The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up (10 page)

“How did you and Joe think to look for Hershel up there at the pavilion?” Trey chuckled. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“Why shouldn’t you ask?”

“Well, that spot used to be known as quite the lovers’ lane.” Trey gave a nervous giggle. “Before they locked the gate. Anyway, that’s what the locals say.”

“I’d never even heard of the place before last night. So I guess I’m still just a summer visitor.”

“Joe never told you about it? Seems as if he would have known. Maybe even taken somebody up there.”

“I’m sure he was a normal teenager.”

Trey snickered. “Well, yeah. I guess Joe has given Warner Pier plenty to talk about over the years. He’s played the field. Or that’s what Meg tells me. She’s the local at our house.” Trey snickered again. “Of course,
you
have nothing to worry about, Lee.”

Something about that second snicker got to me. It changed Trey’s jokes into snide remarks. If Trey could be snide, I decided, I could be snide, too.

I snickered back at him. “Have you asked
Meg
about the old chapel?”

“Meg wouldn’t go there!”

“But you said she was a Warner Pier local.”

The silence grew so long that I finally spoke again. “Did Meg go to school here?”

“High school.”

“High school was a long time ago,” I said. “For all of us. I guess I’d better get ready for wolf. Work! I mean, get ready for work.”

“I’m sorry I bothered you so early.” Trey hung up abruptly.

I was completely mystified. Had Trey called just to gossip about Hershel’s death? I supposed that was logical enough—every coffee klatch in Warner Pier was going to be buzzing over the killing of the town crank. But somehow I didn’t feel that had been the real purpose of Trey’s call.

I thought he was dropping a hint about Joe. Trying to tell me Joe was seeing someone else. Or had seen someone else. But when I’d turned that tactic on him and asked him about his wife, he’d begun to sulk.

Hmmmm. Very interesting.

I made a pot of coffee, got out the toaster, and prepared to waylay Aunt Nettie at the breakfast table. Maybe she knew something about Meg’s past.

By the time Aunt Nettie came out in her white pants and tunic, I’d had some caffeine and my brain didn’t seem to be quite as foggy.

“Who was on the phone?” she said.

“Trey Corbett. But I can’t figure out why he called.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not sure I understood what he said. But when I made a joke about Meg, it completely killed the conversation.”

“Ah.” Aunt Nettie gave the syllable enough nuances to fill a semester of English lit.

“What does ‘ah’ mean? Is there something I should know about Meg? Some deep dark secret in her past?”

“I’m sure you know all that’s necessary.”

“Necessary? Why should anything be necessary? I never even heard of Meg Corbett until yesterday.”

“Oh?” That syllable had a lot of nuances, too.

“Aunt Nettie! If I’m about to put my foot in it up to the knee, tell me! Is there something I should know about Meg?”

“Well, back when she was in high school—back when she was Maggie Mae Vanderveer—well, she and Joe dated for a while.”

I rolled my eyes. “Is that what’s bothering Trey?” Then I opened my eyes wide. “She didn’t leave town in scandalous circumstances?”

“Oh, no! I know Mercy wasn’t very happy about Joe seeing her. Maggie Mae—Meg—well, she didn’t have the best family life. But I don’t like to criticize Meg. It would have been easy for a girl from her background to slide into a lax way of life. The way her mother did, if we’re honest. But Meg was ambitious. She got herself through college.”

“Sounds like someone I know. If Meg had had an Aunt Nettie to put her on the right path, she’d be president.”

Aunt Nettie laughed. “She’s nothing like you, Lee. And her family’s nothing like yours. You never went hungry or were so dirty the neighbors called the welfare department.”

“That happened to Meg? Hard to believe somebody so high-toned could have come from trash.”

“I don’t know for sure. So much of this is gossip I hear from the ladies in the shop. I try not to believe everything they say.” She checked the kitchen clock. “I’ll get coffee and a roll at the shop,” she said. “There’s a woman spending the summer in a cottage near Gray Gables. She’s writing a cookbook of some sort. She has a really funny name, and Lois Corbett—that’s Trey’s cousin’s wife—asked me to talk to her, and she’s coming in this morning.”

Aunt Nettie went to work then, leaving me with a lot more questions about why Trey had called.

I’d been aware that Joe existed when I was in high school just because he had been the head lifeguard at the Warner Pier Beach during the three summers I worked for Aunt Nettie and Uncle Phil. But we didn’t know each other. Besides, by that time Joe wasn’t in high school. He was a student at the University of Michigan. I assumed he’d had girlfriends in high school—most popular and good-looking guys did—but I didn’t remember any of my friends telling me who they were. If Meg, or Maggie Mae, had been around during those summers, I hadn’t known her.

By the time Joe and I met twelve years later, each of us had been married and divorced. I’d never quizzed Joe about ex-girlfriends. He’d volunteered the reasons why his marriage hadn’t worked, and I’d confided my problems with my ex. Neither of us had offered to detail every romantic encounter we’d had in our past lives. Frankly, that would seem like a pretty dumb thing for either of us to do.

Besides, we weren’t engaged or anything. We weren’t even lovers—though that would probably come as a big surprise to the gossips of Warner Pier. Our abstinence was based more on fear than on moral qualms. We were both conscious of our past mistakes and timid about committing future ones. Maybe we were both also aware that we lived in a small town. If our romance ended in a dramatic bust-up, we were still going to be running into each other at the grocery store. There were a lot of reasons for us to be cautious, and so far we had been.

Knowing that Joe and Meg had once dated each other did give me a clue to that undertone of antagonism between them that I’d noticed the day before. It could help explain why Meg was so eager for me to see Joe as a suspect in Hershel’s death and why Joe had glared at her once or twice and carefully ignored her the rest of the time. Or could that antagonism be a screen for another feeling?

Was I jealous of Meg? Should I be? By the time I got to that question I was upstairs in my bedroom, looking in the mirror. I had to admit that right at that moment I wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world. Tossing and turning most of the night will do that to you. And Meg was attractive. She had even looked good after spending an afternoon out in a boat, helping search for a drowning victim.

I went to the closet and pulled out an outfit that I thought was becoming—a brown and peach plaid skirt and a V-necked cotton sweater in the same peach. To heck with the TenHuis Chocolade uniform—that day I was going to feel good about myself. I headed for the shower.

I spent some extra time on my hair and face. I dug some sandals out of the back of the closet, sandals I hoped would make my legs look long and shapely. The plaid skirt and sweater did give my morale a boost. I ate a couple of pieces of toast and contemplated the day.

One thing the day was going to include, I realized, was giving Chief Jones a complete statement on my encounter with Hershel. I decided that I’d better call and see if he wanted me to come by at any particular time.

It seemed as if the chief had been waiting for my call.

“Chief? It’s Lee McKinney. Do you want me to come in today and make a statement?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

The chief gave a deep sigh. “Right away, I guess. In fact, maybe you can identify the murder weapon.”

I
approached the Warner Pier City Hall and Police Department with dread, of course. I couldn’t imagine what horrible object had been used to kill Hershel. And I couldn’t imagine why Hogan Jones thought I might be able to identify it.

When I saw the weapon, I was completely mystified.

“Jerry Cherry and I were out there at daybreak,” the chief said. His tall, skinny shape bent over a table in his office, and he pointed a bony finger at an object which lay there. “Jerry found this,” he said.

The object was a rock about four inches around and three inches thick. A simple, rounded stone—one of the millions which vacationers stub their toes on along any beach on the shore of Lake Michigan.

“What on earth makes you think that was used to kill Hershel?” I said. “There are at least a zillion rocks like that on the beach at Warner Pier. What made this one stand out?”

“It wasn’t on the beach,” the chief said. He was looking tired—he’d probably been up all night—and his weariness deepened the lines in his face and made him look more like Abraham Lincoln than ever. “It was just inside the woods, about thirty-five feet from the pavilion, close to this.”

He picked up a paper sack and showed me that it held a rag. It looked like an ordinary red commercial rag—the kind my dad uses to wipe up grease in his garage, and the kind Joe uses to get varnish off his hands in his boat shop. The kind an industrial laundry delivers or Home Depot sells.

“The rag was what got our attention,” the chief said. “The preliminary report says there are red fabric fibers in the wound in Hershel’s head. And the rock we found with it appears to match the size and shape of the wound. Wounds.”

I shuddered away from a picture of Hershel being hit repeatedly. “Why did you think I could identify it?”

The chief used the eraser end of a pencil to turn the stone over. “It’s got something written on it,” he said.

I looked closely. I could see three letters. “J.R.W.” And a date.

It took me a second to realize they were Joe’s initials—Joseph Robert Woodyard. At the same time I realized there was a small hole in the top of the stone, and a second hole on the side.

I put my lips near one hole and my hand near the second and blew. Air rushed out onto my hand.

“What are you doing?” Chief Jones said.

“It’s a ‘lucky’!” I said. “Don’t you look for lucky stones?”

“I don’t even know what they are.”

“They’re a TenHuis family tradition. When you walk along the beach, you look at the stones, and if you find one with a hole that goes clear through it—it’s a lucky. If you can’t see through it, you have to prove it’s a lucky stone by blowing through the hole or by pouring water through it. Then you write your initials on it and take it home. I don’t know if anybody but us does it. But that’s a lucky stone.”

“It wasn’t so lucky for Hershel. Do you have any explanation for how this particular stone could have gotten up to the old chapel?”

“I didn’t take it up there. I’d never even heard of the place until last night.” I sounded defensive, even to myself. I’d already thought of a place I had put a lucky stone with those initials, but I didn’t want to say where.

The chief waited silently, looking at me steadily. He wasn’t buying my cover-up. I decided to abandon it.

“Okay,” I said. “Joe and I took the runabout up the lakeshore one of the first nice days in May. We had a picnic. It was too cold to swim or even to wade, so we walked along the beach, and I found three or four lucky stones, and Joe found one. When we got back to the shop that evening, I put my stones in the back of the van, and I laid the one he had found near the shop’s downspout.”

The chief nodded. “We found a gap where it looked like one of the stones was missing. The weather had made a little pocket for it.”

All of a sudden I was very angry. “So you knew where it came from all along, and you wanted to trap me into saying the stone came from Joe’s shop.”

“I wasn’t trying to trap you. I was trying not to put words in your mouth at all.”

“You thought I’d lie to protect Joe.”

The chief opened his mouth, but I kept talking. “Well, Chief Hogan Jones, let me tell you that I would not lie to protect Joe.”

“Lee . . .”

“I wouldn’t lie to protect him, because Joe doesn’t need projecting. I mean, protecting! Joe would never have harmed Hershel. I completely deject—I mean, reject!—that idea.”

“Calm down, Lee.”

“I’m not going to calm down. I thought you were a friend of mine, a friend of Aunt Nettie’s. I thought you liked Joe, too.”

“I do, Lee. I like all of you. But an investigating officer has to look at all possibilities.”