The Chocolate Castle Clue (2 page)

Now Aunt Nettie gestured around the storage room. “This place is awful!”

“Is that your fault?”

“Actually, I think I'm pretty good about throwing things away. Apparently I even threw all my high school souvenirs away.”

“Oh, Aunt Nettie! I'm sorry.”

“It can't be helped now. I have no idea when they disappeared.” She shrugged. “But Phil—well, he wanted to hang on to everything. Even those useless old buckets.”

We both smiled. One reason everything in the storage area was so dusty was that almost everything in it had been there since before Uncle Phil died.

“Uncle Phil was a wonderful person,” I said. “I'm sorry we have to get rid of his treasures.”

“Phil's treasures are now officially declared trash!” Aunt Nettie's vehemence made Dolly and me laugh. “If I get a break from the girls, I'll come back and help you.”

Dolly's voice boomed out. She can't speak at a normal decibel level; every sentence is a shout. “We don't want to be here until your reunion is over! We want to get through! So don't worry about coming back!”

We shooed Aunt Nettie on her way and kept digging. I looked at things and tried to be ruthless, and Dolly operated the shredder. Tax records older than seven years, correspondence about orders for chocolates shipped back in 1990, bills paid long ago—all turned into strips of scrap paper. The garbage bags began to pile up.

At one o'clock Joe came back with his pickup, and the three of us filled its bed again. Joe, Dolly, and I then ate lunch in Dolly's tidy apartment—she provided homemade pimiento cheese for sandwiches, and Joe picked up a carton of coleslaw. We finished the meal off with some chocolates from the TenHuis reject bin—Italian cherry (“amarena cherry in syrup and white chocolate cream, encased in dark chocolate”) and Bailey's Irish cream (“classic cream liqueur interior in a dark chocolate square”). They tasted wonderful, even though all of them had been embellished with the wrong designs on top.

After lunch Joe left, and I was finally ready for the three oldest filing cabinets.

I sighed. “Dolly, I don't know what's in those babies, but you've worked like a dog all morning. Plus, you fed Joe and me lunch. Why don't you quit now?”

Dolly answered in her usual shout. “I don't mind, Lee! I hate to leave you out here all alone!”

“Downtown Warner Pier isn't exactly the wilderness, Dolly. And there are still people in the shop, just across the alley.”

“I know. But I'll stay!”

I hated to admit it, but I appreciated her company. After all, Aunt Nettie and I had once made a very unpleasant discovery in that garage. And although we were in the middle of downtown, Warner Pier is a village of only twenty-five hundred, and we were a couple of weeks past the end of the tourist season, so it was pretty lonely in our alley.

The three filing cabinets were themselves oldies but goodies. I knew Aunt Nettie and Uncle Phil had started TenHuis Chocolade with secondhand office equipment, so these cabinets were already old when they had bought them. They were heavy even without the pounds and pounds of paper filling them. And they were sturdy. Today's filing cabinets simply didn't compare with these suckers. If their drawers had been locked—and luckily it seemed none of them were—it would have taken brute force to open them since we hadn't seen any keys for them.

I pulled out the top drawer of the first filing cabinet and resolutely started going through files. “More trash.” I muttered the words as I found a file folder full of brochures on food-service equipment for sale thirty years earlier.

“Hand it over!” Dolly boomed. She stuffed the brochures in the shredder, and I emptied the rest of the drawer. I didn't even try to save the used file folders. They went into the trash.

The next drawer held employment files. I shuffled through them. They reached back to the first people Aunt Nettie and Uncle Phil had hired, during the third year they'd been in business. Before that they had done all the work themselves.

The earliest file, I saw, was one for Hazel TerHoot, who had been Aunt Nettie's chief helper for more than twenty-five years. She had retired two years previously, and Dolly had replaced her. Today Hazel was one of the high school chums Aunt Nettie was entertaining.

The employment files ended ten years ago. I assumed the reason for their sudden halt was that Uncle Phil put such files on the computer about that time.

I didn't have the nerve to toss out the old employment files, although I saw no use for them. I put them in a storage box. They'd go to the new rental unit.

I kept at it. One whole filing cabinet was full of correspondence. Three big drawers. I sighed. Honestly, Uncle Phil, I thought, who cares about a letter asking you to join the West Michigan Business Association in 1984? Bless your heart; you were a great guy, but what a pack rat! All the old letters went into the shredder.

There were drawers of bills. And drawers of tax records—not just the completed forms. Oh no! Uncle Phil had kept the supporting documentation as well. I began to fear the shredder would break down.

I slogged on. And on. And on. And finally—finally—I came to the bottom drawer of the third filing cabinet.

“Yahoo!” I stood up to stretch. I waved my arms in the air. “Dolly! I'm down to the last drawer!”

“Whoopee!” Dolly did a little dance. This was quite a sight, since she's even taller than I am—I'm five eleven and a half, but Dolly's six foot one—and is built more like an oak tree than a willow.

“I'll get the push broom and start sweeping!” Dolly shouted. She went across to the shop.

After I'd stretched until my back felt a bit more like a back is supposed to feel, I pulled my folding chair in front of the final filing cabinet. I leaned over and pulled on the bottom drawer.

The darn thing wouldn't open.

“Don't tell me,” I said. “I finally came to a locked drawer.”

I jiggled. I tugged. I put my foot on the drawer above it and pulled the handle. It didn't budge.

By then Dolly was back with the broom. She jiggled, tugged, and pulled on the drawer.

“Careful!” I said. “We don't want to yank the handle off.”

“Why not? You said these cabinets were going to the dump!”

“I guess you're right. We might as well pry it open. If we had something to pry with.”

“I'll get my tool kit!”

“Tool kit?”

Dolly nodded. “When I left home my father gathered up some old tools for me! I think there's a pry bar in the collection !”

She went across the alley to her apartment and came back with a wooden toolbox—the open, homemade kind with a handle on top, like the ones carpenters are likely to carry. She plunked it onto a small workbench that was against the back wall on the garage side of the area. She flipped on the light over the bench—a mechanic's work light that clamped onto a nail in the wall. The glaring light revealed the contents of the toolbox. And in the bottom of it was a strong-looking black crowbar about two feet long. Dolly waved it triumphantly.

“That ought to open anything in this garage,” I said.

Dolly inserted the narrow end behind the top of the locked drawer and pressed on it. The lock broke, and the drawer popped open about an inch.

“Aha!” I said. “You've done it. Now, I wonder what in the world Uncle Phil thought was worth locking up.”

I pulled the drawer out. The first thing on top was a trophy. It was lying on its side.

I picked it up. It had a heavy black base and was at least two feet tall. On its top was a model of a castle.

“What in the world?” Dolly's voice boomed. “I can understand displaying a trophy, or I can see throwing it away! But locking it up seems kind of odd!”

I read the plaque. The top line was in small letters: FIRST PLACE, followed by the year. The next lines were in larger letters : TALENT SHOW. The final lines were very large: CASTLE BALLROOM.

“Oh, ye gods!” I said. “This is the trophy Aunt Nettie and her friends won the last night the Castle Ballroom was in business.”

I looked at Dolly. “But why did Uncle Phil lock it up?”

Dolly spoke in her usual shout. “Is this the group that's having a reunion this weekend?”

“Yes. They're having a sort of slumber party at Aunt Nettie's tonight. Several of them are staying with her all week.”

I pulled out the first item under the trophy. It was a scrapbook. On the first page was a picture of six pretty young girls, dressed in the styles of forty-plus years ago. They were standing in that traditional angled pose—right shoulders toward the camera—that photographers use to get heads close together in a group shot. The caption under the photo read, THE PIER-O-ETTES. In smaller letters were the words PHOTO BY SHEPPARD STONE.

A young Aunt Nettie, with hair as fair as the gray-blond mixture she had today, was in the middle. I was surprised to realize that I recognized only one of the others. I knew two of the old Pier-O-Ettes very well, but Hazel TerHoot was the only one I could pick out of the forty-five-year-old photo.

Under the scrapbook was a framed certificate recognizing the Pier-O-Ettes for winning some high school competition.

“Until all this came up I never knew that Nettie sang!” Dolly yelled.

“I gather that this group won lots of high school contests,” I said. “Plus, they sang at community events.”

“I guess they never recorded or anything!”

“Not professionally. They broke up after their senior year.”

I lifted out more items. “Look. Here's a box of souvenirs—programs and pins and notes and such.” I picked up a ribbon. It was attached to a cluster of what must have once been flowers. “Even an old corsage.”

I looked at Dolly. “This must be the stuff Aunt Nettie said was lost.”

Dolly nodded solemnly. “She'd like to have this!”

“I'll take it over to her house after we're through.”

I taped a new storage box together and wrote “Nettie's Memorabilia” on the outside. The pictures and other items fit in easily, but the trophy was too large. I went across the alley to the TenHuis kitchen and got a plastic garbage sack and several dish towels. I wrapped the trophy in the towels and put it into the sack. Then I stashed all the items in my van, which was parked in my reserved spot in the alley.

Dolly and I finished sweeping the garage. Joe and I would come by later to pick up the boxes that were to go into the storage unit and to cart the empty filing cabinets away. Even empty, the cabinets were heavy, but I assured Dolly that Joe and I could load them into his truck.

I thanked Dolly for all her work and told her I'd close up the garage and the shop. Dolly ceremoniously presented me with the garage door's remote opener as a sign that she no longer was going to park there.

“Here!” she shouted. “Add this to your string of fish!”

We both laughed, and I pulled the paraphernalia she was referring to from the side pocket of my purse. It was a short ring of chain—actual chain—with gadgets attached to it by key rings. It held a miniature flashlight, a small Swiss Army knife, a zippered coin purse the size of a credit card, extra car and house keys, and a container of pepper spray. My friend Lindy Herrera had given it to me for Christmas. She called it the “no-harm charm bracelet,” because all the “charms” were related to personal safety.

Of course, no one could actually wear the thing on an arm. It was too bulky. Joe had joked that its main use for personal safety would be as a weapon.

“Hit an attacker with that collection,” he had said, “and you'd be likely to take his nose off.”

I didn't use it for my regular car keys, of course. I kept those hooked to a ring that hung on the outside of my purse. But I'd used the knife and the flashlight of the “no-harm charm bracelet” a few times, and it was nice to know I had extra keys and a folded-up ten-dollar bill stashed away in my purse.

So I lugged it around, and now I held it up for inspection. “I can't add the garage door remote,” I said. “It doesn't have a ring on it to attach.”

I punched the remote then, and the garage door went down. But the light on the actual opener, the gadget overhead, didn't go on.

“Dolly,” I said, “why didn't you tell me the door opener's light is out?”

“I always use the central overhead light instead of that one!” she yelled. “I just never got around to putting a new bulb in it!”

“Well, we're not going to bother now,” I said. “We'll turn the garage over to the owners with a dud bulb.”