In Hot Fudge And Cold Blood

by A. R. Winters

  The room reacted with a puzzled, twittering laughter, not quite sure whether she was making a joke, or whether she was out of her mind. Some no doubt suspected it was a little of both.

  “As many of you know, and as all of you should know, I spent many, many hours working on a scrapbook to celebrate the life of the dearly departed Sandra Webb. A scrapbook that mysteriously disappeared.”

  While the crowd was busy oohing at this mildly dramatic revelation, I carefully slid the bolt of the shop door closed to lock it.

  Though it could easily be pulled open again, I was counting on the murderer’s shock and confusion to assist me in keeping them inside. The bolt was just a slight delaying tactic.

  “But my scrapbook wasn’t the only one that disappeared.”

  There were murmurs of ‘mine too’ through the crowd. I of course knew where they all were, but that wasn’t what we were here to discuss.

  “There are…” Sarah raised her eyes to look up at the ceiling in her idea of drama, “strange things afoot in Sequoia Bay!”

  The crowd followed suit and also looked up at the ceiling, but the only notable thing up there was a cobweb that we had missed when cleaning earlier.

  “Err, thank you, Sarah!” I said loudly to grab everyone’s attention again.

  Sarah span around in a billowing twirl, then did a deep bow toward me.

  “The reason I got you all here, is actually not to pre-sell you fudge. It is, in fact, to reveal…” the crowd waited with bated breath “…who murdered Sandra Webb.”

  My announcement was greeted with shocked oohs and ahhs from the crowd—and one person with a rather panicked look on their face. But with me in front of the door, there was nowhere for them to go.

  There was a sudden rattling at the door behind me. I was going to ignore it, but something told me not to. That something was my mother.

  “Let me in, Aria! Unlock this at once!”

  I spun around, opened the door and there she was: my mother, back down to her old fighting weight, dressed in a red dress designed for someone at least a couple of decades younger than her, but, darn it, she pulled it off.

  “Thank you,” she said, entering the room and looking at the crowd with a haughty sniff. Due to my rather exciting announcement, everyone was staring at me, but of course Mom thought they were looking at her. “Good evening, everyone—I’m here!” she said.

  There were murmurings in the crowd.

  “Actually, we’re in the middle of something,” I said to her. “Be quiet and please listen for a minute.”

  “Very well,” she said with a sigh.

  Re-focusing on the crowd, I saw Jack making his way toward us with a look of double consternation on his face. Before he could reach us and no doubt arrest my mother, I had to finish what I’d started.

  “As many of you know, Sandra had the best fudge in town. But what a lot of you don’t know is that ‘her’ recipe wasn’t her own.”

  Everyone except one person gasped. This was a crowd of serious fudge lovers, and this accusation was almost up there with murder for some of them. Possibly even worse than murder for some.

  “And that is why she was killed.”

  I paused to soak up some of the delicious anticipation, and with a start realized that I now understood, at least partly, what drove Donovan to make speeches at every opportunity. There’s nothing quite like a crowd hanging on your every word.

  “Now some of you are probably thinking you know who the killer is. Was it Randi, whose fudge has been nicknamed ‘the poor man’s Sandra’s?’” Actually, I’d just made that saying up on the spot, but after how mean she’d been to me, I hoped it would stick. “No, it was not.”

  “What about the Weight Loss Warrior herself, Walnut Wanda, who was nearly killed after being handed nut-infused fudge by Sandra?” I let it hang for a second before again answering my own question. “No.”

  Taking another deep breath, I began to reconsider my plan. It seemed like a good idea when there were only going to be a couple of people there, but with dozens and dozens of them it had all become just a little too dramatic. I needed to bring this to a close soon.

  “Or was it my beloved old mother, Annabelle Whitmore?” I felt a jolt of pain as my arm suffered a surprisingly solid punch. The pain bled into my pride when a good number of the audience giggled or guffawed at her response. “No, it wasn’t her either.”

  “Who was it?” yelled someone at the back.

  “Get on with it!” said another.

  “Bring out the rest of the fudge!” cried a third, who was going to be in for a mountain of disappointment. There was not going to be any more fudge.

  “No, I can tell you that the murderer was in fact…”

  I let the suspense hang in the air just a little too long, because someone else stole my thunder.

  “Me!” said Lara Fischer. “It was me! I didn’t mean to do it!”

  “… Err, her,” I said pointing her way.

  “Listen to me!” Lara shouted.

  And so of course we all did. There was nowhere for her to escape to now, and there’s nothing more thrilling than a murderer in your midst, even one as diminutive as this mop-headed tourist.

  “Sandra was a terrible, terrible person!”

  The crowd wasn’t impressed with her opening statement, and greeted it with murmurs of murderer, shut it!, and she was better than most of us!

  “Listen! I, too, used to have a fudge business. We had a little store of our own, and a little factory, and we supplied dozens of other shops all over western Washington. Fudge was my life.”

  The crowd’s mutterings became a little more sympathetic. Many of them, too, dreamed of living a life of fudge.

  “Sandra was our employee. My husband and I hired her to help cook up the fudge and package it afterward. But was she happy that we gave her a chance? Happy to have a dream job? Was she satisfied?”

  “No!” shouted the audience as if this were a call and response section of a play.

  “Right, she wasn’t. She…” Lara raised a hand and wiped a tear from her eye, her voice quavering. “…she seduced my husband and stole our fudge recipe!”

  Gasps and cries filled the room at the treachery.

  “When I found out, of course I fired her. But she wasn’t done!” Lara looked around the room with a beseeching expression on her face. “She poisoned the last batch of fudge we made! Our customers fell ill, and my business was ruined. She destroyed my life.”

  Now I felt guilty. I hadn’t realized quite how dastardly Sandra had been.

  “So I tracked her down. I’ve spent months visiting every fudge shop in the country, tasting and sampling them all until I found my recipe again. And when I found it… well…”

  “You killed her!” shouted someone who hadn’t been swayed by her sob story.

  “I didn’t mean to! I just wanted to ruin her business like she ruined mine. I put just a little bit of poison—”

  “Poison!?” shouted a good number of the crowd, while others started immediately talking amongst themselves before she could even finish. A few of them, apparently confused, tossed their current fudge samples onto the floor.

  “HEY!” shouted an incredibly loud voice. I turned, startled, and then was even more startled when I realized that unladylike holler had come from my mother. “Let her finish!”

  When the crowd had quieted down some, Lara took a deep breath, swallowed, and then continued.

  “I put just a little bit of poison into her fudge, to make her customers sick like she did to me. I know that’s wrong, but I wasn’t thinking straight. She ruined everything for me and I wanted to do the same thing to her. But something went wrong. She… she must have eaten too much of it. She must have eaten boxes and boxes worth of fudge for it to have killed her.”

  “Hello?” said Walnut Wanda. “Hello? Can I say something?”

  Enjoying all the revelations, the crowd turned to her. I was intrigued by this turn of events too. What did
Walnut Wanda want?

  “I think I know what happened. Sandra, at the end, became a fudge addict.” She had to pause while the crowd went ooh yet again. “She came to me for help. She was completely addicted to her own fudge and she was gaining weight fast. We were going to start her on a program this week, that was the plan. But we didn’t. Because she was… dead.”

  Everyone gasped again. Idly, I began to wonder just how many times you could gasp in a day. Surely if you heard enough revelations, the effects of the latter ones would wear off, and you’d just end up yawning instead. In fact, looking around, some faces in the crowd were yawning.

  “Okay, anyone else?” said Jack Bowers loudly in his most serious policeman voice. He was now standing right next to Lara and obviously intended to arrest her as soon the revelations stopped coming.

  “Ooh, me again!” said Sarah.

  Obligingly, the crowd turned to her again.

  “I just want to say how happy I am! Thank you everyone for coming! What a wonderful launch for my new fudge business! Hurray!”

  Not sure what the correct response was, I began to clap. For the first couple of claps, I was alone, but the crowd joined in after a moment. Soon we were all clapping, and a few people even started cheering.

  While they were thus distracted, I pulled the door open again to let in some air. With Jack now aware of who the murderer was, there was no danger of her escaping as I’d initially worried.

  “Took your time,” said Mom.

  “What?”

  “You took your time clearing my name. Do try to be a bit quicker next time. It was awful. I was stuck all alone in a five-star hotel in San Francisco while you poodled about.”

  I glared at her.

  “A five-star hotel?”

  She nodded. “What? You don’t think Donovan would put me up anywhere less, would you?”

  “Donovan knew where you were? But he…” I quit trying to make sense of it and just shook my head. “Unbelievable, Mom. Unbelievable.”

  “It is a nice dress, isn’t it?” she said with a happy smile before sauntering off toward her beau, the mayor, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat who found a whole truckload of cream.

  “Aria? Have you got a moment?”

  It was Jack and Lara, who was by his side in handcuffs, a rather miserable look on her face.

  “Of course,” I said, but not without some worry. I was expecting some kind of dressing down; after all, I hadn’t exactly followed the standard procedure for apprehending a murderer. But I’d been worried about her escaping, and it had worked, hadn’t it?

  He squeezed my arm. “Well done. We were about to arrest your mother. In fact, they’ve already put a case together and contacted a prosecutor. I tried to delay it, but after we found the poison and the book about poisoning people… I hope you understand.”

  “Of course I do. If I’d been in your shoes, I’m sure I would have done the same.”

  I left it open for him to say the same about what I had done. He didn’t.

  “Right. I’ll call you tomorrow. About that drink?”

  “Ahem.” Lara gave a fake cough. “I am still here, you know.”

  I ignored her and smiled at Jack. “Looking forward to it.”

  “I’ll be off now. Things to do,” he said, nodding his head at Lara.

  I laughed. “Me too. The shop’s going to be a mess when I get rid of all these people.”

  “Take care, Aria.”

  With a final squeeze of my arm, which lingered a second longer than it needed to, Jack led Lara outside to a police car that was already waiting.

  Afterward, people began to slowly drift out of the shop, most of them chatting in twos or threes about what had gone on. I hoped a few of them would remember that this was actually a bridal store, and might even think of me when they or their friends and relatives got engaged. Then some good might come out of the whole messy affair.

  So the crowd began to dissipate, the murder was solved, and all the mysteries had been resolved.

  Except for one, that is.

  Chapter 25

  The next morning, I had my shop almost back in working order. Sarah and I had stayed up late the night before cleaning everything up and I only had some vacuuming left to do. Outside, we’d nearly filled the dumpster with all the detritus that had been left behind.

  “You know,” said Sarah when I’d finally switched the vacuum cleaner off and we could hear each other again, “I’m not sure I really enjoyed my career as a fudge dealer.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “It was a bit too constricting, you know? Everyone was calling me Sarah the Fudge Princess. There was so much pressure to make sure it tasted good, and that’s without even getting into the whole business side of it all.”

  “Err, right. You do remember that it was me that cooked the fudge, right?”

  Sarah tilted her head at me. “Aria, we all played our roles, and as the owner of the fudge company, it was really all my responsibility when it came down to it. What you’ve got to understand is that when you’re the boss, you take all the responsibility for both the successes and the failures. And there weren’t any failures. You were a good little worker.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said serenely, oblivious to the heavy dose of sarcasm with which I’d laced my last comment. “No, I don’t think the fudge business is for me.”

  “So back to the world of scrapbooking for you?”

  “Scrapbooking? Oh, goodness no. Jewelry making, that’s where it’s at. Harnessing the secret power of crystals and gemstones and crafting them into beautiful necklaces and bracelets, rings and anklets, tiaras and—”

  “Fudge!” shrieked Kiwi from up on his bookcase.

  He had been most put out that I hadn’t invited him to the grand fudge party the day before, but that many people all in one room would have upset him and he would have caused a scene. He hadn’t missed out though; I’d left him upstairs with a quarter of a pound all to himself.

  “No more fudge!” said Sarah and I in unison.

  Kiwi screeched loudly.

  “Cheese puffs!” he demanded.

  Sarah already had a bag prepared, and tossed it up to him. He snatched it out of the air and using his beak and talons tore it open before it could hit the top of the bookcase.

  “But the jewelry making will only be a hobby, right? You’re not leaving me, are you?”

  Sarah smiled. “You couldn’t survive without me, Aria. Yesterday definitely proved that. No, the jewelry making will just be a hobby. I’ll gift my creations to those who need them.”

  “How admirable,” I said with a smile. I was glad she wasn’t really thinking of setting up a business. For one thing, I knew I’d end up doing half of the administrative work for her—and the other half probably wouldn’t get done at all.

  Ding!

  “Mom!” I said with a grin.

  I was looking forward to seeing her for once. Mainly because I was insatiably curious and I needed to be filled in on the bits I didn’t quite understand.

  She was looking as good as ever, possibly even better than she had before the murder. Her facelift didn’t look quite so tight, and her Botoxed face actually seemed to be capable of expressions I hadn’t seen on her in years. And she’d obviously used her trip to San Francisco to ‘invest’ in a few new items for her wardrobe. She was wearing a stylish, slender coat jacket that she wouldn’t have fit into a week before, and had on a blue scarf that looked like cashmere.

  “Hello, girls. Coffee please, Sarah.”

  Sarah frowned. “I’m sorry. We don’t have any coffee.”

  Mom lowered her chin and raised her eyebrows while she stared at Sarah. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to.

  “I’ll pop out and get some.” Sarah was already on her way to the door. “I’ll be back before you can say ‘fudge!’”

  When she was gone, Mom and I sat down.

  “What happened to
you, Mom? How’d you reverse the spell? Was it Hazel?”

  She clasped her hands on her lap and gave me a tight-lipped smile. I knew she was considering not telling me anything, so she could lord it over me and bribe me into doing favors for her in return. She considered it—and rejected it. I had, after all, cleared her name.

  “As you know, when I cast that spell on Sandra, it backfired and turned me into… what I was last week.” She visibly suppressed a shudder at the memory of those harrowing times.

  “Was Sandra a witch?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then why? What happened?”

  “As it turns out, Sandra wasn’t a witch, but she was under magical protection. Someone cast some serious spells of protection on her to prevent her from coming to harm.”

  I snorted before I could stop myself.

  Mom laughed too. “Well, it protected her from magical attack anyway. I’m not sure there’s any spell that will protect you from drinking a gallon of poison-laced fudge.”

  “And so when you cast your spell on her, it just bounced back and affected you.”

  Mom nodded. “It was my own fault, I suppose. Because I knew Sandra wasn’t a witch, I hadn’t bothered to protect myself at all.” She sighed. “Still, live and learn. I shan’t make that mistake again.”

  “And you went to Hazel Crane to help you reverse it?”

  “In a way.” Mom paused. “Actually, she came to me, and we struck a deal.”

  “Yes, she mentioned something about a deal. It sounded really rather ominous. But you’ve paid her back now?”

  “Err, I’ve paid her back, yes.” From the way she was speaking, I knew there was something going unsaid.

  BZZZ.

  My phone began to ring. I glanced at the screen and it said UNKNOWN NUMBER so I silenced the call.

  “Hazel said something about me owing her too. And something about my father.”

  “Did she? I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She suddenly took a serious interest in staring down at some of the dangling ends on her scarf.

  “Mom…”

  “Okay, okay, you owe her too. That was part of the deal. You and I would both owe her. But you’ll be glad to know I’ve paid her back in full.”