The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (13 page)

I ran down myself. “Gina!”

Still no answer.

Quickly I looked through the house. There aren’t that many rooms. Living room, dining room, kitchen, downstairs bedroom, back hall, bathroom. I
looked in all of them. I even went downstairs to our Michigan basement—a cellar with concrete walls and a sand floor.

Gina wasn’t anywhere.

I was absolutely amazed.

For a week Gina had kept to the house, refusing to leave or even to talk on the phone. She had done nothing but lie on her bed reading romance novels. She had barely appeared for meals and had hidden if anyone came to the door.

And now she had not only made some phone calls; she had even left the house.

Where the heck had she gone?

I
was so amazed by Gina’s disappearance that I almost called the cops. Then I imagined how stupid I’d sound.

I wanted to have a serious talk with my houseguest, I’d tell them, but when I looked for her I discovered
she’d gone out for a walk.

Big whoop.

That was the reason people came to Warner Pier, after all. They wanted to get out in the fresh air and go to the beach and look at the beautiful scenery. Just because Gina hadn’t done that for the first week of her visit didn’t mean she wouldn’t ever do it.

So I didn’t call for help. I made my bed, then dressed in denim shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes,
telling myself that Gina would reappear momentarily. But when I came out of the bedroom, Gina hadn’t come back. So I went outside to look for her.

I circled the house, calling her name every now and then. Not too loudly. I didn’t want to be hollering all over the neighborhood. Gina might still be hiding out, even though she’d gone outside. Maybe Gina had come down with an acute case of cabin
fever. I knew I would have been climbing the walls if I’d been in one room as much as she had.

The ground was still damp from the rain in the night. When I reached our driveway, I could see clear footprints in the sandy surface. I decided to see if they told me anything. I felt silly looking at the ground like some kind of frontier tracker, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

There
were plenty of tracks to look at.

The girls had stomped around in their tennis shoes as they got into Brenda’s car to go to work. Darrell’s steel-toed boots were easy to spot; they led to his camper. Okay, I admit it—I tried the door of the camper. I would have loved a peek inside, but it was locked.

Then there were tracks of two sets of men’s tennis shoes, one slightly larger than the other.
I assumed one was Joe and the other was Pete, especially after I noted that the slightly larger shoes stopped where Pete’s SUV had been parked, and the shorter shoes went off down the back drive toward the Baileys’ house, where Joe and I had both been parking, since our own drive was crammed full. Darrell’s boots followed along, occasionally stepping on top of Joe’s tennies, so I could tell he’d
been walking behind.

I’d noticed earlier that Harold Glick wore crepe-soled shoes, so his tracks were easy to spot. Of course, I couldn’t miss Alice’s pawprints, and she was always right beside him. Besides, I knew they’d walked up the drive and around to our back door earlier.

It was in the drive that I found the first evidence of where Gina had gone—the prints of a high-heeled shoe.

I followed
the tracks for ten or twelve feet. Gina had been going down the back drive, toward the Baileys’ house. Once or twice she’d stepped on top of Joe’s tracks.

Then her tracks changed dramatically. Abruptly, instead of high-heeled shoes tripping along, there were the prints of bare feet. Then those disappeared.

I stopped and stared. I could understand Gina kicking her shoes off; they were probably
getting sand in them. But the barefoot tracks stopped right in the middle of the drive. They simply evaporated. Had Gina been yanked up by a balloon? Picked up by a helicopter? Snagged by a noose and thrown into the top of a tree?

I even looked up suspiciously. Right at that spot, tall maples hung over the road. I suppose Gina could have been pulled straight up by some sort of apparatus, but
I saw no sign of it. I shook myself. I was getting silly. So I looked at the ground again. I saw some pits in the surface of the drive. I knelt and looked at them closely.

Then I saw that the impressions of toes edged the pits. The “pits” I’d seen had been the balls of Gina’s feet. She’d been walking along on tiptoe.

“Tiptoeing? Gina was tiptoeing?” I was so amazed that I think I spoke aloud.

However she was traveling, Gina had still been headed toward the Baileys’ house. Feeling like some sort of big game hunter, I kept following her tracks. I followed them until the tiptoe prints reached the Baileys’ carport.

And that was the end. The Baileys’ carport had a concrete floor. I found a few dustings of sand, but if Gina had tiptoed into the carport, all evidence of her had disappeared.

“Gina?” I said her name aloud, but there was no response.

The Baileys’ house—a nondescript 1950s structure—was empty for the moment, since Charlie and Mary Bailey were in California. Which was why Joe and I were able to use their drive for extra parking.

But Gina seemed to have tiptoed into their carport and disappeared from our dimension. And she’d done it in less than the ten or fifteen minutes
I took to dry my hair, put on a robe, and go up to her room.

I looked around the carport. There was simply no place for Gina to hide. No closets, no toolshed, no big bushes. The biggest thing in the carport was a bushel basket I knew held gardening paraphernalia—ragged gloves, a rusty trowel, some worn flip-flops, an old piece of foam Charlie knelt on when he weeded the flower beds, and other
stuff. I ignored that and walked around the house. Gina wasn’t behind it. I tried the doors. They were all locked.

Joe and I had a key, since we were the neighbors designated to keep an eye on the place. Should I get it and look inside?

But if Gina were hiding inside—and I had no idea how she could have gotten in without leaving some sign, such as a broken window or a jimmied lock—she must have
seen me wandering around in the yard. She surely would have come to the door and waved at me.

I walked south on the drive that led from the Baileys’ house to Eighty-eighth Street. That street ran east-to-west. It was surfaced with gravel, and it intersected with Lake Shore Drive about an eighth of a mile south of our drive. Lake Shore Drive, Eighty-eighth Street, the Baileys’ drive, and our drive
formed a rough square.

There were no more of Gina’s footprints—bare, high-heeled, tiptoe, or otherwise—on that end of the drive. The only neighbors who seemed to have walked along there were Harold and Alice. For a moment I considered going by Harold’s house and asking him if he’d seen Gina. But Gina had always fled upstairs if Harold came by; I didn’t like the idea of letting him know anything
about her.

I reached Eighty-eighth Street, still searching for tracks like a frontier hunter. Of course, Eighty-eighth was a public street and led to several houses and a small subdivision east of us, so there was more traffic on it. Besides, the gravel surface wouldn’t show the tracks of anything lighter than a loaded dump truck. I walked on to Lake Shore Drive, which is paved with asphalt.
I saw no sign of Gina. I checked for tracks in the damp earth along the edge of the blacktop—staying clear of the occasional passing car—until I reached our drive. The only tracks I saw were a few wide, flat ones, the kind instantly recognizable as made by beach sandals. I didn’t think Brenda even owned a pair of those; plus these particular ones must have belonged to a tall man with big feet. I wrote
them off as belonging to some beachgoer.

I got back to the house without finding another hint of what had happened to Gina.

With a sort of desperation, I called her name again as I came in the door. No answer. A quick check, upstairs and down, confirmed that she had not returned while I was roaming around looking for her.

By now my stomach was in a knot. Where had she gone? What had happened
to her?

The situation might not require the police, but I decided it was definitely odd enough for a call to Joe.

His cell phone rang several times before he answered, and then his words were terse. Or his word was terse.

“Yes.”

“Joe?”

“I’ll call you back.” He broke the connection.

I made some guttural sound that signified frustration. “How can you hang up?” I asked the phone. “Gina is
your
aunt, not mine!”

Then I reminded myself that Joe was out in a boat, though I hadn’t heard the motor. He might be facing some serious situation—bailing madly because there was a hole in the bottom maybe, or on a collision course with a big yacht.

“He’d better be facing a life-or-death situation,” I said aloud. “If he isn’t now, he will be when he gets home.”

I debated calling him back. But
then I had another idea. I went to the desk in the corner of the bedroom and dug around until I found a scrap of paper. “Aha!” I held it up.

Pete’s cell,
the scrap of paper read. Some scrawled numbers followed.

Since Pete seemed to know so much more about what was going on in my house than I did, I’d call him.

He answered on the second ring, and at first he sounded as terse as Joe had. But
he let me tell him why I’d called.

I was feeling silly by the time I came to the end of my story. “So she might have simply gone out for a walk,” I said lamely. “I may be panicking over nothing.”

“I don’t think so,” Pete said. “I’ll come help look for her.”

I felt relieved at his answer. Unfortunately, he’d hung up without telling me where he was, so I had no idea how long it would take for
him to get to the house. I was quite excited when a car drove in from Lake Shore Drive about ten minutes after I’d hung up, and I felt quite let down when Brenda and Tracy got out of it.

“Hey, Lee,” Tracy said. “We’re both broke. Do you mind if we fix ourselves a sandwich?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “You didn’t see Gina walking down Lake Shore Drive, did you?”

Both girls popped their eyes, and Brenda
yelled in astonishment, “Gina went out?”

I shushed them quickly and sent them to the kitchen to make their own sandwiches. My stomach was so full of knots that I couldn’t consider eating. Besides, it was only eleven thirty a.m. I stood on the front porch watching for Pete. But he didn’t come.

It began to drizzle rain again. I was almost glad. If Gina was simply out walking around, surely she’d
head for the house when she began to get wet. But she didn’t show up.

I tried calling Joe again. He’d turned his phone off. Or maybe he’d dropped it in the lake. Or maybe he’d fallen in himself.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went back out on the front porch and stood there looking out into the drizzle, sweating and wringing my hands.

Just then Darrell came walking down the drive,
coming from the direction of the Baileys’ house.

Darrell had left with Joe a couple of hours earlier. If he was back, then Joe was back. A sense of relief flooded me.

“Joe!” I passed Darrell without a nod and ran up the drive toward the Baileys’ house. Joe and Darrell had apparently come in the back way and parked over there.

Joe’s blue truck was parked in the Baileys’ drive, but there was
no sign of Joe himself.

For a minute I couldn’t figure it out; if Darrell was there, where was Joe? Then I realized that Joe must have sent Darrell home in the truck and had himself stayed with the boat. But why?

I could ask Darrell. I turned around and started back down the sandy lane to our house. And now I thought about Gina’s tracks. Had I ruined them in my headlong dash to the Baileys’?
Had the drizzle destroyed them?

No, I found the tiptoe tracks still visible. But there were new marks beside them. Blunt semicircles had been dug in. What were they? For a moment I stared blankly. Then I looked at my own shoe. The blunt semicircles matched the toes of my shoes. But where was the rest of the track? Why had only the toes made a mark?

It was because I’d been running.

I compared
my tracks to Gina’s. They were nothing alike, of course. Hers were from bare feet, and I’d been wearing tennis shoes. The single similarity was that only the toes had made marks.

“Oh, lordy!” I said. “Gina wasn’t tiptoeing! She was running!”

What could have happened to make Gina not only leave our house, but run down the drive toward the neighbor’s carport?

I definitely needed to tell Joe about
this. And I wanted him to see those tracks.

I whirled and ran back to the Baileys’. It took me only a moment to get a tarp from the back of Joe’s truck. I spread it over the damp sand, covering the patch of ground that held Gina’s tracks. Then I went to our front door, opened it, and yelled at Brenda and Tracy, “Come out here on the porch and eat your sandwiches, please!”