The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (20 page)

A tall guy and a short guy. Lofty and Shorty.

The fellow on the front porch knocked again.

He could knock all night, I decided. There was no way I was opening that door.

O
ur old house was easy to break into. Even when it was locked up, anybody with a rock could get in through one of our casement windows. Plus, at that moment the back door and all the downstairs windows were standing
wide open because of the heat wave.

And some guy I thought was a crook was knocking at the one locked door, and a man I assumed was his pal was heading around the house.

What was I going to do?

I could run out the back.

No, that wouldn’t work. The tall guy was obviously getting in position to cut off my escape that way.

I could run upstairs.

That wouldn’t do a lot of good either. There was
a phone there, true, but I’d have to go through the living room to get to the stairs, and I’d turned on the dining room light, so the living room wasn’t dark. Again, all the curtains and blinds were open. If I went into the living room, one of the guys outside—either the tall one at the back of the house or the short one on the porch—would see me go. They’d know I was trapped up there.

I could
climb out the bedroom window.

No, the windows were open, but I’d have to push the screen off. I knew from experience that those screens needed a good noisy bang before they came out of the frame. The bad guys would hear that and be outside to meet me.

I couldn’t go out the front, out the back, out the side, or upstairs.

I had to go down.

I edged into the back hall. The kitchen light crossed
only one corner of it, and I was able to slip around and get to the door that led to the basement.

The basement might turn out to be as much a trap as the upstairs could be—maybe more. Upstairs I at least could climb out onto the roof and start yelling. But I thought I could sneak into the basement without being seen.

I opened the basement door. Joe had recently gone through the house and oiled
all the hinges, so it didn’t make a sound. I stepped onto the top step and silently closed the door behind myself.

It was dark.

The old TenHuis house has a feature common in houses built around the turn of the twentieth century in our part of the country: a Michigan basement.

I’ve never been able to discover why a Michigan basement is named for our state. Surely they are found in Minnesota,
Indiana, and Wisconsin, too. Are they known as Michigan basements in other states? Or does the owner of a house with a similar feature outside South Bend describe it as “an Indiana basement”?

A Michigan basement has stone or concrete walls, but a sand floor. It’s a far cry from a suburban basement with a paneled recreation room. It’s more like a root cellar. In Texas we have storm cellars, and
the old-fashioned ones are a lot like Michigan basements, except that they’re found outdoors, not under the house.

A Michigan basement may be the scariest place in the world. Aunt Nettie is reasonably neat, but a Michigan basement is used only for storage of nonperishable items and as a haven for spiders and, probably, for mice. Nothing in the world short of two bad guys breaking in upstairs
would have forced me down there barefoot, in the dark, with no flashlight.

By then I was hearing footsteps in the house. Then quiet voices. The intruders didn’t know that there were no secrets in that house. Every movement, every word spoken could be heard upstairs and down. Even in the basement.

The back door guy had apparently let the front door guy in. Their voices came from the living room.

“Where’d she go?”

“I’ll look in the bedroom.”

“She’s probably in the bathroom.”

“Without a light?”

Very shortly one of them was going to go into that back hall and open all four doors that led off of it. And I was frozen halfway down the basement steps. When the door above me opened, I’d be in plain view.

I moved down another step, and as I groped along, my hand closed around a pole. I realized
it was the handle of the mop, which should have been in the kitchen closet. Brenda had mopped the kitchen two nights earlier, and she’d left the mop on the stairs to dry. At the time I’d been annoyed. That wasn’t a good place for a mop, but I never got around to moving it to the right place. Now I gripped it—not as a weapon, but maybe as a distraction.

In another common architectural practice,
the stairs to the second floor of our house are directly above the stairs to the basement. The two sets of steps run parallel, one on top of the other.

I grabbed hold of that mop and turned it around, sponge side up. Then I held it up over my head and aimed it at the ceiling over the door I’d come in. That would be the location of the bottom side of one of the steps that led to the second floor.
I hoped.

Gently I bumped the bottom of the step. It made a small sound.

I wanted the two intruders to think I was sneaking up the stairs.

Immediately, I heard steps going into the living room. “She’s going upstairs!” The guys weren’t even trying to be quiet now. They began thumping up the stairs over my head.

Still clutching the mop, I slid my bare foot down another step. Now that my eyes
were adjusted to the darkness, I could see a bit from the faint light coming in around the door. And I knew where there was a box of matches in that basement. All I had to do was find it without stepping on something sharp or cracking my head on a rafter. Or making noise by knocking something over.

I carefully felt for the next step down, then for another. But I had to hurry. The tall guy and
the short guy wouldn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t upstairs. Then they’d start on the downstairs again, and the basement wouldn’t be far behind.

It seemed an eternity before I stepped onto sand, and I knew I’d reached the bottom. I turned sharply right and put one hand out in front of me. I walked straight ahead until my hand came in contact with bricks. I’d come up against the base
of the chimney.

Now, looking to my right, I could see a blue flicker. The hot-water tank sat on a special little square of concrete, and light from the burner was leaking out underneath it. I knew that on top of that hot-water tank there was a box of matches.

All I had to do to get access to light was reach the hot-water tank without falling over a box of old dishes or some other item my ancestors
had deemed too valuable to throw out but not valuable enough to keep upstairs. And these stored items were all hard, too. Nobody would store old curtains or cotton batting down there with the mice and spiders. No, the boxes held things that would make a loud noise if they were knocked over.

Miraculously, I didn’t fall over any of them getting to the hot-water tank. I picked up the box of matches.
It didn’t feel exactly full. But I could hear the tall guy and the short guy thumping around, so I had to keep moving. I stood the mop up against the wall, pulled a match out, and struck it on the side of the box.

As the match flared, I looked behind the hot-water tank.

Thank God. I’d remembered right. The hole in the foundation, covered with a sheet of plywood, was large enough for me to crawl
through.

The hole started about three feet off the basement floor and was part of our renovation project. It led to the area Joe and Darrell had dug out for the addition to the bathroom and kitchen. The addition would not have a basement, but needed a deep area for plumbing. Eventually the hole would link that area to the basement itself, where the furnace and hot-water heater were. The plywood
was a halfhearted effort at keeping chipmunks and other critters outside while the building project was going on.

Now, if Joe and Darrell just hadn’t screwed the plywood in . . . I shoved on the plywood. It gave easily. Apparently they’d simply leaned it up against the wall from the other side.

It wasn’t the easiest thing I ever did, but I managed to push the plywood far enough aside to get
my fingers around it, and then to lay it flat. Climbing into the hole was faster. The hardest part was putting the plywood back up so that my escape hatch wouldn’t be obvious to the bad guys when they explored the basement.

I’m sure I made noise. But by now the intruders were thundering through the house, making so much noise of their own that I didn’t worry about it.

The next part of the process
was to crawl out into the yard, which was a snap, since the subfloor for the bathroom addition wasn’t in yet. The bad guys had turned on every light in the house as they searched for me, so light was flooding out the windows and illuminating the yard.

In only a few seconds I was outside, standing with my back to the wall of the house. That wasn’t a safe spot. After they were sure I wasn’t inside,
the two searchers would start looking outside. I paused a moment, deciding which way to run.

And I heard one of the guys say, “I’m going to bust Haney with an antique baseball bat over this. It was a waste of time from the beginning.”

“But she saw us.”

“So what? She can’t ID us. We should have let it go.”

I guess
go
was the word I’d been waiting for. I didn’t wait to hear more. I took off
for the sandy lane that led to Lake Shore Drive. I ran through the beach grass in our yard—not exactly a lawn—and when I got to the sand I turned toward Lake Shore Drive. I wasn’t sure where I was headed, but I knew I wanted to be where there were people—people I could trust.

I kept running, but I sure would have liked to have had a pair of shoes.

I barely paused when I got to the road. Which
way? Who would be home? And could I trust them? Those were two important questions.

Ahead of me I saw a light through the trees. It was coming from Double Diamond.

The Double Diamond driveway was dark and twisty, but if a light was on, it probably meant there was someone at the house. Even if it were only Garnet’s uncle Alex, he ought to have a phone with 911 on its number pad, and I could be
pretty sure he wasn’t in with the thieves. After all, they’d robbed
him
.

I ran across the road—it’s amazing how much gravel travels onto a blacktop road from the shoulder—and started down the drive. I was fervently wishing for the flashlight Joe and I had used on Saturday night. Then I realized I was still holding the box of matches.

They weren’t a lot of help, since they dazzled my eyes, but
they gave me moral courage, I guess. I stumbled on, lighting one only when desperate, until I came to the flagstone walk that led to the bungalow’s porch. I yelled. “Help! Mr. Gold! It’s Lee Woodyard!”

I made my way toward the porch, calling out again every few steps. I was conscious of movement behind the living room windows, and before I got to the door the porch light came on. Then the door
opened. Alex Gold stood in the door.

“Mrs. Woodyard?”

“Phone! I need to call the police!”

He was still standing in the door, but I shoved him aside and stumbled into the cottage, blurting out my story of intruders in the house.

I will say Uncle Alex reacted quickly, dashing to a phone on a desk in the corner of the living room. He called 911, and I sank into a chair and massaged my feet.

I groaned. My grandmother told me that as a child in Texas she went barefoot until her feet were one big callus. She swore she could walk on gravel and not flinch. Right at that moment I would have given anything to have feet that tough. Alex Gold was wearing a neat pair of house slippers, and I could see a pair of rubber flip-flops near the front door. I lusted after both pairs of shoes.

Uncle
Alex was talking to the 911 operator. “Yes, we’ll hold the line until they come. Do you want to talk to Mrs. Woodyard?” He listened; then held the phone out toward me. “The dispatcher has sent a car, but she wants to make sure there is no one in the house but the intruders.”

The girls!

The knowledge hit me like a knife in the back. Brenda and Tracy had planned to come home as soon as they cruised
by someplace for a Coke. They might be pulling into our drive any minute.

“Oh, no!” I jumped to my feet. “The girls were coming home right away! The bad guys might still be there! I have to stop them!”

I didn’t ask permission to borrow Alex’s flip-flops. I simply jammed my feet into them and ran out the front door.

I stumbled my way back down that dark drive. I was terrified. I might be only
their landlady, not their chaperone, but the thought of those girls driving up and surprising the two robbers . . .

The prospect of having to tell my stepmother and Tracy’s parents that their daughters had been shot dead turned me into an Olympic runner.

At least, I suppose I ran. I don’t remember how I got down that drive. I may have swum, crawled, or done cartwheels. I just knew I had to head
Brenda and Tracy off. I could not let them drive up to the house and meet those two bad guys.