by JoAnna Carl
A few miles up the interstate, I pulled into a rest area and parked. I sat a few minutes, still thinking. Then I took out my cell phone and called my aunt, Nettie TenHuis Jones, at the chocolate shop.
Aunt Nettie answered the telephone herself. “TenHuis Chocolade.”
“Hi,” I said. “How would you and Hogan like to come over for dinner tonight?”
“That sounds wonderful. We’ve had a really busy day here, and it would be delightful not to cook. And I sure don’t want to go out to dinner. In June. In Warner Pier. Not during what I’m happy to say is a successful tourist season.”
“Great! Come at six thirty. Or seven. Whenever you can make it.”
As soon as I hung up, I called Joe at his boat shop. He didn’t answer, so I left a message, telling him I’d invited some of his in-laws for dinner and that I’d appreciate it if he’d come home ready to fire up the charcoal cooker. I ended with, “I’ll do it if you’re not in the mood.”
Joe is always in the mood to cook out, so I didn’t anticipate a problem there.
I restarted the van and headed on toward Warner Pier. My curiosity bump was still itching, longing to know more about Forsythia Smith, but I had taken steps that would lead to scratching it.
As I drove, I shoved my curiosity into my subconscious and considered dinner. And even though I’d just left the South Haven supermarket, I hadn’t planned for guests. I was going to have to stop at the Warner Pier Superette.
Warner Pier, Michigan, has twenty-five hundred year-round residents. The good thing about living in an ultrasmall town is that you know everybody. The bad thing about living in an ultrasmall town is that everybody knows you, and probably knows your business, too. Or everybody thinks they do.
My mom grew up in Warner Pier, but she moved to Dallas and wound up marrying a tall Texas guy and living in his hometown, Prairie Creek. Prairie Creek is about the size of Warner Pier. When my parents were divorced, the year I was sixteen, my mom moved the two of us to Dallas and got a job in a travel agency. To get me out of the way during that difficult summer, she packed me off to Michigan to work for her brother, Phil TenHuis, and his wife, Nettie, in their chocolate shop. During those three months, Aunt Nettie was truly kind to an angry teenager she barely knew. Eleven years later, when my first husband and I split up, Aunt Nettie—who by then had been widowed—didn’t ask me a single question about my divorce. She just offered me a job running the business side of her shop and factory.
Twice my life had been in crisis, and each time Aunt Nettie and the chocolate shop had been a haven to me.
Things had gone well for me since I moved to Warner Pier. I got my feet back on the ground emotionally. I fell in love again, this time with Joe Woodyard, whom I consider the best-looking and smartest and maybe the nicest guy in west Michigan.
Joe began his career as a lawyer. When he got burned out on law, he bought a boat shop. Now he works three days a week for a poverty law agency in Holland and restores antique powerboats on the other days. Joe is another Warner Pier native, and Joe’s mom, it just happens, runs Warner Pier’s only insurance agency.
Next, Aunt Nettie—after three years as a widow—married Warner Pier’s police chief, Hogan Jones.
Meanwhile—this is a really small town—Joe’s mom married again, too. She married Warner Pier’s mayor, another nice guy named Mike Herrera. I won’t go into Mike’s son being married to my best friend; the relationships are already confusing enough. If I drew a diagram of who’s married to whom, who’s related to whom, and who’s close friends with whom, it would look like a plate of spaghetti. Let’s just leave it at this—between our relatives and our friends, Joe and I know people who know nearly everything that goes on in Warner Pier and Warner County.
When it came to Forsythia Smith, self-proclaimed murderess, I knew that Police Chief Hogan Jones—the second husband of my aunt by marriage—would have all the background on her.
Now, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. That afternoon, as I was stopping at the Warner Pier Superette for steaks and a bottle of Fenn Valley red, I had no intention of getting involved in Sissy Smith’s life. I just wanted to know who the guy bawling her out had been, and I wanted to know why Sissy called herself a murderess.
I’m a nosy person, and that was all I had in mind. I swear.
By six thirty, I had straightened the living room and had the steaks marinating. The table was set. The salad greens were torn up. The potatoes had been rubbed with bacon fat and were baking. The sherbet was in the freezer, and my grandmother’s Depression glass serving dish held chocolates—espresso cardamom, described in our literature as “rich dark chocolate filling flavored with chocolate espresso beans and laced with a hint of cardamom, then enrobed with dark chocolate.”
Joe had come home early enough to take a shower. He was firing up the charcoal cooker, and I was putting snack crackers in a bowl when Aunt Nettie and Hogan pulled into the drive. Ten minutes later we were all on the screened porch, wine or beer in hand, and Joe, Aunt Nettie, and Hogan were complaining about how busy their days had been.
I waited until I’d heard about the rush order at TenHuis Chocolade, the idiot who wanted Joe to paint his 1943 mahogany Chris-Craft with stripes of neon green, and the city councilman who was driving Hogan crazy trying to boss day-to-day operations of the five-man police department.
Aunt Nettie looked at me and smiled her sweet smile. “Lee’s keeping her mouth shut. Today was her day off. I guess she just lazed around at the beach.”
“Oh, I kept busy,” I said. “I went down to South Haven and delivered chocolates. I bought Joe some work shirts at that little department store, and I had lunch at the bakery across the street. Then I went back to the supermarket and did some eavesdropping. I ended up by having a fender bender with a murderess.”
Everybody stared at me. I picked Hogan to stare back at, raising my eyebrows. Hogan is tall and thin, and he reminds me of Abraham Lincoln.
He frowned as he spoke. “Murderess? Who’s that?”
“Forsythia Smith.”
“Sissy Smith? Why do you call her a murderess? And what about this eavesdropping?”
So I told the whole story. Hogan’s frown became a glare. Joe got carefully deadpan, and Aunt Nettie looked more and more worried. When I got to the end, she was the first person to speak. “My goodness, Lee! You certainly ran into an interesting situation.”
“It interested me,” I said. “And it raised a lot of questions. Such as, who was this Ace? Why did he tear into Sissy Smith so viciously? And why did Sissy identify herself as a murderess?”
Hogan was still frowning. “You surely remember the Buzz Smith case.”
“I don’t remember too much about it. Didn’t it happen in February?”
“Oh yeah. I guess that was when you and Joe were in Texas for three weeks.”
“Well, I did hear that Buzz Smith’s wife came home and found him shot to death. But I never heard that she had been accused of killing him.”
Joe spoke. “Gossip!” His voice was full of contempt. “It’s given Sissy a whole bunch of trouble. She consulted our agency about this custody deal, and the whole basis of it is gossip.”
Aunt Nettie nodded. “I keep hoping that story will go away.”
“Nope,” Hogan said. “The sheriff told me last week that he was still having citizens drop in to ask why he hasn’t arrested her.”
“Wait!” I said. “Will somebody explain all this? To begin with, who are Sissy and Ace? I don’t mean just their names. I mean, where did they come from? How long have they been here? Why don’t I know them? Are they locals?”
Joe and Hogan looked at Aunt Nettie. She sighed and began. “Sissy is a local. I guess she’s a sort of holdover from the hippies.”
“The hippies,” I said, “were fifty years ago, and Sissy can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three.”
“That’s right. About forty-five years ago, Sissy’s grandparents were part of a group that formed a comm
une about ten miles east of Warner Pier. Out in the woods.”
I knew the area she meant. Warner Pier looks west over Lake Michigan. We have lots of trees, but it feels open because of the lake and because a town has streets and lawns, so it’s not all trees. To our east, inland from Lake Michigan, the terrain is heavily wooded. It’s flat, but there are lots of trees and bushes.
I was raised in open country, out on the plains of Texas. That area east of Warner Pier gives me the willies. The trees grow right down to the road. Plus, there’s thick undergrowth. You can’t see twenty feet in any direction. When I go over that way—to drive to the township dump, for example—I can hardly breathe.
Aunt Nettie said that in the sixties a group of fifteen or twenty people—Warner County had called them “the hippies”—had moved in over there on land one of them had inherited. There was one good-sized house on the property, plus a smaller house, and they all lived in those in the winter, and some of them camped outdoors in the summer.
“There was one open field on the property,” she said. “They tried to grow strawberries and tomatoes. They had a little fruit stand, but it didn’t work out. There wasn’t work or profit enough to support that many people.”
The experiment lasted only a year or two, she said; then most of the group drifted away. Only the original owner of the property, a woman who called herself Wildflower, had stayed, along with her son.
“Wildflower started a new business,” Aunt Nettie said.
“Oh,” I said. “I know the place you’re talking about! The taxidermy shop! It has a professionally painted sign that says ‘Taxidermy.’ And there’s a homemade sign that says ‘Moose Lodge.’”
Aunt Nettie nodded. “Right. Wildflower is a taxidermist. I think the Moose Lodge sign is a joke. The place has nothing to do with the fraternal organization.”
Hogan spoke. “Wildflower has a moose head over the fireplace, and the insides of the houses are rustic, like hunting lodges. I guess that’s why she calls the property Moose Lodge.”
“Aha,” I said. “I understand that middle-aged gents don’t congregate there on Saturday night to play pool—or whatever Moose members do. But I’ve never seen the taxidermy shop. I guess it’s back from the road.”
Hogan nodded. “Right. It’s not visible until you’re well onto the property. But Wildflower has a well-equipped shop. And by the way, she does have a last name. It’s Hill.”
“Wildflower Hill?” I was incredulous. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“I’ve seen her driver’s license,” Hogan said.
Aunt Nettie went on. “Wildflower is considered something of a recluse. Her son—I don’t remember what his name was—worked as a carpenter. He married a Hispanic girl named Maria. But the son was killed in a car wreck, and Maria died of cancer when Sissy, their daughter, was ten or eleven. Sissy has always lived there with her grandmother.”
“It sounds as if Sissy’s had a hard life. Her parents died young, and her only relative was a grandmother who was probably considered odd by the neighbors.”
“That’s true, but it didn’t seem to hold Sissy back,” Aunt Nettie said. “She went to Warner Pier High, and I remember seeing her picture in the paper when she made the honor society. She worked as a waitress, saved her money, and was able to go to the junior college for a year or so. She probably got a scholarship. But then she made a big mistake.”
“What was that?”
“She dated a boy from a summer family.”
I laughed. “Oh no! Not a dreaded summer guy?”
When I came to Warner Pier at age sixteen to work in the small retail shop at TenHuis Chocolade, the first thing the other counter girls told me was, “Never date a summer guy.” It would, they said, ruin your reputation with the Warner Pier high school crowd.
Of course, some of the summer people were extremely wealthy, which might tend to make them attractive to some girls, but I could readily see the problems “summer guys” might produce. First, their wealthy families might object to the local girls, who were likely to come from undistinguished families. Second, the summer guys were going to go home at the end of August, and if the local boys were snubbing you, the winter might get lonely.
So Warner Pier was friendly to the summer people, but it was considered unwise for local girls to date them.
I’d always thought the whole thing was silly, so I laughed. But Joe, Aunt Nettie, and Hogan didn’t.
“Who did Sissy date?” I said.
“Rupert Smith the Fourth,” Hogan said. “Nicknamed Buzz.”
“The guy who was killed.”
“Right. He married Sissy, even though his family supposedly wasn’t very happy about it.”
“And who is his family? I never heard of a Rupert Smith the Third.”
“Not even the Smiths go by their numbers. They all have crazy nicknames. His dad is known as Ace Smith. There’s a cousin called Spud, and another cousin who goes by Deuce. I think there’s a Chip, as well. Most of them live in Chicago. Or else they’re in the army somewhere. The family tends toward the military. Ace is a retired colonel.”
“Ace is Buzz’s dad? So he was the one who was lambasting Sissy at the supermarket?”
Hogan grimaced. “Sissy and Buzz had a little boy. He must be over a year old now. I’d heard that Ace was trying to get custody of the kid, trying to prove Sissy is an unfit mother.”
“Has the welfare department looked into it?”
“Yes, and they didn’t find anything wrong. So Ace has hired private eyes.”
“Oh, Lordy! Now I’m on Sissy’s side!”
All the people present knew that my first husband had sicced private eyes on me during our divorce. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, even though they didn’t find any evidence that helped him.
“I think Sissy came to be sorry she took up with Buzz,” Hogan said. “Ace wouldn’t help them, and Buzz couldn’t hold a job. Sissy might have thought she was marrying money, but she had to support the family. I doubt Wildflower makes very much from her taxidermy business, so Sissy probably helped her, too. Sissy worked in Holland, keeping books for one of the office furniture companies.”
“Why did Ace lambast her for not even having a job?”
“I don’t know. She must have been laid off. But at the time Buzz was killed, Sissy was working. As near as I could find out, Buzz didn’t do anything around there to help out. Sissy and her grandmother were on a shopping trip to Holland when Buzz was killed. And they had taken the little boy with them. Sissy took him to day care during the week. Apparently Buzz didn’t even babysit.”
Buzz had been killed on a Saturday, Hogan said. Sissy and Wildflower had left at midmorning. They were driving two cars, Sissy’s antique blue Volkswagen and a VW van of similar vintage, which Wildflower drove. They dropped Sissy’s car at a Holland garage, arranging to pick it up on Tuesday. Then they had lunch at Russ’, a Holland restaurant. They’d made the regular Holland round—JCPenney for pajamas for the little boy, the health food store for some things Wildflower ate, Office Depot for ink for Sissy’s computer printer, and two carts of groceries at Family Fare.
“That’s why we know for sure Sissy wasn’t home shooting her husband,” Hogan said. “She’s striking—with that black hair and those green eyes—and Wildflower is unconventional looking, too. Plus, they’re regulars at the health food store, so the people there remembered them. Their waitress at Russ’ remembered them. The only place they went that nobody remembered them was the gas station. And they had a credit card slip from there.”
When they returned home, to the old house where the hippies had once lived, the little boy was asleep in his car seat. Sissy began to lift him out, and Wildflower took a bag of groceries inside. She found Buzz dead in the living room.
Wildflower called to Sissy, telling her not to bring the little boy in. Sissy ran inside, leaving her sleeping son in the car. Buzz had been dead long enough that his body was beginning to cool. They called 9-1-1 on Sissy’s cell
phone. Wildflower waited for the sheriff in Sissy’s car, but Sissy had stayed inside with Buzz’s body.
“It didn’t seem right to leave him alone,” she had told Hogan later.
Buzz had died from a single gunshot wound in the head. Suicide was ruled out, Hogan said. The position of the wound was wrong, and the gun was missing.
The medical examiner later put the time of death at around noon, and the ballistics experts said the murder weapon was a .45 caliber pistol.
“So,” Hogan said, “Sissy and Wildflower both have good alibis.”
“Could Buzz have been shot before they left for Holland?”
“The ME didn’t think so.”
“Then how could this rumor that Sissy killed her husband get started?”
Hogan’s glare came back. “The problem is, Sissy is her own worst enemy.”
Chapter 3
Naturally we all wanted to know why Sissy was her own worst enemy. Two whys and a how rang out.
Hogan stared at the porch floor and took a swig of his beer before he spoke. Even then he didn’t answer our questions. “This wasn’t my case,” he said.
“You mean Buzz Smith’s death?” I said. “We know that, Hogan. Buzz died in a rural area east of Warner Pier. This Moose Lodge where Sissy’s grandmother lives is at least fifteen miles outside our city limits, so it would have been a case for Sheriff Ramsey. Plus, the way rural crime is investigated in Michigan means that the state police would come in anyway. Right?”
“Right. But Warner County doesn’t have loads of law-enforcement officers. So last February, when I heard there was a killing, I went out there, just to see if Burt Ramsey needed help. Burt gave me the job of staying with Sissy and her grandmother.”
“So you were the first law-enforcement official to have contact with her.”
“One of the first.”
“And you thought Sissy was her own worst enemy. Why?”
Hogan sighed. “Sissy has a smart mouth.”
“You mean she makes wisecracks?”
Hogan nodded.