Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  She broke down, sobbing without sound. I put my arms around her thin body, all sinew and long, ropy muscles.

  “Bella. Don’t worry about that now, okay?” Since my father met Bella and married her, he’d gotten a new lease on life. But he was an old man, much older than my late mother, and in the end it was up to him how long that life lasted, it seemed to me.

  How long, and how he would relinquish it. I took Bella by the shoulders and held her away from me.

  “Because he’s fine now, right?” I said. She nodded tearfully. “So let’s just go with that for the moment, okay?”

  She dug in her apron pocket for a tissue, which she extracted and blew hard into. “All right. I guess I’ll have to.”

  The dog nudged her hip worriedly. “And you,” she scolded him, “you’re lying down on the job already. You go watch him.”

  His eyes narrowed comprehendingly and at this her expression softened. “Go on, now,” she said again kindly, and he trotted off, his big black toenails clicking dutifully into the sunroom.

  “Your dad’s already in love with the beast,” she said as the dog leapt back up onto the daybed with a soft, recognizable thump. Then came my dad’s creaky old voice greeting the animal.

  “It’ll be a sad day,” Bella added worriedly, “when it has to go back.” To its owner, she meant: Marla Sykes, now lying in a hospital bed.

  “Like I said,” I told Bella, “let’s do tonight, and we’ll see what new challenges come up tomorrow, shall we?”

  Wade returned from the hall closet, carrying a zippered tote. Standing in the kitchen doorway with it slung over his shoulder, wearing a battered ball cap with the words Guptill’s Excavating lettered on it in red script, he could’ve easily been just another one of the local good old boys, headed out for an evening fishing trip.

  But he wasn’t. At my look he grinned tigerishly at me and gestured for me to come along.

  “Not only do I know him,” he said as we went out and the door closed behind us, shutting off the light from inside, “but if I’m not mistaken, I also know where the guy lives.”

  It was full dark outside, with the wind blowing steadily and a line of clouds streaming over the thin, uncertain-looking moon.

  “Where are we going?” Wade drove this time and I carried the snack that Bella had put together for Ellie: sandwiches and so on.

  “Told you,” he said. “I know where he lives and I want a word with this fellow.”

  Uh-oh. He looked more determined than angry. But on Wade, determined was plenty. He was the kindest, fairest man I’d ever met, but he was an Eastport kid at heart: born here, grew up here, got his values here.

  And he still had them. The values, I mean. So you didn’t mess with his wife.

  You just didn’t.

  * * *

  “His name’s Lenny Crenshaw, lives out on the old Toll Bridge Road,” said Wade.

  We cruised past the IGA, where the floats for the Fourth of July parade were already lined up. In the dancing light of campfires and barbecues set up around the parking lot, the float teams were having a hot dog roast despite the windy conditions.

  “And he’d have been out in that tiny boat on the water because why, again?”

  We’d stopped at the Chocolate Moose. Ellie was there, baking steadily and, to my surprise, cheerfully, especially when she saw the sandwiches I’d brought for her.

  “I talked to George, and he’s fine,” she’d told me through a mouthful, “and to Lee at her summer camp, and she’s fine.”

  She’d looked up at me. “So that means I’m fine. Go on and do what we need done.”

  With a guilty pang over what I wasn’t telling her, I’d given her a grateful hug, glanced around at the well-organized kitchen (chocolate curls here, batter bowl there, wafer crumbs in a crisp, tasty mountain over there), then hurried back to the car and Wade.

  Now the Bay City gas station and the big new Baptist church on the corner receded in our rearview mirror as we rounded the long Route 190 curve out of Eastport.

  “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” I said. “The GPS tracker George put in Ellie’s boat . . . it works. It’s operating, I mean. It’s just not being monitored.”

  Because if it wasn’t working, it made no practical difference whether I told her about it or not. But no such luck.

  “Yep. That’s my understanding, anyway,” Wade said. “Have you talked any more to this Miss Halligan person yet?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure what to say to her. Like I told you, I think it was her creeping around in Marla’s house when Ellie and I were there. But I have no idea why.”

  “Maybe she was looking for the money you found in Marla’s cellar?” Wade suggested as another deer followed the first one.

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s all,” I said, exhaling, “just too mixed-up for me at this point.” I glanced in the rearview mirror again.

  He nodded agreement as we passed the airport and the town garage. The rearview remained empty.

  “Nobody behind us,” he observed mildly.

  “Good.” I felt myself relax a little. On top of everything I still couldn’t shake the watched feeling I’d been having; right now I felt safe, but the truth was that a man was dead and a woman lay injured, maybe even fatally.

  And even though I didn’t know why, somebody did. We rounded the sharp turn at Carryingplace Cove where the clam flats, fully exposed at low tide, gleamed under the cloud-veiled moon.

  Another sigh escaped me. “The thing is, if we tell the state cops or even just Bob Arnold about the cash, they might decide it’s all about that. That someone killed Muldoon over something to do with the money, and hurt Marla because she knew about it.”

  Which wouldn’t clear Ellie, especially since we now had some of the cash ourselves. Maybe she hadn’t had any connection to it before, but she did at this point.

  “The money’s in the freezer at the Moose,” I answered Wade’s unspoken question. “We didn’t know where else to put it.”

  He nodded as we waited for several carloads of people with out-of-state plates headed to Eastport, their headlights blurry in the gathering mist. The forecast, apparently, was still either not being noticed or just not being believed.

  Then we turned left onto Toll Bridge Road in the thickening darkness. “Wild out here,” Wade observed, and he was right.

  At this end of the island wind lashed the low salt marshes, bending the cattails sharply sideways and sending spray up onto our windshield. Ahead on both sides of the road, small houses and sheds hunkered down under swaying evergreens.

  “Tide comes up high enough, this’ll all be awash,” Wade said. “You heard anything more about getting the visitors out of town?”

  I told him about what Bob had said, and how oblivious Millie had seemed. “She said she’d get people out safely before the real weather hits, but I haven’t seen any action on it.”

  Wade slowed between a meticulously well-cared-for double-wide mobile home on one side of the road and a factory-built ranch with a pressure-treated deck, a two-car garage, and a wheelchair ramp on the other. Both yards were thickly studded with small American flags, each lit by its own small solar-powered lamp, as if legions of garden gnomes were also celebrating the Fourth of July.

  “Here we are.” Wade turned in at the next driveway under a canopy of spruce boughs, the wind whipping their tops together high above us with a sound like loud, tuneless whistling.

  Or screaming. Gleams of light showed ahead, leading us toward a rough clearing that held a snowmobile with a blue tarp torn half off its ravaged seat; an all-terrain vehicle so mud-spattered, I couldn’t tell what color it was; and an ancient Honda sedan whose lidless gas filler pipe was stuffed with an old rag.

  The Honda’s right rear window had been replaced with a sheet of transparent plastic. The rear axle was up on concrete blocks.

  None of this seemed auspicious. Still: “I’m coming in, too.”

  Wade looked doubtful. �
�Let me just—”

  “Talk to the guy, I know.” I got out of the car. At the far end of the clearing sat a small teardrop trailer. Light struggled from it through a smeary window; the music had less trouble getting out, maybe because it was loud enough to smash concrete.

  “But you want one thing and I want another,” I said. “Let’s work on it together, okay?”

  Suddenly a large dog shot out of the brush at the back of the property; coming at us, the animal resembled a buzz saw on four long, fast-moving legs.

  “Darn,” I said, wishing I hadn’t left my cell phone in the car’s charger. At first I thought maybe the dog didn’t like Creedence, which was what was blasting out of the trailer at bloodcurdling volume, but when it got close and I noticed the look on its face, I figured it was probably hungry.

  Or possibly it just thought we’d be tasty. Either way, Wade and I stopped short and the dog did, too. “Grrr,” it said.

  The trailer door flew open. “Fang!”

  Of course the dog’s name would be Fang. The creature slunk to his owner, then cringed sharply away from the leather leash the guy swung.

  Luckily, he missed. Oh, I liked this guy a whole bunch already. “Don’t you hit that dog!” I yelled, the words bursting out of me as I stomped toward the trailer.

  “Jake.” Wade hurried up behind me. “Jake, hold on.”

  But I was already at the porch steps—more of those stacked concrete blocks, actually—before he caught me.

  “You hit that dog,” I yelled, shaking Wade’s hand off my shoulder, “and I’ll break every damned bone in your stupid—”

  “Didn’ hit ’im.” The guy peered owlishly at me. “Ain’t even my dog,” he said. “Damn thing won’t leave, so I gotta feed ’im. Eats like a horse.”

  The guy was about thirty, with curly black hair and a two-day beard spreading patchily over his jaw like some dark fungus.

  “Hey,” he said, looking past me at Wade.

  “Hey.” Wade returned the greeting. “How’re you doing tonight?”

  “Fine.” Roscoe kicked an imaginary pebble with the rotted-out toe of his leather boot. “What’cha want?”

  From inside, someone insisted loudly that he had been born on the bayou. I wished heartily that he would go back there as Wade stepped briskly past me, took the leash out of Roscoe’s hands, and gave the dog a pat.

  “Hi, Fang. Good boy.”

  Whereupon Fang, far from eating Wade’s arm off all the way to the shoulder, whined and sat.

  “Dog ain’t bad,” said Roscoe. He was wearing a long-sleeved cotton waffle-cloth shirt and gray sweatpants.

  “Got a big mouth, is all.” He glanced back into the trailer, whose interior was all sepia-toned like an old photograph; after a moment and a whiff I realized it must be from cigarette smoke.

  Lots of it. “You wanna go in?” Roscoe invited halfheartedly.

  By then I’d have rather gone just about anywhere else. But Wade spoke up again: “Yeah, Roscoe. We’ll come in for a minute.”

  The atmosphere inside was a pungent mixture of bacon grease, old dog blanket, and the kind of ashtray that has about a quarter inch of tarry black gunk built up in it.

  “Siddown,” Roscoe invited, lowering the music’s volume.

  So my ears didn’t start to bleed, after all. Tiny and low-ceilinged, the trailer had a small sink, a hot plate, and some cushioned benches to sit on; that is, if you didn’t fear skin infections.

  But what the hell, I was up to date on my shots, so I searched for a space amidst the clutter: lots of old socks, a harmonica, a cardboard box filled with a bunch of the bright-hued plastic-netting bait bags that the lobster fishermen used....

  Roscoe saw me examining them and a shy grin twisted his face. “I like the colors,” he confessed.

  The dog jumped up beside me and settled into the fleece-lined side of an oilcloth foul-weather slicker.

  “They’re very pretty,” I said. “Do you collect them?”

  “Nope.” He’d been doing something at the sink; now he thrust a jelly glass full of something purple at me.

  Grape soda, I realized when I sniffed it. “My favorite,” he said with a crooked grin.

  “Roscoe makes those bags, don’t you, Roscoe?” Wade lifted his own glass in a to-your-health gesture. “Gets paid for ’em.”

  “Yup. Fifty cents each.” (“Fitty,” he pronounced it.) On the diminutive dinette table lay a roll of orange netting, a sturdy pair of scissors, and a heavy-duty stapler.

  “I go clamming, too,” Roscoe added proudly. “Pays my way. That an’ my disability money. I ain’t,” he declared with a lift of his shaggy head, “no moocher.”

  “No,” I said softly through the lump in my throat. Roscoe was obviously doing his best in hard circumstances, and my heart went out to him suddenly. “No, I can see that you are not.”

  Wade spoke again. “So listen, Roscoe, you’re not in trouble, okay? That’s not why we’re here.”

  Roscoe looked frightened at the mere mention of trouble, his not-quite-right eyes rolling wildly toward the door.

  “I mean it,” Wade said earnestly. “Honest, Roscoe, we’re not here for anything bad.”

  Roscoe glanced doubtfully up at him from beneath thick, dark eyebrows that met in the middle. “Pinky swear?”

  Wade offered a crooked pinky; Roscoe hooked it with his own. “Okay, then,” he said, satisfied, and Wade went on:

  “So remember when it was so foggy last night? Were you out in it?”

  So much had happened in the past twenty-four hours, it felt like a week. If I thought about it, I’d realize how tired I was. So I didn’t. Wade turned to me while Roscoe hesitated. “See, Roscoe’s kind of a water rat. He doesn’t care when or what kind of weather, he just likes being in his boat. Don’t you, buddy?”

  Roscoe nodded, purple soda staining his ravaged grin. “I was! I was out on the OCEAN BLUE!” he yelled exultantly.

  But then his grin vanished and he peered suspiciously at us again. “Why?” he demanded.

  I was glad Wade had come, not because I was frightened of Roscoe or of Fang, either—I wasn’t now, not even a little bit—but because I’d never have gotten anywhere with him.

  Wade went on: “Hey, Roscoe, by any chance did somebody pay you to try to scare someone? I mean if they did, it’s okay.”

  Shaking his head stubbornly, Roscoe frowned. “No. No. No.”

  Wade leaned back, his body language conciliatory all at once, and I instinctively did the same. Roscoe was getting agitated, rocking and thumping his knees with his fists.

  “Or,” Wade ventured gently, “you got paid to be a lookout? Like, a guy might’ve wanted privacy out there, maybe?”

  What Ellie had said about our island being a smuggler’s haven popped into my mind. Roscoe looked stubborn; nevertheless, Wade persisted.

  “Only maybe when someone did come, you went one better than you’d been told and tried chasing the intruder off?”

  Roscoe’s lower lip thrust out mutinously. “I was just doing a good job, is all. Ain’t no crime. Didn’t hurt nobody. I always,” he declared, “do a good job.”

  I shot Wade a grateful look. But he wasn’t finished.

  “No. It’s not a crime. Not,” he amended as Roscoe glanced skeptically at him, “anything you need to worry about.”

  Roscoe shrugged, picking resentfully at a ragged cuticle. “So?”

  “It was me, Roscoe,” I spoke up. “The one you swerved at and nearly hit out there. What were you doing, trying to swamp us?”

  He couldn’t have; his boat was too small and the Bayliner was too big. But in the darkness he might’ve misjudged that, or maybe he really was just trying to scare us.

  “Anyway,” I went on, spreading my hands, “I’m not mad at you. I get that you need to make a living, someone offered you a job so you took it, that’s all. No crime there. No harm, no foul, right?”

  Roscoe nodded, then realized what he’d agreed with and looked unhappy.
Outside the little trailer, the wind howled and whined in the trees.

  “All I want to know is why,” I finished. “Like, was it about me specifically? Do I have to watch out for somebody now?”

  Because Roscoe really seemed like a decent kid. Physically older than his mental and emotional age, clearly, but not a jerk.

  Well, except for the leather leash. He saw me looking at it. “I never hit Fang with it. He just thinks I will.”

  This time I believed him. Fang’s original owner had probably put the cringe into the dog, not Roscoe.

  “Anyway,” Roscoe said, looking at his boots just as something banged hard against the outside of the trailer.

  A blown-down branch, probably. Wade stood by the open door, looking out into the windy darkness as Roscoe went on:

  “I don’t know who it was,” he said, “just that I was supposed to chase off anybody who got too close to—”

  The window behind him exploded inward.

  * * *

  “Go, go, go!” Wade grabbed my shoulder in one big hand and Roscoe’s in the other, then hustled us out. I missed my footing on the concrete block steps and came down the wrong way on my ankle.

  “Damn.” I let Wade drag me along, not really knowing which way we were going and not able to care through the bolts of hot anguish shooting up my leg.

  “Ow. Ow. Ow,” Roscoe repeated pitifully, hunched over and stumbling, and, of course, my cell was still back there in the car’s charger.

  Wade hauled Roscoe up from where he’d fallen. “Come on, bud, you’ve got to . . . Damn.”

  “What?” I found my little penlight at last, but its tiny beam wasn’t much help as we scrambled between tree trunks and wiggled through brush, vines, and brambles.

  “He’s bleeding,” Wade said. “Come on, Roscoe, I’ll help you. You can make it, it’s only a little farther.”

  But I had no idea if either of those latter things was true, and from the look on Wade’s face when I cast the penlight’s beam over it briefly, he didn’t, either.

  “Ow,” Roscoe whispered, which I thought wasn’t a good sign. When I turned the beam toward him, I saw that I was right.