The Chocolate Bear Burglary (25 page)

First, I needed a place to hide my van. That was no problem. I decided to leave it in Aunt Nettie’s driveway and walk to the Hart-VanHorn place.

I took a flashlight out of the glove compartment and went back to Lake Shore Drive. I stepped along briskly, trying to look as if I were just out for some exercise, and walked down Lake Shore Drive to the big stone arch that marked the Hart-VanHorn entrance.

The white gate was closed, but it was only designed to keep out cars. A pedestrian could climb right over, and I did.

The compound’s drive had been carefully plowed, so what snow was there was hard-packed and would not show footprints. I might be determined to become a housebreaker, but I wasn’t particularly eager to pay a penalty for my actions. I’d been careful to wear my gloves—slick leather ones that wouldn’t leave fuzzies behind—and to cover my hair with a stocking cap I kept in the van. My red jacket was a problem, but it was too cold to leave it in the van. Anyway, the neighborhood wasn’t exactly thronged with people that time of the day and that season of the year.

As I walked I decided that the simplest way to break into the barn was to first break into Timothy’s house and find the key to the barn. That barn was solid metal, with metal doors and no windows. It would be much easier to break into the old farmhouse.

Timothy’s walk had been neatly shoveled. I followed it to the front porch. I knocked on the door, just in case. Then I tried the handle. No luck. Timothy’s brain wasn’t so addled that he went off and left his door unlocked. I shrugged. But what had he said on the tape? He was responsible for leaving the key in the usual place for the handyman and landscapers.

Timothy routinely left a key outside his house. Where?

A quick look showed me that it wasn’t under the mat. And the mailbox was back on the road, so that wouldn’t be a good place to leave it. My grandmother had always wired an extra key to a bush outside her house, but all of Timothy’s bushes were bare of leaves. I would have seen a wired-on key in a minute.

Well, there are a few advantages to being tall. I pulled off one of my gloves and felt the top of the door frame. Nothing. I wiped any fingerprints away with my balled-up glove.

Maybe the key was at the back door. I hopped over the edge of the porch into the snow and headed around the house. I did try to swish my feet around, hoping to obliterate my footprints. Timothy had old-fashioned wooden storm windows, the kind with ventilation holes along the bottom. I tugged at a couple, but they were in solidly. I was prepared to smash one out, but I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

I tracked snow onto the back porch and tried the kitchen door. Locked. Then I reached up and felt the top of that door frame. And my fingers felt something furry.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. And as I did something flew through the air and landed on the porch floor with a kerplunk.

It was a strip of fur with a key ring attached. And that key ring held a key.

My heart began to beat faster as I used my glove to erase any fingerprints from the top of the door frame, then slid it back on. I was about to break and enter.

It was a big disappointment when the key didn’t fit the back door. It was much too small. Now what? There must be dozens of locks on the four houses and assorted outbuildings of the Hart-VanHorn compound. Which one would this key open? Or did it open a door at all? It really was tiny.

I looked over the edge of the porch and saw an old-fashioned cellar door. The “slide down my cellar door” kind. By all rights it should have been covered with snow, but Timothy had apparently opened it recently and it was fairly clear. And like most of its kind from around 1900, it was kept closed by latch and a padlock.

In a split second I was off the porch and trying that little key on the padlock. It opened. I pulled open the cellar door, grabbed my flashlight out of my pocket, and was down the stairs and into the house. My career as a burglar had begun.

As I’d guessed, Timothy had a Michigan basement. Most older houses in our area, including Aunt Nettie’s, have them. I flashed my light around. All I could see were boxes and heaps of the kind of stuff that accumulates in basements. The stairway was along the right-hand wall.

I went back and wrestled the cellar door shut. Then I crossed the sandy floor to the stairway, stamped my feet to remove what snow and sand I could on the bottom step, and went up to a closed door. The door opened into the kitchen. I looked around. It was a very ordinary kitchen. Judging by the red-and-white color scheme, just like my Texas grandmother’s, it had probably been updated sometime in the 1950s. As I walked across the floor, I left sandy tracks. Tough. Maybe I’d have time to sweep before I left.

“I’ll go back to the kitchen and get the keys.” That’s what Timothy had said on Joe’s videotape. I was in the kitchen. So, where would Timothy Hart keep keys? In a drawer?

It took me maybe three minutes to find the keys. They were in the broom closet on a key rack made of varnished wood with little brass cup hooks screwed in a row. A child’s wood-burning set had obviously been used to cut the word “Keys” into the top of the rack. The rack had such a Boy Scout–project look about it that it summoned up a picture of Hart as a dark-haired twelve-year-old making a Christmas present for his favorite uncle.

The key rack made me feel like an interloper. But I reminded myself that Jeff had been a cute little twelve-year-old, too, and I looked at the keys.

Luckily, most of them were labeled, and I found one that said Garage and one that said Barn right away. Since I wasn’t positive what Timothy called the big storage building, I took both of them. Then I went on through the house, unlocked the dead bolt on the front door, and left it unlocked. Again, I might need to get back through that door in a hurry. I left via the front porch.

I followed the path Timothy and Joe had taken that morning—it was pretty well trampled down by their traipsing back and forth—and went over to the big storage building. The Barn key fit the side door, the one Joe and Timothy had entered by. I closed the door behind me and used my flashlight to find the light switch. There before me were all those shrouded mounds I’d seen on the video.

I didn’t fool around looking at wooden boats. I began nearest the door and moved from mound to mound, yanking up the canvas covers.

The first thing I found was that purple snowmobile. I pulled its cover all the way back and looked it over as well as I could. Of course, snowmobiles all look pretty much alike to me. Unless I found newsprint from the
Grand Rapids Press
on the windscreen, I wouldn’t be able to tell if this was the one that chased me. But it sure did look like it.

I found the model and serial numbers and committed them to memory, one advantage of being a number person. I shuddered and pulled the canvas back over it.

Then I looked under the other covers. I found the newer boat, the one Joe had sneered at as fiberglass; the old wooden Chris-Craft; a big riding mower; a garden tractor; and a small camping trailer. And at the end of the row, exactly opposite a closed overhead door, was an empty space.

It was obviously the place where a car could have sat.

But there was no car there.

I stared at that empty space. I’d convinced myself that Timothy still owned his MGB. Greg Glossop had seen it just a year earlier.

But it wasn’t there. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I stood there blinking.

Then I spoke sternly to myself. “Cry later, Lee,” I said aloud. “Right now you’re trespassing. Get out of here. Then you can bawl all you want.”

I walked clear back to the end of the barn, making sure there were no more rooms to it. But it was just a big, empty shell. There was a loft over half of it, true, but I didn’t think Timothy Hart was strong enough to toss a sports car up there. Just to be sure, or maybe just out of curiosity, I ran up the little stairway and shone the beam of my flashlight around.

Old furniture and boxes. I could see why Gail had been so eager to handle any estate sale the Hart-VanHorn clan planned. There was enough old stuff out there to stock a dozen shops the size of Gail’s.

But there was no MGB. I had broken and entered for nothing.

Now to get out. I hurried back to the door and peeked out, almost afraid I’d be facing some law officer summoned by a neighbor. But there was no one in sight. I stepped outside and pulled the key out of my pocket.

And a second key dropped into the snow.

I scrabbled around until I found it. It was the key marked Garage. I locked the barn door, then stared at the second key.

“Garage.” Hmmm. On the videotape Timothy had said that his sister had a garage in her house. As a matter of fact, the other house, the brick one, probably had a garage, too. Of course, it was unlikely that Timothy’s car would be parked in either of his sister’s garages.

But as long as I had the key, I thought I’d better look.

I trotted down the drive, toward the stone house with the little bridge leading to the porch. The drive, of course, was well cleared down that way, too, and it led around the end of the house and curved down a slope. As soon as I went around the curve, I saw a three-car garage.

The garage was under the house, in the basement, and it had two overhead doors, a double and a single. The Garage key didn’t fit either of them. Perhaps the key fit a garage in the brick house instead.

I stood in the driveway and stared at the key stupidly. Then I noticed a sidewalk that led to the back of the house. It was covered with snow, but its outline was clear. I followed it, doing the foot-twisting trick I hoped would keep my boot tracks from being identified. And there, under a deck overlooking the lake, was another door, an ordinary door, not an overhead door. And the Garage key from Timothy’s kitchen fit.

I went inside and groped for a switch. There was none near the door, and I had to use my flashlight to find a way to turn the overhead light on. And when it came on, I saw another of those canvas-shrouded mounds the VanHorns were so fond of.

This one was long, but not too tall. I was afraid to lift the canvas. It seemed to be my last chance to clear Jeff.

I forced myself to grab the canvas sheet and throw it back.

And there, dirty and mud spattered, was a black sports car.

My heart nearly stopped.

I yanked the cover completely off. I walked down the side of the car, leaned over, and examined the left taillight.

It was broken.

“Yee-haw!”

I’m not a Texan for nothing. I jumped up and down. I crowed with delight. I howled like a coyote.

Jeff was going to get out of jail. Before Rich arrived!

“Yee-haw!”

I was still yelling and jumping when a motor clicked on and the double garage door began to go up.

I
nearly wet my pants.

The dirty cheats! Less than an hour earlier, Hart had told me they were headed to Grand Rapids. They couldn’t possibly have driven all the way up there and back again already.

I left the dust sheet off the sports car and the garage light on, and I ran out the door I’d come in. I made a sharp right turn and ran along under the deck. There was a little snow there, but I didn’t worry about making tracks. I was making time.

My troubles began when I got to the end of the deck and came out at the other end of the house into hip-deep snow. Not only had the snow been piling up there since November, but the ground also rose steeply. I slipped and slid as if I were climbing the Matterhorn without a safety rope.

But I kept going, slogging through the snow, trying to get around the side of the house, out of sight.

Then I heard a voice. “Lee! Lee! What are you doing? It’s only me. Olivia!”

Just as she yelled my feet went out from under me. I landed on my fanny and slid halfway down the slope. I could hear Olivia laughing, though she didn’t sound terribly amused.

“Lee,” she said. “Come here. I’m not going to hurt you.”

I’d been caught. But I hadn’t been caught by Timothy. Timothy, who’d already killed. It was very likely that Olivia didn’t know that her brother had sneaked his car out to make clandestine trips into town to commit crimes. I’d realized that I’d have to confront her sometime. I’d planned to have Chief Jones there, but it now seemed I was going to do it alone.

I got to my feet and came back, feeling really stupid. Olivia VanHorn was her usual poised self, stunning in winter-white slacks, polished boots, and her casual mink.

“I owe you an apology,” I said. “I’m trespassing.”

“Now you’re not. Now you have my permission to be here. Were you looking for the MGB?”