The Chocolate Pirate Plot (2 page)

The huge red sun had just sizzled and sunk into the water over toward Wisconsin. The breeze was cool, but not chilly; sweatshirts were nice, but inside the cabin jackets weren't needed. The water was a deep silky gray, the sky had exactly the right number of puffy purple clouds edged in gold, and gentle waves rocked the boat, making me feel as relaxed as a bird dozing off in its nest.

I was taking a bite of an Amaretto truffle as the pirate came over the stern.

His head popped up first. It was wrapped in a bandana, buccaneer style, and sported a big, bushy beard and a gold earring.

I was looking straight at the head as it appeared, but I was so surprised that all I did was blink.

Pirates on Lake Michigan? In the twenty-first century? Who could blame me if I didn't believe my eyes?

Then the pirate somersaulted over the side and leaped to his feet on the deck.

I leaped to my feet, too, banging my head on the sedan's roof. I probably yelled something witty, like, “Who the heck is that?”

The pirate wore black knee britches and a black vest, open to show a hairy, muscular chest. A pirate pistol was jammed into his broad belt, and he was brandishing a cutlass. Add that to the beard, bandana, and earring—plus a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his biceps—and there was no question of what he represented.

The pirate waved his cutlass. He gave a loud yell, the traditional “Yo-ho-ho!”

My husband, Joe, and our friends Maggie and Ken McNutt were also on their feet as two more swimmers in pirate garb climbed over the stern.

The second pirate's outfit was almost identical to that of the first, except that over his bandana he had put on a funny hat with the brim flipped backward. He produced a whistle and began to play a rollicking sea chantey. Or I guess that's what it was.

The third pirate—a buccaneer queen whose vest had a plunging neckline that revealed her cleavage—began to dance, waving her arms in the air and weaving her feet into an intricate jig.

For the next two or three minutes the pirates went wild. The musician pranced, and the dancer danced. The first pirate waved his cutlass—by then I could see that it was plastic—in a series of fencing moves. He yelled in a hoarse voice, “Avast, me hearties!” and “Lift up the top sheet and spank her!” He clenched the cutlass in his teeth and did a handstand on the gunwale—the low railing along the side of the boat. Next he clambered onto the top of the cabin—we could hear his footsteps as he crossed over our heads—and dropped onto the bow. I peeked outside and saw that he was walking around on his hands, weaving among the horns, radio gear, and other paraphernalia the Coast Guard requires.

All this activity made the twenty-two-foot boat bob and buck. Joe, Ken, Maggie, and I each grabbed our coffee before it could spill. We held on to any parts of the boat we could reach as the dancing and acrobatics made it bounce around. The show was terrific—after our initial surprise we all started laughing—but I was afraid that the jumping around was going to knock one of the pirates overboard.

The buxom pirate queen didn't seem to share my fear. She linked arms with the piper, and then performed a do-si-do while he managed to continue playing.

Then the music stopped abruptly, and so did the dancing. The dancer and the musician gestured dramatically toward the front of the boat and the pirate who had boarded first.

“Yo-ho-ho!” His shout echoed over the water. He pulled the pistol from his belt and aimed it toward our group, right through the windshield.

I wasn't frightened. Despite their grotesque makeup and out-of-nowhere appearance, the pirates had done nothing but amaze and entertain us. I was wondering whether Ken or Joe had hired them as some sort of joke. Besides, the pistol was patently fake—an imitation firearm, a stage prop. I couldn't believe it would actually fire.

So the pointed pistol didn't make me faint. The pirate king simply couldn't be threatening us.

Then he pulled the trigger, and a flag popped out of the end of the gun. BANG! it said.

We all laughed hysterically. I guess we
were
hysterical.

Just as quickly as they had arrived, the pirates left. One by one they dived over the side of the boat, and Ken, Maggie, Joe, and I crowded out of the cabin and stood on the small open deck to look after them. All of us were laughing.

“Who were those masked men?” Ken said.

I hoisted my coffee cup. “Didn't you hire them, Ken?”

“Where would I find pirates to hire? Joe? Did you find a troupe of acrobatic pirates someplace?”

“Not me. Maggie? Are they from the Showboat Theater?”

“No!” Maggie, who teaches speech and drama at our local high school, was an actor and assistant director at our local repertory theater that summer. “At least I haven't heard anything about a pirate act.”

Joe was leaning over the side. “Where did they go?” I realized that none of the swimming pirates had come up again.

“I never heard of mermaids—or mermen—in Lake Michigan,” Maggie said. “And these pirates didn't have tails. So they must have a boat.”

We scanned the horizon. Ken and I exclaimed at the same moment, “There it is!”

Sure enough, around a hundred feet away, just outside the cove, was an inflatable boat, the kind Navy SEALs use. None of us had noticed it earlier, and I still don't know how the pirates got that close without attracting our attention. As we watched, bandanas popped up on the gently rolling surface of the lake. The pirates continued to swim, now with their heads above the water's surface. Within minutes all of them reached their boat, and one by one the pirate crew climbed into it. They waved to us. Their outboard motor roared, and they left, throwing up spray behind them. The backwash reached our boat, bouncing us up and down. The pirate boat headed north, parallel to the shore, and was soon out of sight.

Ken, Maggie, Joe, and I stared after them.

“That was the oddest experience I've ever had on Lake Michigan,” Joe said. “Or anyplace else.”

Ours was the first boat boarded in what came to be known as the Summer of the Warner Pier Pirates.

M
aggie, Ken, Joe, and I all assumed that the pirates were some sort of promotional stunt. Warner Pier—Michigan's quaintest summer resort—was already full of pirates that year. We weren't too surprised that a few more had turned up.

The pirate craze was Marco Spear's fault. That was the year of his first big hit movie,
Young Blackbeard.
The film had everything: comedy, romance, a beautiful Caribbean setting, a cast of thousands, gorgeous costumes and sets—plus
action! action! action!
It also had a handsome and charismatic lead actor who did his own stunts.

America's teenagers gathered in gangs outside movie theaters and chanted his name. “Marco! Marco! Marco!”

My stepsister, Brenda McKinney, was working at TenHuis Chocolade again that summer, and she admitted that she'd seen
Young Blackbeard
twice. And she was nineteen and a sophomore in college, a little old for the fad. Marcia Herrera, the niece Joe and I had acquired when his mom remarried the previous spring, had just turned thirteen, so she was exactly the right age for the Marco craze. She had a half dozen Marco photos taped up inside her Warner Pier Middle School locker, she told me, and she and her friends had each seen
Young Blackbeard
at least five times. She brought me a magazine showing pictures of Marco Spear from infancy to age twenty-two. It had ragged edges because of the number of times it had been read.

Some of the pictures showed Marco in his
Young Blackbeard
getup of tight knee britches and open vest with three days' stubble on his chin. Other pictures showed him in his pre–movie star life as an Olympic gymnastics champion. For those pictures he wore a tight, sleeveless shirt and those stirrup pants male gymnasts wear for competition. At thirty-one, I was too old for the Marco epidemic, but I was young enough to notice that he looked great in either outfit. Of course, the critics claimed he couldn't act nearly as well as he could swashbuckle, but America's girls didn't seem to care.

Marco Spear was clean-cut enough to please the mothers, athletic enough to impress the guys, and sexy enough to attract the girls. That and a major publicity campaign had put him at the pinnacle of celebrity. The guy couldn't move without falling over a member of the paparazzi. The world received daily updates on Marco's life, whether it wanted them or not.

Because of the topic of his first movie as the leading man, Marco had made pirates celebrities, too. The whole country was wearing eye patches and growling, “Arrr.”

Naturally, Warner Pier had gotten on board for the fad. Our chamber of commerce had picked “Warner Pier: A Lake Michigan Treasure” as the slogan for the summer and had selected a logo featuring a buccaneer waving a cutlass and hoisting a treasure chest on his shoulder. Teenagers costumed as pirates roamed our picturesque downtown, handing out golden coins and treasure maps to tourists. A weekly Treasure Hunt sale offered special bargains to shoppers. The climactic production of our summer repertory theater was to be
The Pirates of Penzance,
with Maggie McNutt in the role of Ruth, the pirates' maid.

Even my aunt, Nettie TenHuis Jones, president and chief chocolatier of TenHuis Chocolade, was involved. Our featured items for the summer were pirate treasure chests—four-inch, six-inch, and eight-inch—filled with chocolate coins and jewels covered with shiny gold or silver foil. A giant pirate ship made of chocolate was the centerpiece of our show window. The Jolly Roger that flew from its mast was made of dark chocolate, with the skull and crossbones painted on the banner with white chocolate. The sails were white chocolate, and the decks milk chocolate. It was a work of art—but just for looking, not for eating. Aunt Nettie would kill anybody if they took a bite.

Pirates were everywhere in Warner Pier. So when Joe's meticulously restored wooden boat was boarded by pirates in Lake Michigan—and those pirates did nothing but entertain us—we thought it was yet another commercial promotion.

I'm half Texan, half Michigan Dutch. I had always lived in Texas until I came to Warner Pier three years ago. I came because I needed a new start after ditching my first husband, the one I should never have married to begin with, and because my aunt needed a business manager for her chocolate company.

Warner Pier was my mother's hometown. I'd worked for Aunt Nettie when I was a teenager, so I wasn't a complete stranger, and in the past three years I'd grown to love the place. I also grew to love the chocolate business. And I fell madly in love with a guy named Joe Woodyard.

Joe is a Warner Pier native who first gained local fame at seventeen, when he won top state honors in high school wrestling and high school debate the same year. When I first saw Joe, he was in college and working as a lifeguard at Warner Pier Beach, and I was one of the girls who stood around on the sand admiring his shoulders. We moved in different circles then, and our circles didn't overlap until ten years later.

Joe graduated from the University of Michigan, went to law school, practiced poverty law, and—like me—made a really dumb first marriage, to a nationally known defense attorney. When the marriage ended, he was so disgusted that he quit practicing law. He opted to become “an honest craftsman,” or so he told me when we got acquainted. He bought a small business, Vintage Boats, and began restoring antique powerboats.

I admire Joe's brains, character, and abilities, but I'll admit I was initially attracted to him because I think he's the best-looking guy in west Michigan. Black hair, bright blue eyes, and terrific shoulders. Mmm, mmm. Besides, he's six feet two, and since I'm just a shade under six feet myself—well, it's nice to be with a guy I don't look down on.

By the time the pirates boarded our boat on the evening of the summer solstice, we'd been married for fifteen months and Joe was edging back into practicing law. He had first held a one-day-a-week job as Warner Pier's city attorney. Then, when his mother married the mayor—it's a long story—he quit his city job to avoid any appearance of nepotism, and he joined a legal aid–type organization in Holland, thirty miles north of us. That summer he was commuting up there two or three days a week.

But Joe loves those antique powerboats. To Joe, our picnic on the water in the 1948 Shepherd with Maggie and Ken had been an ideal evening.

Maggie and Ken are what used to be called “a teaching couple.” Both are on the faculty of Warner Pier High School, and both are good at what they do. Ken's math students bring home all sorts of honors, and Maggie's pupils routinely win state speech and drama awards. The kids are terribly impressed by Maggie—she “worked in Hollywood,” they whisper. And it's true that Maggie made a few movies, but if anyone brings up that part of her life, she changes the subject.