Free The Chocolate Cat Caper by JoAnna Carl Page A

a mile a minute, she rolled each piece of nougat into a ball. She made five dozen while I ate my sandwich, her hands working as fast as her mouth. Now and then she stopped to weigh one, to make sure they were all uniform in size, but she didn’t once have to start over. Then she took a mixing bowl and drew several cups of dark chocolate from the spigot on the big electric kettle, where a supply is always kept warm and melted. She rolled each nougat ball in the dark chocolate, creating a rum-flavored truffle to die for. And she did it all without looking at her hands. It was a darn impressive performance.
    By the time I’d eaten, the counter girls had finished cleaning up the shop. I balanced the cash register, and Aunt Nettie and I went out to the house she and Uncle Phil had shared for thirty-nine of their forty years of marriage. During one year they’d lived in the Netherlands, learning the chocolate business.
    I find the house both homey and spooky. It’s on the south edge of Warner Pier on Lake Shore Drive. I guess that every town that borders Lake Michigan has a Lake Shore Drive.
    We’re on the inland side—in other words, we don’t have a view of the lake. A lot of well-to-do people have built either summer cottages or year-round homes in the neighborhood, but Aunt Nettie’s house is older than most. It was built by my greatgrandfather—Uncle Phil’s grandfather—in 1904. He was a carpenter in Grand Rapids who put it up as a summer cottage for his wife and kids. One of his sons, my grandfather, opened a gas station in Warner Pier in 1945, and he winterized the family cottage so that he and his family could live there year-round.
    So my mother and Uncle Phil grew up in the house. It’s a white two-story frame house, with odd bits sticking out here and there for a bathroom and a dining room and a screened porch, which were added on over the years. It’s not luxurious; the bathroom has a claw-footed tub that was probably bought secondhand in 1910 and the kitchen sink was new in 1918. It has a “Michigan basement”—cement walls, but a sand floor—which I think must have been ideal for farm families needing a place to store apples and potatoes, but seems kind of odd in the twenty-first century. The decor is authentic country, not decorator “country,” and features an accumulation of furniture old enough to be antique, but not valuable enough to be worth selling. As I said, it’s homey.
    I also find it spooky, because the area is heavily wooded. That makes it beautiful, I suppose, to anybody who wasn’t born and raised on the Texas plains. I’ve read that people raised in wooded areas find plains threatening because the openness makes them feel exposed. But plains people like me find woods threatening because we feel as if some enemy might be hiding among all those trees. I’ve been spending time in Aunt Nettie’s house since I was sixteen, and I’m still a little uneasy about the place.
    But I was too tired to feel uneasy that night. I didn’t even have nightmares, despite a few vivid presleep flashbacks of Clementine Ripley’s body crashing over that railing and landing at my feet.
     
    The next day started off routinely. It was Saturday, the busiest day of the week for a retail business in a resort community at the height of the tourist season.
    I got up in time to have a cup of coffee with Aunt Nettie before she went to work at seven-thirty. After she left I turned on a cable news show and caught Duncan Ainsley commenting on the death of Clementine Ripley.
    “I’m proud to say she was a friend, as well as a client,” he said. “Her death is truly shocking.” He seemed quite genuine.
    The television newsman said the cause of death was not yet known.
    “Well, it’s gonna be natural causes,” I told him firmly.
    I flipped the TV off, washed a load of underwear, and tossed my dry cleaning into the van. I dressed in Warner Pier business casual—clean khaki shorts and chocolate-brown polo