The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (16 page)

I could feel her frowning at me from some heavenly vantage point. I had all these houseguests,
and they’d received only “bought” food and no entertainment. I got out my recipe collection and started through it.

Pot roast was out. It was too hot to cook it, and it took too long. The same objection eliminated stew; besides, the gang had had something similar to stew within the past couple of days. It looked like meat loaf night. We could stand the oven for an hour. It was so hot already
that no one would notice.

I checked the refrigerator, made a list, and pulled out of the driveway with every intention of going straight to the Superette to pick up three pounds of ground round and seven baking potatoes. But for some reason I went out the back way and got sidetracked.

Leaving that way took me past the little gray house where my friend Inez Deacon used to live. Now that Inez
was in a retirement center, that house was rented to Harold Glick and his dog, Alice. While I had early rejected asking Harold if he’d seen Gina, Harold did see every darn thing that happened in our neighborhood. Maybe there was some way I could ask him about Gina without asking him about Gina. Which shows how much sense I was making.

By then I’d stopped in Harold’s driveway, and Alice was running
to the fence to greet me. There was no help for it. I had to get out of the van and go to the door. I opened my umbrella and went to the gate. Alice frisked around, yapping madly, while I edged inside the yard.

Once I had the gate closed behind me, I knelt and greeted her. “Hello, Alice. Nice to see you, too.” She let me rub her behind the ears and scratch between her eyes.

I heard the door
to the house open, and Harold spoke. “You know what she likes.” He’d come out on the little front porch.

“All dogs like that,” I said. “Sorry to drop in on you, but I had one quibble. I mean, question! I wanted to ask you something.”

Harold closed the door behind him and stood at the top of the stairs. “Of course.” He looked at me expectantly. I had to come up with a question, and I wasn’t sure
how to phrase it.

I killed time by walking over to stand right in front of Harold. It was still drizzling, and I almost joined him under his porch roof. I could hear his window air-conditioning unit whirring, and I had an impulse to push inside to get a whiff of cool air. He didn’t invite me to do that, however. I stood in the yard and looked up at him from under my umbrella.

“Those guys you
saw last night,” I said. “How many were there?”

“I didn’t actually see anybody, Lee. I heard them.”

“What exactly did you hear?”

“The state police detective asked me that same question, and it’s hard to explain. All I know is that I did feel sure that someone was running up the road. There were at least two of them. I heard feet pounding, and I think they must have been panting.”

“That makes
sense, if they’d been on the beach.... Running in sand is one of the most adamant—I mean, arduous! It’s arduous—a really hard thing to do.” I went on quickly, trying not to give Harold any time to think about how stupid my remark had been. “But about your idea for a neighborhood watch—have you thought any more about that?”

“I haven’t done anything. I think we’d have to register with the city,
have membership meetings and such. Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“It could be. All neighbors should look out for one another. But this area is so full of summer rentals, I’m not sure how it would work out. I mean, I see some really strange people walking up this road sometimes. You know, outfits that have to be seen to be believed! Some people apparently leave their fashion sense behind when
they go on vacation!”

I decided to try a little flattery. “Of course, you know that, Harold. You don’t miss much about your fellow humans.”

He smiled. “It’s Alice, of course. I have to take her out, and that means I have the opportunity to observe people. And you’re right about people wearing funny outfits. A lot of the bodies I see at the beach are showing off far too much skin!”

We both laughed.
“It’s those beer drinkers I wonder about,” I said. “I guess those guys work hard to build those big paunches, so they’re determined to show them off. And some women are just as bad!”

“Right. There are a lot of people in bikinis who shouldn’t be.”

“And hair choler. I mean, color! I can see going frankly fake, but what I hate are these home dye jobs that wind up looking absolutely dead.”

“You’ve
got it! I saw a woman with hair that was such a phony black it looked like she’d used shoe polish!”

“Was that the one with the blue shirt and all the jewelry?”

Harold shrugged. “Seems like her shirt was blue, but I wasn’t close enough to see her jewelry. She was down at the beach parking lot, getting into a big white van with a bright orange sign on the side.”

I
went straight to the boat shop, of course. I had to share this with Joe.

He immediately tried to share it with Larry Underwood. Underwood, however, wasn’t at the Warner Pier PD, and the dispatcher said he wasn’t
answering his cell phone.

So it was a bit anticlimactic. I stood around the boat shop until my heart quit thumping—though I tried to tell myself I hadn’t shown my excitement when Harold dropped the white van with an orange sign on me—then I got in my own van again. And this time I actually went to the grocery store.

The Superette is the only place to buy food in Warner Pier, and its name describes
it. It’s a minisuper-market. They stock meat, vegetables, bread, and even booze, but it’s small. That doesn’t mean the selections are limited. It means they’re odd. The store caters to summer visitors, so some departments seem skewed. They carry a dozen brands of extra-virgin olive oil, for example, and the cheese counter rivals anything I’ve seen in Dallas. They have plenty of high-priced
steaks—ideal for grilling on the deck of a yacht—but pot roast and stew meat are not always available. Ground round is in greater supply than regular hamburger, and it’s easier to find whole-bean coffee than a can of Folgers. Most Warner Pier locals go to a bigger supermarket in Holland to buy staples, but I didn’t have time for that.

The biggest drawback to the Superette is its druggist. Greg
Glossop is the root and the main stem of the Warner Pier grapevine. I’ve been known to pluck some information from that grapevine on occasion, so I shouldn’t be critical of Mr. Gossip—I mean, Glossop. But on that day I didn’t want to see him. I knew he’d be trying to pull information about the holdup out of me, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to tell him.

Sure enough, as soon as I came in the
door I saw Glossop in his glass-fronted nest—the pharmacy sits up higher than the rest of the store—and he saw me. His eyes lit up, and he put aside whatever he was working on. A moment later he was out the door of the pharmacy, and we were on a collision course, both aimed for the meat counter.

Faced with a direct confrontation, I decided to attack before Glossop could. Luckily I was able to
come up with a harmless topic.

“Mr. Glossop,” I said. “What’s this I hear about the sale of Warner Pier Wine Shop?”

Glossop’s face screwed up. I could see his inner turmoil. He was not as interested in the sale of the wine shop as he was in getting me to talk about the theft of the Double Diamond jewelry, but he did want to know what I’d heard.

He fell for it. “The wine shop? Who bought it?”

“I was hoping you’d know. All the downtown merchants are curious. The word is that it’s someone from Chicago, someone who owns a cottage here.” I leaned toward him and dropped my voice. “Have you heard anything?”

“Not a word. Since the VanHulens left town . . .” We both raised our eyebrows. The VanHulens were apparently getting a divorce, and the wine business she’d run seemed to be caught up
in the legal proceedings. Everybody in town had already hashed that situation over thoroughly.

“If you hear anything,” I said, “I’d sure like to know who our new neighbors are.”

Darn.
I’d said a word that brought Glossop back to his original purpose.

“Neighbors,” he said. “I guess your new neighbors out on the lakeshore gave you an exciting evening.” He grinned avidly.

I turned to examine
the ground round closely. “The holdup?” I said. “It was a very unpleasant experience.”

Glossop was practically drooling. “Just what happened?”

“The police asked me not to discuss it.”

“I heard that one of the robbers drowned while trying to swim away.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” No, the man I’d been asked to identify had supposedly been stabbed, not drowned, but I didn’t
know
anything.

Glossop went on. “Everyone’s talking about strange cars seen at the beach and—”

“At the beach? That’s nothing to get excited about. There are all sorts of strange cars there every day.” I gave a smile I hoped looked nervous. “And I’ve got to rush. I’ll see you later.”

I grabbed up two packages of ground round and whirled my cart toward the produce aisle. Even Glossop didn’t have the nerve to
follow me.

But his comment about the strange cars had caught my attention. Surely he hadn’t heard about the white van with the orange sign on the door. Of course, if Harold had dropped by for a sack of dog food, it was entirely possible that he’d mentioned the white van to Glossop. The two of them were kindred souls.

If the white van with an orange sign was still around Warner Pier, it ought
to be easy to find. White vans were everywhere, true, but this apparently was a commercial van with a painted sign on its door. An orange sign. A vehicle that noticeable wasn’t going to be hard to track down. Not that there was a central registry for vehicles entering Warner Pier.

Or was there? I stared at a bunch of broccoli. Maybe there was such a list. As soon as I finished my shopping, I
headed for the Warner Pier High School parking lot to check.

In a summer resort like Warner Pier, the population quadruples, maybe even quintuples or octuples, during the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Tourists and summer people are drawn to Warner Pier because of our quaint houses and the narrow streets that give the illusion they’ve returned to the small-town life of the early 1900s.
So they all drive into town, and those quaint narrow streets become so clogged that it’s almost impossible to drive on them.

In other words, parking is a perpetual problem during the summer in Warner Pier. So the town has come up with several attempts to solve the problem. One of them is that every summer the city leases the school parking lot. High school and college students are hired to staff
it, collecting money and allotting slots. Then other students are hired to drive small buses, ferrying drivers the few blocks to the Dock Street Park or to the shops on Peach Street to help them spend their money in Warner Pier.

That summer the head parking lot attendant was Will VanKlompen, Warner Pier High graduate and a sophomore at Michigan State University. Nobody in Warner Pier saw more
cars than Will, and he was dating my stepsister, Brenda.

I drove by the parking lot slowly, making sure Will was on duty. As head attendant, Will made up the schedule, and he tended to work the same shifts Brenda worked at the chocolate shop. Funny how that worked out.

Sure enough, Will’s big frame was lolling in a lawn chair under a big beach umbrella at the entrance to the parking lot. His
hair, sandy in the winter, was now bleached almost white by the sun, and his tan would have given a dermatologist nightmares.

Will wore khaki shorts like all the Warner Pier employers seemed to ask their employees to wear, and the City of Warner Pier’s purple-and-gold logo adorned the upper left-hand side of his white polo shirt.