Yule Log Murder

by Leslie Meier

  “Let me do that.” I tried to help her, but she had neatly covered the porch floor.

  “Do this,” she commanded, and sticking the fork into the saucepan, she lifted a bit of the caramel from the saucepan and waved it over the broom handle. The mixture spun itself into a long sugary thread that hung from the broom, catching the morning light. “You finish,” she instructed. “Too cold out here for me.”

  This was the thing she was going to let me do? So far, my cooking lessons had been closer to demonstrations, but at this tricky juncture she was leaving me on my own? I squared my shoulders and looked at the broom handle. I probably didn’t have long before the mixture cooled into a giant wad. I lifted the fork and flicked.

  And missed the broom entirely.

  “Darn it.” I tried again. And missed again. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. St. Onge’s reaction if she came out to see one strand of sugar moss on the handle, the rest in puddles on the sheet. I tried again, and this time the thread caught. The next one was also a success, and I kept flinging that sugar until the pot was empty and there were long caramel threads up and down the broom handle.

  “I’m done!” I entered the back door and called out in triumph. I couldn’t believe I had succeeded.

  Mrs. St. Onge gave no sign of being impressed. “Time to put the mushrooms together” was her only response.

  I was glad to be back in the warm kitchen. A small pan of brown liquid bubbled on the stove and the room smelled of chocolate.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “No. I meant, what are the ingredients besides chocolate?” But it was useless. I was never going to get a detailed recipe out of Mrs. St. Onge.

  She put the baking sheets with the meringue caps and stems in the center of the kitchen table and lifted the pot from the stove. She made a small hole in the flat side of one of the caps with a paring knife, filling it with a dollop of the melted chocolate. Then she fitted one of the cone-shaped meringues into the hole, turning it into the stem. A bit of the chocolate oozed out the sides, and she used the knife to spread it out, drawing veins so delicate on the underside of the cap, it looked like a real mushroom. I was astonished by her artistry.

  She pointed to indicate I should sit down and pushed the baking sheet in my direction. Evidently, I was to assemble one myself. I got my own knife from the drawer by the sink. All the happy adrenaline from my triumph over the spun sugar left me. What kind of a mess was I going to make of this?

  Hand shaking, I made the small hole in the cap, then filled it with chocolate. When I put the stem in, I saw it was way too much. The chocolate came out and filled the cap. I spread it around so the underside of the mushroom was entirely brown. Weren’t there some like that? I followed her lead, putting the finished mushroom back on the parchment paper, took a deep breath, and took another cap.

  In the end Mrs. St. Onge did six and I completed four. You could easily tell who did which. Mine looked like mushrooms freshly picked that hadn’t yet been washed. Mushrooms that had a disease that left them misshapen. Mrs. St. Onge’s looked like an illustration from a book. “This is what a mushroom should look like,” the caption would say. “Healthy and beautiful.”

  “Should I get the spun-sugar moss?” I asked when we finished.

  “Leave it. We’ll put everything together and taste the cake tomorrow. We’ll each have a big slice.”

  While I wasn’t anxious to prolong the lessons, I was happy to put off the tasting. I made a few notes in my notebook, finishing the instructions for the day, though I still didn’t know what was in that chocolate mixture, exactly. I washed the remaining pans and utensils and put them in the rack.

  “Anything else today?” I asked.

  Mrs. St. Onge glanced toward the kitchen garbage can, its lid poking up from the wadded parchment paper beneath it. “If you could take the garbage out to the shed? Mr. Eames will take it to the dump.”

  I extracted the plastic bag from the can and tied it, then located a fresh one and relined the can. I put on my coat and hat, I wasn’t going to be caught outside without them again. I grabbed my tote bag, then said my good-byes. I figured after I hit the shed, I’d walk across the yard to Mom’s.

  On my way past I smiled at my shimmery sugar strands. The shed was open and there was plenty of room in one of the cans. It made for quick work. But as I spun around to go, the old garage on the property popped into my field of vision. As far as I was concerned, it was as creepy as the house. It had two bays, one closed up tight, but one of the double doors to the second bay was slightly ajar. I went over to investigate.

  The windows in the old garage door were above my height-challenged eye level, but I could see into them by standing on my tiptoes. One of the bays was empty, but when I stood on my toes and looked into the other one, I gasped. There was the sea-foam-green BMW I knew so well. The one I’d watched Gwyn Hillyer park in the St. Onge driveway so many times over the summer and fall. The one Tree Smith said he’d given her.

  What was going on? Should I go back inside and confront Mrs. St. Onge? I pulled out my phone and took a photo of the back of the car and the license plate, then crept out the way I’d come in.

  “Hey, you, girlie! Whaddaya doing in Odile’s garage?” Mr. Eames slammed the trash can down on the driveway. He wore a navy peacoat and a squashed hat with earflaps.

  I jumped a mile. “I-I-I’ve been helping Mrs. St. Onge with some baking.”

  “In the garage?” His skepticism was warranted. For the first time I noticed his truck, an oversized pickup with wooden slats extending the height of the bed. I’d been so absorbed with the sea-foam-green car, I hadn’t heard him drive in.

  I forced a smile. “No. In the kitchen. I came outside to make the spun-sugar moss.” I pointed to the back porch. When he didn’t respond, I continued. “I noticed the garage door was open and came over to close it.”

  “From the inside?” When he put his hands on his hips, his massive forearms bulged under his coat. “You better not be giving Odile a hard time. She’s a friend of mine and I see to it nobody messes with her. Nobody,” he repeated. The menace in his voice made the hair on my arms stand up.

  “I’m just going,” I managed to rasp.

  I walked across the backyard and past him as slowly, and with as much dignity, as I could, but once I passed the line of pines, my feet took off under me, running like the wind, back to the safety of my childhood yard, just as I had all those years ago.

  Chapter Nine

  “Nope. No cars reported stolen.” Jamie turned from his computer monitor to face me.

  “I told you. Nobody knows the car’s missing, so they wouldn’t have reported it stolen. The Hillyers think the car is in Portland with their daughter, Gwyneth. But it’s not there, and I’m pretty certain she’s not, either. Won’t you at least come look at it?”

  “What reason do I have to snoop in Mrs. St. Onge’s garage, looking for a vehicle no one has reported stolen?”

  “You could say you had a hunch.”

  “It’s not TV, Julia. This is my actual life and my actual job. We don’t go crashing around on private property for no reason.”

  I let out a snort of impatience. Why was no one concerned about Gwyneth Hillyer and Bradley Woodward except me? “How about this?” I tried again. “Your property abuts Mrs. St. Onge’s, just like my mom’s does. Maybe, after work, in an unofficial capacity, you could wander over, like a concerned neighbor, and look in her garage?”

  “And then do what? It’s not that I don’t believe you that the car is there, but I don’t have any cause to believe it shouldn’t be. You’re the one going to that house for cake-baking lessons every day. Why don’t you ask Mrs. St. Onge about it yourself?”

  I hadn’t been certain, until that moment, I was going back to Mrs. St. Onge’s the next day. “Can you do one thing? I have the plate number.” I pulled out my phone and brought up the photo I’d taken of the back of the car. “Can you run the plate
and find out who the car is registered to?”

  Jamie sighed. “I’m not supposed to.” But he turned back to the monitor, brought up a new screen, and typed into it. I sat perfectly still. I didn’t want to do anything that might make him change his mind. He turned back to me. “Nineteen-seventy-one BMW, green, registered to Gwyneth Lillian Hillyer, Holly Hill Farm Road, Busman’s Harbor, Maine.”

  “See I told you. And what if I told you a coat the exact same color of that car was hanging in Mrs. St. Onge’s guest room closet?”

  He stood up. Clearly, it was time for me to leave. “I’d say I believed you entirely. And that having a green coat in your guest room closet is not something that attracts the interest of the police.”

  * * *

  “I don’t think you should go back.”

  Chris and I worked in the restaurant on dinner prep. Tonight would be busy, the traditional Busman’s Harbor shopping evening called Gentlemen’s Night. It used to be the time when men went out and bought presents for their wives or sweethearts, but it had evolved into a whole family event, when the stores stayed open late and offered free gift-wrapping. The previous year for many of the shoppers, a new stop had been added to the evening, dinner at Gus’s Too. We would be slammed.

  “It’s the only way to find out what’s happened to Gwyn and Bradley. No one else seems to care.”

  He paused in his knife work. “I can’t stop you. She’s a little old lady, and I’m sure you can take her. Just promise me you won’t eat or drink anything while you’re there.”

  “I promise.” It would be hard to wiggle out of tasting the cake, but I agreed with Chris. It was too dangerous.

  There was a knock at the kitchen door. Chris and I exchanged puzzled glances. It was too late in the day for deliveries. The knocking persisted. I wiped my hands on my white apron and opened the door.

  Holly Hillyer stood there, a tiny figure in her off-white cape. Her eyes were red and swollen. “Come in, come in. What’s wrong?” I led her past Chris, his eyebrows raised in a question, into the restaurant and sat her at one of the little tables in the bar. She’d composed herself somewhat by then, but I fetched a glass of water and some cocktail napkins from the bar to use as tissues.

  “Mrs. Hillyer, what’s the matter?”

  She drew a deep breath. “You’re not a friend of Gwyn’s, are you?” Her tone was sympathetic, not accusatory. “You came to see me, and then you went to Tree, because you think she’s in trouble.”

  I kept my voice calm. There was no use alarming the poor woman, who was already overwrought, with my theories and guesses. “I don’t know if she’s in trouble. I was concerned when she quit working for elder services so abruptly.”

  “If you’re not friends, how did you find out she’d quit her job?”

  Well, that was the rub. “Gwyn worked at the home of my neighbor, Mrs. St. Onge.”

  “That woman! She is so difficult. Did you know, before Gwyn, she had three caregivers who quit after a couple of days each? When I heard that, I warned my daughter not to go to her, either. But Gwyn has a way with seniors. She believed she could befriend the woman and truly help her.”

  “To all appearances, at least from what I saw from the window of my office in my mother’s house next door, Gwyn did help her.”

  “Yes, it’s true. Gwyn does have a way. She told me most of the time the two of them got on fine, but then, suddenly, Mrs. St. Onge would turn on her, berate her. Always over something trivial, like she put a particular kind of food away on the wrong shelf in the pantry.”

  I remembered how Mrs. St. Onge had lost her temper when I’d put the oatmeal on the wrong shelf. Wielding her cane like a sword. “Did the temper tantrums ever get physical?”

  “No. Not that Gwyn ever said. Why do you ask that? You think that woman has done something to her, don’t you?” Holly Hillyer was plainly terrified.

  What did I think? That Mrs. St. Onge had done something to Gwyn. Or Mr. Eames had. Probably the two of them together. “I take it you still haven’t reached Gwyn at her friend’s house in Portland?”

  A tear slid down Mrs. Hillyer’s nose. “No. She does this, she takes connectivity cleanses, when she turns everything off. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. But after you came to the house, I kept trying to call her. I didn’t know her friend’s exact address, but I tracked her down on Facebook and we finally spoke this afternoon. She was surprised to hear from me. She doesn’t know where Gwyn is, hasn’t talked to her in ages.” Mrs. Hillyer began to cry again. “I’m worried something is terribly wrong.”

  I leaned across the table, tapping it with my finger for emphasis. “You need to tell the police Gwyn is missing. Tell them her car is missing too.”

  She looked up sharply. “How do you know that?”

  “If Gwyn’s not in Portland, her car probably isn’t, either.”

  Mrs. Hillyer nodded and blew her nose. “I will. I’ll go straight to the police station. I wanted to make sure you didn’t know anything before I did.”

  I remembered the way I’d been treated by Jamie, who was a friend. In the evening there were only two officers on duty and they would be busy with the crowds shopping on Gentlemen’s Night. I didn’t think Mrs. Hillyer would get much of a hearing.

  I put my hand on hers. “I know it will be hard, but you should wait until tomorrow morning to go to the police. Ask for Officer Dawes. He’ll be on duty then. He’s a friend and he’s aware that I’ve been worried about Gwyn.”

  She hesitated. I couldn’t blame her. But I didn’t want her to go through all the rigamarole I had about missing adults not being missing. Jamie knew right where the sea-foam-green car was. He would help her out.

  She stood to go, pulling the beautiful cape around her. “Thank you.”

  I stood as well and gave her a quick hug. “There’s a woman in East Busman’s Village you should visit. Her name is Julia Woodward. You can’t miss her house. It’s got eight full-sized reindeer on the front lawn. Her son is also missing, and I think his disappearance is also connected to Mrs. St. Onge.”

  Her face went as white as her cape, but she said, “I will.”

  “There’s one more thing. Mrs. Woodward is the wife of the man your husband had the fight with in the botanical gardens. I want you to know that so you’re not surprised when you see them.”

  Holly Hillyer’s eyes opened wide in surprise, but she shook the reaction off. Nothing was going to stand in the way of her hunt for her daughter. “I understand,” she said and went out the back door.

  After she left, I went back to work. Diners would be arriving at any moment. Holly Hillyer had come to see me because she thought I might know something. Did I “know something”? I had questions, but no answers. Where were Gwyneth Hillyer and Bradley Woodward? Why was Gwyneth’s car in Mrs. St. Onge’s garage, her winter coat hanging in Mrs. St. Onge’s closet? I was positive the person who had called Gwyn’s boss and given Gwyn’s notice was Mrs. St. Onge. Was it because she alone knew Gwyn wasn’t coming back?

  I wasn’t looking forward to going to the ugly stucco house in the morning. But as Jamie had said, if I wanted answers to my questions, there was only one way to get them. I had to ask Odile St. Onge.

  Chapter Ten

  The smell of brewing coffee hit me in the face when Mrs. St. Onge opened the heavy front door. “I made us a pot of coffee,” she said. “To enjoy with our cake.”

  The Bûche, in all its glory, was on a platter in the center of the kitchen table. Despite my fears and distractions, the cake was breathtaking. Mrs. St. Onge hadn’t waited for me to add the meringue mushrooms and spun-sugar moss to the plate. I had a momentary pang, wishing I’d seen her remove the long strands of caramel from the broom handle. My cooking lesson hadn’t even risen to the description of demonstration when it came to that phase.

  I had to admit that the platter looked amazing. The Yule log was so appetizing. It didn’t look real, in the sense that you’d expect to see it on a woodland floor. I
nstead it looked like a log in an animated cartoon, so beautiful and perfect. I expected pastel butterflies to swoop through the air, and wobbly-legged fawns with giant eyes to appear at the edge of the room.

  “It looks too good to eat.” I meant it. I had no intention of eating that cake.

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. St. Onge huffed. “The coffee’s not up yet. It’ll be a few minutes.”

  A reprieve. “Is there anything I can do for you in the meantime?”

  “You could take that box with the rest of the Christmas lights back down the cellar.”

  The cellar. I shivered and nodded my agreement. It was a way to put a showdown over the tasting of the cake off for a few more minutes. Subtly (I hoped), I slipped my tote bag over my shoulder. I wasn’t going to be the girl in the horror movie who went down into the creepy basement without her phone.

  “Don’t go in the coal cellar,” she reminded me. I was sure the coal cellar was dark and creepy. She didn’t have to tell me again.

  I humped the box down the stairs.

  I stowed it by the washer, where I’d found it, and turned to go. But as I moved toward the stairs, I was drawn to the wooden wall that separated the coal bin from the rest of the basement. I had to see what was back there, and why Mrs. St. Onge had warned me, twice, specifically not to go in.

  I took my phone out of my tote bag and peeked around the wall. I wasn’t surprised to see that part of the basement had a dirt floor. It wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the state of it. The dirt was loose, not hard-packed, as I would have expected after years of disuse. And it had been recently raked, the tine marks sharply visible in the soil. And, in the dim light from the small, high windows, I spotted two indentations in the freshly raked soil. Each the size of a body!

  I ran for the stairs, knees shaking, breath shallow. Mrs. St. Onge loomed at the top.

  “What do you take?”

  It took me a moment to realize she was asking about my coffee. “Milk, please.” I could barely hear my voice over the beating of my heart.