The Chocolate Mouse Trap (18 page)

“That makes sense.”

“I thought Julie was pretty innocuous, myself. But I find that she had managed to alienate most of the other members of the group with her amateur psychologist act. She ‘outed’ Jason and his partner, Ross, to Ross’s dad. She apparently knew about something unfortunate that had happened to Margaret in high school and kept trying to get her to ‘deal with it.’ This might have meant she threatened to tell someone else something that Margaret, or Margaret and Jim, didn’t want them to know.”

“So what’s next?”

“So now I wonder what she did to the Denhams. They certainly weren’t wholehearted fans of Julie Singletree.”

Joe sighed. “When can we go see them?”

“You don’t need to go.”

“You’re not going alone!”

“Actually, I was planning to see them in a group. The whole Seventh Food Group. We’ve all been invited to a preview of a closeout sale at Veldkamp Used Food Equipment and Supply tomorrow night. According to the e-mails, everybody’s going. Maybe I can talk to Ronnie and Diane informally there. But I won’t be alone. I’ll stick close to either Lindy or Aunt Nettie.”

The person I was to stick close to turned out to be Lindy, because Aunt Nettie decided not to go to the Veldkamp sale. I couldn’t decide if she wanted an evening alone with Hogan—she did ask him over to dinner—or if she wanted me to make more decisions about TenHuis Chocolade on my own. It may have been both, but the evening with Hogan probably carried the most weight.

So Lindy and I went alone, and Lindy insisted on driving her bright green compact, despite her injury just two days earlier. “I feel fine,” she said. “I guess it takes more than a whack up side the head to slow me down. The only thing that might make me nervous about picking you up is that place on Lake Shore Drive where the bank’s caving in.”

“The street department has a barricade up,” I said. “Not that it would stop anything heavier than a bicycle.”

“But at least I’ll be able to tell the spot where I want to stay away from the edge. Now, Lee, you be sure to wear your warmest coat. I can guarantee that Veldkamp’s warehouse is going to be as cold as a well-digger’s fanny.”

Lindy was right. We entered Veldkamp’s through the heated showroom, but once we were escorted to the cavernous warehouse, we might as well have been in Santa’s shipping department. I’d worn my wooly white hat and scarf, my red down jacket, my fur-lined boots, a pair of flannel-lined jeans, and long johns, and I had no impulse to unzip, unhat, or otherwise remove or loosen any garment I had on. Not only was it physically cold, the decor featured concrete floors, dim lights, huge cardboard cartons, gigantic black ranges, and stainless steel appliances in jumbo sizes. Not cozy. It would have felt cold in there on the hottest day of July.

The Seventh Food Group members were obviously not the only people who’d been invited to preview the closeout sale offerings. There were around fifty people roaming around, checking out plate warmers and kicking the tires of rolling tables. Lindy started looking for a freezer. I remembered that I’d promised Joe I’d stick close to her, but Veldkamp’s warehouse didn’t seem all that dangerous, despite the big equipment that could have hidden a regiment of mad bombers. I found a Veldkamp employee and asked directions to the cooling tunnel.

A cooling tunnel is a little air conditioner for chocolates. It’s open at both ends and a conveyor belt runs through it, passing under a Plexiglas arch; cold air sprays into that miniature tunnel. Chocolate melts easily—that’s why you can’t hold it in your hand very long without having sticky fingers. So chocolatiers can mold it or dip it readily, but they then have to let it get cool before they can do a next step, such as adding another layer of chocolate. A cooling tunnel speeds this process up.

Aunt Nettie had explained what I should look for in a cooling tunnel and how much I should be willing to pay. The one Veldkamp’s had looked pretty good—or it would once we’d cleaned it to Aunt Nettie standards—so I put in a written bid. Then I moved to the stainless steel section and began to look at work tables and rolling storage racks.

All the time I was keeping an eye out for Diane and Ronnie Denham, or I thought I was. So I don’t know why I jumped about a foot when I rolled a six-foot-tall storage rack aside and came face to face with Diane.

“Oh!” I said. “You startled me.”

Diane smiled her cheerful Mrs. Claus smile. She was bundled up in a long blue down coat and had a plaid wool scarf wrapped around her head. Just a few of her beautiful white curls peeked out over her forehead. “Hi, Lee. What are you looking for?”

“Storage racks and work tables for Aunt Nettie.” I’d already decided to forget subtlety and simply to ask for information from Diane, so I plunged right in. “I was also looking for a chance to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Julie.”

Diane looked away from me. She put out a gloved hand and gently rolled a stainless steel rack back and forth. “Aren’t the police looking into Julie’s death?”

“Of course. I’m not interested in her death. I’m interested in her life. All sorts of bad things have happened to the Seventh Food Group since Julie was killed. I have a feeling that’s because of things that happened while she was alive. I barely knew Julie, but I feel compelled to—well, get to know her posthaste. I mean, posthumously!”

Diane ignored my slip of the tongue. “I only met her a few times.”

“That’s what all of us say. But she managed to elevate—I mean, alienate!—at least half the members of the Seventh Food Group with her amateur psychology.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I just figured it out this week. Jason—this is just an example—she urged Jason and Ross to open up about their relationship with Ross’s dad. Jason says the poor old guy is ninety years old and in a nursing home. Until Julie shot her mouth off, he considered Jason merely a friend of his son’s. What good is it going to do for them to confront him with their relationship at this point in his life?”

Diane shook her head. “It wouldn’t be kind at all, and it wouldn’t affect Jason and Ross, either.”

“Exactly! But I have a feeling that Julie was Little Miss Helpful to everybody she was around. I know she tried to talk to me about my divorce. I had a hard time dodging her. Did she give you and Ronnie the same treatment? What did you all think of her?”

Diane’s face crumpled, and she turned away. “Julie was awfully nosy,” she said. “She went way beyond asking personal questions. She had—well, she’d researched us on the Internet. I think she’d researched all of us.”

“All of us?”

“Yes. But it was strange, Lee. She didn’t offer to tell us anything about anyone else. About Jason, for example, or about you or any of the others. When you called her an ‘amateur psychologist,’ that described it. She thought everybody should put all their problems on display, should forget about keeping anything secret.”

I shuddered. “I guess she simply hadn’t gotten to me yet. I have as many secrets as anybody else. But she kept her own life completely secret.”

Diane caught her breath sharply, and I realized she was looking at something behind me. I looked around and saw Ronnie coming toward us.

Diane leaned toward me. When she spoke again, she had dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “Lee, don’t talk about Julie in front of Ronnie. In fact, there’s no point in talking about this at all. We signed a confidentiality agreement. We cannot say a word. Under penalty of law.”

I snapped my gaping mouth shut just as Ronnie joined us. “Hi, Lee,” he said. “Diane, there’s a set of big mixing bowls over there you might want to take a look at.”

They went away, and I strolled aimlessly among the giant cartons and superduper mixers while I thought about what Diane had said. A confidentiality agreement? What was that exactly? Under what situation would an outwardly ordinary couple like the Denhams sign such a thing? The settlement of a lawsuit? Something to do with a juvenile offender?

It was a question for a lawyer. I resolved to ask Joe. Then I wandered back to the rolling racks and picked a couple out that I thought would suit Aunt Nettie. TenHuis Chocolade uses a lot of those racks—stainless steel gizmos on wheels, each around six feet tall and three feet square, with space for two dozen metal trays that slide in and out of metal supports. We could use a half dozen, Aunt Nettie had told me, but we had no place to put that many.

Was TenHuis going to have to expand? If we decided I needed an assistant, we’d need a place for him or her to work, and Aunt Nettie definitely could use more storage space. But where would we find the room? I tucked that idea away to think about after I’d figured out Julie.

Lindy and I left for Warner Pier about nine o’clock. She’d made arrangements for Mike to look over the freezer. I was mostly silent as she drove home; Lindy was mad at one of the teachers at Warner Pier Elementary, and I heard about her for the whole thirty miles, but I only listened to about half of it.

It wasn’t until she had turned the green compact onto the Warner River Bridge that she said something that really caught my ear.

“You know, Lee, that car’s been behind us all the way from Holland.”

I twisted around to see the headlights of the car behind us. “Are you sure?”

“Not absolutely positive, of course, but I first noticed a set of headlights that shape and size just as we stopped at the Twenty-fourth Street light.”

“Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I didn’t think anything of it until the lights followed us through Warner Pier. And now he’s closing up on us.”

“Should you turn around and go back?”

“To the police station? There’s nobody there this time of night. They close up and let the county dispatcher take calls.”

“We could go to the Stop and Shop. It’s open all night.”

“Yeah, and some old guy’s at the cash register. A lot of help he would be.”

“He could call Tony or Joe. Heck, I’ve got my cell phone. I can call Tony or Joe. Or the cops.” I reached for my purse.

“I’ve got another idea, Lee. Why don’t I pull in a driveway and turn around. We can go back to town. If the car doesn’t follow us—well, I’m going to feel pretty dumb if we call Tony or Joe, and it turns out to be somebody who lives farther on down Lake Shore Drive coming back from the Holland Multiplex.”

The interstate coming down from Holland had been well plowed, of course, and thousands of cars had driven down it since the last snow, beating the pavement almost free of snow and ice. In contrast, Lake Shore Drive was barely two lanes wide, and it had only local traffic, so it had snow piled along the edges. But there were lots of driveways, roads, and lanes branching off it.

“Turn in at the Nolans’ house,” I said. “Where the big hedge is. If you cut the lights, it ought to hide us.”

Lindy nodded. She sped up, wheeling around a curve in the road. I was looking back at the car behind us when she suddenly turned off the headlights, and I felt the compact swerve as she cut the wheels sharply right.

“Hang on,” Lindy said.

Then she hit the brakes. My seat belt snapped, keeping me immobile. I kept looking out the back window. I could see a red reflection on the Nolans’ hedge. “Foot off the brakes!” I said.

The red disappeared, as did a fainter white. Lindy had turned off the ignition.

For a moment I was scared that the car following us would come into the Nolans’ drive right after us. Then where would we be? Caught between a hedge and a hard place.

But the lights went on by. The car behind us wasn’t even driving very fast.

“Could you see what kind of car it was?” I said.

“I wouldn’t recognize it if I saw it. The headlights just looked odd. But it sure didn’t look like a madman trying to run us off the road, did it?”

“No. But let’s drive back to town anyway.”

Lindy started the car, backed out of the drive, and headed back the way we’d come. I kept a close watch, but no car was behind us. It was close to ten o’clock by then, and all the residents of Lake Shore Drive had apparently gone home. We saw lights through the bare branches of the trees, but we were the only car moving. We drove back across the Warner River Bridge and into town, and Lindy pulled into the parking lot that overlooked the bridge. Again she cut her lights.

“Unless our eyes are reflecting,” I said, “we should be hard to see.”

“We’ll have to peek through our fingers if he comes back.”

He didn’t come back. We sat there looking at the bridge for ten minutes and not a single vehicle crossed it, either coming toward us or going away.

After a few minutes Lindy began to laugh. “I won’t tell Joe about this, if you won’t tell Tony.”

“I do feel pretty stupid. But considering that you were actually attacked just a couple of days ago . . .”

“That was just a thief.” Lindy’s voice was firm. “I refuse to worry about this any more. I’m driving you home.”

We laughed and giggled all the way across the bridge. The relief was great. But I couldn’t help peeking out the back window now and then. So I saw the headlights first.

I gasped. A car had pulled out of a driveway and turned the same way we were traveling. It was moving fast; it fishtailed as it turned onto Lake Shore Drive.

“Not again!” Lindy said.

“Maybe it’s not the same guy.”

“They look like the same headlights to me,” she said. “They reflect off that grill in the middle, and that grill looks like long teeth. Let’s move!”

The little car took a leap forward. Lake Shore Drive follows the edge of Lake Michigan. It’s a narrow blacktop road, and there was ice and snow along the edges. Not a good place for fast driving. But I didn’t care, and Lindy apparently didn’t either. She gunned the motor.

The car behind us was closing in. I didn’t say anything, since Lindy could see it coming in the rearview mirror. I wanted her to concentrate on driving, not looking at the strange headlights behind us.