The Chocolate Moose Motive: A Chocoholic Mystery (2 page)

He was definitely a summer person.

I don’t shop in South Haven all that often. My usual hangout is Warner Pier, twenty miles away and one-third the size of South Haven. But I’d been delivering chocolate to that particular supermarket, so I’d decided to do my shopping there as part of the trip. After all, if the South Haven supermarket was buying our chocolates, I could buy their fabric softener. Not many supermarkets carry our line of luxury European-style bonbons, truffles, and molded chocolates. They’re mainly found in high-end gift and specialty shops.

I’m Lee McKinney Woodyard, and I’m business manager for TenHuis Chocolade, located in Warner Pier, Michigan. My aunt is the expert chocolatier who owns the company and supervises making the chocolates, but I’m responsible for keeping her bills paid and getting her ambrosial product to the retailers who sell it. Usually this means UPS or FedEx, but when our customer is as close to us as South Haven, I deliver.

South Haven and Warner Pier are both Lake Michigan resorts, and both draw wealthy “summer people”—such as the guy with the ugly mouth and the nice clothes—who own vacation homes in our communities. So both towns have supermarkets that aren’t typical of small towns. Yes, it takes a special small-town market to stock prime beef, thirty kinds of imported cheese, and out-of-season fruits. And now the South Haven market had decided to add a selection of fancy chocolates. Naturally—ahem—they’d asked TenHuis Chocolade to
supply a dozen flavors of bonbons and truffles, plus an assortment of our special molded items. This summer’s special items were Michigan animals. Aunt Nettie and her genius crew were producing beautiful chocolate deer, moose, otters, raccoons, and foxes.

Our part of west Michigan has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and it’s been a resort area for well over a hundred years. In summer, the dozens of towns along the shore of Lake Michigan are packed, and the people packed into them can be classified into three distinct categories—tourists, summer people, and locals.

Tourists come for short periods of time—a day or a week or two weeks. They rent rooms from motels or bed-and-breakfast inns. They come in tour buses or private cars. They tend to wear shorts and T-shirts that advertise other places they’ve visited, such as Lake Placid, the Indiana Dunes, and the St. Louis Arch. Sometimes the shirts even say PARIS or advertise a local junior college. They clog our streets, wandering up and down and buying souvenirs.

We love ’em. They bring money to town and leave it behind.

Summer people own or lease cottages and stay the whole summer. Or at least they come for weekends. They are often members of wealthy families—property on Lake Michigan doesn’t come cheap—and some of them have visited this area for generations. They dress out of the L.L. Bean catalog. If their T-shirts say anything, it’s HARVARD, or at least UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. Of course, not all of them are wealthy, but they all pay property taxes.

We love them, too. They bring even more money than the tourists do.

Then there are us locals. We live here year-round, and most
of us make a living from tourists and summer people. We mow their lawns, put up their shutters, repair their air conditioners, roof their houses. We sell them food, clothing, gasoline, wine, hedge clippers, and—in my case—fancy chocolates. We wear shorts and tees, too, but ours tend to say things such as HERITAGE BOAT RESTORATION or TENHUIS CHOCOLADE.

After the white-haired man walked off, I went back an aisle to get my fabric softener, then moved into the grocery department. I kept an eye out for Sissy. My brief look at her had titillated my curiosity. For one thing, she seemed familiar, though I couldn’t figure out just why.

Sissy had been—well, “vivid” may be the best word. That glossy black hair was gorgeous, and her green eyes were riveting. She had been wearing khaki shorts, like three-quarters of the other shoppers, but her off-white tunic was trimmed in colorful embroidery I was willing to bet had been hand done. Her sandals had a handmade look.

Even her tiny stature made her stand out, but maybe that was most noticeable from the perspective of a woman like me, since I’m five foot eleven and a half. My Dutch ancestors endowed me with natural blond hair, and my Texas ancestors provided the gene for tallness. I tower over most other women and a lot of men.

Sissy was stunning and unusual. I wanted to figure out where I’d seen her before, so I tried to get another look at her. But I caught only one more glimpse, and that was clear down an aisle. She was buying a big box of Cheerios, and she disappeared into another aisle while I was looking at shredded wheat.

I didn’t see her again until I backed into her in the parking lot.

Great. First I whanged into her grocery cart; then I dented her car.

My excuse for the accident is modern automobile design. I have trouble seeing out the back of my van, no matter how I twist my neck. I try to park where I can exit by pulling forward, but during the summer tourist season, that’s not always possible in that particular lot, even on a Monday, so I had to back out of my parking spot, and I backed into the right-front fender of a light blue Volkswagen that seemed to come from nowhere.

We didn’t hit hard, luckily. We both stopped, got out of our vehicles, and went to survey the damage. I had a dented bumper, and Sissy had a ding in her fender. The blue Volkswagen was vintage—probably forty years old—but it had been in good shape before I hit it.

Sissy looked dismayed as she surveyed the damage. Our fender bender seemed to have upset her even more than the run-in with the summer guy with the foul mouth.

“I know it’s best not to admit fault,” I said, “but I will say I have trouble seeing what’s behind this darn van. Luckily, I have really good insurance.”

“I was upset,” Sissy said. “I may not have looked as carefully as I should have. Do we have to call the cops?”

“I doubt the cops want to fool with a minor accident like this, especially on private property. I think we can exchange information and go.”

Anyway, Sissy and I got out our information, and I found a notebook so we could write it all down. Sissy wrote my information down first, then tore out the page and handed the notebook back with her license and insurance card.

I started copying, beginning with her license.

The name at the top wasn’t Sissy, which wasn’t too surprising. Her legal name was Forsythia—Forsythia Smith.

It was impossible not to comment on a name that unusual. “Forsythia!” I said. “My favorite spring flower.”

Belatedly I remembered who Forsythia Smith was. Darn. I’d put my foot in it.

Sissy scowled. “My mom and dad were given to flights of fancy.”

“At least no one will ever forget it.”

She laughed harshly. “That’s true. No one will ever forget Forsythia Smith. The southwest Michigan murderess.”

Chapter 2

That was a conversation stopper.

I don’t know if I gasped or grinned. But I do know I didn’t say anything aloud. I kept copying off the information on Sissy’s driver’s license and insurance card, gluing my eyes on the bits of paper.

When I finished writing and looked at Sissy, she had dropped her head and was staring vacantly at the parking lot’s asphalt surface. She looked desperately unhappy.

She raised her head when I handed her cards back. I tried to smile. And I spoke, but why I said what I said—well, I still don’t understand it.

“Hang in there,” I said. “You don’t snare me. I mean, you don’t scare me!”

Sissy raised her head. “You’re the exception,” she said. Her expression didn’t change.

“I’ll be in touch about your fender. If you could go on and get an estimate, it might help.”

She nodded, and we each went our own way.

I guided the van out of the parking lot, cursing myself because I’d twisted my tongue again. I do that when I’m nervous,
but I reminded myself that Sissy couldn’t know that. She’d just think I was an idiot—if she thought about it at all.

I drove across South Haven and negotiated the crazy entrance to I-196. As I headed home, I kept thinking about Sissy and her life.

A few miles up the interstate, I pulled into a rest area and parked. I sat a few minutes, still thinking. Then I took out my cell phone and called my aunt, Nettie TenHuis Jones, at the chocolate shop.

Aunt Nettie answered the telephone herself. “TenHuis Chocolade.”

“Hi,” I said. “How would you and Hogan like to come over for dinner tonight?”

“That sounds wonderful. We’ve had a really busy day here, and it would be delightful not to cook. And I sure don’t want to go out to dinner. In June. In Warner Pier. Not during what I’m happy to say is a successful tourist season.”

“Great! Come at six thirty. Or seven. Whenever you can make it.”

As soon as I hung up, I called Joe at his boat shop. He didn’t answer, so I left a message, telling him I’d invited some of his in-laws for dinner and that I’d appreciate it if he’d come home ready to fire up the charcoal cooker. I ended with, “I’ll do it if you’re not in the mood.”

Joe is always in the mood to cook out, so I didn’t anticipate a problem there.

I restarted the van and headed on toward Warner Pier. My curiosity bump was still itching, longing to know more about Forsythia Smith, but I had taken steps that would lead to scratching it.

As I drove, I shoved my curiosity into my subconscious and considered dinner. And even though I’d just left the South
Haven supermarket, I hadn’t planned for guests. I was going to have to stop at the Warner Pier Superette.

Warner Pier, Michigan, has twenty-five hundred year-round residents. The good thing about living in an ultrasmall town is that you know everybody. The bad thing about living in an ultrasmall town is that everybody knows you, and probably knows your business, too. Or everybody thinks they do.

My mom grew up in Warner Pier, but she moved to Dallas and wound up marrying a tall Texas guy and living in his hometown, Prairie Creek. Prairie Creek is about the size of Warner Pier. When my parents were divorced, the year I was sixteen, my mom moved the two of us to Dallas and got a job in a travel agency. To get me out of the way during that difficult summer, she packed me off to Michigan to work for her brother, Phil TenHuis, and his wife, Nettie, in their chocolate shop. During those three months, Aunt Nettie was truly kind to an angry teenager she barely knew. Eleven years later, when my first husband and I split up, Aunt Nettie—who by then had been widowed—didn’t ask me a single question about my divorce. She just offered me a job running the business side of her shop and factory.

Twice my life had been in crisis, and each time Aunt Nettie and the chocolate shop had been a haven to me.

Things had gone well for me since I moved to Warner Pier. I got my feet back on the ground emotionally. I fell in love again, this time with Joe Woodyard, whom I consider the best-looking and smartest and maybe the nicest guy in west Michigan.

Joe began his career as a lawyer. When he got burned out on law, he bought a boat shop. Now he works three days a week for a poverty law agency in Holland and restores antique
powerboats on the other days. Joe is another Warner Pier native, and Joe’s mom, it just happens, runs Warner Pier’s only insurance agency.

Next, Aunt Nettie—after three years as a widow—married Warner Pier’s police chief, Hogan Jones.

Meanwhile—this is a really small town—Joe’s mom married again, too. She married Warner Pier’s mayor, another nice guy named Mike Herrera. I won’t go into Mike’s son being married to my best friend; the relationships are already confusing enough. If I drew a diagram of who’s married to whom, who’s related to whom, and who’s close friends with whom, it would look like a plate of spaghetti. Let’s just leave it at this—between our relatives and our friends, Joe and I know people who know nearly everything that goes on in Warner Pier and Warner County.

When it came to Forsythia Smith, self-proclaimed murderess, I knew that Police Chief Hogan Jones—the second husband of my aunt by marriage—would have all the background on her.

Now, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. That afternoon, as I was stopping at the Warner Pier Superette for steaks and a bottle of Fenn Valley red, I had no intention of getting involved in Sissy Smith’s life. I just wanted to know who the guy bawling her out had been, and I wanted to know why Sissy called herself a murderess.

I’m a nosy person, and that was all I had in mind. I swear.

By six thirty, I had straightened the living room and had the steaks marinating. The table was set. The salad greens were torn up. The potatoes had been rubbed with bacon fat and were baking. The sherbet was in the freezer, and my grandmother’s Depression glass serving dish held chocolates—espresso cardamom, described in our literature as “rich dark
chocolate filling flavored with chocolate espresso beans and laced with a hint of cardamom, then enrobed with dark chocolate.”

Joe had come home early enough to take a shower. He was firing up the charcoal cooker, and I was putting snack crackers in a bowl when Aunt Nettie and Hogan pulled into the drive. Ten minutes later we were all on the screened porch, wine or beer in hand, and Joe, Aunt Nettie, and Hogan were complaining about how busy their days had been.