We obeyed silently and were rewarded with a look at a bright-eyed, red-breasted bird not three feet outside Inez’s window. It lingered nearly a full minute, scratching in the snow, then flew away.
Inez gave a sort of gasp, and I realized we’d all been holding our breaths. She turned to us then. “Lee! Joe! I’m so glad you saw my robin! So few of them stay in Michigan all winter. It’s always nice to have a witness.”
She embraced us both, then waved us to chairs. “I thought I wouldn’t see you two until the wedding.”
“We’re counting on you to be there, Inez,” I said. “After all, if it weren’t for you, I’d still be sitting around pouting, and Joe wouldn’t even have wanted to marry me.”
She gave a snort. “You’d have quit pouting on your own,” she said. “I was just incidental.” But I could tell she was pleased by my comment.
Inez and I had become friends during the summer I was sixteen. My parents were getting a divorce, my mom was moving from Prairie Creek to Dallas, and I was to transfer from a high school of 250 students to one with 2,500. My mother was busy job hunting, and my dad, I realize today, was becoming involved with Annie, who’s now his wife. In desperation, my mom packed me off to Warner Pier to spend the summer working for her brother and sister-in-law in their chocolate shop.
I was not happy to be there. I was not happy with my parents. I was not happy with one single thing in my life. Then I met Inez walking on the beach. Maybe she understood teenagers because of her years of teaching. Or maybe she and I simply hit it off. Anyway, she did a lot of listening and a little advising, and by the end of the summer I had the confidence to tackle a Dallas high school, to cope with my problem parents, and to accept the unconditional love Aunt Nettie and Uncle Phil were offering me. I’d also been involved in a crime, helping to identify a kidnapper and hit-and-run driver who’d nearly killed Inez.
It was hard to see Inez losing her energy. But that day she looked pretty good, and I told her so.
“I feel fine most of the time,” she said. “It’s just getting harder to breathe. I use oxygen sometimes. But I’m going to dance at your wedding.”
“I’m counting on you for a polka,” Joe said.
We told her about the wedding plans, and she laughed at my account of Aunt Nettie’s redecorating ideas. I answered questions about her old neighbors. She opened the chocolates from Aunt Nettie and offered us a piece. We both declined.
“You have one,” I said. “If it won’t ruin your dinner.”
Inez smiled. “I think I will have one whether it ruins my dinner or not. The bum pump is denying me enough of life’s pleasures. Now tell me about Timothy Hart. Has he managed to stay on the wagon?”
“Well, he hasn’t come staggering down Lake Shore Drive lately,” I said. But Inez’s questions about the neighbors had made me think of her in a different light. “Inez, did you know my mother?”
“I met her when she came for Phil’s funeral, Lee. But she had left home before I moved to Lake Shore Drive.”
“Oh.”
I must have sounded dispirited, because Inez frowned. “You’re not fighting with her again, are you?”
It was Joe who spoke. “Lee had never known that her mother ran off on her wedding day, Inez. She just found out, and she’d like to understand why.”
“Have you asked her?”
“It’s hard on the telephone,” I said. “Especially since she never mentioned the episode to me. But she’s coming for the wedding, so maybe we can talk then. She did ask one question that puzzled me. She wanted to know about the former sheriff, Carl Van Hoosier.”
Inez frowned. “His apartment is in this wing, but I don’t talk with him much.”
“He’s not in the nursing wing?”
“No. He had a stroke and uses a wheelchair, but he still has his apartment. And it’s nice—one of the doubles. And don’t let that dumb act he does sometimes fool you!”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I’ve seen him pull it. If he doesn’t want to talk about something—who made the mess in the puzzle room, maybe—he acts as if he’s out of it. But when the staff aide is gone, he gets this sly look.” Inez nodded vigorously. “You know, my grandmother always said that cranky old people were cranky young people. And I’d guess that
crafty
old people were
crafty
young people. Van Hoosier always had that reputation, and from what I’ve seen of him, he’s as sneaky as he ever was.”
After a few more minutes Joe and I said good-bye. Inez didn’t offer to walk us out. She had grown noticeably more short of breath as we talked.
Joe took my hand as we walked down the hall. “It’s sad to see Inez growing feeble,” he said. “She’s such a stout character it’s hard to realize she won’t last forever.”
I nodded and blinked back a few tears. “She’s still interested in everything around her, though. Did you notice that she claimed she didn’t talk with Carl Van Hoosier, but she knew just how he treated the staff?”
“She hasn’t lost her powers of observation. And how about
your
powers of observation? Do you want to take a peek at Van Hoosier?”
“Well, since we’re here . . .”
Joe stopped at the reception desk and asked for Van Hoosier’s apartment number. Then we went back down Inez’s wing. Van Hoosier’s apartment was at the end.
“Twenty-two east,” Joe said. “This is it.”
“Should we go in?”
“Sure,” Joe murmured quietly. “Like I said, we can always ask him if he remembers the Bill Dykstra suicide.”
Joe tapped on the door. Like most of the doors in the retirement center, it was standing open. But there was no response to Joe’s knock.
Joe raised his eyebrows and tapped again. “Sheriff Van Hoosier? May we come in?”
He took two steps into the apartment, steps that took him into the little hallway with the galley kitchen along one side and the bathroom door on the other. I followed him closely. Somehow I didn’t want to get too far away from him in the alien environment of Carl Van Hoosier’s apartment.
Joe gasped. He took three giant steps into the apartment itself, then dropped to his knees.
The first thing I saw was an overturned wheelchair behind Joe. It took me a moment to realize Joe was kneeling beside a large man who was stretched out on the floor beside that wheelchair.
“Call the nurse!” Joe said.
I scanned the room and found a white cord attached to an emergency switch. I yanked it. “Should I try CPR?”
Joe looked up at me. His hand was on the man’s neck, apparently feeling for a pulse. “I think he’s already dead.”
CHOCOLATE CHAT
CHILDHOOD CHOCOLATE—PART I
As a child during World War II, I was aware of only a few of the sacrifices that civilians were making for the effort to win the war.
The main one, as far as I was concerned, was chocolate.
All the chocolate, we were told, was going to soldiers and sailors overseas. Chocolate bars were in short supply for children.
Across the street from Franklin Elementary School in Ardmore, Oklahoma, was a small mom-and-pop grocery where all the kids would blow our spending money. On the rare occasion when the store got a few boxes of Hershey’s bars, they would all be sold before the first bell rang for the school day.
I was a last-minute scholar, dashing into class just as the bell rang. Even if I had a nickel, I was never early enough to get a Hershey’s bar.
Both my parents liked chocolate. I remember the glee with which my father, after the war, introduced me to the Valomilk Cup, still my favorite form of marshmallow cream, and the Cherry Mash. Then we knew the war was really over.
Chapter 9
“
I
’ll find some help!”
I ran out of the apartment and down the hall toward the reception desk, the nearest place where I knew I could find a staff member. As I got there a completely bald man in a white uniform was walking rapidly toward me, coming through the lounge behind the desk; I knew the nursing-home wing was back that way.
I guessed that the bald man was answering the emergency line in Van Hoosier’s room. I ran to meet him.
“It’s Carl Van Hoosier!” I said. “He’s not breathing!”
The man’s rapid walk became a run, and he barreled past me without a word. I followed him at a fast walk. When I got back to Van Hoosier’s apartment, he and Joe were both kneeling beside the old sheriff, and the bald man had his stethoscope in place.
“I didn’t try CPR,” Joe said.
The bald man took the stethoscope out of his ears. “He has a do-not-resuscitate order in place,” he said.
I stood by the door, feeling shaky. After all my curiosity about Van Hoosier, I certainly hadn’t expected to find him dead. Of course, I wasn’t grieved by his death; I’d never met the man, and what I’d heard about him didn’t make me sorry that we weren’t acquainted. But it seemed extremely odd.
That’s when I began to look around the apartment. And the situation began to seem even odder.
I’d already seen that Van Hoosier’s wheelchair was on its side. A small table was turned over, too. A floor lamp had been smashed. A throw rug was crumpled up. A metal candy dish was in the middle of the floor, and Hershey’s Kisses were all over the place. A lightweight side chair had also been knocked over, and that chair was clear across the room from the wheelchair.
“Listen, y’all,” I said. “This room doesn’t look like some old guy died peacefully. It looks like a fight went on first!”
Joe stood up and looked around. “I suppose it’s possible that he thrashed around in his final moments. But I don’t see how he could have done this much damage.”
The bald guy stood up. Now I could see his name tag: Priddy, RN. He looked around the room. “It does look odd,” he said.
He knelt again. This time he pulled Van Hoosier’s lower eyelid down and looked at it closely. Joe dropped to his knees, too, and watched closely. The nurse felt Van Hoosier’s throat, then looked at his head, feeling around it.
He looked at Joe, and Joe looked at him. They both seemed to be assimilating the situation.
Then Joe spoke. “I used to be a defense attorney. I represented a guy in a strangling case.”
The nurse nodded and stood up.
“This is too weird,” he said. His voice was quiet; I had the sense he was speaking to himself. “He’s got a contusion on his temple, too. Who would want to bash the old bastard, then smother him?”
Priddy, RN, seemed to come to himself. “Sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t a very professional comment. I’ll call his doctor.”
“Lee and I had better wait down the hall, in case this turns out to be a crime scene,” Joe said. “We won’t leave until we find out if anybody wants our names.”
The bald man raised a hand. “Please,” he said, “don’t say anything!”
Joe nodded.
When we got back to the reception area, a middle-aged guy in a suit came rushing out of an office marked “Administrator” and nearly knocked us both flat, so I gathered that Nurse Priddy had called his boss to say they’d had a death. A suspicious death.
The receptionist, who was not concealing her interest in the proceedings very well, told us that we could get coffee in the main lounge, in an area behind her. We said we’d wait there. Joe used his cell phone to call Mac McKay and tell him we might be late for dinner. Then we found seats where we could see the comings and goings.
And there were lots of comings and goings. A man Joe recognized as a Dorinda doctor came rushing in the main door within ten minutes. Not long after that Priddy and the administrator put their heads together near the receptionist’s desk and talked in low voices. We couldn’t hear them, but there was a lot of vigorous gesturing and scowling. The administrator ended it by shaking his head and going to stare out the entrance, arms folded, anger in his shoulders and neck. Apparently the doctor had agreed with Priddy about the suspicious nature of Van Hoosier’s death, because a sheriff’s car pulled up out front, and almost immediately after that a Michigan State Police car drove up. The administrator met them, glaring and talking vigorously. He didn’t seem to approve of murder in one of his nice apartments.
There were no sirens, but the residents of Pleasant Creek knew something was up. A crowd was gathering in the lounge—two old ladies leaning on walkers, a man bent almost in two by osteoporosis, a couple who sat down at a card table and pretended to play gin rummy, assorted women who gathered in clusters and eyed the activities. A few of the people obviously lived in Van Hoosier’s wing, and they made periodic forays down the hall to see what was going on, then came back to report.
I guess we were gawking as much as the Pleasant Creek residents, because I nearly jumped out of my skin when someone behind me called my name.
“Lee? Joe? What are you two doing here?”
I turned to see Rollie Taylor, grinning from ear to ear as usual.
“Rollie?” I said. “I didn’t expect to see you.”
“It’s bingo day,” Rollie said. “And, Lee, did you know that if Bea Arthur married Sting, she’d be Bea Sting?”
I rolled my eyes and groaned. “I thought you said you called bingo on Sundays.”
“And on alternate Wednesdays.” Rollie gestured at the assembled crowd of residents. “These folks usually go straight from bingo to dinner. What’s going on?”
I let Joe tell him. I didn’t want to think about the scene in Van Hoosier’s apartment. I walked over to the window and looked out at the wintry scene. I was beginning to dread the next act in this little drama. Anytime now a representative of either the Warner County Sheriff’s Office or the Michigan State Police was going to find out who had discovered Carl Van Hoosier’s body. And they were going to want to know why two complete strangers had dropped by to see the old guy.
And I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer that question. It wasn’t that I wanted to lie. It was just that the reason we’d come was going to sound so stupid.