The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up (4 page)

“It seems as if the river would be pretty safe,” I said. “You haven’t seen Hershel?”

“No. The phone hasn’t even rung today. I’ll meet you at the dock around five thirty.”

Joe hung up, and I turned back to Patsy. “So Joe hasn’t seen Hershel. I wonder where he could be.”

Patsy had regained her cheerful air. She stood up, draperies flying. “I know I’m being silly. But Hershel . . . well, you know he’s odd. Everybody in Warner Pier knows he’s odd. That’s one reason Frank and I came back here after Mother died. We figured that here, where people knew Hershel was odd but harmless, it would be easier to control the situation. But I can’t help worrying. Especially when he roams around.”

“Why does that worry you?”

“We discover him prowling around, asking nosy questions. He annoys people. You can’t blame them. So I worry.”

She moved toward the door, then turned back, smiling sadly. “Hershel will always be my little brother.”

I tried to say a few reassuring words as I walked to the door with Patsy Waterloo. She seemed like a nice person, and her problem with Hershel made me glad I’m an only child.

There was a lull in retail customers, so I began to try to get my balance sheet caught up. In between addition and subtraction I thought about Joe, and I forgot Hershel completely.

At exactly five o’clock Aunt Nettie came up front from the workroom, carrying a big spoon covered with dark chocolate. She stood in the door of my office and looked at me accusingly. “You’re off duty,” she said. “Go away.”

I laughed. “I guess I’m outta here,” I said.

I closed out my computer, then went back to the alley and got the green and cream outfit from my van. I changed clothes and freshened my makeup in the restroom. I even took my hair out of its businesslike queue and brushed it hard, trying to make it look smooth and sexy. After all, there’s no point in being half Dutch if you don’t flaunt your naturally blond hair now and then.

Having made myself as beautiful as possible, I waved at Aunt Nettie, went out the back door, and walked over to the dock to meet Joe.

I was, I admit, a bit excited. Joe had planned a big evening for us. I wanted it to go off well.

When I got to the docks, Joe’s personal antique boat—the Shepherd Sedan—was easy to find. Antique boats are always the center of a group of people pointing and asking questions.

A “sedan,” as Joe has explained it to me, is a roofed boat. His Shepherd was manufactured in 1948 by a Canadian company. It’s a twenty-two-footer, and its hull is mahogany, burnished to a lustrous brown through weeks of sanding and varnishing, more sanding and varnishing, and even more sanding and varnishing—a total of ten coats of varnish, each sanded by hand before the next one went on. Elbow grease and patience are the keys to restoring old boats, Joe says.

The Shepherd’s roof mimics the shape of automobile roofs in the late 1940s. The front window is Plexiglas. The side windows are safety glass and they roll up and down, just like the windows in automobiles of the day did. The roof itself is of molded plywood, covered with canvas. The dashboard and steering gear are remarkably like an automobile of the 1940s as well.

In fact, Joe had told me the steering wheel was actually manufactured for a car.

Joe has spent hundreds of hours working on the sedan, and the result is a gorgeous boat with a mahogany hull and an off-white roof. It doesn’t really have a cabin, since the back is open, but the roof makes it a great craft for either cool or sunny weather. The Shepherd Sedan may not fly over the water like a Cigarette boat, true, but it’s pure class.

When I made my way through the knot of people looking the boat over, however, I saw a problem. Trey Corbett was sitting in the stern.

He was leaning forward, talking earnestly. His stance made him look nerdier and more middle-aged than ever.

When I saw him, Hershel Perkins immediately flashed through my mind—I guess because Trey had been a witness to the altercation at the post office the day before. So the sight of Trey didn’t make me happy.

I stopped beside the sedan, which was parallel to the dock and a few feet below it. Joe looked up and grinned, but Trey didn’t seem to realize I was there.

“You know the river so well,” Trey said.

“Not as well as a lot of other people,” Joe said.

“We need your help, Joe.”

Joe just shook his head. He extended his hand toward me, then led me down the dock for two steps, until I was opposite the step pad, that rubberized gadget that gives you enough traction to step into the boat gracefully, instead of falling in awkwardly.

Trey finally noticed that I was coming aboard. He leaped to his feet. “Oh! Hi, Lee.”

“Hi, Trey.”

Joe ignored Trey while I stepped into the stern of the boat. He guided me under the roof and up to one of the two front seats.

Trey stood up, looking worried. “I hope we find Hershel soon,” he said. “I really need to be working on the fireplace at the Miller house this evening. I’m giving it a faux marble look, and there’s nobody around to do it the way I want. I worked on it all yesterday evening.”

“Maybe he’ll turn up all right,” I said.

“Listen, Trey,” Joe said. “Considering the altercation Hershel and I had yesterday, I really don’t think I ought to get involved in any search for him. Besides, I promised Lee a nice dinner and a boat ride tonight.”

“But, Joe . . .”

Joe shook his head. “No, Trey. I’m not joining any search party. But Lee and I are going up the river, since we’ve got reservations for dinner at the lodge. If I see a bright green canoe floating by, I’ll make sure Hershel’s not under it.”

T
rey left, but he didn’t look happy about it.

Joe cast off the lines that held the sedan to the dock, assuring me I didn’t need to help, then sat down behind the wheel of the sedan.

“What makes Trey think Hershel’s capsized?” I said.

“He and his canoe are both missing.”

“Patsy Waterloo didn’t mention the canoe. She just said Hershel was gone.”

Joe reached over and squeezed my hand. “Forget Hershel. I am really glad to see you. If you’d backed out of this little trip—well, I think I might have done something desperate.”

“Cut your suspenders and gone straight up, as my Texas grandma would have said? But why would I back out?”

“It just seems as if everything else that’s happened for the past twenty-four hours has failed to turn out the way I wanted it to.”

Joe started the motor and the boat began burbling. The motors of old boats are cooled by pumping water around the engine, and the design gives them a distinctive sound—a bubbling, murmuring, lush sound that lots of people find the most attractive thing about them.

We pulled away from the dock and moved gently out into the river. All of the dock area, of course, is a no-wake zone, so Joe kept the speed slow and steady. This meant the engine was not terribly noisy, and we could talk, if we yelled. I leaned over Joe’s shoulder. “What went wrong?”

“Oh, last night was a fiasco. A wild goose chase.”

“You were going to show somebody the runabout?”

“Yeah. Some guy called, said he had seen the runabout at the South Haven show. Said he wanted to look at it, give his wife a ride. Said he was really determined to buy it. So I chased clear up to Saugatuck in high waves and went to the house he described—and nobody was there.”

“Nobody was there?”

“Not only that, the house he directed me to—one of those right on the water, with its own dock—it’s empty. The neighbors said nobody’s been there for two summers. And the owner’s name is not the same as the man who claimed he wanted to buy the boat. It was some kind of hoax.”

“That’s awful! Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

“I have no idea. I was afraid I’d find the shop burned down when I got home, but everything was okay. It sure did ruin my evening. I had to beat the waves back down to Warner Pier.”

Handling a small boat in fairly high waves isn’t easy. You have to head into the waves, which points your prow away from the shore and means you’re basically traveling sideways. Then when you go over the top of the wave, you suddenly swing the wheel toward the shore—or is it away from the shore? I don’t understand the process at all, and even Joe considers it a struggle.

“I didn’t get back until way after dark,” Joe said.

I slid my hand onto his shoulder. “Tonight we’ll just be on the river. No waves.”

Joe grinned. “All we’ll have to look out for is weeds, mud, and other boats.”

The Warner River is about a quarter of a mile wide at Warner Pier—which is one reason it was a good place to build a pier, I guess, when Captain Hoseah Warner decided to do that a hundred and fifty years ago. Still in the no-wake zone, we traveled slowly up the river, past the house Captain Warner built in 1850—now a bed-and-breakfast inn; past the pseudo-Victorian condos which sell for a half-million each; past Hershel’s funny little house, which always reminds me of the witch’s cottage Hansel and Gretel found. For the first time I noticed the bigger, restored Craftsman-style house behind Hershel’s. Now I realized that must be Patsy and Frank Waterloo’s home.

Joe guided the boat out into the main channel and stepped up our pace. Joe’s a very safe boater, but he likes to rev it up and run his boat all over the lake or the river at top speed; it’s a guy thing. We sped past the entrance to Joe’s boat shop, on our left, and the turrets of Gray Gables, one of Warner Pier’s historic summer homes, came into view on the right. It wasn’t long before the broad glass windows of the Warner River Lodge appeared around a bend. Joe cut his speed way back, and we floated gently alongside the lodge’s dock. The dock attendant caught the mooring line, and we tied up. Joe cut the engine and stepped out—he makes it look easy—then held out a hand so that I could use the step pad to get out gracefully.

“We’re early,” he said. “We can have a drink on the terrace.” He grinned. “Behind one of the umbrellas.”

Two hours later we’d had drinks on the terrace and a marvelous dinner in the dining room. We came back down the stairs to the dock hand in hand. Joe helped me into the sedan, then tipped the dock attendant. The sun was still up. Once we’d cast off, Joe even gave me a quick kiss. I wanted it to last much longer, but Joe started the motor.

I turned sideways in the passenger’s seat and slid my hand around the nape of Joe’s neck. He patted my knee as we moved away from the dock, the motor burbling softly. The boat headed upstream. We were alone.

So it was quite a surprise when a sound like the final trump thundered over the river.

“Joe! Joe Woodyard!”

Joe whirled so fast he must have nearly given himself whiplash, and I jumped higher than I knew I could sitting down.

Downstream we saw a large white boat approaching. Its prow was crowded with spotlights, and the roof of its little cabin was loaded down with radar gear and antennas.

Joe cut the motor to trolling speed. “It’s the city patrol boat,” he said.

I squinted at the boat, looking into the sun. “Chief Jones is aboard.”

As a community that straddles a river and abuts a lake, Warner Pier has to be prepared for law enforcement and emergencies on the water. In the tourist season, there’s a full-time water policeman who enforces safety regulations on the river, and the city owns a nifty patrol boat which he uses. It’s also used to rescue boaters if there’s an accident and to drag the river if there’s a drowning. But the chief rarely goes out in the boat, and ordinary boaters who are obeying the rules and minding their own business—as Joe and I had been—wouldn’t normally be hailed by the city patrol boat.

“What do they want?” I said.

Joe didn’t ask until the two boats were alongside. “What’s up, Chief?” he said. “I hope you’re not going to haul me into the big search for Hershel’s canoe.”

Chief Hogan Jones looked grim. “Nope, Joe. We’re not looking for Hershel’s canoe any longer. His body, maybe.”

“His body!” I yelled, and Joe made a surprised exclamation.

“Yep,” the chief said. “We found his canoe caught in some purple sedge near the entrance to your place, Joe.”

Some police chiefs really know how to spoil a romantic mood.

Chief Jones sure spoiled Joe’s. His face got nearly as dark as his hair, and his jaw clenched and unclenched more often than it had while he was eating his prime rib and steamed baby asparagus in the dining room of the Warner River Lodge.

But there was no help for it. We had to turn downstream and follow Chief Jones back to Joe’s boat shop.

Vintage Boats is in an isolated spot at the end of Dock Street, barely inside the city limits of Warner Pier. The area is pretty close to rural. It’s heavily wooded, like most of western Michigan, a quality which gives a Plains person like me a spooky feeling. Joe had few neighbors, and those few couldn’t see his shop for the trees.

The shop itself is very ordinary, just a big metal building not too different from my dad’s automotive garage in north Texas. The building is heated and well insulated, of course, since Joe works in it all year round. It even has some air conditioning, a rarity for such a shop in Michigan, because Joe sometimes has to close part of it up in the summer to keep dust out of his varnish. It has one main room, forty by eighty, with a couple of fifteen- by twenty-foot rooms at one end. One of those was the office and the other was the space Joe had made into a rudimentary apartment. The only sign of luxury in it was a fancy sound system he said was left from his bachelor days—before he made the marriage he always refers to as “stupid.”

The shop is not a boat house. It’s a hundred feet from the water, but Joe does have a dock on the river. A gravel drive enters the property from Dock Street, circles the building, and leads down to an area where he can launch a boat.