The Chocolate Bridal Bash (7 page)

When I got married both my parents had given sighs of relief. Their little girl (all five foot eleven-plus inches of her) had married a wealthy man who would take care of her. They’d both thought I was crazy when I ditched the jewelry, the nice car, and the fancy house—along with Rich. And they thought I was crazier when I refused any financial settlement from him and even left the household goods behind.

But I couldn’t blame my mother for my bad marriage. She’d approved—heck, even my dad had approved, though he and Rich had nothing in common. But I’d picked Rich out all on my own. I had only myself to blame.

I didn’t yet understand why my mom had pushed me into the beauty pageant circuit, no matter how hard I dragged my heels. I didn’t understand the upbringing she had had, the factors that had made her financially improvident and wild to travel the world whether she could afford to or not. I didn’t understand why she’d never talked about her family much, why she’d never even mentioned having a fiancé who committed suicide.

And I didn’t understand why she’d asked Aunt Nettie if Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier was still alive. I sure did wish that I’d researched Sheriff Van Hoosier before I committed myself to staying out of my mother’s life.

But for nearly a week I stuck to that plan. I stayed out of my mom’s life. And I would have stayed out forever, I guess, if Lovie hadn’t intervened.

It was a quiet Tuesday afternoon, and I was sitting at my computer in my glass cubicle, balancing the TenHuis Chocolade bank statement, when the bell on the street door tinkled. I looked up to see Lovie Dykstra—white hat, red pom-pom and all—coming in. She looked around the shop, glaring, fixed her eye on me, and started across the shop, headed for my office.

I didn’t know why Lovie had come in, but I knew I didn’t want her in my office. She’d be lots harder to get rid of if she came in there and sat down than if she simply stood at the counter. So I jumped to my feet and headed her off. I got into the shop before she could get past the counter and put her foot on my office threshold.

But I tried to be polite, even friendly. “Hello, Mrs. Dykstra. Let me offer you a sample of TenHuis chocolate.”

She scowled. “I didn’t come for candy. I came for information.”

“You can have both.” I went behind the sales counter and gestured at the chocolates in the glass cases. “Do you like light, dark, or white chocolate?”

“No. Your mother Sally TenHuis?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

Her scowl deepened into a glare. “What became of that girl?”

What interest did Lovie have in my mother? I’d been in Warner Pier nearly three years; why had the subject of my mother come up now? I decided I couldn’t hand out information about my mother to a woman who might be unbalanced.

I gave a noncommittal answer. “My mom’s doing fine. Why do you want to know?”

“Where is she?”

“Mrs. Dykstra, I’m not going to tell you anything about my mother until I understand why you want to know.”

We stared at each other over the chocolates for a few moments. Then Lovie gave her cackling laugh. “Heh, heh, heh! I’ll just ask
you
then.”

“Ask me what?”

“How old are you, girl?”

It was the last question I’d expected. I’m sure my jaw gaped. “How old am I?”

“I guess you know!”

I decided I might as well tell her. “I’ll be thirty next month. Why do you want to know?”

Lovie seemed to grow even angrier. She glared at me for another moment. Then her eyes took on a crafty look. “I guess you’re like all these pretty women. You take a couple of years off.”

I was getting as mad as she seemed to be. I turned abruptly, went into my office, and pulled my purse from my desk drawer. I snatched my driver’s license out of my billfold, took it back to the counter, and stuck it under Lovie’s nose. “You can check the birth date,” I said.

Lovie read it, squinting at the small print and looking from the license to me and back again, almost as if she were checking to make sure I was really Susanna Lee McKinney, blond hair, hazel eyes, five feet eleven inches tall. And as she read it, her face seemed to crumple. She aged right before my eyes.

“That man always was a liar,” she said.

“Who?”

Lovie glared at the floor and mumbled.

I was extremely puzzled. “What is it that you want?”

She mumbled again and turned toward the outside door. Suddenly I felt terribly sorry for her. But I couldn’t imagine what I could do that would make her feel better. Desperate, I offered chocolate.

“Mrs. Dykstra, everyone who comes into TenHuis Chocolade gets a sample bonbon or truffle. Please let me give you one.”

She looked back at me and spoke softly. “I just keep hoping.”

“Hoping for what?” She didn’t answer, but I ignored that. I escorted her to one of the two chairs we keep in the retail area. “Here, sit down a minute. And do let me get you some chocolate.”

She let me put her in the chair, and she looked up at me almost as if she was pleading for something. But what?

I tried to smile. “Chocolate is full of theobromine. It actually does make you feel better when you’re upset. Please have a piece.”

“Flavanols,” Lovie said. “They lower your blood pressure.”

I was amazed. Was this some weird throwback to the days when Lovie had been a science teacher? “Right,” I said. “Chocolate is
good
for you. It does contain flavanols. Do you like milk chocolate or dark chocolate?”

“Coffee?”

“Coffee flavored? Sure.” I went to the counter and took out two chocolates—a mocha pyramid bonbon (described in our sales material as a “milky coffee-flavored interior in a dark chocolate pyramid”) and a coffee truffle (“an all–milk chocolate truffle flavored with Caribbean coffee”).

“Do you want to eat them now?” I asked. “Or take them with you?”

“Take ’em along.”

I put the chocolates in a tiny box and tied it with a blue TenHuis bow. Then I brought it out from behind the counter and presented it to Lovie. As I held it out, she grasped my wrist.

My heart pounded. Was I in the clutches of a crazy woman? I resisted the impulse to pull away.

“Listen!” Lovie said. “I wouldn’t bother your mother. She was a sweet young girl. I wanted to love her. I just need to know why she ran away in the first place.”

“She’s never talked to me about it, Mrs. Dykstra.”

She let go of my arm. “I would never bother her. I just don’t understand why that sheriff lied to me. Oh, he was an awful liar, I know. But why did he lie to me about Sally?”

She got to her feet and shuffled toward the door. As she opened it she seemed to become aware of the box in her hand. She turned and looked at me. She no longer looked angry.

“Thank you very much for the kind gift, Miss McKinney,” she said. Her voice had lost its raspy quality. She sounded like a perfect lady.

“You are quite welcome,” I replied.

After she left I stood there, blinking back tears.

What had all that been about? Why had Lovie come? Why had she wanted to know about my mom? Why had she wanted to know my age? Then the answer hit me.

“Oh, lordy!” I said the words aloud. “She thought Mom ran away from Warner Pier because she was pregnant and her fiancé was dead. She thought her son might have been my father. She thought she might be my grandmother.”

I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I felt desperately sorry for Lovie. I almost felt sorry that my birth date had disappointed her.

But my mom had left Warner Pier two years before she married my dad. And I hadn’t been born for eighteen months after their wedding.

At least the date was long enough after Mom left Warner Pier to be convincing. She might have been able to fake my age by six months or so, but a threeand-a-half-year difference was out of the question. No, my dad was really J. B. McKinney, of Prairie Creek, Texas. And Lovie was not my grandmother.

At least I knew how I felt about that. Relieved.

But Lovie had said “that sheriff” had lied to her. She must have been referring to the notorious Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier. He had apparently told her my mom left Prairie Creek for the traditional reason small-town girls left home thirty years ago.

I supposed that was possible, but I doubted it. My mom wasn’t fanatically either prochoice or prolife, but I didn’t think she would have had an abortion. And she couldn’t have started airline school that next fall if she were carrying a baby, even one she gave up for adoption. Or I didn’t think she could have.

But how did Sheriff Van Hoosier get into the act, anyway?

That night I talked to Aunt Nettie about the situation, and she was as confused as I was. I continued to think about the sheriff’s lie from every angle for twenty-four hours, but it still didn’t make sense. How could the ex-sheriff—crooked or not—fit into a picture that included Bill Dykstra’s suicide and my mom fleeing from Warner Pier?

Even after my run-in with Lovie and my twenty-four hours of thinking, I might have stayed out of my mom’s past if it hadn’t been for the Way Back When column of the
Warner Pier Gazette
.

Most small-town newspapers, and even a few bigcity ones, have that column. Some poor reporter is assigned to look at the microfilm of the newspaper from a hundred years earlier and to select a few items to edify the modern reader. In the
Gazette
’s case, they pick items not only from 100 years ago, but also from 150, from 50, and from 25. I never miss the column. You never know what it will disclose: the date some local building came to be constructed, a tell-all about the “pound the preacher” party given by members of the Methodist church in the early 1900s, or an insight into some other Michigan custom from the past. Once it had even described the up-to-the-minute service station and garage being built by a young World War II veteran, Henry TenHuis, who some years later became my grandfather.

This particular week, the 150-years-ago bit was a tirade on some forgotten politician, the 100 years ago described a big fire at the fruit basket factory, and the 50 years ago told about a big snow storm. It was the twenty-five-years-ago item that caught my eye.

“Kemper Swartz is appointed Warner County Sheriff,” it read. “He was selected to complete the term of Carl Van Hoosier, who resigned amid accusations of malfeasance in office.”

So Van Hoosier’s misdeeds had eventually caught up with him—eight years after my mom ran away from Warner Pier and her fiancé committed suicide.

But Joe’s mom had said that Van Hoosier was never actually charged with anything. She could be right. “Accusations,” the Way Back When column said. Not

“convictions.” Maybe Van Hoosier had dodged the bullet, had avoided charges. Maybe the case against him wasn’t strong enough.

I studied that last phase. “Malfeasance in office.” What did that mean, anyway?

Suddenly, I simply had to know. No matter what I’d told Rollie Taylor, I was going to find out more about Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier and what he had been up to twenty-five years earlier. And eight years before that.

T
he first thing I did was call Chuck O’Riley, editor of the
Warner Pier Gazette
. The
Gazette
concentrates strictly on Warner Pier events and people, leaving the main county news to the
Dorinda Daily News,
published in our county seat.

It’s always struck me as odd that almost nobody in Warner Pier subscribes to the
Dorinda Daily News
. You’d think we’d want to keep up on our county. But the Lake Michigan shore communities are so focused on the lake, art colonies, and tourism that we don’t seem to be part of Warner County. If Warner Pier people read a newspaper other than the
Gazette,
it’s likely to come from Holland, Grand Rapids, or Chicago.

The
Dorinda Daily News
owns the
Gazette,
so the
News
publisher is Chuck’s boss. I’d found out earlier that Chuck has his own collection of archives, if you can call loose clippings in manila file folders archives. But he does have some microfilm.

Chuck told me to come by his office around three and he’d help me dig through the
Gazette
files. I was right on time. Chuck set me up with his microfilm reader, and I found the story that had inspired the item in the twenty-five-years-ago category.

It added very little to what the Way Back When column said. The headline might as well have been “Old Boys’ Network Lets Sheriff Escape Justice.”

The county commissioners had had an agenda item on unspecified charges against Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier. When the item came up, the head commissioner opened the discussion by announcing that Van Hoosier had tendered his resignation. The person making the charges, identified only as a county official, had agreed to let the matter drop. No hint of what the charges had been appeared in the
Warner Pier Gazette
. And Chuck assured me the
Gazette
story was the same one that had run in the
News
.

Only one phrase hinted at what Van Hoosier’s sins had been. “I’m just an old-fashioned lawman,” the sheriff said. “I’m not a bookkeeper. So I guess it’s time for me to hand in my badge. Today’s law enforcement is all paperwork and very little catching of criminals.”

Sure.

The commissioners named Van Hoosier’s chief deputy as acting sheriff, and the whole matter was swept under the rug without leaving a single lump. A check of commissioners’ meetings for a month before the resignation and a month afterward didn’t find any mention of the sheriff’s office at all.

I left the microfilm viewer and stuck my head into Chuck’s office. “Hey,” I said. “Have you got a file on the sheriff himself? Carl Van Hoosier?”

“Nope,” Chuck said. “I already checked. I never heard of the guy until that item showed up in the Way Back When.”

Chuck is as broad as he is tall, with dark eyes that seem to be soaking up everything around him.