Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery

by Christine DeSmet

  “Can you put the kilo bars in the melter and turn it on, Sam?”

  “Sure, Ava.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him lick his lips, as if he were nervous. My insides began to flutter. I stared through the microwave window at my thawing cherries.

  Then Sam’s hands touched my shoulders from behind and turned me around. His blue eyes looked confused. I put my hands on his chest, intending to push him away, but his heartbeat tickled my right palm. My heartbeat quickened a little, but I had to admit Sam was taking way too long to sweep me into his arms for a kiss. I was beginning to wonder about my attractiveness.

  His blue gaze swept me up and down. “Would it be okay if we met sometime to discuss things?”

  “What things?”

  “Well, I thought we might need to meet to discuss possibly dating.”

  Any sexy feelings I’d had a moment ago evaporated. “Have a meeting to discuss dating?”

  Oh dear. I’d obviously become unapproachable, not worth romancing at all. I was merely an item on a meeting agenda. But I’d been a sucker for his politeness since high school. He’d been a senior football player and I’d been a sophomore starter in basketball when we noticed each other. He always dry-cleaned his letter jacket before he’d give it to me to wear. I had ached when he graduated before me and left Door County for college. And then we’d reconnected and fallen in love all over again, becoming engaged. After all that history he wanted a meeting? About the possibility of dating? Would I need to do research or fill out questionnaires and report back at future meetings? I was being treated like a client, not a sexy woman worth romancing. What had happened to us? To me? Why hadn’t he grabbed me and tried to have his way with me right here on the floor?

  Dillon poked his head in, saving me. Sam and I turned to unwrapping the chocolate bars to put in the industrial melter. Dillon said, “Hey, Ava, you going to the fish boil tonight? I heard they have a good band.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Great. I have something to talk to you about. I’ll save ya a spot on the beach.”

  Dillon left.

  Sam started to say something but then excused himself, too.

  I collapsed against my counter until my phone buzzed in the pocket of my denim shorts. It was Libby. She reminded me she needed more fudge for the weekend. “You can deliver it anytime later tonight, Ava. I’m going to the fish boil, but I plan to come back out to the lighthouse to catch up on cleaning. I keep finding broken glass in the oddest places.”

  “I’ll stop by, Libby.” I was glad to have an excuse to leave the fish boil early, in case I needed to escape Dillon. Or Sam.

  I also didn’t want to meet up with Piers and Kelsey tonight, or Erik Gustafson. I’d be tempted to ask him why he’d accepted a bribe from Piers and then written a silly note to toss through a window with a rock. I imagined Kelsey karate-kicking both of them and Piers trying to toss Kelsey into the steel drum used to boil the fish.

  For the remainder of the afternoon I made fudge in my copper kettles, showing the process to tourists. They loved trying their hand at raising the long wooden paddles to whip the mixture. The whipping was essential to get the crystals just right so that the fudge came out smooth and not too grainy. Everything had to be timed right and at the right temperature or you could end up with something hard as glass or rubbery as taffy.

  To my surprise, Piers and Kelsey took over the kettles around two o’clock while I loafed my fresh pink fudge on the marble slab at the front window. The chefs were quiet, as if they’d vowed over lunchtime to change their personalities. I swallowed my trepidations and asked them to join me at the fish boil; after all, it was even more important now to get the judges and contestants together for a chat about how the judging would be presented to the public a week from Saturday. And watching Lloyd and Piers interact could get interesting, since Lloyd knew about the bribe.

  When I got to the fish boil that evening behind the Troubled Trout, a good country-swing band provided the music and Piers and Kelsey were engaged in separate conversations on opposite sides of the crowd on the beach. It almost didn’t register with me that the man Kelsey was talking with was Lloyd, of all people. At first I assumed it was merely a judge-contestant conversation, but then they walked together behind a potted evergreen near the path to the parking lot. They were still in my view, though hidden from most of the crowd, including my grandparents and Libby. My grandparents and Libby sat near the big fire and its boiling pot, where the big fillets of fish were lowered in for cooking. Professor Faust was walking up to them.

  Back behind the evergreen, Kelsey had one hand on Lloyd’s forearm, with a drink in her other hand. Then her free hand traveled up to touch his cheek. I gulped at her brazenness. She wore a smile that was so big it gave “friendly” a new definition. My heart was racing. Was she coming on to him right here in public? It grew more curious when Lloyd headed back to the outdoor bar, where he seemed to be lecturing Erik, maybe to cut off Kelsey’s drinks. Erik scowled at Lloyd, said something, then gave him the brush-off, walking away while Lloyd’s mouth still moved, presumably spewing more advice to Erik. Lloyd limped from the bar and made his way toward Libby and my grandparents. Kelsey, still by herself at the edge of the crowd, was watching Lloyd’s retreat and laughing.

  It dawned on me to look for Piers to see what he was up to. He’d wended his way through the crowd a little from the other direction, but he’d planted himself behind a couple of people, as if he were hiding. He was staring hard and cold at the group that now included the professor, Lloyd, Libby, and my grandparents.

  A chill swept over me. What was going on? Common sense kicked in then. Piers was in a direct line to Kelsey. His hard look had to be for her. I didn’t blame him for trying to admonish her trampy behavior.

  Pauline had found John in the crowd, so I was alone. And out of sorts, reeling from witnessing the obvious flirting between Kelsey and Lloyd, while I was still thinking about Sam’s wanting a meeting before we could even date.

  Feeling dull, I wended my way alone toward the outdoor bar near the building for a glass of wine. Before I could get there, Dillon grabbed me for a barefoot dance in the sand. He had a way of sensing my moods. He knew when I needed laughter. Or a dog. By now, the town was used to seeing the “runaway couple” and didn’t pay us much heed. When we finished dancing, Dillon escorted me closer to the water’s edge where it was more private. A skein of pink across the water advertised the impending sunset.

  “I can’t stay long,” he said. “I’m training Lucky on scent-trailing this evening over at the park.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He flushed a possum and a pheasant the other day like a pro.” Dillon dipped a bare foot into the lake, splashing my feet with the cool, clear water. The shadows creeping in with the sunset gave Dillon’s face a seriousness that was uncharacteristic of him. “I was wondering if you’d like to join me and my mother for dinner some night when she’s here. She’s coming for a visit.”

  I hadn’t seen Cathy Rivers in years, and I’d always liked her. But joining them for dinner might give her the wrong impression. I said so.

  Dillon laughed. “She always liked you better than me. She still reminds me about how stupid I was to let you go.”

  “We were young. We moved on.”

  “You inspired me when you dumped me.”

  “Inspired you? How?”

  “A year after we parted, I saw your name in the credits on your TV show. You were making something of yourself, while I wasn’t. So I went back to college and finished up my engineering degree. This humor guy got serious.” He kicked water at me again. “I gotta get Lucky and head to the park before it gets too dark on us.”

  While watching him disappear into the crowd, I hugged my arms, feeling raw and unstable. Dillon had always been a nice guy—until the bigamy charge. But I reminde
d myself that was long ago. This May, when he showed up at my fudge shop after I hadn’t seen him for eight years, it’d been the night of Cody’s senior prom, held on the harbor dock by the shop. Cody had finally got the guts to ask Bethany to the prom. It was a magical night of lights and dancing, a Cinderella fairy-tale atmosphere. Days before the prom, Cody and I had found a stray dog. I’d called the shelter about him. To my shock, Dillon came to my door the night of the big dance to collect his dog.

  I had reeled with emotions at the sight of Dillon. I’d loved him, then hated him. There had been no in-between. But there he stood, filling the doorway, his chestnut hair flying wild in the breezes off the harbor, the glint in his chocolate-colored eyes shining down on me like the moon that night. Magical.

  After we married in Las Vegas, there’d been that same magic for a while. We honeymooned at the Grand Canyon, then drove Route 66 all the way through Santa Monica to the ocean. But then a month later, Chloe from Nantucket and Sharee Ann from Biloxi and their lawyers contacted me, telling me they were also married to Dillon. I got my annulment and headed to Los Angeles and the ocean. I couldn’t go home, but I needed to be near water. I’d grown up in Door County amid the wonderful hug of Lake Michigan that surrounded the land, and I needed to be hugged in a big way after being betrayed by Dillon and making a fool of myself with my family and with Sam. To purge myself of my mistake of marrying so fast, I leaped into writing about my experiences, teaching myself to write TV scripts while waitressing at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Burbank.

  When I finally returned home, Pauline had said she heard that Dillon had been put away for five years. That wasn’t true. She’d just lied to make me feel good.

  Dillon told me in May, “The initial sentence could have been for five years, because it was a Class D felony for bigamy and another couple of years for financial fraud. But none of it but being stupid was my fault.”

  While he had indeed married Chloe in some youthful exuberance a couple of years after one of our college breakups, Dillon had quickly divorced her. He’d thought their paperwork had been filed correctly. He apologized to me for the Chloe thing.

  Sharee Ann was another mistake and another matter. She was a groupie who followed Dillon on his comedy club route. But the groupie who didn’t also want to be a devoted wife spent her time forging Dillon’s signature on a lot of credit card purchases and using aliases.

  At one point, the lawyers thought it appeared Dillon had been married to three women at once, including me in the mix, because of all the delayed filing of various paperwork, including divorce papers. But the dates were sorted out and Sharee Ann finally got her own trial. The rest of us were free.

  Dillon had spent a couple of months in jail before the bigamy charge was finally cleared. I found out the only reason he spent time in jail instead of getting out on bail was that he refused to let his rich parents fork over the money. So underneath it all, he had his principles intact.

  On that night of his return in May, I kept him standing at first in the doorway and didn’t let him in. I still wasn’t sure what to do with him or how to act. My foot itched to kick him in the you-know-whats. I let him do the talking, letting him squirm, grovel, apologize, and beg my forgiveness.

  He finished with “I’ve quit the comedy circuit. I don’t party much. I finished college and went to work for my dad’s construction company. I’m a bona fide civil engineer. I build streets, roads, and bridges, and I’m civil while doing my engineering.”

  He had smiled at his little play on words. I relented and smiled back. It was hard to stay mad at Dillon.

  The trouble now? I ached to get in a fast car with the guy and zip down the road with the tunes on loud. Dillon had loved freedom and a fast life. It made me wonder if having his construction job and a dog were enough for him. When would he get tired of the ordinary life and have to do something wild to stoke his inner fire?

  On that starry Cinderella night in May, with the music and laughter outside, Dillon had taken me in his arms and waltzed me one-two-three around the fudge shop. His dog followed us, making me giggle. Dillon laughed, too, his deep voice filling the aisles as we danced amid the perfumes of fudge flavors and bygone memories. I’m sure some of the high school couples must have seen us, but nobody had ever said a word to me about that night. It was as if that dance in the fudge shop was my and Dillon’s little sacred secret.

  Pauline joined me now at the shoreline. “That’s a wistful smile if I ever saw one. Dillon?”

  “No,” I lied a little bit. “I was thinking about how much I like it here in Door County, and how much I want to do right by the people here, especially my family. I want to prove myself.”

  Everybody was dancing and singing along to old cover tunes from the eighties and nineties. The sunset was strafing the harbor with a fiery collection of colors. Sailboats were coming in for the day. As the sun lowered into the horizon in an orange glow behind the buildings and high bluff where the empty Blue Heron Inn sat, I thought about the orange crayon and the threat to me, and Lloyd’s stern talk when we’d met at his house. Just as the day was turning to night and growing chillier, I, too, felt a dark force descending on Fishers’ Harbor. The day had been filled with fights, threats, and secrets. Lloyd seemed to think the safety of Fishers’ Harbor had been splintered.

  In the distance we finally saw the Chambers Island Lighthouse beacon, a speck glowing in the dark seven miles away in Lake Michigan. Strings of lights came on behind the Troubled Trout. Pauline and I stayed late, drinking wine and talking about boyfriends and how wonderful basketball had been for us, starting with our grade school years near Brussels, Wisconsin, in lower Door County.

  Satiated with nostalgia, I went home and crawled into bed in my cabin. But melancholy seeped in like a wisp of wind through the screens. What would it be like to roll over and see . . . who? Dillon? Sam? Or was there someone else lurking out there that I hadn’t noticed? Someone writing notes about me with an orange crayon? I got up amid a shiver to close and lock my windows, something I never imagined doing in Fishers’ Harbor.

  * * *

  By Saturday morning, I’d decided that making fudge was better than worrying about men or orange crayon messages likely made by bored kids. Lloyd had to be off his rocker. There was no way Erik Gustafson—a star football player only a year ago for our little consolidated school—would ever accept a bribe or participate in shenanigans with Piers.

  Gilpa’s fishing trawler, Sophie’s Journey, was easing into the harbor, so I hurried to make a fresh pot of his strong black coffee. Cody had discovered the secret to Gilpa’s coffee back in May—extra scoops of fresh grounds with pinches of cocoa and sugar out of my kitchen to jazz it up. Our coffee was almost as good as what you could get at the Chocolate Chicken or with the hearty pancake breakfast that came with eggs, meatballs, and lingonberries at Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant.

  Libby called me around eight thirty. I was mortified. I’d forgotten to run the fudge out to her last night. I couldn’t have driven anyway, not after enjoying that second glass of Door County cherry-moscato blend wine with Pauline.

  When I got to the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse at nine, before the place would open for tourists, I encountered Lucky Harbor racing about in the clearing that was flanked by lilac bushes and an old cream brick outhouse to the east, and yards away to the west, a fuel storage building with a red-brown metal hip roof. The woodland lay beyond to the east and west. The dog circled the brush-flanked outbuildings, making rustling noises, as if looking for something. When the dog spotted me, he raced for me. I ducked into the shop and closed the door, handing off my fudge to Libby.

  “Dillon’s dog is out there,” I said. “He’s a little nuts and he loves fudge. Keep your door closed.”

  “He’s a pretty dog, though. Dillon brings him around a lot. The kids love him. I saw them last night out here but didn’t expect them back on a Saturday morning.”

/>   “The dog probably ran away on his own. He does that a lot. I’ll collect him and take him back. Bye, Libby. And again, I apologize for not coming out last night.”

  “Pshaw, you deserved a night of fun after yesterday. No harm done at all.”

  When I left, I closed the screen door quickly behind me, making sure it was latched solidly so Lucky Harbor couldn’t slip in. Sure enough, the dog was at my feet, his tongue dripping from his exertion.

  “Lucky Harbor, slow down.”

  He raced away behind the lighthouse this time, circling it and coming back to me again. He did that a second and third time. I still didn’t see Dillon. Maybe, I thought, the dog knew Dillon was behind the tower, resting from his hike and taking in the view of Lake Michigan.

  As I headed for the corner of the lighthouse, Lucky Harbor startled me when he reversed course to come back to me. He jumped up on me, barking. When he raced away again, I scooted faster. The gravel around the tower’s base crunched underfoot.

  Just past the squared-off corner of the four-story tower, hidden from view of the parking lot, a figure was sprawled across the gravel and grass. My stomach dropped to my feet. “Dillon!”

  I rushed over amid the dog’s shrill barks.

  Chapter 6

  It wasn’t Dillon. The pants and shoes I’d spotted first had only looked like Dillon’s from a distance. At the base of the cream brick tower lay Lloyd Mueller, dead.

  My screams brought Libby charging around the brick building. She fainted at the sight, crumpling onto the green lawn. I called nine-one-one while trying to stop Lucky Harbor from licking Libby’s face. The dog meant well; he was whining.

  Libby came to by the time I talked with a dispatcher. I helped Libby up. Her short, lithe body was shaking. She was around ten years younger than Lloyd, and had always seemed to defy aging—until now. With her tears flowing, she ran her hands into her dyed black bob—scrunching her hair as if to pull it out—then fell to her knees in the gravel by Lloyd’s body. “Lloyd! Lloyd!”