The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (2 page)

Not that he looked dead.

In fact, he was lively-looking, tall and thin, with dark hair shot with gray. He was nicely dressed
in khakis and a blue polo shirt. Only the scar on his cheek kept him from looking distinguished. Instead it made him look rakish—like a James Bond wannabe who might be a good guy to have on your side in a bar fight. And he was smiling widely enough to display canine teeth, which gave him a wolfish look.

A blue Ford pickup truck was parked behind him in our sandy lane. It was pointed toward Lake
Shore Drive, which showed he’d come around from Eighty-eighth Street, driving into our semirural neighborhood by the back road and coming past our neighbors’ house. Despite this hint that he knew the territory, the man had proved he was a stranger by coming to the front door; all our friends and relations come in through the kitchen.

He showed up about eleven o’clock on a miserably hot Monday
in the second week of July. I wasn’t at all happy to hear a knock. For once our five houseguests were all occupied elsewhere at the same time, and I wasn’t due at TenHuis Chocolade—where a major chocolate crisis was under way—until one. I had been enjoying having a moment alone.

I peeked through the screen door cautiously. We rarely get salesmen, but I didn’t know of anyone else who might come
by without phoning ahead. “Yes?”

The man’s grin seemed familiar, though I was sure I didn’t know him. “Hi. Are you Mrs. Woodyard? Mrs. Joe Woodyard?”

“Yes,” I answered confidently, though I’d had that title for less than three months.

“I don’t suppose your husband is home.”

“I expect him shortly.” By that I meant in an hour, but I wasn’t going to tell a stranger too much.

“Oh? Should I wait?
Or I can come back.”

“His schedule is indelicate.” Yikes! I’d twisted my tongue in a knot. As usual. “I mean indefinite!” I said. “His schedule is indefinite. Can I give him a message?”

“Well . . .” The stranger sighed deeply, then smiled again, showing those wolfish eyeteeth. “I guess you could tell him his father came by,” he said.

I remember staring at him for at least thirty seconds before
I answered.

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

Then I slammed the door. The real, solid door, not the screen door. And I turned the dead bolt above the handle.

I moved away from the door, but the man on the porch was still clearly visible through the window. I knew he could see me too, if he glanced inside. I didn’t like that idea, so I went around the fireplace and stood at the bottom of the stairs.
This seemed more subtle than slamming our antique casement windows shut and yanking the curtains closed.

Now the stranger couldn’t see me lurking behind the fireplace, but I couldn’t see him either. And I found that I wanted to keep an eye on him. Where could I hide and watch him?

Hide? Why did I have the impulse to hide? The idea was absurd. Why should the idea of someone claiming to be Joe’s
father make me look for a closet to duck into?

So I moved out into the living room. I didn’t hide, but I did stay near the fireplace, away from the windows, where a person walking casually through the yard wouldn’t be able to easily see me. If the man looked in through a window, I decided, I’d call the police.

Of course, if he wanted to get into the house, I had no way of stopping him short
of hitting him with the fireplace poker. I had locked the front door, but our house—built in 1904—has no air-conditioning. With the temperature and the humidity both in the nineties, all the windows and doors were open. I might lock the front door, but an intruder could come in any other door or any window without trouble.

The man didn’t look into the house. I heard his footsteps leaving the
porch, and I heard the door of the pickup open. He was going away. I wondered what Joe would make of the visit when I told him about it.

He might know who the man was, I realized. He might even want to contact the guy.

I grabbed a pen and a piece of junk mail that happened to be lying on the coffee table, rushed to the front door, unlocked it, and ran outside. The truck was just pulling away,
and I waved the man down. He opened the right-hand window and leaned across the truck’s seat.

I tried to keep my voice noncommittal. “Can you leave a phone number?”

A faint smile crossed the man’s face. Again, he seemed familiar, and suddenly I knew why. That grin—the corners of his mouth went up just like Joe’s. And his eyes were the same bright blue.

I caught my breath, but I didn’t speak.

The stranger put the truck in gear. “I’m not sure where I’ll be,” he said. “I’ll call later.”

He drove away, and I stood there gaping after him.

He simply could not be Joe’s dad.

Only a few weeks earlier, I had laid a wreath of plastic carnations on Andrew Joseph Woodyard’s grave. Joe’s dad had been dead for nearly thirty years.

A
s soon as the truck had turned onto Lake Shore Drive, I dashed for the phone to call Joe. But my plan followed the pattern our whole summer was taking—it didn’t work out. The line at Joe’s boat shop was busy on my
first try, and before I could hit redial, three of our houseguests showed up.

First the white pickup with the camper pulled in and parked beside the garage. Darrell Davis got out, studiously ignoring me as I waved at him through the kitchen window. He walked around to the back of the truck, shoulders slumped in his usual sullen posture, and climbed into the camper. At least Darrell had his own
bed. He didn’t sleep in the house, and he had a portable potty. He dumped the potty and showered at the boat shop, although he ate with us. So he wasn’t exactly a houseguest. A yard guest, I suppose. He got power for his lamp and his fan from our garage.

Darrell was Joe’s guest, if we had to choose sides. Joe had dropped out of the full-time practice of law five years earlier to restore antique
motorboats and work part-time as Warner Pier City Attorney. But for several years just after law school, he’d been with a Legal Aid–type agency in Detroit. Darrell, back when he was eighteen, had been one of Joe’s clients. He’d been accused of a home invasion—one that resulted in the death of a notorious drug dealer. Joe had been convinced Darrell was innocent of the killing, but Darrell had been
convicted anyway. He’d gone to prison. Joe and some of his investigator pals had hung in there, and five years later another guy had confessed to the crime. Darrell was released without a stain on his character. Unless you count the trauma of five years in prison.

Joe had heard that Darrell had completed a carpentry course but couldn’t get a job. The next thing I knew, Darrell had been hired
for the summer to help Joe with a remodeling project at our house and to be an extra pair of hands at the boat shop. I’d also come up with some work we needed for TenHuis Chocolade, installing shelves in a storeroom, and Darrell had promised to work that in. Joe couldn’t afford to pay Darrell much, so meals and a parking place for his camper were part of the deal.

Did I trust Joe’s belief in
Darrell? Yes. Did I like having a guy who had spent five years behind bars living in my backyard? No.

The five-year-old Ford driven by Brenda, my stepsister, pulled in and parked in the drive. Her passenger was Tracy Roderick, who had morphed into a houseguest a few days earlier. Both of them were working the retail counter at TenHuis Chocolade that summer, and Brenda was staying with us. Tracy
was a guest for the rest of July, while her parents drove across Canada.

The two girls got out of the car carrying shopping bags, their eighteen-year-old jaws spewing conversation.

When I’d first met Tracy, she’d barely turned sixteen, and she was mainly identified by stringy, dirty blond hair. But during the past two years Tracy had grown up. She was much more poised, and she had developed
a nice figure. A good haircut and a few highlights had made her hair a shiny, tawny blond. If Tracy had a character flaw, it was one that most of us have: She loved to gossip. But all in all, she had become an attractive and responsible young woman.

I was counting on that responsibility to rein in Brenda. I’d been seventeen when I acquired a stepmother and a five-year-old stepsister. Now, thirteen
years later, Brenda and I had never lived in the same household for more than three months, so we barely knew each other. We’d never had any opportunity—or any particular reason—to become more than acquaintances.

But Brenda, along with my dad and her mom, had come to Warner Pier when Joe and I got married three months earlier, and Brenda guarded the guest book at the reception. Tracy was serving
cake, so the two of them met, and Tracy introduced Brenda to the college-age crowd of Warner Pier. The first result was a long-distance romance for Brenda with a guy named Will VanKlompen. The second result was Brenda’s application for a summer job at TenHuis Chocolade. It’s hard to turn your stepsister down. Brenda would be staying with us until mid-August.

Although Brenda used my maiden name,
McKinney, no one would take us for sisters. Brenda was around five-four—not a nearly six-foot giraffe like me. And she had dark hair and eyes and a smooth olive complexion, again contrasting with the blond hair I owe to the TenHuis genes my mother passed on and the greenish hazel eyes I got from the Texas side of my family. Her figure was curvy and cute, and she had dimples. I could see why a guy
like Will, who had grown up taking west Michigan’s tall Dutch blondes for granted, would be bowled over by her.

Both Brenda and Tracy were wearing tank tops over shorts tight enough to show off their fannies.

“Hi, Lee,” Brenda said. “I found a really cute bathing suit.”

“Yeah,” Tracy said. “Now if it’ll just stay warm enough to wear it.”

Brenda laughed. “It’s sure hot enough today! I can’t
believe y’all don’t have air-conditioning up here. And the ones who have it run it with the windows open!”

“In Michigan we don’t need air-conditioning all that often,” Tracy said. “At least, that’s what my mom says.”

“That’s what Aunt Nettie says, too,” I said. “Per-sonally, I think you should have air-conditioning even if you need it only an hour a year. But the picturesque casement windows
in this house make it complicated to install window units, and Joe says we need a second bathroom more than we need central air. Maybe next year we’ll get it. Until then we’ll all swelter together.”

“Oh, the heat will break soon,” Tracy said. “It never lasts very long.” She sounded more confident than I felt. We were moving into our fifth day of miserable heat and humidity, and the TV weather
forecast wasn’t hopeful.

The girls went upstairs, still chattering, and I reached for the phone again. Then I heard a timid knock at the screen door.

“Mrs. Woodyard?” Darrell always spoke softly. I could barely hear him.

I opened the door. “Hi, Darrell,” I said, maybe acting a little friendlier than I felt. “And please call me Lee.”

Darrell ducked his head. He was tall, but managed to bend
his spine into a shape that took six inches off his height. He pulled the ball cap off his wispy, light brown hair. The effect was that he was bowing and touching his forelock, like the undergardener in a British period novel.

When he spoke again, his voice was still soft. “Sure, Lee. Joe said to tell you he won’t get home for lunch. Some guy showed up with a fancy boat he wants restored. He
asked Joe to go eat with him.”

“Oh.” That meant I’d have to wait to talk to Joe about the stranger who’d claimed to be his dad. “It’s a little early for lunch, Darrell, but are you ready for a sandwich?”

“I don’t want to bother you, Mrs. Woodyard.”

“That was the deal. You help Joe, and we feed you. So if you’re hungry, come on in. Or you can wait until straight-up noon. You’re not getting anything
fancy either time.”

“Now’s fine,” Darrell said. “I can wait in the camper.”

“Aw, come on in and talk to me. How’d your morning go?”

“Okay.” Darrell sidled into the house and stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. “Joe taught me to operate his paint sprayer.”

“Now that you can do that, you’ll get stuck with a lot of spraying,” I said. “That’s not Joe’s favorite job.”
I got a stack of paper plates, a handful of paper napkins, and a bag of potato chips from the back hall, which we use as a pantry. Darrell moved to let me into the dining room, and I put them on the table, which we keep covered with washable vinyl.

“Would you mind opening these chips, Darrell? I think we can just eat them out of the sack. I told you lunch wasn’t going to be fancy.”

Darrell expertly
pulled the top of the chip bag apart.

Before I could turn back to the kitchen, I heard Brenda tripping downstairs. Literally. She couldn’t seem to get the hang of the narrow turn at the landing, but so far she hadn’t fallen all the way down.

There were a couple of soft thuds as she caught herself, then rapid thuds as she ran on downstairs. There was a loud thump as she reached the living room,
right around the corner from where Darrell and I were standing in the dining room. Before I could say anything, Brenda spoke.