The Chocolate Bear Burglary (5 page)

At ten thirty the dryer buzzed, and Jeff folded his underwear, then said he’d take a shower. He was still pouty, but he didn’t make any comments about our strange bathroom.

Aunt Nettie’s house was built by my great-grandfather and originally was the TenHuis family’s summer cottage. My grandparents decided to live there full-time, so they winterized the house in the late 1940s, but the bathroom hasn’t changed much since the family got indoor plumbing in 1915. For one thing, there’s only one bathroom in the three-bedroom house. For another, we still have an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub. Uncle Phil had changed the plumbing to allow for a shower. He hung a circular rod over the tub, and Aunt Nettie put up a shower curtain on each side. That was the shower. It wasn’t exactly like the facility I knew Jeff had in his mother’s house—his own bathroom with a tiled, walk-in shower. So I was surprised that Jeff didn’t complain. He’d grown up in a house full of antiques; he wasn’t likely to think the claw-foot tub was quaint.

As soon as I heard the shower, I knew the noise would keep Jeff from hearing anything else. I looked at the phone and again wished I could talk to Rich or Dina, but I still had no home numbers for either of them. So I called Joe Woodyard.

Several nights a week Joe called me. But Aunt Nettie’s house not only has only one bathroom, it also has only one phone. And that phone is in the kitchen. So when I talk to Joe I sit on a stool by the kitchen sink. Aunt Nettie tactfully stays in the other room. I didn’t want to carry on a conversation with Joe while Jeff was digging in the refrigerator for a bedtime snack or otherwise standing around with his ears hanging out. I told Joe as much.

“So you and Nettie took the kid in,” he said.

“Aunt Nettie’s too kindhearted not to. But there wasn’t really anything else to do.”

“You could send him to a motel.”

“I suppose my credit card would stand it, but Jeff claims he left college because he wants to be on his own. Lending him money doesn’t seem like a good thing to do, and neither does paying his rent. And I could hardly send him to the homeless shelter.”

“You could send him to jail.”

“No, I couldn’t, Joe. That’s not a realistic opinion. I mean option.”

“Maybe not. But—listen, how about if he comes over here?”

“No! You don’t have any room for him.” Joe was living in one room at the boatyard. He had a rollaway bed, a hot plate, and a microwave.

“I’ve got an air mattress and a sleeping bag. I don’t like him alone in the house with you and Nettie.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not. The kid definitely tried to break into the house this morning. That’s a criminal act. You admit you don’t know him too well. How long has it been since you saw him?”

“A couple of years.”

“Have you heard anything about him in the meantime? Like, was he president of his Sunday-school class?”

“No, I haven’t heard much about him since Rich and I divorced, and I doubt he’s president of his Sunday-school class, since I never heard of either of his parents taking him to church. But I’m not afraid to have him in the house.”

“Well, put a chair under your doorknob.”

The water stopped then, and Joe and I hung up on that slightly antagonistic note. It seemed that a lot of our conversations had been ending that way lately.

I guess I was getting tired of sitting home by the telephone. Joe kept telling me he wanted us to start dating, but we didn’t seem to be getting close to that goal.

Joe was a Warner Pier native; his mother ran an insurance agency across the street from TenHuis Chocolade. I’d first known him—or known of him—twelve years earlier, when Joe was chief lifeguard at Warner Pier’s Crescent Beach, and I was one of the gang of teenaged girls who stood around and admired his shoulders. Joe had been a high school hotshot—allstate wrestler, state debate champion, straight-A student, senior class president. He got a scholarship to the University of Michigan and did well there and in law school. Aunt Nettie says his mother glowed every time his name was mentioned.

But after law school Joe surprised his mother by going to work for a Legal Aid–type operation instead of the big firm she’d pictured. His mom wasn’t as excited about that.

Then Joe met Clementine Ripley.
The
Clementine Ripley. One of the nation’s top defense attorneys, the one the movie stars and big financiers called before they called the cops.

Ms. Ripley went to Detroit to defend one of Joe’s clients pro bono. Before the trial was over, he’d fallen for her in a major way, and she had found him a pleasant diversion. Joe convinced her that they should get married, even though she was more than fifteen years older than he was.

Warner Pier says that it was doomed from the start, and Joe says he was naïve—only he uses the word “stupid.” He also might not have expected the attention the marriage drew from the tabloid press: TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY WEDS TOYBOY LOVER IN MAY–DECEMBER ROMANCE.

That was followed by TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY BUILDS SHOWPLACE HOME IN TOYBOY HUSBAND’S HOMETOWN. Next, TOYBOY HUSBAND OF TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY QUITS LAW CAREER, DENIES PLAN TO BECOME HOUSE HUSBAND. Finally, TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY SPLITS WITH TOYBOY HUSBAND. AGE NOT FACTOR, BOTH CLAIM, with a subhead, “Ex now repairing boats.”

Joe’s version is that Clementine Ripley’s approach to the practice of law crystallized his disappointment in the morality of a legal career and made becoming an honest craftsman seem a more honorable way to make a living. So he bought a boat repair shop in his hometown. Specializing in antique wooden boats, he did beautiful work, work to be proud of. But his mother had quit glowing whenever his name came up.

Then, just when Joe had thought he’d escaped from the glare of the media, Clementine Ripley was murdered in her “showplace home in toyboy ex’s hometown.” The tabloids came back.

The crime was solved—that’s how Joe and I met each other again. Then Ms. Ripley’s lawyers dropped another bombshell. They revealed that she hadn’t changed her will after her divorce from Joe. Joe inherited her entire estate, plus he was named executor. The tabloids stuck around.

To complicate matters further, Clementine Ripley left an extremely involved estate. Joe was having to spend several days a week with accountants, attorneys, court appearances, even finding a new home for her champion Birman cat, who now lived in Chicago with a former housekeeper. Joe swore he wasn’t going to keep any of the money—and he said there wasn’t going to be much left, anyway—but it was forcing him to spend a lot of time concentrating on his ex-wife’s affairs.

Not on his own affairs. Not on my affairs. On Clementine Ripley’s affairs. The woman was haunting him.

The tabloid press was haunting him, too. They seemed to have some conduit into Warner Pier. Any little thing Joe did popped up in the tabloids. The previous week he had talked to the mayor, to see if the city was interested in owning the fifteen-acre Warner Pier estate Clementine Ripley had left behind. Two days later the headlines read, TOYBOY HEIR OF FAMED ATTORNEY SEEKS BUYER FOR MANSION.

Our mayor, Mike Herrera, swore he hadn’t told anybody but the park commissioners. How had the tabloid found out?

Neither Joe nor I wanted to see ourselves splashed across the
National Enquirer
—TOYBOY HEIR OF FAMED LAWYER ROMANCES TEXAS EX–BEAUTY QUEEN WHO WAS WITNESS TO EX–WIFE’S DEATH. So I understood why Joe and I were having a telephone romance. But I was getting tired of it.

Jeff went up to bed, and I said good night to Aunt Nettie and went up, too. I didn’t get undressed, but I wrapped up in a comforter and read by my bedside lamp, which is rather dim. I got interested in my book, forgot Joe, and barely heard Aunt Nettie moving around as she got ready for bed.

Then, across the hall, I heard Jeff’s bed creak. His door opened, he came out, and he stopped outside my door.

Instantly, I remembered what Joe had said about putting a chair under my doorknob.

My heart jumped up to my throat. I told myself I was being crazy, but that didn’t do any good. Joe’s warning had created suspicions, and it was no good denying they existed. I was scared.

I lay still, not breathing, just listening. It was ludicrous. Jeff was on one side of the door, listening to me, and I was on the other, listening to him.

I didn’t breathe again until I heard Jeff move on and start down the stairs.

Stupid, I told myself. Even kids have to get up to go to the bathroom now and then.

I wondered if Jeff
was
going to the bathroom. Or if he was going to Aunt Nettie’s room. That gave me another stab of fear.

So I listened carefully to his progress through the house. I’d spent a lot of time in that house. I could tell who was walking where without moving anything but my ear.

Jeff crept down the steps to the living room, then turned toward the dining room. He went into the kitchen.

Good. He was going to the bathroom.

But when he got to the kitchen, he stopped. He fumbled with something that thumped. Was it the hall tree where all the winter jackets had been hung?

I heard a click. I was sure the sound was the lock of the back door.

The door opened, then shut. I heard Jeff’s footsteps cross the back porch, then scrunch through the snow in the side yard, moving toward the driveway and off into the night.

W
hat the heck was Jeff up to?

I quickly turned off my bedside lamp, slid out of my cocoon of comforter, and went to the window. I pulled the curtain aside and peeked out.

Could Jeff be creeping outside to smoke? Aunt Nettie didn’t have ashtrays out, true, but he hadn’t asked about it. The kid would have to be a confirmed nicotine addict to go outside for a cigarette in fifteendegree weather.

Did he want to get something from his SUV? Unless he’d hidden something under the seat, I didn’t think there was anything left in it to get. I’d even given him a plastic grocery bag for his trash, and he had filled it with soft-drink cups and fast-food debris that afternoon. The SUV had looked empty.

Was he going someplace? That didn’t seem likely. For one thing, I’d noticed that his gas tank was close to empty. I’d planned to buy him a tank of gas the next day, but I hadn’t told him that yet. Besides, if he wanted to leave, Aunt Nettie and I had made it clear we weren’t going to try to stop him. There was no reason for him to sneak off in the middle of the night.

And it was the middle of the night. My watch read 1:00 A.M.

But middle of the night or no, the interior lights flashed inside Jeff’s SUV; then I heard the motor start. But only his running lights came on when the Lexus began to move. He backed down the driveway slowly. This was definitely as surreptitious a trip as he could manage.

Where was he going? I had to know. Or at least try to find out. Maybe if I followed him, I’d get a clue as to why he had left Texas.

I was still dressed, so I grabbed my purse and rushed down the stairs in my stocking feet, hoping that I wasn’t waking Aunt Nettie. At the back door I stepped into my boots and pulled on my jacket and cap. By the time I got outside, Jeff’s taillights had turned onto Lake Shore Drive, and his headlights popped on. I ran to my van, thudding along the cleared walk and then scrambling through the snow along the drive. I pulled the no-lights stunt until I was past the house. I was still trying not to wake up Aunt Nettie, but I half expected to see her standing at her bedroom window as I went by; Aunt Nettie doesn’t miss much.

Even without lights, it was easy to see where I was going. Our part of Michigan is heavily wooded, but there are only a few evergreens; nearly all the trees are bare in winter. The snow on the ground reflected what light there was, giving the night a luminous quality. I drove about a quarter of a mile before I turned on my headlights.

By then I was asking myself if I was wasting my time. Jeff had about a three-minute head start, and even one minute would give him enough time to get away from me completely. But a few factors were working in my favor. If Jeff had gone anyplace but Warner Pier, I might as well forget the chase and go home. But if he had gone into Warner Pier, it was just a small place; I could drive up and down every street in the town in fifteen minutes. Plus, his gold Lexus RX300 was really noticeable. There probably wasn’t another car like it in Warner Pier in the winter. So if I spotted one, I’d know it was likely to be him even before I saw the Texas tag.

Besides, if Jeff had sneaked out because he wanted to buy something, there was only one place in Warner Pier that was open all night, the Stop and Shop out on the state highway, at West Street and North Lake Shore Drive. I didn’t consider that a strong possibility. Jeff had claimed he had less than five dollars in his pocket.

So I crossed the Warner River on the Orchard Street bridge and drove up and down the streets of Warner Pier. I was all by myself; the town shuts down completely on a winter night. Streetlights made the snow glitter at every corner, and the Victorian houses looked like wedding cakes.