The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle Read Online Free PDF

By raking up a scandal? I’d be ashamed.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Writing about that old story. It doesn’t do any credit to the family. Or to you!”
    “Why, Uncle Silas! You simply don’t have a romantic soul.”
    “Romantic, my foot! Disreputable! Scandalous!”
    Maia smiled, but her smile looked angry. She leaned close to the old man. They were much the same height, the top of her teased hair was even with the dirty baseball cap he wore. “Now, Uncle Silas—”
    But the old man wasn’t having any. “I don’t want to hear any more about this foolishness,” he said. He wasn’t quite yelling. “It’s not women’s business! It’s sure not the business of stupid women who shame the family!”
    Vernon suddenly appeared between the two combatants. “Come on, Mae,” he said. “You can talk to your uncle later.”
    But Silas turned on him. “And I blame you, Vernon. Encouraging her in this silliness! She ought to be in the kitchen canning, not making a fool of herself with this writing nonsense. You should have stopped her.”
    Vernon drew himself up, and I realized what a big man he was. “I’m proud of Mae,” he said. “And you should be, too.”
    Then he turned away, guiding Maia-Mae in front of him, escorting her for all the world like a bodyguard with a princess.
    The old man snorted angrily and walked away in a different direction, crossing Dock Street and walking toward a beat-up old pickup.
    I checked to make sure that Maia and Vernon were out of earshot; then I turned to the three city officials I’d been talking to, Joe, Chief Hogan Jones, and Mayor Mike Herrera. “Who’s the literary critic?”
    Joe laughed, Mike rolled his eyes, and Hogan Jones spoke. “Silas Snow,” he said. “He’s an uncle to Mae or Maia or whoever she is these days.”
    “I gather he’s not excited about the prospect of a movie of her book being filmed.”
    Joe answered me. “I guess he’s also not excited about having the movie shot on his property. It’s the farm at the Haven Road exit. The one with the fruit stand.”
    “The stand that’s all pumpkins right at the moment?”
    “Yeah. Not that every fruit stand in the Midwest isn’t covered with pumpkins this time of the year. But it’s the farm where the real-life story of Maia’s book supposedly happened.”
    “Do you mean that Julia Snow and Dennis Grundy actually existed?”
    This time all three of them shrugged. Chief Jones spoke. “You’d have to look up the records to see if there’s any truth to her tale. I doubt it happened exactly that way.” He walked away, followed by Mike Herrera.
    I spoke to Joe. “I knew Maia’s book was based on some sort of local legend, but I didn’t know it was a family story.”
    “Every town up and down Lake Michigan has some old tale about Chicago gangsters, you know.”
    “If all those stories were true, there would have been more gangsters than peach growers around the lake.”
    “True. But supposedly Al Capone did have a camp of some sort on the Upper Peninsula.”
    “That’s hundreds of miles from here.”
    Joe nodded. “But back in the twenties and thirties, lots of farmers had little cottages they rented to tourists, just the way a few of them still do. Some of them had docks where cargo could be shifted quietly. And sometimes questionable people rented those cottages.”
    “Just the way they could now.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, from what I heard at my grandmother’s knee, I’m guessing that Silas Snow’s father, Mae Ensminger’s grandfather, had a cottage like that back in the woods, with a path down to a creek where it was possible to land a small boat. Apparently old Mr. Snow rented it without asking for references. The story is that a young tough guy from Chicago rented it for a whole summer sometime in the late twenties. Everybody local assumed he was hiding out from the law.”
    “And the Snows had a daughter.”
    “Right. An older half sister to Silas and to Mae’s mom. That’s