The chocolate frog frame-up: a chocoholic mystery

by JoAnna Carl

  The second class is the "summer people," the ones who own second homes in Warner Pier or along the shore of Lake Michigan and who stay in those cottages or condos for much of the summer. Summer people tend to wear khakis and polo shirts, or other forms of "resort wear." They walk along more briskly, headed for the furniture store, the hardware store, or the insurance office. Lots of the summer people are from families who have been coming to Warner Pier for generations. Lots of them are wealthy, some are famous. They're important to the Warner Pier economy, too, since they pay high property taxes for the privilege of living there part-time.

  Joe and I represented the "Ideals," people who live in Warner Pier year-round. There are only twenty-five hundred of us. The other twenty thousand (I'm overestimating, but not by much) thronging the streets were tourists and summer people.

  Locals wear every darn thing. Joe had on navy blue work pants and a matching shirt, an outfit suitable for working in the shop where he repairs and restores antique boats. I was wearing khaki shorts and a chocolate brown polo shirt with "TenHuis Chocolade" embroidered above the left boob. A few Warner Pier locals actually wear suits and ties. A very few. Most dress more like the summer people, except for the artsy crowd. That group goes in for flowing draperies and ripped jeans.

  The throng on the street kept Joe and me from exchanging more than a few words as we walked along. When we got within a few doors of TenHuis Chocolade, Joe spoke. Can I come in and talk to you for a minute?"

  "Sure," I said. I opened the door and savored the aroma that met me. Warm, sweet, comforting—pure chocolate. Also chocolate laced with cherry, with rum, with coconut, with strawberries, with raspberries, with other delicious flavors. I never get tired of it.

  The two teenagers—Tracy and Stacy—working behind the retail sales counter seemed to be handling the half-dozen tourists who were salivating over the display cases, so I just waved to them and led Joe into my office. The office is a small, glass-enclosed room which overlooks both the retail shop and the workroom where the chocolates are made. The skilled women who produce the chocolates were cleaning up for the day—checking the temperatures on the electric kettles of dark, milk, and white chocolate, washing up the stainless steel bowls and spoons, putting racks of half-made bonbons in the storage room, running final trays of chocolate frogs and turtles through the cooling tunnel.

  Lifelike frogs, turtles, and fish molded from chocolate were Aunt Nettie's special item for that season. The small ones--about two inches—were plain molded chocolate, but the larger ones--six or eight inches--were more elaborate. Most of the larger ones were of milk chocolate, with fins and other detailing in either dark or white chocolate. The milk chocolate turtles, with their shells decorated with white chocolate, were especially nice, and the frogs--white chocolate, decorated with dark chocolate eyes, mouths, and spots—looked as if they might actually hop.

  In the office Joe and I both sat down. "Any chance you could get off early tomorrow?" he asked.

  "I could talk to Aunt Nettie. She's planning her big pre-tourist season cleanup project–taking the chocolate vats apart—so she may be here late. I guess Stacy could balance out the cash register."

  Joe opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the bell on the street door rang, and I caught a flash of bright green from the corner of my eye. Hershel Perkins was walking in.

  Joe had his back to the door, so he couldn't see him. I leaned over and spoke quietly. "Hershel just came in to scrounge his daily chocolate. Let's go back to the break room."

  Joe and I both avoided looking into the shop again. We walked through the workroom and into the very pleasant break room. It's filled with homey furniture-- an antique dining table and some easy chairs—and on the walls are several framed watercolors by local artists.

  But right at the moment the break room was crowded. The ladies who had finished up were leaving, and that room is the passage to the back alley. They were walking through, one at a time and in groups, making a great show of not paying any attention to the business manager and her boyfriend.

  Joe frowned, then spoke quietly. "I need to talk to you privately. Could you walk down to the park? I'll buy you an ice-cream cone."

  "Let me tell Aunt Nettie."

  Aunt Nettie was up in the shop, talking to Hershel. It was a little ritual—she was practically the only person in Warner Pier who acted glad to see him. "Hershel, you mustn't save that too long," she was saying as I came in. "They're for eating, not looking at."

  "Aunt Nettie," I said. "I'm going out for a few minutes."

  Aunt Nettie turned her back to the counter. "Certainly, Lee. And I'm just getting a eight-inch frog for Hershel. It's the first one we've sold. He wants it as a mascot for his canoe."

  I was astonished. Hershel Perkins came in the, shop every afternoon and asked for a sample piece of chocolate. I'd never known him to buy anything, particularly not an expensive molded frog. Stacy--Stacy was the plump one; Tracy had stringy hair—turned around and waggled her eyebrows at me. She was obviously astonished, too.

  I smiled at Aunt Nettie. "That's great, Mr. Perkins."

  Hershel just scowled.

  I went back to the break room. "The roof may fall in," I said "Hershel is actually buying something. He comes in nearly every day to cadge a sample."

  "Why does Nettie let him get away with that?" Joe said.

  "She says everyone who comes in the shop gets a sample, and Hershel's no different. I think, she feels sorry for him."

  "I feel sorry for him, too, and I don't want to argue with him again. But I've got to talk to you. Now. Come on."

  I was extremely curious. We went out through the alley door and down to the Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, stood in line behind a half-dozen tourists, then took our cones over a block to the Dock Street Park.

  The Dock Street Park is the pride of Warner Pier. It's narrow, but it stretches along the Warner River for a mile. The riverside is lined with marinas and public mooring spots for hundreds of small craft. As usual, the river itself was crowded with boats, which an either follow the Warner River upstream or travel down the river and out into Lake Michigan.

  None of the park's benches was empty, so we walked along the dock near the public mooring.area. Down the way I saw a knot of people gathered around a spiffy wooden motorboat, and I recognized Joe's 1949 Chris-Craft Runabout. Its mahogany deck and sides shone as beautifully as they had the year the boat was built.

  I was surprised to see it. Joe usually drives his pickup to town. If he uses a boat, he uses his 1948 Shepherd Sedan. "How come you brought the runabout in?" I said.

  "A guy up at Saugatuck wants to see it," Joe said. "I'm going to take it up the lakeshore. Besides, I'm dying to show it off around the marinas. Since the sale fell through."

  The boat's price tag was $20,500. Twice Joe and his banker had celebrated because they thought it had sold. Twice the sale had fallen through.

  But Joe obviously didn't want to talk about boats. He stopped out of earshot of the gawkers.

  "What's this about?" I asked.

  Joe stared at his ice-cream cone--one scoop of French silk and one of pecan praline. "I've got a proposition for you," he said.

  Then, to my astonishment, he blushed. And he began to stammer. "That was the wrong word. I mean, I've got an invitation. I mean, if you'd like to . . . Maybe we could.."

  This was really amazing. I'm the one who stammers around, using the wrong word. Joe is the former defense attorney who could convince a jury to turn loose Attila the Hun."

  He finally stumbled to a verbal stop. and stared at me, apparently at a loss for words.

  "What is it, Joe?" I asked.

  He took a deep breath. I did some work on a cabin cruiser for Dave Hadley--you know, at the Warner River Lodge. So—well, he's offered me an evening out at the lodge in exchange. I thought we could take the Shepherd Sedan up there for dinner. Then we could cruise farther up the river or out into the lake; if it's calm. I mean, if the mosqui
toes' aren't too bad. But you know we'd need to do it on a weeknight. Because—well, of how crowded the lodge is on weekends. I thought about tomorrow night. If, that is, if you could get the night off."

  It wasn't the most gracefully phrased invitation 'I'd ever had.

  Joe's ice-cream cone was dripping down his hand, and he didn't seem to notice. He flushed a slightly deeper shade. "I sound like an idiot," he said. "But I really want you to go."

  He looked at me anxiously, and I wanted to laugh.

  Or give him a big hug. Joe obviously wanted this to be a big romantic evening, and his awkwardness made it plain that he really wanted me to go.

  Didn't he know how complimentary that stumbling and stammering was? Because Joe really was cool. If asking me to go to the Warner River Lodge for dinner could throw him into tizzy . . . If he could make the trip into an event, with a ride up the river . . . It meant my answer was important to him.

  Which was both gratifying and surprising.

  "Lick your ice cream," I said. "When do you want to leave?"

  Joe grinned from ear to ear and hauled an arm back as if he was going to yell "Yeehaw!" the way us Texans do. Instead, he exuberantly threw his ice-cream cone about fifty feet out into the river. Then he used his clean hand to squeeze mine. I was sure he wanted to kiss me, but hand-holding is as big a display of affection as I'm likely to get from Joe on a public sidewalk in a public park.

  Joe and I had been edging into romance for nearly a year, but it had been a slow journey, and our final destination was still unknown. We both were hauling a lot of emotional baggage, mainly connected with our former spouses, and events such as murder had thrown even more obstacles in our way. For months we hadn't done anything but talk on the phone.

  Finally, late in February, Joe had invited me out in public. Since the night we'd made our official appearance at Dock Street Pizza—social center of Warner Pier, Michigan—all our friends and relations had regarded us as a couple. I was twenty-nine and Joe was thirty-three; they assumed we were ready to settle down.

  But we weren't a couple yet. And there were a lot of pitfalls in the way of our becoming one.

  The first was money, and that was largely my fault. I have a horror of debt which I developed by watching money problems break-up my parents' marriage, and my feelings about money only grew more complicated after I married a wealthy man who thought he could buy a solution to any difficulty. Since I knew Joe didn't have a lot of money, I wouldn't let him spend much on me. Seeing him pull out a credit card to pay for dinner ruined my whole evening.

  Money bothered Joe too. By now his buddies from law school were buying big houses and taking European vacations, and he must have had moments when he regretted leaving the practice of law. Because of his legal problems involving his ex-wife—who died deep in financial doo-doo and without changing an old will which made Joe her executor—he could only work part-time on his boat business, so it wasn't growing very fast.

  Plus, our living arrangements put a lot of traps in the pathway to romance. Joe lived in one room at the boat shop and cooked with a hot plate and a microwave. His decor included a roll-away bed and a worn recliner. Because of this, he didn't like to invite me over. I shared a house with my aunt. I'd asked Joe over to dinner a few times, but Aunt Nettie insisted on retiring to her bedroom, where she tried to be quiet. Joe and I sat in the living room, uncomfortably aware of her presence.

  Then the tourist season hit, and I started working from noon until around ten p.m. We had a lot of problems just scheduling dates.

  But the biggest pitfall may have been that we both recognized that we weren't in this for a casual fling. Maybe we were making excuses to keep each other at arm's length. Maybe the truth was that we were both scared.

  Our situation was very much up in the air. Sometimes I got really impatient. Dating Joe was like reading a book when I was simply dying to know how it would end. But I couldn't turn to the back page to find out.

  It had been a long, cold winter and spring. But now the weather had warmed up enough for a trip up the Warner River in Joe's favorite wooden boat. And a client had offered Joe dinner for two at a snazzy restaurant, so I wouldn't feel compelled to lecture him about wasting money. I thought I could get an evening off. No wonder the two of us stood there looking into each other's eyes and beaming more brightly than Michigan's summer sun.

  Then a cloud crossed Joe's face. He yanked my hand. "Come on!" He pulled me along the dock. "Here comes Hershel."

  I looked at the boats beside us. One was a bright green canoe with the words "The Toadfrog" on the prow. "Yikes! We're right beside his canoe."

  Joe and I walked down the dock at a brisk pace.

  "Hershel never wears a life jacket," I said. "Maybe he'll drown himself on the way home."

  Chapter 2