The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle (18 page)

“A local?”

“At least he has enough local knowledge to know that TenHuis Chocolade furnishes chocolates to Gray Gables. He knew that if he called in an order you’d run right out there.”

“He must have even known that I’m usually the one who makes deliveries.”

Hogan nodded. “And he knows you got out of that van alive and crawled off into the bushes.”

“Right. So?”

“So let’s be cagey here. Let’s let the bastard think he killed you.”

“
Y
eah, Lee,” Joe said. “Maybe you could just dis appear for a few days.”

I barely had to think a minute. “That sounds heavenly,” I said.

Yes, at first disappearing sounded like a wonderful idea. But I quickly realized it isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Sure, we’d all like simply to retire from the world on occasion. No phone calls, no letters, no e-mail. In fact, people have been known to do that. But those people probably weren’t planning to come back. My disappearance had to be short-term, and that’s a problem. I mean, when you go on vacation, you stop the newspaper, right? If you just disappear, you can’t do that. Newspapers and the other routine matters of life pile up.

My very first comment showed I had the wrong idea. “I guess I could work at home for a few days.”

The chief shook his head. “Nope. No work.”

“No work? But this is our busy season!”

“Yeah, but nobody’s going to believe you’re dead if you’re still turning out work.”

Aunt Nettie spoke. “We could manage, Lee. I could tell you what comes up, you could tell me what to do, and I could do it.”

This time the chief smiled as he shook his head. “No, Nettie. You’d have to be away from the office as well. You’d be involved in the search for Lee.”

“Oh!” Aunt Nettie gave a little gasp. “I guess you’re right. It wouldn’t be very realistic for me to keep on making chocolates if Lee were missing.”

“That’s right,” VanDam said. “It will have to be a complete masquerade or there’s no point.”

We worked on the details. Aunt Nettie and I would stay home twenty-four hours a day. She would answer the phone. If people came to the house—“And they will,” Chief Jones warned. “The ghouls will gather.”—Aunt Nettie couldn’t let them in. If she couldn’t avoid letting them in, I’d have to hide out. We’d have to leave most of the shades drawn. Aunt Nettie would have to stay away from the shop.

The worst part was I’d have to let my friends believe something terrible had happened to me.

“How about Lindy? I’d have to tell Lindy,” I said.

“Nope.” The chief’s voice was firm. “And the same with the people at the shop. If they know you’re all right, someone is sure to let it slip. The only way is just to disappear, Lee. If you can’t do that . . . well, we’ll have to think of a different plan.”

I was confused. “But what’s the point of all this? Why do you want the rifleman to think I’m dead?”

Joe answered. “First off, Lee, it’s the best way to keep you safe.”

“I appreciate that. But couldn’t I just go to a motel in Holland or something? Then I could at least do some work.”

“That’s an alternative we could consider,” Chief Jones said. “But I’d like to try the disappearing act for a few days. It will give us an excuse to search the woods around here thoroughly, for example. We can look in people’s outbuildings. And you never know when somebody will say the wrong thing, let something slip.”

“What about Timothy?” I said.

We all turned to look at him. Timothy Hart was the weak link in all this, of course. Tim is a sweetheart in a lot of ways, but he had spent years in an alcoholic fog. He’s not the person I’d pick to share an important secret.

Timothy drew himself up proudly, then assured us he had been dry for nine months.

“I will not say a word to a soul,” he said. “I’ll stay home from AA.”

“We don’t want you to do that,” Chief Jones said. “Just remember, Tim, that one dropped hint at the Superette could be fatal for Lee.”

Timothy promised silence with great solemnity. But the chief’s warning left me more scared than I had been since I fell out of the woods onto Lake Shore Drive. Somehow the chief’s comment made the whole thing seem real. Until then it had had a dreamlike quality.

When we got back to Aunt Nettie’s house, I did insist that I be allowed to phone my parents in Texas, so I could tell them I was really all right before news of my disappearance hit the news media. It turned out that my mother, who’s a travel agent, was in Mongolia, so I called my dad in Prairie Creek, Texas.

As soon as he figured out I was alive and not in need of medical attention, he wanted to know about my van. My dad owns a small garage, and he’d found that van and fixed it up for me.

“I haven’t seen it,” I said. “It’s still sitting over there where the guy with the rifle was. But I’m afraid it’s in pretty bad shape, judging from the number of shots it took. I know the windshield’s gone, and maybe the tires.”

“That’s easy to fix,” he said.

“I’m sure you and a good body man could get it back in tiptop condition, Dad. But I don’t think I’ll ask you to try. I never want to see that van again.”

I teared up and had to hand the phone to Chief Jones then. The chief warned my dad not to speak to any reporters. “A hint that Lee is alive could mean she’s not,” he said.

By then I was able to talk again, and I took the phone to say good-bye. “Bye-bye, Daddy. Don’t worry about me.”

“Take care, honey. I’ll do my best to act real natural.”

There was no reason to believe the rifleman was watching any of us, but the chief and Lieutenant VanDam were determined to make my disappearance look real. For example, the chief, who must have thought of this plan the minute Joe called him in Holland, had first sent a patrolman in an unmarked car to check out my van. Joe got the job of making the official “discovery” that I was missing.

Joe had said good-bye at Timothy Hart’s. Later he told me he stopped and picked up a sandwich, trying to act as if that was the reason he’d been roaming around, then went back to his apartment and cleaned up his painting supplies. At nine p.m. he walked across the street and banged on the door of TenHuis Chocolade, giving an imitation of a guy trying to keep a date.

Meanwhile, I got in and out of the shower. That turned out to be a painful process, since my elbows were skinned worse than when I learned to ride a bike the Christmas I was seven. Aunt Nettie smeared them with antibiotic ointment and covered them with gauze. By the time Joe called the house to complain that I had stood him up, I was tucked into bed in a flannel nightie. I listened on the upstairs extension while Aunt Nettie assured him I hadn’t come home.

“Oh, dear, Joe. Where can she be? It’s not like her to—well, just disappear.”

Joe didn’t laugh. “She said something about making a delivery after work.”

“That wouldn’t have taken her long. She was taking some mints out to Gray Gables.”

Joe pretended to think that over. “That end of Inland Road can be pretty lonely this time of year with all the summer cottages closed. I’ll drive out there and make sure she didn’t have car trouble.”

Aunt Nettie made me comfort food—a grilled cheese sandwich, a cup of hot chocolate, and two Mexican vanilla truffles (“Light vanilla interior in milk chocolate.”)—and brought it upstairs on a tray. I turned on my dim bedside lamp and ate it. After I finished, I lay down knowing it would be a half hour or more before anything else happened. Joe had to “discover” my van, call the police, and wait for them to arrive before he could call Aunt Nettie again. I guess I fell asleep. I found out later Aunt Nettie had unplugged the upstairs telephone. I slept through most of the night’s excitement. I’ve always suspected Aunt Nettie of dissolving an antihistamine in my hot chocolate.

Aunt Nettie had the hard role, of course. She had to be up all the night, taking calls from the police and acting worried.

The next day was more of the same. I mainly stayed upstairs. Of course, I did have to sneak downstairs to the bathroom now and then, since we only have one. This meant Aunt Nettie had to keep all the downstairs shades pulled. Chief Jones stationed a patrol car in her driveway, ostensibly to keep reporters away, actually to give the two of us warning of visitors.

But the main problem with being a missing person was boredom. By that afternoon I was out of my skull, ready to throw a shoe at the television and all set to trash every book in the house.

I wanted to read the files of the Warner Pier
Gazette,
and I couldn’t do that.

I told Joe as much when he came by under the guise of consoling Aunt Nettie.

“I never realized that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment,” I said.

“What bothers you the most?”

“I’m
missing
everything! I don’t know what’s going on.”

“The cops are mainly tramping around in the woods,” Joe said. “I thought you got enough of that last night.”

“I did. But I still want to know what’s happening. I had big plans for today.”

“Lee, have you been detecting again? Chief Jones said—”

“I wasn’t doing anything that any citizen couldn’t do. All I’d planned for today was a trip to the
Gazette
office. I was going to look at their files.”

“What files?”

“Files on everybody who seemed to be mixed up with Aubrey Andrews Armstrong.”

“You mean Maia and Vernon?”

“And Maggie McNutt. And maybe Ken.”

“What did they have to do with Armstrong?”

I bit my tongue. I couldn’t tell Joe all the details. “Maggie was afraid of him,” I said. “She thought he was a crook.” I didn’t mention seeing the red Volkswagen near the fruit stand just after I found Silas Snow’s body.

Joe looked at me and shook his head. “I’ll try to find you some new reading material,” he said.

But it was Chief Jones who showed up at five p.m. with a large, flat bundle.

Aunt Nettie let him in while I stayed away from the door. He plunked the bundle on the dining room table. “Here, Lee. Joe says you need something to keep you busy.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s five years’ worth of bound Warner Pier
Gazette
copies. It wasn’t the easiest thing I ever accomplished, but I pulled rank and got them from the library.”

I eyed them suspiciously. “You had to pull rank?”

“They’re normally not checked out.”

“I know. But what do you want me to do with them?”

“Look through them. See what you find out. About Maia. About Vernon.” He waved his hand. “Joe said you’d planned to look the
Gazette
files over.”

“Yeah, but Chuck was going to let me see his personal files. I figured they’d be clippings, not whole newspapers.”

“I’ll go by there tomorrow and photocopy everything in Chuck’s files. And I’ll let you see it. But they’re probably not too complete. It would help me if you’d look through these papers.”

I gave the chief a short list of people who had been involved with Aubrey Andrews Armstrong or who had showed any interest in him: Maia, Vernon, Maggie and Ken, Silas Snow himself, maybe Chuck O’Riley—it was hard to go much further than that.

“I guess Silas had a hired man,” Aunt Nettie said.

The chief nodded. “Yes, his name is Tomas Gonzales.”

I wrote that down, but I didn’t expect to stumble over it in the Warner Pier
Gazette
. Except for Mayor Mike Herrera and schoolkids, the Hispanic citizens of Warner Pier tend to be invisible.

The whole thing had the air of a make-work project designed to keep Lee busy and out of the hair of law enforcement. I didn’t like it. But I’d agreed to the disappearance, so I could hardly say I was too busy to look at five years of old
Gazette
s.

“I’ll start after dinner,” I said.

“Oh, my!” Aunt Nettie said. “I forgot to tell you, Lee. Hazel and Dolly insisted on cooking dinner for me. Dolly’s supposed to bring it out just after five.”

“We’ll have to hide these
Gazette
s, then,” the chief said.

We barely had time to stow the heavy bound volumes upstairs when our police companion in the driveway beeped his horn to warn us someone was coming. I sat in a comfortable chair in the corner of my room, ready to stay quiet. There are no secrets in Aunt Nettie’s house; the smallest whisper or the tiniest creak of a bedspring is heard throughout the house.

Of course, that meant I could also hear every word spoken in the living room. I sat down, picked up my book, and cocked an ear for Dolly Jolly’s booming tones.

But the voice of the visitor didn’t boom. It tinkled. The visitor and Aunt Nettie had to come right into the living room before I realized who it was. Lindy Herrera.