Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  “They’ve been saving for this wedding practically forever,” I added as Ellie dropped our deposit envelope into the slot, then eased forward out of the lane.

  “D’you think he did it, though?” she added.

  We headed toward my house, past the ball field, where the Little League moms were mowing and trimming, then past the Community Center, where long tables and metal folding chairs were being hauled in for tonight’s combination bingo game and baked bean supper.

  Which I always think is a potentially very funny combination, but never mind. “No,” I said. “If he had, he wouldn’t have been so sneaky about it.”

  He’d had, I was sure, plenty of weapons training; the Coast Guard was, after all, a military organization at heart. And from the rapidness with which he had ascended his career ladder I gathered there was also a spine under all that good-heartedness he displayed.

  Maybe a temper, too, although I’d seen no evidence of that; the opposite, actually.

  “So why not just say who stitched his forehead up?” she wondered aloud.

  That was my question, as well. Or one of them. “Maybe he’s protecting someone? But if that’s true, then who? And why?”

  We turned onto Key Street, where the maple trees unfurled sticky green leaves. Daffodils flashed yellow, and behind white picket fences the tight purple clumps of lilac blooms were beginning to open.

  Over it all hung the sweet smell of saltwater, but the sight of my driveway and what was in it wasn’t sweet; not even a little bit.

  Rather, what wasn’t in it: no red pickup truck.

  All our other vehicles were there: my husband Wade’s old pickup, Sam and Mika’s little Toyota sedan, my own car, an elderly Rav 4, and the vintage Ford Galaxy that Bella had been driving.

  Vintage in the sense that it was old and beat-up, that is, with enough silver duct tape holding it together to build a whole new car. But that wasn’t the point.

  The point was, my dad hadn’t come home. That or he’d been there and taken off again, which was worse. Ellie glanced alertly at me.

  “Not ready to go inside yet?”

  “How’d you guess?” My stiffened shoulders and anxious expression must have clued her in. Besides . . .

  “Look,” I said. “If Andy did kill Toby Moran, or Sharon did—”

  Tellingly, Ellie didn’t contradict that last part.

  “—then there’s not going to be a wedding, so there won’t need to be a cake.”

  Which solved one problem, all right. But it didn’t solve our bigger difficulty.

  “And I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have the heart to ask either one of them for that money.”

  The fairly hefty sum that we’d already spent on the ingredients, I meant. Ellie was already backing out of the driveway again. I could only hope that Bella hadn’t noticed our arrival.

  But probably she was already so angry at my father’s absence, she couldn’t see straight; it was yet another of the good news/bad news situations I seemed prone to lately.

  “Me neither,” said Ellie, meaning the money we didn’t want to request. “And if they didn’t do it, but the police decide that one of them did . . .”

  “Correct. Then it’s the same; no wedding, no cake.” And no more Chocolate Moose, either, I added silently, not having the heart to say it aloud.

  “The only scenario that gets us paid in time for us to stay in business,” I went on, “is if they didn’t. And if we can prove that they didn’t. Kill Moran, that is.”

  By showing, I meant, that somebody else had. Ellie kept driving—back down Key Street, turn right on Water Street, straight out to the island’s end and then via tight, twisty lanes, narrow alleys, and long driveways all the way around the island, and back nearly to where we’d started from.

  Half a block from downtown she pulled to the curb, up against a lot of rosebushes grown nearly together across an old brick path.

  She’d been silent a while. But now: “I’ve been thinking the same. The finding-out part, I mean. It’s why I brought us here.”

  And that in a nutshell was my friend Ellie White. Brave, smart, and utterly undaunted by any situation we’d ever confronted so far . . . If I could’ve saved The Chocolate Moose for her by feeding myself to lions, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.

  We got out and made our way down the flagstone path leading to a cottage; a tiny cottage, with a low, arched front door half-hidden by more roses and a small, round window just beside the door so the occupant could peer out.

  Halfway there, a white pea-graveled side path led invitingly downhill to a large, barnlike structure with a lot of chicken-wire-reinforced windows and a brand-new green metal gambrel-arched roof.

  “Hmm,” I said, pausing where the side path branched off.

  Norm was a car collector, I happened to know, or had been when he was working steady and could afford to be. The barn was where he kept his cars; that’s why the windows were all reinforced.

  Which meant there was probably a lock on the door, too. Ellie squinted questioningly at me. “No reason at all,” I said in reply to her look, then sprinted down the path toward the barn.

  As I’d said, I had no reason to think Andy Devine’s troubles had anything to do with Norm’s car barn. But I was curious, and here we were, and it’s not like me having a look through one of those windows was going to hurt anything, was it?

  No, it certainly wasn’t. But it didn’t help anything, either, as far as I could tell.

  Making our way down the path, we glimpsed a rat skittering away into the rocks heaped by the water’s edge, but it wanted nothing to do with us, so that part was all right. When we got to the barn, though, I couldn’t see much, and what I could make out had nothing to do with Andy Devine or Toby Moran.

  “What’s in there?” Ellie asked as I pressed my face to the wire-reinforced window. Inside the barn, dusty shafts of sunlight slanted down from the higher panes, raising the visibility inside the large, mostly empty space from nil to minimal.

  “Looks like he’s got six of them left,” I replied.

  I recognized a vintage Fiat, an old Alfa Romeo sedan, and a cute little MG two-seater in dark British Green. The rest were covered with tarps.

  I stepped down from the cinder block I’d been perched on. Norm had owned eight cars; I knew because he’d had them in the Fourth of July parade the previous summer. Now I theorized aloud that being out of work for a while might’ve meant he’d had to sell a couple of them.

  “And we care about that because . . . ?” Ellie wanted to know as we made our way back uphill again.

  I shrugged. “We don’t, I guess. You just never know when a little background info will come in handy, that’s all.”

  Also, I’m very nosy, I might have added, but she already knew that. We reached the house, built on a bluff overlooking the water.

  “What a great spot,” said Ellie, smiling as she breathed in the perfume of the roses all around us. “Quiet, private, and yet it’s just a couple of blocks from downtown, and with a water view, too.”

  I agreed. With its burnished brass nameplate on the massive old wooden door, the rough cedar-shingled roof and mossy wooden gutters that looked as if they’d been there for centuries, the cottage was the kind of place that an elf from a storybook might live in, or a hobbit.

  Or a disgraced veterinarian.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure anyone would be home, but after a moment scuffling sounds came from inside. After eyeing us coldly through the porthole-type window by the front door, Norman McHale let us in.

  Grudgingly, but he did it. And I gathered he didn’t spend the entirety of his mornings in the Rubber Ducky, either, as I’d feared when I saw him earlier; having no work and not knowing if or when he’d get his career back must’ve been wearing on him.

  “Sit down,” he told us, sweeping stacks of books and magazines from a couple of dusty chairs and waving us to them.

  He stood over us, his long-fingered h
ands rubbing themselves together uneasily. I got the sense he didn’t often have visitors. Then without asking, he put tiny glasses of liqueur on a tray and set it down for us.

  I took one as Ellie began: “So, Norman . . .”

  The room was small and low-ceilinged, made even more cramped-feeling by the heavy, dark-upholstered furniture and the bookcases lining the walls. A hissing propane heater glowed in the brick hearth at one end of the chamber, while a massive, ornate dining room set with eight chairs and a mirrored breakfront crowded the other.

  In a plain black frame over the mantel hung Norman’s veterinary degree. Someone had taken the parchment from the frame, scribbled out the elaborate, curlicued script on it with a thick black magic marker, then put the degree back into the frame and hung it.

  By a roofing nail, it looked like, and was that an orange rubber band that he’d used in place of picture-hanging wire?

  Ellie went on. “Norm, did you stitch up Andy Devine’s forehead last night, by any chance?”

  His dark, shaggy eyebrows twitched in annoyance. “No. Why, who says I did, and why do you want to know, anyway?”

  I sat, managing not to cough at the dust plume puffing up from the upholstered chair beneath me. Surgical cleanliness had departed from his routine, apparently.

  “Anyway, I don’t talk about my patients,” he added, suddenly sounding nervous. “Animal or human, not that I have any—”

  I pounced. “So you did work on him, then.” And before he could reply, “See, if you did, I’ve got no problem with that whatsoever.”

  Norm looked unpersuaded.

  “And I understand that getting your name involved in a murder investigation, even trivially, might not be so good for your license reinstatement prospects,” I added.

  Still no reaction. Have I mentioned that Ellie is very smart?

  “But if you say you didn’t,” I went on, “then I’ll have to go on poking around trying to find out who did and if it turns out to be you, after all, who knows what I might have to do with the information?”

  He caught my drift, his dark eyes flickering at me from under those massive eyebrows; really, they were remarkable.

  “I see. So this is blackmail, then?” he demanded coldly.

  I shrugged, fingering the smeary little glass he’d poured the liqueur into. “Nope, just me pointing out consequences. But, come on, Norman, you know us. We’re not here to jam you up.”

  Ellie picked up one of the books Norm had moved. “Directory of Rural Veterinary Clinics,” she read from the cover.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Planning a move, are you? Maybe find a place way out in some other boondocks where they haven’t heard of you, and start your career all over again?”

  Norm hiked the wine-colored dressing gown he’d changed into up over his narrow shoulders. It was a silk, elaborately brocaded number that should’ve gone with embroidered slippers and a pipe.

  Snifter of brandy, maybe, late in the evening with the radio on, soft music tinkling out into the night. But it was early afternoon and I was willing to bet he’d be wearing that dressing gown all day.

  He gave in suddenly, putting his liqueur glass down on the room’s cluttered mantel. “All right, all right. So what if I did stitch him up? The Devine kid, I mean, what difference does it make if I—”

  “He won’t say so, Norm. Protecting you, maybe. But now he’s in custody over Toby Moran’s murder, and any secret he tries keeping from the cops could be the thing that sinks him.”

  I paused for breath. “And that’ll sink his wedding, and that will sink Ellie and me. In a way,” I added as he peered curiously at me, “that you don’t need to know the details of, only that it’s true.”

  Ellie chimed in. “Seriously, Norman. We’re not trying to hurt anybody, including you. But if you did treat him, we need to know what he told you. Otherwise . . .”

  “Otherwise he’s done for, or probably he is, anyway, and by some logical connections too boring to go into right now, we are, as well.”

  To illustrate all this, she drew her finger dramatically across her throat. It wasn’t the gesture I’d have chosen, but he brightened at it. Boring as his life was nowadays, I got the sense that even an imitation throat-cutting was better than the usual tedium.

  “I see.” He seized his liqueur glass again and sat across from me on a dusty velvet settee, brushing away a cat.

  They were everywhere in the room, I saw as my eyes grew used to the clutter. On shelves, under chairs . . .

  “In that case,” he pronounced, “it seems that I have no choice. Do no harm and all that, right?”

  He tossed back the liqueur. “All right. Short and sweet. He came over late, didn’t call, knocked and I let him in. I’d just gotten in, myself, actually.”

  The timing sounded right. “What did he say?”

  Norman rolled his eyes. “The standard line of head-bump sufferers everywhere, when they don’t want to tell the real story.”

  He picked up my liqueur glass from the coffee table between us and drained it, too. “Said he walked into the corner of a locker door at the Coast Guard station.”

  Same story as he’d told us. “You believed him?” queried Ellie.

  Norm snorted. “Please. For one thing, it wasn’t that kind of a wound. This wasn’t a gouge; it was the kind of split you get from a punch, not from a sharp corner of something.”

  A cat stepped into his lap; he stroked it automatically as he spoke. “Bit by bit, though, I got it out of him. He’d been accosted by a rowdy fellow who had a grudge against him. Toby Moran.”

  “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t he want anyone to know that?”

  Norman nodded agreement. “My thought precisely. Why not just go up to the emergency room in Calais, get your stitches from a pro?”

  The bitterness in his tone made me reply. “You’re a pro, Norman,” I told him gently.

  He looked mollified. “Be that as it may.” The cat got up, walked away with its tail switching, then came back as Norm went on.

  “He said the guy jumped him from behind on the street outside the Rubber Ducky. Sucker-punched him; Devine hit back by reflex, he said, but he missed.”

  Ellie glanced at me as Norman sipped liqueur and went on. “Thing is, he said, he’s at a tricky point in his career, and if his superiors knew he’d been in a fight—even one that he hadn’t initiated and never even landed a punch in—it could derail an important promotion that he was up for.”

  This did make sense; Ellie and I glanced at each other. “He’s changed his story, today,” I said, and Norm looked interested.

  “He told us a little while ago that it happened behind the Duck. That’s where the body was found, too,” I said. “I don’t see why he’d have told you otherwise, unless . . .”

  Norman peered wisely at us from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. “Unless the truth is that our friend Mr. Devine never got jumped at all. That maybe instead Devine followed his victim into the shadows behind the buildings, but didn’t want to say so.”

  “And since he never thought that you’d be talking to anyone about it—”

  “Exactly,” Norm replied approvingly to me. “This morning, he’s realized his new story makes more sense and has felt free to change it, not thinking I’d ever contradict him.”

  But Ellie shook her head. “I don’t know, Norman. That path overlooking the harbor leads straight back to the Coast Guard station. Andy had a perfectly good reason for being there last night, no evil motives required.”

  She picked her own little liqueur glass up, sipped from it, and blinked, putting it down carefully again. I’d smelled mine, and next to this stuff, Allen’s Brandy was flavored sugar water.

  “So he didn’t have to lie about it in the first place, or if he did have a reason to, we still don’t know it,” she said.

  “Yet,” I added, annoyed, because why couldn’t people just tell the whole truth in the first place? Why did Ellie and I have to go around dragging it out of th
em, when we had a wedding cake to figure out how to bake?

  If we did. Turning my mind from the looming spectacle of our imminent financial destruction, I drank, then got up and poured myself more of the liqueur, which turned out to be dandelion wine—delicious, and with a kick to it.

  Coughing at the second dose, I managed, “Good heavens, Norman, how long did you age this, anyway?”

  The burnt-orange-colored liquid was like a cross between rocket fuel and something that has been sitting in an oaken cask for half a century or so.

  He looked pleased, nodding and tenting his fingers. “Oh, about two years.” Digging a battered Moleskine from the mess he’d moved from the coffee table, he added, “I’ll put you on my list for a bottle of the next batch, shall I?”

  His deep-set eyelids lowered and raised slowly. “Meanwhile, to get back to the point.”

  He wrapped the ribbon around the Moleskine. “Your friend’s head injury was superficial, bleeding freely when he came to the door and asked me to administer first aid.”

  “Which you did,” I said as Norman nodded again. “Did he say anything else about what happened?”

  By now, the mid-afternoon sun sent hazy shafts between the parlor’s drawn curtains, lighting up more of the room’s jumbled furnishings: an antique mirror, a tarnished silver samovar, a chandelier whose myriad crystal pendants were heavily swathed in cobwebs.

  From the front hallway, a large green parrot squawked; we’d passed it on our way in here. Norm still looked reluctant. Finally: “I’m still a good veterinary surgeon, you know. I mean—”

  He regarded his fingers, which were slim and well-kept, tipped by clean, short-clipped nails. “I still have something to offer. But first I’ll need my license re-instated.”

  He looked up at us. “And you’re right, I don’t imagine stitching up the split forehead of an accused murderer—which, by the way, constitutes practicing human medicine without a license—will do my argument much good when I go before the board again.”

  I got up. Ellie too. He put his glass down. “I want my life back, you know? But if the board turns me down, makes my suspension a permanent thing, it will all be over.”