The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (19 page)

Originally, or so the local historians say, the River Villa employed a staff of twenty-five. Its original owner—or his wife—was a patron of the arts, and throughout the 1920s they kept an open house for Warner Pier’s art colony and for their Jazz Age friends from Chicago. The Depression of the 1930s ended that life. The River Villa was abandoned, its balconies
falling down, its patios and flower beds gradually plowed up by maples.

The house sat on a thousand acres that Warner Pier of the 1920s and 1930s had called worthless. It was worthless in those days because it wasn’t suitable for fruit trees, then the main cash crop of the area, and later it was considered worthless for building vacation cottages, because it was too far up the Warner River. Prime
building lots then were on the lake, and there was still lots of lakefront property in those days.

Today the property would be valuable for development as home sites. Unfortunately, the heirs couldn’t decide what to do with the place, so it just sat there. The house had been considered for a bed-and-breakfast, for a resort, for a school. But the heirs couldn’t agree on who should buy or lease.
It was rented to two artists, and they held classes in what was once the ballroom. The grounds were completely overgrown.

So the place had a red tile roof, and it ought to have lots of birds. Maybe it was where Pete had been watching owls. It was possible to drive into the grounds, and I decided it might be worth doing that, just to see if Pete’s forest green SUV was parked anywhere obvious.

I called the shop to say I’d be late. I didn’t have the nerve to talk to Dolly Jolly. I’d ignored her and her problems all day, and my conscience was eating at me. Luckily, Tracy answered the phone and told me the air-conditioning crew was there, so that made me feel a little better as I got into my red van and drove off in the wrong direction, away from my duty to chocolate.

The River Villa
had a gravel parking lot near the house, and a meandering dirt road looped through the site. Pete’s SUV was not in the main parking lot, so I started along the drive. I drove slowly, partly because the road was full of potholes.

I had swung around the property and was headed back to the main gate when I saw a glint down a road that looked as if it might lead to a garbage pit. And there, behind
a bush, was a forest green SUV, its color camouflaging it from casual glances.

I stopped the van and walked over to the SUV. A peek through the front window and I was sure. Pete’s wide-brimmed bush hat was in the front seat. I’d found his ride.

But where was Pete? I looked all around. No sign of him.

Why had he parked in this hidden spot? The River Villa renters didn’t seem to be concerned
about trespassers. If Pete wanted to walk around the property and look at birds, why not park in the official parking area?

There were two obvious answers. The first was, Pete didn’t want someone to know he was there. The second was, he was looking at something close to this particular spot, and he wanted to be able to get back to his car in a hurry.

I went back to my van, found a pad and pencil
in my purse, and wrote a note telling Pete he was needed quickly at the Warner Pier PD.
Bring Darrell an alibi for Saturday night,
I wrote. I walked back to his SUV and stuck the note under a windshield wiper.

Then I took another look around. I couldn’t believe Pete wasn’t close by. I called his name: “Pete!” But somehow I didn’t want to yell it out loudly.

I was turning to leave when I saw
a path. It didn’t look exactly well traveled, but it led downhill, toward the river. I hesitated only a moment before I followed it.

I was immediately sorry. Mosquitoes and deer flies the size of pigeons descended. All I had for protective gear was a chocolate brown polo shirt and a pair of khaki slacks. I pulled the neckline of the shirt up over my head, pretending it was a hood. This left a
strip of my back in peril. I almost turned around. But then I saw a footprint that looked a lot like it might be Pete’s, and I couldn’t resist going on.

After running the gauntlet of mosquitoes and flies through thick woods for about fifty feet, I came to an area where the trees abruptly cleared. I left the woods and found myself on the bank of the Warner River. Actually, I nearly found myself
in
the river. The last few feet were steep, and I slid down the path rather dramatically, giving a loud yelp as my feet went out from under me and I sat down harder than I really like to sit. When I stopped sliding my feet were just a foot from the water.

The path continued upstream. I stood up, taking in my surroundings.

And the first surrounding I noticed was two guys in a boat, laughing at
me.

One of them, a plump type, hollered, “You okay?”

I waved feebly. “Just surprised!”

I walked along the path, trying not to stare at the boat, but it had surprised me as much as my sudden slide had. It surprised me because it was so close.

The town of Warner Pier was built where the river deepens before it enters the lake, at a spot where it is possible to load cargo boats. Upstream the
river tends to become wide and swampy. But at this spot it was narrower and deeper than I’d expected. So the two men in the boat were only fifty feet or so away.

They were tying up a very ordinary fiberglass boat at a ramshackle dock. Joe, the expert on antique wooden boats, would have sneered at theirs. The cottage behind it was a real fixer-upper, and a very ordinary blue pickup sat beside
it.

I had no idea anything as tumbledown as that cottage remained on the Warner River. Property values for anything with a view of the water—whether lake or river—had gone through the roof; if people couldn’t afford to keep their property up, they sold it and lived off the proceeds.

But I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the men, their boat, or the cottage behind them. I simply walked on up
the path along the river, looking into the woods for a glimpse of Pete. After a hundred feet or so I hadn’t seen him, and the bugs were still bombarding me, so I turned around and started back.

From this direction I could see the two men with the boat without turning my head, so I took a good look at them. Somehow they seemed familiar. One was tall, and the other was short. Then I saw them eyeing
me the way I was eyeing them, and I quickly began to examine the woods again. I refrained from calling out Pete’s name, however.

A tall guy and a short guy. Lofty and Shorty. The same combination as the two men who had held us at gunpoint.

Then I told myself I was seeing bad guys everywhere, and I kept walking.

Finding where the path started up the bank didn’t prove to be too easy, but I spotted
it. I slipped and slid up the slope, whacking at insects like a windmill, keeping my head down to make sure I didn’t fall again and this time sprain an ankle.

I was still looking at the ground when I reached the road, and a voice growled. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

After I’d jumped as high as the trees that arched over us, I realized that Pete, the missing bird-watcher
himself, was leaning against his SUV. His binoculars were hanging around his neck, and he was scowling like an eagle who’s just lost a rotten fish to a loon. And I was the loon.

“Pete! You didn’t have to scare the sacks—I mean, the socks! You didn’t have to startle me like that!”

“I wish I could scare you! How did you know where to find me?”

“Just a guess. That picture of an owl you showed
us included a red roof, so I figured the River Villa was one place you’d been looking at birds. When I saw your SUV . . .”

“You just naturally went down to the river and nearly fell in.”

“You saw me? Why didn’t you say something?” I was getting mad.

“What’s to say? What are you doing here?”

I stabbed my forefinger toward his windshield. “An emergency came up. Joe needs to find you. You didn’t
answer your phone.”

Pete snatched the note from the windshield. “And you leave information just lying around where anybody in the world could find it!”

“Look! If you want to communicate with us by cider—I mean, by cipher! If you want secret messages, you’re going to have to give me a codebook. Good-bye!”

I shoved past Pete and headed for my van, but he grabbed my arm. He swung me around. His
binoculars were digging into my chest. Suddenly we were nose-to-nose again, just as we had been under the tarp a day earlier. And the same thing happened. We stood there staring at each other.

I shoved Pete’s hand off my arm. “I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m late getting to the office because I was trying to find you. Joe and I would appreciate it if you’d go by the Warner Pier PD and tell the cops
whether or not you can say where Darrell was during that robbery at the Garretts’.”

I guess I had the last word. Anyway, Pete didn’t answer me. I got into the van and drove away.

Pete was the most arrogant jerk I’d ever been around. And what the heck was he up to out at the River Villa? He definitely was not watching birds.

 

I hadn’t been at my desk long when Joe called. “Hey, Lee,” he said.
“Underwood found out that an Andrew Woodyard had been registered at the Holiday Inn Express in Holland for the past week. He checked out Wednesday.”

I had to pull my mind back to what Joe and I had been talking about an hour earlier. “The motels? The ones Gina called? Andrew Woodyard? Someone was using your dad’s name? That’s spooky.”

“I know. Underwood’s sending one of his men over there with
a picture of the dead man.”

“But we already know the dead man was claiming to be Andrew Woodyard! What we don’t know is who he really was.”

“Yeah. And getting the motel to ID him isn’t going to get closer to that.”

I told Joe I’d found Pete, but I didn’t tell him the circumstances. Then I tried to work the rest of my shift. Joe called at six o’clock to say that Pete had shown up to alibi Darrell,
and the state police were letting Darrell go. The three of them were going out to dinner, he said. He invited me to join them, but his invitation didn’t sound real enthusiastic. I told him I’d eat at my desk. Brenda went down to the corner for sandwiches for herself, Tracy, and me, and the three of us—the entire staff of TenHuis Chocolade after five thirty—concentrated on getting everything
done so we could leave early. Not that it worked. The tourists kept coming in to suck up our air-conditioning until the moment I locked the door at nine p.m.

Brenda, Tracy, and I celebrated with chocolate. My Crème de Menthe Bonbon (“the formal after-dinner mint”) had a bit of bloom, but I found it reviving. Then we got busy, and we finished with the cleanup and money balancing by nine twenty.
The boyfriends were going to some guy thing that night, so Brenda and Tracy were free, but they decided to stop by some teenage hangout on the way home. I told the girls I’d see them later and drove home, dreading the stag party I’d find there.

But the house was dark. It stays light until nearly ten o’clock in our part of Michigan in July. If Pete, Joe, and Darrell had come in since dinner, it
had still been light when they left again. In fact, I felt sure they hadn’t come in; Joe would have left the porch light on for me.

I was so tired that I forgot where I’d been putting my car. I had parked in my own driveway before I remembered Joe and I had been leaving our cars at the Baileys’ house.

I was too tired to care. I decided somebody else could park at the Baileys’ that night. I got
out of the car, slammed the door hard, and tromped to the back door. I unlocked it, went inside, and turned on the kitchen and dining room lights. The dining room light shone into the living room, and I could see there was no mail on the mantel, the designated spot for it. That meant that no one had even walked down to the road and picked it up. I wasn’t going to do it either, I decided. I threw
my purse down on the dining table in disgust, then kicked off the rubber-soled loafers I usually wear to the office.

If I was alone in the house at least I could use the bathroom without wondering if someone was pacing back and forth outside the door. Barefoot, I started to that room by way of the back hall.

But I never made it. I’d barely entered the back hall when someone knocked on the front
door.

The knock only added to my annoyance. Who the heck could that be? With my luck it would be Harold and his darn dog, Alice, dropping by to pass on some useless information.

That back hall had four doors off it. The one I’d just passed through led to the kitchen. The one to its left, always kept closed, led to the basement. The one on the right led to the bathroom. The one in front of me
led into the downstairs bedroom—the bedroom I shared with Joe. And a door at the other end of that room led to the living room and the front door.

Still angry, I veered toward the bedroom, the most direct route to the front door.

When I entered the bedroom, all the curtains and the windows were open. Since there are lots of windows in that room, I could see out on the south side, which overlooks
the front porch, and on the west side, which overlooks the side yard.

I wasn’t surprised to see a dark figure on the porch. Someone had just knocked on the front door, after all.

But I was surprised to see a second dark figure going past the windows on the west.

Someone was walking through the side yard. It was someone tall. What was he doing there?

I looked back at the porch. The man out
there was short.

A short guy and a tall guy. The two robbers in the wet suits. And the two guys in the boat, the ones who had laughed when I slid down the bank.

And Pete had been “watching birds” in their vicinity.

I realized the guys in the boat must have been the same guys who had been in the snapshots Pete had shown me. The guys whom he had photographed at Beech Tree Public Access Area.