The Chocolate Mouse Trap (5 page)

But Martin Schrader’s request probably didn’t mean anything. He was upset over Julie’s murder and casting around for any scrap of information. At least, I had convinced myself of that by the time we had collected our coats and were standing under the porte cochere waiting for the cars to be brought around.

“Ms. McKinney?” The voice came from behind me. It was barely audible, but I heard its distinctive squeak. I turned to find Brad Schrader standing there.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “I wanted to apologize for my uncle.”

“Apologize?” Had Martin Schrader decided he didn’t want to talk to me after all and sent Brad with his excuses?

Brad went on. “I saw him taking you aside. I hope he wasn’t . . . objectionable.”

“He was very polite, Brad. Why did you think he’d been objectionable?”

Brad looked down and shuffled his feet. “Well, sometimes he . . .” Then he looked up, took a deep breath, and spoke in a rush. “He’s the family lech, see. More or less a dirty old man. I wouldn’t want him to annoy you.”

I had an impulse to laugh, but I managed to contain it. “Don’t worry, Brad. I can handle middle-aged leches.” I shook hands with him and told him again how sorry I was about Julie.

“I’ll miss her e-mails,” I said. “She was always sending something interesting.”

Brad nodded. “She was on several lists,” he said. “I guess that’s where she got all that joke stuff.”

“I didn’t always have time to read the things she sent,” I said. “But we probably all have a big file of her past messages. I can always go back and read them again.”

That idea seemed to make Brad more morose than ever; he didn’t reply, and I was out of small talk, too. Luckily, Aunt Nettie’s blue Buick showed up then, and Lindy, Margaret, and I got into the car.

I waited until we were out of the driveway before I began to giggle. The thought of inept Brad trying to warn me off his poised and worldly uncle was simply laughable.

Of course, I had to explain my amusement to Lindy and Margaret.

“Huh,” Lindy said. “Julie’s relatives might be rich, but they’re just as odd as mine.”

“Mine are odd, too,” Margaret said. “I asked my mom once if our family was crazier than anybody else’s, and she said no. She said we just knew them better.”

“Same here,” I said. “If we’re picking the oddest, I’d put my mom up against Uncle Martin and Cousin Brad combined. But one thing Martin Schrader said was really interesting. That part about talking to some of Julie’s friends, to ‘someone her own age.’ ”

“Why do you say that?” Lindy said.

“Think about that gathering we just left. Was there anybody there Julie’s age?”

We all were silent for a few seconds. I was reviewing the crowd, and I guess Lindy and Margaret were, too, because they spoke at the same time.

“Not really,” Lindy said.

“Just a few,” Margaret said. “There was that group that clustered around the couches in the big room. They looked younger than most. But I eavesdropped on them, and I think they all worked for Schrader Labs. One of them was Martin Schrader’s secretary.”

“Maybe Julie’s friends are having a separate service—more of a wake or a party,” Lindy said. “That’s what Warner Pier’s artsy crowd does sometimes.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “If Julie went to high school in Holland, you’d think some of her friends would still be around.”

“There aren’t too many of us,” Margaret said.

I swiveled my head toward her. “Did you go to high school with Julie?”

“Yes. Didn’t either of us ever mention it?”

“No. I thought you met through some party or wedding.”

“Julie and I graduated from Holland Christian the same year. But we didn’t run in the same crowd. I really got to be friends with her during the past year.”

“Maybe her friends are not high-toned enough for the Schraders,” Lindy said. “Maybe they deliberately didn’t invite them to the funeral.”

We all thought it over again, but it was Margaret who finally said what we were all thinking—right out loud. “Julie was so cute. You’d think she would have had a boyfriend.”

But none of us could think of any boyfriend-type person at the service.

“You know,” I said, “thinking back to the Food Group e-mails, Julie never mentioned a boyfriend, did she? In fact, we never learned much about her personal life.”

“You’re right,” Lindy said. “She never had much to say about herself. When Diane and Ronnie became grandparents again, they put a message out right away. When Tony Junior made the honor roll for the first time, I told everybody I saw, and I put a message on the Food Group list. Even you, Lee. You’ve mentioned working on the new apartment several times.”

“And I let everybody know when I was so worried because Jim’s hours got cut back,” Margaret said. “And Jason—he told about the horrible weekend he spent painting his living room, when it rained and the paint wouldn’t dry. But Julie—she never said a word about herself. Just weddings and parties she was planning and all that philosophical stuff.”

“Strange,” I said.

“Odd,” Lindy said.

“Weird,” Margaret said. “But I can understand Julie not wanting to talk about her relatives. If the uncle is a lech, the cousin is a nerd, and the grandmother is bossy as all get out . . . well, if you can’t say anything good, shut up.”

We shut up. Or at least we changed the subject. Lindy and Margaret traded stories about their kids, and I kept my mouth shut and concentrated on the road. That was because it began to snow just as we reached the southern edge of Grand Rapids.

Since I was raised in Texas, I didn’t get a lot of experience driving in snow when I was growing up. Now ice, yes, Texas usually has a couple of dandy ice storms every winter. I’ve seen some horrible sleet and freezing rain around both my hometowns, Dallas and Prairie Creek. But thick, heavy snow is strange to me. It makes me nervous.

I reminded myself that Michigan highways are well maintained—we saw several snowplows during the trip—that Aunt Nettie’s Buick was a good, heavy car with the proper tires for driving in snow, and that I was smart enough not to hit the brakes suddenly or spin my tires trying to start up. But I was still nervous, maybe because I was afraid I’d do something stupid rather than because I was afraid I’d have a wreck. Though having a wreck in somebody else’s car is not high on the list of the things I want to do.

But we didn’t have a wreck. The only bad moments were three or four times when semis passed us going a million miles an hour and threw sheets of snow onto our windshield. The road didn’t get too bad, though it snowed harder—naturally—the further south and west we went. It’s called “lake effect snow.” Tradition has it that the closer you get to Lake Michigan, the heavier the snowfall gets, and it’s true. I’ve read a scientific explanation for this, but don’t ask me to repeat it.

We dropped Margaret off in Holland, then drove on to Warner Pier. I took Lindy to the big old house she and Tony had moved into right before Christmas. Tony Junior and his chocolate lab, Monte, came out on the porch to greet us. Lindy invited me in, but I declined, and she put her hand on the door handle.

“Gosh!” she said. “I’ll always wonder if the killer was in Julie’s apartment when I went by there that night.”

“What! You were at Julie’s apartment the night she was killed? Have you told the police?”

“I told Chief Jones. He said he’d pass it along to the Holland detectives, and they might want to talk to me. He said I shouldn’t mention it, so don’t tell anybody else.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I went up to visit Maria Nunez at Holland Hospital. You know, the gray-haired waitress at the Sidewalk Café. She had pneumonia, but she’s better now. Anyway, I was coming back by Food Fare, and I realized I was near Julie’s. So I stopped.”

“When was this?”

“About nine o’clock. It was kind of late to drop in on somebody, so I just knocked once. She didn’t come to the door, and I went away.”

“So you didn’t see anything suspicious?”

“It was dead silent, Lee. Oh! That’s not a good choice of words, is it? But I couldn’t see into the apartment at all. It’s not as if the window blinds were open or anything. All I saw was the parking lot.”

“And there was no car in it that bristled with axes and guns, huh?”

“Nope. I slipped and fell into a really weird, bugeyed car that was parked backward, but it probably belonged to one of the other tenants. And you know me, it could have been a Rolls-Royce, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.”

I laughed. Lindy’s indifference to cars is legendary among her friends. Her husband swears he puts an Indiana University pennant on her antenna, even though she’s not a Hoosier fan, because Lindy would never find her car in a parking lot if it didn’t have a red-and-white flag on it.

I promised Lindy I wouldn’t say anything about her visit to Julie’s apartment; then I left, saying I wanted to check on TenHuis Chocolade before it closed up.

Which was a fib. Actually, I wanted to call Joe Woodyard. I was supposed to see him shortly, but I wanted to talk to him right that minute. I wanted to tell him about the strange funeral for a nice girl who apparently had several peculiar relatives, but no friends. I wanted to tell him Uncle Martin wanted me to go out to dinner with him, and I felt uneasy about going, but I couldn’t say exactly why, and, no, it wasn’t because nerdy Cousin Brad told me Martin was a lech. The whole day had been strange, and I wanted to talk about it with someone who cared.

So I drove carefully to TenHuis Chocolade, parked in front of the shop and went in. I waved to Aunt Nettie, inhaled six deep breaths of chocolate aroma, helped myself to a Dutch caramel bonbon (“Soft, creamy, European-style caramel in dark chocolate”), then went to the telephone.

Naturally, I couldn’t find Joe. He wasn’t at his boat shop. He wasn’t at his apartment. He didn’t answer his cell phone.

We had a date for seven o’clock, when he was supposed to come out to the house I shared with Aunt Nettie. I really had promised I’d cook dinner for him. But we’d made that plan after Hogan Jones had asked Aunt Nettie to go out to dinner with him that evening. Would the snow change their plans? Would it change ours? Aunt Nettie and I saw enough of each other without double dating.

I was still wondering when Aunt Nettie came into the office. She looked serious. “How were the roads?”

“Not too bad.”

“It’s supposed to stop pretty soon. Hogan and I still plan on going into Holland for dinner.”

That was one of my questions answered. But before I could react, Aunt Nettie pulled a bright pink envelope out of the pocket of her white, heavy duty food service apron. “I got an unexpected letter,” she said. “I wanted to show it to you.”

“Who’s it from?”

“My sister-in-law. My brother’s widow. Read it.”

She shoved the envelope across the desk. It was not only bright pink, but the flap was scalloped and printed to look like lace. I opened it. The notepaper was scalloped to match, and it also had tiny hearts dancing across the top.

“ ‘Dear Nettie,’ ” I read. “ ‘I know we haven’t been in touch much since Ed died, but you’ve always been good about remembering Bobby at Christmas and on his birthday. Plus when he graduated from high school. I have appreciated it.

“ ‘Well, Bobby is now close to graduating from Eastern Michigan. He’s majored in marketing, and he’s done pretty good. He has worked part-time as a waiter, and I’m proud of him. Since he’s my only chick, I guess I ought to be!

“ ‘Anyway, you said in your Christmas letter that the business is back on track and you and Phil’s niece were thinking of expanding. Will you need to hire someone around June? It would be such a good opportunity for Bobby!

“ ‘I’m sorry to be so pushy, but I’d never forgive myself if Bobby missed such a good chance to be involved in a successful family business.

“ ‘I’m doing fine. The plant has had some layoffs, but so far my job seems safe.

“ ‘Love, Corrine.’ ”

So help me, as I read those final words, I could hear Mrs. Schrader’s voice echoing in my ear. “I suppose you are your aunt’s heir.”

It took me a minute to form a reply. And then I blew it.

“It would have made a better imposition if Bobby had sent a recipe himself,” I said.

Usually Aunt Nettie can figure out what I was trying to say, but that one confused her completely. She looked at me with an expression of openmouthed incomprehension.

In fact, my statement had thrown me completely. For a moment I didn’t have the slightest idea myself what I’d been trying to say. Then I began to scramble. “I mean—I mean—Bobby would have made a better impression if he had written and sent his résumé himself.”

Aunt Nettie’s face smoothed into its usual placid contours. “I agree,” she said. “I haven’t seen Bobby in years. I have no idea whether or not he’d be a good worker.”

“I wonder if Bobby knows his mom wrote you. He might not even be interested in a clerical job. And that’s what we need. Or what I need. I could use somebody to help with the orders and shipments and to handle the front counter. Or did you have something else in mind?”

“I didn’t really have anything specific in mind, Lee. Corinne has always acted like I was completely helpless without Phil. When I wrote her at Christmas—well, I guess I was trying to brag a little. After all, we were finally able to begin paying ourselves full salaries! I must have overdone it.”

“We’re entitled to brag a little,” I said. “Last year was the best TenHuis Chocolade ever had.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“
You
should do? About Bobby? Talk to him, I guess. The problem with family members is that they’re easy to hire, but hard to fire. I marvel that you had the nerve to hire me.”

“That was an easy decision. You’d worked here earlier. I knew you were a hard worker and had a head for figures.”