Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  After making my way around the two white wicker chairs and table tightly grouped on the porch, I found that door was locked, but the key was under the doormat. This, I thought, was suspiciously convenient. Because why would you make it so easy for an intruder to . . . ?

  But then, Hadlyme’s crew was young; maybe they didn’t realize that all burglars knew about doormats. Thinking this, I opened the door and went in, then hesitated in the darkness.

  “Hello?” I called. Heaven forbid one of them had stayed behind and was asleep in here. “Anybody home?”

  No answer. No snake, either, I hoped. I snapped the flashlight on, aimed it at the light switch on the wall beside me, and reached out for that, just as—

  From the doorframe above me, Linda dropped down companionably onto my neck.

  * * *

  “Gah!” After dropping the flashlight, I grabbed the reptile with both hands and flung it across the room onto the plaid-upholstered couch. By the time I hit the light switch, the animal had slithered away.

  Where? I wondered frantically, glancing around. But the snake was nowhere in sight.

  Through the cottage’s rear window I saw Wade’s headlights flash on and off once. The message was plain: What the heck are you doing?

  Right, I thought, and shut the light off hurriedly, plunging my scaly new pal and myself into the darkness once more. Wouldn’t do to have somebody come home unexpectedly and see a lamp burning.

  By the yellow glow of the flashlight I got myself across the cottage’s cramped living area—chairs, that couch, a tiny TV, coffee table—into the even smaller bedroom.

  And immediately hit pay dirt: spread out on one of the twin beds were a lot of papers. I scanned the flashlight beam across them.

  A birth certificate lay there, along with copies of cancelled checks with dates of twenty years ago. A handwritten letter, also a quarter-century old, began with the words “Dear Henry.”

  I sat on the other narrow bed, reading as fast as I could. But when I got to the end . . .

  “Drat,” I whispered into the silence. Because the letter didn’t really end; instead it simply broke off in the middle of a sentence asking—no, begging—that Henry return to Eastport, marry the letter’s author, and acknowledge his son, Lionel. The unidentified author....

  The page with the signature line on it was missing, but the words on the last page that remained said that if Henry refused to do any of these things, the letter’s author would be forced to—

  To do what? The letter didn’t say, but it seemed pretty clear that whatever it was wouldn’t be good. Aiming the flashlight around while trying to keep an eye peeled for Linda the Friendly Snake, I rummaged among the remaining papers on the bed in case the final page of the letter was there somewhere.

  It wasn’t. And now I was starting to feel pressed for time; it was getting late, and I had three more cottages to nose around in, as well as that big tour bus that Hadlyme had apparently been living in.

  Scanning the room for anything else that might be interesting, I got up, feeling suddenly even more anxious. Then I heard someone out on the porch.

  Yikes. The porch light went out. And the switch for it was on the inside wall, I remembered, which meant either the bulb in the porch fixture had coincidentally chosen that moment to fizzle out or somebody had unscrewed the bulb.

  Slowly the cottage door opened with a stealthy creak of hinges. I shrank back on the bed, discovering too late that Linda the snake had the same idea. She didn’t like unknown intruders any better than I did, apparently.

  What she did like, though, was me. By the moonlight slanting in through the window, I watched her uncoil from a nest-like depression in the pillow and wriggle across the bedspread at me. Her pointy tongue flickered, reminding me that her fangs were probably sharp, too.

  At the same time, I was increasingly aware that whoever had come into the cottage was still in it, coming toward me right now just as steadily and relentlessly as the snake.

  Just not with quite as much horrifyingly hypnotic bobbing and weaving; she had her head up in the air as if sniffing it and was regarding me steadily with her small, black impossibly intelligent eyes.

  Meanwhile, soft footfalls in the cottage’s main room were nearly at the bedroom door, which luckily had swung closed by itself when I came in. Linda kept coming, too, and as I shifted nervously to get away from the persistent reptile, the footsteps outside halted.

  And then Linda sprang. Or that’s the only way I can describe it: one moment she was on the bedspread, and in the next she’d drawn back and hurled herself suddenly, and ended up draped loosely around my neck once more.

  “Eep!” I exhaled softly, jumping up. Linda fell off me, back onto the bed again. And that would’ve been that in the whole dealing-with-a-snake department except for the part about snake food....

  When I jumped, I’d knocked a big glass jar of something off the bedside table. The lid fell off, rolling across the floor, the jar’s contents boiling out in a dark tide. And then they were on me:

  Crickets, hundreds of them, dark shapes skittering and hopping across the bedspread’s white chenille. They were what Linda the snake ate, I guessed, not that I had much time for speculation about the diets of pet reptiles, because just then the bedroom doorknob began turning.

  So there I was, being attacked by crickets while a snake lurked somewhere in the shadows—where had Linda gone, anyway?—and while some unknown but most likely very unfriendly person was about to burst in and catch me.

  And what they might do then, I didn’t want to think about. There had been a murder around here lately, after all, and there was also a reason that someone had disabled that porch light just now.

  On top of which, the crickets were all over me, and if any went down my shirt I would not be responsible for my reaction; at least those caterpillars hadn’t felt skritchy.

  Meanwhile, the doorknob kept turning and the moment lengthened.

  And the panic button Wade gave me wouldn’t do me much good if somebody burst in here with another cutlass or, heaven forbid, a gun.

  But then I had it: I could slide under the bed. Maybe whoever it was would think I’d gone out the window.

  Hey, it was worth a try. Swiftly I dropped and rolled. No snake was down there, I was pleased to discover, and it seemed that most of the crickets had stayed on the bedspread.

  A couple of stray socks, a paperback book, an eyeglasses case, some dust kittens . . .

  I had time for a quick inventory before the door opened the rest of the way and a flashlight beam strobed the room. I shrank back farther toward the cottage’s wall as a pair of sneakers crossed the braided rug.

  The intruder’s flashlight beam poked everywhere: walls, dresser, bedside table, bed . . .

  Floor. I held my breath. The sneakers looked familiar, but I was too scared to think much about them.

  They moved away. I let a breath out. But then they stopped as if someone had second thoughts. Turned toward me where I huddled. And—

  The beam glared under the bed, blinding me. I cringed away sharply, bracing my feet hard against the wall, thinking that if I shot out from under the bed very fast and then flung myself at the window, maybe I could—

  “Jake.” The voice was even more familiar than the sneakers had been. “Jake, come on out of there, it’s me.”

  Ellie. Relief flooded me as I scrambled up, brushing madly at any stray insects that might be lurking. Shadows leapt on the walls as she aimed the flashlight around, scrutinizing everything.

  “Look out,” I warned, “there’s crickets, and a snake, and—”

  “I don’t care.” If a snake wanted to cause her any difficulties tonight, it had better be a really big snake, her tone suggested. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”

  I explained quickly. She did the same; George got home, told her about the crew hanging out in the Crab, and here she was.

  “I called, but you didn’t answer,” she said, looking around some
more. “Stopped by the house, too, but it’s all dark.”

  I dug in my bag. Fortunately, I’d hauled it along when I got out of the truck, earlier. But I found no phone in it. “I must’ve dropped it on your boat when I lost my keys,” I said. Usually I’d have noticed, but this time I just hadn’t happened to. And everyone at home was already in bed.

  Which was where I wished I was. “Anyway, let’s go. It’s that motor home of Hadlyme’s that we really need to look through,” she said, hurrying me out of the tiny bedroom.

  It not only was in disarray but also looked like the Great Cricket Massacre had happened in it.

  “Wait.” I ran back to shut Linda inside the bedroom, figuring it was the least I could do for a snake who hadn’t bitten me. Glancing around, I spied an envelope on the floor, where I must’ve knocked it.

  Crouching, I reached for it, then froze as the reptile’s small scaly head darted out from under the bed.

  Beady little eyes, flickering tongue . . . “Nice snake,” I said to it, hoping it would retreat.

  But Linda didn’t budge. “Jake!” Ellie whispered urgently.

  “Go on, now, nice snake. Good snake, go on back under the . . .”

  Linda’s head shot out past my hand, her fanged mouth opening so wide that I could practically see her tonsils.

  Or whatever snakes have for tonsils; in the next instant, those needle-like choppers chomped onto a cricket I hadn’t noticed.

  No doubt the cricket had been hoping Linda wouldn’t notice it, either, but no such luck; down the snake hatch it went, still kicking its rear legs as Linda withdrew to finish her meal.

  “Bon appétit,” I whispered, then grabbed the envelope, skedaddled back out of the bedroom, and took off out of the cottage right behind my hurriedly exiting friend.

  After relocking the door, I stuck the key back under the mat. Lionel—this was his cottage, obviously—would know someone had been inside, but there was no sense drawing a picture for him of exactly how that had happened.

  “Come on, Jake,” said Ellie, “we don’t have all night.”

  From across the clearing I could make out the shape of Wade’s truck still hunkered under the trees; he must’ve seen me, too, his headlights flickering briefly again before going dark once more.

  “Okay,” I said, sticking the envelope into the back of my pants to keep my hands free, “now what?”

  Ellie hustled ahead of me along the edge of the clearing toward Hadlyme’s big motor home.

  “We don’t know how long they’ll be out,” she replied over her shoulder, then scampered up the metal steps and tried the door handle.

  Locked. “Rats,” she said.

  Across the clearing, a shape flickered through the trees . . . or had it? In the darkness I wasn’t sure. “Ellie?”

  Ignoring me, she clenched her fist, drew her arm back, and gave that door a solid thump like the kind she’d given her boat’s radio. In the clearing’s chilly silence, the impact sounded like a bomb had gone off.

  “Ellie! Come on, now, we should really try to be more—”

  The door swung open. I stared. “How . . . how’d you do that?”

  “It wasn’t locked,” she explained simply. “Just stuck shut.” She stepped into the gloom inside the RV.

  “What do you mean it wasn’t locked? That doesn’t make . . .”

  But then I stopped, because “gloomy” wasn’t even the half of it. Suddenly Henry Hadlyme’s luxurious recreational vehicle was the last thing I wanted to be inside of; staring into its depths from the relative safety of the entrance, I felt like that cricket confronting Linda’s fanged mouth.

  “Ellie?” I glanced nervously back to where moonbeams lit the clearing in silvery gray tones, like a stage set for a ghost story.

  But in answer only silence yawned darkly from the motor home’s interior. Cautiously edging forward, I suddenly recalled reading in a magazine at the dentist’s office about Hadlyme’s quirks—“Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Henry the Foodie (And Why You Should Care)! ”—one of which was that he slept in complete darkness.

  Meanwhile, the eleventh thing I didn’t know about him was who’d killed him, and boy, did I ever want to find out so I could go home. Suddenly all the lights in the living area snapped on.

  “Ew,” I said, squeezing my eyelids shut.

  “Sorry, I didn’t know they were all on this one switch,” Ellie apologized. “But the windows in these things are tinted, so I don’t think you can see the lights on from outside.” And then, “Oh dear.”

  I forced my eyes open again and wished I hadn’t. The large luxuriously appointed vehicle could’ve been home to a family of five, or even more if you counted the cramped slot over the driver’s seat that someone was apparently supposed to sleep in.

  And all of it had been ransacked. Abandoning my caution, I rushed through the rooms: drawers yanked open, cubbies emptied, wastebaskets overturned. Even the contents of the clever hidden storage spaces in the bedrooms had all been dumped and rummaged through.

  But either what someone was looking for hadn’t been here, or they’d found it and taken it. After our own search, Ellie and I met in the kitchen area.

  “We could go through it all again,” I said halfheartedly.

  But I didn’t begin the task, and she didn’t, either. “Nice kitchen,” was her bleak comment.

  Even the sugar bowl had been dumped out onto the dinette table, and the upholstered bench seats on either side had been slit, their stuffing yanked out.

  “Yeah,” I replied, feeling as if my own stuffing had gotten the same rude treatment; heavens, this was disappointing.

  But then Ellie brightened. “You know, if they’d found something, it wouldn’t be such a mess in here, would it? They’d have stopped as soon as they—”

  “Huh.” I thought about it a minute. “You’re right, they kept searching, didn’t they? In fact, it looks as if they did everything but take a hammer and bash open the—”

  We looked at each other. If we’d been in a cartoon, a thought balloon would’ve formed over our heads. Then:

  “Walls!” we said jubilantly together, because here’s the thing: in my old house, if you wanted to shut off the water to fix a leak—a big leak, the kind that is gushing down through the floor into the electrical wiring—you had to bash your way through the plaster with a sledgehammer to reach the valve.

  Afterward you covered the hole with a neat plywood patch and painted it to match the wallpaper. Now Ellie smiled, remembering the episode that taught me this just as well as I did.

  “Modern places like this have access panels, though,” she said, and at this we jumped up and rushed to the motor home’s bathroom. It was small but it held all the usual fixtures plus some that I hadn’t expected—a jetted tub, for instance, and a walk-in shower with a standard shower head instead of one of those ghastly nozzle-on-a-plastic-hose gadgets.

  But even the most luxurious motor homes can have leaks; in this one, the access panel for the pipes was in the rear wall of the sink cabinet.

  Ellie pulled out her Swiss Army knife, equipped with every possible gadget including a screwdriver. The big one was still in her bag, too, but its blade was too large for these screws; moments later when the wall panel fell off, a cigar box tumbled out into my hands.

  The box was taped shut. Curiosity pierced me. But we could open it later; we’d been in here too long already, so with the box tucked firmly under my arm I turned, intending to vamoose, and Ellie was close behind me.

  But we couldn’t vamoose because just then a soft warning toot from Wade’s truck horn stopped us.

  “Oof,” said Ellie, who’d run into me from behind when I stopped suddenly.

  “Oof yourself,” I replied, unnerved. Then, “Sorry, I just—”

  I waved my free arm at the motor home’s large living-area window, which looked out into the clearing. At my gesture, Ellie snapped the lights off and we both froze, standing there in the darkness in the large, luxurio
us RV of a man who’d been murdered recently.

  “There,” whispered Ellie, and then I saw it too, going by right outside the RV’s window. It was a dark blue ball cap with a sunrise emblem embroidered on it in orange and yellow thread and the word EASTPORT lettered in red.

  “Drat,” I muttered. It was Bob Arnold’s hat, and underneath it was Bob Arnold. Now he was coming around the RV’s front fender, squinting unhappily and wielding his own flashlight; in a minute he would be inside.

  I looked around at the chaos in the dead man’s motor home, the ransacking’s aftermath strewn everywhere. And here we were, right in the middle of it, so it looked as if we must be the ones who’d—

  “Jake! This way!” Ellie’s voice came from the vehicle’s rear bedroom. Bob’s feet sounded on the steps outside.

  He was our friend, but there wasn’t a broom in the world big enough to sweep this mess under the rug. I’d have slithered down a drain like Linda the snake if only I’d fit.

  Hastily I followed the sound of Ellie’s voice down the motor home’s hallway, between the bathroom, the laundry area, and another small room that Hadlyme had been using as an office. Now it, too, looked as if a whirlwind had gone through it: drawers yanked open, papers scattered.

  But I didn’t care about that anymore, just about getting out of here; these new modern RVs were really quite spacious and comfy, I thought as I hurried along the hall, and if I ever did get out of this I decided I would buy one and drive it to somewhere that nobody could find me for a minute’s peace for a change.

  But right now, the “getting out of this” portion of the program still seemed most important. Behind me the vehicle’s metal door creaked open, then clicked shut. Next I heard Bob moving around, his flashlight shedding stray beams into the hall.

  “Here,” Ellie whispered in the darkness, making me jump. She was in the small louver-doored closet in the bedroom, shoving aside the few clothes not already tossed out onto the floor.

  “I’ve seen these vehicles on TV,” she whispered. “They all have at least one other exit.”

  Right, it was a fire-safety feature, I supposed. And sure enough, this vehicle did have a sort of hatchway leading out to an indoor-outdoor-carpeted cargo compartment over the rear wheels.