The Chocolate Castle Clue Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Author’s Note

  ALSO BY JOANNA CARL

  ALSO BY JOANNA CARL

  The Chocolate Cat Caper

  The Chocolate Bear Burglary

  The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up

  The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle

  The Chocolate Mouse Trap

  Crime de Cocoa (anthology)

  The Chocolate Bridal Bash

  The Chocolate Jewel Case

  The Chocolate Snowman Murders

  The Chocolate Cupid Killings

  Chocolate to Die For (omnibus edition)

  The Chocolate Pirate Plot

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library,

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, October 2011

  Copyright © Eve Sandstrom, 2011

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Carl, JoAnna.

  The chocolate castle clue: a chocoholic mystery/JoAnna Carl.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55853-9

  1. McKinney, Lee (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Fiction.

  3. Chocolate industry—Fiction. 4. Michigan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A51977C477 2011

  813’.54—dc22 2011020329

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Dave,

  with thanks for bouncing those ideas back

  when I throw them at him

  The CHOCOLATE Castle Clue

  Chapter 1

  I didn’t set out to solve one of the biggest mysteries in Warner Pier’s history. All I intended to do was clean out the garage.

  And I wasn’t happy about it. It was too pretty of a day to be cleaning out a garage. It was one of those glorious fall days with mellow light everywhere, a pale blue sky, soft air I wanted to wallow around in, and Michigan’s trees all wearing muted shades of yellow, orange, brown, rust, burgundy, and green.

  I would definitely have preferred to be taking a boat ride out into Lake Michigan, hiking through the local nature reserve, eating an ice-cream cone in the Dock Street Park, or even sitting at my desk in the office of TenHuis Chocolade. But no, I’d put the garage storeroom off as long as I could. The time was here. I had to sort through it that afternoon.

  Luckily, I had help. Dolly Jolly, chief assistant to the chief chocolatier for TenHuis Chocolade, was up to her vivid red hair in dirt and debris as the two of us investigated boxes and filing cabinets full of . . . well . . . stuff, and tried to fill up the bed of my husband’s pickup truck. Filling the bed of that truck was one of our goals, and it was already looking as if we’d fill it twice.

  My husband, Joe Woodyard, drove a pickup because he owned a boat shop, so he had to be prepared to haul boats. He restored antique wooden power boats. That was half his workweek. During the other half he was a lawyer, practicing poverty law with a nonprofit agency thirty miles up the road, in Holland. The reasons for his split personality—professionally—are too complicated to go into, but I admire both his personas.

  The garage storeroom Dolly and I were clearing out was across the alley, behind the TenHuis Chocolade factory, offices, and shop on Fifth Street in Warner Pier, Michigan. My aunt and uncle, Phil and Nettie TenHuis, founded the company (“Luxury Chocolates in the Dutch Tradition”) thirty-five years ago. Uncle Phil died in a car wreck five years ago, so Aunt Nettie was now sole owner of the company. I’m Lee McKinney Woodyard, their Texas niece, and I’ve been business manager for three and a half years.

  TenHuis Chocolade had rented the garage and storeroom across the alley for twenty years. Uncle Phil, and occasionally Aunt Nettie, had used it to store obsolete equipment and old business records. More recently we’d crammed the contents of the garage side into the storeroom side so that Dolly Jolly could use the remaining half for her Jeep SUV. She lived in an apartment above TenHuis Chocolade, so a space down the stairs and just across the alley had been handy for her.

  Aunt Nettie owned the TenHuis Chocolade building, but the storage space we were working on was in a building that faced the next street over. Now that building had changed hands, and the new owner wanted his space back. We had to vacate, and we couldn’t take all our stuff out until we’d sorted, tossed, and packed. I was prepared to rent a storage unit for the things we wouldn’t be able to get rid of, and Dolly would have to park on the street until another downtown garage space opened up. Garage spaces in Warner Pier’s business district were scarce.

  That Friday Dolly had moved her Jeep onto Fifth Street, so we had a fair amount of room for the sorting, tossing, and pack
ing. After Labor Day there was always plenty of on-street parking in a resort town like Warner Pier.

  We’d begun the day by piling up some pieces of old equipment for the dump and sending others to the secondhand restaurant-supply dealer. Aunt Nettie had declared all of it useless, “unless it goes to some museum.”

  Next we’d packed up plastic buckets, plastic bins, and plastic lids from containers that had originally held fondant and other chocolate-making supplies. This was typical of Uncle Phil’s pack-rat tendencies: saving bins, buckets, and plastic lids for twenty years just in case anyone ever wanted them. No one ever had, and no one ever would. These we put into giant garbage sacks to be taken to the recycler. Joe had carried those away at midmorning.

  I had rented a heavy-duty shredder, and after the plastic was gone, Dolly and I started on the papers.

  Aunt Nettie was taking the day off, but she came by for a few minutes. She was descended from west Michigan’s Dutch pioneers—her maiden name was Vanderheide—and all she needed was a cap with starched wings and some wooden clogs to look as if she’d just stepped off a canal boat in Amsterdam.

  “You two make me feel guilty,” she said, patting her gray and blond hair. “You’re working so hard, and I’m spending the week visiting with old friends.”

  “You’ll work hard all week, since you’re the main hostess,” I said. “And you’ve worked hard to get ready for this reunion.”

  “I just hope all the girls have fun.”

  Aunt Nettie referred to her high school pals as “the girls” even though they were all in their sixties. It was the first time the group of six friends had all been together in more than forty years.

  Their reunion was part of a larger one. Five years of Warner Pier High School graduating classes were to gather a week later. A banquet, a picnic, tours, a boat excursion out into Lake Michigan—all sorts of activities were planned.

  Aunt Nettie had even ordered special molds so she could make Warner Pier High School mementos out of chocolate. Tiny models of the old high school (torn down thirty-five years ago), little diplomas, and miniature mortarboards had all been embellished with the graduation class years and were ready to be handed out to the old grads.

  She had also created more historic molds, including a tiny version of the Warner B, the boat that brought one of the first groups of settlers to the area; the old Root Beer Barrel, a drive-in popular in Aunt Nettie’s youth; and the first school, a one-room structure torn down a hundred years ago. But the most spectacular chocolate piece was a model of the Castle Ballroom, a landmark in Warner Pier from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. Aunt Nettie had made a three-dimensional replica two feet high, plus smaller two-dimensional versions.

  And Aunt Nettie and her five friends were the stars of the reunion. They had all worked together as waitresses at the Castle Ballroom and had also been a prize-winning vocal group at their high school. They were to perform again at the reunion banquet. Their private weeklong reunion was partly for fun, but it also gave them an opportunity to rehearse. They had to learn to sing together again.

  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.

  T
here 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.