Read The Chocolate Bear Burglary Online

Authors: Joanna Carl

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Women Sleuths

The Chocolate Bear Burglary (19 page)

BOOK: The Chocolate Bear Burglary
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Joe gave my hand a final squeeze, and we left it that way, with me to call property owners or merchants on the river side of the street, the side where TenHuis Chocolade was located, and Joe to call those on the Orchard side, the side where his mom’s office was. We didn’t need a list; we knew everybody on both sides of the block. Besides, about a third of the shops weren’t open in the wintertime.
Aunt Nettie called out, saying she and Tess were leaving by the back door. Joe said good-bye and went across the street to his truck, which was parked in front of his mother’s office, then drove off. I picked up some paperwork to take home. I hadn’t done a stroke of work that day. I left by the street door, since I’d parked in front of the shop.
The picturesque streetlights of downtown Warner Pier don’t exactly shine like spotlights, so the block was fairly dark, as well as deserted. I was locking the door to the shop when I heard a banging noise.
This was followed by someone calling out, “Gail! Gail! I’m here! Let me in!”
I whirled toward the sound. Someone was standing in front of Gail Hess’s antique shop—inside the crime scene tape. All I could make out was a bulky coat, but I could tell the voice belonged to a woman.
A dim light shone in Gail’s window, but nothing stirred behind the curtain. Or behind any other window on the block. The streetlights puddled on the slushy snow along the curb. When the woman stopped knocking and yelling, the whole street was silent.
The woman called out again. “Gail! I’m freezing!”
Someone was trying to rouse Gail Hess, to rouse the dead.
It was spooky. A rabbit ran over my grave, making me shudder, and I fought an impulse to jump into my van and tear out of there.
But that wouldn’t do. I sternly curbed my imagination, and called out, “Hello! Can I help you?”
The woman turned toward me. Now I saw an oval of white face, topped by dark hair. “I hope you can,” she said. She stepped across the yellow crime scene tape and moved toward me. “Gail Hess invited me to stay with her. She knew when I was to arrive. But she’s apparently not there. Has something happened? I didn’t understand all this yellow tape.”
Great. I was going to get to tell one of Gail’s friends that she was dead. I decided I’d better not yell it out. I jaywalked across the empty street, meeting the woman near the opposite curb.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“Bad news? Has something happened to Gail?”
We stood there in the slush, and I told her about Gail. As far as I could see in the faint light, the woman looked shocked, but she didn’t burst into tears.
“Good heavens!” she said. “Do they know who did it?”
That was a trickier question. I decided to level with her. “No,” I said. “They’re holding my stepson as a witness, but I’m convinced he didn’t have anything to do with it.”
The woman lifted her eyebrows. “And you are?”
I introduced myself and pointed out TenHuis Chocolade. “Are you an old friend of Gail’s?” I asked.
“Not really. My name is Celia Carmichael. I’m the author of a book on chocolate molds.”
“Oh, yes. Gail mentioned that a well-known expert on antique molds was coming to take a look at the Hart collection. But she hadn’t said when she expected you.”
“Are the molds in her shop?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’d still like to get a look at them.”
“That would be up to the police.” It occurred to me that Celia Carmichael might be worth questioning. She hadn’t been in Warner Pier the night Gail was killed, true, but she knew a lot about chocolate molds—if that was what our burglar had been after—and she had obviously talked to Gail recently.
Celia Carmichael sighed deeply. “I suppose I might as well drive on to Chicago. There’s probably no place to stay here. Gail said most of the inns and motels were closed.”
“A few are open, and they’re certainly not crowded. Besides, Chief Jones might want to talk to you.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “The police chief? Why would he be interested in me?”
“I expect he’s interested in anybody who talked to Gail during the past few days,” I said. “Come into the shop and I’ll call him.”
“I don’t know anything about this. I barely knew Gail. I’ll just drive on. I only came to see the molds.”
“The molds may be involved in Gail’s death.”
“How could that be?”
“She had displayed some of them in our shop, and someone broke in there two nights ago. One of them was stolen.”
“One was stolen? Only one?”
“My stepson apparently interrupted the burglar, and he ran out the back way.”
“What would this have to do with the attack on Gail?”
“I consider it a strong possibility that the burglar came back for the rest of the molds, not knowing my aunt had insisted that Gail take them back to her shop. If Gail came out and confronted him, he might have killed her. Please wait while I call the chief.”
Ms. Carmichael frowned. “It’s late, and it will still take me more than three hours to get to Chicago. I’d better go on.”
I was becoming more and more convinced that she should talk to the chief. “It will take you even longer if he asks you to drive back tomorrow. After I tell him you were here.”
She moved toward her car. “Look, I hardly knew Gail.”
“Then why were you coming to stay with her?”
“I wanted to see the molds.”
“Well, apparently the molds are still there. Stick around and maybe the chief would let you in to look at them. Maybe he’d even want you to look at them. Give him an expert opinion.”
“I get paid for that sort of work.”
“Not if you’re subpoenaed.” I tried to say that confidently. I had no idea whether or not it was true. I wasn’t even sure if you could subpoena a witness for questioning, or just to testify in court.
“I’ll leave my card. If the chief wants to talk to me, he can call.” She pulled off one of her gloves and started scrabbling through her purse.
I didn’t want her to leave without talking to the chief, but I was beginning to be afraid I was going to have to wrestle her into TenHuis Chocolade like a rodeo cowboy with a steer. “This is a small town,” I said. “The chief can be here within a few minutes.”
She handed me a card. “I don’t want to wait.”
I took the card, but I decided to try one final, desperate bit of arm-twisting. “I don’t understand. You say you drove all this way to see the molds, but you won’t wait ten minutes to ask the chief if he’d let you see them.”
“Examining them would take longer than ten minutes. I was going to combine seeing the molds with a visit to Gail.”
“But you said you and Gail weren’t close friends.”
“We weren’t! I was only coming because . . . well, because she talked me into it.”
I’d hit a nerve. “Was Gail paying you for an expert opinion?”
“No.”
“Then why were you coming? And coming to spend the night? If your home base is Chicago, you could drive up, spend several hours checking the molds, then drive back the same day.”
Celia Carmichael stood silently for a long moment before she spoke again. “Look, apparently you knew Gail fairly well. Did she ever try to talk you into doing something you didn’t want to do?”
“Well, she wanted my aunt to display the antique molds in her shop, and Aunt Nettie wasn’t crazy about the idea.”
“Did Gail give up?”
“No. She kept coming around. She brought the molds over. She was pushy.”
“Well, that’s the way she was about my coming by here. She found out I was going to a sale in Saginaw, and she became convinced I should drive back—way out of my way—and stop to see the molds. She just pushed and pushed until it was easier to come than to argue anymore.”
“You seem like a fairly strong-minded person, Ms. Carmichael. It’s surprising that Gail could push you around like that.”
“She must have taken lessons from you! Is everybody in this town this aggressive?”
“If we need to be. Look, just walk across the street with me and wait—in our nice warm office—while I call the chief.”
She glared.
I made one final push. “It will be even more annoying if I call the chief and he asks the state police to pick you up ten miles outside of town.”
She gave an exasperated growl. But she walked across the street, toward TenHuis Chocolade.
I let us into the shop, then went into the office and called the police station. The dispatcher said she’d find the chief and send him over. Then I turned around and got my first good look at Ms. Carmichael.
She looked just like Gail Hess. That rabbit ran over my grave again.
Chapter 15
A
s soon as my shuddering had stopped I realized that my first impression wasn’t really right. The resemblance between Gail and Celia Carmichael was superficial. But it was certainly startling.
Celia Carmichael was probably fifteen years older than Gail. But like Gail, her most striking characteristic was frankly fake red hair, cut short and tousled. Her features were nothing like Gail’s, but the two women were much the same height. The down coat Celia wore was bright green. Gail’s coat had been almost exactly like it.
I decided I’d better act like a hostess. “You must be frozen. Can I Gail you something?” I bit my lip. “I mean get you something?”
Ms. Carmichael was scowling. “I don’t look like Gail,” she said angrily. “She looked like me. She used to imitate everything I did.”
“What’s the saying? The sincerest form of flattery?”
“It may have been sincere, but it was extremely annoying. Every time I wore something to an antique event where Gail was, the next time I saw her, she’d have something like it. When I decided to become a redhead, I thought that would stop her. But, no! She got the same haircut and colored her hair exactly the same shade.”
“I can see it would be embarrassing. How long had you known her?”
“Too long!” Celia Carmichael clamped her jaw shut. She sat down in one of our straight chairs, folded her arms and glared. She declined a chocolate and refused to take her coat off. She just sat there. I called Aunt Nettie to tell her I’d be home a little late. Then Celia Carmichael and I waited silently until Chief Jones came to the door.
I’d expected the chief to ask her to go down to the station, but he merely pulled up our second chair and talked to her in his casual way. I guess it worked. He did get a bit more information out of her.
I went into the office and pretended to work, but neither Chief Jones nor Celia Carmichael lowered their voices, so I could hear every word. The tale she told the chief was the same one she’d told me, and the chief responded with the same question I’d asked her.
“If you and Gail weren’t friends, why did you agree to come here and spend the night with her?”
“Gail simply nagged me until I agreed to stay over. Plus, I did want to see the molds. She wanted me to advise her about selling them. They’re quite famous, you know.”
“No, I wasn’t really aware of that.”
“Oh, yes! Matilda Hart—I guess that this Olivia VanHorn is her daughter—was one of the earliest collectors of Americana. The chocolate molds were only a part of her collection. She snapped up butter tubs, pie safes, wonderful furniture—lots of real treasures—back in the thirties and forties, when most people thought that sort of thing was just junk. Some of her collection is on permanent loan to the Smithsonian.”
The chief whistled, and Celia nodded firmly. “That was why the idea of Gail handling a Hart estate sale was so silly. She didn’t have the contacts, the organization. The entire Hart Americana collection is going to be worth something over a million.”
“But wasn’t Gail talking about an auction of things here at the Hart-VanHorn summer cottages? The valuable stuff would have been at Mrs. VanHorn’s permanent home.”
“Perhaps that’s what the VanHorns had in mind. But Gail was thinking big.”
The chief mulled that over a moment. “You say she e-mailed you. Do you still have those messages?”
“I may have killed some of them, but most should still be there. My laptop’s in the car. Or I could pull them off any computer with Internet access.”
The chief asked if she could use my computer, and Celia logged on and pulled up her e-mail messages. She had a half dozen from Gail, and she allowed me to print all of them out for the chief. Celia was right about one thing: Gail had definitely been thinking big about the Hart-VanHorn sale.
All the messages were gushy, in typical Gail style, but the final one really outdid itself. But gush was all it contained; no facts.
“Celia!” it began.
You will NOT believe what has happened. I’m not saying anything until it’s all settled, but I’ve stumbled across a MAJOR OPPORTUNITY. You’d never believe how much old glass—or even plastic—can be worth.

LOL!!!!!
Hopefully, I’ll be able to TELL ALL when I see you.
Bye-bye,
Gail.
Celia Carmichael swore she had no idea what Gail had been talking about. “She was always full of big plans,” she said. “But none of them ever came to anything. And I know nothing about glassware. If she’d stumbled across some exciting piece of glass, she wouldn’t have been telling
me
about it.”
“There’s no indication that this had anything to do with the Harts and VanHorns,” Chief Jones said.
“No. In fact, I interpreted it as meaning she’d come up with some new project, gotten some new bee in her bonnet, maybe forgotten all about the VanHorns. That’s the way Gail operated.”
That ended the conference. The chief told Celia she could go on to Chicago if she wanted, then mentioned the motels and a couple of B&Bs that were open. He escorted both of us outside. But I grabbed Celia for one more question before she drove off. “Do you know anything about why Gail left Indiana?”
BOOK: The Chocolate Bear Burglary
11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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