Free The Chocolate Bridal Bash by JoAnna Carl

liked. On the white-collar front, the cashier of the First National Bank of Dorinda was charged with embezzlement, and the records of the city clerk at Canton, a village north of Warner Pier, were found to be extremely irregular. There were no murders in the county that year, but several assault cases were filed. Most of the accused had Spanish surnames. I guess the hometown guys had been getting away with more than these newcomers were, thirty-three years ago.
    The national crime front had been pretty interesting. There was a major robbery at a jewelry exchange in New York, and some inventive thief put up a false night deposit box outside a bank in Cleveland. At least a dozen merchants plunked their day’s take inside before the thieves loaded the box into a stolen truck and carried it away.
    That was also the year of the famous Quinn McKay kidnapping, in which the son of industrialist Benson McKay III was snatched in Chicago and held for ransom by a group that wanted money to fund their radical social agenda. He was released after several months by kidnappers he described as anonymous guys in ski masks. I’d read about the case in some historical article; the kidnappers had never been caught. We still heard about that around Warner Pier because the McKay family owned a cottage just south of Warner Pier. A Mrs. McKay—of the middle-aged-but-not-admitting-it type—came in for chocolate now and then. But not her stepson, Quinn McKay.
    I couldn’t help checking out the wedding stories, too, of course, since I had weddings on the brain. The most popular bridal gowns had Empire waistlines and puffy lace sleeves, like the one my mother had left behind. But the muslin dresses with cotton lace—the style she had worn when she married my dad—apparently didn’t become fashionable until later.
    The clothing ads showed teased hair and shirt-dresses with A-line skirts that stopped just above the knee. The fabric stores had specials on polyester knits. Shoes had big clunky heels.
    The News obituaries included my grandfather’s, of course. And later a brief notice about the death of Bill Dykstra.
    Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier didn’t get a lot of attention that year. One irate lakeshore resident had gone so far as to appear before the county commissioners, saying he wanted to complain about the sheriff. But when he was told he’d have to state his complaint in an open meeting, he backed off.
    Van Hoosier had investigated the rural crimes, of course, and he’d been the law officer who took the erring cashier into custody. He’d announced that he was going to run for office again, and his supporters had held a fund-raiser for him in July.
    There was nothing that seemed to tie in with my mom’s aborted wedding, her fiancé’s death, and her flight from Warner Pier. Information about that was more likely to be found in the Warner Pier Gazette .
    I looked at my watch. The library was going to close in a few minutes. I didn’t have time to look at the fifty-two Gazette s that would have been published that year. But maybe I could look at Bill Dykstra’s local obituary.
    I rewound the News files, replaced them in their drawer, and found the Gazette files for August. Bill’s suicide had rated a news story on page one. His obituary had run a week later, discreetly omitting the cause of death listed openly in the earlier story.
    I learned nothing new about Bill’s life. I already knew the names of his parents, and I had an outline of his educational career. What else is there to know about a twenty-year-old guy? The only surprise came in the list of bearers, the traditional six friends picked to escort the casket to the grave. These were still listed in Warner Pier obituaries in the early 1970s.
    Three names I’d never heard before led the list. Either I didn’t know them, or they had moved away from Warner Pier. I wrote them down. One of today’s local businessmen came next—Thomas Hilton from the Garden Shop. Then there were two