The Chocolate Bridal Bash (15 page)

The tall man picked a Frangelico truffle (“hazelnut interior coated in milk chocolate”). Just a bit venturesome, and really good. I gave him one, and he moved to the window—truffle in one hand, list of flavors in the other.

The door opened again, but the person who came in this time was no stranger. It was Mike Herrera, the mayor of Warner Pier.

I hid my sigh and greeted him. Mike’s one of my favorite people, but I needed to work, not talk. Besides, in the battle over who was going to pay for the wedding reception, Mike was dating Joe’s mom, so he was naturally on Mercy’s side. And since he was the owner of the restaurant where we were having the reception, he was in a position to swing a lot of weight.

Not that I minded getting a nice discount. But we didn’t want Mercy to run the reception, and we didn’t want to feel that we were indebted to Mike for giving us an extraspecial price. We wanted to pay our own way and pick out our own menu.

Mike glanced at the man in the heavy jacket. Mike’s a merchant, and I knew he would never keep me from waiting on a customer. But he apparently could tell that the man was thinking about his purchase, so he walked over to the counter and pulled off his hat, a sort of furry fedora.

“How’re y’all?” he said.

Mike is a fellow Texan, one of the few I’ve found in western Michigan, and he makes sure he hangs onto his “y’all.” Since he knew “y’all” is the plural form of “you,” I knew he was asking about Aunt Nettie as well as me.

“Aunt Nettie and I are doing fine, Mike. What can I do for you?”

“I figured out what I wanted to geef you and Joe as a wedding present.”

Uh-oh. Mike’s Tex-Mex accent was coming out. That meant he felt nervous. What was he up to?

“We don’t really expect anything, Mike. Of course, a place setting of our stainless would be nice.”

“No. I’m gonna geef you and Joe champagne.”

“We’d love a bottle.”

“How many people are coming to the reception?”

“Oh.” As I suspected, Mike had joined Mercy’s campaign to pay for—and run—the reception.

Mike leaned closer. “How many? A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Right now we’ve got twelve.”

“Twelve hundred people!” Mike looked very surprised.

“No, Mike. Twelve people. You, Mercy, Aunt Nettie, Hogan, Lindy, Tony, my dad, my stepmother, my stepsister, my mother, and Joe and me. Plus the minister. Thirteen.”

Mike rolled his eyes.

The tall man had turned around, and I spoke to him. “Have you decided, sir? Do you want specific flavors or just a sampler?”

“One of each?” He sounded like a badly tuned bullfrog.

“That will make a half-pound box.”

“Then I guess I need two of each.”

“Great.” I folded a box, lined it with paper and began filling it. Mike leaned over the counter and spoke in a low voice. “Mercy would like to pay for the whole reception.”

“I know, Mike. She told Joe and me that. But I’m going to hang on to the etiquette books on this one. It’s the bride’s side of the wedding party that’s supposed to pay for the reception. So I don’t want Mercy to get involved. I’ll handle the reception. And that includes buying the champagne.”

“Mercy—”

“Mike! My dad sent a check to help. I appreciate Mercy’s offer, but I’d rather handle it myself.”

My dad’s check wouldn’t pay for a quarter of the reception, of course. I was pretty sure that Mike knew my father’s circumstances were modest. He’d guess the truth.

I kept loading the box, and I concentrated on the paying customer again, trying to be friendly. “Has it gotten colder out?”

The tall man ducked his head and croaked out an answer. “It hasn’t warmed up.” He seemed to begrudge every word I dug out of him. Not a friendly type. In fact, he turned his back on me and went over to stare out the window again. All three of us were silent while I finished filling the box and tying its blue ribbon neatly.

“Here you go, sir,” I said.

Mike shuffled his feet, plainly waiting to begin arguing again while I made change for the hundreddollar bill the man in the stocking cap handed me.

“Thanks.” His final word was as gruff as the rest of his conversation.

Mike stared at him as he went out the door. “He sure looks like . . .” His voice trailed off, and he turned back to me. “Now listen, Lee, I’ve made my mind up. I’m giving you and Joe the champagne for the reception as a wedding gift, and it’s gonna be good champagne, not cheap stuff. I don’t want to hear another word about it. All you can do is say thank-you like a Texas lady.”

He jammed his furry hat on his head. Then he left, walking like a man who knows his own mind.

I ran to the door and put my head out. “Mike!” I said. He didn’t turn around.

“Thanks, Mike! But, no thanks!”

The battle over the reception was beginning to wear me down.

J
oe called then and asked me to meet him for lunch. I dumped the responsibility for TenHuis Chocolade’s retail sales on Dolly Jolly and left. I was tired of answering questions. Joe already knew how we’d happened to stumble across a dead body the previous afternoon, and he had a pretty good idea of how I felt about it, so we could talk about something different.

Unless he’d managed to ask Rollie about Bill Dykstra. But he hadn’t done that yet, Joe told me. I was relieved.

After an hour of talking with Joe about topics such as Mike Herrera insisting on buying champagne for our reception, I felt refreshed and reenergized and headed back to work. And I did work. The phone did not ring, the front door did not open, and I accomplished quite a bit.

By four thirty, when the front door did open again, I was feeling triumphant. I looked up to see a stranger, the second stranger who’d been in that day. This one was also shrouded in Michigan winter wear, although instead of a stocking cap he had the hood of his parka pulled down over his face.

I got up and went to the counter. “May I help you?”

“Hi, Ms. McKinney,” the man said. He shoved the hood back and revealed a completely bald head.

Then I did know him. It was Elmer Priddy, RN, the man who had confirmed the death of Carl Van Hoosier twenty-four hours earlier.

“Hello! I didn’t expect to see you again.”

“I heard you tell the deputy you worked here. I get over to Warner Pier on my days off. Look at an art gallery, eat in a good restaurant. Get a little culture with a capital K.”

“You’ll have to include chocolate.” I gestured at the display counter. “Pick a sample.”

This called for a bit of discussion, of course. I defy anyone to simply pick a TenHuis bonbon or truffle without debating between the round coconut-covered one and the dark chocolate square with one dot of milk chocolate in the center. But after a couple of minutes Priddy was munching a dark chocolate square, known to TenHuis fans as a lemon canache bonbon (“tangy lemon interior with dark chocolate coating”). Canache—pronounced “ca-nosh”—is a type of filling, sort of a soft jelly. We don’t make hard-jellied centers.

As Priddy rolled his eyes in bliss, I brought up the unpleasant events of the previous afternoon. “I don’t suppose there’s an official report on what killed Van Hoosier.”

“Not yet.”

“Joe and I were a little surprised that you agreed with him about Van Hoosier’s death being suspicious.”

“Your fiancé identified the main thing right away. The red dots in the conjunctivae, the inside of the eyelid. It’s hard to miss. And Van Hoosier had that lump on the side of his head; I could tell that easily. So when the doctor agreed . . .” He shrugged.

“Did the blow kill him?”

“Oh, no. In fact”—he leaned across the counter—“there was a pillow—I think the killer tried to smother him, but Van Hoosier was feistier than he’d expected. When he fought back, the killer must have hit him. Stunned him. Then used the pillow.”

I shuddered. “Van Hoosier doesn’t sound like he was a very nice man, but that’s awful! Do the police have any suspects?”

“They wouldn’t be telling me. But dozens of people go up and down that hall every day. Residents, staff, visitors—heck, the florist comes by. And the dry cleaner.”

“Do you have any idea how long he’d been dead?”

“That’s for the experts to figure out. But the doctor took his temp, and judging by that, I’d guess at least two hours.”

I gave a chuckle that didn’t sound funny even to me. “I guess that clears Joe and me then. We’d only been at Pleasant Creek an hour.”

Priddy’s chuckle sounded genuinely amused. “And you didn’t have any motive for killing him, right?”

“None at all. In fact, we wanted to meet him, and he died before we got a chance.” Then I added quickly. “Not that there could be any conjunction. I mean, connection!”

Priddy was nice enough to ignore my twisted tongue. “You didn’t know him at all?”

“No, I’d only heard of him.”

“That’s odd.” The bald man looked puzzled.

“Why?”

He leaned across the counter, frowning. “This is TenHuis Chocolade, right?”

“Yes.”

“But your name is Lee McKinney. Is there a TenHuis in the business?”

“My Aunt Nettie.” I reached into the counter and, using the tiny tongs we use to serve chocolates, I began to neaten up the rows of mocha pyramids. “Actually, she’s Jeannette TenHuis. But she’s a TenHuis by marriage, not birth.”

Priddy looked more puzzled. “Is there a Sally TenHuis?”

I jumped so hard my tongs sent a couple of pyramids flying into the glass front of the case. I know I gave Priddy a wild-eyed look.

“Sally is my motive,” I said. “I mean, my mother! My mother—of course, she’s Sally McKinney now—was a TenHuis. But she was never assorted—I mean, associated! She was never associated with TenHuis Chocolade. How did you hear of her?”

“Oh, Van Hoosier used to mutter about her.”

“Van Hoosier! Why? What did he have to say about my mother?”

Priddy gave a major shrug. “I never could understand. He’d gotten awfully vague mentally, you know. He hadn’t been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or anything. But his mind wandered.”

“Did you talk to him a lot?”

“Maybe more than I talk to some of the other residents. He could get around by himself, but he took a lot of medication, and he had to be supervised. He was one of those who would pretend to swallow, then spit his pills in the trash. That wing is my responsibility five afternoons a week. Besides, Van Hoosier was lonely. He didn’t have any family. He’d never married. I guess the nearest thing he had to friends was the McDonald’s retiree coffee klatch, and those guys didn’t exactly come around to visit all the time.”

I mentally contrasted Van Hoosier with Mac McKay—Mac with his committees, close family, church friends, and comfortable home. Mac was healthier than Van Hoosier had been, of course, but the differences weren’t all a matter of health. Mac would never be alone because he had invested himself in friends, family, and community while he was active. Instead of leaving his hometown for the Florida Intracoastal Waterway when he retired, he stayed around and served on the library board.

Van Hoosier apparently hadn’t bothered to develop friendships. The rich people whom he’d done favors for weren’t interested in Van Hoosier once he wasn’t in a position to help them out.

Van Hoosier might have had a lot more money than Mac, but Mac was much richer.

That didn’t explain why Van Hoosier would have talked about my mother. “I don’t understand why Van Hoosier would have been interested in my mom,” I said. I tried to laugh. “As far as I know she was always law-abiding.”

“I don’t know that he wanted to arrest her,” Priddy said. “He’d just mutter her name and something about kidnapping. Was she ever kidnapped?”

“What? Absolutely not!”

Priddy shrugged again. “I just moved to Warner County ten years ago. Was there a famous kidnapping here?”

“Not that I ever heard of. There was the McKay kidnapping. The McKays have a cottage here, but the kidnapping happened in Chicago.”

Priddy shrugged. “Well, like I said, Van Hoosier’s mind had been wandering for as long as I’d known him.”

We left it at that. Priddy stood around a few more minutes, and I asked him get-acquainted questions. Where was he from? The Detroit area, he said. How long had he worked at the Pleasant Creek Center? Nearly a year. Did he like his job? Yes. He hadn’t earned his nursing degree until he was past forty, but he found it a very rewarding profession.

Priddy bought a half-pound box of chocolates, insisting on all coffee-flavored ones—coffee truffles and mocha pyramids. Then he went out into the late afternoon gloom, leaving me confused and curious.

All these years, I gathered, my mom had feared Sheriff Van Hoosier. And all these years Van Hoosier had wondered what became of her. Maybe they should have gotten together while Van Hoosier was still alive.

But obviously Mom had gone to great lengths to avoid him. Besides, if Van Hoosier had actually wanted to find her, I told myself, he could merely have come to Uncle Phil’s funeral. Or he could have come by TenHuis Chocolade. Aunt Nettie would have been willing to forward a letter to her.