“This was the late sixties, early seventies, remember,” Mercy said. “There was still a lot of demonstrating going on. Ed joined a group that was protesting about the environment. Then he moved into the antiwar movement. He grew the required mat of hair and reportedly smoked a lot of pot. The gossip was that he lived in a
commune
. We all knew what that meant. Or thought we did.”
At one time, Mercy said, Lovita had said she blamed herself for involving Ed in her own concerns for the environment, concerns that had eventually led him to the antiwar movementand his subsequent flight to Canada.
And Lovie’s husband, Ed Sr., had not been sympathetic to Ed’s actions.
“I think it caused a major split in the family,” Mercy said. “Though Lovie and Ed Sr. never separated.”
“It’s not as if her son was a career criminal,” I said.
Mercy gave a “what can you do?” shrug. “A lot of things happened to Lovie. First, Ed Jr. was a big disappointment to her husband. Second, because of Ed’s problems and her participation in demonstrations, the board of education became suspicious of her teaching. She had to fight not to be fired. Third, Bill committed suicide. Fourth, her husband began to have poor health. He was in and out of the hospital a dozen times with heart problems before he died. That was five years or so after Bill’s suicide.”
“How awful!”
“I guess Ed Sr.’s death was the last straw for Lovie. She took her retirement in a lump sum, bought that junkyard out on the highway, and renamed it Lovie’s Recycling Center. It’s not a real recycling center, of course. She doesn’t have any equipment beyond a can crusher. She just collects stuff and hauls it into Holland.”
Mercy reached over and patted my hand. “Anyway, Lee, she had a lot of problems. But people have had more problems than she did and kept on with life without becoming the town eccentric. If she’s—well, cracked—I doubt that your mother had anything to do with her becoming that way.”
I nodded. “I guess that’s not what’s bothering me, really. The problem is, my mom has always refused to come back to Warner Pier. But I wanted—we wanted her to come to our wedding. So I called and more or less twisted her arm like a pretzel until she said she’d come.”
“But she did say she’d come?”
“Yes! Now I wonder—should I have insisted? Is my mom so despised around Warner Pier that it—won’t be a happy experience for her?”
Mercy smiled. “I don’t think the villagers will grab their pitchforks and form mobs, Lee.”
“Oh, I know. But I wonder if she knows what’s happened to Lovie. I guess I’d better warn her.”
“That might be tactful. But it shouldn’t stop her from coming.”
“And the other thing is, why did she ask Aunt Nettie about this old sheriff?”
“Which old sheriff?”
“I don’t remember. It was one of those Dutch names.”
I expected that remark to get a laugh out of Mercy. It seems as if at least half of the natives of western Michigan are descendants of Dutch settlers. Tall blonds are everywhere, and our telephone directories have more ‘Van’ names than they do Smiths. I thought my reference would be considered a joke.
Instead Mercy got a look of real horror. “Not Van Hoosier? Carl Van Hoosier?”
“I think that was it.”
Mercy leaned closer to me and gripped my hand until I thought my fingers would drop off. “Stay away from him!” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t get mixed up with Carl Van Hoosier!”
CHOCOLATE CHAT
BIRTH OF AN OBSESSION
I apparently loved chocolate from the moment I was born and loved books from the moment I could sit in my mother’s lap and be read to.
This must have been genetic; my mother loved both chocolate and reading, particularly reading mysteries.
She told me that as a very small child I called chocolate milk “choc.” Once, she said, I asked for “choc,” and she replied, “As soon as I finish my chapter.”
I answered, “Whenever I ask for choc, you
always
say, ‘As soon as I finish my chapter.’ ”
She helped set my priorities forever—mysteries and chocolate. But I’m not yet sure which order they come in.
Chapter 5
I
t was gratifying to see that Mercy’s reaction had left Joe as surprised as I was.
“What’s the deal on Van Hoosier?” he said. “Don’t tell me that Warner County, that absolute bastion of virtue, once had a crooked sheriff.”
“I’m sure every county in the United States has had one or two crooked sheriffs in its history,” Mercy said. She’d released her grip on my hand and seemed to be trying to compose herself. “Van Hoosier never stood trial or anything. There was simply a lot of gossip about him.”
“Aunt Nettie said she thought he was dead,” I said.
But Mercy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think I would have heard about it.” She stood up. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Wait a minute, Mom,” Joe said. “Just what was Van Hoosier accused of?”
“It was just gossip.”
“What kind of gossip?”
Mercy sighed. “When I was in high school—just before your mom would have been in high school, Lee—the gossip was that if Van Hoosier caught a couple parked on a back road it was bad news. Supposedly he would handcuff the boy in the back of the patrol car, then . . .”
Her voice failed her, and Joe finished her sentence. “He’d rape the girl?”
Mercy nodded. “As I say, nobody ever got him into court. And since he was a county official, he wasn’t over here by Lake Michigan too much. He usually hung out over near Dorinda—wouldn’t get too far from the courthouse. So very few Warner Pier couples were involved. Or would admit it. Back then—well, girls were hesitant to report things like that.”
She looked from Joe to me then, and her face was defiant. “But I believed the stories,” she said.
“They could be true,” Joe said. “However, the same story was going around when I was in high school, and we had a different sheriff by then. And the attack always happened to some couple that someone knew, but they’d never tell the name.”
“You mean like an urban legend?”
Joe nodded, and Mercy went on. “I hope that’s all it was.”
Her story seemed to cast a pall over the lunch table, and we were all morose as we rinsed the dishes and stuck them in the dishwasher. I was the one who broke the silence. “I guess I could find out if Van Hoosier’s still alive,” I said.
Mercy’s reaction was almost identical to the one Aunt Nettie had displayed fourteen hours earlier, when I mentioned looking into Bill Dykstra’s death. She snapped one word out. “No!”
I stared at her, and she went on. “No, Lee. That curiosity bug of yours is a symptom of your intelligence, and I don’t like to discourage it, but this is not the time or the situation for curiosity. The situation with the Dykstras and your mother—it’s over. People have nearly forgotten. Let it be!”
Then Mercy put on her dressy black coat, buttoned it up, and headed back to her office.
She left me feeling uneasy. How could she tell me not to be curious when there was so much to be curious about? It was like hearing a joke—not that this situation was funny—and missing the punch line.
Why had my mother run away from Warner Pier on her wedding day? Why had Bill Dykstra committed suicide? Why had his mother become the town’s eccentric?
Or one of the town’s eccentrics; we have plenty.
And where did this former sheriff fit in? Had my mom and her young fiancé been among his victims? I hated that thought so much that I stuffed it deep in the back of my brain.
Mercy and Aunt Nettie had both advised me not to try to find the answers to any of those questions. But they hadn’t made me promise.
However, right at that moment I had to go back to work. Between having emotional storms and quizzing Mercy, I’d taken a long lunch hour. Aunt Nettie wouldn’t jump on me, but the shop was really busy and was likely to stay that way through Easter. I was having to take time off for wedding preparations anyway, so my tardiness made me feel guilty as I jaywalked back to TenHuis Chocolade.
And it turned out that I had reason to feel guilty. While I was at Joe’s stuffing myself with grilled cheese and interrogating my future mother-in-law, TenHuis Chocolade had been hit by a crisis.
Dolly Jolly, our most striking employee, boomed out the news as I came in the door. “The jazz band bunnies didn’t come!”
Dolly is even taller than I am and is twice as broad. Her hair is a bright red, and her face is dotted with matching red freckles. Her voice is just naturally loud. Every word she speaks seems to be coming through a powerful speaker system. She’s also a brilliant cook. She had joined TenHuis Chocolade six months earlier and was rapidly becoming Aunt Nettie’s right-hand helper.
“I thought the bunnies were in the UPS delivery yesterday!” she said. “But they’re weren’t!”
“Have you checked with Ohio?”
“Not yet! We just now quit looking for the molds!” Dolly clutched her hands together. “We need to make and ship this afternoon!”
I slipped out of my jacket and reached for my Rolodex. The nation’s largest supplier of molds for chocolatiers is in Ohio. We had placed a special order with them, asking for replicas of four molds originally made by T. C. Weygandt & Co. in the 1950s. Each mold showed a bunny playing a different jazz instrument—drum, banjo, accordion, saxophone. A Grand Rapids band instrument company had ordered two hundred of each to use as favors at a school music convention they were helping to sponsor.
The order for eight hundred six-inch rabbits wasn’t going to make or break our profits for the year, of course, though it was a nice piece of business. The point was that we delivered our product as promised. The order hadn’t been placed until late, so we had known we were cutting it close. In fact, Aunt Nettie hadn’t wanted to accept the order. But when the Ohio people said they could ship the molds in ten days, Dolly talked her into it.
As Dolly said, we could “make and ship” the same day and, if we did, we could handle it. But we couldn’t make the darn things until we had the molds.
It took five minutes for me to get the UPS tracking number from the Ohio mold shop. Then I went to the UPS site. Dolly was still standing beside me, looking almost tearful.
“They sent them second day,” I said, “instead of overnight. But this says the molds are on the truck. At least the number indicates ‘out for delivery.’ I guess Leon will deliver them today.”
Dolly’s face became more anguished than ever. “But Leon won’t be here until after four thirty!”
At our request, TenHuis Chocolade is the UPS man’s final stop before he heads back to Holland. I knew he was probably someplace in Warner Pier at that moment, making earlier deliveries.
“I’ll find him,” I said.
As I’ve said, Warner Pier is a small town. We all know the UPS man’s delivery schedule. I got on the phone and began to try to track him down.
Leon had been by the bank, I learned, and by the hardware store. The hardware store clerk, naturally, had been in high school with my mom, so she took the opportunity to quiz me about her. “Is she coming to the wedding?”
A day earlier I wouldn’t have thought anything about her question. Now it infuriated me, but I tried to answer as if it were a normal question.
“She says she’ll be here,” I said. “Maybe I can catch Leon at the Garden Shop.” I hung up, seething, and phoned the new number.
“He brought us a big shipment of birdfeeders,” Tom Hilton, the Garden Shop owner, said. Then he added, “By the way, Lee, is your mother coming to your wedding?”
Again I had to force myself to make a casual answer. “Sure is, Tom. She’s fleeing up. I mean, flying! She’s flying in for the wedding.”
“I’ll look forward to seeing her. We graduated from high school the same year. You know, she kinda left Warner Pier with its jaw dragging.”
I cut him off. “Tom, I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got to run away—I mean run! I’m going to run to the corner and see if I can catch Leon at Shorewood Gifts.” I hung up, mentally cursing my unruly tongue, and grabbed my jacket.
When I got to the corner and looked toward the river, to my relief I saw the big brown bulk of the UPS truck. Leon had left Shorewood Gifts and was just putting his foot into his truck. By yelling in a loud, unladylike manner and running down the street waving my arms, I managed to catch him. And he found the molds. I asked Leon to make us his final pickup stop of the day, as usual, so Dolly, Aunt Nettie, and the other hairnet ladies had two hours to get the jazz band bunnies ready to go. Luckily, they weren’t to get a fancy wrapping.
Between that crisis and about a million phone calls, I was able to put my mother, Bill Dykstra, his mother, and Sheriff Van Hoosier out of my mind until quitting time. Then I thought the whole situation over. Despite the warnings from Aunt Nettie and from Mercy, I wanted to know more. But I didn’t want to start a whole lot of talk by asking questions around town. So, how could I look into it? How could I figure out what had happened more than thirty years ago?
I decided to start at the Warner Pier Public Library. The library was open in the evenings for the convenience of students. Joe was tied up with a city planning meeting that night, so I was on my own.
I told Aunt Nettie I would work late and eat a sandwich when I got home. She left, apparently unsuspicious. I worked until six p.m.—nibbling on a couple of Mexican vanilla truffles (“light vanilla interior coated with milk chocolate,” according to our sales sheets). Once I was convinced Aunt Nettie wasn’t coming back, I locked the shop and headed for the library.
The Warner Pier Public Library, like a lot of our buildings, is a prize example of high Victorian architecture. It was, I understand, originally built to house the Methodist Church. Along in the 1950s the Methodists built a snazzy brick number out on the highway, apparently designed to attract summer visitors, and their old building with its gingerbread-trimmed steeple was sold to the city for use as a library. The county library system had to level the sloping sanctuary floor and to add an unsightly ramp for handicapped access, but much of the original Queen Anne Victorian is intact.