Five-Alarm Fudge

by Christine DeSmet

  Chapter 29

  My mother flashed by me in a blur as she raced to her black-and-white delivery van. “Your father’s at the top of that barn and he’s not answering his phone.”

  Meaning he could be trapped in the fire. He always left his phone behind when he was stacking bales because it was too easy for it to drop into the hay and disappear.

  Everybody at the Dahlgren place and surrounding Ava’s Autumn Harvest scrambled for cars and phones to call nine-one-one.

  Pauline and I tumbled into my truck.

  Dillon was ahead of me in the rented blue car with Piers.

  Within minutes, it seemed like a hundred vehicles and people jammed into our turnabout near the barn.

  Tongues of fire were shooting from the roof.

  On the ground, dust puffed everywhere. Car doors slammed. Smoke tainted the air. My mouth went dry.

  Mom cried out, “Pete! Pete! I love you! We’re coming!”

  My father was leaning out the window in the peak of the barn—a height of about four stories—with smoke billowing out around him. “Dad! We’re coming!”

  I ran for nearby hoses and yelled to people to get the ladders in the shed.

  Wes Weaver and Jonas and a few others raced to the bottom of the barn to herd cows and calves outside to the barnyard and pasture.

  Dillon and Piers hoofed it back with the ladders as a couple of tourists and I manned ordinary garden hoses. We stretched the hoses as far as we could, but little of the water was reaching into the haymow. A new sprinkler system had been installed, but for some reason it wasn’t working.

  The fire growled inside the belly of the haymow, a ghastly sound that scraped me hollow inside.

  Above us, my father was practically floating in smoke.

  A sour smell of hay burning rent the air around us.

  Sirens screamed in the distance.

  Arnaud came barreling in on a tractor from the fields. He jumped down, and along with several others dove with shovels and forks into the alleyway of the haymow to clear it to prevent the fire from moving to the other half of the barn. But with some roof beams now on fire, I didn’t know if that would help. Smoke clouds dipped from above.

  Pauline and Kjersta were stomping out cinders that had fallen near us.

  Dillon was setting up a ladder against the barn wall. I raced to help steady it with Piers. Piers shoved the extension as far up as it could go. It didn’t reach my father, who was yelling, “Hot, too hot! My back!”

  The sirens were getting louder. I was muttering prayers.

  Dillon yelled my way, “Rope. I need rope.”

  I raced to the machine shed nearby and brought back a coil of half-inch rope. Dillon snatched it and then climbed the ladder that extended partway up the barn. He attempted to toss the coiled rope up to my father. The coil sailed back to the ground like a flailing snake. I tossed it back up to Dillon while Piers steadied the ladder.

  The first fire engine roared into the vicinity. It slowed to find a way around all the vehicles.

  My father was bent over the window frame above us yelling, “Help me! Help!”

  Dillon yelled, “We’re coming, Pete!”

  The crowd behind me gasped as my father flipped himself out of the window four stories above us, dangling now by only his hands on the sill. Smoke blew off his jeans. His shirt looked split open in back and charred. Red flames licked out at the top of the window, making it look like a mouth about to devour my father.

  “We’re coming, Dad!” I yelled. “Hang on!”

  My mother was jumping up and down in tears, her hands cupped like a megaphone around her mouth. “Pete, you’re gonna make it. Hang on, honey, hang on!”

  Another fire engine barreled in, skirting the cars by busting right through our pasture fence.

  The first fire engine came around the shed, then shoved some tourist’s car out of the way, denting the car all to heck. The engine’s ladder was already extending as it pulled into place at the front of the barn.

  Dillon, who was atop our ladder, leaped over to the extension ladder off the fire engine and then rode it up as it motored into place, stopping a few feet below my father.

  Dillon scrambled to the last rung, with a firefighter coming up the ladder right below him. Dillon stretched up to my father’s feet.

  In a leap of faith, my father let go of the window ledge and fell into Dillon, who crumpled, making all of us scream on the ground. But they grappled for a hold on the ladder and the firefighter with them held on to Dillon.

  My mother collapsed on me, crying. “Thank God, thank God.”

  I clung to her. “He’s okay, he’s okay.”

  He was alive, but as he descended, we saw that the backs of his jeans all the way up his legs, butt, and then the shirt on his back had been scorched, splayed open to show raw red skin. The fire rescue crew whisked my dad away in a cloud of dust as three more engines came screaming and barreling down Highway DK.

  Arnaud appeared before me blackened from smoke. Nobody would recognize him as a prince.

  He grabbed my arm, rushing me around the vehicles. “Va! Go to ton pere. Your father.”

  I realized Mom and I had been frozen in shock, numb at what was happening around us. “Thank you,” I mumbled, getting my senses back.

  Pauline and I stuffed Mom in my truck in the backseat. Lucky Harbor leaped in with her.

  We followed the rescue vehicle to the Sturgeon Bay Hospital. Pauline dug out Mom’s blessed buttons and passed one to the backseat.

  Mom said, “Who wants to harm us? It’s because I discovered the body, isn’t it?”

  Lucky Harbor whined. In the rearview mirror I glimpsed him licking Mom’s face.

  Steamy anger roiled inside me as I hunkered two-fisted on the steering wheel, my foot pressed to the floor to keep up with the fire rescue vehicle transporting my father. Dotty’s word came back to me: revenge. Who wanted revenge? And for what?

  Pauline said, “Ava, it’s . . . about . . . you.” Her voice was shaky. “The voodoo doll proved it.”

  Mom asked, “What voodoo doll?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It was just a doll I found in Jonas’s chapel.” I gave Pauline a hard glance to shut her up.

  My mother hiccuped. “I should never have called you about finding that body.”

  “Mom, you did the right thing.”

  “Honey, this has to be about the recipe. Somebody knows it’s valuable. They’re jealous.”

  “Why would you think this has to do with the recipe?”

  “Everything goes back to the church in Namur. The body. The organ bench. The knife. The fires could be meant to distract us from the recipe. Somebody wants time to find it for themselves.”

  Mom had likely been watching too many crime shows on TV, but what she said resonated with me.

  Pauline was nodding, too. “This trouble only started about a week ago when news of the recipe leaked out because of Fontana.”

  My whole body jerked awake.

  Pauline said, “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” With my mother in the backseat I didn’t want to talk too much about my suspicions, but I thought I knew who had murdered Cherry and who was setting the fires. But I needed proof.

  * * *

  My father suffered smoke inhalation and first-degree burns on his back, legs, and some fingers. He’d dislocated a shoulder from his aerial feat out the haymow window, but the doctor said he’d be healed mostly within a couple of weeks.

  When I drove Mom and Dad, Pauline, and Lucky Harbor back to the farm, I noticed a nondescript gray sedan was following us from some distance. “Deputy Vasquez is behind us.”

  “Thank goodness,” my mother said. She and my father were in the back with the dog between them. They each had their arms around the curly-haired water spaniel and were petting him. Lucky Harbor was smiling, as if he knew calming my parents was his mindfulness job.

  It was five o’clock by the time we pulled into the farmyard. Th
e sun was low. The tourists had gone, but neighbors were still there as well as Dillon and Piers and Arnaud. All were filthy with soot and dust. They’d been working hard with the firefighters to remove smoldering and sodden hay from this half of the haymow.

  Half the barn roof had caved in. My dad had a sick look. He and Mom had an arm around each other’s waist. I had to hold back tears.

  Pauline put an arm around my waist to pull me close. “No lives were lost. Look at all the friends you have.”

  Just behind us a yellow school bus pulled in. Mercy Fogg was driving, to my shock. Several high school guys I recognized trundled out. They set to work putting hoses and ladders away with Dillon and Piers. Others were pushing charred hay into a pile far away from the barn.

  My father, with an arm in a sling to ease his dislocated shoulder, took a couple of the young men to the milking parlor to show them what to do.

  John was rounding up cows that had escaped from the fence that had been busted by the fire engine. Marc was recording everything going on with John’s video camera. I had started to stalk over to him when Mercy Fogg caught me by an arm.

  “Hey, Miss Fudge Lady, cool it. This is the heart of what Door County is about, neighbors helping neighbors. Let him capture it on camera. It’s not often we capture a soul on film. Besides, that guy is from the big city. He’s about as useful helping on a farm as a fifth teat is on a cow.”

  Mercy left me in shock as she trundled back to her yellow school bus and took off down our gravel lane.

  Pauline muttered, “I don’t get her. You’re not her favorite person, but then she does something like this.”

  “Yeah, she’s a mystery to me, too. But don’t play cards with her.”

  Jordy and his crew were there, too, finishing up looking around.

  I asked, “What’d you find?”

  “So far, not much here.”

  “Somebody set a fire in the barn. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “Could be the hay was too wet when you put it up. We have to check for that.”

  Jordy had to eliminate natural causes. Alfalfa had to be at the perfect dry stage for baling. If too many juicy stems were baled up into the compacted bales of hay, a chemical reaction created heat and the bales could burst into flames. But my father was an expert on hay.

  I said, “Why didn’t the water system work? It’s practically new.”

  “The firefighters found a couple of valves had been shut off.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “It could be your father was repairing something and didn’t turn the valves back on.”

  But Dad told Jordy everything should have been in working order.

  When Jordy headed for his squad car, I followed.

  Jordy took off his official hat. His hair was sweated up. He’d been climbing around the hay for a while. “Any thoughts on who did this, Ava?”

  “I don’t believe it was Daniel Dahlgren. Have you stayed in touch with him?”

  “No. Balusek is trying to locate him. If Dahlgren left the county, it won’t be good.”

  “My theory is he’s so angry about being blamed for Cherry’s murder that he doesn’t want to see anybody right now. Daniel has a lot of pride. He also doesn’t want anything to do with Fontana.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Did you find any perfume smells around our property just now while looking? I thought I smelled an odd sour smell earlier.”

  “Could be your imagination. You want to blame Fontana.”

  “No, I don’t. But you smelled her perfume in the church, and the smell lingered near Ava’s Autumn Harvest after that fire, and it was certainly in the chapel where I found the doll. And now here.”

  “So she’s to blame. Present at all these events.”

  “Or maybe you and the firefighters are supposed to blame her. It’d be a good idea to confiscate everything you can at her roadside market down on Highway 57 and at her house. Don’t let anybody get their hands on her perfumes and perfumed soaps.”

  “Is she a friend of yours?”

  “We knew each other in school. She’s a little older.”

  “Could she be an accessory to murder and arson?”

  I hated saying it, but I had to tell the truth. “Could be. She may not realize she’s an accessory, though. I have no proof for any of this, Jordy, but the coincidences seem to add up. Did you find anything in the vacuum cleaner bag yet?”

  “Women’s hairs. Men’s hairs that didn’t belong to Tristan Hardy.”

  I wanted to leap and hug him, but then I realized what he was up against. “I vacuumed a whole lot of that church. Is this a needle in a haystack?”

  “It could’ve been, but you managed to get a few hairs with blood on them. Those I’m interested in.”

  “A man’s hairs?”

  Jordy nodded. “Fairly short, an inch or so, dark.”

  “An inch? Dark? Daniel has blond hair and it’s longer than an inch.”

  “I was thinking about Kjersta Dahlgren and Mike Prevost. Both have short dark hair. He’s got maybe an inch-long Mohawk at his widow’s peak in front.”

  “I’m sure he dyes his hair. I call the color ‘sienna.’ Was it sienna?”

  “That I wasn’t told. I’ll ask.”

  Jordy was being judicious, meticulous. I had to admire that, while I was too quick to jump to conclusions. “You’ll have a DNA match soon?”

  “In a week.”

  “Always a week with you, Jordy. We can’t have this murder taint the party for the prince and princess.”

  Jordy settled his hat back on. “Did you find that holy fudge recipe of the sister’s yet?”

  “No. Why?”

  “A treasure hunt always brings out desperate people.”

  I was about to tell him who I thought was a prime suspect when Jordy added, “Somebody around here thinks they’re going to win the lottery by finding that recipe. They’re going to great lengths to make sure you’re kept busy doing everything but looking for it. Anybody recently become poor and resent it?”

  Jordy’s theory shot my theory to heck. I was thinking that maybe Professor Weaver or somebody in his department had committed the murder.

  But poor people? That was most of us, even Mike Prevost, Jonas Coppens, and the Dahlgrens. We were all relatively poor in Door County. I asked, “What about rich people who want to stay rich? What about jealousy? What about revenge or glory?” I was quoting Dotty now. “Those are good motives for murder.”

  Jordy opened his car door and stood with his arms resting over the top of it. “So, who’s on your short list?”

  “Did you get a chance to talk with the rest of Cherry’s colleagues? Professor Weaver said the whole department was in serious conflict with Cherry.”

  “I’ve got interviews lined up for next week.”

  Next week. “You might also talk with Mike Prevost and Jonas Coppens about their theories. I get this feeling they’re keeping mum about something significant that could break this wide open.”

  After he drove away, I went to find Pauline. She was closing the gate in the barnyard after John had shagged in a couple of cows.

  “Pauline, we have an important errand to run.”

  We headed toward my truck, wending our way through smoldering hay, hoses, and around a couple of deputy cars still sitting near our barn.

  Pauline said, “I don’t like that look on your face. You’re starting to look like Lucky Harbor. Brown hair, nose to the ground always sniffing for clues.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, P.M.”

  “Should I toss you some fudge, A.M.?”

  Lucky Harbor woofed at the word “fudge.” I dug in my pocket for the crackers, and to please Pauline I tossed one in the air and caught it in my mouth.

  Pauline shook her head as we got into my pickup truck.

  Chapter 30

  The yellow tape was gone at the Namur church. There were no vehicles. It was going on six o’clock, the dinner
hour for tourists. I needed to see if I could find more clues.

  Maria’s car wasn’t in sight, but I knew she’d be lurking somewhere watching us.

  I walked over to the collection of headstones under the tree where Grandma had been working a week ago. There were three ancient stones with the name Coppens on them. I touched the lettering on one, which had weathered to faint, scratchy ripples. Looking beyond to the actual graveyard behind the church, I began to feel certain I knew what had gone on and how Cherry got himself killed.

  Pauline said, “You think Jonas murdered him?”

  “No. But his history here gives us clues, Pauline. The Coppens family has been here a long time in Door County and they command respect. This murder is about respect.”

  I told Pauline my theory of who it might be.

  She grabbed a headstone to hang on. “We can’t tell anybody that. That’s, uh, too preposterous, too big. You’ll be in the national news. You better be right.”

  I called my grandmother. She and my grandfather were driving down from Fishers’ Harbor. “Grandma, do you or Grandpa remember a man buying a lot of Cinderella fudge and other items in the past week?”

  She didn’t, and Grandpa said he’d been in and out of his shop too much to notice. I called Dotty. She recalled men coming in to buy bait and beer.

  Cody, however, gave me a clue when I called him. “I saw a guy standing around who looked fat, but like his arms were holding on to things under his jacket. I’m real sorry. Other customers came in, so I didn’t chase him down.”

  “That’s okay, Cody.” I asked him about my perfume theory.

  He said, “Alcohol burns clear and is the hardest to detect by a fire department’s sensors.”

  “What about alcohol in wine?”

  “Nope, Miss Oosterling. If there are by-products of making wine that have concentrated alcohol, then that might work. But wine alone wouldn’t start your fires. If so, heartburn would take on a new meaning.”

  “Cody, what have you learned in your classes about timing devices?”

  “Pretty easy to do. Alarm clocks, some string, and a candle will do it.”