The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle (20 page)

Then Aunt Nettie called up the stairs. “I walked the dog, and put him in his crate. Now I’m going to bed! Good night, you two.”

I lifted my head. “Good night, Aunt Nettie!”

Joe called out, too. “Good night!” Then he kissed my forehead. “I guess I’d better go.”

I put my arms around him. “I don’t want you to,” I said.

He gave a rueful laugh, but he kept holding me. “With a cop outside in the drive and Aunt Nettie downstairs?”

“I don’t care. I want you to stay.”

I talked him into it. At least he stayed a long time. When I woke up at four a.m. he was there, but at six he’d gone. He left a note. All it said was, “I love you.” That’s all it needed to say.

Aunt Nettie and I both got up at our usual times, but we had a leisurely breakfast. She’d just made a second pot of coffee at nine o’clock when our cop companion beeped his horn and Chief Jones’s car pulled into the drive. He stopped and talked to the patrol officer who had wasted his time in our driveway. I figured the officer was telling him Joe had stayed nearly all night. I still didn’t care.

The chief looked solemn as he came in. “Morning, Nettie. Lee.”

Aunt Nettie smiled. “Good morning, Hogan. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

“Maybe. I’ve just got a minute. But I have to tell you two one bit of news.”

The chief was so serious that his comment made my stomach go into a spasm of fear.

Aunt Nettie looked stricken. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing, maybe. But we found Aubrey Andrews Armstrong’s SUV this morning.”

“
O
h, Hogan! Is he dead?”

“He’s still missing, Nettie. He wasn’t in the SUV.”

I jumped into the conversation. “Where was the SUV?”

“In a creek bed off the road to the winery.”

“Then it wasn’t in our neighborhood.”

The chief screwed his face up. “Depends on how you look at it. Where’s that map I sent out?”

Aunt Nettie and I led the chief up to the spare bedroom, where the map was laid out on the bed. We all gathered around it, and the chief pointed with a ballpoint pen. “Here’s the Grundy cottage. Here’s Silas Snow’s fruit stand.” The pen swooped. “Here’s the Interstate.” The pen moved east of the Interstate, then tapped. “And here’s where the SUV was found.”

“Gee,” I said. “When you look at from a bird’s angle, the winery road is real close. But if we want to buy a bottle of Lake Michigan Red, we have to go way around because we can’t cross the Interstate.”

“That’s true if you drive. But Jerry Cherry tells me that when he was a kid he used to cross the Interstate through culverts and under bridges.”

“Then you think someone who lives here on Lake Shore Drive could have ditched the SUV, then walked home?”

“Sure. Or they could have ditched it and someone picked them up.”

I left it to Aunt Nettie to make the next comment.

“You mean Aubrey, don’t you? Aubrey could have ditched his own SUV and had some confederate pick him up.”

“Anything’s possible, Nettie.” The chief gestured at me. “Lee’s escape through the woods night before last proves that people can roam around this area at will without being seen. If you look at this map, you can see how many houses there are. You’d think Lee wouldn’t have been able to walk even a quarter of a mile without falling into somebody’s backyard.” He tapped the map again. “But here’s Gray Gables, and here’s the Hart compound. It’s more than a mile, and Lee walked it without stumbling into an occupied house.”

“I wanted to find one, too,” I said.

“You made that expedition through a heavily wooded area, Lee. We retraced your steps with dogs, and you went over some pretty rough terrain. But my point is that people can move around out here without being seen. So finding Armstrong’s SUV in a certain spot doesn’t incriminate—or clear—anybody. Including Armstrong himself.”

Aunt Nettie pressed coffee on the chief, and he took a cup with him as he left. His last instructions were to me. “Good luck with those old
Gazette
s,” he said. “Joe said you thought it was make-work. But it needs to be done, and we don’t have anybody available to do it. You might find out something that is key to this whole deal.” He walked on toward his car, then turned back. “Don’t forget to check the land transfers.”

So I got dressed and started in on the
Gazette
s, working backward from the most recent issues and referring to the list of names the chief had brought. By lunchtime I knew a lot about our neighbors.

I knew that the Baileys, who lived closest to Aunt Nettie, had gone to the Bahamas last winter and that their son had been promoted to first sergeant in the U.S. Army. I knew about the Bahamas, of course, since I’d picked up their mail. But neither of them had mentioned the son’s promotion, and I hadn’t read about it earlier. I found out that Silas Snow had sold thirty acres of orchard land to a developer from Grand Rapids. By cross-checking with the map, I figured out that this plot was farther down Lake Shore Drive, nowhere near the Grundy cottage or the fruit stand. I discovered that Chuck O’Riley had come to Warner Pier because he had relatives in the area; he was the nephew of a Mrs. Vanlandingham who owned an antique shop in Warner Pier.

These discoveries showed the difference between the Warner Pier
Gazette
and a city paper. None of these items would have appeared in the
Dallas Morning News,
or even in the
Grand Rapids Press
or the
Holland Sentinel
. But the
Gazette
would print nearly any news release sent to it, and it loved any type of personal news: college students who made the dean’s list, church suppers, club fund-raisers, land transfers. The only two newspapers I ever saw report land sales were the
Gazette
and the
Prairie Creek Press,
back in my Texas hometown, which is about the size of Warner Pier.

I kept on skimming through the
Gazette
s. Ken McNutt, I learned, had taken first prize at an antique car competition, being recognized for the excellent mechanical condition of his red 1959 Volkswagen. The son of the Wilsons, another set of Aunt Nettie’s neighbors, had won a scholarship to Perdue. Sally Holton, who lived in a spectacular house right on the lake, had been a hostess for the garden tour of the Warner County League of Garden Clubs. Vernon Ensminger had written an angry letter to the editor, complaining about our state representative’s stands on wildlife conservation. “An intelligent policy does not pit hunters against ‘tree-huggers,’ ” he wrote. “No one loves the outdoors and the beauties of nature like hunters. We’re the ones who get out to enjoy them and who encourage our families to learn about birds and animals.” I knew my dad, also a deer hunter, would endorse his position.

The
Gazette
is just a weekly, of course, and I was able to read at a pretty good rate, once I’d figured out how to recognize a piece contributed by the State Department of Agriculture or by General Motors. Those weren’t going to have any local names. And a lot of the articles were already familiar, since I do read the rag, known informally as the “Warner Pier Gaggette,” every week.

I got back to early summer when I hit a really interesting article—Chuck’s interview with Maia Michaelson, published when her book came out. In it she described her early writing as “a secret vice.” She had deliberately kept her ambition to be an author a secret, she had told Chuck. “No one knew of my hidden life but my dear husband, Vernon,” she said. “He has been a wonderful help and encouragement to me.”

How had she learned to write? “If I have a talent, it’s simply a God-given gift,” Maia said. “I simply tune in to the eternal. My characters speak to me. Sometimes I feel that I am simply channeling their words, their hopes, and their longings.”

Chuck pressed her on how her skills were developed, asking if she had taken writing classes. “Oh, no!” Maia said. “Inspiration can not be regimented! Writing to please a professor would smother the creative impulse.”

It made me glad I’m an accountant. We learn our professional skills from people who have already figured out standard ways to perform our required chores. We don’t have to start from scratch and teach ourselves—with or without “creative impulse.”

But the interview also made me doubt the news Dolly had given me about Maia’s publisher. Dolly had been sure that the publishing house did nothing but vanity publications. Maia, however, gave Chuck a whole paragraph about how she had submitted her manuscript to the editor, how she had waited with bated breath, praying that it would be accepted, and how she had greeted the news with ecstasy.

“When I heard from them, I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry,” she said. “I danced all around the house!”

That didn’t sound as if the editor’s acceptance had included a bill for several thousand dollars. Maybe Dolly was wrong.

Maybe that should be checked out. I had Aunt Nettie call the chief. Luckily she had the number of his cell phone. After she handed the phone to me, I quickly sketched Dolly’s belief that the publisher of Maia’s book only did vanity publishing, contrasting this with Maia’s account of selling her book.

“It may not have anything to do with anything,” I said, “but it’s a little discrepancy, and that’s what you said you were interested in.”

“Joe’s working for me full time,” Hogan said. “I’ll get him to check it out.”

Aunt Nettie again spent the morning answering phone calls from concerned friends. The chief still had a Warner Pier patrolman stationed in the driveway to keep people from approaching the house, but the phone rang and rang. Aunt Nettie brought me a sandwich at noon, and I kept reading. By then I was back more than a year—like I said, once I learned which articles to check, I could go through a
Gazette
pretty fast.

I made sure I looked through the obituaries and checked the names of survivors. The Snows and Ensmingers had faced another family funeral, I learned, when a cousin had died a little more than a year ago. She’d lived at South Haven, but the
Gazette
ran the obituary because she was originally from Warner Pier. Or I guess that was the reason. Tracy Roderick had lost a relative, too—her grandfather. Her mother was listed among the survivors of a “leading Warner County fruit farmer” six months earlier. Tracy herself had been in the paper a lot, because of her class activities. Most students at WPHS were.

Another source of local names, I discovered, was activities of the various planning commissions in the county. I remembered that the Baileys had tried to build a rental unit on their property. The commission said no.

Actually, the two square miles I was studying had come before the township or village planning and zoning bodies fairly often. Property values in the area had skyrocketed in recent years, and developers were trying to buy up property and put in whole additions. Mostly the commissions hadn’t agreed to this, though one new addition with about twenty-five lots had been approved. I already knew this; when the wind was from the east, I could hear the dirt-moving equipment from my bedroom.

By then I was two years back, to a time before I moved to Warner Pier. Another developer, I learned from the
Gazette
s, had applied for permission to develop forty acres closer to Aunt Nettie’s house. I checked the location, and it was right next to the Grundy cottage. Hmmm, I thought, Silas could have sold another piece of property—just the way he’d sold the one farther south—and made a bundle.

I was surprised when I read that he had opposed the addition. In fact, he’d not only come before the township commission to speak against it, he’d stated that he was refusing an offer from the developer.

“That land’s been in my family for more than a hundred years,” Silas told the commission. “It’s good orchard land. It would be an out-and-out crime to cut down those trees and wreck that farmland. I won’t go along with it.”

Silas’s refusal to sell forced the developer to limit the size of the project, and the commission turned the deal down, saying they didn’t want the area developed piecemeal.

This episode seemed weird. Silas hadn’t objected to development a mile south. Why had he sabotaged it there? I turned to the map again.

The plot the developer had tried to subdivide was just south of the Grundy cottage. He must have wanted to buy the cottage and the orchard behind it, where the rifleman had hidden and shot at Aubrey.

I gnawed a knuckle and thought about the Grundy cottage. Why wouldn’t Silas sell it? He didn’t rent it out. He could have torn it down and added the lot to his orchards, but he hadn’t done that, either. He just let it sit. That didn’t seem like wise use of his resources, but he had the reputation of being a sharp businessman. I wondered idly just what Vernon and Maia would do with it.

Aunt Nettie had been not only answering the phone but also entertaining Monte. Now he came lumbering into the room on his big puppy feet, looking for a little attention from me. I got up, found an old sock, and played tug of war with him for a little bit. When he tired I gave him the sock to chew on, sat down, and ate my leftover from lunch—a mocha pyramid bonbon (“Milky coffee interior in a dark chocolate pyramid.”).

That chocolate, I remembered, was Maggie McNutt’s favorite. I decided to skip ahead in the
Gazette
s, back to the September she and Ken were hired. In a town the size of Warner Pier, new teachers are always profiled. It took me only a few minutes to find the headline: FIVE NEW TEACHERS JOIN WP FACULTY RANKS.

Chuck hadn’t been editor in those days, but the story was strictly routine, obviously taken from the resumes of all the new teachers.

Ken, I learned, had received a bachelor’s in math from Kalamazoo College, then had gotten a master’s in education at the University of Michigan. He’d been a member of the mathematics honorary society and the Young Conservatives. Throughout the first paragraph, his background seemed as nerdy as Ken looked and acted.