by JoAnna Carl
“Yeah. She does it every night.”
“She has more guts than I do.”
“Maybe she floats down. I’ve always thought she looks like a helium balloon bobbing around on a string. One of those funny character balloons with acrylic hair on top and accordion-pleated legs and arms dangling down.”
Mike laughed. “Pretty good description. Why does everybody dislike her so much?”
“She’s professionally officious and personally snoopy. But I guess I’d better find her. Do you want to wait in the break room?”
“Anything to be with you. I’ll brave the Hellhole and come along.”
I moved toward the stairs. “You’re the guy with the medals. Pretend there’s a bad guy to be arrested down there. Come on. I’ll hold your hand.”
“Thanks, but I’ll use both hands to hang onto this railing. It feels firmer than it looks.”
Mike followed me, and we edged down the winding black metal stairs, each with a strip of industrial yellow painted along its edge.
“Whew!” Mike said when we were standing on the concrete floor. He looked back up the stairs. “What a place to take a header!”
“Martina goes down it in high heels.”
“She must be part acrobat.”
“Yeah, and the rest is witch with a capital B. I’m not looking forward to disturbing her rest. She’ll pay me back with snide remarks for a week.”
We started down a pathway outlined with yellow paint. It wandered through an underground Stonehenge formed by giant rolls of paper.
And a noise came from behind the rolls.
It was a crumpling noise, as if someone had stepped on a piece of paper.
Both our heads snapped toward the sound, and we both stopped in mid-step. I couldn’t see anything except solid walls formed by rolls of newsprint.
“You said nobody’s down here this time of the night,” Mike said.
“The pressmen are the only ones who work in the basement during the evening, and we just left the whole crew upstairs on dinner break.”
“Maybe one of them wasn’t hungry.”
“That could be,” I said. “I don’t know how many are on the crew, so I guess somebody could have stayed behind. That might explain the movement you saw.”
Having assured ourselves that the noise hadn’t been anything important, we walked on down our yellow-edged path.
“This paint always makes me think of the road to Oz,” I said. “But it winds up at the witch’s castle, not the Emerald City. I guess the yellow is an OSHA requirement. The forklift zips back and forth through here during the day.”
The Gazette Building covers a square block, and the Hellhole is a block long and half a block wide. It’s filled with rolls of paper in a variety of sizes—from full rolls, which are nearly as tall as I am and are a whole lot bigger around, down to quarter rolls, the ones the pressmen call “dinks,” which are about the size of coffee tables.
An ax murderer could squat down and hide behind one of the half rolls. A dozen full rolls, lined up, could hide a band of terrorists. And twenty rolls, stacked ten on top of ten, could hide a band of terrorists riding in an armored personnel carrier. Even a dink could hide a rattlesnake or a rabid rat.
Quit being silly, I ordered myself. I didn’t want Mike to see that the Hellhole made me jumpy, so I began to talk.
“Martina is simply the nosiest person I’ve ever known,” I said. “Once she cornered me in the break room and told me she wanted to know all about you and about our ‘hopes, plans, and dreams.’ “
Mike laughed. “I’d like to know about those, too.”
“Or, like that first time you and I went to Dallas. I didn’t tell a lot of people we were going, but Martina got wind of it. She followed me into the ladies’ room and quizzed me like the D.A. going after a third-strike-and-you’re-out criminal. Had you gone on the trip, too? Where had we stayed? Did we have a suite or a double? Did the room have a king-size bed? She wanted to know all the details—and I don’t mean about the Dallas Museum of Art.”
“What made her so curious?”
“She wanted me to know that she knew that we were sleeping together. It gives her some perverted sense of power to know other people’s private business.”
Mike’s voice sounded suspicious. “Just what did you tell her?”
“Oh, I was sweet as sweet. And I told her all about the Treasures of the Tsars exhibit. Believe me, I didn’t tell her about the hotel, or the suite, or exactly what happened to the chocolates on the pillow.”
Mike leaned close and whispered in my ear. “I’ll never forget those chocolates.”
“You nut!” I laughed, but I could hear a tremble in the sound. I had heard another unidentifiable noise.
I walked on quickly, tugging Mike’s hand. When he flexed his fingers, I realized I was clutching him the way he had clutched the metal railing at the top of the stairs. I tried to relax my grip before I sprained his fist.
No one was there, I told myself. No ax murderer, no band of terrorists. Not even a rabid dog. Only a noise. Noises happen. Buildings shift. Or they do get mice. Mice are more afraid of people than people are of mice. The noise had been nothing. It had no importance. It was my imagination. And we had nearly reached the other end of the Hellhole without meeting disaster.
The path among the monoliths turned, and we neared the back hall. “The press is around this next corner,” I said. “You’ll have to come down here sometime when it’s rolling. It’s an interesting sight.”
But as we turned, sight was not the sense that we used. Smell came into play. We both gasped and covered our noses.
“Dang!” I said. “What is that odor?”
“Paint thinner?” Mike said. “Kerosene?”
“Ooh!” I said. “I’ve smelled it before. It’s some chemical they use on the press, but it’s never been that strong.”
“Why did it hit us as we came around that corner?”
“I don’t know. But let’s get out of here before we suffocate!”
Mike ignored my remark. He pointed ahead, down a short passageway, toward a box lying on its side in the middle of the floor, beside a pile of red industrial rags.
“Those rags must be where the fumes are coming from,” he said. “What’s back there?”
The rags were heaped up in front of a door.
I gasped, and this time it wasn’t the fumes. “That’s the door to the ladies’ lounge!” I said. “Martina’s in there!”
Read on for an excerpt from JoAnna Carl’s latest Chocoholic mystery
THE CHOCOLATE BOOK BANDIT
Available now from New American Library
Every native-born citizen of Warner Pier, Michigan, can diagram sentences. At least those over the age of twenty.
This is due to the untiring efforts of the two Miss Ann Vanderklomps—aunt and niece—who between them taught English at Warner Pier High School over a period of sixty years. As a result of their work, everybody—everybody—who went to WPHS during that time period knows what it is to parse and how to do it.
This ability is not confined to those who have a literary bent. It also is held by people such as Tony Herrera, who has worked as a machinist ever since he finished high school, and whom I’ve never seen read a book. Tony has been one of my husband’s best friends since their days on the WPHS wrestling team. Then around two years ago Tony’s dad married my mother-in-law, so he and Joe—my husband—are now officially brothers.
Tony is intelligent, with a wonderful personality and top– notch mechanical skills, but when it comes to books, he waits for the movie version.
I was thinking this as Tony stood in the center of our living room. He held his nose, giving his voice a nasal tone, and at the same time he made that voice deep and dramatic. “The misplaced phrase is a bugaboo of the English language,” he said. �
��Be ever on guard against it. Why, only last week there was a reference in the newspaper—the newspaper!—to a dog who—and I quote—‘returned to the inn where he and his master had been staying before going cross-country skiing.’”
Tony rolled his eyes dramatically and adjusted imaginary bra straps. Then he picked up his bottle of Labatt Blue beer and pretended to use a straw to drink from it, slurping loudly. His audience—all five of us—laughed loudly.
“That prepositional phrase is completely misplaced,” Tony said, putting the beer down. “It should have been at the beginning of the sentence. That would make it clear”—he shook his right forefinger, but pinched his nose with his left hand—“it was the dog, not his master, who went cross-country skiing.”
We all continued laughing as Tony released his grip on his nose. He spoke in his normal baritone. “Lee, you’re gonna love getting to know Miss Vanderklomp.” Then he dropped back into his seat on our couch and took a normal swig of Labatt Blue. “And don’t let that water bottle she carries everywhere fool you. It’s not water. It’s Pepsi. She’d kill a kid who brought a soda to class, but she’s never without her Pepsi.”
The six of us, all early thirty-ish, were having dinner at our house on a late September evening. Three of the group—Joe, Tony, and Tony’s wife Lindy—had grown up in this small Lake Michigan resort town and were Warner Pier High School grads. Two others, Maggie and Ken McNutt, had moved to Warner Pier five years earlier and both taught at that high school. I’m Lee Woodyard, and I came to Warner Pier from my native Texas to become business manager for TenHuis Chocolade, the luxury chocolate shop my aunt Nettie owns.
All six of us are firmly entrenched in the life of our little town and Lindy, Tony, Joe, and I have a complicated series of interconnected relationships. Mike Herrera, Tony’s dad and Joe’s step-father, owns two Warner Pier restaurants, plus a catering service, and has served as mayor of Warner Pier (Pop: 2,500) for three terms. Not only have Joe and Tony been pals since high school, but Lindy and I worked in the retail shop at TenHuis Chocolade when we were both sixteen. Several years ago Tony’s dad, Mayor Mike, hired Joe as city attorney. Then Joe’s mom married Mike, and Joe quit his city job to avoid any appearance of nepotism. And Lindy works for her father-in-law’s company, managing one of his restaurants and running the catering operation.
When you throw in the fact that my aunt—who as owner of TenHuis Chocolade is my boss—married the Warner Pier police chief—well, a normal mind would be boggled. If you drew a diagram of our relationships, it would look like a genealogy of some European royal family in which cousins routinely marry cousins.
Maggie and Ken were the only normal people present.
Tony’s imitation of the fabled Miss Vanderklomp had been inspired by my mentioning that I’d been asked to serve on the Warner Pier library board. Miss Vanderklomp was active with that group.
“Aw, c’mon,” I said. “I’ve never actually met her but I’m sure Miss Vanderklomp can’t be that bad. She’s funny-looking, true, since she does her hair like a Dutch boy, and she’s got that husky Dutch-boy build. She can’t help looking as if she’s ready to plug a finger in a dike.” “It’s not anything to do with Miss Vanderklomp’s appearance,” Tony said. “She’s just a character. Unforgetable. And unstoppable. You’ll learn! Once she tells the board what the library is supposed to do, you might as well vote yea. She’s going to get her own way.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “That’s the way she taught English, and that’s the way she runs the library board.”
“She can’t run the board,” I said. “She’s not even a member. She doesn’t have a vote.”
At that point I heard the timer go off in the kitchen. I stood up. “Dinner is ready. Joe, you see if anybody needs a drink refill, and I’ll get the chicken Tetrazzini.”
Lindy followed me into the kitchen. “Anyway, Lee, you’re going on the library board at an interesting time.”
“Because of the new building, you mean?”
“Yes, and the new director. I met him Tuesday, and I don’t think he’s going to kowtow to Miss Vanderklomp and her buddies on the board. You may be in a fight over the selection of books pretty quick.”
“A fight? Over the books? I don’t plan on that. When they ask an accountant to join a board, they usually want somebody to look at the finances. Look, Lindy, I just went off the Chamber of Commerce board, so I said I’d think about accepting a new chore. The only complication is that I also got asked to join the tourism committee at the Chamber, and I don’t want to take two new jobs at the same time. But you know the drill. If you’re going to live in a town like Warner Pier, you have to do what you can to keep the community functioning.”
“True. We’re not large enough to have a village idiot. . . .” Lindy let her voice trail off, and I finished her sentence.
“So we all have to take turns.”
We both grinned at the old joke. I took the chicken Tetrazzini out of the oven. Lindy grabbed the beet salad, and we served up dinner. I forgot about Lindy’s warning.
Or maybe I didn’t. Something I can’t explain made me delay accepting the appointment to the library board. I decided I’d attend a meeting before I agreed to join the body.
Finding a body? That never crossed my mind.
The library board meetings were held at seven o’clock on the second Monday of the month in the meeting room at the library. The October meeting was to be the final one held in the “old” library. And believe me, “old” was an accurate word for that building.
In fact, the library building was one of the oldest in Warner Pier, and Warner Pier was founded in the 1840s. The structure’s history had been traced in a recent article in The Warner Pier Weekly Gazette, and the information was fresh in my mind.
The library was housed in a two-story frame building that originally had held a store downstairs and living quarters for the store’s owner upstairs. A man named Andreas Vanderklomp built the building, and generations of Vanderklomps ran the store and lived above it.
But the Vanderklomps had a tradition that was more than commercial. From the earliest days, according to the article, at least one daughter in each generation had become a teacher.
The early-day Miss Vanderklomps had taught in one-room schoolhouses, of course. After Warner Pier opened a high school, the Miss Vanderklomps had taught there. Miss Emily Vanderklomp had taught mathematics beginning in 1928. And in 1945, the first Miss Ann Vanderklomp had been hired to teach English. In 1975 she had been joined by a niece, another Miss Ann Vanderklomp, who also taught English. For ten years they overlapped, and any confusion was avoided by the use of initials. The older Miss Vanderklomp was “N. Ann Vanderklomp,” and the younger one—the one who now haunted the library board—was “G. Ann Vanderklomp.”
Around about 1950, the Vanderklomp store closed. In fact, I think that the Miss Vanderklomp Tony had parodied is today the last member of the family living in Warner Pier. And when the store closed, the owners—the brother of Miss N. Ann and the parents of Miss G. Ann—donated the building to the city for use as a library. They also donated the family’s book collection, and when browsing the shelves of the Warner Pier Public Library today it’s still possible to run across a 1944 Book of the Month Club selection with a Vanderklomp bookplate inside the front cover.
Gradually the old building deteriorated. Today the upstairs floor sags, and the whole building needs to be rewired. Just after I moved to Warner Pier four years ago, a bond election approved construction of a new library. That building, near Warner Pier High School, was now nearly completed and was scheduled to open in a month. As Lindy had mentioned, the library also had a new director, a man named Henry Cassidy. His nickname, or so I’d read in the Gazette, was “Butch,” and he was forty-two. I hadn’t met him yet.
Like all meetings of city committees, the library board meetings are open to the public unless certain subjects ar
e being discussed. So I trailed into the library about ten to seven on the appointed day without a specific invitation. The library closes at seven on Mondays, so the few patrons left were lining up to check out their selections. A plump, middle-aged woman was staffing the front desk—her name plate read Betty Blake, Assistant Librarian—and she stopped checking out books long enough to direct me to the meeting and tell me to feel free to look around.
Following her instructions, I walked a long way down a narrow passage between towering shelves; the library is one of those buildings that seem to go on forever. I passed the broad public stairs that lead to the second floor, where the reference and non-fiction sections are. A narrower set of stairs, or so I’d been told, was available at the back of the building. I went past the rolling ladders along the walls, now tied down for safety reasons, and I identified the inconspicuous door—marked “Staff Only”—that led to the workroom. I looked inside and found a typical cluttered space. Next came another door. Looking inside, I discovered a tiny hall with access to the back door leading to the alley and to the back stairs leading up, as well as to the basement stairs going down.
Near that door was a little room with a beat-up metal table in the middle. A dozen folding chairs with lightly padded seats were lined up along the walls. I’d found the meeting room.
When I entered the tiny room, one person was already there: Dr. Albert Cornwall, a retired history professor I had met a few times. Dr. Cornwall’s friends called him Corny. I called him Dr. Cornwall.
Dr. Cornwall was sitting in the corner, with his chair tipped back against the wall in a pose that looked quite precarious. I was tempted to clap my hands, whistle, or make some other startling noise, to see if he’d fall over. Of course, I resisted that impulse. If Dr. Cornwall fell over, he’d probably break a hip. I guessed his age at early 80s; maybe late 80s.
Dr. Cornwall was dozing. Dr. Cornwall was often dozing these days.
I picked up an agenda from a stack at the end of the meeting table and sat down quietly, since I didn’t want to be the one who disturbed him. I’d barely seated myself when we were joined by Rhonda Ringer-Riley, the board chair. Mrs. Ringer-Riley was sixty-ish, with blond hair in one of the tones considered suitable for older ladies. She wore a coordinated sportswear outfit, and she carried a large flowered tote bag.
