The Chocolate Bridal Bash (24 page)

My comment didn’t have the desired effect. “Chief Jones! He’s probably as big a crook as that sheriff was!”

Lovie pulled her padded jacket around her as if she were in a strong north wind. She began to rock back and forth. She gave a loud sniff and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

I had to respond to her sorrow. I took two Kleenex from a box Hogan’s secretary kept on her desk and sat down by Lovie. “Let’s trust the chief as long as we can,” I said. “He’s a really smart man, and I think he’ll do his best to understand everything that’s going on.”

“Ed’s all I have left,” she said.

“I know.” I put my hand on her arm.

“And he’s good!” Her voice became loud again. “He would never have killed anyone! He would have saved his brother if he had known!”

Her words made me feel as cold as she looked. Here was confirmation that Ed had been mixed up in whatever happened to Bill Dykstra, in the crime that had sent my mother fleeing to another part of the country, afraid to come back to her hometown.

What did Lovie know about that? I leaned forward to ask her. As I tried to formulate the question, I heard the Warner Pier PD radio, broadcasting from a corner of the office. I didn’t understand all the police jargon, but I recognized the voice as coming from Jerry Cherry. And he sounded excited.

Jerry Cherry? Excited? Jerry was the patrolman the chief had sent out to Aunt Nettie’s house to make sure she and Mom were all right.

I listened. The chief had apparently picked up the mike he kept in his office, but I could hear both ends of the conversation.

“What’s going on?” Hogan asked.

“Chief, I got here, and two cars were in the drive, but I couldn’t find anybody,” Jerry said. “I walked all around the outside of the house. Nada. Then I tried the back door. It wasn’t locked, so I went inside. Yelled out who I was.” He took a deep breath. “And Mrs. TenHuis answered me. Way far off.”

“Where was she?”

“Chief, she was locked in the basement! The door had been jammed so that she couldn’t get out. She says a guy wearing a ski mask put her down there. And he must have taken Lee’s mom away. She’s not here anywhere!”

I
t’s hard to explain how I wound up fleeing the police station in Lovie’s old truck.

“Fleeing��� isn’t the right word, of course. When Jerry Cherry broadcast the news that Aunt Nettie had been locked in her own basement and my mom was nowhere to be found, the four of us who heard it leaped to our feet like a chorus line hearing the cue to go on stage, though each of us sang a different song.

Hogan yelled, “Is Nettie all right?”

Ed Dykstra rushed out of Hogan’s office, slamming the office door back against the wall with a crash.

Lovie called out plaintively. “Ed?”

I ran for the door.

But Ed beat me. He didn’t stop to answer his mother, and he came by me so fast that it’s a miracle I wasn’t knocked over by the wind. If I had fallen, he would have trampled me into the tile floor of the Warner Pier PD and not even noticed. I followed him out as quickly as I could, but Ed was jumping into his small SUV by the time I reached the sidewalk.

I stood there, bouncing from side to side, realizing that my van was at Herrera’s. I heard Hogan’s patrol car revving up, back in the PD’s parking lot. Its siren began to blare, and I realized I was too late to get a ride with Hogan. I’d have to run several blocks to get transportation.

Then Lovie came scuttling past, headed for her beat-up old truck. So I didn’t hesitate. I climbed into the passenger side without asking permission. Lovie barely gave me a glance. She just started the truck, threw it in reverse and shot out of her parking place.

I started to call Joe to tell him what had happened, and I realized that I didn’t have my purse. I’d left it in the police department, on the floor under my chair. So I didn’t even have my cell phone.

I was riding with the town’s crazy woman, nobody knew where I was, and I had no way to contact anybody who might want to know. I considered asking Lovie to let me out, but she was heading in the direction I wanted to go, so I kept quiet.

Hogan’s siren was rapidly fading into the distance, but Lovie’s old truck was noisy, so I had to yell at her. “Do you have a cell phone?”

She shook her head, but she didn’t look toward me.

I fastened my seat belt. I could only assume Lovie was headed to Aunt Nettie’s house.

Lovie seemed to be a good driver, though she was ignoring the speed limit. She went tearing down Peach Street, turned onto Dock Street, then crossed the Orchard Street Bridge. After she swerved onto Lake Shore Drive, I could see the spinning lights on top of Hogan’s car a quarter of a mile ahead of us, and we could hear his siren. As long as we were following Hogan, I wouldn’t feel threatened.

Hogan slowed and turned into Aunt Nettie’s lane. I assumed Lovie would turn in after him. But Lovie went right by.

I grabbed her arm. “We needed to turn there!”

She shook her head so hard the red pom-pom on her hat bounced like an apple on a McIntosh tree hit by a strong wind. “We’ve got to save Sally!” she said. She drove on, looking straight ahead, completely intent on the road.

The siren had stopped, and I tried yelling over the truck’s noise again. “Where are you going?”

“To get Sally away from those awful men!”

“Which awful men!”

“That Quinn McKay!”

“Quinn McKay?” I gulped that one down. It didn’t come as a big surprise. I was convinced my mom had seen Quinn McKay at his family home—walking around free at a time when he was supposed to be a hostage—and she’d heard at least two other men talking. I didn’t stop to wonder who the third might have been.

Lovie was muttering. What was I doing, barreling along Lake Shore Drive in a truck driven by a crazy woman?

“Yes, Quinn McKay was in it,” she said. “And Ratso.”

“Ratso?”

“Ratso! The one I thought was my friend. The one I trusted.”

Lovie seemed to be grinding her teeth. She sounded crazier than ever. “The one I should have told on years ago. But I had to protect Ed.”

Who could she mean?

I yelled again. “Where are we going?”

“Where they’ve taken Sally. Pray that we’re not too late. They’ve already killed two people. She’s got to be there!”

“Where?” I yelled out the question, and Lovie turned her head toward me for half a second. “Why, the McKay house,” she said. Her tone implied that I must be a complete idiot not to know.

I sat back. If Quinn McKay was one of my mom’s kidnappers, I supposed that taking my mom to his family cottage had some logic. But Lovie wasn’t making sense, and I was sorry that I’d ever got in her truck.

“Oh, it’s all my fault!” Lovie was still muttering. “I got them into it. Ed and Ratso! I thought it was a good idea.”

“You thought what was a good idea?”

“The protests. But it turned out to be a bad mistake. Ratso ramped up the whole deal. I told them it was stupid. I thought I’d talked them out of it! Then they killed my son!”

“Did they kidnap Quinn McKay, too?”

“Kidnap? Ha!” Lovie was slowing now. I could see the hulk of the old white house, the McKay place, back in the woods. Was she going to turn in?

“Mrs. Dykstra! Lovie! We should go to the police! Turn around and go to Aunt Nettie’s house.”

“No,” Lovie said. Her voice was quiet, but firm. “No, I’ve got to go here. I’ve got to face them down, make them turn Sally loose.”

She swung into a lane marked by a mailbox with a cheerful red cardinal painted on it. Then she stopped, blocking the drive.

“We get out here,” she said. “You can go back to your aunt’s house. It’s best if I go on alone.”

She got out of the truck and started slogging on up the drive.

I gaped a minute, then I slogged after her. If my mom was being held at the McKay house—a claim I didn’t accept—it was the last place in the world for a crazy old lady.

“Lovie—Mrs. Dykstra! Let’s go back to the truck. Let’s call the police. If the kidnappers are there, the police should deal with it.”

“No! I should deal with it. It’s all my fault.”

Lovie slogged on, head down, picking her way through really nasty snow—snow that had melted and refrozen a dozen times on a driveway that had not been plowed all year.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I slog after her? Slog back to Lake Shore Drive and find a phone? Lots of the houses along there were closed for the winter. It wouldn’t be easy to find one. I might have to hitchhike. But would I dare accept a ride, with kidnappers on the loose? I might have to slip and slide for more than a mile—clear back to Aunt Nettie’s house.

I obviously should have run down to pick up the van instead of jumping into Lovie’s truck. Time spent running two blocks on Warner Pier’s cleared sidewalks would have saved me time that I needed more now.

But I simply couldn’t let a crazy old lady go off to a deserted house in the Michigan winter by herself. I told myself that Hogan was looking for my mother. As worried as I might be about her, I couldn’t really do anything at Aunt Nettie’s house. And I might be able to persuade Lovie to get back in her truck and give up this trek to the McKay house.

Because I considered her story about the kidnappers being there completely ridiculous.

So I followed her up the long drive that led to the McKay house, listening to her mutter about everything being her fault. I talked, too, but our conversation wasn’t logical.

“I believed we could change things,” Lovie said. “But not this way. Not this way!”

“Come back to Aunt Nettie’s with me, Mrs. Dykstra! We’ll let the police handle this.”

“I should have spoken out years ago, but it might have meant Ed’s life! I couldn’t bear to lose both my sons.”

“Please come back with me, Mrs. Dykstra.”

“I thought Sally was safe, as long as she didn’t come back!” She turned to me and spoke angrily. “Why did you make her come back?”

“I didn’t! I—”

But she grabbed my arm and gave a mighty “Shh!” We’d come around a line of evergreens and were within sight of the house.

“Be quiet!” Her voice was an order. “They mustn’t hear us.”

I whispered, but I pleaded with her. “Mrs. Dykstra, come away. You can see that the house is deserted. All the shutters are up. There’s no one here. If you think the house should be investigated, we’ll ask Hogan Jones to do it.”

I was wasting my breath. Lovie walked on toward the house, and I trailed helplessly in her wake, like a dinghy being pulled along by a scow.

This was the first time I’d ever seen the house clearly, since it was completely hidden by foliage nine months out of the year and was only a ghostly shape in the bare woods in the winter. It wasn’t a showplace, as so many of the summer homes along the lakeshore are. It looked more like a big, roomy farmhouse. It was surrounded by an acre of snow and had evergreens as a background, but the heavy shutters nailed over each window kept the house from looking like a Christmas card. It didn’t look welcoming; it looked cold and ominous.

The snow around it was unbroken by human tracks. The porch was covered with drifts, and the cellar door was so snowed in that I could barely see what it was. As we approached the house, the only unshuttered opening I could see was a side door that led onto an extension to the porch—a sort of deck. I realized that that must be the door to the bedroom, the one my mom had fled through thirty-three years earlier.

Lovie hadn’t let go of my arm. She clutched it and motioned toward the north side of the house. She was still whispering. “We can get in through the kitchen.”

“Lovie! We can’t go into the McKay house! We’re trespassing already.”

I might as well have kept my mouth shut. She kept her grip on my arm and slogged forward.

Now we were off the drive, fighting our way through unbroken snow, rounding the big square white house. I gave up the argument. We didn’t have a key to the house, so we couldn’t get in without smashing the back door. When Lovie saw that no one was at the house, she’d surely agree to go back to Aunt Nettie’s with me.

But as we reached the north side of the house, I got another surprise. Lovie hitched up her ski jacket and reached into the pocket of her flannel-lined jeans. She pulled out a key. A key that had been discolored by age.

Lovie gave a guttural laugh. “Ed Sr. always told Ben he needed to change the locks on this place,” she said. “Neither he nor this fancy-pants wife who inherited ever got around to it.”

Using a finger to caution me to silence, she stepped onto a broad back porch. As I followed her, I looked down to make sure where the step was.

That’s when I saw the footprints.

They led around the other side of the house, up the steps, and onto the back porch. My eyes popped. I could see two sets of larger tracks—men’s boots, I’d guess. Then there were marks that showed skidding and sliding.

And there was one clear print of a woman’s shoe.

Had the kidnappers brought my mom here?

While I’d been gaping at the tracks, Lovie had silently crossed to what must have been the kitchen door. She tried the handle, then put the key in her jacket pocket.

The door was already unlocked. As Lovie opened it, I could hear voices.

Lovie was right. The kidnappers had taken my mom to the old McKay house. She had been fighting, trying to get away, as they dragged her to the back door. But she’d been alive. That one clear track showed she’d reached the back door on her own two feet.

As soon as I reached that conclusion, I questioned it. After all, the McKay house wasn’t at the end of the earth. It was only a mile and a half away from Aunt Nettie’s, in a civilized—if lonely—neighborhood. And even though the house had been closed for the season, that simply meant the heat wasn’t on, the water had been cut off, and there were shutters on the windows. As Lovie had just demonstrated, it was possible to go in and out at will, and there was no reason members of the McKay family wouldn’t do that anytime they wanted. I couldn’t identify the track of my mother’s shoe; the track on the back porch might have been made by a McKay wife, daughter, or girlfriend.