The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up Read online

  But right at the moment the break room was crowded. The ladies who had finished up were leaving, and that room is the passage to the back alley. They were walking through, one at a time and in groups, making a great show of not paying any attention to the business manager and her boyfriend.

  Joe frowned, then spoke quietly. “I need to talk to you privately. Could you walk down to the park? I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone.”

  “Let me tell Aunt Nettie.”

  Aunt Nettie was up in the shop, talking to Hershel. It was a little ritual—she was practically the only person in Warner Pier who acted glad to see him.

  “Hershel, you mustn’t save that too long,” she was saying as I came in. “They’re for eating, not looking at.”

  “Aunt Nettie,” I said. “I’m going out for a few minutes.”

  Aunt Nettie turned her back to the counter. “Certainly, Lee. And I’m just getting a eight-inch frog for Hershel. It’s the first one we’ve sold. He wants it as a mascot for his canoe.”

  I was astonished. Hershel Perkins came in the shop every afternoon and asked for a sample piece of chocolate. I’d never known him to buy anything. Particularly not an expensive molded frog. Stacy—Stacy was the plump one; Tracy had stringy hair—turned around and waggled her eyebrows at me. She was obviously astonished, too.

  I smiled at Aunt Nettie. “That’s great, Mr. Perkins.”

  Hershel just scowled.

  I went back to the break room. “The roof may fall in,” I said. “Hershel is actually buying something. He comes in nearly every day to cadge a sample.”

  “Why does Nettie let him get away with that?” Joe said.

  “She says everyone who comes in the shop gets a sample, and Hershel’s no different. I think she feels sorry for him.”

  “I feel sorry for him, too, and I don’t want to argue with him again. But I’ve got to talk to you. Now. Come on.”

  I was extremely curious. We went out through the alley door and down to the Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, stood in line behind a half-dozen tourists, then took our cones over a block to the Dock Street Park.

  The Dock Street Park is the pride of Warner Pier. It’s narrow, but it stretches along the Warner River for a mile. The riverside is lined with marinas and public mooring spots for hundreds of small craft. As usual, the river itself was crowded with boats, which can either follow the Warner River upstream or travel down the river and out into Lake Michigan.

  None of the park’s benches was empty, so we walked along the dock near the public mooring area. Down the way I saw a knot of people gathered around a spiffy wooden motorboat, and I recognized Joe’s 1949 Chris-Craft Runabout. Its mahogany deck and sides shone as beautifully as they had the year the boat was built.

  I was surprised to see it; Joe usually drives his pickup to town. If he uses a boat, he uses his 1948 Shepherd Sedan. “How come you brought the runabout in?” I said.

  “A guy up at Saugatuck wants to see it,” Joe said. “I’m going to take it up the lakeshore. Besides, I’m trying to show it off around the marinas. Since the sale fell through.”

  The boat’s price tag was $20,500. Twice Joe and his banker had celebrated because they thought it had sold. Twice the sale had fallen through.

  But Joe obviously didn’t want to talk about boats. He stopped out of earshot of the gawkers.

  “What’s this about?” I asked.

  Joe stared at his ice-cream cone—one scoop of French silk and one of pecan praline. “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said.

  Then, to my astonishment, he blushed. And he began to stammer. “That was the wrong word. I mean, I’ve got an invitation. I mean, if you’d like to . . . Maybe we could . . .”

  This was really amazing. I’m the one who stammers around, using the wrong word. Joe is the former defense attorney who could convince a jury to turn loose Attila the Hun.

  He finally stumbled to a verbal stop and stared at me, apparently at a loss for words.

  “What is it, Joe?” I asked.

  He took a deep breath. “I did some work on a cabin cruiser for Dave Hadley—you know, at the Warner River Lodge. So—well, he’s offered me an evening out at the lodge in exchange. I thought we could take the Shepherd Sedan up there for dinner. Then we could cruise farther up the river. Or out into the lake, if it’s calm. I mean, if the mosquitoes aren’t too bad. But—you know—we’d need to do it on a weeknight. Because—well, of how crowded the lodge is on weekends. I thought about tomorrow night. If, that is, if you could get the night off.”

  It wasn’t the most gracefully phrased invitation I’d ever had.

  Joe’s ice-cream cone was dripping down his hand, and he didn’t seem to notice. He flushed a slightly deeper shade. “I sound like an idiot,” he said. “But I really want you to go.”

  He looked at me anxiously, and I wanted to laugh. Or give him a big hug. Joe obviously wanted this to be a big romantic evening, and his awkwardness made it plain that he really wanted me to go.

  Didn’t he know how complimentary that stumbling and stammering was? Because Joe really was cool. If asking me to go to the Warner River Lodge for dinner could throw him into tizzy . . . If he could make the trip into an event, with a ride up the river . . . It meant my answer was important to him.

  Which was both gratifying and surprising.

  “Lick your ice cream,” I said. “When do you want to leave?”

  Joe grinned from ear to ear and hauled an arm back as if he was going to yell “Yeehaw!” the way us Texans do. Instead, he exuberantly threw his ice-cream cone about fifty feet out into the river. Then he used his clean hand to squeeze mine. I was sure he wanted to kiss me, but hand-holding is as big a display of affection as I’m likely to get from Joe on a public sidewalk in a public park.

  Joe and I had been edging into romance for nearly a year, but it had been a slow journey, and our final destination was still unknown. We both were hauling a lot of emotional baggage, mainly connected with our former spouses, and events such as murder had thrown even more obstacles in our way. For months we hadn’t done anything but talk on the phone.

  Finally, late in February, Joe had invited me out in public. Since the night we’d made our official appearance at Dock Street Pizza—social center of Warner Pier, Michigan—all our friends and relations had regarded us as a couple. I was twenty-nine and Joe was thirty-three; they assumed we were ready to settle down.

  But we weren’t a couple yet. And there were a lot of pitfalls in the way of our becoming one.

  The first was money, and that was largely my fault. I have a horror of debt which I developed by watching money problems break up my parents’ marriage, and my feelings about money only grew more complicated after I married a wealthy man who thought he could buy a solution to any difficulty. Since I knew Joe didn’t have a lot of money, I wouldn’t let him spend much on me. Seeing him pull out a credit card to pay for dinner ruined my whole evening.

  Money bothered Joe, too. By now his buddies from law school were buying big houses and taking European vacations, and he must have had moments when he regretted leaving the practice of law. Because of his legal problems involving his ex-wife—who died deep in financial doo-doo and without changing an old will which made Joe her executor—he could only work part-time on his boat business, so it wasn’t growing very fast.

  Plus, our living arrangements put a lot of traps in the pathway to romance. Joe lived in one room at the boat shop and cooked with a hot plate and a microwave. His décor included a roll-away bed and a worn recliner. Because of this, he didn’t like to invite me over. I shared a house with my aunt. I’d asked Joe over to dinner a few times, but Aunt Nettie insisted on retiring to her bedroom, where she tried to be quiet. Joe and I sat in the living room, uncomfortably aware of her presence.

  Then the tourist season hit, and I started working from noon until around ten p.m. We had a lot of problems just scheduling dates.

  But the biggest pitfall may have been that we both re
cognized that we weren’t in this for a casual fling. Maybe we were making excuses to keep each other at arm’s length. Maybe the truth was that we were both scared.

  Our situation was very much up in the air. Sometimes I got really impatient. Dating Joe was like reading a book when I was simply dying to know how it would end. But I couldn’t turn to the back page to find out.

  It had been a long, cold winter and spring. But now the weather had warmed up enough for a trip up the Warner River in Joe’s favorite wooden boat. And a client had offered Joe dinner for two at a snazzy restaurant, so I wouldn’t feel compelled to lecture him about wasting money. I thought I could get an evening off. No wonder the two of us stood there looking into each other’s eyes and beaming more brightly than Michigan’s summer sun.

  Then a cloud crossed Joe’s face. He yanked my hand. “Come on!” He pulled me along the dock. “Here comes Hershel.”

  I looked at the boats beside us. One was a bright green canoe with the words “The Toadfrog” on the prow. “Yikes! We’re right beside his canoe.”

  Joe and I walked down the dock at a brisk pace.

  “Hershel never wears a life jacket,” I said. “Maybe he’ll drown himself on the way home.”

  The remark didn’t seem so funny twenty-eight hours later, when Hershel’s canoe was found smashed and half submerged in the Warner River.

  Chapter 2

  We almost ran up the dock to the next sidewalk, then cut back through the park, toward Dock Street. Joe was still holding my hand, but he was frowning. “I don’t understand what got into Hershel down at the post office,” he said. “I’ve never had any quarrel with him.”

  “How have you missed? He’s quarreled with everybody else.”

  “I avoid him. In the past whatever bee he’s had in his bonnet hasn’t caused our paths to cross. Until now. Because I’m not backing down on the Root Beer Barrel. I’m going to sell that property.”

  “But why should Hershel care?”

  “Who knows why Hershel does anything? Why did he picket the Superette two years ago, wanting them to put a warning label on all products containing refined sugar?”

  I had lived in Warner Pier only a year, so this was news to me. “You’re kidding! And he snags chocolates from Aunt Nettie every day? What does he think sweetens them?”

  “Nobody expects Hershel to make sense. Last year, as you may recall, he devoted himself to an attack on the use of gasoline-powered engines in boats.”

  “Hence the canoe?”

  “Right. I lay low on that one. He didn’t seem to realize I repair gasoline engines, so he concentrated his harassment on Green Marine. Apparently his new craze is historic preservation.”

  I looked back and watched Hershel paddling across the river toward the willows that hid his ramshackle house. His distinctive canoe—the only kelly green canoe on the river—wobbled, since Hershel wasn’t much of a canoeist.

  “I hope we’ve heard the last of Hershel for a while,” I said.

  Aunt Nettie agreed easily with my plan to take Tuesday evening off.

  “You and Joe need more time together,” she said. “If the girls have any questions, I’ll be here. I’m planning to start cleaning the vats about four o’clock.”

  “You’re sure I don’t need to help?”

  “No! I want you to keep us solvent, not mess around with the chocolate. Go out with Joe.”

  So at eleven o’clock that night, I was standing in my closet doorway and trying to figure out what to wear the next evening when I went out to dinner at the Warner River Lodge, with the prospect of a boat ride afterward.

  My fragrance would be simple to select—mosquito repellent would fill the bill. Formal dress would not be required; Warner Pier is a resort, after all. I decided to wear cream-colored slacks, a cotton sweater in a soft green, and a shirt printed with green fronds on a cream background. Joe had once told me that sweater made my eyes look green; he seemed to consider it a compliment. Plus, it was an outfit I could wear tennis shoes with, and rubber-soled shoes would be best in a boat.

  I went to work at eight-thirty the next morning. Aunt Nettie showed at one p.m. Beginning at four, she tore up the entire workshop—the chocolate making area—as she superintended the cleaning of the chocolate vats.

  TenHuis Chocolade depends on having a ready supply of melted chocolate for the bonbons, truffles, and molded chocolate we produce. So we keep a vat of each kind of chocolate ready all the time. These are TenHuis-sized vats, of course. They’re nothing like the enormous vats the Hershey plant would need. But the vats still range from four to five feet tall and are a couple of feet in diameter. The smallest one—for white chocolate—holds one hundred seventy-five pounds of chocolate. The dark chocolate vat holds two hundred pounds of chocolate, and the milk chocolate vat two hundred fifty pounds.

  The vats are made of stainless steel and are something like giant thermos bottles—vats within vats. The inside vat holds the chocolate, and the outer vat holds hot water. An electrical element keeps the water at an even temperature, and the water keeps the chocolate at an even temperature. The top to the inner vat opens so that solid chocolate can be dropped in, but when Aunt Nettie or one of her helpers needs to take chocolate out, they use a tap and run the melted chocolate into a pitcher or mixing bowl, just like getting water from the sink. Inside the vats are paddles which churn gently twenty-four hours a day.

  Those vats are boogers to clean. All the chocolate has to be drained—which means you have pans and kettles of chocolate sitting around the shop getting solid. The paddles and other internal parts have to be scraped down, then washed by hand in hot, soapy water. The hot-water vessels have to be drained and the water replaced.

  Fortunately, the job doesn’t have to be done very often. Aunt Nettie insists that it be done early in the summer, before the heavy tourist season starts and before she and her crew begin producing the first Halloween items.

  It was a good thing Aunt Nettie didn’t need my help. I spent the day in a dreamy state, making even more verbal faux pas than usual. I handed some tourist a dark chocolate bonbon with a white dot in the center of the top and told him that I’d give him the raspberry, leaving out the word “cream” (“Raspberry Cream—Red raspberry puree in a white chocolate cream interior, coated in dark chocolate”). Then I asked Tracy to check the supply of mocha perimeters, instead of mocha pyramids (“Milky coffee interior in a dark chocolate pyramid”). The worst one was when I reached into the display case for a Midori coconut truffle, and at that moment Stacy asked me if Joe and I were going out that evening. I nodded and said, “We’re rolling in coconut.” This was a reference to the truffle I was picking up (“Very creamy all-white chocolate truffle, flavored with melon and rolled in coconut”), but don’t ask me why the chocolate’s description worked its way into my reply.

  Luckily, the answer cracked both Stacy and me up—something about picturing Joe and me rolling in bushels and bushels of Angel Flake—and we laughed the rest of the afternoon. Every time we quit one of us would start again. The customers must have thought we were nuts. Coconuts.

  We were still snickering when a plump brunette walked in the door. I didn’t know her, but I immediately classified her as a member of the Warner Pier art colony. Something about her flowing draperies and folksy beads.

  Stacy spoke to her immediately. “Hi. How’s your summer going?”

  “Racing by, Stacy,” the brunette answered. “Racing by. But today I’m hunting my brother. I don’t suppose he’s been around?”

  “No—unless he came in this morning.” Stacy turned to me. “Did you see him?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know whom we’re talking about.”

  “Oh!” Stacy looked astonished. “This is Mrs. Waterloo. She’s my English teacher.”

  Thank goodness I’d said “whom.” And I’d certainly misjudged her profession. But Waterloo? Was this Mrs. Frank Waterloo? If so, she was a sister to the cranky Hershel Perkins. I regarded her war
ily. Was Hershel’s crankiness a family trait?

  But the plump brunette was smiling in a most uncranky way. She did have thin lips and a wide mouth like Hershel’s, but on her the family feature became generous and humorous. She did not resemble a frog at all.

  “You’re Lee McKinney, aren’t you? We haven’t met. I’m Patsy Waterloo.” She extended a hand that was covered with rings—the handcrafted kind. “Hershel Perkins is my brother. Nettie is always terribly patient with him. I know he’s not much of a customer.”

  “Mr. Perkins bought a big frog yesterday,” Stacy said. “First one we’ve sold.”

  “But he hasn’t been in today,” I said.

  Patsy Waterloo made a face that was half-friendly and half-dismayed—I guess you’d call it a grimace. Then she moved down to the end of the counter and cocked her head, beckoning me to join her. When I did, she spoke again, dropping her voice almost to a whisper. “You’re the girl Mercy Woodyard’s son has been pursuing, aren’t you? Pardon me for being such a nosy bitch.”

  I laughed. “Nobody else in Warner Pier apologizes for being interested in their navels—I mean, their neighbors! Yes, I’m seeing Joe.”

  “Have you talked to him today?”

  “No. Why?”

  Mrs. Waterloo’s grimace became more concerned than friendly. “Well, we haven’t seen Hershel since last night.”

  “Oh, does he live with you?”

  “No, he lives next door. But he usually eats dinner with us. Anyway, after that scene in the post office . . .”

  Her voice seemed to fade away. She turned around, draperies swirling, and nervously walked up and down, back and forth in front of the counter. Then she leaned over, very close to me, and spoke more softly than ever. “Hershel was still talking wildly last night. About Joe. I thought he’d gone home to bed. But this morning . . . his bed hadn’t been slept in.”