Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  Right, and the Moose was still on a tight budget. She’d have done it herself, but George was particular about his tools.

  “So I laid it on the counter by the cash register, meaning to pick it up when I left, but then when I went out, I was still so mad at Matt Muldoon that I forgot about it.”

  “You locked the door?” Behind one of the houses we passed, a backyard bonfire sent orange flames leaping, lighting a family party now sliding into sozzled cheerfulness, by the sound of it.

  “Yes, I rattled it, just to be sure,” she said.

  I was starting to have an idea where all this must be going. We reached Hillside Cemetery and stopped at the gated entrance; the gate stood open, as it had for years, and the path ahead led between old marble stones slanting this way and that into the darkness beyond.

  “But on my way home I remembered again,” said Ellie. “So I went back to the shop. To get the needle, you see. And that time I had to fiddle with the door practically forever before I could get in.”

  Because the old, stubbornly uncooperative lock had still been in it, I realized. Her pale face was earnest in the thin, yellow gleam of the last streetlight before the cemetery’s gloom.

  “When I walked in, the pastry needle was on the floor. I thought I’d brushed it off the counter by accident. I didn’t even see it at first. I just went out to the kitchen. I did switch the lights on out there to double-check that I’d turned off the oven.”

  She always turned off the oven. She always double-checked, too. “Okay,” I said. “Then what?”

  But I already knew with bleak certainty what must be coming.

  She let out a shaky sigh.

  “I had turned the oven off, of course. Then on the way out again I saw it there on the floor, glimpsed it from the corner of my eye, because you know how the streetlight shines in and . . .”

  She stopped, gathering herself. “So I picked it up, not even thinking about how it got there. But it was all sticky and yucky-feeling, and that made me change my mind about keeping it.”

  A grimace creased her face. “So I dropped it back into the kitchen trash bin, and then I did leave.”

  She sucked in a breath. “When I got home and saw my hands, there was some red stuff on them. But even then it never occurred to me that it might be . . . I mean, why would I think that?”

  Why, indeed. We started back toward the Moose in silence. By now in the backyards the bonfires were dying down and the voices of the cheerful, beer-buzzed people had quieted considerably; only a few overtired kids fussed in the shadows.

  “So you didn’t see him. Muldoon’s body, I mean.” The wind was rising again, gusting in puffs, but not gentle ones, more like sly shoves. A raindrop smacked my face, and then another.

  “Jake, it’s not that I didn’t see him. He wasn’t there. He just wasn’t. I couldn’t have missed him.” She sighed deeply. “You don’t believe it, do you? Why would you? I can barely believe it myself. He must’ve been dead, but—”

  We passed the small white-clapboarded Eastport Tides building overlooking the boat basin. Down there no holiday atmosphere prevailed; instead men and women were on the fishing boats stowing away gear and making sure their lines were secure.

  They at least understood that a storm was coming. “I believe you, Ellie. Honestly, I do.”

  Down the bay lightning flashed sullenly like bombs going off on the horizon. “The problem,” I went on, “is that the needle was still there in the shop for you to find, but . . .”

  She nodded emphatically. Ahead of us the Chocolate Moose sign over our shop’s doorway swung in the breeze.

  “. . . somehow Muldoon wasn’t.”

  Eight

  Back inside the Moose, Ellie rushed to the oven to check that the temperature in it hadn’t deviated by even half a degree.

  But I went directly to the kitchen worktable, where I’d found Muldoon dead, leaning against it with his arms outstretched and his head jammed down into the chocolate warmer.

  The cops had examined everything in here already. But they hadn’t known what the place was like normally, of course; whether or not there were any scratches in the fresh floor wax that Bella had applied only a day earlier, for instance.

  “What are you doing?” Ellie peered through the oven’s window to check on the health and welfare of the pair of cakes baking in there. I crouched behind her to peer anglewise at the floor in the bright fluorescent light.

  “Well, we can be sure of one thing. If he was already dead, then he didn’t walk anywhere, did he?” I asked.

  That pastry needle hadn’t gotten onto the floor by itself, either. Someone had placed it there, ready for someone else to put her hands on it.

  And deposit her fingerprints. Or so I now believed: “So someone must’ve dragged or carried him,” I said, squinting at the floor’s gleaming waxed surface.

  And sure enough, a pair of faint scrapes marred Bella’s fresh wax job. The drag marks, because that’s what they were, obviously, led from the worktable across the floor to the cellar trapdoor.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “Of course.”

  Wind rattled the shop windows as I hauled up the trapdoor by its canvas handle; because we were a commercial establishment, the handle was tucked under a piece of loosened linoleum so as not to be a tripping hazard.

  I peered down. The fuse box hung on the wall at the foot of the stairs, just where the light from up here ended. But before that, on the top wooden cellar step, a dark stain had spread.

  Ellie stared past me at it. “They didn’t know this was here, did they? This trapdoor, the cops didn’t see it because when it’s shut, it’s darned near invisible.”

  “Yep.” Her husband George had refloored the whole shop for us before we opened, and the linoleum tile’s perfectly matched edges fitted so smoothly together that you could easily miss them.

  “So somebody stabs him there.” I pointed to where the heel marks on the floor began.

  “It must’ve happened while I was on my way home.” Ellie’s face smoothed in thought. “And then I came back here.”

  She looked up at me. “But they couldn’t have known I would. So why hide him?”

  Because based on the timing, that’s what must have happened. The bloody needle said he was dead by the time Ellie got back.

  “Maybe whoever did it was still here. Saw you coming, through the front shop window. Saw you standing there, trying to get that door open.”

  The light dawned on her face. “And dragged him, fast. Got him down through the cellar trapdoor and hustled down there with him, pulled the door back down on top of them both.” She shivered. “What an awful few minutes it must have been, waiting down there with his body. Waiting for me to leave again.”

  A faint rustling sound came from next door, over on Miss Halligan’s side of the wall, which divided our two shops; back here the wall was only framing and Sheetrock.

  That reminded me: “Ellie, did you smell anything?” I pointed at the wall with Miss Halligan on the other side of it. It seemed the vintage-clothing seller never went home.

  “That lemon cologne she wears, did you smell it when you came in here that night?” I pressed.

  Not that I could imagine the elegant little shopkeeper skewering Muldoon, dragging him to the trapdoor, then hauling him back up and dragging him to the table and propping him against it.

  And it turned out I probably wouldn’t have to, because Ellie shook her head. “Nope. Not a whiff. And I think I would have.”

  As she spoke, Ellie took from the rack two of the cakes she’d baked earlier and covered them lightly with plastic wrap, then set them in the cooler; the proper aftercare of these elaborate baked delicacies is almost as important as the baking process itself.

  “So,” she said, sighing, contemplating the ingredients for the last pair of cakes to be baked tonight, “grab him, drag him, get him out of my sight fast. That must’ve been what they did.”

  “And hunkered down under
that trapdoor with his dead body until you left again,” I added, shivering. It was the creepy part, but it wasn’t the cleverest part.

  Wind-driven rain slammed the windows, then stopped as suddenly as it had begun. We were getting the early part of the storm intermittently, it seemed.

  Later there’d be more. “Somebody tossed that needle onto the floor,” I said, “hoping someone else would pick it up. Someone like you or me, probably.”

  “And get fingerprints on it,” Ellie agreed, taking a pitcher that I hadn’t seen before from the cooler. “What a dirty trick.”

  From the pitcher she poured what I saw must be iced coffee into two tall glasses, dosing each liberally with cream and an ice cube. Then from a bakery bag she’d also produced from the cooler, she removed two muffins.

  “Ellie, when in the world did you have time?”

  She managed a smile. “This afternoon between naps, when you were out doing all that running around.”

  She’d made doughnut muffins, was what she’d done. I recognized chocolate doughnut muffins with plenty of chopped maraschino cherries mixed into them, and cherry juice in the chocolate frosting: Zowie!

  I finished the first one, then bit into a second. To wash it down, I had a swallow of Ellie’s own patented thousand-mile-an-hour juice, otherwise known as iced coffee.

  She made it—I winced at the first sip, then eagerly took another—strong, and boy, did I ever need it. I felt, you should excuse the expression considering what had happened here recently, dead on my feet. “Um, Ellie?”

  Through the doorway to the front of the shop, I could see rain splattering the window again, harder this time.

  “Ellie, why are you powering us up like rocket ships, when we have only two more cheesecakes left to bake tonight?”

  The muffins made me feel even guiltier about that damned GPS tracker. But now I decided that telling her about it could wait until morning; she wouldn’t be using the boat tonight, and we both had enough upsetting things to think about.

  “So you believe me?” she asked. She was ignoring my question about the coffee, which when Ellie does that means the answer needs parceling out gradually so I won’t have a heart attack about it.

  Which reminded me, I needed to get home so I could check on my dad. “Oh, of course, I believe you,” I said. “I told you I did.”

  I finished my second muffin. “Why, I’ll believe half-a-dozen unbelievable things before breakfast, if you’re telling them.”

  A last gulp of coffee; then we shut the lights out and went outside. “Come on, though, why have you powered us up this way?”

  Water Street was deserted, the musicians gone home. Bits of windblown trash moved on the wet pavement; Styrofoam cups and wadded napkins bounced and whirled. I fell into step beside her.

  “Two things,” she replied as we strode energetically toward my house. “Three, counting the dog.”

  She wouldn’t say more, though, marching us past Wadsworth’s Hardware Store, a flower shop called Petal Pushers, and the locked-up, tied-down tent city by the fish pier, still full of summer-holiday vendors occupying the parking lot with their trucks and trailers.

  “Let’s just enjoy the peace and quiet for a little while,” she entreated, and I had to agree that we deserved it. So I didn’t press her.

  A couple of the pier-side pickup trucks looked ready to start hauling trailers, but no one was around and there was certainly no urgent action being taken. I wondered aloud about it, and Ellie shrugged.

  “Lot of ’em are from around here,” she said. “Probably they figure they’re not far from home and they’ll get there one way or another, never mind the weather.”

  They were on the wrong side of the causeway for that kind of optimism, though, as were the rest of the visitors to Eastport who hadn’t yet skedaddled.

  The night air felt heavy and loaded with silent menace. “I hope they’re right,” Ellie went on uneasily, seeming to feel it, too.

  I glanced back over my shoulder, but saw nothing amiss in the little waterfront business district. Still, I couldn’t shake the sensation.

  “What I hope is that whoever shot at me earlier isn’t around here, somewhere, right now,” I said, glancing back again.

  “Unlikely.” Ellie squared her shoulders defiantly. “For one thing, shooting you with me right here alongside you would spoil their plan, wouldn’t it?”

  Of framing her, she meant, and I thought she was probably right. Besides, the vehicle that had sped away from Roscoe’s had been some kind of muscle car, to judge at least by the sound of the engine, and I hadn’t heard any of those down here tonight.

  Still, the thought hustled us along under a night sky racing with clouds, past the Waco Diner, with a few pickups still parked out in front of it, and the Happy Crab sports bar, with a few more.

  Across the bay on Campobello an emergency vehicle raced along the shore road, its cherry beacon flaring at us through the dark. The wind whipped up even more as we hurried along the wet, gloomy street toward my house.

  Inside, the hall lamp shed a golden glow and the night-light was on in the kitchen, where I found Maxie asleep. The big dog didn’t lift his head when I came in, just nuzzled his long snout into his bed. But when I spoke to him, he followed me obediently out into the dark yard and back.

  Only when I returned did I spy the note on the kitchen table, in Bella’s jagged scrawl. From it I gleaned that my dad was still fine, and Wade was out for a few hours with his buddies. (There was a Major League Baseball game on TV tonight and Wade was the only one of his friends not rooting for the Red Sox, so it promised to be an exciting evening.)

  Also Sam had called.

  * * *

  Suddenly I was wide awake. “What?” I blurted; Maxie glanced up at me. In the night-light’s dim glow I squinted hard at the sheet of notepaper, as if it could somehow be made to give up more information.

  But it didn’t. Impatiently I scanned the kitchen: no blinking light on the phone machine, no saved messages on it, either . . .

  And no hint from Bella’s note as to what Sam had said. In the kitchen doorway Ellie appeared, listening calmly to my rant.

  Why had he called here? Why not call my cell phone? What was he so worried about that he didn’t want to talk to me about it?

  Then she summed up the situation for me. “So we know Sam’s alive, and he’s able to call home, and he did.”

  I stopped short, feeling my blood pressure drop. “Oh. You’re right, I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  I’d been on the point of going upstairs to the third floor to ask Bella about the call, even if it meant waking her.

  “He’ll call again, probably just misdialed the number, speed-dialed the house instead of my cell,” I babbled, relieved at this new, much better interpretation of what had happened.

  “Come on,” said Ellie, dangling my car keys in front of me, and I was so befuddled by the number of things I’d seen and done in the past few hours that I followed her dumbly to my car without protest.

  There’d been another note, too, from Wade. He’d left it on top of the refrigerator where no one else would look for it.

  Be careful, it said, beside a heart with an arrow drawn through it.

  And that was Wade, who wouldn’t tell me what to do. Or what not to do, more to the point right now, any more than I’d tell him.

  But I got the point: be careful. Oh, you betcha, I thought. But whether that will be enough is another story, I thought as I backed the car out.

  “You haven’t told me yet,” I said to Ellie. “Where we’re going, I mean.”

  There was no sense obsessing over Sam; as Ellie had pointed out, he was alive and that was good enough, for now. We pulled out onto Key Street just as the massive bell on the old Maine Seaman’s Church tolled eleven, its low bongs vibrating heavily through the night.

  Ellie didn’t reply, just pointed. On Route 190, heading out of town at her direction, we encountered little traffic, except for the fami
lies of deer browsing by the road.

  I forced back a yawn; my brain was still buzzed from the jet fuel disguised as coffee and from knowing that Sam had called, but my body was already begging for another jolt of the stuff.

  As if she were reading my thoughts, she passed a thermos cup to me; the fragrance alone was enough to snap my eyes wide open again. “We’re going to Calais,” she said.

  Which was not precisely an answer to my question, either. At eleven o’clock at night almost everything there would be closed, just as it was here. Everything, except . . .

  The thermos coffee tasted of plastic, but it did the trick. Belted in beside me in the passenger seat, Ellie smiled as sudden enlightenment must’ve dawned on my face.

  “That’s right. The hospital is open because it always is,” she said. “And even if she’s not fully recovered yet, I think if we play our cards right, we can get in to see Marla.”

  She straightened in her seat. “And I want to,” she declared. “Right now, before anyone else talks to her.”

  Which sounded right, actually. If we could find out who’d clobbered her, where the cash she’d had was from, and maybe even what was up with the photos of Miss Halligan on her computer . . .

  Well, it was a lot to ask for, especially from an injured woman. But we needed it; I stepped on the gas.

  Minutes later we crossed the long, curving causeway to the mainland, with the water on both sides spreading darkly and the sky low and threatening. At the Route 1 intersection we turned north toward Calais, the empty road winding narrowly between brackish inlets and towering spruces, gnarled orchards and old, abandoned-looking farms.

  “I still don’t see how we can get into a hospital patient’s room at this hour,” I said after a little while.

  Ellie stared straight ahead, her back straight and her jaw set determinedly. “I’ve got a plan for that” was all she would say.

  Well, all righty, then, I thought, but I trusted her. It was a key element of our success: we could depend on one another.