhere. Dr. Cornwall represented a new and growing class—summer people who have retired to Warner Pier. They’re not quite local; it takes several winters before they move beyond their summer resident status. But they’re becoming a force in the town.

  Rhonda had inherited a half-dozen lakeshore tourist cottages, and she and her husband rented them out each summer, so they were part of the Warner Pier business community. Their cottages and their home were about a mile from where Joe and I lived, south along the shore of Lake Michigan.

  “Oh, hi, Lee,” she said. “I heard that you’re to replace Abigail on the board.”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “You should take the job. There’s nothing to it but one meeting a month.”

  “I would have thought you’d have been quite busy for the past year, what with the planning and construction of the new building.”

  “The director—the former director, Catherine Smith—took care of nearly everything. We’re a rubberstamp body, I’m afraid.” Was her tone a bit on the dry side? Or was that my imagination?”

  Rhonda sat down and produced a notebook and pen from her tote bag. She laid these on the table, then
she took out a large piece of knitting.

  Before I could question her about the board, a tall, slender young woman came in. She had long, brown hair and carried a baby in a sling. At the door to the room she turned back and spoke firmly. “Geraldine, you’re to keep an eye on Hal. Stay strictly in the chidren’s section. Any problems, come and get me.”

  I recognized her, too. Gwen Swain. She was the wife of an engineer who worked at a power plant south of us. Lindy called her “the earth mother.” I knew from Lindy that Gwen home-schooled her oldest child and had been known to nurse her baby while browsing the produce at the Superette. For the moment the baby was napping.

  Gwen gave me a vigorous handshake and sat down next to Dr. Cornwall.

  Hard on her heels, Carol Turley stomped in with her usual awkward gait. She carried a fancy red leather folder, a sort of miniature briefcase.

  Gwen spoke to her. “Oh, hi, Carol. Is that the case you were telling me about?”

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled a rather nervous smile. But she blinked her eyes so rapidly I thought she was trying not to cry. “Yes, Brian gave it to me last week. For my birthday.”

  “That was a sweet thing to do,” Gwen said.

  Carol blinked harder. “Yes, my husband really is a sweetie.”

  Maybe so, I thought, but he’s not real romantic. I mean, a leather folder isn’t a diamond ring or even a dozen roses. But I guess it was something Carol would use all the time.

  Carol dropped the folder on the table, and it made quite a thud. Dr. Cornwall jumped and opened his eyes. Luckily, his chair did not go over.

  Carol was the kind of person who is never noticed in a crowd. She was about my age and short, with dirty blond hair. But I couldn’t call Carol plain; her big brown eyes were too expressive. She shut them tightly, then popped them open. After taking a deep breath, she spoke to me. Her voice had its usual whine. “I see you’ve decided to join us.”

  “Actually, this is an exploratory visit,” I said.