JoAnna Carl

by The Chocolate Bear Burglary (lit)

  This comment made Olivia blink, and Gail hastily spoke again. "I'll be sure and tell her they're not for sale. But she'll enjoy seeing them."

  The three of them continued talking about the molds, each from her own angle. Aunt Nettie looked at their historical connection to the chocolate business, Gail at their value to collectors, and Olivia VanHorn at her childhood memories.

  I stood by and listened. We weren't exactly swamped with customers that day—in fact, winters are really slow for nearly all Warner Pier retail businesses. The "hairnet ladies," the women who actually make the chocolates, stay busy with mail orders and com­mercial accounts, but Aunt Nettie and I don't bother to keep anybody on duty at the counter in the winter. If customers walk in, one of us runs up to wait on them.

  I was considering going back to the paperwork piled up on my desk when the phone rang. I answered the extension behind the counter. "TenHuis Chocolade."

  "Lee? I'm glad it's you."

  It was Joe Woodyard. Calling me at the office. That was strange. Joe and I were circling around a love affair, but for a lot of complicated reasons we—or maybe just Joe—didn't want to become an item for Warner Pier gossip. So Joe phoned me several times a week, but we'd agreed that he would always call me at home.

  "Hi," I said.

  "Lee, I just caught a kid trying to break into your house."

  "What?"

  "I'd have called the cops, but—" Joe stopped talking.

  "But what? Joe, if someone tried to break in ... Who is it?"

  "He claims he's your son."

  Chapter 2

  My son? I was so astonished I think I hung up without saying another word. I headed for my office. I stepped into my boots, pulled on my ski jacket, and walked past Aunt Nettie, Gail Hess, and Olivia VanHorn without speaking. I went out the street door, leaving them gaping after me. Or Aunt Nettie and Gail gaped; Olivia merely raised a well-bred eyebrow.

  I drove off in my van, which had been Michiganized with the proper license plates and three fifty-pound bags of kitty litter, carried as ballast and for emer­gency traction.

  The day was sunny and the streets fairly clear, either covered with hard-packed snow and ice or melted through to the pavement. Snow several feet deep cov­ered the lawns and fields I passed on the way to Aunt Nettie's house on the outskirts of Warner Pier. I drove cautiously, like a Texan in snowy weather, but I didn't really pay a lot of attention to the road. I was too upset at the thought of my "son." My son the burglar.

  I'd figured out who it must be.

  I was glad I'd stopped for my boots as soon as I pulled into the driveway, a sand lane about a hundred yards long that connects Aunt Nettie's two-story white farmhouse—built in 1904—with Lake Shore Drive. Every town on Lake Michigan has a Lake Shore Drive, of course. Aunt Nettie and I lived on the inland side, but this time of the year we could glimpse the lake through the bare limbs of the hundreds of trees between us and the water.

  I saw that the drive was blocked by Joe's truck—a blue pickup with "Vintage Boats - Stored and Re­stored" on the side—and by a sporty gold SUV. Even from the road I could see that it was a Lexus RX300. That figured, if I was right about who the burglar was. The Lexus was half off the road and obviously stuck. That figured, too. The kid who drove it probably thought an SUV could go anywhere; it couldn't.

  Aunt Nettie hires a man who plows the drive when it needs it. (He also scrapes the snow off the porch roof, because that roof slopes so gently it can collect enough of Warner Pier's "lake effect" snow that it might collapse. I'm not in Texas anymore.) So the drive was fairly clear, but since the snow melts and refreezes on a regular basis, its surface was icy and rough. If the Lexus had stayed on the road, though, it shouldn't have gotten stuck. I parked my van behind Joe's truck, got out and began slipping and slogging toward the house. As I passed the Lexus, I noted its Texas tag. Again, just what I expected.

  Joe—six feet plus, with dark hair, blue eyes, lots of brains, and skillful hands—was standing on the front porch of Aunt Nettie's house. Sitting on the porch steps, with his head down nearly to his knees, was a skinny kid in a down jacket, jeans, and tennis shoes. He wore thick glasses, and he had a gold ring in his left eyebrow. His ears were pierced, too—no, they were more than pierced. They had big eyelets in the lobes, as if he expected to tie shoelaces through them.

  The kid didn't seem to have gloves or a hat. Joe wasn't wearing gloves or a hat either, but somehow he looked macho, as if the winter didn't faze him. The kid just looked cold.

  Joe and I exchanged nods, but I didn't stop to talk. I went right around him, to the kid. I could have whacked him, but I tried to stay calm.

  "Hi, Jeff," I said.

  The kid lifted his head to glare at me, and I saw that he also had a stud in his lower lip. Then he ducked his head and studied the walk some more. He didn't speak.

  "He claims he's your son," Joe said.

  "He used to be," I said. "He's Jeff Godfrey. For five years he was my stepson."

  Joe looked relieved, then tried to hide it. I fought an impulse to laugh. I guess finding out I had a teenaged son would have come as a shock to him.

  "Y'all might as well come on in," I said.

  I knocked the snow off my boots, unlocked the front door, and went inside. Joe held the storm door open, but he had to gesture before Jeff got up and preceded him into the living room.

  There was a mat by the door, and Jeff and Joe had already knocked most of the snow off their feet out on the porch. I kicked my boots off and walked around in my heavy socks. Then I looked Jeff over. I hadn't seen him in two years—it had been at Christmas two years and two months earlier. His dad, Rich Godfrey, had insisted that Jeff join us on Christmas Eve, and Jeff had sulked and sneered the whole evening. Rich had finally blown up at him. It hadn't been a happy holiday.

  Jeff had grown taller, of course. He was still scrawny, but he had reached his dad's height, maybe an inch shorter than I am, and he had Rich's light brown hair. But his face was thin like his mom's, and the gray eyes behind his glasses weren't like either of them. He wasn't as spotty as he had been two Christmases earlier. Between the glasses and the jewelry in­stalled on his head, he seemed to glitter.

  "Well, Jeff, have you had lunch?" I said.

  Jeff finally spoke. "No, but I'm not hungry." I was having a hard time not staring at the huge holes in his earlobes, and the stud in his lip seemed to bounce around.

  "I'll fix you a Sandwich anyway. Joe? Ham sandwich?"

  "Thanks."

  Joe took his jacket off and hung it on the hall tree by the front door. He seemed watchful, and I realized he was keeping an eye on Jeff. Did he think the kid was going to go berserk?

  Would Jeff be likely to go berserk? I hadn't the slightest idea. He'd been eleven when I married his dad and sixteen when I divorced him. I'd tried to be a nice stepmom, but Jeff had always avoided me like poison.

  I didn't know him at all.

  I turned up the furnace heat, then showed Jeff where the bathroom was; in Aunt Nettie's old house you get there by way of the kitchen and the back hall, so it's kind of tricky. Then I started making five ham sandwiches, three on white and two on rye.

  Joe came into the kitchen while I assembled bread, cheese, and ham. "How did you happen to catch Jeff?" I said.

  "I was headed down to Benton Harbor to look at a boat. I thought I'd take the lake road and check on how the ice is treating the beach. I saw the Lexus stuck in your drive, so I stopped. The kid was up on the porch roof, trying to get in that window."

  "The one over the stairwell?" I was horrified.

  "Right. He's lucky he didn't succeed and break his neck." Joe lowered his voice. "How well do you know this kid?"

  I kept my voice low, too. "Not well, I'm afraid."

  "I could still call the cops."

  "Let me talk to him first."

  But that didn't prove easy. Even after Jeff sat down at the dining room table and decided he would eat a ham sandwich and have some mi
lk, he was determined not to give out any information.

  "How'd you wind up in Michigan?" I asked.

  "Got in the car and drove."

  "Why?"

  Jeff took a big bite, chewed and swallowed before he answered. "I wanted to see a new place."

  "You turned eighteen in July." Jeff looked up sharply at that, maybe surprised that I remembered his birthday. "Did you start college this year?"

  "Yeah. SMU."

  Southern Methodist. In Dallas, his hometown, but a good college, not easy to get into. Jeff had been doing something right.

  "Are you still working for your mom?" Jeffs mom, Dina, has an antique shop.

  "I was. Saturdays. I made some deliveries, pol­ished stuff."

  "Does your mom know where you are?"

  That got a quick and angry reply. "No, and I don't know where she is!" Bite, chew, swallow. Then, "I don't live at home anymore."

  "You living in the dorm?"

  "I was."

  "Did your dad send you up here?"

  That brought a gape that made the lip stud bob around. "No! He wouldn't send me anyplace!"

  Jeff's reaction was genuine enough to settle that particular suspicion. Rich hadn't sent his son as a go-between of some sort. Good. Maybe Rich had quit trying to salvage his hurt pride.

  "Then why did you come?"

  "Not because I wanted to see you."

  "Jeff, please don't ask me to believe that you wan­dered a thousand miles from home and college and just happened to get stuck in the driveway of your former stepmother."

  Bite, chew, swallow. Glare. No answer.

  I was getting impatient. "Come on, Jeff! Joe still thinks we should call the cops. Explain yourself."

  Now Jeff pouted.

  "If you did come all this way to see me, Jeff, for heaven's sake why didn't you come by the store? Why didn't you phone? Why did you try to break into the house?"

  He scowled and rubbed at one of his earlobes. I fantasized about sticking my little finger through the huge hole in it.

  "I thought maybe you'd loan me some money," Jeff said. "Then when I found your house, I got stuck. I was trying to get in to use the phone."

  He raised his head and shot Joe an angry glance. "This guy . . ." He stopped talking, ducked his head and stared at his sandwich. "At least he had a cell phone."

  Joe raised his eyebrows. "When I drove up he was halfway in that upstairs window," he said. "I could take a look at it. Has Nettie got a ladder?"

  "In the garage. The key's hanging in the broom closet off the back hall."

  Joe stood up. "I won't be far," he said.

  Jeff sullenly ate two more bites of his sandwich, but after we heard Joe go out the back door and saw him pass the dining room windows, he glared at me. "Does that guy live here?"

  I swallowed a sharp answer, then tried to speak calmly. "Obviously not, Jeff. If he lived here he'd have a key. Joe's just a friend. He's not even a frequent visitor."

  "I saw him in the papers. He's the guy you were mixed up with over that murder."

  "His ex-wife was murdered, true. Neither of us had anything to do with it."

  "Dad said—"

  "Quit trying to change the subject, Jeff. What are you doing here?"

  "I'm broke. Like I said, I thought maybe you'd lend me some money."

  "I haven't got any money to lend. Why don't you call your mom."

  "I told you. I don't even know where she is."

  "Then call your dad."

  "He won't talk to me."

  "What happened?"

  Jeff squirmed and made a low, growling sound. Then he whacked his fist on the table and yelled, "They both threw me out!"

  I could see Joe whirl around and start running back toward the house. But Jeff was back into his sullen mode, staring angrily at his plate. I got up and went to the back door to assure Joe the situation wasn't out of control.

  As I walked back to the table, I thought about what Jeff had said. I wasn't sure I believed it.

  If Jeff had had a specialty, it had been playing his parents against each other. When I pointed this out to Rich, he got mad at me instead of at Jeff. It was hard to believe that Rich and Dina would ever have stopped fighting over Jeff long enough to throw him out; Jeff would have figured some way to divide them and ruin the plan.

  Jeff might well have deserved to be thrown out. He'd always been bratty, and his ear, eyebrow, and lip jewelry would have given his dad a stroke. But I found it hard to believe that his parents had actually tossed him. Jeff's mother had always doted on him, and so had Rich, in his own selfish way. Rich saw the other people in his life merely as reflections of his own success. Dina got a big settlement when they di­vorced, so he could brag to his friends about how she took him to the cleaners. For Jeff, Rich had always provided the best private schools—best, as in most expensive—and the best bicycle and the best summer camp and the fanciest tennis shoes. I had benefited from Rich's largesse, too; I'd always had jewelry, a snazzy car, a fancy house.

  The only thing Rich hadn't given any of us was respect and love, but he didn't have much of that to spare.

  When I walked out and left the jewelry, the car, the house, and the clothes behind, I was trying to convince Rich I loved him, not his money. His reaction had shown me the truth—Rich saw his money as an exten­sion of himself. When I rejected the one, I had re­jected the other. He hadn't forgiven me.

  But if Rich loved anybody, it was Jeff. It would take a lot to make him throw the kid out. I needed more details.

  "What do you mean, they threw you out? How could they throw you out if you were living in the dorm?"

  "Just what I said. They finally agreed on something. They didn't like my grades. They didn't like my credit card bills. They ganged up on me and said I had to get a job flipping hamburgers and make it on my own. Earn my own spending money. Buy my own gasoline. Pay my own car insurance."

  Yeah, I thought, "make it on your own" from a dorm with room and board paid. I guess I was jealous. My parents hadn't been able to help me with college.

  Joe came in with the ladder and went to work on the window over the stairwell. He began by putting a footstool even with the bottom step, to make a level space large enough for both legs of the ladder. Joe then climbed up the teetery ladder to close the win­dow Jeff had opened from outside. I held the ladder and prayed, as Aunt Nettie had a month earlier when I did the same stunt so I could change the lightbulb over the stairs.

  I could see how Jeff had been entrapped. He had tried to get in a window in a row that was easy to reach from the porch roof. The one Jeff had tackled had a storm window that was warped in some way and hung a little crooked. Which, I'm sure, was why Jeff had climbed from the porch railing to the roof and up to that particular window.

  Since he'd never been inside the house, Jeff had no way of knowing that the handy-dandy window was over the stairwell. He'd been darn lucky that he hadn't fallen in headfirst, tumbled fifteen feet down to the wooden stairs, and broken his neck.

  I shuddered at the thought of having to tell Rich and Dina that I'd come home from work and found their son dead in my house. Jeff wasn't the only one who had had a narrow escape.

  Jeff finished his sandwich and milk, then voluntarily got up to go outside and help Joe with the storm win­dow. This time he held the ladder while Joe climbed onto the porch roof. Joe whacked the wooden frame of the storm window with a hammer and got it to fit a little better. I found a pair of Uncle Phil's old boots and lent them to Jeff. He and Joe collected a couple of shovels from the garage and went down to dig out Jeffs SUV.

  As soon as they left the house I called Jeffs dad, the guy I've nicknamed Rich Gottrocks. He's a big-time real estate developer in Dallas. Or maybe he just thinks he's big-time. He had acquired a receptionist with a British accent.

  Miss Brit told me Rich was unavailable. And his executive assistant was unavailable, too, she said. No, she had no idea when either of them would be back. She'd be only too happy to take
a message.

  I left one. "Jeff is here in Warner Poor. I mean, Warner Pier. In Michigan! Please call." I gave my name, but didn't identify myself as an ex-wife. Then I called Jeffs mom at her antique shop. I got her answering machine. Her message said the antique shop would be closed for a week, but it didn't give me a hint about where she was or why she'd closed. I left a message there, too. Next I called information and asked for a home number for each of them. Both were unlisted. Rats!

  Two long-distance calls wasted. I was still standing beside the telephone trying to figure out what to do when the thing rang.

  Could it be Rich? Or Dina? I snatched the phone up, hoping I could shift the responsibility for Jeff onto one of his parents.

  But the phone call was from Aunt Nettie. "Are you all right?" she asked. "You ran out like something was after you."

  "Just a dirty secret from my past," I said. "You may have forgotten I used to be a wicked stepmother."

  "Oh, my! Rich's son called?"

  I could always count on Aunt Nettie. She knew all my secrets and loved me anyway. I poured out the whole story—Jeffs unexpected arrival, his attempt to break in, the lip stud, the eyebrow ring, the earlobe eyelets, the sullen attitude, and all the danger flags he was running up in my mind.

  "So I don't know what to do about him," I said. "If he's broke, I don't really want to turn him away. I tried to call both his parents, but neither of them is available. He's apparently walked out on college. But I certainly can't see giving him money, even if I had any to give."

  Aunt Nettie didn't hesitate. "What he needs is a job," she said. "He can stay there at the house, and we'll put him to work packing chocolates for TenHuis Chocolade."

  Chapter 3

  TenHuis Chocolade couldn't afford another em­ployee. Aunt Nettie knew this as well as I did. She and I had even cut our own salaries to help make ends meet. This was one reason I wasn't enrolled in the review course for the CPA exam.

  But we could use some packing help. And I didn't see any other way to keep Jeff corralled, to try to have a little control over him. So I offered him a job.