The Chocolate Moose Motive: A Chocoholic Mystery Read online

  So ended Sissy’s first day at TenHuis Chocolade.

  That summer, Joe and I had been sitting out in the yard after dinner every evening. We had a reason besides just enjoying the twilight; a great horned owl had shown up in the neighborhood, and if we sat out there, covered with mosquito repellent and talking quietly, we usually saw her glide silently along over our lane. We knew the owl was a she because Joe had spotted her nest in a hollow in one of our maples. Using binoculars, we’d seen the giant owlet the nest had held, and we’d even seen the young owl take one of its first flights.

  According to the bird book, a great horned owl has a wingspread of fifty-five inches. That’s about four and a half feet. This was one big bird. She preyed on field mice and other small rodents, so she was a very nice bird to have visiting our yard. But she was so huge and so silent that I had an irrational feeling she might carry off one of us.

  I don’t claim to be a major nature lover, but that owl was awesome.

  Having a quiet talk about the day’s happenings with your husband can be awesome, too. And that night, as we waited for the owl, I reported to Joe on Sissy’s first day on the job.

  “Sissy seems like a good worker, and she’s eager to get into the swing of things. I just hope all this interest in her dies down. It may increase business, but the gawkers and gossips are a pain in the neck.”

  “Of course, you were a bit curious about Sissy yourself.”

  “True. I admit I gawked at her that first day I met her in the supermarket. But now I’m curious about someone else—Wildflower.”

  “Sissy’s grandmother? I haven’t seen her around town that I know of. I hear she’s almost a recluse.”

  “I’d love to meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everybody says she’s a hippie. I thought all the hippies became regular citizens twenty years before I was born. I read about them, and I guess I always had a sneaking wish that I’d been around to be one.”

  “A hippie? But, Lee, you’re an accountant.”

  “Even accountants might like to kick over the traces a little. The idea of having long flowing hair, of sitting around while singing folk songs, of living in a commune, of demonstrating for justice—it has a romantic feel.”

  “Well, you have long hair and you can sing folk songs, and I think you’re in favor of justice, but I definitely don’t see you in a commune. You like your privacy.”

  “True. Still, I’d like to meet Wildflower.”

  Joe looked serious. “I guess you could just go out to Moose Lodge and introduce yourself.”

  “Oh yeah. ‘Hi there, hippie. I’d like to stare at you.’ I don’t think so.”

  “You could ask Sissy to introduce you.”

  “She said she would sometime, but I’ll have to wait until it’s convenient, and you said yourself that Wildflower doesn’t come to town often. I can’t think of any excuse to just go out there and introduce myself.”

  “Excuse?” Joe thought a moment. “Well, you could join a church and say you were recruiting new members.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You could support a political campaign and canvass for votes. Or ask Wildflower to join the Warner Pier Chamber of Commerce. Or to contribute to the Red Cross.”

  “Or I could forget the whole thing, and sometime Wildflower will come by to have lunch with Sissy, and I’ll meet her.”

  Joe punched the air with his fist. “Be proactive, Lee. Wildflower is a taxidermist. You could take a dead animal out there to be stuffed.”

  “Sure. Next time I see a roadkill raccoon, I’ll shovel it into the back of the van. I’m sure Wildflower would love that.”

  I’m sorry to report that was almost what happened.

  Chapter 6

  That evening was the final time we saw our beautiful great horned owl. The next morning Joe saw an odd lump of fluffy brown out under a tree, the one where she often roosted during the day. When he investigated, he found her lying in the bushes, dead.

  He called me, and the two of us stood over her.

  “Oh, gee,” I said. “I wonder what happened to her.”

  “I don’t see any signs of injury,” Joe said. “I guess birds die just the way other creatures do.”

  She looked much smaller, lying in the bushes where she had fallen. With her broad wings furled, she was no longer a giant. As the bird book said, she was only twenty-two inches or so long from the tips of her tail feathers to the tops of her feathery horns. It had been her huge wingspread that made her seem so large.

  Joe pushed back the sleeve of his lawyer suit and checked the time. “I have to leave. We can put her in a garbage bag, and I’ll bury her this evening.”

  I smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “The last time I held a funeral for a dead bird it was a sparrow, and I was six years old.”

  “I was seven, I think. But I don’t want to just toss her away. She’s been a pal.”

  “I’ll call someone from the bird club and see if there’s a scientific use for a dead bird.”

  “Donate her body to science? That sounds good.”

  Our evenings weren’t going to be the same without the big bird swooping by.

  After Joe left, I called the president of the Warner Pier Bird Club. He directed me to the biology department at one of the colleges in Kalamazoo, sixty miles away. He said they had a collection of mounted birds and animals. I called them at eight thirty. I talked to one of the biology professors, asking if they’d like a great horned owl corpse.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “You’re at Warner Pier? Can you freeze it?”

  “I don’t have freezer space for something this big.”

  “The problem would be getting someone over there to pick it up in a timely manner.”

  I considered my schedule. I had an important customer coming by at one o’clock, and it was an hour’s drive from Warner Pier to Kalamazoo. “I’ll bring it, but I can’t come until tomorrow. Maybe I can find freezer space for it.”

  “Wait a minute! There’s someone there who could help out. Do you know where the Moose Lodge Taxidermy place is?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ms. Hill does scientific mounting for us. Give her a ring. If you can get it to her, she can look the owl over and call the collection curator if she thinks it’s a good specimen.”

  I hung up, shaking my head. Joe’s joking suggestion that I take Wildflower a dead animal had come true. But I hated taking her a friend.

  A quick phone call to Moose Lodge Taxidermy was answered, not by Wildflower but by Sissy. She checked with her grandmother and assured me the older woman planned to be in her shop all morning. And, yes, she’d look the owl over. If it was a good specimen, she’d either mount the owl or prepare it as a study skin for the college.

  “I could just take it home with me tonight,” Sissy said, “but it ought to be refrigerated in the meantime.”

  “That’s going to be hard to do. This is a big sucker. I’ll take it out there as soon as I get the shop open. Tell your grandmother I’ll be there as quickly as possible. With the big bird in a bag.”

  “She says to make sure it’s dead. Some guy once brought her a duck he’d shot, and when he opened the trunk of his car to get it out, the thing flew off. Scared him half to death.”

  I lifted the sack holding the owl into the back of my van. The bird was surprisingly light. I remembered being told that the bones of birds are hollow, plus a lot of the owl’s bulk was feathers. I guess birds can’t weigh much or they couldn’t fly.

  Getting the shop open and telling Aunt Nettie where I was going took only a few minutes. Explaining the day’s tasks to Sissy, a brand-new employee, took a little longer. But by ten a.m. I was back in the van and headed east along the two-lane state highway that went past Moose Lodge Taxidermy.

  I got more nervous by the mile. First, I was going to meet Wildflower. Second, I had to pass through the scariest kind of Michigan terrain to do it.

  I guess if I live up here i
n Michigan until I’m a hundred, I’ll still be a plains person. Not being able to see the horizon makes me uneasy, and the highway leading east out of Warner Pier is just a narrow cut between trees that grow from sixty to a hundred feet high.

  It’s like the story about the Texas boy who took a trip to the big woods of Minnesota. When he came back, someone asked him if he had seen a lot of pretty country. He shook his head. “I didn’t see a thing,” he said. “No matter which way I looked, trees were blocking the view.”

  Folks from Prairie Creek, in North Texas, don’t see what’s funny about that story.

  But I drove on anyway, into the woods and undergrowth, into country where the trees grew right down to the edges of the highway, into places where the bushes and vines and weeds were so thick that walking among the trees would be impossible.

  When I turned at the professionally lettered Taxidermy sign, I found myself even closer to the trees. A narrow sandy lane led past the ramshackle little wooden stand Aunt Nettie said had once been used to sell tomatoes and strawberries and past the rustic sign that read MOOSE LODGE. That sign was decorated with a cartoonish moose with a goofy expression. It needed painting.

  The undergrowth was thick next to the highway, but, after about fifty feet, the vegetation suddenly cleared out. The property became open and sunny, with only an occasional tree. The thick growth near the road was used to create privacy, I realized.

  Once I was in the cleared area, I saw three buildings—two small houses and, farther back, a building that looked like a metal barn. The houses were both covered with rough siding; they weren’t log cabins, but they had that feeling. They had been left unpainted. They had porches across the front. Originally, I deduced, they’d both been the same size, but one now had an ell on one side. Both buildings had stone chimneys. Both looked neat and trim, with small, tidy yards. Both yards were fenced.

  As Hogan had said, the dwellings were far from shacks. They were simply deliberately rustic. The only thing ramshackle was the old fruit stand out by the road.

  Sissy had told me her grandmother would be back in “the shop,” and I assumed that was the metal building. I drove past the houses, pulled onto a gravel parking area, and got out of the van, giving a quick toot on the horn. I got the owl out of the rear deck and headed toward the door.

  Entering the building was like ducking underwater. Fish were swimming all around everywhere.

  The fish—most of them were huge—swam over all the walls and hung from the ceiling.

  Then I looked farther into the room, and I saw the birds. Ducks, geese, quail, and wild turkeys were suspended like mobiles, and a few were taking flight from the floor.

  Next I spotted the animals. An opossum swung from a branch hung on the wall, and a raccoon sat beside an acrylic pool and washed its food. A black squirrel was on top of a display case, beside the telephone.

  The startling thing was that I didn’t feel as though I’d walked into an exhibit of stuffed animals. These were so lifelike that I felt as if I had walked into a pen full of live animals, birds, and fish. The fish seemed to swish their tails, the birds might have waggled their wings any moment, and the small critters had eyes that looked back at me just the way I was looking at them. None of them moved, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had.

  If these were examples of Wildflower’s work, she was a true expert.

  There wasn’t a sound in the room. It took me a minute to absorb all this. Then I called out. “Hello!”

  “Hello!” A voice came from an inner room. “I’m back here.”

  I went through an open door and found myself in a large workshop. At the back, standing beside a large metal table with a rim around it, was a gray-haired woman.

  I had finally met Wildflower, Warner Pier’s last remaining hippie. She was skinning an enormous fish.

  “Sorry about the aroma,” she said. “A fish is always a fish. You got here a little sooner than I expected.”

  “What is that you’re working on? It’s huge!”

  “A muskie. The dream fish of Michigan anglers. This guy weighed about forty-five pounds.”

  “Wow!”

  “Wow is right. The Michigan record is just over fifty pounds, so he’s a biggie. A Chicago man caught him up north.”

  I watched as Wildflower expertly removed the thick, fatty skin from the fish.

  “It seems too bad that nobody will eat that huge fish,” I said.

  “Muskies are good eating, true, but that Chicago guy will have more fun showing it off. Actually, I’ll freeze some filets for him.” Wildflower smiled. “And Sissy and I may have a fish dinner. I’ll look at your bird in a minute.”

  “No hurry. As long as I’m back by one o’clock, I’m fine.”

  “Good. Maybe you’ll have time for a cup of coffee.”

  Wildflower gave me a quick look from under her eyelashes, and I realized something. While I’d been dying to get a look at Wildflower, she’d been dying to get a look at me. That was natural enough. Her granddaughter was working for me, after all.

  “Sure,” I said. “I never turn down a cup of coffee.”

  I watched for about five minutes, studying Wildflower while she finished skinning the fish. She was built nothing like Sissy. Where Sissy was petite, her grandmother was tall and on the skinny side. Wildflower had long gray hair—as a hippie should—and it hung down her back in a loose braid. A bright red twisty, the sort found on a bread package, was wound around the end of the braid, and she was wearing tattered jeans and a baggy T-shirt. Her skin was wrinkled and leathery, like the skin of a person who spent a lot of time outdoors and couldn’t be bothered with a hat.

  Her hands were fascinating. They had long graceful fingers, the kind people call surgeon’s or pianist’s hands. Their movements were graceful, as well as quick and deft.

  “Your work is beautiful,” I said. “The possum out front nearly bit me.”

  Wildflower laughed. “He’s usually pretty docile. I mount only small animals, fish, and birds. No deer, sailfish, or lions.”

  “You must have a successful operation if you can limit your clientele that way.”

  “In this part of Michigan, my business would be mostly fish anyway, with birds through the fall and winter. It’s only the deer hunters and the guys who go to Africa that I have to turn away.”

  The room we were in was about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. About half of it was filled with metal shelving, and that shelving was packed with cans and jars. Among them I saw a box labeled BORAX DECAHYDRATE—Wildflower said it was close to an old-fashioned product called 20 Mule Team Borax—a camp fuel similar to kerosene, and a gallon bottle of Elmer’s Wood Glue. The big metal table had a drain and hot and cold running water. This, she said, was actually an autopsy table she picked up at a sale of surplus medical equipment. Midway along one side of the shop was a huge commercial freezer.

  The accountant in me toted up the equipment in the shop. Hmmm. Wildflower couldn’t be as hard up as Warner Pier people thought she was. Her property, buildings, and equip-ment would be worth quite a bit. Of course, that could all be countered by debt, but somehow that didn’t seem likely.

  In a few minutes she hung up the fish skin on a hook and cleaned out her work area. She looked at my owl and pronounced it a beautiful specimen. Then she showed me the other two rooms in the shop. One was a storage room full of what looked like tiny dinosaurs. Wildflower explained that these were Styrofoam forms used as the innards of mounted animals. My mental picture of “stuffing” the wild animals over a wire skeleton had been completely wrong. The other room was a drying room, where mounted fish with blank eyes hung from the ceiling. Wildflower said they were waiting to be embellished with paint and to have their eyes implanted.

  “This is fascinating,” I said. “Do you give tours?”

  “Not formal tours. I run a one-woman business, so I don’t have a lot of time for visitors.”

  “I guess this property is pretty remote. Not like th
ings are along the lakeshore.”

  “It’s not too remote.” She gestured toward the back of the shop building. “We have eighty acres, and the Fox Creek Nature Preserve adjoins our property on the north.”

  “Oh! Joe and I have hiked there. It’s beautiful in the spring.”

  “It draws people year-round. The trails are used by cross-country skiers in the winter, of course, and by hikers the rest of the year.” She grinned. “I assure you, we don’t have as much privacy as we would like sometimes. So the Warner Pier stories about us running a nudist colony out here are not true. Somebody would have seen my skinny butt.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one!”

  “People always come up with creative stories about anybody who doesn’t fit the mold. And I broke the mold a lot of years ago. Do you still have time for coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  She led the way to the larger of the two rustic houses, the one with the ell. We entered through a large mudroom that any rural Michigan homeowner would have loved to have. It had a sink for washing dirty hands and muddy boots, a big rubber tray for draining boots, and hooks along the wall for coats. A door led into the kitchen. Beyond that, the living room was visible through a large pass-through.

  And way at the end of the living room, hanging on a giant stone fireplace and chimney, was the head of an enormous moose.

  I followed Wildflower through the kitchen and realized the living room must be in the ell extension to the house. It was a room about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide.

  The stone fireplace and chimney were beautiful. They were made of light-colored stone, hewn into blocks and laid in an intricate pattern. But the moose head was so gigantic, it dominated the room.

  “I thought you didn’t do large animals,” I said.

  “The moose is not my handiwork. It was here when I moved in. A previous owner shot it in Canada. It was pioneer days the last time anybody shot a moose in Michigan.”