The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (6 page)

Mercy runs
her office with the help of one assistant, and that assistant had recently announced she and her husband were moving to Lansing. Mercy had been interviewing replacements, but maybe she hadn’t been able to find anyone suitable.

Dolly left, and I got busy. TenHuis Chocolade isn’t like most Warner Pier businesses—completely dependent on the summer tourist season. We ship chocolates to department
stores, specialty shops, caterers, and individuals year-round. But summer is still busy for our retail shop as Warner Pier’s tourists wander our quaint streets. We have plenty of locals and summer people as customers as well.

I checked in with the two counter girls who would be working until Brenda and Tracy came at four o’clock; then I began on my e-mail. Most of our orders come by e-mail.
I have to keep up on it.

I’d finished with the e-mail and moved on to the regular mail by the time young Cal Vandemann came in. I turned him over to Dolly and kept working. Only a few minutes later, Tracy and Brenda came bounding in. I glanced at the clock at the back of the workshop—my office has glass walls, so I can see the retail shop and the workshop. And the clock astonished me. Brenda
and Tracy were half an hour early.

Brenda stopped near the door, but Tracy charged right into my office.

“Listen, Lee,” she said. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

“What have I done now?”

“You haven’t done anything. It’s what we heard at the Superette.”

“Now, Tracy, if you’ve been talking to Greg Glossop . . .” Greg Glossop is the pharmacist at Warner Pier’s only supermarket, and he’s the
most notorious gossip in town.

“No! I steered clear of Mr. Gossip, just the way you said I should. But I couldn’t help overhearing—”

“Tracy! No gossip!”

“Lee! This is important!”

“Is it true?”

“Of course it’s not true!”

“Then I don’t want to hear it.”

Tracy’s face twisted into a knot of agony. “Some-times gossip can be important, Lee. You need to hear this.”

I sighed. “Sit down and tell
me. Just don’t yell it so the whole shop can hear.”

Tracy came in the office, pulled the door shut behind her, and sat in my visitor’s chair. She leaned across my desk and dropped her voice.

“Brenda and I were in the cosmetics aisle, see, and you know that’s right next to the cereal.”

“One aisle over. I know.”

“Well, some summer lady was over there. I don’t know who she is, but I’ve seen her
in the Superette before. A fake blonde. One of the ones who wears a bikini with a push-up bra.”

“In this weather that’s a practical garment.”

“She didn’t have a bikini on today, but I’ve seen her in one before.”

“Okay, Tracy. I get the picture.” I began to be afraid the gossip would be that this bikinied blonde was pursuing my husband. I trusted Joe, but I didn’t want to hear even an unfounded
rumor along those lines. “What did she say?”

“She said that looking for a new insurance agent was such a pain.”

“Insurance agent?”

“Yes. Then the woman she was talking to—I looked at her later, and it was some older woman I don’t know—that woman said, ‘Oh, we’ve always been happy with Mrs. Woodyard.”’

“I should think so.”

“The first woman said, ‘Oh, we have, too. Until all these burglaries
started.’ Then she lowered her voice—you know, the way you do when you’re pretending to tell a secret. She dropped her voice, but it was still loud enough for us to hear an aisle over. And she said, ‘It just seems awfully funny that only her clients are getting hit in these burglaries. I told Bob we simply can’t take the chance of giving a list of our belongings to a thief!’ ”

For the third time
that day, I was completely astonished.

First my dead father-in-law had come to the door. Then I’d discovered that one of my houseguests was packing a pistol. Now I’d been told that my mother-in-law was suspected of being part of a burglary ring.

If I’d had Pete’s pistol right at the moment, I might have tracked down the bleached blonde in the bikini with the push-up bra and shot her dead. How
dare she say such a thing about Joe’s mom? No insurance agent in the world could be more conscientious about guarding the interests of her clients.

Tracy was still looking at me, her eyes wide, eager to see my reaction. I tried to pull myself together and keep my temper. Losing it wouldn’t help Joe’s mom.

“You were right, Tracy. I did need to hear this,” I said. “But no one else does.”

Tracy
shook her head vigorously. “I won’t say a word.”

“I guess you and Brenda can talk about it with each other, since she heard it, too. But I’d appreciate your not saying anything to anybody else.”

Tracy’s head shook so hard she could have scrambled her brain like an omelet.

“Not the boyfriends.”

She shook again.

“Not the girlfriends.”

Another shake.

“Nobody. In fact, I feel sure that Mercy
would have grounds for a lawsuit against anybody who speculated publicly about her professional reputation and behavior. Slander is a serious matter.”

Tracy nodded, her eyes bigger than ever.

“I do appreciate your telling me, and I’ll talk to Joe about it. Now you and Brenda have time for coffee before you come on duty.”

I slipped them each money for a fancy cappuccino and gave Brenda the same
caution I’d given Tracy. I hoped the mention of a lawsuit would keep the two of them quiet.

Then I sat down and made a list of the things I needed to talk to Joe about.

His friend Pete’s gun. His aunt using our house for a hideout. Our lack of privacy on what was still our honeymoon. This gossip about his mother. And the stranger who claimed to be his father.

What else could come up?

W
hen Cal Vandemann reported on the air-conditioning an hour later, the news wasn’t good.

“I’m trying not to replace that compressor,” he said. “But I’m afraid I have to.”

“If we need a compressor, get us one.”

“They’re
really expensive, Lee.”

“Not being able to do business is even more expensive, Cal. Get the compressor.”

I tried to tell myself Cal couldn’t be as dumb as he looked, but his little-kid looks did not encourage confidence. His dad, who had died the previous winter, had been burly. He’d looked like a person who knew air-conditioning. I knew Cal was in his thirties, but he looked like a junior high
kid.

Cal scratched his head. “The problem is going to be
finding
a compressor.”

“If we need it, we need it, Cal.”

“I know, Lee. But it’s this heat wave. Everybody else’s compressors are out, too.”

“Cal, I won’t balk at the price.” As a business manager, I hated to say that, but we were desperate. “Find one!”

He left. But he didn’t look confident.

At least my office was cool. I tried to work,
resolutely ignoring the customers and clerks in the shop. I didn’t look up when I heard Tracy in an animated conversation with someone, but it didn’t save me from interruption. Tracy came to the office door and said, “One of your neighbors wants to talk to you, Lee.”

I looked up to see an attractive woman of fifty or so. She was petite and well proportioned and had strawberry blond hair in a
fake but tasteful shade. Her coordinated sportswear outfit marked her as a summer person. She looked like the kind of customer who was likely to need a special order—silver trays full of truffles and bonbons, or a hundred souvenir bells for a fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Tracy had said she was a neighbor, but I’d never seen her before. I decided she must be a neighbor from Warner Pier’s business
district.

She came into my office, and I stood up and tried to look pleasant. “Hi. Are you from the wine shop?”

“Oh, no.” The woman smiled. “I’m a neighbor from across Lake Shore Drive. I wanted to introduce myself.”

As far as I knew, no one had moved onto Lake Shore Drive since Harold Glick, and I didn’t think Harold had a wife. Besides, Harold didn’t live
across
the road. He lived
down
the
road. So who could this woman be?

I offered to shake hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we had a new neighbor.”

“I’m not exactly new.
Re
newed, maybe. I’m Garnet Garrett. We’re at the Double Diamond cottage.”

“Oh! Please sit down.”

Double Diamond was a landmark along the lakeshore, and, yes, it was exactly across Lake Shore Drive from us, although we couldn’t see it because of the hundreds
of trees between the two houses.

We’re on the inland side of the road, but Double Diamond overlooks the lake. I’d seen the cottage from the beach. It was a large, comfortable-looking, Craftsman-style house, with porches on three sides and walls covered with weathered gray shingles. I thought it was surrounded with far too much thick brush, a landscaping style I call “mosquito heaven.” But nobody
had asked me.

Mrs. Garrett perched on the edge of a chair. “Dou-ble Diamond has been leased outside the family for twenty-five years, so I haven’t been here since I was a newlywed. But we’re planning a family reunion at the cottage later this month.”

“I’m originally from Texas,” I said, “and when I first saw the cottage’s name, I thought a rancher had wandered up here.”

She smiled. “The diamonds
refer to jewels, not cattle brands. My grandmother was Opal Diamonte.”

I’m sure I looked blank, and Mrs. Garrett smiled apologetically. “She was an opera star back in the 1920s.”

“Now I remember! Joe’s grandmother was thrilled when she came to see us, and learned our house was right across the road from Double Diamond. She’s still an opera fan. And wasn’t there an exhibit of some of your grandmother’s
jewelry last winter? I read about it in the Chicago paper.”

“Oh, yes, the famous jewels. They’re responsible for all our weird family names.”

“Garnet? That’s not so weird.”

“Well, the whole thing is my silly great-grandmother’s fault. If she hadn’t given her daughter two jewels as a name, we wouldn’t be cursed into the third generation.”

“Cursed?”

“With crazy names. My grandmother—the opera
singer—was named Opal Diamond, if you translate her last name from Italian. She was proud of her name, and she didn’t marry until she met a dashing gentleman named Ruben—which means Ruby in German. And his last name was Gold.”

We both laughed.

“They thought their names forced them to carry on the jewel tradition. My mother was blessed with Ruby, and her sister with Pearl. And my poor uncle Alex
isn’t named Alexander. He’s Alexandrite.”

“A semiprecious stone, right?”

“Right. It has the interesting quality of being green in natural light and red in artificial. That may have marked Uncle Alex’s personality, which has always grown more vivid as the sun goes down. Anyway, the family was practically out of jewels by the time my generation appeared. My sister is Jade, and I got Garnet.” She
smiled again. “I had the bad judgment to add Garrett by falling for a nice guy named Dick Garrett.”

I laughed. “I’m afraid to ask if you have children.”

“We do. Mary and Richard Junior. Three generations was enough of that jewel nonsense! But my grandmother did have a fabulous collection of Art Deco jewelry, and she supposedly paid for the Warner Pier property—back in 1927—by selling a fancy
belt buckle shaped like two linked diamonds and encrusted with diamond stones. Hence the name of the cottage. Everybody thinks we’re all rich because of that darn jewelry, but I assure you we’re not.”

I didn’t comment. Lakeshore property near Warner Pier is so valuable today that a belt buckle would have to contain stones the size of the Hope Diamond to pay for a couple of acres with a view
of the water. The Diamonte-Gold descendants might not think of themselves as wealthy, but they owned a nice chunk of real estate.