Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “I could see it happening,” I said. But when Ellie looked up from the batter she was mixing, I could tell from her expression that she didn’t even believe it herself.

  “Yeah.” I sighed heavily, setting aside the first chocolate cheesecake crust and starting to build the second.

  Yeah, me neither.

  * * *

  The next morning dawned clear and bright, as if the night’s fog had never even happened.

  “Thanks, and you have a great day, too!” I told the Moose’s first customer of the day, handing over a white paper bag full of chocolate biscotti.

  When I left the house, Ellie had been sliding the fifth set of cheesecakes into the oven. We’d done two pairs overnight, baked those biscotti, and then thrown together a few pans of everyone’s favorite, Toll House cookies, so we could open the shop.

  Also during the night Wade had returned, peered tiredly into the kitchen where we still labored, and gone up to bed. Now I swallowed some more of the jet-fuel-strong coffee I’d brought down here with me as the door opened again.

  “Good morning, Jacobia!” Miss Halligan bustled in.

  “And to you, too.” From the counter I could see out across Water Street, where it didn’t seem as if Bob Arnold’s warnings had produced their desired effect. If any more Fourth of July vendors tried cramming themselves onto the fish pier, I thought it might break off and float away.

  The town was still full of tourists also; in the bad-storm-coming-soon department, the crystalline blue sky smiling down on us now just wasn’t very persuasive.

  “Any news?” Miss Halligan’s bright gaze darted around.

  “About the murder? No, nothing.”

  In a short black ruffled skirt and black leotard top, black leggings, and her usual neat black ballet flats on her feet, she looked as if she belonged in a chic Greenwich Village apartment, not a remote Maine island fishing village.

  I thought she was about to say more, but just then Ellie came in lugging more bags of fresh baked items for our display case.

  “Your dad’s up,” she told me. Briskly she unloaded a dozen frosted devil’s food cupcakes and a chocolate-cream brioche into the display case.

  “Bella got him into the shower, got some breakfast into him, and now he’s back in the sunroom, bright as a new penny.”

  That was good news. I’d been worrying pretty steadily about him whenever I wasn’t busy trying not to fall off a boat, get lost in a fog, or be run over by a cargo freighter.

  Last out of Ellie’s bag was a foil tray full of pinwheel cookies, rich with swirls of thick, melty semisweet chocolate and studded with walnut bits.

  “Bella said now that your dad’s settled for the morning, she’d watch the oven.”

  Because that fifth pair of cakes was in it, Ellie meant. “And Bob Arnold called, he’ll be stopping by to see me,” she added.

  An alarm bell rang in my head. “You going to tell him the girlfriend story?”

  Miss Halligan exited as a quintet of bagpipers marched down Water Street, practicing for the Fourth of July parade, which was now just forty-eight hours distant.

  I mean, assuming it didn’t get drowned out. “Not yet,” Ellie said over the din. “For one thing, if I did, I’d probably also end up telling him all about the excitement we had last night.”

  Precisely. Bob was not only a genius at getting rowdy guys to chill in his squad car’s backseat, but he was also a whiz at getting information out of them.

  And he’d get it out of us, too, if we weren’t careful. “Also I don’t want to look like I’m grasping at straws by offering up some kooky theory,” she said. “Better to know more for sure.”

  Right. “So maybe after you’ve eaten something more nourishing than cookies,” she continued, eyeing the display case where a few more biscotti were missing than I had actually sold this morning. “And when you’ve made sure that Bella really has taken those cheesecakes out of the oven,” she added.

  Her eyes were wide and guileless. “Once those things have happened, I thought I’d stay here in the shop for a while, and you might try asking around a little,” she said. She smiled sweetly at me. “About the girlfriend, that is, and about who might’ve been out there in a little boat last night?”

  She didn’t have to ask twice.

  Four

  An hour later I was in my car, headed over the long, curving causeway that linked Eastport to the mainland. A wide inlet spread to my left, its flat surface mirroring the azure sky; on my right the bay raced turbulently with whitecaps hurling themselves along.

  At the Route 1 intersection I pulled over and dug my phone out. Ellie’s ideas about what I should snoop into were fine, but first I wanted to talk to Marla again. Something about the party at the Salty Dog and the woman there with Muldoon that night just hadn’t sounded right to me.

  An eagle soared lazily over the pointed firs lining the road as I called and got her answering machine. Probably the chocolate maker was tending something delicious, and couldn’t come to the phone. But she’d said she’d be there, so I turned south to Lubec again, this time via the land route.

  The road was crowded with tourists in RVs, locals in pickup trucks, and highballing eighteen-wheelers from the tree-harvesting operations up north, their massive trailers packed to overflowing with eighty-foot tree trunks.

  It almost made our fog-choked voyage of the night before seem safe; by the time I rolled into Lubec nearly an hour later, my hands felt permanently fused to the steering wheel.

  On Front Street I parked in front of the once-busy fish-processing plant, a long wooden-frame structure with a lot of small, high windows stretching out onto the wharf. A hundred years ago the sardine-packing industry employed whole families of downeast Mainers; now local artisans rented workspaces in the venerable old building.

  Crossing the street, I made my way among summer visitors in cargo shorts, fanny packs, and flip-flops. Gazing around, they blinked in wonder at the town’s wooden storefronts now transformed into cafés and galleries, the harbor’s glittering blue water, and the combination antiques fair and farmer’s market being set up on the library’s front lawn.

  “Marla?” I called, entering the fish-packing plant. Inside, the fish-canning equipment of long ago had been replaced by a potter’s wheel, a stained-glass artist’s tools, two looms, some yarn-dying tubs, and a spinning wheel. A scrimshaw engraver’s whalebone storage area—the great mammals sometimes beached themselves nearby—filled one whole end of the huge structure.

  “Marla?” I called again. The high windows sent gold bars of sunlight slanting onto the bare floor. The place smelled like old wood, hot metal, oil paints, vegetable dye, and very faintly but perceptibly of fish.

  No answer from Marla, and when I entered her linoleum-tiled, drywalled, and totally sealed-off cooking room—because it wouldn’t do for dust from glass cutting and whalebone etching to fall into the chocolate kettles, would it?—no one was there.

  “Hello?” Behind a door framed into the drywall, Marla’s workspace had a gas stove and brass-shaded hanging lamps. The tables were granite-topped, the sinks all brushed aluminum with gooseneck faucets and spray handles. Pots and pans stood on low shelving and implements bristled from stoneware jugs. They all looked new and in good shape, and so clean even Bella would have approved.

  Several thickly wrapped bundles stood on one of the tables. From the exotic return addresses, multiple stamped labels, and illegibly initialed customs stickers, I guessed they contained the raw cocoa paste that Marla imported and made into chocolate.

  Also on a high shelf I recognized the kind of steel lockbox that Wade used for handguns. No surprise; in downeast Maine lots of people owned firearms. But there was still no sign of Marla.

  I looked around some more, hunting for a way to leave a note, but didn’t find any. An electric kettle, bigger and more heavily built than any Crock-Pot I’d ever seen, stood on a table of its own. Beside it was a ceramic jar labeled COCOA BUTTER and some small
er bottles: vanilla extract, several more I didn’t recognize.

  It all looked wonderfully supplied and well organized, as if she was getting ready to start a batch of something. No one was here now, though, so I decided to visit the Salty Dog; maybe she was having lunch.

  In daylight the bar’s rugged interior looked pale and anemic, the windows dust-filmed and the bar stools’ leather seats patched with silver duct tape. I slid onto one of them and ordered a Moxie.

  The tourists knew better than to come in here looking for food, apparently. The bartender, a wiry old guy with a shaving cut on his chin, slid the Moxie bottle at me.

  “You gonna drink that or pour it in your boat battery?” he asked.

  That’s the thing about Maine’s official soft drink: It’s so versatile. You can clean barnacles off a boat’s hull with it, I’ve heard, and it tastes like something a troll must’ve stewed up in a cauldron under a bridge, bitter with a harsh, rooty twang.

  Even I’m not a complete fan of the stuff. But I slugged down a big gulp straight out of the bottle just to show the bartender that I could, and he looked impressed.

  Not enough to confide in me, though. “Ain’t seen her,” he answered without stopping to think when I asked about Marla.

  I got the feeling he’d have said the same whether she had been in or hadn’t; what happens here, stays here, etc. To confirm my theory I asked about any recent birthday parties in the place, like the one Marla had mentioned.

  In reply he looked at me like I was speaking ancient Greek, and when I mentioned a possible lunch menu, he waved a knobby hand at the peanut bowls still out on the tables from the night before.

  Same peanuts, too, I was pretty sure. So I took my Moxie and went back outside into the bright day, to the dock where Ellie and I had tied up.

  With an army of gleaming black seals cavorting in the water there now, the scene had a carefree, summer-holiday feel; even the wooden fishing boats, some so work-worn that they looked as if only their aging paint jobs held them together, bobbed jauntily at their moorings.

  Strolling among men and a few women carrying tackle boxes and bait buckets, I bought a hot dog from a truck doing business in the parking lot and carried it down onto the lawn overlooking the seals’ acrobatics.

  That’s when I saw the small wooden boat pulled up onto the beach. With only a five-horse engine on the rickety transom, the rot-riddled little vessel looked utterly unequal to any wild tides or twisty currents, and it had been dark the night before.

  So I wasn’t at all sure this was the boat that had behaved so rudely to us. But Marla might know whose it was; I wondered, too, if by now she’d located any snapshots of Matt Muldoon and the woman he’d supposedly been with, that night in the Salty Dog.

  Most of all, though, I wanted to know why Marla thought the woman was Muldoon’s girlfriend. It was a pretty big conclusion for Marla to jump to, I thought, especially since she hadn’t actually been there to see anything herself.

  So after I finished the hot dog, which was excellent, and rinsed it down with the Moxie, which was liquid and tasted like something ladled up out of an old tree stump, I drove out of town along the shore road toward Marla’s house.

  Beach roses lined the narrow, curving blacktop on both sides, filling the air with a fruity perfume that made the summer day heavenly. Driving along with the windows rolled down and the radio on, I stole quick glances at the Gulf of Maine’s indigo water and the island of Grand Manan jutting distantly from it.

  The road ran between rosebush-fenced meadows for a mile or so; then I spotted a sandy driveway with a massive old lilac bush blooming at the end of it. A weathered plank nailed to a post bore Marla’s last name spelled out in seashells; following the rutted lane past a bank of solar panels mounted atop a granite boulder, I reached a graveled turnaround.

  “Marla?” Her car was in the open garage next to the simple A-frame structure. “Hello?” I called.

  But the only reply was the rush of wind on the high, grassy bluff overlooking the bay behind the house, which was small and a bit run-down. Around here salt air scoured paint off a place nearly as fast as a person could apply it.

  Marla had tried renting the place to tourists, once she’d bought her Eastport location, I recalled, but tenants thought the house was too primitive, too isolated, or both.

  Personally, I thought coming all the way to downeast Maine and then complaining about the primitive isolation was hilarious, but hey, I liked Moxie.

  Or I was trying to, anyway. On the porch I touched the front door and it swung silently open at my touch.

  “Hey, Marla, are you here?” Maybe she’s gone for a walk with that big dog of hers, I thought, but then I noticed the mess.

  Books, papers, manila envelopes with lengths of twine tied around them . . . everything was pulled out of the wooden bookcases on either side of the fireplace. Cookbooks, tax papers, cards with notes scribbled on them, checkbook registers . . .

  When the door banged shut behind me, I must’ve jumped a foot. But it was only the wind blowing through the sliding-glass panels that looked out over the water, skittering the scattered papers like dry leaves across the slate-tiled floor.

  “Marla?” I whispered. The small galley kitchen, all polished granite and stainless steel, gleamed emptily. Ditto for the bath and the two small bedrooms downstairs; in one of them I thought I caught a whiff of familiar fragrance, but no one was there, and I could see up into the A-frame’s vacant loft area, too.

  And then I heard it: “Oh.” Just that one word from out on the deck sent me running; I found her sprawled on the wooden stairs leading down to the sloping backyard.

  “Damn,” Marla uttered. She was covered in blood.

  “Wait.” I crouched by her. “Stay there, I’ll call somebody.”

  Which I did, my fingers finding the numbers on my phone even though I was so frightened suddenly that once I got someone on the line, just remembering my own name turned out to be a challenge.

  It wasn’t so much the blood that scared me. Crusted in her hair, dried in blackish runnels on her cheeks . . .

  No, what really unnerved me was the idea that her attacker might still be around here somewhere.

  Her eyelids fluttered, her bloody fingertips straining weakly toward the deck’s top step. “Just relax,” I said. “Help’s coming.”

  “. . . Maxie,” she muttered thickly, her fingers still moving in an attempt to point at something. Then I spotted the dog lying on the grass below the deck’s rail.

  The unhappy animal looked wretchedly up at me from where it had fallen. Or been thrown, some son of a bitch had . . .

  “Don’t move,” I ordered Marla, and hurried down the steps. Down on the grass I approached the big German shepherd cautiously.

  He wasn’t whining or bleeding. His teeth looked intact. All four legs moved when I touched them, and when I spoke to him, his tail thumped twice.

  But he wasn’t trying to get up, and I could only suppose that he knew he was in serious trouble, and should wait for the humans to help. “Okay, buddy,” I said. “Good dog.”

  Out on the blue water beyond the bluff, a white sailboat came about, sails flapping. “Okay, boy, they’ll be here soon.”

  “Wuff,” the dog uttered patiently.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, hoping he couldn’t tell that I wasn’t nearly as sure as I was trying to sound.

  Probably he could, though. At the top of the deck stairway, Marla lay motionless. I couldn’t do anything for her, either, and I knew enough not to try to move her.

  But what I didn’t know was how badly either of them was hurt, so it was a very long ten minutes before I heard the siren wailing up the shore road.

  Moments later Bob Arnold came hustling around the side of the house with his duty weapon drawn, and I must say I’ve never been so pleased to see a loaded gun in my life.

  But Bob was an Eastport cop, not a Lubec one. “What the heck are you doing here?” I demanded.
r />   It wasn’t the most urgent question on the docket, not by a long shot. But I must’ve been in shock.

  “Sit,” Bob said to me; Maxie’s tail thumped apologetically. The poor thing probably thought it was a command.

  “Anyone else here?” Bob lowered his weapon. But not all the way, and his pale blue eyes were narrowed professionally.

  I waved at the deck. “Marla’s up there.” While I was focused on the dog, she’d somehow made it all the way to the top step.

  “I think she must have surprised somebody inside,” I said. “She’s hurt and it’s all torn apart in there.”

  Bob noticed the dog. “Criminy,” he uttered in disgust. Then the ambulance screamed in, and after that everything went fast:

  EMTs flocked to Marla, got a foam collar around her neck, and loaded her onto a stretcher. Bob called a local veterinarian, who arrived in a panel van within minutes and attended to the dog.

  “We’ll see,” the animal doc replied tightly when I asked him about the canine’s prognosis.

  The Lubec cops got there, too, finally, and took a statement from me when they arrived, and then I was done. But as I walked to my car, Bob stopped me.

  “What were you doing here?” His voice was businesslike; the coincidence of Muldoon’s murder and my finding an assault victim so soon after the first crime hadn’t eluded him.

  Well, of course it hadn’t; it didn’t take but half a brain to wonder about it, as Bella would’ve said. I was thinking about it, too.

  “I wanted to thank her for some extra chocolate she gave us the last time we bought from her,” I said, repeating what I’d told the Lubec officers.

  He looked levelly at me, clearly not believing this for an instant. “So you drove all the way down here?”

  The vet started his van. I looked back at Bob. “You betcha,” I said. “That’s absolutely correct.”

  He kept looking at me, his rosebud lips pursed in a way I found nervous-making in the extreme. But in the end he just shook his head slowly.