The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

normally be hailed by the city patrol boat.
    “What do they want?” I said.
    Joe didn’t ask until the two boats were alongside. “What’s up, Chief?” he said. “I hope you’re not going to haul me into the big search for Hershel’s canoe.”
    Chief Hogan Jones looked grim. “Nope, Joe. We’re not looking for Hershel’s canoe any longer. His body, maybe.”
    “His body!” I yelled, and Joe made a surprised exclamation.
    “Yep,” the chief said. “We found his canoe caught in some purple sedge near the entrance to your place, Joe.”
    Some police chiefs really know how to spoil a romantic mood.
    Chief Jones sure spoiled Joe’s. His face got nearly as dark as his hair, and his jaw clenched and unclenched more often than it had while he was eating his prime rib and steamed baby asparagus in the dining room of the Warner River Lodge.
    But there was no help for it. We had to turn downstream and follow Chief Jones back to Joe’s boat shop.
    Vintage Boats is in an isolated spot at the end of Dock Street, barely inside the city limits of Warner Pier. The area is pretty close to rural. It’s heavily wooded, like most of western Michigan, a quality which gives a Plains person like me a spooky feeling. Joe had few neighbors, and those few couldn’t see his shop for the trees.
    The shop itself is very ordinary, just a big metal building not too different from my dad’s automotive garage in north Texas. The building is heated and well insulated, of course, since Joe works in it all year round. It even has some air conditioning, a rarity for such a shop in Michigan, because Joe sometimes has to close part of it up in the summer to keep dust out of his varnish. It has one main room, forty by eighty, with a couple of fifteen- by twenty-foot rooms at one end. One of those was the office and the other was the space Joe had made into a rudimentary apartment. The only sign of luxury in it was a fancy sound system he said was left from his bachelor days—before he made the marriage he always refers to as “stupid.”
    The shop is not a boat house. It’s a hundred feet from the water, but Joe does have a dock on the river. A gravel drive enters the property from Dock Street, circles the building, and leads down to an area where he can launch a boat.
    There are a lot of trees and bushes, but no landscaping. No grass to mow, no flower beds to weed. And there are about a dozen antique boats lined up on one side—each covered with canvas or plastic tarps. These represent a big part of Joe’s money woes—he agreed to buy them before his ex-wife died and landed him in the middle of her legal and financial problems. If he can ever get back to his business full-time, the collection of antique boats has the potential to make him a lot of money. But until then, they’re just so much junk he has to make a bank payment on every month.
    Joe’s dock is equipped with a boat lift, a sort of big cradle that can lift a boat out of the water. The lift is covered with a canvas roof. This allows Joe to keep one boat ready to go in the water all the time. Right at that moment, the boat lift held the 1949 Chris-Craft Deluxe Runabout, the boat Joe was trying to sell. He usually kept the sedan tied up on the other side of the dock. Any other boats he wanted to take for a ride had to be hauled to the river on trailers and put in the water just the way my daddy puts his bass boat in Lake Amon G. Carter, down in North Texas.
    Most small boat shops, I’ve found out, are not on the water. In Warner Pier, they’re certainly not. The waterfront property—either on the river or on the lake—is too expensive to waste on workshops; it’s all occupied by apartments, marinas, B&Bs, restaurants, resorts, and high-dollar homes. Joe had been able to hang on to his property, known locally as the “old Olson shop,” because it was on the outskirts of town and had not yet attracted the eye of a developer. But the time was coming when he might find it