The Chocolate Mouse Trap (9 page)

I called Lindy to make sure Jason had caught her. She had her laptop with her. Its files were fine, she said.

“I took the day off, because I’ve got to work tonight,” she said. “Mike has city council meeting, of course, and he wants me to be at Herrera’s to close tonight.” Herrera’s is Mike’s upscale restaurant. He keeps it and the Sidewalk Café open most of the winter. In addition to her catering job, Lindy fills in whenever he needs her at one of the restaurants.

Lindy promised to back up her files, and I hung up, relieved to find that not everyone in the Seventh Major Food Group seemed to have been hit by either a burglary or a computer virus.

By then the computer had finished copying the files I was most concerned about, and I took the disk out, marked it with “backup” and the date, then put it in my desk drawer. I resolved to think about something else. I hung my jacket on the coat tree in the corner, traded my snow boots for a pair of loafers, and wandered back into the shop, taking deep, soothing breaths laden with chocolate aroma. Aunt Nettie wasn’t in sight, but the place was bustling, just the way a chocolate business should be four weeks before Valentine’s Day.

I stopped beside Dolly Jolly, one of our newer employees. Dolly had popped up in our lives the previous summer, when she rented a remote cottage near Warner Pier to use as a retreat while she wrote a cookbook. When fall came, she decided she wanted to stay in Warner Pier. She rented the apartment over TenHuis Chocolade, and she asked for a chance to learn the chocolate business.

Dolly is unforgettable. She’s taller than I am, built like a University of Michigan linebacker, and has brilliant red hair and a matching freckled face. And she can only speak at one decibel level—the top of her voice.

“Hi, Lee!” she shouted. At the same time she flipped a five-inch mold over and gently tapped until what looked like a bowl of dark chocolate—actually a puffed, hollow heart—fell gently onto a metal tray, where it lay beside identical hearts.

“Hi, Dolly. How’s the stock holding out?”

“Fine! But you might want to ask Nettie! She said something about needing raspberries!” Frozen raspberries are used to make the filling for a popular TenHuis bonbon.

I nodded. “We don’t want to run out of raspberry creams.” Because of their lovely pink insides and their yummy flavor, raspberry creams (“Red raspberry puree blended into a white chocolate cream interior, covered in dark chocolate”) are highly popular at Valentine’s. “Where’s Aunt Nettie?”

Dolly pulled over a second tray, loaded with small solid chocolate hearts, cupids, and arrows. She began to fill the bigger hearts with an assortment of the small items. “She’s in the break room working on something! Did you see the messages I left for you?”

“I guess not.”

Dolly shrugged. “There were only a couple of calls! They said they’d call back! But this one guy came by!”

“Did he leave a name?”

“I left it on the desk! Martin? Martin something!”

I thought a moment. “Martin Schrader?”

“Older guy? Kinda short?”

Of course, to Dolly anybody who isn’t playing in the NBA is “kinda short.” But at not quite six feet, I’d looked down slightly when I talked to Martin Schrader face to face.

“Beautiful head of white hair?” I said.

Dolly nodded. I stood by and watched as she took a second five-inch dark chocolate heart, spread melted dark chocolate around its edge, then “glued” the two hollow hearts together. The most obvious result was a puffed, dark chocolate heart filled with special little Valentine symbols in dark, milk, and white chocolate. The second result would be a profit for TenHuis Chocolade; these were popular with our customers. Dolly used a spatula expertly, trimming away any chocolate that oozed out from the seam.

“Beautiful job,” I said. “Aunt Nettie’s sure happy that you wanted to come to work here.” Dolly’s face turned a shade brighter than usual, and I went on back to the break room. I found Aunt Nettie sitting at a table, hunched over a yellow legal pad.

She looked up and frowned. “I wish you could write this letter for me, Lee.”

“You usually make me write all your letters. Why can’t I write this one?”

“It’s to Corrine.”

I sat down across from Aunt Nettie. “Yes, you need to answer her yourself.”

“If only I knew what to tell her about Bobby.”

“You could just treat it like any other application, I guess. Tell Corrine all we have open is a routine clerical job or something like you’ve got Dolly doing—a sort of apprenticeship in how to make chocolate.”

“Yes, I could do that. Then I’d ask for a résumé.”

“If Bobby’s interested.”

“If he’s interested.”

I took a minute to tell Aunt Nettie about the computer problems that had hit Jason, House of Roses, and Hideaway Inn. Then I went back to my desk, feeling a little bit angry, a little bit fearful, and a little bit jealous. After all, Bobby was a blood relative to Aunt Nettie. I wasn’t. As a matter of fact, he was probably her closest relation. If she were to fall into a vat of chocolate and drown that afternoon, Bobby could well get everything. I didn’t even know if Aunt Nettie had a will or not. I could be working for Bobby and living in Bobby’s house, the one
my
greatgrandfather had built with his own hands.

Again Rachel Schrader’s voice echoed in my subconscious. “I suppose you are your aunt’s heir.”

I sat down in my chair and slammed a desk drawer. Stupid! I was acting stupid! I’d only worked for TenHuis Chocolade a year and a half. Aunt Nettie had made chocolates for thirty-five years. The business belonged to her. She could do anything she pleased with it.

I stared at my computer screen and tried to think about something else. Anything else. E-mail. I called WarCo—our local server here in Warner County. They said they had identified the virus that hit Jason, and sure enough, a copy had also gone to me.

“What!” Fear gripped me.

“We got it stopped. It came from a fake address.”

“How can you tell?”

“Easy. This one is pretty notorious. It was originally used by a guy who was a regular ecoterrorist.”

“A what?”

“He claimed to be a supporter of ecology, only he did it by sending viruses to companies he thought didn’t use ecological principles he approved of. They caught him finally.”

“I hope they sent him up for life.”

“No such luck. Anyway, the scuttlebutt is that he managed to convince the authorities he was only a tool of the organization he worked for. It may have been true. He got off with a big fine and a severe warning, but no jail time.”

“Why would he want to attack the Seventh Food Group?”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s the same guy. I think someone has appropriated one of their addresses. Everybody in the trade knew the addresses.”

Assured that my e-mail was safe, I opened it up. There were a dozen orders and queries. For the next forty-five minutes I concentrated on clearing them out. I replied to the queries, attaching my stored price list to several of them. I acknowledged the orders and moved them out of the e-mail file and into a special file I keep for those. I printed out a note from my mother, detailing her itinerary for a trip to Brazil, then hit REPLY and sent a message urging her to have fun. I didn’t go into my personal problems with her.

I had no other personal e-mail besides that one message from my mom. For a moment I missed Julie’s annoying jokes and inspirational items.

By the time I had finished handling e-mail, I was in a much better frame of mind. I might still be jealous and suspicious of Bobby, but I felt calmer and more confident in Aunt Nettie’s ability to handle her own affairs.

And I was thinking about computers, so the problems that had hit the Seventh Major Food Group came back to mind. I gave in to curiosity and called Diane Denham to find out about the electronic woes at the Hideaway Inn.

Diane sounded dispirited. “I’m really upset over this virus,” she said.

“Then you got hit by the same virus that hit Jason?”

“That’s what Jack Ingersoll thinks. Our files are gone, Lee! Kaput! Zip! All our reservations for next summer. All our accounts. All our correspondence. Gone! Why would anyone do this?”

I didn’t have an answer, so I listened sympathetically until Diane was ready to hang up. Then I tried vainly to work on my own business. But it was no go. I simply couldn’t concentrate. Finally, I went back to the shop and found Aunt Nettie.

“I give up,” I said. “I’ll have to work late tonight.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong with the business. I just can’t get these computer problems out of my mind. It’s nearly time for Tracy to come in for her after-school gig on the counter. I’m going back to House of Roses and see if the police found out anything.”

Aunt Nettie smiled. “If you’re not going home for dinner, maybe you and I could snatch a pizza. Whenever you’re ready.”

“That’ll be fun. You and I don’t eat dinner together—just the two of us—very often these days. Since your social life is so active.”

I left Aunt Nettie smiling, put on all my winter regalia, and went back to House of Roses. When I went in the shop’s front door, Carolyn looked out of her office.

“I don’t see any crime scene tape,” I said. “Have the police been here?”

“Chief Jones came himself.”

“I think he does all the detective work.” Warner Pier has only four guys on the force, after all.

“He certainly acts as if he knows what’s what when it comes to a crime scene. And he thought Jack was right. He found scratches on that window. Plus, he thought somebody had deliberately messed up the tracks outside the window—you know, so they couldn’t be identified. But he said it would be hard to catch the burglar.”

I followed Carolyn into her office. “When does Jack think he can work on your hard drive?”

“Not for a week or more. He’s got to do a job in Holland. Some insurance office. He said he could come in the evening, but I don’t want to hang around here all day waiting for customers and all night keeping Jack company.”

Carolyn reached for her telephone pad. “By the way, I got confirmation on the roses for Joe’s mother. The bronze variety is available.”

“Good. The rust and cream colors ought to look good in her office. Did they confirm the price? I’d better write it down.”

Carolyn looked through some papers on her desk. “The price is right here. Someplace.”

I picked up a notepad Carolyn had placed at a spot that would be handy for customers, then reached for a ballpoint pen. On the corner of the desk was a brass jug full of the rainbow-hued ones she passed out to customers. And right in the middle of twenty-five rainbow-hued pens was one white one.

Carolyn picked up a slip of paper and turned back toward me. “Help yourself to a pen,” she said. “I’m trying to get rid of those.”

“Are you changing your logo?” I said. “That white pen is really different.”

“White pen?” Carolyn frowned, then focused her eyes on the brass vase and its contents. “Where did that come from?”

She picked it up and turned it over, looking at it closely.

I could see the light dawn. She might as well have yelled, “Eureka!”

“What is it?” I asked.

Carolyn gave a sly smile, then chuckled. “It’s nothing. I just remembered where this pen came from.” She stuck the pen in her center desk drawer, then smiled at me. Her whole mood seemed to have changed. She’d been depressed. Now she was elated.

“I’ll have Mercy’s roses out by noon tomorrow,” she said. And she actually hummed a little tune.

I was going to ask just what had changed her outlook, but her phone rang. Carolyn answered it. “Sure, Lee’s here,” she said. Then she handed me the receiver.

It was Tracy, the high school girl who was helping us with retail sales every afternoon during the Valentine rush.

“Lee?” Her voice was low. “There’s a guy here to see you. A Mr. Schrader. He says it’s important.”

Rats. As soon as I’d left the office, Martin Schrader had come back. I sighed and decided I might as well get the meeting with him over.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell him to wait in my office. I’ll be right there.”

I told Carolyn I had a minor emergency at the office and drove back to TenHuis Chocolade. As I entered the shop, Tracy beckoned to me. “I almost never got that guy to sit down in your office,” she said. “He kept roaming around the shop.”

“He’s probably just nervous, Tracy. He’s the uncle of that girl who was murdered in Holland. I’m sure the whole family is upset.”

“He’s her uncle? He doesn’t look old enough to be anybody’s uncle.”

I turned and looked through the glass wall that surrounded my little cubbyhole of an office. I expected to see the distinguished and handsome gray-haired Martin Schrader.

But instead I saw a skinny, dark-haired guy with a hangdog expression.

My caller was not Martin Schrader. It was his nephew, Brad.

M
y first reaction was annoyance. I’d cut short my questions for Carolyn because I felt obligated to talk to Martin Schrader. And my visitor turned out to be his nerdy nephew. I wouldn’t have hesitated to let Brad sit an hour. After all, he hadn’t even hinted that he was going to drop by.

My second reaction was a major itch on my curiosity bump. Why had Brad come?

Common politeness required that I find out; so did extreme nosiness. I went into the office, shook hands with Brad, and sat down at my desk.

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” I said. “What brings you by?”

Brad’s voice squeaked as much today as it had the day before. “I guess I wanted to ask your advice.” Brad dropped his head and stared at the floor. “I was wondering what was the best way to get acquainted in Warner Pier. You know, meet people.”

I was astonished. “Let’s back up here, Brad. I didn’t even know you lived in Warner Pier.”