The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery Read Online Free PDF

giggled harder.
    Darrell sat down at the other end of the table and gave a secretive smile. “You can handle them, Pete,” he said.
    He was right. Pete was the most dangerous kind of male chauvinist pig; the kind women loved. The testosterone I’d caught a whiff of as he went through the kitchenoozed from his pores.
    He didn’t fit the clichéd picture of a bird-watcher. But a bird-watcher was what Pete claimed to be and what Joe swore he actually was.
    Pete had shown up two days after Gina had, telling Joe he’d just dropped by to say hi and to meet me. He’d been planning to stay near Warner Pier for a week, camping and watching birds, he said, but his camping place had proved to be closed,so he was going back to Detroit. Before I could say, “But we’ve already got a houseful of people,” Joe had said he could stay with us—as long as he didn’t mind tossing his sleeping bag on our screened-in porch.
    When I got Joe alone, I quizzed him about who Pete was and what he was doing in our house. But Joe had proved uncommunicative. In fact, for the past week I’d barely seen Joe. He was workinglate at the boat shop, or he’d had to make a quick trip to Lansing on city business, or he’d even spent an evening closeted with his mother on some vague family matter neither of them would talk about. Finding time alone with him hadn’t been easy, especially when I was doing a lot more cooking than usual, plus the shopping and planning required to feed seven people three meals a day.
    I savagelycut my sandwich in half—pretending the slice of braunschweiger on it was a hunk of Joe’s hide—and watched as Gina wrapped Pete around her finger and Pete wrapped Gina around his. They were a perfect match: a woman who was a man magnet, and a man women slobbered over. The wonder was that they hadn’t hated each other on sight.
    Gina was asking Pete about his morning’s bird-watching. He replied byproducing a digital camera and showing her a picture of an owl. After she’d oohed and aahed, he passed the camera around to the rest of us. And yes, the picture of a great horned owl taking off from a red tile roof was impressive.
    Gina moved closer and closer to him, and I got madder and madder. Gina was an independent woman who ran her own business. Why didn’t she see Pete the way I did, asthe classic male chauvinist?
    I realized that Pete and Gina were the only two people having a conversation. Darrell was looking miserable. We’d forced him to join us at the lunch table, but none of us was talking to him.
    “Darrell,” I said, “Joe says you’re really good at carpentry—and you know that’s a skill he values highly. How did you learn that?” Then I was afraid I’d asked a tactless question.What if Darrell had learned carpentry in prison?
    But he answered in his barely audible voice. “High school vo-tech. I had a good teacher.”
    A few more questions—about the teacher and the class projects—and Darrell opened up a bit. I could actually hear his voice. Tracy and Brenda talked a little about vo-tech classes in their high schools. Brenda had taken VICA, I learned. Pete and Gina stoppedtalking only to each other. Pete threw in a funny memory from his own high school shop class.
    After twenty minutes of conversation, half a sandwich, a handful of chips, and one Mocha Pyramid, I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to run,” I said. “Gina, if I stop at the library, do you want more of the same?”
    Gina loved the “innocent” romances. I thought they were all alike and all nauseating. “Eachto his own taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow.” That was another of my grandmother’s sayings.
    “Oh, thanks, hon.” Gina jumped to her feet. “I’ll get the books that are ready to go back.”
    “I’ll just check the mail,” I said. “Then I’m leaving. Tracy and Brenda, you’re putting up the leftovers and doing dishes, right? And Joe’s responsible for dinner.”
    The girls nodded, mouthsfull.