The Chocolate Cat Caper (9 page)

I also find it spooky, because the area is heavily wooded. That makes it beautiful, I suppose, to anybody who wasn’t born and raised on the Texas plains. I’ve read that people raised in wooded areas find plains threatening because the openness makes them feel exposed. But plains people like me find woods threatening because we feel as if some enemy might be hiding among all those trees. I’ve been spending time in Aunt Nettie’s house since I was sixteen, and I’m still a little uneasy about the place.

But I was too tired to feel uneasy that night. I didn’t even have nightmares, despite a few vivid presleep flashbacks of Clementine Ripley’s body crashing over that railing and landing at my feet.

 

The next day started off routinely. It was Saturday, the busiest day of the week for a retail business in a resort community at the height of the tourist season.

I got up in time to have a cup of coffee with Aunt Nettie before she went to work at seven-thirty. After she left I turned on a cable news show and caught Duncan Ainsley commenting on the death of Clementine Ripley.

“I’m proud to say she was a friend, as well as a client,” he said. “Her death is truly shocking.” He seemed quite genuine.

The television newsman said the cause of death was not yet known.

“Well, it’s gonna be natural causes,” I told him firmly.

I flipped the TV off, washed a load of underwear, and tossed my dry cleaning into the van. I dressed in Warner Pier business casual—clean khaki shorts and chocolate-brown polo shirt with a TenHuis logo. At ten I fixed myself a bowl of local blueberries, lightly sugared, and followed them with bacon, eggs, and toast, a brunch that would last until my six p.m. dinner break. At eleven-thirty, I left. I stopped at the corner where the dry cleaner used to be, only to discover it was now a real estate office. So I left the dry cleaning in the van and went on to TenHuis Chocolade, ready to start my first shift as a supervisor. Which on a Saturday during the busy season was going to include helping out behind the counter—the reason I’d worn the company outfit.

Aunt Nettie, who believes that tourists want to watch chocolates being handmade even on Saturdays, was working with a limited crew—just three hairnet ladies—when I arrived. She kept rolling creamy white chocolate truffles in coconut (“Midori Coconut truffles—very creamy all white chocolate truffles, flavored with melon and rolled in coconut.”) as she reported on the morning. It had been routine, she said, except for lots of phone calls from her friends as Greg Glossop spread his opinion around town. We were both delighted that neither Chief Jones nor the tabloid press had shown up with questions.

“The longer we wait to hear from Chief Jones,” I said, “the more I think Clementine Ripley had a stroke. Or maybe some kind of aneurysm.” Aunt Nettie agreed.

Aunt Nettie took a lunch break at one, but worked until four-fifteen, so I was able to ask her some questions before I took over. One of the questions was the name of the counter girl with the stringy ponytail. Her name was Tracy. Her partner that afternoon was a plump girl of similar age, but with better hair, and her name was Stacy. So if I them mixed up, who could tell?

Aunt Nettie obviously wasn’t confident about leaving me in charge, but Stacy and Tracy assured her they’d show me the ropes, and we shooed her and the ladies in hairnets out the door.

At four-thirty the phone rang. I didn’t exactly jump to answer it, since I expected it to be another of Aunt Nettie’s pals wanting to gossip. When I picked it up after the third ring, I was surprised to hear Aunt Nettie herself.

“Lee?” Her voice was all quavery.

“Aunt Nettie? What’s wrong?”

“The house is all torn up. We’ve had a burglar!”

I didn’t have to stop and think about that one. “Get out of the house!” I said. “He might still be there. I’ll call the cops and be right there.”

I called nine-one-one, left Tracy and Stacy on their own, and ran out the back door. I got to the house half a block behind the Warner Pier patrol car.

Aunt Nettie was standing in the drive beside her big Buick. I hugged her, and the two of us waited outside while the deputy checked the four rooms downstairs and the three upstairs. Nobody was there.

When we looked in the door, the house was a wreck. I started inside, ready to begin cleaning up, but I was stopped by the patrolman, a burly young guy whose uniform had been tailored to fit like a second skin. His name tag read CHERRY.

“Let me call in and see what the chief wants to do about this,” he said. “He’ll probably want photos at least. Maybe fingerprints.”

I was surprised. I’d lived in Dallas too long. My mom’s apartment there was burglarized, and the cops didn’t bother to take fingerprints. She had to wait hours for an investigator to show up at all. I was glad to learn things were still different in a small town.

Aunt Nettie and I were sitting on the porch when another car pulled in, and Chief Jones unfolded his long legs and got out.

I hadn’t expected to see him. “What are you doing here?” I said. “Do you do all the investigations?”

“Most of them. Warner Pier has a force of five, and that doesn’t include a detective, so I have to do double duty.” He looked over the top of his half glasses and grinned his folksy grin. “Besides, when a newcomer to town is involved in two emergency calls in two days, I’d better check it out. What’s going on?”

“I don’t understand it,” Aunt Nettie said. She’d gotten over being frightened. Now she sounded miffed. “Usually Warner Pier burglars just hit the summer people.”

“Guess these guys don’t have any hometown spirit,” the chief said. He opened the trunk of his car and revealed all sorts of esoteric equipment.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Aunt Nettie said. “It’s so much easier to break into a house that’s going to be empty for weeks or months. Even that doesn’t happen so often since most people have alarm systems. And I don’t even have anything worth stealing!”

“You’ve got a television set, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“A VCR? A stereo?”

“No. Phil and I were at the shop so much that we don’t have anything but a TV and a clock radio. All our furniture’s old, and none of it’s valuable. We don’t have silver tea services or jewelry or fine art.”

The chief sent Patrolman Cherry off to find out if any of the neighbors had seen anything, and he showed us where the burglar got in, which turned out to be a dining room window. It was an old casement that locked with a latch. Someone had smashed out a pane with a rock, then reached inside and opened the window. He found fingerprints on the window, of course, but I began to have a feeling they were going to belong to Aunt Nettie and me.

As soon as the police allowed us into the house, Aunt Nettie called Handy Hans Home Repair Service to come and fix the window, and then we looked around. I began to think Aunt Nettie’s assessment of the situation was right—she and I apparently owned nothing that a burglar was interested in taking. At least I couldn’t see any big gaps among our possessions. Things just seemed to be all messed up.

The sheets and towels, which Aunt Nettie kept in a cedar chest at the foot of her bed, had been dumped out onto the floor, and clothes were tossed on the floor of her bedroom downstairs and of mine upstairs. The living room furniture was turned over, but when we put it back in place, nothing seemed to be irreparably damaged. The sofa cushions and the pads in the seats of the rocking chairs had not been ripped open, and the magazines hadn’t been shredded. The food stuffs were still in the kitchen cupboards. A couple of bottles of wine—Michigan wine, of course—were still on the shelf in the pantry.

“What about you, young lady?” the chief asked. “Your aunt said she doesn’t own any electronic gadgets or jewelry. I hate to quote gossip, but the talk around Warner Pier—among the people who knew you when you worked here before—was that you were married to a wealthy man. Do you have any good jewelry? Diamond watches? What’s missing?”

I really didn’t want to answer. It’s embarrassing to be twenty-eight years old and own nothing worth stealing.

“I don’t have anything like that. When I divorced Rich, I left everything behind,” I said. “I don’t own anything but my clothes and the old van.”

He frowned at me. “Nothing valuable?”

“Nothing.”

I tried to sound firm, the way I had when I argued with my lawyer. But the chief kept staring at me, and I began to feel that I had to give him some explanation.

“Look,” I said. “Money was in the middle of every argument Rich and I ever had. I was sick of it, so I refused a financial sentiment.”

Darn, tongue-tied again. “I mean settlement! I refused a financial settlement.”

Chief Jones looked unbelieving. “Didn’t you at least take the dishes and furniture?”

“I guess you had to be there,” I said.

That was all the explanation I could give anybody for what I did—leave a marriage after five years and wind up poorer than when I said, “I do.” But a complete explanation would be a novel, and I didn’t feel like writing one.

I called the shop to check on Tracy and Stacy. They were all agog over the emergency, but they said things were going okay. Aunt Nettie and I kept on straightening up. We still didn’t find anything gone. Then I heard Aunt Nettie give a gasp.

“What did you find?” the chief said.

“I did have a hundred dollars in my underwear drawer,” Aunt Nettie said. “Five twenties. They’re gone.”

Chief Jones duly noted the missing money.

“I guess the burglars were mad because they didn’t find anything else,” Aunt Nettie said. “Maybe that’s why they messed everything up.”

The chief shrugged.

“They could have messed things up a lot more,” I said. “A sack of flour and a dozen eggs on the kitchen floor would have kept us busy twice as long as it’s taken us to hang up all these clothes. Is this restraint typical of Warner Pier burglars and vandals?”

“I wouldn’t say so. Your aunt’s right when she says they usually hit the empty summer cottages and clean out the electronic gadgets and other stuff, things that are easy to pawn. Guns—they’ll take those. Sometimes they go for antiques. Of course, lots of people are like Mrs. TenHuis and keep a little money in the house, and if a burglar finds it, it’s gone.” He began to gather up his equipment. Aunt Nettie sat down on the couch and began to sort the magazines our burglar had tossed around.

The chief kept picking up, but he looked at me while he stowed things away. “You know, Ms. McKinney, there could be a connection to what happened at Clementine Ripley’s house.”

“You don’t really thing my autn or I had anything to do with that?”

“I can’t rule it out. Or maybe the burglar was looking for something you took away from there.”

“What was I going to take? A ladle from the kitchen? A glass from the bar? That house isn’t exactly full of stuff that would be easy to steal. There are no doodads on the tables, and the few paintings on the walls are too large to stick in my pocket.”

He grinned that Abe Lincoln grin. “I didn’t really figure that you stole anything.”

“The only things I handled belonged to Herrera Catering. Glasses, linens, sodas, and mixers. Booze. Lemons and limes. And I didn’t bring any of them away.”

“I sure do hate coincidences.”

“You mean the burglary? I agree completely. From my point of view it seems weird to be dealing with the police two days in a row. But coincidences do happen, Chief Jones.”

He nodded, but he still looked skeptical.

“Besides,” I said, “we still don’t know that Clementine Ripley’s death was anything but natural.”

“Well . . .” The chief seemed to speak reluctantly.

Suddenly I felt sure he knew something I didn’t want to hear. “What’s happened?”

“The Grand Rapids office of the state police is going to announce it at six. It seems Greg Glossop was right for once.”

“He was right?”

Chief Jones nodded. “Yep. After what he said, the state lab tested the candy for cyanide.”

“You don’t mean—!”

“Sorry to be the one to break the news. Cyanide had been injected into all the chocolates in the little box your aunt fixed. The cause of death won’t be official until the autopsy results are in, and that’ll take several days. But Clementine Ripley’s death is being investigated as a murder.”

All of a sudden the living room was again as topsy-turvy as it had been after the burglars left. I grabbed the back of one of Aunt Nettie’s antique rocking chairs to keep from turning upside down myself.

Then I looked at Aunt Nettie. Her face had crumpled like limp lettuce. “Oh, my stars,” she said. “
That’s
not going to be good for business.”

“It certainly isn’t,” I said.

But all in all Aunt Nettie took the news the way she takes everything—calmly.

“You aren’t surprised?”

“Maybe I don’t really understand it yet, Lee. At first it seemed impossible. But when a person everybody in the world had some reason to dislike—someone like Clementine Ripley—dies under such odd circumstances . . . Well, maybe it would seem stranger than ever if she’d died of natural causes.”

“Mr. Ainsley said he wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody shot her,” I said. “But poisoning is hard to believe. I was just sure she died of a stroke or something. This is awful.”

“It’s going to be bad for everybody,” Chief Jones said.

“And now I guess you’ll need those statements from both of us.”

“You’ll have to give statements, but I won’t be taking them. As soon as we got the report, I called in the state police.”

“Oh? Is that standard procedure?”

“It’s optional.” For the first time Chief Jones sounded short-tempered. “It seemed like the best idea. We’d have to use their lab anyway.”

His jaw clenched a couple of times before he went on. “They’re sending one of their best men—Detective Lieutenant Alec VanDam. He’ll have a team, of course, in a case this high profile. He’ll be in touch with you. And I guess I’ve done about as much as I can around here. Jerry may find a neighbor who saw something.”