The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (23 page)

Which brought me to the boyfriends: Will VanKlompen and Tracy’s steady date, Jack Eberhardt. Had the girls told them about our ménage? Had some spy then asked the boys about the odd group where their girlfriends were staying?

All these things rolled around in my mind
for an hour or more. Brenda got up, and she and Tracy watched some talk show in the den, but I was so taken with my own thoughts that I barely spoke to them. And after all that thought I came up with no new ideas.

After the jewelry had been hidden in Darrell’s camper, I’d asked the neighbors if they’d seen any strangers around. Maybe something would still come of that. Hardly a revolutionary
thought. But it kept me from thinking about the possibility that someone actually sharing our house had been telling the bad guys what we were up to.

I decided to follow up on my earlier inquiries. I bit the bullet and called Harold Glick. If anybody got around the neighborhood, he did. I was grateful when he didn’t answer the phone. I left a message, saying I was still trying to figure out whether
strangers had been prowling the neighborhood, and that I’d call him back.

I called several more people. Most of our neighbors weren’t home, and the two who answered the phone didn’t have any strangers to suggest. Both of them wanted me to tell them what had been going on over at our house. Having cop cars around doesn’t enhance your reputation as a desirable neighbor.

My final call was to the
Garretts. I’d found the number on my desk, where I’d put it the day Garnet came by the office, and stuck it in my purse. Of course, I knew that Uncle Alex was the only person at Double Diamond, and I didn’t think he would be any help. But I called anyway. To my surprise, Garnet answered the phone.

“Oh!” I said. “I thought you and Dick were in Grand Rapids.”

“We are. This is my cell phone number.
Oh, Lee, I talked to Uncle Alex this morning, and he told me about the awful experience you had last night. I’m so sorry!”

“Uncle Alex—I mean, Mr. Gold—saved my bacon, or maybe my life. If he hadn’t been home, I was going to have to take to the woods. Barefoot.”

“I hope, hope,
hope
that this had nothing to do with our holdup. You and Joe must think we’re international spies or something.”

She’d said the magic word. I interrupted her to ask if they’d seen any strangers who might have been spying on our house.

“Everybody in Warner Pier is a stranger to me,” Garnet said. “We’re the newcomers.” She gave a few descriptions of people whom she’d seen walking down Lake Shore Drive, and I quickly realized that my quest was useless. A few of them I could identify. But others . . . who knew?
They could have been anybody.

“I guess I’m wasting time,” I said. “A stranger who’s wearing a swimsuit could be renting a summer cottage. Heck, in any neighborhood all a bad guy has to do is paint ‘Lawn Service’ on the side of his pickup and throw a power mower in the back. Then he can go anyplace and do anything, no questions asked. I guess we’d have to fall over somebody holding a telescope
up to his eye if we were going to identify a spy.”

Garnet laughed. “I’m glad you can joke about it, Lee. I’ll talk to Dick; maybe he noticed someone.”

“Whether he did or not, please tell him thanks for the loan of his beach shoes.”

“Beach shoes? What beach shoes?”

“The ones he left by the door at the cottage. Last night I had to take to my heels barefoot, and my feet were already sore by the
time I got to Double Diamond. So I borrowed a pair of flip-flops I found by the front door.”

“Dick never wears flip-flops.” Garnet lowered her voice. “He lost a toe to a lawn mower when he was just a kid. He’s self-conscious about it. He always wears closed shoes. The flip-flops must belong to Uncle Alex.”

“But Mr. Gold said they didn’t. And they were much too large for his feet.”

“Another
mystery! Listen, I’ll call you back if I think of anything.”

We hung up, and I sat there idly wondering about the flip-flops. When Mercy’s kitchen telephone rang I jumped. It was Joe.

“Listen, Lee,” he said, “Underwood doesn’t want us to move back into the house until he figures out who tried to kill you last night.”

“Oh, gee! That’s going to be real inconvenient.”

“Yeah, but he’s right. It’s
a lot safer. Mom will take us in.”

“Have you asked your mom how she feels about this?”

“I called to warn her, and she said she was okay with it. Of course, we can’t stay away from the house entirely.”

“I hope not! I’m itching to get out there and get some clean clothes.”

“Underwood says it’s okay to go out there now. The crime scene team is just about to leave, and he’s got a Warner Pier
patrol car keeping an eye on things. Can you get a ride with the girls?”

“I’m sure I can. Aren’t you coming? You need clean clothes, too.”

“Maybe later.”

I was catching a hint of excitement—or was it worry?—in his voice. “Joe, is something wrong?”

“I hope not.” He took a deep breath. “It’s Pete. He never has shown up. And now some farmer has called in and says a green SUV is in a ditch about
five miles east of Warner Pier. Underwood’s sending a car to check it out.”

“You’d better stick with the state police, Joe. See what’s going on.”

“I’ll call when I find anything out.”

I arranged to pick up Darrell; then Brenda drove us all home. As warned, a Warner Pier patrol car was sitting in our drive. Plus, the mobile crime lab was still parked at the Baileys’ house, and we could see glimpses
of activity over there.

I was so curious I walked over to the Baileys’ instead of going into my own house. The crime scene investigators, of course, waved me off, so I stood thirty feet away from the cement carport where I’d been parking and called to them.

“Have you found any sign that the bad guys waited for me over there?”

“Detective Sergeant Underwood will get a report.”

So they weren’t
going to tell me anything. I watched them for a few minutes. One technician made a cast of something on the ground. Footprints or tire tracks? Another was looking through all the items under the carport. She had even taken everything out of the plastic bushel basket where Charlie Bailey kept the stuff he used when working in the yard. A foam rubber kneeler, a trowel, a pair of pruning shears, two
nozzles for the garden hose, and a reel of plastic line for the weed whacker were all laid out neatly on the concrete floor. As I watched, the technician turned the basket upside down. Several sponges fell out.

I turned around and walked back to our house, frowning. Something about that basket bothered me. I didn’t figure out what it was until I got home.

When I walked up onto the porch, a pair
of black flip-flops were beside our front door.

That was what had been missing from the basket!

What were those flip-flops doing on our porch?

I realized that they were the shoes I’d worn back from Double Diamond at midnight the night before. I’d kicked them off on the porch before I went inside.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I’d seen those black flip-flops sticking out of the top of that plastic garden
basket every time I’d parked my van in the Baileys’ carport. But when they disappeared, I hadn’t missed them. When they reappeared—at Double Diamond—it had never occurred to me that they were the same shoes. Desperate for footwear, I’d simply put them on and worn them.

Now the question was, how did they get from the Baileys’ house to Double Diamond?

And that wasn’t hard to answer.

I went over
to the Warner Pier patrol car and told our guard that I needed to walk over to the neighbor’s house for a moment. The patrolman—a college student working for the summer—looked doubtful.

“You can come along,” I said. “I want to be as cooperative as possible.”

The student, who wore a name tag saying, SWARTZMAN, made a big deal out of calling in to say where we were going. Then he drove me down
our road across Lake Shore Drive, and up to Double Diamond. He stopped outside the cottage.

He didn’t accompany me to the door. I knocked and called out, “Mr. Gold!” After a bit of scurrying inside, Uncle Alex came to the door.

“Mr. Gold,” I said, “I need to talk to Gina.”

He batted his eyes innocently. “Gina? Gina who?”

“Gina Woodyard, my husband’s aunt.”

“Why would she be here, Mrs. Woodyard?”

“I’m not sure she is, now. But please don’t tell me she wasn’t here at one time.”

He dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet. And I heard a giggle behind him.

“Oh, Lee, you found my hideout!”

Mr. Gold opened the door wider, and I saw Gina behind him.

I
was so glad to see Gina alive and whole that I resisted the temptation to wring her neck. I hugged it instead.

I then stood back and noted that she was wearing her pink high heels, the ones whose tracks I had followed
down the drive.

“Gina, we’ve been so worried!”

“I’m sorry, hon. But I did call and say I was all right.”

“That was before the murder!”

“Murder? What murder?”

For the first time I realized that Gina had no way of knowing that Joe and I thought her ex-husband was a murder victim. The Grand Rapids television and newspapers had mentioned that a body had been found in Lake Michigan and foul play
was suspected, but no announcement had been made of my identification of the man as one who had claimed to be my husband’s father. And no one had mentioned his bunion, the physical feature that he shared with one of the burglars. In fact, if any reporter had speculated about a connection between the robbery at Double Diamond and the dead man, I hadn’t seen the report.

Gina was frowning. “Was
there a murder?” she said.

“Gina, do you have a photo of your ex-husband?”

She smiled ruefully. “Which one?”

“Art. Art Atkins.”

“I might. I haven’t cleaned out my wallet in a year. Why would you want to see a picture of
him
?”

“I’d like to see the picture before I explain.”

She looked concerned, but went upstairs to get her purse without asking any more questions. As soon as she was gone,
Alex Gold quizzed me about how I had figured out where Gina was. I explained about the shoes.

“I couldn’t see how they’d gotten to Double Diamond unless Gina wore them over here,” I said.

Alex Gold seemed quite proud of himself for giving her refuge. “Gina is a wonderful person,” he said. “Of course, I’ve known her casually for years. But having a chance to become well acquainted with her has
been a privilege.”

I tried not to smile. Gina had made another conquest. Whatever “it” is, Gina definitely had it.

Gina came down with a big tote bag embellished with a sequined parrot. I felt like an idiot; I’d hadn’t realized she’d taken her handbag when she ran away.

She pulled out a red leather wallet stuffed with papers. Then she sat down on the couch and began to pull things out. “Oh,
I wondered where that receipt was. And here’s my AARP card. And this picture—oh, it’s my neighbor’s son’s graduation photo.” She stacked money, scraps of paper, photos, membership cards, and credit cards on the couch in teetering piles, daring them to slip between the cushions. Finally, she triumphantly held up a small photo. “I knew I had one!”

She handed it over. Originally it had been a larger
snapshot, and it had been cut down to fit into the wallet. It was creased and scarred, and it showed Gina sitting next to a handsome man in a restaurant or bar. I looked at it carefully.

The man was the same one who had come to the door and claimed to be Joe’s dad, the man whose body was now in the county morgue.

“Gina, I have some bad news.” I had no idea how she’d react to learning about Art
Atkins’s death.

She had seen the news coming. “Art is the dead man we heard about on television,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I know you two had split, but once upon a time you must have cared deeply for him.”

Tears were welling in Gina’s eyes. “Art ran with a bad crowd,” she said. “They wouldn’t let him get away.”

Uncle Alex reached over and patted her hand. She smiled at him. “Thanks, Alex. I’ll
be all right.”

I tried to speak briskly. “You’ll have to go and identify the body, Gina. And I’m sure the state police will want a statement. But can you explain a few things to me first?”

“I’ll try, Lee. What do you want to know?”

I hardly knew where to start. “Just tell me about Art,” I said. “And why you came to our house to hide out. And what made you take off so suddenly.”

Gina sighed
deeply and clasped her hands in her lap. “I never thought I’d wind up married to a burglar!” she said. “But that’s what Art’s profession was. Cat burglar! And he used me—
used me
—to locate victims.”