The Chocolate Bear Burglary (17 page)

Then the door to Aunt Nettie’s bedroom opened, and she looked out. She wore a blue robe, and her hair was messed up, and I was so glad to see her that tears began to trickle down my face.

“I called the police,” she said firmly. “I don’t know who’s riding that snowmobile around here, but I’m really tired of it. I guess they think we’re at work this time of the day and won’t know about it. But there is a limit!”

Then she looked closely at me. “Heavens! Lee, have you been outside? And what happened to your jacket?”

The jacket looked as if I’d been rolling in the snow. Dirty snow. The cedar had ripped a sleeve. I’d tracked snow all over the kitchen floor and into the back hall. I went back to the kitchen door, the assigned spot for taking off outside clothes, and told Aunt Nettie what had happened. I tried to laugh it off. I didn’t want to frighten her.

But her round face screwed up into an angry apple. “Oh, Lee!”

“I’m not hurt,” I said. “It was pretty exciting. But the police will be here soon, and I’ll tell them about it. Maybe they can identify the snowmobile by its tracks.”

“I doubt it.” Aunt Nettie looked out the kitchen window. “It’s snowing harder.”

She called the police again, telling the dispatcher that the snowmobile rider had not only trespassed, but had actually chased her niece.

“Please tell whoever is on duty to get right out here,” she said. “Maybe they can still tell something about the snowmobile.”

“Maybe they could even follow it to its lair,” I said.

But it was no good. Jerry Cherry showed up within a few minutes, quickly followed by the chief. They tramped through the yard and looked at the piled-up snow along Lake Shore Drive, but when they came inside to report, the chief said the new snow made tracking the snowmobile impossible.

“I guess my messed-up jacket is the only evidence I can show you to prove the whole thing even happened,” I said.

“Did you see the rider?” Chief Jones asked.

“I could tell that somebody was guiding the darn thing,” I said. “But he had on a helmet. It made his head look like a bowling ball, and it had a guard over the face. It could have been anybody.”

“How big did the guy look?”

“Enormous! But that may have been the jacket.” I described the jacket, saying it was made of some woolly fabric. “It could have been fake fur,” I said. “Or Polartec. Something with a lot of texture.”

The chief frowned, and his frown made me furious.

“You’d better not say you don’t believe this happened,” I said.

“Well, after the burglary night before last and a killing last night . . .”

“This was more than trespassing by a snowmobile. Trying to kill me is a major crime.”

“It sure is,” Chief Jones said. He was drawling, pulling his words out long. “And adding it to what Jeff said . . .” He paused again.

“What Jeff said? This is one thing you can’t blame on Jeff, Chief.”

“But if it was the killer of Gail Hess coming back. . . .”

“That’s silly! Why would the killer hang around here?”

“I don’t know, Lee. But I do know that, except for the helmet, your description of the snowmobile rider is a lot like the description Jeff gave of the person he claims to have seen minutes before Gail Hess’s body was found.”

T
hat remark seemed to have knocked me out. The next thing I knew I was tucked into my own bed, the clock radio read 2:30 P.M., and someone was tapping at my door.

“Ms. McKinney? Lee?”

I rolled over, barely catching my head before it fell off my shoulders. “Tess? Come in.”

She peered around the door, looking as if she expected to need a whip and a chair. “I’m sorry. I know you haven’t been asleep long enough. But that Joe guy called.”

I groaned, sat up, and discovered I was wearing my underwear and no pajamas. The jeans and sweatshirt I’d had on when the snowmobile chased me were tossed on the back of a chair. I guess I had simply pulled them off and crawled under the covers.

I held on to my head. It wouldn’t do to allow it to roll under the bed. “Is Joe still on the phone?”

“No. He said not to get you up, but if you woke up to tell you that Jeff’s attorney is going to be meeting with him at four p.m. Your aunt went to the chocolate shop.”

“Thanks, Tess.” I yawned so widely I nearly dislocated my jaw, got out of bed, and headed for the shower.

By four o’clock I’d poured hot water outside me and coffee inside me and had dragged myself—and Tess, who didn’t want to stay at Aunt Nettie’s alone—to the police department in time to meet Webb Bartlett before he saw Jeff. The day was still gray, but the snow had stopped, and the streets had been plowed.

Webb might have been Joe’s age, but a bald spot and a paunch made him look older. His eyes were shrewd, and he didn’t bluster. I liked him, and I hoped Jeff would.

Webb didn’t ask me any questions before he saw Jeff, and he told Tess she’d have to wait until he and Jeff had conferred before she could go in. So Tess and I moped around the police station. The chief was out, but the part-time secretary took me into his office and quietly told me that the chief had run a check, and neither Jeff nor Tess seemed to be in trouble with the law, either in Texas or in any state between there and here. I was almost ashamed of how relieved I was to hear that.

When Webb came out, Tess went in, armed with the clean clothes, toothbrush, comb, and razor we’d brought for Jeff. The Warner Pier Police Department doesn’t really have a jail, just a holding cell, which is usually empty. But I appreciated the chief’s keeping Jeff there, instead of booking him into the county jail thirty miles away. I pictured Jeff in with hardened criminals and shuddered. He might have a stud in his lip, but he was just a baby.

Webb and I sat down to talk. He brushed aside my assurances that his fee would be paid. “I’ll take my fee out of Joe’s hide if Jeff’s dad balks,” he said. “Now, the police have to charge Jeff within forty-eight hours or let him go. Maybe he won’t have to go before the judge at all. What do you know about the victim, this Gail Hess?”

“Not a lot. Her antique shop is across the street from TenHuis Chocolade, but—well, in the summer we were all too swamped to socialize, and during the fall I was trying to get my job figured out and didn’t get around much. I didn’t really get acquainted with her until this Teddy Bear Getaway campaign started.”

“She was the campaign chair?”

“Right. Aunt Nettie wasn’t planning to do much with the campaign, but Gail insisted that we should take part.”

“Your aunt opposed the campaign?”

“No, she thought it was a good idea, but it’s not really key to our business. Most of the retail merchants in Warner Pier are completely dependent on the trade of tourists and summer residents. Some of them close up after Labor Day, and the ones who stay open, naturally they’d like to increase their winter sales. But TenHuis Chocolade has built up quite a mail-order business. Our retail shop pays for itself in the summer, but it doesn’t make a lot of difference to our overall profit picture. This time of year we’re busy shipping Easter and Mother’s Day orders. We don’t care much about retail sales. The shop’s only open as a sort of courtesy. Of course, that attitude shocked Gail.”

“Was she a Warner Pier native?”

“I don’t know, but Aunt Nettie will. We could go over to the shop and ask her.”

I spoke briefly to Jeff. Then Tess, Webb, and I left the police station and walked toward the shop.

Webb took a deep breath and gestured at our surroundings. “This is marvelous! Marvelous to be able to walk anywhere in the business district. And in a beautiful little town like this. I see why Warner Pier is such a tourist attraction.”

“It is really pretty,” Tess said. “In the daylight.” She obviously felt like she had been let out of her motel-room jail. When Jeff had been locked up, she’d been released.

Webb Bartlett was gesturing again, this time at the upper stories of the buildings along Peach Street. “What’s up there?” he said.

“Mostly apartments.”

“Apartments! Maybe there were witnesses to Gail Hess’s killing.”

I frowned. “I doubt it. Aunt Nettie has an apartment upstairs in her building, but it’s only occupied when the summer workers hit town. I think that’s the case for nearly all the buildings. The downtown is deserted on winter nights.”

“There’s the skating rink man,” Tess said. “Jeff and I saw him when we went out. That would be an awful job.”

I explained to Webb that the Warner Pier tennis courts are transformed into skating rinks every winter, and that one city employee had the job of maintaining them in the depths of the night. “There are people who run snowplows, too,” I said. “But I don’t think they would have been out last night. The snow didn’t start until this morning.”

“Finding a witness would be an extra added attraction,” Webb said. “I guess we’d better not get our hopes up.”

By then we had reached the store, and I was pleased to see that the glass in the door had been replaced. I took Webb back into the shop to meet Aunt Nettie, who was draining milk chocolate from the thirtygallon vat where it was kept already melted. She took a work bowl full of the ambrosial stuff to a table and began to ladle it into plastic molds shaped like the back halves of teddy bears. Without stopping her work—pour a ladleful of chocolate into the mold, tip the mold this way and that to make sure the inside was properly coated, pour out the excess, weigh the mold to make sure she’d used the right amount of chocolate, then put it aside on a tray—Aunt Nettie greeted Webb. Then she asked Tess if she’d like to make a little money by taking over Jeff’s job packing chocolates. When Tess agreed enthusiastically, Aunt Nettie called to Hazel, the chief hairnet lady. Hazel escorted Tess back to the packing area for her first lesson in the shipping and handling of the fragile molded chocolate.

Aunt Nettie took her tray of hollow chocolate teddy bear halves to the cooling tunnel and started the batch along the conveyor belt.

Webb was bug-eyed. “That’s fascinating,” he said. “But why are you making the back half of a teddy bear?”

Aunt Nettie showed him the matching molds that were the front halves of the teddy bears, plus the miniature chocolate toys—tiny cars, tops, balls, and drums—that would fit inside the two halves. “The fronts of the bears are already decorated,” she said, displaying the bears’ happy white chocolate grins and dark chocolate eyes. “When these backs I’m making are firm, we put the little chocolate items inside, then we glue the halves together with chocolate. They’re a special item for the promotion, but Marshall Fields is taking two hundred and fifty of them.”

“It must be the dickens to get those dark and light designs on there!”

“The designs are part of the mold,” Aunt Nettie said kindly. “We do that first. Then, after the design is set, we pour the milk chocolate in. It’s not that hard.” She smiled a little smugly. The truth is that it
is
hard. But Aunt Nettie has developed her own secret technique—which I won’t describe—for making the designs quickly. Or a skilled person can make them quickly. I can’t.

“I’d like to buy one for my daughter.”

Aunt Nettie presented Webb with a teddy bear that had already been assembled and given its special Teddy Bear Getaway wrapping. He held it like a treasure. I could see that we’d gained a customer.

I asked her about the apartments. She agreed with me that nearly all the downtown apartments were empty in the winter.

“Most of them are rented to summer workers,” she said. “Just a few are occupied. Gail’s, of course.”

Webb looked surprised, and I’m sure I did, too. “Gail lived over her shop?” I said.

“Yes. She said she couldn’t pay a mortgage on the shop and another one on a house. You know how expensive it is to rent or buy a place to live in Warner Pier.”

I knew. With people building million-dollar homes in Warner Pier and leasing houses and condos for thousands and thousands of dollars each summer—well, I knew I was lucky to live with Aunt Nettie in a house that had been in the family for a hundred years. It was that or commute from someplace way back off the main road or from Holland or Grand Rapids.

But learning that Gail lived over her shop was real news.

“I’d been wondering how she happened to cross paths with the killer,” I said. “I thought maybe she’d been lying in wait for the burglar and had caught him breaking in over here again.”

“She wouldn’t have needed to set an ambush,” Aunt Nettie said. “She would have only had to look out her front window.”

I walked to our show window and looked over at Gail’s shop. “It’s covered with crime scene tape at the moment,” I said. “I guess her apartment is, too.”

Webb turned to Aunt Nettie. “Was Gail a native of Warner Pier?”

“No, but she’d lived here nearly twenty years.”

“Did she have any family?”

“She was single, and I never heard her mention having been married. She never talked about any family, but that doesn’t prove anything. I know who might know, though. Mercy Woodyard.”

“That’s Joe’s mom,” I said to Webb. “She has an insurance office here. She insures practically all the local businesses. I’ll call her and ask.”

Mercy Woodyard told me she had sold Gail a small life insurance policy. Her beneficiary was a sister, Nancy Warren. “She’s a teacher in Indianapolis,” Mercy said. “I gave Chief Jones her name, and he contacted her. She’s due in any moment. The chief doesn’t want her staying in Gail’s apartment, so I made her a reservation at the Inn on the Pier. It’s practically the only place open this time of year.”

I didn’t remind her that the Lake Michigan Inn was open, too. Mercy obviously meant that the Inn on the Pier was the only picturesque place open. And it definitely looks picturesque, though in February, when it could be called the Inn on the Ice, it also looks darn cold. It sits right on the edge of the river. In the summer boaters come up the Warner River and tie up at the inn’s dock, then check in as if they’d parked their Chevys outside the Holiday Inn.