by JoAnna Carl
“I’m sure it was just a mix-up,” Mom repeated. “The escort must have been sent to pick up some other passenger. Then, when Lee ran up to us, he saw that he had the wrong person. He was embarrassed and went away.” The blond guy nodded his crew cut, and the Grand Rapids cop looked stony.
I tried to stick to my guns. “But you said he carried a sign with your name on it, Mom. Sally McKinney.”
“Maybe I was mistaken, Lee. Maybe it was just ’McKinney.’ Or it could have been some other ‘Mc’name. McKennon, maybe. Or McSomething else.”
“The man wasn’t carrying a sign when I saw you,” I said. “What happened to it?”
Mom looked puzzled. “I don’t really remember. Could he have simply dropped it into the trash?”
“We can look,” I said. I stalked back toward the gate, leading a procession of the crew cut security man, a uniformed Grand Rapids cop, and my mom, who was still objecting to the whole process with every step. We retraced my mom’s steps, going back to the passageway that she would have come down after disembarking, and having her identify the spot where her well-dressed escort had been waiting. We looked in the nearest trash container. It held no sign, and no pieces of cardboard that could have once been a sign.
I led them on through the big waiting room. She’d made a stop at the ladies room, Mom said, and the escort had stood outside. There was a trash container at that spot. No sign was in it.
To my relief, Joe showed up then. I’d called his cell phone before we’d even reached the security office, but he had taken time to deliver the boat before he came back to the airport.
Of course, he had to hear the whole story from the beginning. And once more Mom assured everyone the whole thing was some sort of mix-up.
I was steaming, which meant I was talking more like an idiot than ever. “I know that my mom had a narrow estate. I mean, escape! That man tried to thatch her. I mean, snatch her!”
“But there’s no physical evidence,” the security guard said, “and your mom thinks it was just a mistake.”
I looked for Joe, but he’d disappeared. So had the Grand Rapids cop.
“I appreciate your concern for your mother,” the security man said, “but there’s no physical evidence.”
“And what physical evidence could there be?”
“How about this?” It was Joe’s voice.
We all swung toward it, and I saw that he was coming out of the men’s room. Using a paper towel, he was holding a handful of torn cardboard. He showed us the top piece. “cKi” it read. We all crowded into the business center and laid the pieces out on a worktable, assembling them like a jigsaw puzzle.
The pieces spelled out “Sally McKinney.”
“See,” I said to my mom. “He was trying to snatch you.”
But my mom’s jaw was clamped into that firm, Dutch line that I’d learned meant she and I were about to have a fight.
“It doesn’t prove anything,” she said. “All it proves is that he thought—thought—he was supposed to meet me. He had the wrong person, that’s all. He must have looked at the wrong list. If we ask at the Avis desk—which we should have done before imposing on the time of the security guards, I’m sure that they’ll tell us he was supposed to meet someone else on that flight.”
She took a deep and determined breath, then went on. “But at any rate, I’m sure it was only a mix-up, and I want to drop the matter.”
The Grand Rapids policeman, who had been completely silent during the whole episode, finally spoke. “Would you be willing to sign a complaint?”
“No!” Mom’s voice was extremely firm.
I took a breath as deep as my mom’s had been and opened my mouth, ready to join battle.
But Joe surprised me by putting his arm around my shoulder. “Let it go, Lee,” he said softly. “There’s no point. We’ll sort this out after we get home.”
“But Mom doesn’t know all the crazy things that have been happening around here,” I said.
“What crazy things?” the Grand Rapids cop said.
“Oh, like strange—” The look on Mom’s face stopped me cold. I realized that she didn’t want me to bring up her history as a runaway bride, and it really didn’t seem to be a good idea.
“What crazy things?” the cop repeated.
“Oh, my fiancé and I found a dead man two days ago.”
Joe spoke quickly. “He was a patient in a nursing home.”
The cop shrugged and appeared to have lost interest.
“Let’s pick up your mom’s car and get on home,” Joe said again.
I began to see that I might be better off keeping my mouth shut. If we could just get to Warner Pier, Hogan could advise me.
So the whole kidnapping episode ended in anticlimax. I tried again to talk Mom out of renting a car, assuring her that Joe’s pickup was a perfectly comfortable vehicle for the ride to Warner Pier and that she could borrow my van the rest of her stay. But she wouldn’t be convinced. A half hour later—by now it was getting dark—we were leaving Gerald Ford Airport in a midsized Chevy. Joe was following us. Mom put my name on the rental agreement, and she asked me to drive, since I knew the way. A new bypass had opened, making the trip to Warner Pier much shorter than it had been when she came to Michigan for Uncle Phil’s funeral.
We didn’t say much until we merged onto I-96. Then Mom turned to me and made that sound I always called a “significant sigh.” When I was growing up, it usually meant I’d said or done the wrong thing and was going to hear about it.
But this time, she surprised me with praise.
“Lee, I did appreciate your efforts back there. And I’m sure you were right. That man did try to kidnap me.”
“Mom! If you agreed that I was right, how could you refuse to sign a complaint!”
“Joe and that cop found the sign, and I noticed it was saved, in case I change my mind, and we need it as evidence someday. But you were not only right about the kidnapping attempt, you were right about something else. ‘Strange things,’ you said. A lot of strange things have been happening. And maybe we need to talk about them before we involve yet another law enforcement agency.”
She sighed again. “So I’m going to break down and tell you about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. Or ever will happen to me.”
CHOCOLATE CHAT
1930s CHOCOLATE
My grandmother Nettie Bohreer Waite saw her family through the Great Depression by managing a bakery in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Here’s one of her chocolate cake recipes.
GRAN’S FUDGE CAKE WITH MOCHA FROSTING
2½ cups sugar
2 sticks margarine
5 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup cocoa
3 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
Cream sugar and maragarine. Beat in egg yolks. Add vanilla. Add cocoa. Sift flour with soda and salt. Add to first mixture alternately with buttermilk. Beat egg whites stiff and fold in.
This makes four layers or one large sheet cake. Bake layers twenty to twenty-five minutes at 375 degrees.
Mocha Frosting
1 stick margarine
4 tablespoons coffee
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg yolk
1 pound powdered sugar
Soften margarine, then mix all ingredients. Beat until smooth.
Gran’s instructions end, “This makes two layers to feed your family and two to take to church.”
Chapter 17
My head whipped toward Mom. I swerved slightly and nearly hit a passing car, but I got back into my own lane before his horn stopped blaring.
Embarrassing? Mom was going to tell me about her most embarrassing moment? People don’t leave their homes because they’re embarrassed. What could this have to do with all the suspicious things that had happened?
Mom was giving another deep sigh. “You probably wouldn’
t even think it was embarrassing,” she said. “Your generation, I mean. Times have changed so much. But Bill and I—I know the sexual revolution had happened before our engagement, but it hadn’t hit Warner Pier High. Oh, we all knew that Ed—Bill’s brother—had lived in a commune, and there were whispers about what went on there. But the kids in high school still talked about who was ‘doing it.’ And my mother—Oh, Lee, sometimes I’m glad you never knew my mother.”
“Aunt Nettie said she had sort of come unglued after your dad died.”
“That’s the politest way it can be expressed. Yelling, screaming, crying. I don’t think that Phil and Nettie knew what was going on at all.”
“Aunt Nettie says they didn’t. She says they were so focused on starting their business . . . I think she feels that they let you down.”
“I never blamed them because our mom was nuts. But one of the things she was nuts about was making sure that Bill and I didn’t have sex. She would question me. Where did we go? What did we do? She didn’t come out and say what she was afraid of—she seemed to be afraid of the word—but her meaning was clear.”
Mom laughed, though the sound wasn’t humorous. “She was trying so hard to keep us celibate and was so sure that we were going to rip our clothes off and go at it if we got a chance that she had the oppositeopposite effect, if you can understand what I mean. I became self-conscious, scared of having sex. On the day of the rehearsal, if she’d asked me if I wanted to call the wedding off, I’m afraid I would have.”
“Maybe that’s why you were willing to leave when Bill told you to.”
“No, the evening of the rehearsal things took quite a different path.” Mom sighed again. “Vita and Ed Dykstra had everybody over for a picnic dinner after the rehearsal. It was really nice. Vita was a wonderful cook. And she was so creative. You probably know that.”
I realized that I’d never told Mom that Vita Dykstra had changed into Lovie, the town nut, running around collecting aluminum cans. I decided this wasn’t the moment, and Mom went on.
“Anyway, it was a lovely evening, and everyone was being so nice—including Bill. He really was a sweetheart, and I was realizing how lucky I was to get him. It was all fine until we were leaving, and Mother blew it. The minister was shaking my hand and making the kind of glowing remarks the occasion called for— about young love and a happy future—and Mother pops up and says, ‘Yes, Reverend Vanoss. Now I won’t have to worry about her getting pregnant.’ ”
“That wasn’t cool!”
“No! I was so crushed I began to cry. I said, ‘You’ve never had to worry about that!’ And I ran off and got in Bill’s car. I think maybe Mother started to come after me, but Bill stopped her. I could see him talking to her. Bill was always tactful, you know. I’m sure he told her he’d calm me down and bring me home. Of course, that made me madder than ever. I felt that he was taking her side. When Bill got in the car, he must have thought he was sharing the front seat with a buzz saw.”
“Poor guy.”
“Oh, he handled it. He took my hand, and he said, ‘Tomorrow night we’ll be on our honeymoon.’ And he kissed my palm.”
“And he was how old? Twenty? He really was a peach, Mom.”
“Yes, like I said, Bill was always calming people down. He’d had plenty of chances to perfect that trait in the last couple of years, with his brother and his dad being at odds, and his mom caught in the middle. A bad situation.”
“I heard a few things about that.”
“Anyway, Bill and I left the party. We went out to our regular parking place, which was behind the big shed at the McKay cottage.”
“Bill’s father was the caretaker, right?”
“You knew that?”
“I found out accidentally.”
“The cottage hadn’t been opened that summer, so the property was secluded and . . . well, we parked there.”
“Naturally, Mom.”
“I said your generation wouldn’t be embarrassed by what happened. But, remember, I was still a virgin. Here it was the night before our wedding, and we’d never actually ‘done it,’ as the kids said. But a couple of things had changed. First, I’d gone to the doctor the month before, and I was now on the pill.”
Mother turned toward me. “I went without consulting my mother. Would you believe it? She didn’t think a young girl needed to have a pelvic exam before she got married. And she knew Bill and I didn’t want to have kids right away, but she wouldn’t even discuss birth control with me. Or sex, for that matter. I got a book from the library.”
“You did much better with me, Mom.”
“If I did, it was in spite of her, not because of any lesson I learned from her.”
“You said two things had changed. What was the second one?”
Mom thought about it a moment. “I guess the second one was Mother’s unfortunate remark.”
“That she didn’t need to worry about your getting pregnant?”
“Yes. I finally rebelled.”
“A lot of kids would have rebelled a lot earlier.”
“Bill had always gone along with my decision, bless him, but he was just a regular twenty-year-old guy. When it became clear that I’d changed my mind from ‘slow down’ to ‘go ahead,’ he reached in his pocket and came out with a key. ‘Let’s not stay here, in the car,’ he said. ‘Let’s go someplace special.’ I said I’d be afraid to go to a motel, but he grinned real big and said that wasn’t it.
“Bill got a flashlight out of the glove box, and a blanket out of the trunk. Then he led me onto the back porch of the McKay house. The key he had was to the back door. He’d snitched it from his dad.
“I was nervous—fearful, but excited. I said, ’What if some of the McKays come?’ But Bill said the father and stepmother were in Europe, and that Quinn was in Chicago.
“The electricity was off, but Bill used his flashlight to show me the kitchen, which was small, and the living room, which was nice, but not elegant. Antiquey. Then he said, ’This is what I wanted you to see,’ and he took me into a bedroom that was right off the living room. And it was elegant, but with a rustic twist. Polar bear rug. Mink bedspread. Stone fireplace. Fourposter bed carved to look like tree trunks. Heck, those posts looked like redwood trunks, real heavy.”
“It doesn’t really sound like a lakeshore cottage ought to look, Mom.”
“Thinking back, I’d say it was in the worst possible taste. But Mr. McKay—he was always bringing home a new wife, and that’s what the current one had wanted, I guess. I remember that the windows had heavy drapes with elaborate wooden cornices.” She laughed. “It was really something, a sort of a Victorian brothel. Anyway, it didn’t take long for Bill to spread his blanket on the bed—we weren’t so passionate that we forgot that we didn’t want to leave a mess—not even dirty sheets. And—well, we took our clothes off and got on that fancy bed.”
She quit talking, and I didn’t say anything either.
“We got pretty involved with each other, but before anything had actually—well, happened!—this blinding light began flashing around the living room.”
She turned toward me and put her hands to her head in a frantic gesture. “Lee, if I live to be a hundred, nothing will ever scare me like that did.”
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. The thought of the innocent almost–bride and groom—ages eighteen and twenty—getting caught in a fantasy bedroom in a lonely cottage was right out of a sex comedy. But what might have been funny in the movies would not have been the least bit humorous in real life.
“How awful!” I said. “So you weren’t as alone as you thought. What did you do?”
“I slid off the bed on the opposite side from the door. Then I crawled around to the foot, trying to find my clothes while not making a single sound. Of course, Bill was doing the same thing on the other side of the bed. We might have been able to hide—get into the closet or something—except that Bill stepped on my hand, and I yelped. Oh, it was a scene from a smutty
comedy. A nightmare.
“Somebody out in the living room said, ‘What’s that?’ and came to the door and flashed the light around the bedroom. Bill and I were spotlighted—both of us still stark naked.
“I was sure, of course, that it was Bill’s dad. After all, he was caretaker for the place, and they’d had some problem with prowlers, so I thought he’d come around to check. So I was embarrassed, but not frightened. Then the person laughed! Laughed!
“Bill said, ‘Ed?’ I thought he was talking to his dad. At first I couldn’t figure out why he was calling his dad by his first name.”
I gasped. “Ed? Was it Bill’s brother? The one who had gone to Canada?”
“At the time, I couldn’t figure out who it was. Bill told me to get dressed, and he grabbed his clothes and took them out into the living room. He left the flashlight, but he closed the door behind him. And I began to try to scramble into my clothes.”
“I’d have been shaking too hard to button a button.”
“I was wearing some sort of a granny dress, I think. I managed to get it on backward, I remember, and had to take it off and try again. And one of my sandals was under the bed. I had to get under there with the spiderwebs to find it. I finally managed to get everything on, and then I sat down at this weird dressing table—carved weirdly, I mean. I swear it had gargoyles on the legs. I sat there and cried.”
“You were just a kid!”
“I was really too young to be getting married, though I did love Bill. But right at that moment I was so embarrassed and terrified I could have died. And the noises coming from the living room didn’t help.”
