Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “You’ve been here in Lubec all day,” I said to Marla. She’d told us that she had been.

  “And still you already know who got murdered, that’s how fast word travels around here. Yet we’ve never heard about a girlfriend he supposedly had?” I finished my Irish coffee. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Marla spread her hands. “Hey, I’m just saying what I heard. As far as I know, they only came in here a few times, though, and then the accident happened, so . . .”

  Of course. The deaths of the fishermen, all local guys with wives and kids, had occupied everyone’s minds for days.

  “Okay,” I conceded. Unlikely as it still seemed, I guessed it was possible that amidst the local tragedy, the gossip had simply dropped off everyone’s radar screens.

  “But what were you saying before about the party that night?” I asked. She must’ve brought it up for some reason.

  “Pictures,” said Marla as if this must be obvious. “It was a party, so I’ll bet that someone was taking pictures. Wouldn’t you think?”

  Doink. Of course. “Marla,” I leaned in toward her, “do you think you could find people who were also at the party and see if they do have photographs? Get them e-mailed to me, even?”

  If they existed, and if any of them had accidentally included Muldoon’s companion, it would at least give the cops someone else to think about besides Ellie, wouldn’t it? So Marla agreed to try, and on that note we got ready to go.

  Five minutes later we all met again under the marina lamps and stowed the large butcher-paper-wrapped chocolate blocks (two of baking chocolate and four of the regular semisweet variety) on the Bayliner. Meanwhile, Marla’s German shepherd pal, Maxie, supervised from the backseat of her owner’s old Ford station wagon.

  “Nice dog,” I said, and Marla grinned.

  “Yeah, you don’t have to worry much with him riding shotgun,” she said. “I don’t care how ornery you are, you don’t want to try crossing Maxie.”

  Which reminded me. “Hey, Marla, do you know any grouchy guys with small boats around here?”

  She barked out a laugh. “Lots of ’em, you get crossways with ’em. Some get pretty mean over their lobster trap territory, too.”

  She slammed her car’s trunk. “Anyway, let me know if you need more of anything. I’m staying at my house here in Lubec tonight, and I’ll be here all day tomorrow, too,” she called as we cast off.

  Ellie gave the dock a hard shove; soon Lubec was a toy town again, twinkling across the water behind us.

  Ahead the lights of Eastport shone hazily, seeming to dim and brighten without reason, although of course that had to be an optical illusion.

  But then, “Go below and find the compass,” Ellie said, her voice tautly urgent. Which was when I realized suddenly: the haze, dimming and brightening . . .

  It was no illusion, and that wasn’t the worst of it. Glancing back, what I saw rising behind us struck a colder chill in me than even my saltwater dunking earlier.

  In the fading moonlight the fog bank looked as solid as concrete. It hadn’t been forecast; they often weren’t. But Lubec’s marina lights were already hidden behind it.

  “Compass,” Ellie repeated, more forcefully this time.

  I half-fell through the hatchway, yanked open the equipment bin, and scrabbled around among flares and a flare gun, batteries, first-aid kit, and signal horn, then simply hauled out everything and grabbed up the compass from the jumbled heap.

  Finally after handing it up to Ellie, I replaced everything in the bin, and while doing that, I spotted the wires sticking up from the bin’s bottom, leading to a small box screwed to its back wall.

  If I hadn’t emptied the bin completely, I’d never have seen the wires or the box they led to. And I was unfamiliar with boat electronics, so I didn’t think much of them at the time. Besides, there was still the little matter of us being lost in the fog for me to freak out about.

  Which I was trying not to do, but still. “Okay, now, due west a little, then north,” Ellie said calmly. “Tide’s halfway in, we’ll probably have enough water even if we do misnavigate a little.”

  Personally, I did not want us misnavigating by so much as a millimeter. I wanted us smack-dab on course—and also not crashed onto any rocks.

  Ones, I mean, that at low tide were visible so you could avoid them even in the dark, and at high tide were deep enough so you wouldn’t hit them, no matter what. Right now, though, we were at midtide, so they were barely submerged.

  Able, in other words, to rip the guts out of our motorboat without us seeing them coming. “Um, Ellie?”

  Oh, I didn’t like this even a little bit. She looked relaxed and in control at the helm; only if you knew her well would you notice the squared set of her shoulders, the determined thrust of her chin.

  “Ellie, d’you see that can?” It was a large floating channel marker, barely visible in the water with fog thickening around it.

  Thickening fast. “Darn,” uttered Ellie in reply; not what I wanted to hear. “We’re not quite where I thought we were, then.”

  The fog thickened again. One minute it was a misty curtain, and the next a thick gray drapery fell.

  “Okay,” Ellie sounded resigned. “We’re not that far off our course. And although we’re stuck until this fog lifts, the good news is that it probably won’t take long.”

  I liked the sound of that last part; well, except for that “probably.” But then a loud whonk! blasted out of the murk at us.

  Really loud. “Freighter,” said Ellie. “On its way—”

  “Into Eastport,” I gulped. The huge container vessels came in and out of our harbor all the time to load stove pellets, wood pulp, machinery, and even livestock for shipping overseas.

  “Ellie,” I began, “we should really get on the radio or our phones—”

  Whonkkkk! Louder this time. We couldn’t see any lights on the big vessel yet, and I sure hoped we wouldn’t. In this kind of pea soup we’d only see them moments before they slammed into us.

  “And call the Coast Guard,” I finished.

  But she shook her head firmly at me. “And say what, that they should make that big ship stop dead in the water?”

  She waved me up to the wheel. “Not gonna happen. And anyway, it’s too late. We need to go where they won’t be.”

  She took a breath. “And if the channel marker is that way”—she pointed toward where it had been until the fog swallowed it—“then I’m pretty sure . . . yes.”

  In the dim glow of our running lights, she nodded decisively. “All right. See that thing there?”

  Mounted on the boat’s dashboard was a cigarette-pack-sized gadget with a small screen glowing on it. The screen’s radium-green cursor flashed steadily, and below that some numbers were displayed.

  “That’s a depth finder,” Ellie explained. “The cursor is us, and those numbers are how deep the water is beneath us.”

  Oh, for Pete’s sake. “Why weren’t we using this all along?” It would’ve taken the steam out of my dashed-on-the-rocks worries, that was for sure.

  “Because it doesn’t work very well.” As if to prove this, the screen went black briefly, then flickered gradually to wavering life again.

  “I’m saving up to replace it,” she said just as another horn blast split the night.

  “It’s for fishing, mostly, anyway,” Ellie said when we could hear again. “I don’t even use it much. I just always stay in deep-enough water by reading the charts.”

  She pushed the throttle and we nosed ahead cautiously in the enveloping fog. “You take the wheel, keep our compass needle aimed the way it is right now, and when the cursor here turns red, you drop us into neutral, fast.” She pointed to the depth finder’s screen. “We’re going into the shallows and putting our anchor down there.”

  By “shallows” she meant the water over the very rocks that we’d avoided so far. I may have indicated my discomfort with this idea. But then: WHOONK! The horn’s blast nearly
collapsed my lungs.

  “Okay,” I agreed hastily, grabbing the Bayliner’s wheel, which tried instantly to wrench itself from my hands; the currents here were fast and now the tide was running pretty energetically, too.

  Also there was the small concern of the hydraulic steering system not being in exactly tip-top condition, another thing I knew she’d been saving to fix. But there wasn’t much we could do about it now; instead Ellie scrambled out onto the bow while I stuck to navigating and also to hyperventilating, sweating, and shaking, all motivated by that enormous horn honking again.

  Eventually, though, the on-screen cursor glowed red. So all right, then, I thought. Throttle in neutral, check.

  “Ellie?” A breeze stirred the fog and I smelled Christmas trees suddenly, which meant either that Santa Claus was aboard that freighter or we were approaching an island big enough to have trees on it. And unless I was completely turned around direction-wise, the only island like that anywhere nearby was . . .

  “Ellie?” A chain rattled. I couldn’t see her through what was essentially a fat cloud squatting on us. The chain rattled heavily again; then came a splash and more silence.

  “Ellie?” The boat swung around hard and stopped with a lurch that nearly knocked me off my feet. Then finally she appeared.

  “I did it!” she exulted. “We’re solidly at anchor now and that big ship will never dare to come this near to—”

  “Treat’s Island,” I said. Had to be; nothing else in the bay had full-grown fir trees growing on it. We’d have fetched up on its rocky edge already if Ellie hadn’t managed as well as she had.

  “Look,” she whispered. Behind us, the freighter loomed out of the fog with its bow wave foaming and its deck lights all ablaze.

  The vessel’s name was stenciled on her stern: Star Verlanger. Seeing it, I swallowed hard. “That’s Wade’s ship.”

  Of course, I realized; he was up there right now, guiding the freighter into port. Luckily, he didn’t know we were here, stuck in the fog, and if I had anything to do with it, he never would.

  I mean I loved him like crazy and all, but I wasn’t stupid. Ellie must’ve read my thought. “I can keep a secret if you can,” she said, watching the big vessel slide back into the murk.

  “Deal. George wouldn’t like this much, either.”

  Which was putting it mildly. Right now her husband was in Bangor working a construction job and wouldn’t be home until next week. But she knew as well as I did that we’d better keep mum about tonight’s little adventure for a lot longer than that.

  The ship’s engines thrummed a low note that faded and was gone. Then its massive wake rolled up out of the darkness at us and threw us around very unpleasantly until it passed, too.

  But the anchor held. When it was all over, I leaned on the Bayliner’s rail, letting my stomach settle and breathing in the cool mist.

  “Ugh,” said Ellie, sounding a little shaky.

  “Yeah, me too.” I don’t usually get seasick, but just then my innards felt as if they might suddenly decide to become out-tards.

  “How long d’you really think this fog might hang on?” I asked. It would take Wade another couple of hours of paperwork at the marine terminal before he headed home.

  “Maybe half an hour, ordinarily,” she replied. “That’s all it usually is. But I guess with a big storm coming in soon, it could be different. It could even be . . . I don’t know . . . until morning when the sun burns it off?” she guessed unhappily.

  She didn’t know any more than I did, in other words; she’d educated herself thoroughly and practiced very diligently with the Bayliner, but she was no ancient mariner.

  Still, there was no reason to push the panic button; after all, she’d brought along hot coffee. There was emergency food on the boat, even if it was only stale Fig Newtons. And Marla Sykes, bless her heart, had put a generous amount of milk chocolate into our bag as a gift.

  So we wouldn’t starve. Ellie went below, snapping on the cabin lights that made the enclosure into a small, snug cave; that is, if you didn’t glance through one of the portholes. The fog was so thick, it looked solid enough to carve chunks from it.

  The Bayliner rocked gently. The anchor chain clanked. Ellie set out the hot coffee, the cookies, and the milk chocolate, along with a deck of cards. “Want to play rummy?”

  We could’ve called for help. We had our phones, the Bayliner had a radio, and the Coast Guard would’ve come at once with their rescue vessel out of the Eastport station.

  But Ellie was the stubbornest creature on Earth at times like these; she’d cry uncle if she needed to, and not a minute before.

  Besides, if we called anyone, all would be revealed.

  So I just sat there eating slivers of milk chocolate while she dealt gin rummy hands and the fog billowed stubbornly outside.

  And then we waited.

  For a while I couldn’t believe I was here. It was unlike me; I’m more of a sunny-afternoon type of boating enthusiast, drinks on the foredeck and a tube of tanning lotion and so on. But the darkness and salt smells, waves slopping against the hull, and the foghorns sounding mournfully in the distance all convinced me.

  We were out here, all right, alone late at night in the damp, foggy darkness, floating and waiting.

  And waiting some more.

  * * *

  Hours passed. Two of them, to be exact. But then, just as we were about to give up and call for assistance, the fog lifted and the rest of the trip home was uneventful.

  Not much later we were clambering back up the Summer Street dock’s gangway, hauling the blocks of chocolate.

  “I could’ve killed him, you know,” said Ellie.

  “Muldoon? Don’t say that.”

  Driving home through the silent streets, we passed only drawn shades and darkened windows. It was just after two in the morning.

  “Why not?” Ellie leaned back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed. “I was mad enough, and everyone in town knows it.”

  “That doesn’t mean you need to go around declaring it.”

  Rain spattered the windshield; an early warning of the storm yet to come, I supposed. The moon had vanished behind clouds.

  “You think Wade’s home yet?” Ellie asked.

  “Hope not.” Or that Bella was still up, either. The fog had been as wet as any downpour and explaining why we both looked like drowned wharf rats might get tricky.

  But my driveway was empty and inside the house the kitchen was dim and quiet. Ellie got the coffee machine burbling and I unwrapped the chocolate chunks; there was plenty now for what we still had to do, so the trip had been worthwhile, at least.

  “Okay,” said Ellie determinedly when we’d changed clothes and drunk some of the hot, strong brew she’d made. “Six down, six to go.”

  Cakes, that is; she’d been busy with them all afternoon. Now while she assembled our baking utensils, I organized the rest of the ingredients.

  “Have you thought any more about what Marla said?” Ellie asked as I got the butter from the refrigerator. “About Muldoon having a girlfriend?”

  “So Marla thinks,” I said skeptically, measuring sugar into a bowl. “Her whole story sounded kind of thin to me, didn’t it to you? We’ll see if she finds any pictures.”

  And we’d poke into the tale ourselves, too, although trying to confirm a rumor without actually starting one would take some delicacy. In Eastport, if you began asking whether or not a guy had a girlfriend, by evening the story around town was not only that he did have, but that the two of them had run off together and got married.

  Thinking this, I greased two springform pans and tossed cocoa powder lightly around in them. Ellie gathered more of the batter ingredients and began mixing them. Then when I’d finished prepping pans, I crushed more chocolate wafers and started working melted butter into those.

  “Anyway, if it’s true,” I said, pressing buttered crumbs into the bottom of the first pan with my fingertips.

  “Then h
e was smart to pick the Salty Dog for his date night,” Ellie finished, rubbing another lemon up and down on the grater.

  “It’s the one place you could go around here without everyone knowing about it,” I agreed. “The younger crowd wants someplace with a pool table and music, and the lah-di-dah types want, well, someplace more lah-di-dah. Candles on the table and so on.”

  Which left the Salty Dog for the wharf rats and a few odd ducks like Marla. Ellie dug a large wooden spoon from the kitchen drawer and got busy with it: beat-beat-beat.

  “So, do you want to tell her or should I?” she asked, her eyes on the mixture she was creating. Ellie meant that the cops would probably be visiting Marla soon.

  Because if we wanted to take the focus off Ellie as a suspect in Muldoon’s murder, we couldn’t very well not report what we’d heard and who we’d heard it from, whether we believed it ourselves or not.

  And the cops would want to confirm what we said by asking Marla about it. “I’ll call her,” Ellie said. “But you know, about this other thing . . .”

  “What thing?” I checked my phone yet again for a message from Sam—nope—then pulled up the weather radar on the small screen. I still couldn’t believe that a storm not due to strike Eastport for two more days was already wreaking havoc on the transportation system in Boston.

  And then I knew it wasn’t, since right now the radar had it spinning over North Carolina. So Sam must’ve been delayed for some other reason, and I disliked more and more trying to imagine what that reason might be.

  Plenty of people do manage to stop drinking permanently and completely, I know. But Sam’s all-time record was six hundred days.

  And counting. “What thing?” I repeated.

  “The boat that buzzed us out there,” said Ellie. “Because I think maybe he was distracted, busy dealing with his lobster traps, and then he looked up and saw us and swerved away at the last minute.”

  Around us the house was silent, the moonless night outside as still as a held breath. I pressed more wafer crumbs up against the springform pan’s vertical sides.

  “Sure, that sounds possible,” I said.

  It did, too; out on the water at night the way he’d been, not expecting company, and we’d been idling along pretty quietly at that point, so maybe he didn’t even hear our engine over his own.