Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  Upright, I took some deep breaths, very carefully not looking at Hadlyme lying there with a life-sized stuffed parrot safety-pinned to his shoulder and a blade shoved into its chest. A familiar parrot . . .

  And a familiar blade. “. . . dead,” I finished weakly, and sat down hard again while he spoke brusquely into his radio.

  With his round pink-cheeked face, rosebud lips, and thinning blond hair clipped very short around the top of his balding head, Bob Arnold didn’t much look like a police officer even when he was in his official blue uniform, as he was today.

  But he had a voice that could cut steel when he wanted it to, along with a sort of spin-’em-around-and-swat-’em maneuver that could put an unruly person into his squad car swiftly and efficiently, and Bob wouldn’t even be breathing hard afterward.

  None of which he needed at the moment. I could’ve been knocked down by a twitch of his little finger, I felt so shocked by what I’d found.

  “Jake, I told you to stay where you were.”

  Faintly from outside I could already hear a siren approaching, not much to my surprise; as always, the festival was so well policed that you’d think real pirates were invading the town.

  He crouched beside me again. “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. I came down here for . . .” I waved at the bucket, the mop, and the broom scattered around me. “And the next thing I knew . . .” I waved at the body. “He fell out of the cabinet at me. I was on my way upstairs, but I got crosswise in the stairway somehow, and . . .”

  Bob squinted puzzledly at me.

  “And then I fell,” I finished. “It was right before you came in.” A different thought struck me. “How’d you get in, anyway?” I knew I’d locked the shop door.

  Bob shrugged. “Ran into Ellie, and she gave me these.”

  He held out my keys, the ones I’d dropped on the Bayliner. “I saw the lights on inside and I wanted to give them to you, so . . .”

  I sat up. The cellar only spun a little bit, which I regarded as a good sign. But as I sat getting my wind back, it was dawning on me: there was a dead guy lying nearby, and he had a big sword stuck through him. Also, the more I looked at the brightly colored stuffed bird, the more certain I was that I recognized it.

  A siren screamed up outside. “You stay here,” Bob instructed me, and started back upstairs.

  But then he turned. “Jake, you’re sure that when you found him, he was just like that. Dead, with the sword run through him. And the parrot . . .” Bob’s eyes narrowed. “Say, where have I seen that thing lately?”

  It was just what I’d been wondering. At last it came to me. “It’s Ephraim’s.” My grandson’s, I meant. “Or he’s got one just like it, anyway,” I said as something jingled upstairs.

  Then footsteps thumped the floor overhead, and two ambulance guys appeared at the top of the stairwell. After hurrying down, they hovered over me intently and began assessing my condition.

  It had taken them only a glance to figure out Hadlyme’s. “I do not,” I began, “need any of your—”

  But they were too busy recording my pulse and blood pressure to listen. Once they discovered I had both, they peered into my eyes and examined the wound on my head, pronouncing it superficial.

  I clambered to my feet. My surroundings lurched dizzily, but I wasn’t about to let them know it.

  “I’m fine,” I declared, meanwhile determining privately that I would get up those cellar steps and back into the shop or die trying. For one thing, there was coffee up there and I needed some badly.

  But for another, I really had begun recognizing that cutlass: unhappily, but pretty darned certainly. It wasn’t one of the rubber or plastic imitations that guys in their Blackbeard or Barbarossa costumes were gallivanting around with during the pirate festival.

  No, this was the real deal: Damascus steel, a wrapped leather grip, richly engraved at the hilt. It was two hundred years old and valuable, and I knew all this because it belonged to my husband, Wade Sorenson.

  I’d last seen it in my own kitchen. The two-foot blade had a few dings in it, but given that the weapon was more a historical item than a useful one, Wade had decided not to fix them.

  All these facts came back to me as I stood wavering uncertainly at the foot of the stairs. Instead of saying them aloud, though, I kept my mouth shut and waited for further developments.

  For the cellar to stop spinning, for instance. I glanced down at my shirtfront. Blood from my wounded forehead stained it.

  “I look,” I muttered, “like Lady Macbeth.”

  By then I could barely put the two words together, I was so—

  Dizzy. A sound escaped me. Suddenly six Bob faces whirled like a Ferris wheel in front of me, and my ears rang like gongs.

  “Uh-oh,” said somebody. An ambulance guy, maybe.

  Then I passed out.

  * * *

  “Stay,” said my housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, six hours later.

  And yes, I do know that sounds complicated. But the boiled-down version is pretty simple: she’d been my housekeeper, and then she’d married my father. Now they both lived in my big old house with the rest of us: Wade; Sam; his wife, Mika; their little boy, Ephraim; and me.

  Plus my headache, which was now so huge I thought it might need to be given a room of its own. Anywhere but in my skull would’ve been fine with me. In the emergency room they’d determined that I didn’t have a concussion, a stroke, a blood clot, or any of the many other serious conditions they were obliged to rule out when a person rolled in through their doors with a headache and a history of passing out.

  But oh, did it hurt. “Drink this,” said Bella, pushing me gently back down into the recliner where I’d been sitting, then handing me a steaming mug. I sniffed: coffee, heavily spiked with brandy.

  Double the fun. Probably forbidden, too. When the docs said fluids, I doubted they’d meant booze. “Bella, maybe I shouldn’t—”

  We were in the front parlor: high ceilings, ornately carved wooden mantel, tall windows with lace counterpanes and heavy, old brocade draperies.

  “Just never you mind,” said Bella. In her sixties, hatchet-faced and green-eyed, with frizzy dyed-red hair, big front teeth, and bony wrists like chicken drumstick knobs that were sticking out of her green sweatshirt sleeves, she was my rock, my can’t-do-without-her helper, and most of all, my friend.

  And right now, apparently, she was my boss. “Don’t even start with me,” she added in no-nonsense tones. “You’ve had a shock, and a bad bump, and found a body. And I’m in charge of you.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a good deal better suddenly. Bella was bossy all the time, and not always in a welcome manner, but the idea of someone else being in charge seemed particularly attractive at the moment. I took a gulp of my hot drink and felt the brandy molecules percolating through my collapsed brain cells, reviving them.

  Or at least making them dance around very happily indeed, which was enough for me at the moment. Leaning back, I regarded my familiar surroundings: beneath the brass chandelier, a small blaze flickered warmly on the tiled hearth and the cranberry-glass lamps under their antique parchment shades cast a reassuring glow over the comfortable old room.

  But it was awfully quiet. “Where is everyone?”

  It was dark outside the windows, and ordinarily by now Sam and Mika would be upstairs bathing Ephraim, Wade would be (a) out on the water or (b) in his shop fixing whatever rare or valuable weapon somebody wanted expertly repaired, and my dad would be in his studio on the third floor of our massive old dwelling. At age eighty-plus he’d taken up oil painting, a brand-new interest of his, which was why the whole place smelled a little bit like turpentine lately.

  “I got them all out of the way,” Bella replied. “So you could rest.”

  “Really? All of them?” I thought about asking her where she’d gotten the bulldozer to do it, but I couldn’t muster the energy. For her nursing duties this evening she wore a flower-p
rinted apron over the sweatshirt, plus jeans and a pair of loafers.

  No socks. Maybe she’d used a flyswatter, I imagined dreamily. Or a rolling pin. I suspected I wasn’t thinking clearly. But never mind.

  “Now, you drink that up,” she urged. “All of it, mind you, and close your eyes when you feel like it, and—”

  “I know, don’t move an inch.” It was what she always said when anyone in the house was sick, and she gave me a thin, grudging smile in return. She was an overbearing old fussbudget, our Bella, but she would have stepped in front of a freight train for any one of us.

  So when she’d gone, I tried to obey: sip, doze, sip some more. I would deal with it all tomorrow, I decided. Until . . .

  “Psst!”

  I lurched up. My head only swam a little bit. The sound, muffled by the heavy drapes, came from the open-a-crack window behind my chair.

  “Jake!” It was Ellie, calling to me from outside.

  “Ellie, what’re you—?”

  “Bella won’t let me in! Not even a phone call, she says, but I’m afraid if we don’t talk before tomorrow—”

  I got up and hunkered behind the chair by the window, pulling the curtains apart slightly. The sweet scent of newly mown grass drifted in; since Sam had combated the very real scarcity of local jobs by starting his own independent lawn care business, our whole neighborhood was like a putting green.

  Well, except for our lawn, of course. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I whispered to Ellie through the open window.

  From Water Street where the pirate festival was still going on just a few blocks distant, music and laughter drifted.

  Ellie’s face floated ghostly white in the gleams of lamplight escaping the window. “Me too. That you are, I mean. How are you?”

  I touched my forehead: ow. But the dizziness was really fading, I thought. “Fine,” I said, stretching the truth a little. “What’s going on?”

  Plenty, probably. I’d left her with all that baking to finish, plus all the shop cleanup. Not to mention that by now on account of what I’d found, there were probably lots of . . .

  “Cops.” She finished my thought. “County sheriff’s deputies, so far, and a bunch of reporters are showing up, too.”

  Sure, I thought; Hadlyme really had been a TV personality, even if only a minor one, not as well known as he liked to think. And the pirate cutlass run through him only made his murder more interesting.

  I mean, if anything can be more interesting than a corpse with a stuffed parrot pinned to its shoulder. “Do they know—?”

  “Oof.” A muffled sound drifted up—not a curse, but close. “Darn, I tripped over a root.”

  The old trees in the yard had roots very near the surface, and they were hazardous in the dark. “And I dropped my . . .”

  Then came scuffling noises; I guessed she was retrieving things from her satchel. And while that was happening, Bella came in with a tray in her hands and spied me at the window.

  “Who’s out there?” she asked suspiciously, but Ellie had already vanished into the darkness among the lilacs at the edge of the yard.

  “No one,” I told her, “just noise from downtown.” Much more of this and my nose would grow longer than my arm. I settled back into the chair and let her put the tray on my lap.

  She’d made a slice of toast, homemade and well buttered. I bit in and found that I was hungry. Also it didn’t hurt a bit that the tea was Constant Comment steeped in a pot.

  “How’s Dad?” I took another bite of toast while Bella pulled a clean dust rag from her apron pocket and began running it over the wooden furniture.

  “Well, he’s no spring chicken, you know,” she said, sighing resignedly.

  I used to believe her cleaning fetish was part of a personality disorder, but eventually I’d come to realize that it was an aesthetic choice. And living in a house that was always as clean as a surgical suite was not unpleasant, once I’d gotten used to it.

  “Thinks he’s Michelangelo. He’ll be up on a stepladder painting the ceiling before you know it. But it keeps him busy,” she went on.

  Her voice was like a creaking hinge on account of her being no spring chicken herself. “Out of my hair,” she added, sounding put-upon. But she loved him extravagantly, and we all knew it.

  She shoved the rag back into her apron pocket. “Now you just go on sitting there, you hear? Let your brains try gathering themselves back together for once. If they can,” she finished dryly.

  She knew about the body in the shop cellar, of course; by now the news must be all over town. And she was no fan whatsoever of any kind of murder investigation, especially if it involved me.

  Which was why she was trying her darnedest to head off this one. “Now, Bella—” I began placatingly.

  Over the past few years, Ellie and I had been involved in what even I thought were way too many suspicious deaths in and around our little community. Snooping into them, that is.

  “Sam and Mika took the baby downtown to see the torch parade,” she interrupted my thought, “to give you some peace and quiet.”

  So take advantage of it, her tone added sternly as she slipped behind the recliner I sat in and shut the offending window with a decisive thud.

  Then she left me to finish my toast, which I did quickly before crumpling my napkin, gulping my tea, and hurrying out the front door into the chilly evening before Bella could come back and catch me.

  Ellie was waiting for me just outside the glow of the porch lamp, as I’d known she would be.

  “How are you?” she repeated, squinting at the gauze square taped to my forehead.

  “Just ducky.” I followed her to her car and got in, not slamming the passenger-side door until we’d gotten away from the house.

  “I’m still a little dizzy, and I’ve got a bit of a headache,” I said. This last part was putting it mildly. “But don’t worry, my brains have gotten stirred harder than this before, without any bad effects.”

  Ellie glanced skeptically at me as if to say she wasn’t so sure. But she was just kidding.

  I think. Anyway: “The shop’s fine, and the baking for tomorrow is all done. Mika came down to help me finish it while you were at the emergency room,” she said.

  Besides having produced my excellent grandson, my daughter-in-law was smart, talented, even-tempered, and—most important to me right now—in her life before she met Sam and came here, a prize-winning amateur pastry chef.

  “So we’re all set to open for business again,” Ellie said as she drove us toward downtown.

  On Water Street, hilariously drunk pirates hoisted bottles and sang about keelhauling guys just like themselves while dancing around a bonfire in the parking lot by the fish pier.

  “Uh, then what are we doing here?” I asked, watching the orange sparks spiral up into the night.

  She pulled over in front of the shop and turned to me, her face deadly serious in the glow of the nearby street lamp. “Jake, I’m not entirely sure you understand your situation completely.”

  “Oh, of course I do. I found the body, and not long before that I had a loud, very public argument with the deceased.”

  So the homicide detectives who would soon be arriving to look into the murder would be interested in me. But big deal, right?

  Or so I thought, which just goes to show how clearly I wasn’t thinking, and how right Ellie was to be concerned.

  But I didn’t realize that, either. “I mean, of course it was murder,” I went on.

  “People don’t just pin toy parrots to their shoulders, fall on sharp cutlasses at exactly the right angle to pierce their hearts, and then shut themselves into basement cabinets so they can bleed to death in peace.”

  I took a breath. “So yes, I do know the cops will be examining any possible involvement of mine.”

  But there wasn’t any, and they’d figure that out fairly quickly, I still felt certain.

  “Right,” Ellie agreed, eyeing me closely. “But . . .”

&nbs
p; A guy tootling on a flute strolled tipsily by on the sidewalk, only occasionally veering off into the gutter. Behind him Bob Arnold strolled, unperturbed; a happy drunk was the least of his worries.

  “But what?” Once Bob had safely passed without spotting me, I got out of the car and followed Ellie as she went into the shop. Then another thought hit me:

  “But never mind being ready for tomorrow, productwise. Can we be open at all? And did Bob say it was okay to mop the floor and—”

  It wasn’t the first crime ever committed in the Moose, so I knew the police would be touchy on the subject of evidence contamination.

  “Yes,” Ellie called from out in the kitchen. “The upstairs is okay, anyway, he said. Only the cellar is off-limits.”

  She returned to the shop front with coffee and a plate of fresh peanut-butter blossoms, each with a chocolate kiss pressed into it.

  “All the ambulance people have already tramped in and out up here,” she said. “Once for you, and again later for Hadlyme’s body. So Bob took a lot of photographs and measurements, yellow-taped the alley door and the trap door in the kitchen, and called it good.”

  Listening, I devoured one of the peanut-butter blossoms, washing it down with the pure ambrosia Ellie poured from the French press.

  Then she sat across from me, still looking more serious than I thought the situation warranted—that is, until I heard what she had to say.

  Warranted was the correct word, all right. There’d be one sworn out soon, according to Ellie, who’d heard it from Bob Arnold himself.

  A warrant for my arrest. I felt my jaw drop. “But—”

  “Motive, method, opportunity,” she ticked off on her fingers, the three boxes every murder investigator wants to check.

  And all three had my name right next to them. “Well, all right, then, I guess, if they want to be that way about it,” I said snidely. But this was serious. “He really thinks so? Bob does, that . . .”

  She nodded, biting into a chocolate kiss. “That they’ll charge you? Unless some other suspect gets even likelier-looking, yes. Which by the way . . .”

  Yeah, yeah. I ran through the likely thought process in my head. There was the argument I’d had with Hadlyme, the fact that during it I’d threatened him, and of course that all the people watching us had heard me do it.