The Chocolate Cat Caper (13 page)

Then I heard something again, and that something was fumbling around with some small metal trash cans Aunt Nettie keeps on the back porch as raccoon-proof storage. As I watched, a large black blob moved close to the porch rail, then again disappeared under the roof.

If that was a raccoon, it was the biggest sucker in Michigan.

I turned around and found myself nose to nose with Aunt Nettie. I jumped so high my T-shirt nearly turned into a parachute as I came down.

Luckily, I didn’t scream. “You scared me,” I whispered. “I thought you’d stayed in the other room. Have you called the police?”

“The phone won’t work.”

We’d unplugged it. Aunt Nettie had forgotten that, I decided. I crept across the hall and down the narrow stairs—there are doors at the top and the bottom so Aunt Nettie can compartmentalize the Michigan winter cold—with her close behind me. The stairs end in the corner of the living room, and I peeked around the door at the bottom before I came out. I saw nothing, but once again I heard that noise.

I walked into the kitchen as quietly as I could and found the phone cord where I’d draped it across the back of the kitchen stool. I ran my hand along the cord, feeling for the funny little plug that would fit into the bottom of the telephone. And my hand ran right up the cord to the telephone.

The phone was already plugged in.

I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear, but it was just a gesture. If that phone was plugged in, then Aunt Nettie was right. The phone wasn’t working.

It was time to panic.

I was stuck in a house well out of earshot of any neighbor and surrounded by bushes and trees. There was an intruder on the back porch. He or she had disabled the telephone. And I felt responsible for my aunt—who was a perfectly capable sixty-year-old woman, although she might not be much help in a fight.

But if that black blob on the back porch got into the house—again?—fighting might be our best option.

I put my lips close to Aunt Nettie’s ear. “Think of some kind of a weapon,” I said.

She whispered back, “I don’t own a gun.”

“I know! But this house should be full of blunt instruments.”

“I’ll grab Grandma TenHuis’s big iron skillet.”

“Good! Just don’t hit
me
with it. I’ll go get the fireplace poker.”

I tiptoed into the living room. I was feeling for the poker when I heard a crash from the kitchen, and I nearly jumped out of my T-shirt again.

Aunt Nettie spoke, sounding perfectly calm. “I dropped the skillets,” she said.

There was no more point in trying to be quiet. I grabbed the poker and sent the tongs and shovel flying onto the brick hearth, then ran back toward the kitchen. “Turn on the porch light!”

I heard a terrific clamor on the back porch.

I flew to the window of the dining room, which stuck out at an angle to the main house and had a clear view of the back porch. I got there just as the porch light came on, and I looked out on a scene of complete slapstick. Aunt Nettie’s porch chair was ricocheting off the railing. A hanging pot was swinging wildly, the petunias in it bouncing. Tin trash cans were rolling everywhere, and the lid of one of them flew away and crashed into the back door like a badly tossed Frisbee. Unfortunately it had covered the can filled with sunflower seed for the bird feeders, and the slick black seeds poured down the back steps like lava.

And in the middle of it all, a black figure was falling off the porch.

It had arms and legs this time, and I tried to get a good look at it. But it was still just a faceless blob, and the darn blob wouldn’t hold still. It rolled around with the tin cans, got up to its knees, slipped on the birdseed and fell down again, got up once more and staggered off around the corner of the house.

I ran to the living room window, on the side of the house, parted the curtains, and looked out. All I could see was a flashlight beam, moving rapidly toward the drive.

I turned to run to the front door and look out, and I had another one of those moments of sheer terror when I bumped into Aunt Nettie. Again.

“Auntie! Make some noise!” I pushed past her and ran to switch on the front porch light and look out the window that faced the road. Aunt Nettie was right behind me. But we were too late to get any kind of look at the intruder. The black figure had disappeared into the trees, and all we could see was the bouncing beam of the flashlight. Aunt Nettie and I stood there holding the skillet and the poker and watched the light disappear when it reached the Lake Shore Drive.

“Whew!” I said. “I’m sure glad you heard that noise.”

“I’m not,” Aunt Nettie said. Her lips were pursed angrily. “That burglar apparently didn’t want to get into the house this time. If I’d just kept quiet, maybe we could have had an uninterrupted night’s sleep.”

At that point our sleep had definitely been interrupted. I went upstairs, turned on the dim bedside lamp—somehow that seemed safer—and started getting dressed in black jeans, a dark sweatshirt, and an old pair of dark-colored sneakers.

Aunt Nettie came to the door. “What are you doing?”

“The phone’s out. I’ve got to go call the police.”

“No! You’re not leaving this house!”

“What if he comes back?”

“Then we’ll scare him off again.”

“Aunt Nettie, he might bring weapons next time. Or re-enactors. I mean, reinforcements.”

“What if the reinforcements are already here? What if he wasn’t alone? What if someone else is hidden outside?”

Well, that had already crossed my mind. But we couldn’t simply sit in that house and wait until daylight. So I clenched my jaw, hoping that would keep my teeth from chattering. “I don’t think that’s too likely,” I said. “I’ll run along the path to the Baileyss house and call the police.”

“The Baileys aren’t home.”

“Don’t you have a key? Anyway, my van’s parked over there. If I can’t get in the house, I can drive down to the all-night station.”

Then I stopped and considered Aunt Nettie. I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave her alone. “Maybe you’d better come, too.”

“No! Neither of us is stepping out that door.”

We were still at an impasse when I tied my last sneaker string and went down the stairs. I was determined to go, and Aunt Nettie was determined that I wasn’t leaving the house. The argument had almost reached the “Are not!” “Am too!” stage by the time we got to the living room.

That was when somebody knocked at the front door.

Of all the things that had happened, that one was the scariest. I do believe my heart stopped dead right inside my rib cage.

Aunt Nettie and I clutched each other.

“Mrs. TenHuis?” a deep voice said. “It’s the police. Are you all right?”

We did have the sense to look out the window and check to make sure the vehicle in the drive had a light bar on top before we opened the door. Then we yanked a young blond patrolman inside so quick he almost got a knot in his nightstick.

“I saw the lights on,” he said. “Is anything wrong?”

We poured out our tale, and he pulled his radio off his shoulder and told the dispatcher to send him some backup and to contact Chief Jones. Then he looked at the back porch.

“We might get some footprints,” he said. “Not out here, but around at the side of the house.”

“Well, when you find the guy,” I said, “he’s going to have bruises up and down his shins and shoes full of sunflower seeds.”

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Nettie said, “the birds are going to be all over the porch tomorrow morning.”

She was wrong. By morning the porch was so thick with reporters and photographers that the birds couldn’t get near it.

Both front and back porches were thick. We found out later that the just-out-of-journalism-school editor of the
Warner Pier Weekly Press
listened to the scanner on his way back from a party in Kalamazoo, and he apparently let out the news that two witnesses in the Ripley killing had been threatened by an intruder. He probably did it to curry favor with the big city reporters. I guess it worked for him; he left for a new job the next week, before TenHuis Chocolade could yank its advertising.

Thanks to his efforts, by sunup we were under siege. And I don’t mean sunup as when the sun hit the house. I mean sunup as when it came up over the horizon way over there behind all those trees and bushes that were habitat for deer and turkeys and which kept Aunt Nettie’s house gloomy until after eight o’clock on July mornings.

We didn’t answer the door, once we saw who was out there, but it sure wasn’t like a relaxing Sunday morning. And we didn’t even have a working telephone. The phone company had told the police they couldn’t get a repair crew out until Monday.

“Maybe we should go down to the shop,” Aunt Nettie said. “We could hide in the break room.”

“But how will we get there? We’d have to fight our way through.”

Rescue came in a truly surprising form.

First we heard a siren coming down Lake Shore Drive. It grew louder and louder. Then it seemed to be right at the end of our drive, not moving. I peeked out around the shade on the upstairs window, and I saw the Warner Pier rescue truck edging through the crowd of press.

“Good heavens!” Aunt Nettie said. “I hope none of those reporters has had a heart attack or anything.”

“I’m not as charitable as you,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind if the whole bunch dropped dead.”

As we watched, the rescue truck drew up right in front of the front door, and Greg Glossop got out and strutted up onto the porch. He pounded on the door.

Aunt Nettie gave a deep and disgusted sigh. “Well, I can’t ignore him,” she said.

“I can.”

But she was already on the way downstairs.

“Don’t open the door,” I said. I followed her.

Aunt Nettie went into her bedroom, which had a window that opened onto the porch. She moved a chair, pushed the curtain back a few inches, then opened the casement window a crack. A roar went up from the reporters, and Glossop moved over to the window.

“Chief Jones sent us to get you out,” he said. His light-colored eyes were dancing with excitement, and his plump face was self-important.

“Why?”

Glossop bounced on his toes, and his round belly looked like a basketball being dribbled. “Don’t you want to get away from these reporters?”

“Yes, but why does the police chief care?”

“That state detective wants to talk to you.”

“Then why doesn’t he come and get us himself?” Glossop’s belly jiggled again. “The chief talked him out of that. He says if they come in here with a police car it’ll look like you’re being arrested.”

“But neither of us needs an ambulance.”

“We’re calling it a practice run.”

“Oh.”

Aunt Nettie closed the window and turned to me. “Should we go, Lee?”

“We can hardly refuse. If the state detective wants to talk to us, and if the chief doesn’t want to cause more commotion . . .” I shrugged.

Aunt Nettie cracked the window again. “Give us ten minutes to get ready.”

Glossop nodded, then crossed to the front door and stood there, arms folded, on guard. He didn’t look quite as intimidating as Hugh, Clementine Ripley’s goonlike security guard.

Aunt Nettie put on blue chambray pants and a coordinating tunic, and I put on a plaid flannel shirt over my jeans and T-shirt. Then Glossop and the other two members of his crew formed a protective arc around us and escorted us across the porch and into the back of the ambulance. We ignored the yells. “Who’s sick?” “Where are you going?” “Did you poison the chocolates?” “Who tried to break in?”

Once we were inside, the driver turned on the siren and edged through the crowd and onto Lake Shore Drive. Looking out the back window, I saw reporters and photographers running for their cars, and I sighed. They were obviously going to chase us, and then everyone would know that we’d been taken in for more questioning.

But after about a block, the driver suddenly sped up, and I saw a Warner Pier police car pull out into the road behind us with lights flashing. Then another pulled out. The two of them blocked the road, and we drove off—figuratively giving the press the finger. It was a great moment.

As soon as we were around the curve and out of sight, the driver cut the siren.

“Oh, my,” Aunt Nettie said. “That was fun.”

Glossop preened. “The chief and I worked that maneuver out. Now we’ll have you at the Ripley house in a few minutes.”

“The Ripley house!” I almost yelped out the words.

“Yes, that’s where they’ve set up a sort of command post. It’s easy to control access there, you see. And there’s lots of space.”

“I guess so.” Yes, access to Clementine Ripley’s house was controlled.

“Of course, you and Nettie are going to see the top-dog detectives. They sent another team over to the police station. They’re interrogating the catering staff.” Glossop shrugged off the importance of the catering staff.

Huh,
I thought. The catering staff was all over that house. Any of them could have poisoned those chocolates. I was somewhat comforted to learn that we weren’t the only people being questioned.

“I can understand why you wouldn’t want to go back to the Ripley estate,” Glossop said.

“Oh, I don’t mind.”

“Well, I mind going! I don’t even want to think about that terrible woman.”

“No one seemed to like her.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t! She caused me a lot of problems—and only because I insisted on performing my duty.” Greg Glossop reached under his seat and produced a can of Diet Coke. He took a drink, then leaned back against the side of the ambulance, looking self-righteous.

I found myself madly curious. Glossop had obviously had a run-in with Clementine Ripley, but he was such a notorious and obnoxious gossip that I didn’t want to encourage him to talk—about anything. I leaned against the other side of the ambulance and closed my eyes. I’d find out some other way, I told myself.