The Chocolate Bridal Bash (14 page)

Greg had been his usual gossipy self until I asked him for his own opinion about Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier. Then he’d begun to hem and haw. He hadn’t wanted to say anything. Finally he’d come up with the name of someone else who had been upset with Van Hoosier. That had seemed to relieve him. He had quickly tried to focus my attention on the former owner of the Superette—a man who was probably dead now, twenty-five years after the events in question. Then Greg had dashed for the door so quickly that he almost bowled Jason over.

By the time I’d analyzed this, Jason was inside the shop, and I tried to put the episode with Greg aside. Jason was an old friend. I prepared my spiel about finding a dead body and my assurances that I was going to survive the experience.

Jason strode over to the counter and spoke.

“Sorry it took me so long to get back to you,” he said.

His remark left me feeling completely blank. “Back to me?”

“Yes. You called yesterday. What did you need?”

I
couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. At that moment, my phone call to Jason might have been made in another lifetime, instead of just twenty-four hours earlier. I scrambled to remember it.

“Oh!” I said. “I’d forgiven—I mean, forgotten! I mean . . .” Then the fog cleared. Jason had been a bearer at Bill Dykstra’s funeral. I’d planned to ask him about Bill.

“Come in the office,” I said. “I’ll get someone to watch the counter, and we can talk.”

I gave Jason a chocolate I knew was his favorite—Italian cherry (“an oval bonbon with a dark chocolate shell, filled with white chocolate flavored with Amarena cherry”). He sat in my visitor’s chair while I ran to ask Dolly Jolly to keep an eye the counter. Then I sat in my own chair and stared at Jason. I wasn’t sure just how to begin.

Jason licked cherry filling off his lips and looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Why did you call, Lee?”

A direct question seemed to be the simplest way to answer his direct question. “Jason,” I said, “how well did you know Bill Dykstra?”

“Bill? God, I haven’t thought of Bill in a million years. That was a real tragedy.” Jason sighed deeply. “I met Bill when we were both attending technical school in Holland. He was in electronics, and I was in food service, but we served on the student council together. He tipped me off to the first job I landed down here, so in a way Bill’s the reason I wound up in Warner Pier. I even stayed with his family the first couple of months I worked here.”

“Then you knew the whole family well.”

“I only met Ed—the brother—once. That was the first year Bill and I were in school together.” Then Jason frowned. “But don’t get it wrong. Bill and I were just friends. I was still way inside the closet back then. He had no idea.... How’d you find out that I knew him?”

“I looked up his obituary, and you were a bearer. What kind of a guy was he?”

Jason stared at the ceiling a minute. “I always thought he was a lot like his dad. Uncomplicated. Liked to work with his hands. Maybe more interested in how things worked than in how people worked.”

“Were you surprised by his suicide?”

“Surprised isn’t the word for it. Try stunned. Or totally freakin’ amazed. I’d been at the rehearsal dinner on Friday night, and he seemed completely happy. Nervous, of course, and excited. But pleased. Then Saturday morning his dad called to say the wedding was apparently off and Bill was missing. I helped hunt for Bill. But I’m glad to say I wasn’t the one who found him.”

“Do you have any idea why Bill called the wedding off?”

Jason’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know he did. We all thought that was Sally’s idea.”

“Mom says not.”

“She didn’t figure out that he was suicidal? Decide he wasn’t a good marriage risk? That’s what I always figured happened.”

“No, Mom says Bill was the one who backed out. And she says he wouldn’t explain why. He put her on the bus, made her leave town.”

“Good night!” Jason shook his head. “I always thought Bill was the sane person in his family, but maybe he was as nutty as the rest of them.”

“Were they all peculiar? Of course, Lovie . . .” Jason and I both raised our eyebrows. “But I didn’t know that the father and the other brother were odd, too.”

“They weren’t nutty, really. In fact, they were nice people in a lot of ways.”

Jason thought a few moments before he spoke again. “I guess the Dykstras were an example of what the sixties and seventies were all about. Ed Sr. was a blue-collar guy, an electrician and general handyman. He could build anything, repair anything. World War II vet. High school education. Fishing trips and beer at the corner bar type. Then—I got this from things Bill told me—when the boys were little, their mom decided she needed to work.”

I nodded. “Reflecting the social changes of the era. Women’s rights.”

“I don’t know about that. I think they needed the money. Maybe that’s the same thing. Anyway, Mrs. Dykstra had always been a more intellectual type than Ed Sr. She decided to go to college so she could get a job as a teacher, which was one of the better jobs for women at the time. But in college, she got into the ecology group, began to work hard to save the environment. Which sounds great, except that Mr. Dykstra thought all those people were a bunch of pinkos, so he didn’t like her going to demonstrations and such. Then Ed Jr., who was really into Scouting, began working on his Eagle, and Mrs. Dykstra helped him come up with some environmental project. So Ed Jr. wound up in the save-the-environment movement and began protesting with his mom. After he went to Ann Arbor, that protesting led him into the antiwar movement. He dropped out of college, which made him eligible for the draft. So he went to Canada. Which their dad really thought was pinko.”

“How did Bill feel about all this?”

“Caught in the middle. Mostly, he sided with his dad, because he and his dad had always looked at the world in the same way. Or maybe it was because he thought Ed Jr. was siding with their mom. Or their mom was siding with Ed Jr. Judging from what Bill used to say, their home life went right down the tube. I think that’s why Bill went to electronics school, instead of college. He wanted to get out on his own as fast as possible.”

“Probably that’s why he wanted to get married, too.”

“That may have been part of it, Lee. But he was nuts about your—about Sally. Anyway, I saved my tips and bought a suit at JCPenney to wear in the wedding. And I had to wear it for the funeral instead.”

“I was surprised to see that Rollie Taylor was a bearer, too. How did he know Bill?”

“I don’t think he did, really. He was called in at the last minute. He was a friend of Bill’s mom.”

“Of Lovie’s?”

“Yeah. We didn’t call her Lovie then. I guess she’ll always be Mrs. Dykstra to me. But she had known Rollie over at Western Michigan. They took education classes together. I know she urged him to apply for a job over here.”

“Did Bill have a problem with drinking?”

“No! Whatever gave you that idea? If the guys went out, he—well, nowadays we would have said he was the designated driver. He rarely drank at all. I was amazed when I heard there were beer cans in his car when they found him.”

“How about drugs? Pot?”

“Lee, you’ve been listening to too much hearsay about our generation. Jokes like, ’If you can remember the sixties and seventies, you weren’t there.’ Very funny. And it may have been true for a lot of people. But if Bill had a weakness, it was for chocolate. He would have killed for a homemade brownie. Maybe he was marrying Sally because he wanted to cozy up to her brother the chocolatier.”

Jason laughed, then went on. “Bill and I were worker bees. The draft had been abolished, so we didn’t have to worry about getting killed in Vietnam. We were trying to get jobs and keep them, get on with our lives. We weren’t out smoking pot every night. And neither was your mom.”

“But the sheriff found pot in Bill’s car. After he was dead.”

Jason let that soak in for a moment. Then he seemed to go nuts. He jumped to his feet. He twisted his body as if he were in pain. He clenched his fists in the air. He yanked at his ponytail.

He obviously wanted to walk up and down, maybe kick something, but there was nothing kickable in my office, and there was no pacing room.

I didn’t know if I should panic or not. I’d been around Jason when half his waiters didn’t show up, when the chef ruined the steamboat round, and when the bartender got drunk and passed out behind the bar. But I’d never before seen him go berserk. He seemed to be completely incoherent. I considered calling 9–1–1. My report about Bill Dykstra had almost sent Jason over the edge.

Finally Jason leaned across my desk, putting his face close to mine. He pounded a fist on my blotter.

“No!” he said. “Bill never used pot! You’re lying!” “It’s not
my
story, Jason! A law enforcement official told Joe and me that. Someone who saw the sheriff’s reports at the time.”

“Then he lied!”

I began to wonder if Mac McKay had been wrong. Had he remembered incorrectly? I tried to soothe Jason. “Well, naturally, the guy who told us that could be wrong.”

“I suppose it was your pal Hogan Jones!”

“No, Hogan . . .” I tried to tell him Chief Jones hadn’t even been in Warner Pier thirty-three years earlier, but Jason was talking again.

“No! Jones hasn’t been there that long! It must have been that jerk Van Hoosier himself! That old liar! I’ll find him and kick him in the patootie!”

“You’re too late,” I said. “Somebody kicked him yesterday. Permanently.”

“What do you mean?”

I picked up my copy of the
Grand Rapids Press
and pointed to the news story on Van Hoosier’s death. Jason read it rapidly. I was glad the news story left out Joe and me, at least by name.

Jason threw the newspaper down and said exactly what my mom had said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

He looked at me sharply. “But if you and Joe didn’t talk to Van Hoosier, who told you that pot was found in Bill’s car?”

I decided it wouldn’t be wise to give Mac McKay’s name to Jason in his present mood. “A guy who worked with Van Hoosier told us,” I said. “And his opinion of Van Hoosier was exactly the same as yours, incidentally. Plus, he didn’t have the original report in front of him. It may not even still be in existence. So we can’t check it out. But why are you so sure that Bill didn’t smoke pot?”

“Bill hated that stuff. He’d seen what it did to his brother. Bill was really disgusted with him. Ed quarreled with their dad over his antiwar viewpoint, but their mom always took Ed’s side. Then she figured out he was doing drugs and kicked him out.”

“So Ed didn’t simply run away to Canada. He was booted out of the family home.”

“Something like that. And I guess he didn’t come home, even after his dad died and even after Jimmy Carter gave the guys who split for Canada a get-out-of-jail card. Ed might have contacted his mother, of course. None of us would be likely to ask her if she’d heard from him.”

I trotted out the rest of the names from Bill Dykstra’s obituary, asking Jason if they were close friends of Bill’s. He confirmed that the first three guys had left Warner Pier.

“That was a long time ago,” Jason said. “Bill and Tom Hilton were high school buddies. But why are you looking for friends of Bill’s, anyway?”

He had me there. I’d started the search because I wanted to know why my mom had fled Warner Pier on her wedding day, and she hadn’t seemed inclined to tell me. But now Mom was headed to Michigan, and she’d promised to talk to me. Tell all. So I really had no excuse for quizzing people about Bill Dykstra.

All this ran through my mind while Jason sat in my visitor’s chair and looked at me expectantly. I had to say something, no matter how stupid it sounded.

“I’m just curlicue,” I said. “I mean, curious! My mom never told me about all of this, and I wanted to know. Actually, last night she agreed to tell me—her side, at least.”

I told Jason about my mom’s forthcoming visit, again issuing a warning that she’d be here only a short time. I didn’t know that she’d want to see Jason, or that he’d want to see her, but that gave both of them an out.

Jason went into another round of questions then, which I luckily recognized as an attempt to learn who had told Joe and me about the pot found in the car with Bill Dykstra. I was able to head him off, but I vowed to call Joe ASAP and tell him that Jason was after our informant with blood in his eye. Not that I thought Jason would actually attack Mac McKay. But he might bad-mouth him, and I’d rather he didn’t do it by name. Actually, as long as any confrontation between Jason and Mac remained verbal, I felt sure that Mac could hold his own.

Jason left, and I was reaching for the telephone, ready to punch the key on the speed dial that would summon Joe to the other end of the line, when—once again—the door to the shop opened.

I looked up to see a tall man coming in. He was dressed for the Michigan winter—shrouded in a parka zipped up over his chin and a stocking cap pulled down over his ears. Only a sliver of his face was visible, a sliver that featured a distinctive broad nose.

A stranger. Maybe he was a legitimate customer. I took my place behind the counter. “May I help you?”

“I need a box of chocolates.” His voice was unusually raspy. I wondered if he was getting over a cold. “A pound, I guess.”

I immediately told him the price. I didn’t want the bill to surprise him. Unlike Rollie, the newcomer didn’t turn pale. He nodded, agreeing to cough up a nice stack of bills. Next I asked him if he wanted specific chocolates. He looked blank. Obviously, I had another customer who didn’t know what TenHuis manufactured. I handed him a list of flavors and gave him a guided tour of the showcases, pointing out the decorations of each flavor.

“Plus you get to pick a free sample,” I added. “What sounds good to you?”