The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery (3 page)

“What do you think? Are the polka dots too much?” She swung into the room, putting a hand on the frame of the open French doors between the living and dining rooms. She pivoted into a sexy pose. She was wearing an extremely skimpy bikini.

She and Darrell saw each other
at the same moment.

All I heard was two startled gasps. Then I was alone in the dining room while Brenda’s feet thudded back up the stairs, and the back door slammed behind Darrell.

“Damn,” I said calmly.

The summer was sure getting interesting.

I yelled out the back door, “I’ll call you when lunch is ready!” Then I followed Brenda up the stairs. I found her in my old bedroom, which she and
Tracy were sharing. Brenda was standing in the corner, her eyes the size of Frisbees, while Tracy lay on the bed, laughing hysterically.

“Brenda, if you wear that bikini at the Warner Pier Beach,” I said, “guys are going to look at you.”

Brenda’s mouth got straight and firm. “Maybe they’d be guys I
wanted
to look at me. Why didn’t you tell me Darrell was down there?”

“I thought you would hear
us talking.”

“He always whispers! That’s one of the creepy things about him.”

Tracy sat up. “What’s with that guy?”

“Darrell? He’s a former client of Joe’s. Joe thinks he’s a good worker.”

“People around town are saying—”

“Tracy!” I deliberately made my voice sharp. “When you asked if you could stay here for a month, what did I tell you?”

Her lips got as tight as Brenda’s. “No gossip.”

“Right. And I’m going to hold you to it. Remember. . .”

“I know, I know.” She went on in a singsong voice. “Large-minded people talk about ideas; ordinary people talk about things; small-minded people talk about other people.”

“Yes,” I said, “and you’re too kind a person to be small-minded.”

Brenda pouted. “Are you going to try to improve my character, too?”

“Nope. When I told your mom you
could come for the summer, I said I was going to be neither a mother nor a chaperone. You’re in charge of your own character.”

I turned toward the stairs. “I’m going to get all the sandwich stuff out, but I have to be at work at one, so I’ll be leaving the dirty dishes for you two. But we’re using paper plates. I’ll call when everything’s on the table.”

I paused at the door. “And Brenda, the
swimming suit looks fine, but before you wear it to Warner Pier Beach you might want to get a bikini wax.”

I plodded downstairs, ready to get out the cheese, lunch meat, and bread. And chocolates for dessert—TenHuis chocolates, which the heat was forcing me to keep in the refrigerator. Aunt Nettie would be horrified. Chocolates should not be refrigerated, but when the truffles were going to melt
into puddles, I didn’t have much choice.

The summer was becoming stranger and stranger. I guess that a ghost in a blue pickup shouldn’t have surprised me; I’d already had enough surprises to last the whole season.

Joe and I had looked forward to having a summer when we could concentrate on each other, on becoming a married couple.

Instead, two things had happened. Good things, in the main,
but they distracted us from each other.

Since I’d come to Warner Pier two years earlier to become business manager for my aunt’s chocolate company, I’d lived with her in the 1904 house on Lake Shore Drive. The house was basically a small Midwestern farmhouse. It had been built by my great-grandfather, a furniture maker in Grand Rapids, who used it as a summer cottage for his family. When my grandfather,
Henry TenHuis, came back from World War II, he’d winterized the cottage to use it as a year-round home. He married my grandmother, built a service station and garage in Warner Pier, and raised my mom and my uncle Phil in the house. He died when my mom was a senior in high school. My grandmother continued to live in the house until she died a few years later, and Uncle Phil and Aunt Nettie
had moved in thirty years ago.

I wasn’t too surprised that Aunt Nettie decided I should have the house. She’d lived there for much of her married life, true, but she always described herself as “a TenHuis in-law.” I was the last actual “TenHuis descendant,” she’d told me. I’d assumed that I’d get the property at some indefinite future time when Aunt Nettie, God forbid, couldn’t live on her own.

Aunt Nettie was a lively and energetic lady who was barely past sixty. She wasn’t even talking about retiring. I had thought of the day when she’d give up her home as far away.

But when Joe and I got married, her wedding present to us was a deed to the property. We were astonished. We weren’t quite so astonished to learn the reason: she was planning to remarry.

For a year Aunt Nettie had been
keeping company with Warner Pier’s police chief, a tall guy who looks like Abraham Lincoln. The single women of Aunt Nettie’s generation considered Hogan Jones the best catch in Warner Pier. He could have taken up with women wealthier—and yes, with women more attractive—than my plump aunt Nettie. But he’d chosen her. I considered their romance a tribute to Aunt Nettie’s disposition and Hogan’s insight
into human nature. I expected them to be very happy.

While Joe and I were in New York on our honeymoon, Aunt Nettie and Hogan slipped away and got married at the Warner County courthouse. Then Aunt Nettie began living at Hogan’s house, and she handed us the TenHuis family property. Joe was able to get out of the lease on his apartment, and it seemed foolish not to move right into the old house,
even though we had to act in a hurry.

Aunt Nettie and Hogan were spending the month of July abroad, first on a barge cruising the rivers of Germany and then visiting Aunt Nettie’s friends in the Netherlands, where she’d spent a year learning to make those fantastic truffles and bonbons that TenHuis Chocolade’s promotional literature describes as “handmade chocolates in the European tradition.”

Aunt Nettie hadn’t really moved out completely when she and Hogan left for Europe, so the house was still full of her furniture. Joe and I put most of our own stuff—including around a hundred wedding presents—in the garage. But basically we had two housefuls of furniture and would until Aunt Nettie and Hogan got back and sorted things out.

Joe decided that—since things were confused anyway—we
might as well remodel. We would put in that upstairs bathroom Aunt Nettie had always intended to add. And while we were at it, we could extend the kitchen to add room for a dishwasher and could push the downstairs bathroom’s wall out to accommodate a stall shower.

Joe loves working with his hands, so my suggestion that we find a contractor was ignored. Joe hired Darrell and started digging holes
for the new foundation. At least he wasn’t putting a basement under the addition.

Then more people who needed room and board began showing up.

Joe and I were getting used to being a married couple in a situation that included a construction project and five houseguests.

Each houseguest had a different schedule for meals and laundry and going to bed and getting up. There were five vehicles—luckily
two of our guests were afoot—trying to share a driveway that will hold three cars only if they’re parked at exactly the right angle. People were raiding the refrigerator. People were wanting to watch different television programs and listen to different radio stations. Plus we had only one bathroom, and that was about to lose one of its walls.

And now Brenda didn’t want Darrell looking at her
in her new bikini.

I had almost decided to run away from home when I heard the clippity-clop of high heels on the stairs. Joe’s aunt Gina was coming down.

I groaned. At least Darrell wasn’t intrusive, and I liked Brenda and Tracy. But Gina seemed to intrude everywhere, and I didn’t like her.

But maybe, I thought, she’d know something about the stranger who had claimed to be Joe’s father. After
all, Gina was his sister.

I
listened as Gina carefully picked her way down our wooden stairs. If she wouldn’t insist on wearing high-heeled shoes, she could walk downstairs without doing that teeter-totter act, I thought angrily. And why did
she have to dye her hair that awful lifeless black? And why did she wear those skinny leggings that made her legs look like sticks, and those big bright tunics that made her body look as round as a beach ball? And why did she pile on that clunky junky jewelry? And why did she call me “hon” when I don’t even like her?

And why did she knock every single drop of Christian charity out of my mind
and spirit?

I’d had a good upbringing mainly because of my Texas grandmother, Rose McKinney, who babysat for me most of my childhood. When I was critical of people, Grandma Rose would always say, “Have a little Christian charity, Lee. Try to understand other people’s problems.”

So before Gina appeared in the dining room doorway I reminded myself that Joe’s aunt had had a lot of problems and
deserved pity, not resentment. I looked at her and accepted the dead black hair, the kelly green tunic, the red beads, the long red earrings, and the glittery cardinal pinned on her shoulder. Then she spoke—“Hi, hon”—and knocked every charitable thought out of my mind.

I hope I kept my feelings out of my voice as I greeted her. “Hi, Gina. Did you finish your book?”

“Yes, I did, hon. You wouldn’t
have time to stop at the library for me this afternoon, would you?”

“I don’t leave the shop until after nine o’clock, but I might be able to do it before I go in.”

“Oh, hon, I don’t want to be a bother.”

But you
are
a bother,
I thought. Out loud I said, “Lunch is nearly ready.”

“Good.” Gina started toward the back hall, where the bathroom is located. “But first I must use the . . .” She frowned.
“Are the facilities in use?”

“Not unless somebody snuck around through the bedroom.”

Gina went past me, and I heard the bathroom door close. I hoped she wouldn’t stay in there teasing that awful hair too long. I was determined to ask her about Joe’s dad’s death. But was the information I might get worth the strain of trying to dig it out of Gina?

I didn’t have the slightest idea what Gina was
doing in my house anyway.

I’d met Gina before Joe and I were married, of course, and she’d brought Joe’s grandmother to our wedding. Gina—short for Regina—lived in a small town in central Michigan, where she ran what was reported to be a successful antique shop. Joe’s ninety-one-year-old grandmother had an apartment in a retirement center in the same town. As her mother’s only surviving child,
Gina was the “designated daughter,” and by all reports, she visited her mother several times weekly, took her on excursions, shopped for her, escorted her to doctor’s appointments, and handled all the other details of caring for an elderly parent. Grandma Ida was not particularly incapacitated, considering her age, but she needed a family member to help her out now and then.

I’d never heard
Gina complain about taking responsibility for her mother. So Gina had her good points, even if she did call me “hon.”

But I couldn’t understand why she was at my house instead of halfway across Michigan running her business and taking care of her mother. A week earlier, Gina had shown up and announced that she wanted to pay us a short visit. When Joe pressed her for a reason, she said she was
getting a divorce—Joe said he thought it was her fifth—and her ex-husband was making things “unpleasant.” She was vague about what “unpleasant” episodes had occurred. Gina denied that her ex had threatened or physically abused her—reasons that would have made it evident why she needed to hide out.

Because hiding out was exactly what Gina was doing. She had stashed her car someplace in Holland,
and she never left the house.

Not that she spent a lot of time with the rest of us. Most of the time she was upstairs, lying on the double bed that took up most of the floor space in our smallest bedroom, reading, while a box fan blew the damp air over her. She had read at least twenty romance novels in the week she’d been a houseguest. She came down only to use the bathroom.

And to eat. Gina
never missed a meal, but she always disappeared back upstairs before it was time to do the dishes.

Brenda and Tracy called Darrell “the creeper,” and Gina “the dinner guest.”

I didn’t feel that I could kick Joe’s aunt out, and I thought Joe should be responsible for quizzing her about why she was at our house. But as I opened a package of braunschweiger, I vowed that Gina wasn’t going to escape
my questions about Joe’s dad. I wanted to understand who the stranger who had come to the door was, and learning about Joe’s dad—even if he’d been dead for nearly thirty years—might give me a clue.

As Gina drifted back into the kitchen, I pounced. “Gina, tell me about Joe’s dad.”

“Andy was my big brother. Ten years older than I was.”