The Chocolate Book Bandit

by JoAnna Carl

  But I sure did wonder what was in that basement. Miss Vanderklomp had already come by my office to quiz me about getting in there. Now she had apparently made a frontal attack on the underground section of the library, and Butch had barely stopped her from tearing off the crime-scene tape and invading the area.

  What was down there?

  As we filed in I realized that Carol had rejoined us, and Rhonda had also arrived. We all took our seats like ladies and gentlemen, and Rhonda called the meeting to order. The only new agenda item, she said, was to review the effect the investigation into Abigail Montgomery’s death would have on the library operations. She brought up two or three items the board had failed to consider on Monday, when the meeting ended rather dramatically.

  Throughout the meeting I was self-consciously aware of Hogan’s request that I watch how everyone interacted. I watched them all suspiciously. And I didn’t notice a thing out of the ordinary.

  I was relieved when Rhonda called on Butch for a report on the current situation at the library.

  The investigation was having very little effect on actual operations, Butch said. “The library remained closed yesterday, but we opened on schedule this morning. Of course, we’ve had a busy day today. I believe Betty has issued a dozen new cards.”

  “The common garden-variety sensation seeker,” Cornwall said.

  Butch nodded. “I’m sure the curiosity effect will wear off soon. I’m also sure everyone here has been interviewed by the investigators.”

  Carol gave an angry sniff. “I certainly knew nothing to tell them. And I owe Corny, Gwen, and Lee an apology. I shouldn’t have lost my temper when I first came in.”

  The three of us made “never mind” motions. Gwen was the only one who spoke. “We’re all in an emotional uproar,” she said. “I didn’t like that detective upsetting my kids.”

  “I’m sure we were all cooperative,” Rhonda said soothingly.

  “I haven’t talked to the investigators,” Miss Vanderklomp said. “And I don’t intend to do so.”

  “I’m afraid you must, if they request an interview,” Rhonda said. “After all, to them we’re all witnesses.”

  “I am not a witness! I saw nothing. I didn’t even speak to Abigail Monday.”

  “But, Miss Vanderklomp, you and Abigail and I met on the front steps. We came in together.”

  “That’s not speaking. That’s just greeting each other. We didn’t discuss anything.”

  I decided to jump in. “Did Mrs. Montgomery seem normal when you met her? I mean, she wasn’t angry or preoccupied or anything?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “That’s the sort of thing the detectives need to know,” I said. “If she was calm, fine. But if she’d been upset or angry—”

  “I didn’t know her well enough to read her moods by the way she said ‘hello,’” Miss Vanderklomp said. She threw her head back and looked down her nose at me.

  “I am not a witness,” she said, “and I am definitely not talking to any detectives. You, Mrs. Woodyard, were the person who declared Mrs. Montgomery dead. You remained with her body until the emergency technicians came. You are the one they should question.”

  She made her mouth into a prim little line and gave a firm nod.

  I had definitely been put in my place. In fact, the whole board was in its place. And we all accepted our chastisement meekly.

  “Is that all the board’s business?” Miss Vanderklomp asked.

  Rhonda rolled up her knitting. “I will mention that I talked to the funeral home about services for Abigail.”

  “Oh yes,” Miss Vanderklomp said. “We should sit in a group.”

  “That won’t be possible. The services are to be private.”

  Miss Vanderklomp frowned in a disapproving manner. But she left with no further comment.

  But as soon as she was out of the room, Mr. Cornwall gave a rich chuckle. “What a disappointment for Ann,” he said. “There’s nothing she likes better than a juicy funeral.”

  And with that comment he followed her out the door.

  Gwen spoke. “Totally wacko,” she said. “All of them.”

  I was growing to like Gwen more all the time.

  Carol gathered her papers. “Since there’s no funeral, I guess we ought to go by the house.”

  “It sounds as if the family wants as little attention as possible,” I said. “You can sign the book at the funeral home, even if there’s no visitation. Or a handwritten note is always proper. And if that remark sounded incredibly prissy, it’s because when I was sixteen somebody made me take an etiquette class at the YWCA.”

  Gwen chuckled. “Your comment may have been prissy, but the recommendation is good. I think a short note to Timothy Hart will fulfill any obligation I have.”

  Carol, Gwen, and I all left, and I went straight to Aunt Nettie. Not for comfort, but for advice. After all, I’m only an adopted citizen of Warner Pier. I needed to consult her about local funeral etiquette. Joe and I knew Tim pretty well. Was a note enough? Should we go to see him? Or was it better to let the family have its privacy?

  I was a bit surprised when she came out in favor of a visit to Tim’s home.

  “Considering your rather close acquaintance with Tim,” she said, “you probably should drop by.”

  “Oh, dear. Should I take food?”

  “I don’t think you need to cook anything. I’ll go with you, and we’ll take a box of chocolates. Is now a good time? I need to finish enrobing.”

  “Enrobing” always sounds to me as if the chocolatier is dressing up for a ball. Actually, the word describes giving bonbons, and sometimes truffles, a chocolate shower bath. Chocolate makers have special machines to do this.

  The first step in making a bonbon is forming a shell, a hard chocolate case of the desired size and shape. These are made in utensils that look a bit like ice-cube trays. Melted chocolate is poured into them, then poured out, so that only the walls and floors are covered.

  These shells are filled with fondant in the desired flavor. (My favorite is a soft, gooey Dutch caramel. It has almost no resemblance to those chewy caramels that come wrapped in cellophane.) A solid chocolate lid then is used to close each shell. Ah, but the bonbon is upside down at that point. So after the lid has cooled and become solid, the chocolate maker flips it over, places it on a conveyer belt, then runs it through the enrober. The bonbon moves along a conveyer belt while melted chocolate—either white, milk, or dark—showers gently over it.

  Excess chocolate falls into a receptacle underneath and is scooped up to be melted for another use; we don’t waste it.

  To complete the process, the bonbon is sent on a trip through the cooling tunnel, then hand decorating is added, and a bonbon has been born.

  Yum.

  It took Aunt Nettie about half an hour to get the enrobing process to a stopping place, then change from her white uniform into a casual pantsuit she had hanging in her locker for just such an emergency. It was five thirty when we pulled into Timothy Hart’s driveway.

  A uniformed security guard greeted us, so I guess Hart and his uncle were trying to avoid strangers, particularly reporters. Timothy Hart, the guard said, was receiving guests at Mrs. Montgomery’s house. He pointed out where other guests had parked, and told us to join them.

  The Hart compound on Lake Shore Drive is a large piece of property overlooking Lake Michigan. Tim told me once that his grandfather picked it up by paying the back taxes during the 1920s. The value of just the land today would be close to a million dollars. The houses and storage buildings would quadruple that figure.

  There are four houses and a large storage barn on the land, and they almost provide a history of the property, maybe of Warner Pier as well.

  Nearest the road is a small white farmhouse, probably built in the 1890s. Tim lives there. Behind it is a Craftsm
an bungalow. I’ve always assumed that Tim’s grandparents built that in the twenties, soon after they acquired the property. Overlooking the lake are a brick house and a stone house. Both have low roofs and a 1970s look.

  The stone house was built by Olivia VanHorn and her husband. Olivia was, of course, Tim’s sister and Hart VanHorn’s mother. It’s been closed up since Olivia’s death.

  The brick house was built as a vacation place by Abigail Montgomery and her husband, and Abigail had lived there year-round since she retired and moved to Warner Pier.

  A horseshoe-shaped drive accessed each house, then swung around to pass the storage building. The lane finished by returning to Lake Shore Drive. This provided one-way traffic circling the property. There was a tennis court in the center of the horseshoe.

  Aunt Nettie and I went on down to the brick house and parked beside two cars that were already there. Tim greeted us at the front door. I was rather amused to see that the other guests included Warner Pier’s state senator and his wife. They had brought a giant fruit basket. As a former elected official, Hart still has clout in party politics. The other couple was apparently from Grand Rapids. All of them had obviously come to see Hart, not Tim. As soon as we arrived, they got up and said good-bye. They seemed relieved to have an excuse to leave, and Tim seemed glad to see them go.

  He gave a big sigh after the door shut behind them. Then he turned to us. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Come on back.”

  Abigail’s house was furnished with antique Asian furniture and art. On a large Japanese screen over the couch, cranes pranced and postured among water plants. The screen’s colors were muted by age; when I lived in Dallas I’d seen enough antique Japanese art to recognize this as the real thing. A kimono, its pattern vivid in reds and blues, was suspended on a second wall, and a collection of celadon urns was arranged on a table.

  Three walls of a small adjoining room were lined with bookshelves. They actually held books. The fourth wall was of glass and overlooked Lake Michigan. Again, the decorative objects such as vases, candlesticks, and small statues were all Asian antiques.

  “This house is beautiful,” I said.

  “Abby and her husband traveled in the Orient a lot,” Tim said. “She could tell you the history of every piece of art they had collected.”

  He blinked. “I’m going to miss her, you know. We had dinner together nearly every evening.”

  Tim led the way into the kitchen, which had a homey feel. A small dining area also overlooked the lake. The chairs were upholstered with fabric featuring poppies. On the granite countertop was a fancy coffeepot that produced one cup at a time, so we each got to select a flavor.

  As we were waiting for the gadget to perform, Aunt Nettie spoke. “Tim, are you exhausted?”

  “Oh no. Hart has handled most of the callers. But he needed to go into Grand Rapids to arrange for . . . to arrange with the cemetery. Bill’s ashes are already there, so Abby’s will be there, too. I haven’t had to do much except sit around here and wonder. I just can’t understand why something like this could happen to Abby.”

  Neither Aunt Nettie nor I had any answer for that question. But I did seize the opportunity to ask a question of my own.

  “Tim, that night at the library, you said something about Mrs. Montgomery being worried. Did you tell Hogan about that?”

  “I guess I forgot to. But I didn’t know what she was worried about, so it didn’t seem to matter.”

  Tim opened the refrigerator and bent over. “I think there’s some cream in here. Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Hart and I asked the maid to clean out the refrigerator—you know, get rid of the perishable stuff. She hasn’t touched a thing, and she went home an hour ago.”

  “I can do that,” I said. “I already told Hart I’d be glad to help out. Do you want the things taken to your house?”

  “No, I’m going to Grand Rapids tomorrow, probably for at least a week. I hoped the maid would just take them away with her.”

  “Lee and I will be glad to clear it out,” Aunt Nettie said. “We’ll leave the mustard and mayonnaise, but we’ll take anything that might spoil.”

  “I hate to ask you to do something like that.”

  Aunt Nettie and I assured Tim we were just being neighborly, and the three of us sat at the table and talked. Aunt Nettie encouraged Tim to reminisce about his childhood, and I was glad to see that Tim felt he could be informal with us.

  Abby, he said, had always been the curious child in the family. “Once she got in trouble for going through our mother’s checkbook. She said she wanted to know how much the grocery bill was.”

  After about twenty minutes the phone rang. As Tim went to answer it, Aunt Nettie and I found a grocery sack in a holder in the broom closet. Then we began to pack up the refrigerator.

  Of course, with only one person living in the house, it wasn’t exactly full anyway. We left the condiments and canned fruit alone and put the lunch meat in the freezer. We put half a dozen eggs, a quart of milk, and half a carton of cottage cheese in our sack. Then I opened the hydrator and began to hand out vegetables.

  “It looks as if Abigail was quite a salad eater,” I said. “Here’s an unopened bag of romaine.”

  “We’d better take that,” Aunt Nettie said. “It spoils so quickly.”

  I gave her tomatoes, green onions, and half a jicama. Then I reached for a head of iceberg lettuce. It was at the back of the drawer and had been stuffed into a plastic bag. The bag had been closed with a twist tie.

  As soon as I picked it up, I realized it felt funny.

  “Huh?” I stood up. “This is odd.”

  “Lettuce?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I placed the head of lettuce on the counter, untwisted the wire holding its sack closed, and dumped out the contents.

  The head of iceberg was made of plastic.

  “Aunt Nettie,” I said, “this is one of those hiding places. It’s hollow. I’ve seen them in catalogs. You know, ‘Hide your jewelry; fox the burglars.’”

  Now that we had the fake lettuce out of the bag, we could see how it opened. We left it closed.

  “We’ll give this to Tim,” Aunt Nettie said firmly.

  Luckily, Tim joined us within a minute, and we showed him the plastic lettuce head.

  “We’d better open it,” Tim said. “It’s probably my grandmother’s wedding ring.”

  Tim’s guess was right. A small velvet drawstring bag popped out of the lettuce. It held three rings, each with colored stones, and a brooch in the shape of a rose. The brooch was centered with what appeared to be a nice diamond.

  “That’s what I thought,” Tim said. “Abby occasionally wore these, but I’m sure any other jewelry she owned is in her safety-deposit box. We found the bank box information in her desk, but we haven’t had time to go down there. Wait a minute. There’s something else in here.”

  He turned the little velvet bag upside down and shook out one final item.

  A key clanked onto the granite countertop.

  Chapter 12

  It was a pretty key, just about three inches long. Gold in color and delicate-looking, it might have been hung in a nook as a decorative accent, or pictured on the cover of a book with a title like “The Key to Her Heart.”

  When Joe and I took over the TenHuis family house, we found a half dozen keys like these—same shape, but larger—in a box in the basement. Aunt Nettie said they had been the house’s original 1904 door keys.

  But why on earth was this key hidden with Abigail’s jewelry?

  “It can’t be for this house,” Tim said.

  Aunt Nettie agreed with him. “It’s a key to a much older lock than this house would have,” she said. “This house isn’t more than forty years old. In fact, I’d expect this key to open a cedar chest or some sort of cabinet
, not a door.”

  “I can’t think of anything like that around here,” Tim said. “Hart and I haven’t taken any kind of inventory yet, but we looked around.”

  I picked the key up and looked closely at it. Again, I was impressed by what a delicate little piece of equipment it was. The part that hung down, the tab that actually would trip the workings of a lock, was intricately cut. It looked as if it ought to be antique, but it was shiny and new.

  “Tim,” I said, “your house is older than this house.”

  “More than a hundred years old.”

  “Could this key be for some lock at your house?”

  “Nothing much locks at my house.” Tim produced a modern door key from his pocket. “No, Abigail rekeyed this whole house when she moved back from California, and I got new locks and keys at the same time. I don’t have keys anything like this one, and I never have.”

  We considered several other possibilities. Tim said that a key for the big storage shed, where the family’s sports and garden equipment was stored, was hung on a nail in Abby’s pantry. He pulled it out, and, again, that was a modern key. Plus, Tim said he was sure that Abby had had no key to the older house, the Craftsman style their grandparents had built. “Nobody’s used it since our parents died,” he said. “There are two keys for it in a cupboard in my kitchen. They’re nothing like this little thing.”

  We all stared at the key. Inspiration did not strike any of us.

  “Maybe it’s to Abigail’s jewelry box,” Aunt Nettie said.

  Tim shook his head. “The jewelry box was unlocked, and the key was inside. Abigail didn’t have much good jewelry.” He gestured at the items we’d found in the fake lettuce. “This may be the whole collection. As I said, anything else would be in her safety-deposit box.”

  “One of life’s little mysteries,” I said. “The key is probably for something in Mrs. Montgomery’s house in California, and she was keeping it as a souvenir.”

  “But why did she keep it with Grandma’s jewelry?” Tim put the rings, the brooch, and the key back into the fake lettuce. “I’ll take all this up to my house.”