In Hot Fudge And Cold Blood

by A. R. Winters

  “Oh,” she said with a dismissive shake of her head, “it’s a guideline rather than strict law.”

  That’s not what it sounded like to me.

  “But,” she continued, “I’ve decided to follow it this time. I’m going to see this scrapbook through to the end.”

  “And then move on to something else?”

  She shook her head adamantly.

  “No, I’ve found my passion. You’ll be calling me Scrapbook Sarah decades from now. I just love it. Now, are you going to just stand there, or are you going to do some work and help me?”

  “What exactly is it that you’re doing?”

  Sarah placed her scrapbook on the counter and opened it up to a page somewhere near the end. I peered over her shoulder to look at it. It was titled “Sandra’s Beautiful Home… and Fudge Shop!” There was nothing else on the page.

  “You see,” she said jabbing a finger at all the empty white space. “I wanted to get a picture or two to put in here, showing where she lived.” She pulled something out of her bag and plopped it on top of the book. It was a Polaroid camera.

  “I didn’t know they still made those.”

  She gave me a withering look. “So are you going to come or not?”

  “I wouldn’t mind another look at the neighborhood. It might inspire some ideas.”

  “Or maybe the killer will be there!” said Sarah with a sudden burst of excitement.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “It’s a law, or a rule, or something. Killers have to go back to where they killed.”

  “I’m not sure they have to. And anyway, the killer could have been back dozens of times already. They’re probably bored of the place.”

  Sarah peered at me, confused. “Why would they go back dozens of times?”

  “I’m not saying they did, I’m… never mind. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 16

  It was a pleasant if nippy walk through Sandra’s old neighborhood. The trees lining the streets were tall and mature, making it feel like you were walking through a leafy tunnel as you passed under the leafy canopies. The houses were pretty in an old-fashioned way, and I could certainly see why Donovan liked the idea of turning some of them into little galleries and artisanal shops. The nightclub idea still didn’t strike me as being viable though.

  “It’s just around this corner,” I said, indicating the upcoming bend.

  Sarah raised her camera, as if ready to snap something at a moment’s notice. As I didn’t expect the house to lurch off in an attempt to escape at our approach, I found her readiness quite amusing.

  “There it is!” I said as it came into view.

  Sarah quickly took a picture and her device made a loud whirring noise as it processed the film. Judging from our angle, Sarah had managed to get a sliver of the house from between two trees.

  “You’ll get a better one closer up,” I said to her.

  “I know. I just didn’t want to miss the chance!”

  With a few more steps, the whole house came into view and we entered her short and wide-open driveway, still with the sign at the entrance reading “Sandra’s House of Fudge.”

  “Look,” said Sarah, raising her camera in a pointing gesture and then lifting it up to her face and quickly snapping another photograph.

  In front of Sandra’s door were two different things of interest. One living, and one almost certainly not.

  Right by the front door, turned away from us, was a woman. As we watched, she pushed open the door and scurried inside. The door was pushed, but not closed completely, behind her. Next to where she was standing was a small pile of parcels, which appeared to be deliveries left just outside the door.

  “Who was that?” asked Sarah, giving me a nudge with excitement.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she works for some cleaning service or something. They have those, after murders, to clean the crime scene. You should have seen it! There was fudge everywhere.”

  Sarah removed the square photograph that had emerged from her camera and held it up.

  “Just a moment, and we’ll see!”

  The house remained still and there was no visible sign that there was life inside from our position on the street. The woman who’d gone in seemed a little too nicely dressed to be a cleaner, and hadn’t been carrying any supplies either as far as we could tell.

  “Here we are!” said Sarah, waving her photo in front of me.

  The photo showed the woman pushing open the front door. With her back turned to us, we couldn’t tell who it was.

  “It’s evidence, right?” asked Sarah, her voice dripping with excitement.

  “It’s evidence that someone’s gone in the house.”

  “But not of murder?”

  “Not quite. Come on. Let’s see who it is.”

  “It could be dangerous!”

  “Maybe, but there’s two of us at least.”

  “If they attack us, I’ll blind them with my flash and then wallop them with the camera!”

  “And I’ll stand back and watch. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I told her. “I’m sure it’s all perfectly innocent.”

  Despite what I told her, I had my doubts. The furtive way the woman had hurried inside the house wasn’t that of someone who was supposed to be there. Was this our murderer?

  “Come on,” said Sarah, yanking at my arm and leading ahead.

  When we got to the front door, I gave it a gentle tap with my hand and it swung inward silently just like last time. I raised a finger to my lips, and Sarah gave me a nod in response.

  In retrospect, sneaking into the house instead of calling or ringing the bell probably wasn’t our wisest moment. Sarah quickly stepped in ahead of me, keen to lead the way. That was fine with me. I’m no coward, but if someone else wants to lead the charge into a dangerous situation, I’m not going to stop them.

  With exaggerated tiptoeing steps, Sarah stalked down the hallway while I followed three steps behind. The kitchen where I’d found Mom and the deceased Sandra was straight ahead toward the back of the house, but there were rustling sounds coming from a room off to the right. If I remembered correctly, that was the living room. I hadn’t entered it last time, but I’d seen into it as I’d passed by.

  Sarah led us right up to the edge of the door frame. She pointed to indicate there was someone in there, and I nodded to show that I too had heard the noises. She held up a finger to her mouth to urge me to remain silent. Then she held up three fingers.

  Two…

  One…

  With an ear-splitting banshee shriek, Sarah jumped in front of the doorway and then charged in. Her violent yell came as a complete shock to me—I thought we were trying to be quiet—and it elicited a scream of surprise from me. I followed her as fast as I could, still screeching through the panic.

  We entered the room like two screaming harpies and our shouts were immediately matched by the scream of the woman who was already in there.

  “Arrgh!” she cried as Sarah charged into the middle of the room toward her.

  The woman dropped the book she was holding and held her arms up to shield herself from whatever she thought we were about to do.

  All three of us continued screaming for several seconds longer before we could regain a modicum of control.

  “Hello… Molly…” I said between gasps as I recovered.

  White-faced, she raised a shaky hand to her mouth, and then fell down onto the chesterfield sofa next to her, which only had one of its three cushions in place.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in a trembling voice.

  “Hi!” said Sarah brightly. “We saw someone breaking in and came to help.”

  “Help?” said Molly, peering up at us. She was squeezing her hands together on her lap.

  “What happened here?” I asked as I peered around the room.

  It looked like it had been ransacked.

  The books were spread across the floor in front of the bookshelves inst
ead of on them. The magazines under the coffee table had been tossed aside and the table itself was upside down. A couple of the cushions from the sofa that Molly was sitting on had been thrown into a corner of the room.

  “I don’t know,” said Molly, shaking her head and quickly wiping an eye before dropping her hands back to her lap.

  “Has the house been burgled?” I asked.

  “Did you burgle it!?” shouted Sarah.

  “No!” Molly’s answer was more of a yelp than proper speech. She took a deep breath and then managed a more measured tone. “I just got here myself. You said you saw me enter. I didn’t have time to do all this!” She opened her arms expansively to the room.

  She did have a point there, I supposed. “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Yeah!” said Sarah, waving her camera at Molly. “What do you think you’re doing!”

  Before Molly could respond, Sarah put the camera in front of her face and squeezed the button. The blinding flash and noisy whirring caused Molly to let out another shriek.

  “Sarah,” I said, taking her by the arm, “that’s enough. You’re frightening her.”

  She took a moment to consider, then gave me a nod. She removed the latest picture from the camera and stepped back, away from Molly and me.

  Molly took a deep breath. “I was just here to bring in the parcels. You saw them outside, right?”

  “Yep, we saw them all right. But they are still outside.”

  “Yes, you interrupted me,” said Molly, frowning. “When I opened the door, it didn’t look right in here, so I popped in to have a look around. I could tell the place had been robbed immediately.”

  Sarah appeared back by my side and picked up something off the floor. I glanced at it. She was holding the book that Molly had dropped in fright when we entered. It was an appointment book for the current year.

  “I just picked that up off the floor. I guess it was a futile gesture. I wasn’t going to tidy all this up. But it’s just habit, I suppose. I’m what they call houseproud and I can’t stand mess.”

  “I see. Sorry to scare you, Molly. We better call the police, and report the burglary.”

  Molly nodded in agreement immediately. Perhaps even a little too quickly?

  What if Molly had been inside this house, ransacking it, and then seen us coming from the window? She could’ve just pretended to be entering the house for the first time. It would’ve been easy for her to slip out the back, go around the front, and ‘enter’ just before us.

  “Hello? Police? I want to report a murder-burglary!”

  I spun around. Sarah had already called the police and gotten through.

  “Well, the murder wasn’t today. It was just a burglary today.” She tilted her head thoughtfully as she spoke. “But there was a murder here. What? Yes. Yes, we’re at Sandra’s House of Fudge…”

  “Sandra’s illegal house of fudge,” muttered Molly.

  “…yes, that’s the one. See you soon. Bye.” Sarah hung up the phone with a satisfied smile on her face.

  “There.” Sarah stood in front of Molly. “The police are coming for you now.”

  I nudged Sarah again. “Not for her, for us. For the house.”

  Sarah ignored my correction. She was already going through the photos of Molly she’d taken, holding each one up and peering at it as if she would glean some vital clue from her inspection.

  We stood and sat awkwardly while we waited for the police. We didn’t have much in common and making small talk with a person you’d half-scared to death a few minutes ago was more than a little uncomfortable. Sarah and I ended up staring at our phones once she was done looking at her pictures, while Molly sat in silence on the sofa, hands on her knees and a patient look on her face.

  After approximately forever, the police showed up with a squeal of tires outside. Thudding boots ran up, and then the front door was pushed open with force, causing it to bang against the interior wall.

  “This is the police!” cried a familiar voice.

  “In here, Jack,” I yelled.

  And, not for the first time, I waited in a murder victim’s house while my almost-boyfriend Detective Jack Bowers arrived.

  Chapter 17

  “Oh! Hi, Jack!” I said with a smile when he entered the living room.

  He gave me a quick grin of greeting and then peered around the room as if perplexed. His gaze then returned to me.

  “Aria. You do turn up in the most interesting places, don’t you?”

  I nodded. He’d once caught me in the home of a different murder victim and had threatened to arrest me if I did it again. Obviously, the circumstances were completely different this time. I had a good reason for being in the house this time. Well, a reason, anyway.

  I hoped he’d see it the same way.

  “My officers are going to have a look around and see what’s missing,” said Jack in his most serious policeman-voice. “And we’ll need to get statements from all of you. We should be able to do that here. There won’t be any need to go down to the station.”

  “Great,” I said with a smile.

  “Aria? If you’ve got a moment…” Jack beckoned me over to him. I’d clearly been chosen first because I was his favorite. At least, I thought maybe that was the case.

  I followed him out of the living room and down the hall to the kitchen. I half-expected to see Sandra still there, head in the big pot of fudge, but of course she was long gone and the kitchen had been completely cleaned up.

  “You wouldn’t know there’d been a murder in here, would you?” I said after looking around the room.

  “No, not at all. You know, pretty much all these older houses have seen a death or two,” said Jack.

  “Oh?”

  Jack pulled out two chairs from under the wooden table that was pushed up against the right-hand wall.

  “Sure. Back fifty, a hundred years ago, most people died at home instead of in hospitals.”

  “Oh. I thought you meant murders,” I said with a frown.

  Jack smiled while he patted one of the chairs for me to sit on. “If that was the case, they’d need another dozen Jack Bowers!”

  “That would be nice,” I said with a smile that quickly faded as my cheeks went crimson in blush.

  “Ah. Anyway,” said Jack sitting down, “what were you doing here, exactly?”

  I was pleased and relieved that I actually had a good excuse for being in a murder victim’s home for once.

  “Sarah wanted to take a picture of the house, for her Sandra scrapbook. But when we got here, we saw a strange woman going in the front door. We thought it might have been a burglar, so we went to investigate.”

  “Are you a police officer, Aria?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “But I did wear a uniform for Halloween one year. Going as a witch every time was getting old.”

  Jack flashed another polite smile but now it seemed forced.

  “Aria. If you see someone breaking into a home, especially a home in which a person has been murdered, it is of utmost importance that you call the police. You mustn’t…” he hit the table with the palm of his hand, “mustn’t go in after them. What if it had been the murderer? Maybe you’d be lying over there,” he said, pointing to the floor by the stove, “instead of sitting here.”

  I looked down at my hands, my shoulders hunched over like a schoolgirl who’d misbehaved. “Sorry. It was a woman, and she didn’t look threatening, from what we saw. And there were two of us.”

  Jack nodded, and reached over, placing his hands atop mine.

  “I only say these things because I worry about you, Aria. Also, I don’t want you breaking the law. But mostly because I worry about you.”

  We both grinned at each other.

  “So when you arrived, you realized it was Molly, and then…?”

  “We saw the place had been ransacked and so we called the police. There’s not much to it.” I looked him in the eyes as I spoke. His dashing green eyes that turned
emerald in the sun.

  “And what was Molly doing when you arrived?”

  “She was in the living room, looking around. She’d picked up a book off the floor—Sandra’s appointment book—and then she screamed.”

  “She screamed?” said Jack in surprise. “Why did she scream?”

  My eyes flicked down from his.

  “Well, because Sarah screamed. I think she did it to scare the burglar—who turned out to be just Molly. And her screaming made me scream. And our screaming made Molly scream.”

  “Aria, Aria, Aria. How do you keep getting yourself in such messes?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  For a couple of seconds, I ran back over all the events in my mind. It didn’t seem like I had missed anything important.

  “Nope, that’s it.”

  “And your mother?” he asked, leaning in.

  “Still haven’t heard from her,” I said with a shake of my head. “She’s completely disappeared as far as I can tell.”

  “If she doesn’t show up soon, we’re going to have to put out a warrant for her, I’m afraid. We really do need to speak to her.”

  “I understand,” I said sadly. “I do hope she comes back soon. It’s just so… embarrassing, having her disappear on us all.”

  “Embarrassing for you, but a headache for the police.” Jack sighed and stood up. “Okay, I’ll speak to Molly next and then Sarah.”

  Pushing my chair back I rose to my feet. “I’ll send her in now.”

  “Don’t get into any trouble!”

  I shot him a grin. “No more today, I promise.”

  “Just today?”

  With an enigmatic smile, I refrained from answering and went out to grab Molly.

  I lingered in the hallway until Jack was done speaking to all of us. In the meantime, a couple of other police officers whom I didn’t know investigated the house, searching upstairs and downstairs for whatever it was that police looked for after a burglary.

  “All done,” said Jack when he returned with Sarah in tow.

  “Did our stories match?” I asked with a grin.