The Chocolate Mouse Trap (26 page)

“But I didn’t see anything.”

“You said there was a car—you called it ‘a bugeyed car’—in Julie’s parking lot, right? You said you stumbled and fell into it.”

“Yes, but—Lee, you know me. Unless the car was some odd color, I wouldn’t know it again.”

“But you also said it was parked backward.”

“Right. It had been backed into its slot.”

“It only just now occurred to me, but Brad parked his car backward in the shed out beside his house. And he drove a Prius, which is a rather unusual car. If he was inside Julie’s apartment . . . if he looked out and saw you stumble and fall into his car . . . he’d find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t remember it. And maybe you would have, eventually.”

Warner Pier and Michigan State police were gathering, and Joe got permission for us to leave. The Neon and Joe’s pickup had to stay there for the moment, so Aunt Nettie came to get us. It was at her house that the others read the message from Brad to Julie, the message I’d read in the car, the message I believed had caused her death.

It was far at the bottom of the long list of e-mails I had printed out and given to Aunt Nettie. I hadn’t read it until that afternoon, and I’m sure none of the other members of the Seventh Major Food Group had read it either.

“Julie,” it read. “Last night Uncle Martin admitted to me that he intends to develop the Warner Pier property as a resort. I could kill him! That land absolutely must be saved! The only hope is to give it to the Lake Michigan Conservation Society.”

Brad and Julie had exchanged several other messages on the topic. Julie had tried to calm Brad down. But he had been adamant. “A louse who would treat the lake this way isn’t even fit to live,” Brad had written. “And Grandmother won’t DO ANYTHING.” He had put the words in all caps, the e-mail equivalent of shouting.

Julie, bless her heart, had replied with some stupid poem about good coming out of evil. She had later forwarded the same poem to the Seventh Food Group, with Brad’s irate messages trailing along at the end.

Hogan Jones, who’d been informed about Brad’s crash on his way back from Lansing, came by the house as soon as he could. Hogan read the printout and shook his head. “Sounds like Martin might have been meant to be the real victim. Brad obviously killed Julie, but I doubt it was premeditated. Julie just got in the way, sent this message on. He probably got mad about that and hit her.”

“She was such a little thing,” I said.

Hogan nodded solemnly. “Yes, Brad probably panicked when he discovered he’d killed her. And then Carolyn Rose, Lindy, and Lee stumbled into the mess.”

It was right at that moment that a car pulled into Aunt Nettie’s drive. It crawled up to the house, paused, then inched into the parking area behind the house.

“Who can that be?” Aunt Nettie said.

“More cops?” I looked out the window. “Oh, golly! It’s a big white Cadillac, and I think Rachel Schrader is in it!”

I was already feeling sorry for Mrs. Schrader, and as I watched Martin help her out of the car, I felt terrible. We all ran out to greet them, of course. We were all talking at once, offering to help with the wheelchair, to carry Mrs. Schrader, to do anything she needed done.

But she waved us aside. “I can walk as far as Mrs. TenHuis’s door,” she said. “It’s only vanity that makes me use the chair.”

She crept down the walk, leaning on Martin’s arm, and I saw what she meant. Her limp was pronounced and unattractive. But she made it into the house. There she sank into a rocking chair and turned to me and Lindy.

“I’ve come to ask you young women to forgive me. To forgive Martin. If we’d acted on our suspicions you wouldn’t have had this terrible experience.”

I didn’t know what to say, but Aunt Nettie saved the day. “Oh, Mrs. Schrader,” she said. “It must have been awful to suspect your own grandson. No one can blame you for believing in him as long as you could.”

Martin sank into a chair, his face gray. “Brad has nearly driven Mother crazy, ever since his parents died.” He looked up at Hogan. “I guess you found out about the trouble he got into over hacking.”

Hogan nodded, but I was mystified. “I thought Brad never touched computers,” I said. I held up the computer printout. “I was surprised when I saw these messages to Julie.”

Martin looked at his feet. “Brad was forbidden to touch a computer as part of his plea agreement,” he said. “He was involved in the Ecoterror case. It took a lot of lawyers, but in the end the prosecutors couldn’t prove that he’d actually been one of the hackers Ecoterror used, and he agreed to a plea bargain that avoided jail time. We had a hard time finding him a job that didn’t involve computers. That’s how he wound up in public relations. He only had to use a computer as—well, a typewriter. And he could be imaginative. He came up with the design for that new white pen.

“Mother and I have been frantic since Julie died. We knew Brad had a bad record, but we couldn’t figure out any reason he would have killed Julie! He was closer to her than he was to anybody else. I kept telling myself I must be wrong, that Julie must have been killed by a burglar. Or a stalker.”

He turned to me. “That’s why I quizzed you, Lee. I hoped Julie had mentioned some threat. An odd phone call. Something.”

Mrs. Schrader spoke. “And I had much the same idea, Lee. When I heard that your e-mail group had been hit by a computer virus of course I suspected Brad. But I couldn’t understand why he would do such a thing. If he’d been caught, it would have meant prison.”

I didn’t say anything. Brad had gone far beyond sending a computer virus to the Seventh Food Group. He’d burglarized House of Roses, he’d knocked Lindy out and stolen her laptop, and apparently he’d even managed to get into my computer while he was waiting in my office.

Martin went on. “I kept hoping that Brad wasn’t involved until today, when I took a look at the old Jeep. Brad had put it back up on blocks, but a look under the hood convinced me he’d juiced it up so that it would run. I headed back to Grand Rapids to talk to Mother. I thought we could get a lawyer, then convince Brad he had to give himself up. But I was too late. Brad made one more attempt at getting you and Mrs. Herrera out of the way. Thank God you escaped!”

“Thank God Joe listened to his answering machine,” I said.

“Thank God Lee was suspicious about the e-mail from Mrs. Schrader,” Lindy said.

“But I called to check on that,” I said. “Brad must have answered the phone imitating Ms. VanTil’s voice. He fooled me completely.”

“I’m sorry to say that the young people have made fun of poor Hilda’s odd voice for years,” Mrs. Schrader said. “Brad was particularly good at imitating her, because his own voice had a rather whiny sound.”

Until then Mrs. Schrader had displayed an iron control, but now tears began to fill her eyes. “I’ll always blame myself. I didn’t get along with Brad’s father. As a result, I didn’t see much of either Brad or my son while Brad was small. I didn’t realize what an unstable person Brad’s mother was. I didn’t step in when Brad was young; I did nothing to help a bad situation.”

“Mother! Anything you had suggested would only have been seen as interference!” Martin shook his head. “Without his parents’ cooperation, I don’t think anyone could have helped Brad.”

“I could have done more after they died, Martin. When Brad moved back here, I shouldn’t have let him move out to the cabin. He was alone too much. He sulked and felt sorry for himself. And he got back into computers, despite agreeing not to do that. We should have done something to take him out of himself. I failed him.”

“Julie tried to help him,” Martin said. That comment seemed to end the discussion.

Brad’s house was searched that night, of course, and we found out later that the final evidence turned up there. Julie’s Macintosh computer and Lindy’s laptop were hidden in a closet, along with a laptop that Brad apparently owned himself. Brad, of course, had never kept his agreement not to touch a computer.

Since Julie died, he’d been hooking into all the Seventh Food Group e-mails. Stupidly, none of us had taken Julie’s address off the master list, so anything we sent to each other had gone to her address as well. And like most of us Julie kept her e-mail access code stored in her computer, so getting into her messages was no problem.

Brad had used Julie’s e-mail when he pretended to be his grandmother and enticed Lindy and me out to the Schrader estate. If I hadn’t disobeyed instructions and left a message for Joe, telling him where we were going, Brad might have trapped us. Joe had saved our lives.

No one understood exactly how Carolyn Rose got into the deal, but her phone record did show a call to the Schrader house in Warner Pier. As Joe and I pieced it together, she must have realized that someone from Schrader Labs had dropped the white ballpoint in her shop, and that—because she found the pen near the window the burglar had used—that someone had been involved in the break-in. She must have called Martin at Schrader Labs to tell him about it. Was she hoping to reestablish her connection with Martin? Maybe.

Carolyn left a message with Martin’s secretary, but she then called the Schrader house at Warner Pier. Brad must have answered the phone. Carolyn would have had no idea that the white pens were a new item that only a few people had access to, so she probably mentioned the pen. Whatever she said to Brad, it caused him to come to her shop and kill her.

But Brad wasn’t entirely cruel, I guess. The searchers also found a cage of pet mice in his house. There was a brown one, which Martin Schrader identified as Brad’s. But there was also a white one which Martin identified as the mouse taken from Julie’s apartment. All we could figure was that Brad hadn’t wanted to leave it there unfed. That was the best we could discover to say about Brad.

One of the things that really mystified me was, why had Julie been afraid of Jason? It took me a day to realize that she hadn’t been afraid of him at all. Brad had merely claimed she was, possibly trying to keep the police interested in Jason. He lied.

That night I felt truly sorry for both Martin and Rachel Schrader. I took a little comfort from seeing the tender way Martin handed his mother into her car. Now that she had only Martin to turn to, maybe they could comfort each other.

The Schraders had barely left when another car came up Aunt Nettie’s drive. It was a compact car, not a law enforcement vehicle.

“Who can that be?” Aunt Nettie said.

The compact pulled around the house and stopped. A short, round guy—wearing a down jacket that made him look even shorter and rounder—got out.

Aunt Nettie gasped and ran out the back door. “Bobby! We’ve had so much excitement I nearly forgot you were coming!”

Bob came in rather nervously, as if uncertain of his welcome, but when he saw that Aunt Nettie was really glad to see him, he agreed to stay overnight, rather than driving three or four hours back to the Detroit area in the dark.

Bobby turned out to be well-scrubbed, with the square Dutch face so typical of Michigan. Once out of his down jacket, he wasn’t as round or short as he’d looked getting out of his car. He was just a couple of inches shorter than I am.

Of course, he had to be introduced to Joe and to hear all about our excitement, so it was after ten o’clock and we were all eating pizza before he and Aunt Nettie began to talk about his job prospects.

“Did you bring us a résumé?” Aunt Nettie asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Bob said. “I appreciate your asking for one, but I’d really rather stay in the Detroit area.”

I admit that I felt a weight lift from my shoulders.

Bob grinned in a way that looked a little like Aunt Nettie. “See, my girlfriend has another year in college. So, even if I don’t find a real good job right away, I want to stay over there for now. I think maybe my girl—Lisa—is one reason Mom is pushing me to ask you for a job. She likes Lisa okay, but she thinks we’re too young to settle down.”

“Mothers are like that,” Aunt Nettie said. “And she’s got a point. You don’t want to make lifetime commitments too early.”

Bob nodded. “Oh, we’re not rushing into anything. Besides—well, I’ve always worked in food service. I’d like to try something else, if I can.”

Aunt Nettie smiled. “That makes sense, Bobby.”

“Plus, I’m not sure I want to get involved with family—I mean in a business way. I want to—you know—prove I don’t need to get any special treatment from relatives. Prove that I can make it in the real world.”

Aunt Nettie looked at me. “Is TenHuis Chocolade part of the real world, Lee?”

I laughed. “It is during the weeks before Valentine’s Day. The chocolate business doesn’t get any more real than that. But Bob has a good point. Chocolate is a very specialized business. I can understand his wanting more general experience in a first job out of college.”

Bob looked apologetic. “It’s not that family isn’t important, Aunt Nettie. It’s just that I don’t want to be too tied up with family. Unless it’s with Lisa.”

I thought about what Bob had said as I finished my pizza. Bob didn’t want to be “too tied up” with family, except with his girlfriend, whom he obviously saw as his future wife.

I felt the same way about Joe. When I thought of family, he was the most important person who came to mind.

But there was more to it than that. Look at the Schraders. Mrs. Schrader hadn’t gotten along with Brad’s father. So she’d seen very little of Brad while he was growing up. Now she blamed herself for not making more of an effort to help him.

Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. On the other hand, fifteen years earlier Aunt Nettie had taken in a difficult teenaged niece for the summer. Her kindness had laid the basis for a lifelong friendship between us. Plus, the example of a good marriage I’d seen as I lived in the same house with her and Uncle Phil—well, it had sure given me a better pattern than the one I’d gotten from my parents.