Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery

by Christine DeSmet

  “You must be exhausted, Grandma. I’m sorry.”

  “The need for sleep evaporates when I’m protecting my little duckling.”

  She fed me a delectable pancake painted with a smiley face in tasty red cherry syrup. Grandma’s kitchen atmosphere filled me, too. The room hadn’t changed much in the twenty-some years they’d lived here, except for a new stainless steel refrigerator and stove. The black-and-white floor tiles were original, and even the electric clock above the sink in the shape of a copper pot still kept time perfectly. It matched the antique copper gelatin molds on one wall. The entire place sparkled because it was cleaned with love. It made me think about Grandpa saying that Lloyd still loved Libby. It saddened me that maybe Libby didn’t realize how Lloyd had looked out for her over the years.

  “Grandma, what did Libby think about Lloyd’s secrecy over his real estate deal?”

  Her arms paused in a sudsy sink. “I thought he was a rat, but Libby was never one to blame him for anything. She’s devastated by his death. I’m sure she’s eager to find out what’s going on, just like the rest of us.”

  Grandma went back to washing dishes.

  I wasn’t sure if Grandpa had told her about Lloyd’s secret box, so I was limited in what I dared ask. “There was another cabin owner yet on this street not too long ago. Did they sell out?”

  “Oh yes. Lloyd bought that cabin a few months ago.”

  “So your cabin is the only one that Lloyd didn’t own on all three blocks?”

  Grandma Sophie grabbed a dish towel. “What are you getting at?”

  “It’s odd the entire street would be bought for a condo development—or as Lois and Dotty say, ‘a helipad for the rich’—but the buyer would build around your cabin.”

  Grandma slid into the chair across from me, the dish towel balled in her hands. “Build around it? Oh my. They do that in big cities. Build high-rises around some dumpy house or church.”

  “Did Lloyd mention moving this house?”

  “They’ll have to move this cabin over my dead body!” She tossed the towel toward the counter.

  “Grandma, it’s odd you weren’t asked to sell. Unless Lloyd left it up to the new owner to pressure you.”

  “Lloyd would never have done that to us.”

  But I’d already learned that Lloyd was secretive. It would be awful if the new owner were Cathy Rivers, Dillon’s mother. That would devastate my grandmother. “Are you sure Lloyd never even hinted to you and Grandpa about this new owner?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, Ava, and your grandpa and I don’t keep secrets.”

  Hmm. That wasn’t true. I excused myself to go to my fudge shop.

  * * *

  It was six a.m., late by my grandpa’s standards, by the time I got to Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge & Beer. I had showered, put my hair into a knot on top of my head, and then changed into my Sunday best—a fresh sleeveless white blouse and denim knee-length shorts and sturdy athletic shoes.

  Because it was Sunday, I refrained from calling Dillon this early. As Pauline said, I had a habit of poking bears awake in their caves; nothing good came of doing that. Instead, I planned to look through Lloyd’s old cookbooks. There had to be some special reason he’d plunked those in my lap.

  The usual cadre of fishermen was milling about, buying minnows and six-packs of fudge and beer to take out on their excursions. One guy was filling his Thermos from Grandpa’s coffeepot. Gilpa was wheeling and dealing a price for his fishing guide services with a man and his son, so I knew he’d be taking Sophie’s Journey out onto Lake Michigan, leaving me alone to tend both registers.

  I expected a good crowd later. On Sundays the tourists did last-minute shopping before clearing out of their cabins and condos. The sunrise and a breeze were busting up the gray blanket of fog in our harbor; humidity was predicted to stick around and the sixty-degree temperature would climb to around eighty later.

  After Gilpa’s customers left, I blocked the front door open to take advantage of the cool air and sweet smell of the freshwater lake. I wiped dew off the front tables outside, then watered the geraniums.

  When I went to retrieve the cookbooks from under the counter, they were missing. Thinking that perhaps Cody had put them somewhere for safekeeping, I searched every drawer, shelf, and even in our safe, which was hidden under a shelf next to the floor in my galley kitchen. They hadn’t been set aside in the storage room, either.

  When I returned to the front, Professor Faust stood at the counter, holding the cookbooks. “Your employee Cody allowed me to peruse these. I promised to return them this morning. I hope that was okay? I asked him to be sure to let you know I had them.” He set the small stack on the counter.

  “Perfect timing. I was just looking for them, coincidentally. What did you think?”

  He ran a hand through his windblown gray hair. His hazel eyes grew as twinkly as the luster dust I put on my fudge. “The church ones in particular carry a treasure trove of names and personal notes referencing people who came over directly from the old countries in the mid-1800s. This is like a genealogical tree for the Fishers’ Harbor area.”

  His excitement made the professor look younger than his sixty years. He had dressed more youthful today, too, in tan chinos and deck shoes, and a plain polo shirt in a green color that matched his eyes.

  He pulled a slim cookbook from the stack. “This one from the Lutheran church I found particularly interesting.” With great care, his fingers parted the pages. He let the double-page spread splay before me.

  To my amazement, there was a recipe for fudge from a Ruth Mueller. I asked, “A relative of Lloyd’s, I believe?”

  “His grandmother.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I called Libby. She confirmed it.”

  The professor showed me pages with recipes by Ruth Mueller in all the cookbooks Lloyd had given me. There were several for cakes, including one for German chocolate cake with its gooey, caramel-coconut frosting. But the fudge recipe drew my attention. It was simple, with no temperature mentioned. Usually you had to boil and stir fudge until it reached 238 degrees on a candy thermometer. This recipe said to “stir the bubbly mixture while your children dance with their father around the woodstove until they’re tired.”

  The words made me smile. “Lloyd’s grandmother had a sweet sense of humor. That’s a novel way of telling time for fudge.” I closed the books. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Thank you, but I’m on my way to set up an outdoor booth at the lighthouse.”

  “The Eagle Bluff Lighthouse?”

  “Yes. The campground affords me a new audience every day for my book sales. I’ve never sold so many books.”

  “Why outdoors?”

  “Officer Vasquez said not to cross the police tape.”

  This alarmed me. “But I thought they’d finished looking around yesterday after we found Lloyd.”

  “Oh no. I was over there to do a book signing later yesterday and found I couldn’t get in. A woman officer was there for another look.”

  So Jordy perhaps had taken my suspicions to heart yesterday. Or he was just doing his job. I asked the professor, “Do you think it was murder? Or did Lloyd somehow fall off?”

  He shrugged. “I only knew Lloyd through your contest. He was a genial man who loved his golf. I doubt he had enemies, and I don’t see a happy man like that leaping to his death.”

  “So you think it was an accident?”

  “I’ve been to the top of a few of Door County’s ten lighthouses, including that one while doing my research, and all of them have good railings and good footing. I suppose, though, if one leaned too far out and a foot came up, throwing you off balance . . .”

  I could see it on his face, though, that he didn’t believe Lloyd had slipped. I said, “Lloyd golfed a lot, which requir
es good balance.”

  We grew somber. Lloyd had been murdered.

  My mother’s words on Friday echoed back. She’d pointed out the threat in the note had been to me. Both Lloyd and I had been mentioned. Lloyd was dead. Was I next? My insides thrashed about like our lake in the throes of a storm.

  The professor touched my arm. “Ava? What’s wrong?”

  I was shaking. “We have a . . . murderer among us. Don’t we?”

  “Oh, I doubt that. Wouldn’t such a person have left Door County already?”

  “Of course you’re right.” But I needed to change the subject. “Could you sign one of your books for me? I’m sorry I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to ask you before now.”

  After signing my copy of Wisconsin’s Edible Heritage, the professor said, “Take a look in my index and you’ll find Oosterlings’.”

  While he went to look at fudge in the glass case, I flipped to the page. A couple of paragraphs noted how fish were brought off Lake Michigan and stored in ice in shacks. During bad weather the fishermen would even sleep in the same shack until the weather cleared. The “shack” was our bait shop. An old photo showed a sign at the front door: Mueller’s Fishing Company. That didn’t surprise me because Gilpa had bought the shop from Lloyd Mueller.

  “Then it’s true what my grandfather and I thought,” I said, musing out loud while thinking about the secret cavity under the floorboards in the storage room.

  “What is?”

  I told him about our theory that fishermen probably used the floor as a hiding place for their wages or other things.

  The professor’s eyes popped. He withdrew a notepad and pen from a pocket. “The cabins on your street were built to house fishermen and lumbermen who could be gone for weeks. Perhaps Lloyd Mueller found treasures, and that’s why he kept buying the cabins on Duck Marsh Street—they were filled with treasures. Have you looked under the floor of your grandparents’ cabin? And yours? Have you given this little fudge shop a thorough search? You could be rich, Ava, and you just don’t know it.”

  Chapter 10

  The idea of riches hidden under the floor of our cabins—or under the fudge shop—kept me in good spirits as tourists filtered in on Sunday morning. If I found booty I’d buy Gilpa a new boat. I’d just received a call from the Coast Guard that he and the fishermen he’d taken out were stranded on Lake Michigan out past Chambers Island, about seven miles out. They were fine, but they’d need a tow. My grandpa’s problems with his old fishing trawler happened as often as mosquito bites in the woods. When I arrived in May, on the very day of my Cinderella Pink Fudge debut at the Blue Heron Inn, Gilpa had been stranded on the lake with guests from the bed-and-breakfast.

  By ten o’clock the shop was bustling and my stitches were itching again. I freed the ponytail knot atop my head, then got busy selling all ten of my current fudge flavors, including local favorites of walnut, maple, coffee, and butterscotch, as well as Cinderella Pink Fudge and Worms-in-Dirt Fudge. John and Pauline arrived as I finished wrapping pink paper around an order of Cinderella Fudge.

  Pauline and John looked way too satiated, as if they’d had more than just breakfast in bed this morning. Pauline was striking with her long brown-black hair feathering over a lightweight red hoodie sweatshirt that matched red shorts that showed off her athletic legs. She’d put on makeup to hide the big bruise lining her face.

  John, on the other hand, wore his usual Hawaiian shirt—this one with red wineglasses dotting it—which looked like a muumuu on his portly frame. He wore his usual baggy shorts and sandals. John laid his video camera and light on Gilpa’s cash register counter, then helped himself to coffee.

  Pauline rushed to my register. She whispered, “Lloyd was murdered. Just like we surmised. It’s on the front page of the online Door County Advocate this morning.”

  Pauline moved aside while I rang up a purchase of two pink purses for a mom and her daughter. Cody had Sundays off, but I was wishing I had an assistant today so I could escape to go over to the lighthouse to look around. After the customers left, I said as much to Pauline.

  “No,” she said, “this time let’s not get involved. I have better things to worry about.”

  “I can see that.” I tilted my head toward John, who was scuffling about the bait shop. He picked up a foam cooler, then began measuring off a lot of the rope from the round bale I usually stole from to cut a length to tie up Lucky Harbor. “What’s he doing?”

  Pauline’s tall body slumped. “He said he wants to face his fear. Help me stop him.”

  “I’ve wanted to stop John since you met him.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. What’s his fear?”

  “Water. He’s going out in a boat today.”

  “But he gets seasick.” I recalled that in May John had gotten sick that Sunday morning on my grandfather’s boat and had to be brought back in before the tour even got under way. The delay had caused Gilpa and his remaining passengers to end up in a storm on Lake Michigan, with the boat breaking down. I’d even thought for a time that it was a ploy and John had perhaps murdered the famous actress during my fudge’s debut.

  I set Pauline at ease. “John won’t have to go out with Gilpa. I just got a call that he’s stranded again.”

  “Not your grandfather’s boat. John’s not going fishing. He signed up for a shipwreck diving tour with lessons.” She shuddered. “He signed up only a half hour ago over the phone. He wants to take underwater pictures of treasure for his TV show.”

  Going diving to view shipwrecks was big business for Door County. We had one of the world’s best collections of freshwater shipwreck sites in the world. Schooners hauling everything from lumber to Christmas trees to ore and gold had sunk within several yards of the shore at some points.

  Pauline was whispering between clenched teeth now. “John said you and the professor were talking about sunken treasure. The minute John got off the phone with Professor Faust this morning, he changed his plans. We were going to visit wineries today with the professor, but now John’s determined to learn to scuba dive.” She placed a hand over her heart. “Look at John, Ava. He’s a bowling ball. He’ll sink and never come up.”

  I almost said that’d be a good thing, but I held my tongue. “Listen, P.M., John knows what he’s doing.”

  The place was getting more crowded. Several men had come in and were talking with John as they shopped for bobbers, bait, and beer. John was joking with them, discussing the best way to signal from underwater if he were in trouble. Pauline peered at me with pure misery all over her face. I was saved when I saw Cody coming down the dock toward the open door with Sam and Dillon, along with his dog. Dillon and Sam weren’t enemies, but they had certainly given each other polite distance. Until now.

  Pauline abandoned me to head over to John.

  “Good morning,” I said to the trio as they walked across the wooden floor, all of them wearing boating shoes. “What’s up? Cody, it’s your day off, remember?”

  Dillon said, “We’re going fishing together. And scuba diving. It was Cody’s idea.”

  Cody said, “Yeah, I asked Sam and Dillon to go. Did you know Dillon already knows how to scuba dive?”

  I stared in disbelief at the three men. Other women had paused, too. Dillon was a tall, dark, muscular specimen wearing a black T-shirt under a denim jacket and low-slung jeans. Sam was a blond good ol’ boy who looked yummy in a light blue polo shirt that stretched across his broad shoulders. He wore khaki shorts that made him look fun instead of his usual stuffy self. Cody, with his red hair full of cowlicks and face full of freckles, was a charmer, too.

  I said, “This Sunday must be something special for guys because John is going scuba diving for shipwrecks.”

  Dillon grabbed a fudge sample from the plate I kept atop the glass case. “We’re going out on the sa
me boat. Moose Lindstrom’s Super Catch I.”

  Moose—or Carl—was Gilpa’s chief competitor. My grandpa refused to admit it, but he was jealous of that brand-new big, superliner style of boat with its air-conditioned cabin, kitchenette, and lounge, not to mention its massive engines, which purred and didn’t grunt and puff smoke like a broken-down antique farm tractor.

  I came around the register counter to whisper, “John’s never been scuba diving. Don’t let him go. He gets seasick. He’s just doing this to prove something to Pauline.”

  Cody whispered, “Because he wants to marry her?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I didn’t. I just looked at him. Sam says that it’s important to read a person’s face. John’s face says he’s going to ask her to marry him soon.”

  I flashed Sam an admonishment. “Sam, read my face. You can’t be serious. John is not right for Pauline. She knows nothing about him.”

  Cody said, “They’ve known each other for two and a half months. Since the other murder. Now they have two murders here in Door County in common. They’re developing what’s called a history together. Right, Sam?”

  Sam shrugged.

  I tried again. “Cody, John’s not even as mature as you.”

  “He’s in his fifties. I asked him. And Sam is two years older than you, and Dillon is six years older. You like them both, don’t you? Despite them being older?”

  Now Dillon and Sam were hiding smiles behind their hands. Even Dillon’s dog was standing there, wagging his tail at me.

  All this bonding among men was going too far, particularly if it was going to end up with my friend getting hurt by John Schultz. “Have all of you forgotten that John found Piers and Kelsey for this fudge contest and they could be murder suspects?”

  Cody said, “But John doesn’t fight. He won’t murder Pauline.”

  I swallowed my shock yet again.