Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  My dad handed over his newly reissued driver’s license and the car’s registration and insurance cards, while I thanked my stars that I kept the latter two documents together in the glove compartment and not just knocking around loose in the vehicle somewhere.

  The cop handed the documents back, along with what turned out not to be a ticket, after all; it was a warning to get the taillight fixed promptly or pay a big fine next time.

  “Thank you, Officer,” my father said politely; then we were free to go.

  Only by that time there was nowhere to go to. The road stretched emptily away into the darkness; while we’d been getting our warning, the motorcycle had gone ahead, out of sight.

  Silently, we turned around, passing the patrol car again; back in Eastport, we rolled slowly through the darkened streets. At the Coast Guard station, Andy Devine’s motorcycle stood parked in the lot beyond the heavy black iron gates.

  “So the guy on the bike had been following us?” I said. “Earlier, that is.”

  First the car that had been behind us, then the figure that had either been in the downtown doorway or hadn’t . . .

  “At least now we know there’s definitely another bike around here besides Andy’s,” I added.

  Had to be; there was only one way onto the island, and no one had passed us on it. So the bike we had been chasing couldn’t have gotten back here ahead of us.

  “And whoever’s on that other one was out at Miss Blaine’s place the night she was attacked,” I finished. I was sure of it now.

  Because I supposed I could accept that just by chance two very similar motorcycles might be owned by different people in one small geographical area of downeast Maine: Andy’s and someone else’s.

  But not three of them. For one thing, those bikes were expensive. And as I may have mentioned, downeast Maine isn’t exactly boiling over with spare money, especially in early summer.

  So as far as I was concerned, the biker we’d been chasing just now was the one who’d zoomed by us going out the long dirt lane from Miss Blaine’s place when Ellie and I had been going in.

  And that meant it hadn’t been Andy out there, after all, when Miss Blaine was being attacked. He probably really had shown up by chance out on the Lake Road afterward, not because he was a culprit.

  In short, he’d been telling the truth. But there wasn’t much I could do about it, because for one thing just try telling a homicide detective that kind of story; go ahead, I’ll wait.

  Besides, other than the two similar motorcycles part of it all, I still had not the slightest idea what the heck was going on.

  “Hey, we gave it a shot,” said my dad as we drove once more up silent Key Street. The moon sank toward the west, a blurry disk in a sky gauzy with incoming fog.

  “Yeah, thanks.” We pulled into the driveway. “Sorry about that taillight.”

  The porch lamp was on, a lot of shiny brown June bugs bopping themselves silly against it. The rest of the house was dark.

  “Don’t worry about it. I can fix it tomorrow.” We got out. Mist drifted like pale ghosts across the dark back lawn.

  “Been quite a while since I’ve come face-to-face with one of ’em, though,” he added with a small chuckle.

  A police officer, he meant. Back in the old days there was a time he’d had so many warrants out for his arrest that he’d—

  Well, I didn’t know what he’d done about it, actually. I hadn’t had any connection with him for that part of his life, or mine.

  But I had one now. “Nice driving,” I said as we climbed the porch steps together.

  A reminiscent smile creased his face. “Used to do a lot of that, back in the day.”

  “Yeah, I can tell.” He’d enjoyed it, too, and even as nuts as it had felt while it was happening, I had to admit so had I.

  In the house, Max, the big old German shepherd, got up from his dog bed and padded out to greet us, his tail wagging slowly.

  “Listen, Dad, about the truck . . .”

  But before I could finish, he held up a hand. “Back in the day was a long time ago, though, Jake. How about if right now we just let an old man go on up to bed?”

  There was plenty more that I could have said, and that I wanted to ask him, too, now that we were getting along so easily together. But he was right; we were both tired, and tomorrow would be a difficult day.

  Because tomorrow, I’d decided sometime during the course of the long evening I’d just been through, was when Ellie White and I would be accepting the inevitable, and shutting down our beloved Chocolate Moose for good.

  Nine

  “What we need,” said Ellie the next morning, “is a frosting that’s substantial enough to decorate with, and sticky enough to keep the whoopie-pie cake sections from sliding all over the place, but—”

  “But doesn’t taste like lard,” I finished for her, lard being the secret ingredient to a frosting so stiff, you could cut yourself on the edge of it while still raving about its flavor.

  But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to her about. “Ellie,” I began after I’d told her that Andy and Sharon were in police custody.

  It was 7 a.m., and when I’d arrived she was already set up in the kitchen of The Chocolate Moose, cranking out cookies, cupcakes, and another four dozen ginger-chocolate biscotti for a special order plus an extra dozen for me to take home.

  These, by the way, are in my opinion the perfect food, with enough fresh grated ginger as well as slivers of the crystalized kind to spark inspiration, plus enough good chocolate to fuel action.

  Too bad that Ellie wasn’t giving me the third thing I needed: opportunity. But since she didn’t want to do the only thing that was currently on my list of what we needed to take action about, I guessed that was understandable.

  “Ellie, we’re going to have to get it over with sooner or later,” I tried. But it was no good; she’d come to a decision, too, and she was sticking with it.

  “When the sheriff comes and throws us out into the street,” she declared stubbornly, “that’s when I’ll leave the Moose.”

  “Oh, Ellie, you know that’s not going to happen,” I sighed.

  Or at least not soon; in Maine it is so difficult to evict people from rental property that we’d be driven out by our own embarrassment long before anything official could happen.

  But in my heart it was how I felt also. “I am going to miss this place,” I admitted.

  Out front in the shop area, the old paddle-bladed ceiling fans turned slowly, moving the air heavily laden with spices and chocolate and with the aroma of the fresh coffee now brewing on the counter.

  In the glass-fronted display case a few dozen cookies, some chocolate éclairs, and a chocolate sheet cake that we were selling by the piece awaited our last few customers. Meanwhile, she was readying our final big catering order for a party in Machiasport, an off-the-beaten-track waterside hamlet thirty miles south of here.

  Luckily, the customer was coming to pick up the order herself, since while my arm felt a good deal better this morning, I still had no interest in driving all that way to deliver the stuff.

  “Oh, I am so much going to miss it,” Ellie agreed, her hands moving mechanically through another attempt at a suitable frosting for that dratted whoopie-pie wedding cake.

  She seemed to feel that as long as she worked on the wedding cake—even though with both Sharon and Andy in custody there was not going to be a wedding, obviously—she didn’t have to give up on the Moose.

  I stirred cocoa powder into the rest of the dry ingredients—flour, baking powder, baking soda, pinch of salt—for the cookies, then beat the eggs and vanilla into the creamed butter-and-sugar mixture. The éclair shells were done and the biscotti were already in the oven; once these cookies were frosted—

  And while I am on the subject, may I just say right here that a plain chocolate cookie, made with quality ingredients and with a plain chocolate frosting generously spread onto it, is one of the truly good things in life? Becau
se it is, especially with a cup of coffee.

  Anyway, once the cookies were frosted, the Machiasport order would be complete: a sad milestone. “So listen,” I began again.

  Ellie’s expression darkened. “No, no, just hear me out,” I said. “Because it’s true, one more day isn’t going to kill us.”

  It was what she’d been arguing for. “And we even have milkshake ingredients left,” she said, brightening at my remark.

  But not at her bowl of frosting. Licking a bit of it off the tip of her finger, she made a face that said this stuff, like the batches before it, tasted like lard. And even though there was a well-known way of getting around this, Ellie would use bottled imitation butter flavoring when pigs flew, so I didn’t mention it.

  “Also, I suppose there could still be developments,” she said. “Ones that we haven’t had to dig up by ourselves, that is.”

  In the murder case against Sharon and/or Andy, she meant, and I supposed she might be right. Someone else could confess, for instance. Or Toby Moran could turn out not to be really dead, which to me seemed about as likely.

  Mostly, though, when it came right down to it, I just couldn’t stand to be the one to break Ellie’s heart. She’d see reason when she was ready; she always did, sooner or later. And I was going to give her all the time in the world, I decided; all the time she needed.

  Out past the shop’s front window, gulls dove and flapped behind small boats puttering industriously around in the boat basin, while on the bay a flock of sailboats scudded, their sails billowing tautly.

  Then as if triggered by our decision to stay open at least for today, a customer appeared at our locked front door. And although we didn’t open until ten, we figured what the heck, and let her in.

  Marilyn Gibson was a pleasant, energetic local lady with short salt-and-pepper hair, twinkly dark eyes, and harlequin glasses on a chain around her wattled neck.

  “I heard you might be closing, that’s not true, is it?” she wanted to know as I wrapped up six pieces of sheet cake for her, for a luncheon she was hosting at noon.

  “Because we just don’t know what we’d do without you,” she added.

  By “we,” she meant the ladies of Eastport; women’s club members here tended not to dress elaborately or to display elegant mannerisms; no doormen assisted them nor headwaiter ever ushered them to any chic restaurant tables.

  But they still had their many civic projects to talk over and fund-raisers to plan. This year so far they’d paved the tennis courts, reseeded the ball field, and bought new litter baskets for downtown, plus a professional service to empty them regularly.

  “You aren’t, are you?” she demanded again, accepting her change. “You aren’t closing the shop?”

  Like I say, word gets around. “I’m so sorry,” I murmured as it struck me again how much I had enjoyed all this.

  “I’d say we could still cater events just for you ladies,” I went on, “but since the most important member of the team won’t be here—” I waved toward the kitchen just as Ellie peeped out from it, while Marilyn Gibson pushed her glasses up onto her nose and looked seriously aghast. “No! Ellie? You’re leaving us? Oh, that’s too bad.”

  She shook her head comprehendingly. “But I understand, we all do have to make a living. Good luck to you, dear,” she finished kindly.

  The little bell over the door jingled as she went out. “So you told her?” Ellie said as Marilyn strode past the window outside.

  I nodded, not quite able to speak. Ellie felt bad enough already; there was no sense my making it worse by bawling my own fool head off.

  “We don’t have to really do it,” I managed. “Close, I mean. Like we said, if something illuminating comes up today, some . . . some clue or something, we can always change our minds.”

  Bob Arnold drove by in the squad car, heading for his office. Norm McHale passed in the other direction, driving the little dark-green two-seater MG sports car we’d glimpsed in his car barn. He’d put the top down, and the tan leather upholstery shone richly.

  “I just thought the club ladies deserved a heads-up, after all the business they’ve given us,” I finished, swallowing hard.

  “Poor Jake,” Ellie said sympathetically, putting her hand gently on my shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s all going to turn out fine.”

  But it wasn’t and we both knew it. Our dream of a chocolate-themed bake shop, where everything was made the old-fashioned way and with all the best ingredients, had turned to a heap of rubble.

  I was in the shop’s little washroom when I heard the phone ring, and when I came out again Ellie was putting all this morning’s product onto trays.

  “It turns out the lady in Machiasport can’t pick up her order,” she explained. “So I thought I’d just drive it down there.”

  “But, Ellie, what about Lee’s recital? The violin students’ big spring concert?” I reminded her, and she looked vexed, glancing up at the clock on the wall behind the cash register.

  “Darn, you’re right. It’s an hour each way; the concert’s right after lunch, and I wanted to be there with her before the—”

  Lee was going to play “Greensleeves.” I’d heard her practicing it, and she was good; besides, she had to have at least one parent at the recital, didn’t she?

  “I’ll go,” I said, and twenty minutes later we had my car loaded.

  “You’re sure your arm will be all right?” Ellie worried aloud.

  I wasn’t; the incision felt like acid was being poured onto it. “I’ll be fine,” I assured her, lying through gritted teeth.

  “Just watch out for other drivers, then,” she cautioned as I started the car. “I don’t want to have to finish shutting this place down all by myself.”

  So she was coming around to the idea. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or not. Either way, I figured a couple of hours alone in a car full of chocolate wouldn’t hurt me.

  Maybe the fumes would even improve my mood, and if worse came to worst I could always bite into one of those biscotti, which at the customer’s request had been baked so crisply, you could’ve hammered nails in with them.

  But as I pulled out of the parking space in front of the Moose, Jenna Waldrop came quick-stepping down the sidewalk toward me, waving at me to stop.

  When I did, the ringleted and bracelet-bedecked young teacher got into the car beside me and slammed the door.

  “I have to talk to you.” Her bracelets clinked as she clasped her hands in her lap.

  “What is it, Jenna?” I sighed. The last thing I needed was an earful of her bitterness. “I mean, I’m sorry you’re so unhappy, but . . .”

  “The other night at the Duck,” she said, ignoring me. She’d decided to tell me something and now she was going to, no matter what.

  “There’s something no one’s talked about. But I was there.”

  I drove slowly out Water Street toward Jenna’s house. “And?”

  “After Toby got thrown out and then Andy left, I did, too. To go home, I mean.”

  Which was what Marienbad had said. “But I stopped in the ladies’ room,” Jenna went on. “And . . . well, I’d drunk too much. Mom was on the warpath again, I didn’t want to—”

  Yeah, yeah. Same old story. “Hey, Jenna, cut to the chase, okay?”

  I thought she’d be annoyed, not that I cared. Right now I had my own problems. But she just laughed a little wildly.

  “The chase. Right. Well, the chase is that when I came out of the ladies’ room, no one in the place knew I was still there. Norm McHale, specifically.”

  Jenna and her mom lived in a tiny wood-frame cottage backed up to a granite ledge, on a side street so steep it was a wonder anything but birdhouses was built on it.

  I pulled up in front and set the parking brake. A curtain in the front window twitched; dear old Mom, I supposed.

  Jenna sucked in a breath, seeing it, too. “So I was just getting myself together to go out the door when I looked back. And there was Norm, jus
t then going out the emergency exit.”

  The curtain twitched minutely again. I may or may not have made a rude gesture in its general direction. “Really,” I said to Jenna.

  She nodded firmly, her auburn ringlets bouncing. “Really. I know he didn’t see me, he didn’t look back. No one did, I sort of slid out the door quietly. I was,” she added shamefacedly, “kind of a mess.”

  I considered this. “And . . . before or after this happened, did you see anything else unusual?”

  Her forehead creased. “Just . . . well, some scuffling sounds. From down there behind the Ducky on the walkway. Not loud, though; I didn’t think much of it.”

  Where Andy and Toby had gotten into their altercation, she meant. Andy said there hadn’t been many words spoken, just punches thrown.

  “Jenna, have you told anyone else about this?”

  The young woman shook her head miserably. “No, and I don’t want to. Mother doesn’t know I go to the Duck at all, she thinks I—”

  The curtain hadn’t moved again. My work here is done, I thought, feeling a touch of glee.

  “Jenna, I want you to go right now and find Bob Arnold, and tell him about this. Do you want a ride?”

  Jenna glanced at the house. “No, I’ve got to go in for a minute first and settle her down. But I will do it, I promise. Walking back to Bob’s office,” she added, “will keep me away from here longer.”

  She put her hand on the car door, but I stopped her. “Jenna. One last thing. Why are you telling me this?”

  She paused, considering. “Well, I’ve been thinking for a while now about what’s going to happen when she dies. I mean, nobody lives forever, do they?” she added worriedly.

  Yeah, if Mother Waldrop had been my mom, I’d have been concerned about that, too. Looking up at the house again, Jenna went on.

  “I mean, she’s my mom and I love her, but she’s a bitter, unhappy woman.”

  She turned to me. “And if I’m not careful I’m going to end up just like her, aren’t I?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Another small laugh, then: “Oh, don’t worry, you don’t have to answer that. I know what you think of me, and I deserve it. Sharon Sweetwater definitely hates me, and I deserve that, too, the way I’ve behaved to her.”