The Chocolate Bear Burglary Read online

  All this had happened in about two seconds, and Gail and Aunt Nettie had spent those seconds staring at the chocolate molds. Now they turned around, and both of them gaped at me and Olivia VanHorn.

  Mrs. VanHorn was getting her color back. “I’m fine,” she said.

  Gail Hess began to fuss around. “Goodness, Olivia, what happened?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing! I have these turns. I’m sorry if I frightened everyone. They go away quickly.”

  She was looking much better. “My doctor assures me it’s nothing serious.”

  “I hope not! Shall we call a doctor?”

  “Oh, no! Hart drove me in. He went down to the bank to speak to George Palmer. George chairs the party for Warner County, you know, so Hart needs to keep in contact with him. But I’m fine now.”

  She might be fine, but the mention of George Palmer had nearly made me faint. George was the local bank manager and Aunt Nettie’s loan officer, and I found him annoying. Plus I’d had a real friendship with his predecessor, Barbara, so every time I had to deal with George, I missed her.

  Mrs. VanHorn looked at me and smiled graciously. “Your niece reacted quickly, Nettie.”

  The smile froze me. It was gracious as all get out, true. But the dark eyes stabbed right through me. I had punctured the dignity of a great lady by noticing that she was about to fall down in a dead faint. Embarrassed, I moved back behind the counter.

  But Olivia VanHorn wasn’t through. “Thank you very much for the first aid, Lee.”

  I had to respond. “We have lots of practice,” I said. “Everybody swans over Aunt Nettie’s chocolates.”

  I’d done it again. Gotten my tongue tangled and used the wrong word. Gail and Olivia VanHorn stared at me and even Aunt Nettie looked puzzled.

  “I’ll try that one again,” I said. “All our customers swoon over Aunt Nettie’s chocolates.”

  Everybody smiled, and I went on. “Sparklin’ reparty ain’t my fort-tay,” I said. “I git my tang tongueled.”

  Aunt Nettie laughed, so Gail decided I’d done it on purpose that time, and she smiled. Olivia VanHorn gave a perfunctory chuckle. I gestured at the shelves. “If you’re feeling better, I hope you are pleased with the display of chocolate molds.”

  Olivia VanHorn looked at the display and nodded. “They look wonderful, Nettie.”

  “I’m going to put one or two in the showcase,” Aunt Nettie said. “I’d like for people to be able to see the detail, but I know they are quite valuable. I don’t want anybody picking one up to look it over.”

  “It’s a beautiful collection, Olivia,” Gail said. “I was really surprised when Timothy said you wanted to sell them. I remember the lovely display your mother had in that wonderful oak china cabinet in the bungalow. And they’re highly collectible.”

  I’d been around enough antique dealers to know how to translate “highly collectible.” It meant “nice commission for me.”

  Olivia VanHorn nodded. “Timothy gave them to you?”

  “They were with some other things he brought in on consignment. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No, my idiot brother didn’t tell me. I’m delighted that you’re using them for your display, Nettie. But Gail, I really don’t want them sold.”

  “Then we’ll take them down immediately,” Aunt Nettie said.

  “No, no! They’re perfect for the Teddy Bear Getaway theme. I’ll pick them up after the promotion is over.” Now Olivia VanHorn gave a rather stilted laugh. “After Timothy has a piece of my mind.”

  Gail began to apologize profusely, but Olivia brushed her words aside. “Gail, it’s not your fault in any way. In fact, it’s not Timothy’s fault. I remember he said he was going to take a box of old kitchen things from the basement of the bungalow to an antique dealer, and I assured him it was all right. I didn’t realize the molds were in the box.”

  Olivia VanHorn was looking much better. She stood up, and she and Aunt Nettie began to look at the individual molds. “I always remember this one, the acrobat bear wearing a fez,” Mrs. VanHorn said, tapping the shelf in front of that one. “When I was a little girl, I had a book about a circus and a bear who did tricks. I always thought this was a mold of him. Actually, of course, it’s a German mold.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gail said. “An Anton Reiche. It dates from around 1929. But it’s not the most valuable in the collection. I have a friend in Chicago, Celia Carmichael, who’s a real expert on chocolate molds. I believe she evaluated them for your mother, Olivia. Celia is coming up this way in the next few days, and she wants to stop by and see them.”

  This comment made Olivia blink, and Gail hastily spoke again. “I’ll be sure and tell her they’re not for sale. But she’ll enjoy seeing them.”

  The three of them continued talking about the molds, each from her own angle. Aunt Nettie looked at their historical connection to the chocolate business, Gail at their value to collectors, and Olivia VanHorn at her childhood memories.

  I stood by and listened. We weren’t exactly swamped with customers that day—in fact, winters are really slow for nearly all Warner Pier retail businesses. The “hairnet ladies,” the women who actually make the chocolates, stay busy with mail orders and commercial accounts, but Aunt Nettie and I don’t bother to keep anybody on duty at the counter in the winter. If customers walk in, one of us runs up to wait on them.

  I was considering going back to the paperwork piled up on my desk when the phone rang. I answered the extension behind the counter. “TenHuis Chocolade.”

  “Lee? I’m glad it’s you.”

  It was Joe Woodyard. Calling me at the office. That was strange. Joe and I were circling around a love affair, but for a lot of complicated reasons we—or maybe just Joe—didn’t want to become an item for Warner Pier gossip. So Joe phoned me several times a week, but we’d agreed that he would always call me at home.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Lee, I just caught a kid trying to break into your house.”

  “What?”

  “I’d have called the cops, but—” Joe stopped talking.

  “But what? Joe, if someone tried to break in . . . Who is it?”

  “He claims he’s your son.”

  Chapter 2

  My son?

  I was so astonished I think I hung up without saying another word. I headed for my office. I stepped into my boots, pulled on my ski jacket, and walked past Aunt Nettie, Gail Hess, and Olivia VanHorn without speaking. I went out the street door, leaving them gaping after me. Or Aunt Nettie and Gail gaped; Olivia merely raised a well-bred eyebrow.

  I drove off in my van, which had been Michiganized with the proper license plates and three fifty-pound bags of kitty litter, carried as ballast and for emergency traction.

  The day was sunny and the streets fairly clear, either covered with hard-packed snow and ice or melted through to the pavement. Snow several feet deep covered the lawns and fields I passed on the way to Aunt Nettie’s house on the outskirts of Warner Pier. I drove cautiously, like a Texan in snowy weather, but I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the road. I was too upset at the thought of my “son.” My son the burglar.

  I’d figured out who it must be.

  I was glad I’d stopped for my boots as soon as I pulled into the driveway, a sand lane about a hundred yards long that connects Aunt Nettie’s two-story white farmhouse—built in 1904—with Lake Shore Drive. Every town on Lake Michigan has a Lake Shore Drive, of course. Aunt Nettie and I lived on the inland side, but this time of the year we could glimpse the lake through the bare limbs of the hundreds of trees between us and the water.

  I saw that the drive was blocked by Joe’s truck—a blue pickup with “Vintage Boats–Stored and Restored” on the side—and by a sporty gold SUV. Even from the road I could see that it was a Lexus RX300. That figured, if I was right about who the burglar was. The Lexus was half off the road and obviously stuck. That figured, too. The kid who drove it probably thought an SUV could go anywhere; it couldn’t.r />
  Aunt Nettie hires a man who plows the drive when it needs it. (He also scrapes the snow off the porch roof, because that roof slopes so gently it can collect enough of Warner Pier’s “lake effect” snow that it might collapse. I’m not in Texas anymore.) So the drive was fairly clear, but since the snow melts and refreezes on a regular basis, its surface was icy and rough. If the Lexus had stayed on the road, though, it shouldn’t have gotten stuck. I parked my van behind Joe’s truck, got out and began slipping and slogging toward the house. As I passed the Lexus, I noted its Texas tag. Again, just what I expected.

  Joe—six feet plus, with dark hair, blue eyes, lots of brains, and skillful hands—was standing on the front porch of Aunt Nettie’s house. Sitting on the porch steps, with his head down nearly to his knees, was a skinny kid in a down jacket, jeans, and tennis shoes. He wore thick glasses, and he had a gold ring in his left eyebrow. His ears were pierced, too—no, they were more than pierced. They had big eyelets in the lobes, as if he expected to tie shoelaces through them.

  The kid didn’t seem to have gloves or a hat. Joe wasn’t wearing gloves or a hat either, but somehow he looked macho, as if the winter didn’t faze him. The kid just looked cold.

  Joe and I exchanged nods, but I didn’t stop to talk. I went right around him, to the kid. I could have whacked him, but I tried to stay calm.

  “Hi, Jeff,” I said.

  The kid lifted his head to glare at me, and I saw that he also had a stud in his lower lip. Then he ducked his head and studied the walk some more. He didn’t speak.

  “He claims he’s your son,” Joe said.

  “He used to be,” I said. “He’s Jeff Godfrey. For five years he was my stepson.”

  Joe looked relieved, then tried to hide it. I fought an impulse to laugh. I guess finding out I had a teenaged son would have come as a shock to him.

  “Y’all might as well come on in,” I said.

  I knocked the snow off my boots, unlocked the front door, and went inside. Joe held the storm door open, but he had to gesture before Jeff got up and preceded him into the living room.

  There was a mat by the door, and Jeff and Joe had already knocked most of the snow off their feet out on the porch. I kicked my boots off and walked around in my heavy socks. Then I looked Jeff over. I hadn’t seen him in two years—it had been at Christmas two years and two months earlier. His dad, Rich Godfrey, had insisted that Jeff join us on Christmas Eve, and Jeff had sulked and sneered the whole evening. Rich had finally blown up at him. It hadn’t been a happy holiday.

  Jeff had grown taller, of course. He was still scrawny, but he had reached his dad’s height, maybe an inch shorter than I am, and he had Rich’s light brown hair. But his face was thin like his mom’s, and the gray eyes behind his glasses weren’t like either of them. He wasn’t as spotty as he had been two Christmases earlier. Between the glasses and the jewelry installed on his head, he seemed to glitter.

  “Well, Jeff, have you had lunch?” I said.

  Jeff finally spoke. “No, but I’m not hungry.” I was having a hard time not staring at the huge holes in his earlobes, and the stud in his lip seemed to bounce around.

  “I’ll fix you a sandwich anyway. Joe? Ham sandwich?”

  “Thanks.”

  Joe took his jacket off and hung it on the hall tree by the front door. He seemed watchful, and I realized he was keeping an eye on Jeff. Did he think the kid was going to go berserk?

  Would Jeff be likely to go berserk? I hadn’t the slightest idea. He’d been eleven when I married his dad and sixteen when I divorced him. I’d tried to be a nice stepmom, but Jeff had always avoided me like poison.

  I didn’t know him at all.

  I turned up the furnace heat, then showed Jeff where the bathroom was; in Aunt Nettie’s old house you get there by way of the kitchen and the back hall, so it’s kind of tricky. Then I started making five ham sandwiches, three on white and two on rye.

  Joe came into the kitchen while I assembled bread, cheese, and ham. “How did you happen to catch Jeff?” I said.

  “I was headed down to Benton Harbor to look at a boat. I thought I’d take the lake road and check on how the ice is treating the beach. I saw the Lexus stuck in your drive, so I stopped. The kid was up on the porch roof, trying to get in that window.”

  “The one over the stairwell?” I was horrified.

  “Right. He’s lucky he didn’t succeed and break his neck.” Joe lowered his voice. “How well do you know this kid?”

  I kept my voice low, too. “Not well, I’m afraid.”

  “I could still call the cops.”

  “Let me talk to him first.”

  But that didn’t prove easy. Even after Jeff sat down at the dining room table and decided he would eat a ham sandwich and have some milk, he was determined not to give out any information.

  “How’d you wind up in Michigan?” I asked.

  “Got in the car and drove.”

  “Why?”

  Jeff took a big bite, chewed and swallowed before he answered. “I wanted to see a new place.”

  “You turned eighteen in July.” Jeff looked up sharply at that, maybe surprised that I remembered his birthday. “Did you start college this year?”

  “Yeah. SMU.”

  Southern Methodist. In Dallas, his hometown, but a good college, not easy to get into. Jeff had been doing something right.

  “Are you still working for your mom?” Jeff’s mom, Dina, has an antique shop.

  “I was. Saturdays. I made some deliveries, polished stuff.”

  “Does your mom know where you are?”

  That got a quick and angry reply. “No, and I don’t know where she is!” Bite, chew, swallow. Then, “I don’t live at home anymore.”

  “You living in the dorm?”

  “I was.”

  “Did your dad send you up here?”

  That brought a gape that made the lip stud bob around. “No! He wouldn’t send me anyplace!”

  Jeff’s reaction was genuine enough to settle that particular suspicion. Rich hadn’t sent his son as a gobetween of some sort. Good. Maybe Rich had quit trying to salvage his hurt pride.

  “Then why did you come?”

  “Not because I wanted to see you.”

  “Jeff, please don’t ask me to believe that you wandered a thousand miles from home and college and just happened to get stuck in the driveway of your former stepmother.”

  Bite, chew, swallow. Glare. No answer.

  I was getting impatient. “Come on, Jeff! Joe still thinks we should call the cops. Explain yourself.”

  Now Jeff pouted.

  “If you did come all this way to see me, Jeff, for heaven’s sake why didn’t you come by the store? Why didn’t you phone? Why did you try to break into the house?”

  He scowled and rubbed at one of his earlobes. I fantasized about sticking my little finger through the huge hole in it.

  “I thought maybe you’d loan me some money,” Jeff said. “Then when I found your house, I got stuck. I was trying to get in to use the phone.”

  He raised his head and shot Joe an angry glance. “This guy . . .” He stopped talking, ducked his head and stared at his sandwich. “At least he had a cell phone.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “When I drove up he was halfway in that upstairs window,” he said. “I could take a look at it. Has Nettie got a ladder?”

  “In the garage. The key’s hanging in the broom closet off the back hall.”

  Joe stood up. “I won’t be far,” he said.

  Jeff sullenly ate two more bites of his sandwich, but after we heard Joe go out the back door and saw him pass the dining room windows, he glared at me. “Does that guy live here?”

  I swallowed a sharp answer, then tried to speak calmly. “Obviously not, Jeff. If he lived here he’d have a key. Joe’s just a friend. He’s not even a frequent visitor.”

  “I saw him in the papers. He’s the guy you were mixed up with over that murder.”

 
; “His ex-wife was murdered, true. Neither of us had anything to do with it.”

  “Dad said—”

  “Quit trying to change the subject, Jeff. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m broke. Like I said, I thought maybe you’d lend me some money.”

  “I haven’t got any money to lend. Why don’t you call your mom.”

  “I told you. I don’t even know where she is.”

  “Then call your dad.”

  “He won’t talk to me.”

  “What happened?”

  Jeff squirmed and made a low, growling sound. Then he whacked his fist on the table and yelled, “They both threw me out!”

  I could see Joe whirl around and start running back toward the house. But Jeff was back into his sullen mode, staring angrily at his plate. I got up and went to the back door to assure Joe the situation wasn’t out of control.

  As I walked back to the table, I thought about what Jeff had said. I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  If Jeff had had a specialty, it had been playing his parents against each other. When I pointed this out to Rich, he got mad at me instead of at Jeff. It was hard to believe that Rich and Dina would ever have stopped fighting over Jeff long enough to throw him out; Jeff would have figured some way to divide them and ruin the plan.

  Jeff might well have deserved to be thrown out. He’d always been bratty, and his ear, eyebrow, and lip jewelry would have given his dad a stroke. But I found it hard to believe that his parents had actually tossed him. Jeff’s mother had always doted on him, and so had Rich, in his own selfish way. Rich saw the other people in his life merely as reflections of his own success. Dina got a big settlement when they divorced, so he could brag to his friends about how she took him to the cleaners. For Jeff, Rich had always provided the best private schools—best, as in most expensive—and the best bicycle and the best summer camp and the fanciest tennis shoes. I had benefited from Rich’s largesse, too; I’d always had jewelry, a snazzy car, a fancy house.

  The only thing Rich hadn’t given any of us was respect and love, but he didn’t have much of that to spare.

  When I walked out and left the jewelry, the car, the house, and the clothes behind, I was trying to convince Rich I loved him, not his money. His reaction had shown me the truth—Rich saw his money as an extension of himself. When I rejected the one, I had rejected the other. He hadn’t forgiven me.