Five-Alarm Fudge

by Christine DeSmet

  “So you went upstairs in the schoolhouse, but then he left. Then what?”

  She covered her face with her hands as she cried.

  Her actions didn’t look fake. I swallowed my misgivings. Still, my head was warning me that Fontana was smart.

  “Fontana, how long did you stay in that room? Did you hear anything?”

  Fontana’s face popped up from her hands. “A car. I thought he was moving the car closer to the schoolhouse. But then I waited. I heard a car again. Then a car passing by on the road. I think I fell asleep then. I only had one tiny drink, but I couldn’t believe how tired I was.”

  “Maybe Cherry slipped something into your drink. Do you know what time you heard the cars?”

  “It had to be around midnight or later.”

  The timing fit with everything else I knew about the case, but I knew people estimated time and could be off by a lot. “So, after you woke up, then what did you do?”

  “I got dressed. I was wearing a really nice black silk sheath dress I’d found in Sister Bay—”

  “Fontana, please. You got up, got dressed, went outside, right?”

  “Sure. It was beautiful out. All the stars. But deadly quiet.” She shuddered. “The moon was shining down on all those gravestones by the church. It spooked me out because Cherry was gone. The car was gone. He’d . . . left me.”

  She began to cry again, but I couldn’t take it. “Enough with the tears. You’ve been bedding Michael and Jonas within days of your lover being killed. You can’t be all that sorry he’s gone.”

  After tossing the pillow aside, she launched off the sofa and headed to the kitchen. I followed. She poured a glass of milk but didn’t offer me anything.

  “I am sorry he’s gone. I thought I might have a future with Cherry.” She leaned her backside against the sink.

  Sliding into a chair at the kitchen table, I watched her down the entire glass of milk. Her hand shook. Was she covering up for helping to kill a man? Or telling the truth? I didn’t know.

  I tried a different tack. I reminded Fontana that she had always helped protect me from bullies as a kid. Boys and girls had teased me mercilessly for being tall for my grade. They had called me Bean Pole and Giraffe.

  Remembering registered a smile on her face as she put her glass on the counter. “If only we could all go back to a life that wasn’t so complicated, right? I’d give anything to only be dealing with bullies right now.”

  It was about the most profound thing she’d said in a long while, which confounded me. “Did you tell the sheriff the things we’ve been talking about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you get home that night?”

  “I walked.”

  She lived along Highway 57 not far from her roadside market. Getting there was only about three miles or so south from Namur on County Trunk Roads DK and Y. Still, at night, that would be a long, scary walk.

  “Did anybody see you?”

  “No cars passed me.”

  “And you told the sheriff all this?” I had to be sure.

  “Yeah.”

  I suspected the sheriff doubted her story. I had my doubts, too. Everything she’d told me was dramatic and interesting, but it painted her as the poor waif abandoned by her man and knowing nothing about his dead body lying in the basement of Saint Mary of the Snows. She’d said before how much she hated basements. But seeing a dead man in one could spook a person enough to make her run down a country road.

  I still had two big questions. “Why is there a bunch of stuff from my fudge shop in the chapel by the road? And who hit the chapel?”

  She sprang away from the sink. “There’s what in there?”

  “Cinderella Pink dolls, purses, soaps. Why?”

  “I don’t know why. But I know who hit the chapel.”

  “Who?”

  “Mercy Fogg in her limo. That woman was here earlier.”

  “Dropping off my mother after breakfast.”

  “No, I mean she stopped here at Jonas’s and told him to give himself up. When he told her to leave, she did, but she fishtailed the limo out of his driveway, just missing his mailbox. Then she drove right into the shoulder of the road and pushed at the chapel as if the limo were a bulldozer. That woman is crazy.”

  * * *

  After I left Fontana, it felt normal yet disconcerting to do something as simple as help my mother sell fudge to tourists.

  I buried myself in the joy of talking about how I made my fudge. I gave away coupons to encourage visits to Fishers’ Harbor and Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge & Beer.

  A few people asked about the scorched ground nearby, but we shrugged it off to a grass fire caused by a cigarette being tossed out a window.

  When Pauline arrived, I told her about the chapel. She had to see everything herself.

  At the chapel alongside the road, Pauline peeked in, then said, “You didn’t tell me about the voodoo doll.”

  “Voodoo?”

  From the altar she picked up a doll with brown yarn hair and a frilly pink yarn dress made by Dotty Klubertanz. A hat pin was stuck through the doll’s head.

  I shuddered. “I didn’t notice that before.”

  “How does your head feel?”

  “Not like it’s got a pin through it.”

  “Somebody’s mad at you.”

  “At me? Why?”

  “Because you’ve been snooping around your neighbors’ places trying to find evidence that one of them is a murderer. If you were doing that to me, I’d probably have a doll I’d be poking pins in.”

  “Thanks a lot, Pauline.”

  “Hey, we teachers take psychology in college.”

  “This has to be Mercy’s idea of a joke. She hit the chapel after putting this stuff inside knowing that eventually I’d check it out.”

  I called Jordy. He said that until Jonas called him about the damage he wouldn’t stop by.

  “What about the doll with the pin in its head? And the fire? Somebody is threatening me, Jordy.”

  “That’s merely a doll with a pin in its head. Maybe it was wearing a hat and the hat fell off. I don’t have time to chase down there to look at a pin in a pink doll.”

  I mentioned that Cherry and Fontana allegedly had a tryst in the old schoolhouse. Jordy asked if I thought Fontana had made that up. I told him the truth: She might have. She was a totally unreliable witness. But I told him Pauline and I had found the disturbance in the bedroom dust.

  Pauline and I then drove in my pickup to the Prevost Winery, with Lucky Harbor in the back. My mother and I had prepared a list of wines we wanted to sell at the market. I’d use that as my cover, in case Mike asked what Pauline and I were doing wandering around his place. Lucky Harbor was in the backseat, panting, eager to be on a mission with his nose. I popped him a few crackers as we drove along the highway.

  Pauline said, “Lucky Harbor is like a drug addict and you feed his habit. You’re an enabler.”

  “One of my best qualities.”

  “There is no way you could be a teacher. You’d be a bad influence on every child. You don’t have restraint. You lie, poke your nose in other people’s business, and enable lawbreakers. No restraint is your flaw.”

  “I thought not knowing how to trust myself to be happy was my flaw. That’s what you told me months ago.”

  “The lack of trust has to do with Dillon. You’re working on that, though I don’t think you should trust him completely yet.”

  “Why not?” I thought she could see that Dillon and I were making a go of things.

  Pauline said, “You’re proving my point. You lack restraint. You broke your Wednesday rule for sex already. You now get sex whenever you want it.”

  “This sounds like you and John haven’t been having sex lately.”

  She shook her big purse on her lap and growled. “He and Marc have a schedule that certainly doesn’t include me. They’re crisscrossing Door County like madmen, and John’s taking Marc out on a
boat to fish today. Then they’re going to tape cooking the fish later at some restaurant. I asked John where I was on the schedule and he actually looked at the schedule trying to find a minute for me.”

  I laughed, then realized my mistake. She was right—I had no restraint. “I’m sorry, P.M. John cares about you. Trust me on that.”

  I ached to divulge John’s planned surprise about singing at the kermis but kept my lips zipped shut. Restraint, restraint.

  It was going on four o’clock when we pulled into the winery parking lot, prime time for tourists driving up from Chicago to stop for bottles of wine before they headed north to Fishers’ Harbor and Sister Bay.

  Assuming Michael was inside, Pauline and I headed for the back of the building and the freezer with Lucky Harbor.

  “Help me find something to break the lock.”

  Pauline asked, “Why didn’t you steal the key? You’re slipping.”

  “I can’t walk up to Mike and ask him for the key to break into his freezer.” I grabbed her purse and then crouched down on the ground with it.

  Pauline hissed, “Give that back.”

  I came up with a screwdriver. “You were holding out on me, P.M. You saved me a trip back to the truck.”

  The lock was small. I stuffed the screwdriver through the eyehole loop, then shoved it at an angle with all my might. It didn’t give.

  “Now what?” I asked myself mostly.

  “We get out of here. You have no restraint at all. Stop this.”

  Lucky Harbor was whining as he sniffed about the bottom of the freezer. No way was I leaving now.

  “Push with me, Pauline. We played basketball in college. You can’t tell me that at thirty-two we’ve lost all our strength already.”

  She put her hands over mine on the screwdriver. “Grab, grip, grumble, grunt.”

  “Today was a G day?”

  “Yup. We used the goat cam online to visit the goats on Al’s restaurant roof in Sister Bay.”

  After a gargantuan heave, we popped the lock.

  “Make sure nobody heard us,” I said to Pauline, pointing toward the corner of the building.

  She trotted over, then peeked. “All clear.” She stayed put, clinging to her purse.

  “Chicken,” I said.

  “If you’re going to reveal a human head or something, I don’t want to see it. I’ll never get it out of my head.”

  I lifted the heavy, white-enameled steel lid, pushing it back so it’d stay open.

  I blinked several times at what I saw.

  Lucky Harbor stood on his hind legs, his front paws on the edge of the opened freezer, eager to get a gander.

  I turned to Pauline. “We better get the sheriff.”

  Chapter 26

  I called nine-one-one. Pauline backed right into Deputy Maria Vasquez, who rushed around the corner of the winery. Pauline yelped.

  With my phone still in my hand, I asked Maria, “How’d you get here that fast?”

  “I’ve been tailing you in an unmarked car. Sheriff’s orders.”

  “When did he give this order?”

  “Saturday. When you called in the body.”

  Pauline said, “Thank goodness. She has no restraint, you know. She’s trying to get herself killed.”

  Ignoring Pauline, I directed Maria’s gaze to the freezer chest. “Getting killed could happen with all this stuff. Or start fires with it.”

  Maria whistled. “Enough stuff to blow up all of Sturgeon Bay.” She called Sheriff Tollefson.

  The freezer was filled with chemicals in big bottles and canisters, mostly plastic. If the dog had smelled the chemicals, perhaps there were leaks in the bottom of some of the material. I was surprised fumes hadn’t made it all blow up already.

  Maria said, “Did you touch any of this stuff?”

  “No,” Pauline and I said in unison.

  Pauline asked, “Are you going to arrest Mike Prevost?”

  “Right now we just want to know if he owns the material or not. No law against owning this material.”

  But it looked mighty suspicious to me, considering how much fuss Mike had made about not allowing chemicals on his land. Maria made a note of every label. There were pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Bugs, plants, and molds didn’t stand a chance.

  Maria made us stay put until Jordy arrived in about twenty minutes.

  He stalked right up to me. “Now what have you gotten into? Another doll?”

  Lucky Harbor sniffed his shoes and pants. His shoes were covered with mud and what looked like dung of some sort. Jordy grimaced. “I was fishing through a pile of manure behind the Dahlgren garden shed.”

  That information put me on alert. “What were you doing there?” I tossed crackers off in the nearby grass to distract Lucky Harbor.

  “Inspecting it again before they arrive tomorrow or whenever.”

  “The Dahlgrens are out of jail?”

  “Released last night on bail. They put their property up as collateral.”

  “Why didn’t they come home immediately?”

  “Their lawyer advised them to lie low. He got them a motel room.”

  “Where?”

  “Telling you where they are would defeat the purpose of them getting a secret motel room.”

  Maria filled in the sheriff on the chest’s contents.

  The sheriff asked me, “Did you see somebody put these things in here?”

  “No, but Lucky Harbor was sniffing around here on Tuesday afternoon when I was here. Somebody might have spilled some of this.”

  Jordy let his gaze travel the ground. “The grass would show spots if something spilled, but I don’t see anything. Probably a leak in the bottom of this thing. Did you talk with Prevost?”

  “No. You told me to stay out of your business. Dillon said the same thing.”

  Pauline said, “She’s working on a new skill—restraint. Could we go?”

  The sheriff said, “Not yet. Maria, could you go inside and ask Mr. Prevost to come out here? Thanks.”

  Pauline’s bug-eyed look told me she was trying to signal me about something.

  When Mike came around the corner with Maria, his round head flushed at the sight of all of us and the opened freezer chest. I couldn’t tell if his reaction was innocent surprise or panic because he was guilty. He said he didn’t know anything about the chemicals.

  Jordy asked, “When was the last time you opened this chest?”

  “Months ago maybe. The freezer unit isn’t working right anymore. I haven’t had a chance to haul this to the recycle center.”

  I picked up the broken lock from the ground. “Is this yours?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t put it on there. Try Jonas Coppens. The punk is determined to ruin me.”

  I said, “He’d have no reason to bring his chemicals over here. But I did see that you closed off the gate in the fence between you two. Why?”

  “Because of Daniel Dahlgren.”

  Jordy shifted his stance on that name. “What about Dahlgren?”

  Mike seemed to shrink by several inches. “My land abuts the Dahlgren property to the west. We’ve been friends for a long time.” His face wrinkled, as if he were in pain.

  Jordy scowled at him. “Well?”

  “It’s personal.”

  Maria was taking notes.

  Mike was sweating. I felt sorry for my former math teacher.

  He said on a rush of expelled breath, “I had an affair with Fontana when she was married to Daniel. I love her.”

  His bedding Fontana came as a surprise. While she had never dated two men at the same time, she couldn’t bear to be alone. She moved from one man to the next as easily and swiftly, in my opinion, as water moves downstream. Fontana having an affair meant she must have been at a very low point in her marriage to Daniel. I felt bad for her because of all her mistakes of the heart.

  Jordy asked, “What does this have to do with Jonas allegedly putting these chemicals here?”

  “Jonas wants me
out of the way . . .”

  I said, “So he can have Fontana.”

  “No,” Mike said. “Jonas wants this land back. I bought this land from his parents almost thirty years ago. After they were killed in the car crash, he hasn’t been the same. It’s like he’s trying to go back in time and recreate what his parents started with. It’s as if he thinks he can resurrect them if he puts everything back in place the way it was before he was born.”

  Jordy called the BUG Fire Department and requested the Hazardous Materials Unit to come out. Maria went back to her car to retrieve a fingerprinting kit.

  Pauline and I returned to my truck and got in. Lucky Harbor hopped in, too.

  I asked Pauline, “What were your faces all about?”

  “John was here. They’re going to find his fingerprints on that freezer.”

  “How do you know he was here?”

  She pulled a man’s watch from her purse. “I found this on the ground under the taller weeds the goats somehow missed near the freezer. It’s John’s.”

  I smelled the watch. It possessed the piquantness of pesticides. “You better air out your purse. Get a whiff.”

  I passed it under her nose. Pauline recoiled as I asked, “How do you know this is John’s?”

  “The words ‘Star Sales Promoter’ are on the back.” She showed me. “This is a watch he got from his old employer, the riverboat cruise company.”

  “John will love being questioned about why he was out here. You know he was obviously here filming.”

  “I keep losing him to these little intrigues. Which seem to be your doings.”

  “Don’t blame me for John’s adventurous spirit. Maybe you should speak up more, Pauline. Since you met him you’ve become a mouse.”

  “I can’t believe you said that. Are we fighting?”

  “No. Never. But you need to tell John off. Dillon told me the truth to my face the other night. It didn’t feel good at first to learn I was going overboard on everything—”

  “So true.”

  “Just listen. I realized he was right. He cares about me. If you care about John, talk to him about what’s bugging you. Use your teacher voice, too. I like your teacher voice.” Her teacher voice was operatic and authoritative, designed to stop a kid before he ran into the street in front of a car.