Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery

by Christine DeSmet

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “You’re supposed to be on a boat fishing and finding shipwrecks in Lake Michigan.”

  Pauline cried out, “Something’s happened to John. They had to come back because John’s sick, or worse. I need to get back. Crap, I left my purse on the bus.”

  “Pauline, get a grip. I’ll call Dillon.”

  My phone was always in my pocket. When I called Dillon, I found out that Lucky Harbor had jumped ship right in the harbor as usual to chase frogs. Dillon had been just about to call me to watch for him. The men were okay and the Super Catch I was closing in on a shallow shipwreck site in Lake Michigan. John had had his first diving lesson and had done well.

  Pauline held a hand over her heart while breathing hard from our exertion. “John isn’t careful, you know. He doesn’t think things through.”

  I was picking burrs out of Lucky Harbor’s curly fur and tossing them far into the underbrush. “That’s an understatement. What is it exactly that you see in him? You two are such opposites.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Is this a serious relationship?” I let the dog go for a romp.

  “What are you getting at?”

  I couldn’t bear to broach the “marriage” word. “I was going to say something about messy, sloppy John not deserving you, but you’re more a mess right now than he usually is.”

  “You, too.”

  Our shorts had threads torn from them, our legs and arms were striped with bloody scratches, and her red hoodie had been plastered with some sort of sticky weed seeds.

  The dog brought the rope to me. By now it was pretty slobbery. I told him, “No. Drop it.”

  He did.

  Pauline said, “Dillon’s done a good job with him. You, too. You make a nice threesome.” She had one of her devil looks.

  “Stop it, Pauline.”

  “If Laura and I can’t get you to pick a date via picking fabric swatches, then maybe we can use this dog. Dogs are good judges of people.”

  “If that’s true, I must remind you that the dog keeps running away from Dillon, not to Dillon. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

  “You’re going to have to choose somebody for that prom next Saturday night.”

  “If there is one. Kelsey is nuts and maybe she murdered Lloyd Mueller because she was upset about this fudge contest and Lloyd spurning her overtures to hook up.”

  “Nobody murders somebody for refusing to have sex with them.”

  “But what if they did have sex and she was afraid Lloyd was going to tell somebody about it and disqualify her from the fudge contest? He almost told both of us about them having sex.”

  “He said she was ‘friendly’ and then changed the subject. For a guy his age that word doesn’t mean sex necessarily.”

  As usual, schoolteacher Pauline was right. I began heading back the way we came. Lucky Harbor bounced ahead of us, his head barely popping above the tall ferns.

  Pauline said, “Being on the tower this morning was awful risky because it was so public. Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe she’s trying to make it look like she’s nuts so she’ll get off in court.”

  “It’s all far-fetched. That couldn’t have been her on that tower. Mercy is a known liar and manipulator.”

  I agreed with Pauline. Then I got mad. “That darn woman got us out here for nothing. That was probably some dumb kid from the campground we just chased.”

  It wasn’t long before we were back on the comfortable hiking trail. Lucky Harbor ran hard ahead of us, halting here and there to sniff something.

  Pauline said, “What kind of nose does that dog have?”

  I smiled at her. “My thoughts exactly after I found Lloyd. The dog was everywhere smelling the bushes, the grounds, everything. I’m betting he saw Lloyd fall.”

  “So if Lloyd’s death is a murder, that dog might have seen the murderer, too?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not if it was early morning and pretty dark yet.”

  “Could he sniff around for the box for us?”

  We were walking faster now. The dog was ahead of us, loping toward the trailhead.

  “Nifty idea,” I said, “but we don’t have anything from the box to let the dog smell.”

  “But you have the hole in your fudge shop’s storage room floor. He could smell around in that.”

  “That’s brilliant, Pauline.”

  “Thanks, Sherlock. Just call me Watson.”

  “Not Sherlock. I’m Poirot. He was a Belgian detective.”

  “Did Poirot have a buddy? Who am I?” Pauline asked.

  “Hastings. Poirot’s buddy was Captain Arthur Hastings of the police force. Hastings had a penchant for women with auburn hair.”

  “You make me sound like a lesbian for liking you.”

  “Liking women might be better than liking John.”

  “There you go again. You know little about him. You’re not being a very supportive best friend lately.”

  “All right. Sorry.” But as her best friend I was wondering about John’s background. I’d trusted him to set up the fudge contest and here we were, chasing after one of John’s choices in chefs who was running away from us in the woods and who could be a murderer.

  As we headed out of the woods, I saw that the bus was gone. “Damn. She left us.”

  “That woman is nasty. And she has my purse in that bus. How could she dump us like that?”

  “Because Jordy’s here.”

  A few yards from where the bus had been parked, Jordy’s tall frame leaned against his squad car, his regulation-brimmed brown hat leveling his dark gaze at me.

  Chapter 12

  For having a runner’s trim body, Jordy could look mighty muscular and imposing when he wanted to, like now when his gaze pinioned me. “What the hell is going on out here? My dispatcher calls me about a possible suicide in progress and I end up getting run off Shore Road in the park by a yellow school bus going like a bat outta hell.”

  “That was Mercy Fogg. You didn’t ticket her?”

  “No, because I was in a hurry to get here to stop a suicide. I don’t suppose you’re going to take a dive off the lighthouse and make my future bright.”

  Pauline smirked, but I didn’t find my own demise all that funny. The sun was high in the sky now, deepening the shade under Jordy’s hat brim as he stepped toward me. My stomach acid crashed about like waves on the lake hitting the shoreline not far from us.

  “Jordy—”

  “Sheriff Tollefson. Now tell me what’s going on out here.”

  “Mercy Fogg told us she saw Kelsey King on top of the tower early this morning when they were bird-watching.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Mercy was escorting a birding group.”

  “Not her. Miss King.”

  “Kelsey was singing.”

  Jordy swiped at his face, as if he wanted to wipe away the vision of me. “I’ll assume this is leading to something. How early was this?”

  “Probably eight or nine o’clock. Earlier maybe. I didn’t ask Mercy for an exact time, but it wasn’t too long ago. It was near the end of their birding.”

  “It’s almost noon now. So you think Kelsey King stayed up on the tower for hours waiting for you to come out here now to watch her commit suicide?”

  We were interrupted by Lucky Harbor running helter-skelter between us and around us. This time, his antics clicked with me.

  “He wants us to follow him, Sheriff.”

  I trotted fast after Lucky Harbor, who had already rushed in a brown blur behind the lighthouse. The dog was performing nose-to-ground figure eights all the way to the rock wall that protected people from falling down the steep bluff.

  We raced to the waist-high wall. I expected to see another body. But th
ere wasn’t any. Red-winged blackbirds rocketed off cattails far below us. A sailboat passed by; four people on it waved. We waved back.

  Jordy said, “I need to get going. I have an appointment to see Libby Mueller at noon, and Professor Faust called me about something the two of them found earlier today at the construction site in Fishers’ Harbor.”

  He started walking away, but Lucky Harbor charged to a lilac bush toward the west of the lighthouse and growled. All of us headed to the bush.

  Pauline said, “There’s a wad of paper in there.”

  Jordy said, “Stand back. Don’t touch or disturb anything. Hang on to the dog.”

  The dog had slipped his collar, so I grabbed a handful of the fluffy brown fur on the back of his neck and hoped he didn’t mind.

  Jordy peered at the bush from several angles. “Not sure how Maria could’ve missed this. We scoured this place until eight o’clock last night.”

  With a tweezers and a small plastic bag he withdrew from a pocket, Jordy extracted the note, took a look, then sealed it before we could read it.

  My instincts told me he was hiding it purposely from me. “How bad is it?”

  Pauline and I crowded around him, putting on the pressure.

  Jordy read it aloud. “One down, one to go.”

  Pauline said, “It looks like the same printing as the other note. Nice and neat again. Calm.”

  “As in calm about killing me!” I shrieked.

  Lucky Harbor plopped down on top of my shoes, then leaned against my scratched-up legs. He looked up at me as if saying, “I’m here for you. I’ll protect you.”

  I said, “Kelsey has to be the one behind all this.”

  Jordy asked, “You say it was her out here just now, though we have no proof. Any motive for her to do this?”

  “Other than she thinks this fudge contest is stupid and she hates me and she’s weird?”

  Pauline said, “She doesn’t hate you. She hates Piers.”

  “Maybe she’s trying to blame this on Piers?”

  Jordy said, “Trying to frame Piers Molinsky for murder is a serious charge.”

  I told Jordy in rapid-fire fashion what I knew about Piers trying to bribe our village president, Erik Gustafson, on Tuesday, and that Lloyd had told me about that on Friday. I added, “I’m pretty sure Piers knows Kelsey was trying to bribe Lloyd by using sex.” I explained what I saw on Friday evening. “There’s no love lost among them all.”

  “Where can I find Piers today? At your shop?”

  “Later, yes, but right now you can likely find him at Laura Rousseau’s shop, the Luscious Ladle, in Sister Bay. I gave him the task of coming up with new recipes for his famous muffins that would go well with chunks of my Cinderella Pink Fudge in them.”

  “How did you convince him to do that?”

  My face grew hot under Jordy’s watchful eyes, but I admitted, “I lied. I said John wanted to videotape a special segment on him with the new recipe.”

  Pauline said, “What a brilliant, yummy idea! Your cherry-vanilla fudge chunked up in . . . oh, I’ll eat any flavor, but red velvet cake muffins with your fudge in the middle is just chewy chocolates colliding in colorful collusion.”

  “You’re prepping a lesson on the letter C, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  Jordy shook his head, but he was licking his lips. “I’ll visit him later. What else ya got?”

  “Professor Alex Faust said Erik told him he’d speak with Lloyd about holding off on the real estate deal so that the town could save the historic buildings on Duck Marsh Street.”

  “Including your cabin?”

  “I’m only renting, but yeah.”

  Pauline offered, “There’s been a rumor that a helipad is going in, and even Ava’s grandparents may have to move and maybe the harbor would be redone with Oosterlings’ Bait, Bobbers and Belgian Fudge and Beer being bumped off.”

  Jordy said, “That sounds like a motive for Gil and Sophie to wish bad things on Lloyd.”

  Oops. I gaped briefly at Pauline for her faux pas, then said, “My grandfather was his best friend, Jordy. But there have to be people jealous of Lloyd or mad enough at him to murder him. Somebody hauled him or forced him to the top of the lighthouse. The murderer was making a statement. Which brings me to Mercy.”

  “You can’t keep blaming her because she’s a little different,” Jordy said.

  “But you just saw her tear out of here, Sheriff, and Lloyd told me she couldn’t be trusted. You already know she wrote threatening notes to Lloyd that I saw in that missing box. Is there any news on that missing box?”

  “No, but—” He glanced at his watch. “I’m fifteen minutes late meeting Libby Mueller and the professor.”

  “We’ll go along.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need a ride, first of all. You’d leave us stranded out here?”

  “You have a cell phone. Call somebody.”

  Pauline said, “This little episode of stranding us could get out and affect your reelection.”

  The sheriff and I stared at her. Being impolite wasn’t like Pauline.

  Jordy said, “You’re threatening me?”

  Pauline shrank a little, more like her old self, so I stepped up and said, “She’s not feeling well because Mercy stole her purse. Pauline practically has a whole year’s supply for her classroom in that thing. It’s worth a million. We’ll need to make a lengthy report if we don’t get it back.”

  Jordy’s facial expression then reminded me of a kaleidoscope inverting its fractured images a dozen times before it came into a focus. “Both of you, in the car. Your dog, too. All of you in back, behind the barrier. And no funny business. I still can’t believe all this trouble over a fudge contest.”

  Lucky Harbor boinked his nose into Jordy’s pants at knee level. I handed Jordy some Goldfish crackers and said, “He thinks ‘fudge’ means ‘treat.’ Do you think he’d make a good police tracking dog? Could you give Pauline and me some pointers on how to train him to track killers? You guys must have some handbook on that, right?”

  Jordy fed the dog his crackers, then hustled us into the backseat, slamming the door shut a bit harder than I suspected was normal.

  * * *

  We found Pauline’s purse dumped at the corner of Shore Road and Highway 42, right next to the stop sign.

  Instead of stopping at Libby’s, Sheriff Tollefson took us back to my fudge shop. Jordy said his visit to Libby was official and he couldn’t have us along. That sparked my curiosity, but he refused to answer my questions. Was Libby under suspicion? Probably not for real, but she of all people might know of a personal enemy of Lloyd, if there were any besides Mercy.

  When we arrived in the downtown, about to turn off on the side street leading to the fudge shop, the sheriff spotted Libby standing with Professor Faust on the sidewalk a block ahead of us. They were next to Dillon’s white construction truck, looking into the open truck bed. Jordy turned off his blinker for our turn and then proceeded straight ahead, parking in a space reserved for the construction workers.

  He said, “I’ll assume you two can walk to the shop from here.”

  He could assume that, but that’s not what we did. Lucky Harbor struck off for the lake, though, while Pauline and I pretended to be looking in a store window.

  Libby said to Jordy, “We stopped in the bookstore. The professor came out while I was finishing my purchase. He found it.”

  “Found what?” Jordy asked.

  “The rifle. It’s there.” She pointed toward Dillon’s truck. “That’s my ex-husband’s rifle. Dillon Rivers stole one of Lloyd’s rifles.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a gift?” Jordy peered into the truck bed.

  “Lloyd has a collection that’s priceless. He wouldn’t give it away.”

  Jordy sl
ipped on latex gloves. Amid thunks and clanks he nudged tools or supplies around. He lifted the rifle gingerly by the end of the barrel.

  Both Pauline and I looked away toward the window in front of us, our reflection showing our shock.

  Jordy bagged the rifle, then busied himself talking with the professor and Libby. Pauline and I took off. My wobbly legs could barely get me around the corner. I stopped to lean against the building. Pauline did the same.

  I whispered, “What the heck is Dillon doing with one of Lloyd’s rifles?”

  Pauline whispered back, “I can’t even guess, but he’s not going to like the greeting he’s going to get when he and the others return from that diving and fishing excursion.”

  * * *

  The bait-and-fudge shop seemed oddly normal when Pauline and I arrived close to twelve thirty. Bethany was there with girlfriends, with Butterflies in tow, who screamed with glee when they saw their teacher. They hugged Pauline—or more accurately, Pauline’s legs—dragging her over to the children’s table in the far corner.

  My grandmother was at the shop, helping Lois and Dotty, which likely accounted for the place not becoming a church bazaar. But Grandma Sophie seemed subdued, while everybody else made a fuss about my tattered clothing and scratches.

  Dotty picked a burr out of my hair that Pauline had missed during our ride in the squad car. “You see?” Dotty said. “Here you are again, a mess.”

  Lois agreed, laughing. “Do you realize every time we see you, you’ve skinned your knees or worse? This is not the look you want for TV.”

  I washed up quickly in the restroom in back, wondering about Grandma’s mood. Out in front, Lois made me don an apron again, a frilly pink one. My stitches were bothering me, so I skipped my usual ponytail and held my hair back from my face with barrettes instead. I looked ready to star in a 1960s sitcom.

  Grandma was dusting a back shelf, her back to me. Her demeanor was worrying me. I asked her with forced cheer, “Know what show this reminds me of, Grandma?”