The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (21 page)

Just as I got to Lake Shore Drive, the lights of a car appeared to my right, coming toward me. Brenda and Tracy should be coming from the left. I was already panicky, and that car raised my panic to red-flag levels. Who was it? By now the bad guys must know I’d escaped from the house. They might be
cruising the neighborhood looking for me.

I jumped behind a bush. I did not want to take a chance on any strangers at that point. No, I’d lie low until the car was past, and I could run across and hide in the undergrowth beside our drive, ready to jump out and wave Brenda’s car down.

To my horror the car slowed, and I realized it was turning into our drive. Then I heard the music coming from
the vehicle. There could only be one car in western Michigan that played country music every moment the motor was running. I might not be able to see the color, but I knew that was Brenda’s car.

I plunged across the road and into the headlights, waving. Brenda’s brakes screeched. Luckily she was able to stop.

I ran up to the passenger’s side and grabbed the door handle. “Quick! Let me in! Get
out of here!” I yanked the door open and fell in, right across Tracy’s lap.

The next few moments disintegrated even further into farce.

Tracy and Brenda were yelling.

“Lee!”

“What’s going on?”

I was yelling: “Back up and turn left!”

And we were all doing our yelling over the sound of some country singer wailing about drinkin’, chea-tin’, and his mama.

I was sure everybody within a mile
could hear us, but I didn’t care. All I could think was that I wanted those girls out of there before the bad guys—the ones who had had guns when they invaded the Garretts’ house—found them.

When I gasped out an explanation, of course, Brenda and Tracy—with the solid judgment of college-age youths—wanted to go up to the house. I thought I would have to throw myself in front of the car to stop
them. It seemed like an hour before I convinced Brenda she should back up far enough to turn into the Double Diamond drive.

When we pulled up in front of the Double Diamond cottage, Alex Gold was standing on the porch.

“I was going to come after you,” he said. “The nine-one-one operator still wants to talk to you.”

I ran into the house and grabbed the phone.

“I’m sorry.” I was gasping. “I
realized that two tremendous—I mean, teenage! Two teenage girls were going to go up to the house any minute. I had to stop them.”

“Don’t leave again,” the dispatcher said. “I have a unit headed for your address. How many intruders are there?”

I stood there, trying to give coherent answers. I was glad to see that Tracy and Brenda had followed me in. They were introducing themselves to Alex. I
turned my back and tried to concentrate on the 911 operator’s questions.

“I’m afraid they’ll be gone by the time the patrol unit can get here,” I said.

“What kind of vehicle were they driving?”

“I didn’t see . . .” I gasped again. “I’ll bet it was a blue Ford pickup. That’s what they had this afternoon. And that’s what the dead man was driving.”

“Dead man? There’s a dead man?”

“No! No! I
mean the man who was found in the lake yesterday. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

The 911 operator was growing more and more confused, and she must have been ready to yell at me, but she kept her temper. She kept asking me questions, but my answers were getting more and more nonsensical. “Ask Underwood!” I said. “He knows who I am and how I fit in.”

“Who’s Underwood?”

I realized that I was talking
to someone in the sheriff’s office thirty miles away. She might well be unaware that Detective Underwood of the Michigan State Police was involved in an investigation at Warner Pier. The situation was way out of control.

At that point Alex tapped me on the shoulder. “I can see the lights of the police car,” he said. “They’re here.”

“The police are here,” I said. “I’m handicapped. I mean, hanging!
I’m hanging up.”

I slammed the receiver down and followed Alex out onto the porch. As I closed the screen door behind me, I realized he was alone out there. Brenda and Tracy weren’t with him. I’d barely grasped that when Brenda’s car started down the driveway.

“Where are the girls going?” I’m afraid I screamed the question.

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “When you said something about a blue pickup,
they looked at each other and rushed out the door.”

I
made a weak effort at running after Brenda’s car, but I knew it was useless. After about thirty steps I stood stock-still in the Double Diamond drive, shaking my fists at the sky.

“So help me, God! If Brenda’s
still alive at midnight, I’m going to send her back to Texas, and then I’m going to fire Tracy’s behind! I don’t care if I have to personally watch the counter every hour we’re open for the rest of the summer!”

Brenda’s car turned south on Lake Shore Drive, just before a second patrol car went skidding into our drive. Neither car had used its siren, so I gathered some attempt was being made to
catch the intruders in the act. But I doubted that they were still there.

The girls hadn’t gone to the house. But where had they gone?

I went into the Garrett cottage and used the phone to call 911 again. I told the dispatcher that Brenda and Tracy had taken off and that I had no idea why, but I was afraid they were looking for the bad guys. I described both of them and pointed out that Brenda’s
car had Texas plates. The dispatcher didn’t sound too excited, and maybe there was no reason to get excited. Knowing Brenda and Tracy, they might have simply gone off because one of them realized she was out of nail polish.

Then I called Joe on his cell phone. He answered on the second ring. I could hear Italian music, so I gathered that he, Pete, and Darrell had gone to the Dock Street Pizza
Place. I guess I made sense when I tried to tell him what had happened. Anyway, he told me to stay at Double Diamond, and he’d be there in a few minutes.

Then I fell into one of the Double Diamond chairs, kicked off the flip-flops I’d borrowed, and rubbed my feet. “Uncle Alex—I mean, Mr. Gold! I’m sorry to have involved you in all this.”

“Don’t apologize! It sounds as if you got involved because
you were a witness to the robbery over here.”

“Maybe.” I held up a flip-flop. “Anyway, thanks for lending me your beach shoes.”

Alex looked at the sandals as if he’d never seen them before. “Those aren’t mine,” he said.

I looked at his tiny little foot, which was at least three inches shorter than mine. “I guess they belong to Dick then. If you don’t mind, I’ll keep them on until I get home.”

He frowned for a moment. Then his face cleared. “You’re welcome to them. You’d better wait here. Let the police handle things at your house. I’m sure they’ll be over to talk to you in a few minutes.”

He was right. Very shortly Warner Pier patrolman Jerry Cherry parked his patrol car outside and came to the door. Jerry’s boss, of course, was my aunt’s new husband, Hogan Jones. I’d known Jerry
ever since I moved to Warner Pier, and I was glad he’d been the law officer detailed to babysit me.

No one had been found in our house, Jerry said.

“I wasn’t imitating—I mean, imagining! I didn’t imagine those two,” I said.

“Oh, no. There are some signs of intruders. The other guys are checking for footprints and such, so you need to stay here until they’re through.”

“Is someone looking for
the girls?”

“Oh, yeah. Detective Underwood got involved, and he sent a state police car south on Lake Shore Drive. And now, do you want to tell me just what happened?” Jerry smiled. “I know you told the dispatcher, but you’ll have to tell it several more times.”

Joe and Darrell came in while I was talking to Jerry. After Joe and I had held each other awhile, Joe said he’d walk over toward our
house and see if he could find anything out. My impulse was to dig both hands into his shirt and pull hard to keep him from going, but I restrained myself. He instructed Darrell to stay at Double Diamond with me. Pete hadn’t come in with them.

Shortly after Joe left, the girls came back. They’d gone about five miles south on Lake Shore Drive before a Michigan State Police trooper had pulled them
over and ordered them to return to the scene.

I was still angry with them. “Why on earth did y’all take off?”

Tracy answered. “You said the guys might be driving a blue Ford pickup, and one had come flying out of Eighty-eighth Street as we came by. We thought we might see where it had gone.”

“Of all the dumb—”

“Oh, Lee! We weren’t going to stop it or anything. We just thought we might see
where it turned off.”

I bawled them out good and proper, but they didn’t look contrite. “Well,” Tracy said, “we didn’t find it anyway. So I guess it was a waste of gasoline.”

Joe came back in. “I almost got cornered by Harold and Alice,” he said. “I told him you needed me here.”

“I do.”

“I guess Pete’s around somewhere. I haven’t seen him since we left the Dock Street.”

In half an hour or
so Underwood came in to quiz me. I explained how I’d come into the dark house and had seen the stranger at the front door, then a second stranger circling the house. Because one was tall and the other short, I’d decided that they might be the two men who had held us up at the Garretts’. Then I’d decided they were very likely the same two I’d stumbled over looking for Pete Falconer at the River Villa
that afternoon. I told him how I’d fled down the basement stairs and escaped through the hole in the foundation, crawling out from under the current bathroom into the gaping hole that would eventually be covered by the floor of the bathroom addition.

The part that interested Underwood most was the angry comment I’d overheard once I was outside: “I’m going to bust Haney with an antique baseball
bat over this.”

I didn’t know which guy had said it, but I was sure that was what he’d said. Underwood quizzed me several times to make sure.

“That’s what it was,” I said. “I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now.”

“Is there anybody around here named Haney?”

“Not that I know of.”

Joe didn’t know of any Haneys in Warner Pier either. Even Tracy—who was likely to know everybody
and everything about them—had not heard of anyone named Haney. We checked the Warner County phone book and found only one Haney listed, a John Haney who lived in Dorinda, the county seat.

“Why an ‘antique’ baseball bat?” Underwood asked. “Why not a regular one?”

I didn’t have an answer to that either.

By then it was after eleven, and Underwood broke the news that we needed to stay out of the
house until noon the next day so the crime scene team would be able to finish up in daylight.

“That’s fine,” I said. “If those guys are still on the loose, and it’s too hot even to close the windows, I wouldn’t stay in that house if it were guarded by a company of Marines.”

“We’ll go to my mom’s,” Joe said.

I glared at him. Was he forgetting our houseguests? “She hasn’t got room for six people.”

“It’s either that or we drive thirty miles to Holland. You know we can’t find rooms in Warner Pier. Not in July.”

Brenda asked the key question. “Does your mom have air-conditioning, Joe?”

“Central.”

Tracy, Brenda, and I spoke in unison. “Let’s go.”

Joe called his mom, and she agreed to take in the whole gang. Darrell hung his head and dragged his feet, but he obviously wouldn’t find it convenient
to stay in his camper while our house was overrun with crime scene investigators working thirty feet away.