Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  I scrambled across the carpet behind Ellie, closing the hatch from the closet behind me. The cargo area’s exit to the outdoors was lever-operated; Ellie found the handle and pulled it, and the next thing I knew we were on the ground, running.

  But not, unfortunately, to Wade’s pickup truck—never mind that I’d had my heart set on its nice, warm passenger compartment with my nice, warm husband waiting inside.

  Because—surprise! When we reached the secluded area of the campgrounds where the pickup truck had been parked under the big old trees, the truck wasn’t there anymore.

  Any second now, Bob Arnold would be coming back out of the RV, scanning the immediate area for whoever’d been in there before he arrived.

  I nudged Ellie, and she nodded silent agreement; we mustn’t be found here, looking as if we’d just been rooting around in a murder victim’s belongings, must we?

  No, we damned well mustn’t. “Come on,” I whispered, hurrying her around the clearing’s edge to where we’d started: Lionel’s cottage.

  “Wait, we’re not going back in there, are we?” She glanced over her shoulder across the clearing, but Bob wasn’t following us.

  He hadn’t seen us. Yet. “Nope,” I said. “But behind the cottages there’s a sort of path down to the beach. We can come back up farther along the shore from here and keep Bob from seeing us that way.”

  I’d glimpsed the path earlier, at low tide when there actually had been a beach of sorts down there, stony and rugged but at least offering a place to stand.

  Now the tide had come in, and when we peered over the bluff, the beach was gone. All that showed in the moonlight were rocks, crashing waves, and tangles of seaweed, the kind that will catch you and snarl up your arms and legs before dragging you under to drown.

  Assuming, I mean, that the rocks haven’t already fractured your skull . . . but there was no help for it.

  “This way,” I said, hoping hard that I sounded more confident than I felt, and started down.

  A small, weathered rail fence ran along the bluff’s edge. We ducked under it as sticks and gravel kicked loose by our feet rattled out ahead of us and cascaded away downhill. And then suddenly I was cascading downhill, too....

  Sliding and half falling, I clung to bushes, exposed tree roots, and then a wiggling thing. A fistful of them, squirming, writhing . . .

  “Agh!” I let go, and just then Ellie must have as well; gravity took over and we began sliding faster down the path toward a flat, slippery-slide sort of rock formation at the foot of the cliff.

  A flat, wet rock formation . . . Fright seized me as I realized what was coming. “Ellie, we’ve got to try not to fall into the—”

  But it was too late. I hit the sharply downsloping rock, bounced very hard, and shot out across it into the crashing waves.

  “Oh!” I exhaled, flailing uselessly as without hesitation the frigid water seized me, swirling me out toward the really deep stuff. Desperation made me strong, but for all the good my tries at swimming did, I might as well have been already unconscious.

  Then I went under, tumbling and rolling, desperate for air but not getting any—not even knowing which way the air was until at last the waves hurled me upward again and I managed to suck a breath in.

  “Ellie!” I yelled, not seeing her, but it came out a strangled yelp and then I was under once more, gargling and gagging.

  I bounced off another rock, rolled on jagged gravel, got a slippery not-good-enough grip on a fat weed-slimed rope of some kind, and—

  My brain kicked in. Wait a minute, a rope?

  My hand wrapped around it. From the long, slick, muscular feel of the thing, it was either a rope or an octopus tentacle, which was what my oxygen-starved brain cells suggested. But by then I didn’t care if I was holding the hand of a giant squid; I grabbed onto it and pulled, then pulled some more until finally I hauled myself up onto that flat rock again, choking and coughing.

  “Ellie?” Each precious, agonizing breath came out bubbly with breathed-in salt water, and my eyes, nose, and throat felt acid-burned.

  “Ellie!” Panic impaled me as I gazed around frantically for her but couldn’t see her anywhere. Around me the ice-cold waves crashed down ferociously and a chill breeze knifed wickedly into me.

  Ellie . . . I opened my mouth to shout for her again, but my teeth were chattering so hard that I couldn’t. Hot tears scalded my cheeks, mingling with frigid spray that went on drenching me, and even now my grip on the flat rock was loosening. Then—

  Then a shape separated itself from the maelstrom. It was her, clambering unsteadily onto a tiny wave-slopped bit of beach that still remained, looking just as cold and miserable as I felt.

  But she was alive. “Jake!” she cried as, energized by relief, I scrambled off the rock and hotfooted it across two more, fortunately without slipping and breaking my neck or anything else.

  “Oh, I thought you were—” Beaming, she threw her arms around me. But not for long; we were too wet and clammy.

  “Come on,” I said, and helping each other make our way along the rocky shore until we got to another path, longer but not so steep, and scrambled exhausted up through little stones until we were back to the edge of the campgrounds again.

  When we peeped through the underbrush, Bob Arnold’s car was still there, and now a second squad car was pulling up alongside the first. So we slunk off the opposite direction, through blackberry bushes with thorns as sharp as hypodermic needles.

  Mosquitoes were there, too—lots of them, out having an end-of-summer blood fest; after my watery adventure I’d have thought my own blood would be too cold to interest them, but by the time we got out to the main road at last, it was a wonder I didn’t need a transfusion.

  As I’d been praying it would be, Wade’s truck was there in a driveway behind some trees, unseen by the cops when they’d gone by.

  I staggered toward it, feeling in the back of my pants for the envelope I’d stuck there and by some miracle finding it intact. But then I realized what I didn’t have, and stopped short:

  “I . . . I lost it,” I blurted through lips trembling with cold.

  Wade stared puzzledly from behind the wheel, trying to make sense of my drowned-rat appearance. I tried again:

  “I l-l-lost . . . th-the . . .” But I couldn’t do it, and suddenly it was all just too much. “I l-lost . . .”

  Ellie tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, heartbroken. But:

  “No, you didn’t,” she said, holding out the cigar box.

  Five

  Ten minutes later we pulled into my driveway on Key Street. By then Wade had the heater blasting and even as soaked as I was, it was all I could do to force myself out of the warm cab, especially when I saw all the other vehicles in the driveway ahead of us.

  My dad’s truck was the last one in, its shiny fire-engine red paint gleaming pristinely under the yard light; how he got it was a story I’ll tell another time, but he loved it and after a long, many-faceted battle of wills, Bella had let him keep it.

  Next came Sam’s work truck, another essential vehicle, wedged between Mika’s little Kia sedan and my old Honda—both essential as well. After that came a flatbed trailer crowded with lawn-care machines, including two riding lawn mowers, an old rototiller, and a post-hole digger.

  Correction: the pieces of a post-hole digger, rolled up in a tarp. Sam meant to reassemble them into one that actually dug, and there was a plow blade around here somewhere, too, ready for snow-plowing season, which would arrive in about fourteen seconds.

  Sighing, I squeezed past the digger parts that stuck out over the flatbed’s edge to retrieve a xylophone and a toy car that Ephraim must’ve dropped there; the last thing we needed in that driveway was any more vehicles.

  The last thing we needed in the house was a xylophone, too, but never mind; we’d already dropped Ellie off at her place, so now I went in, shed my clothes unceremoniously, and stood in a hot shower until my body had stopped shivering and my blo
od no longer had ice crystals in it.

  Downstairs, Wade put a steaming mug of coffee in front of me. In my jammies and slippers and with my warmest robe wrapped around me, I sipped gratefully, glad for the brandy he’d added to it.

  “So what was the deal with Bob Arnold?” I asked. “Why’d he show up, do you suppose?”

  The rest of the family was in bed. Wade had a beer in his hand. “Dunno,” he said, setting it down.

  “I was lucky Bob didn’t spot me,” he went on. “Maybe he was just on regular patrol? I mean, that campgrounds might get some vandalism, way off the beaten track like it is.”

  He angled his head at the cigar box. “So what do you figure’s in it?”

  It was drenched after its dunking, but we’d peeled off the tape wrapped around it and opened it while we were all still in the truck; we’d found a sealed plastic container inside.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll bet it was what somebody was looking for in Lionel’s cottage. And in the RV, too.”

  The plastic container was the size of a bar of soap, and we hadn’t been able to get it open no matter how we pulled at it. Now Ellie’s big screwdriver from her satchel lay on the table beside it, and if that didn’t work we could always use an old-fashioned hammer.

  Ellie came in quietly through the porch door, fresh from her own shower at home and with her blond hair pushed up into a damp topknot.

  “Oh, good,” she said, “you found my big screwdriver.”

  She’d taken it off her boat, then lost it when she dropped the satchel earlier; I guessed once she found I was gone, Bella must’ve been investigating out there under the window and brought it in.

  Now I shot Ellie a look before she could report on how we’d soaked the cigar box. Wade remained reasonably on board with all we had done so far; still, he didn’t need to know every detail about the watery portion of our trip to the campgrounds, I’d decided. Back in the truck I’d just said we’d had to take a wet detour.

  “Here goes,” he said, running the sharp edge of the tool’s blade along the seam where the plastic container’s top and bottom met. “There,” he said, pulling the box halves apart at last.

  Inside lay a small, faded color photograph of a young family—a pretty, fresh-faced young woman; a little girl about four years old; and a baby in the woman’s arms. No writing was on the photograph’s back, and none of us recognized the people—not even Ellie, who’d grown up in Eastport and knew just about everyone in town.

  I’d set the envelope I’d filched from Lionel’s cottage on the radiator to dry on my way in; now I fetched the envelope and opened it, finding the certificate inside wet but still legible.

  “Twenty years ago,” said Ellie, eyeing the certificate’s date. It was for a baby boy named Wallace Benoit; the mom’s name was Anna, and the space where the father’s name should’ve been was left blank.

  “Benoit,” Ellie said thoughtfully. “Not ringing a bell.”

  Wade didn’t recognize it, either. He went to the alcove and pulled out the phone book; he searched the pages but found no one by that last name in the area.

  “Not that it means anything,” he said. “Folks have cell phones now. They’re not in the book’s listings.”

  So we were stumped, but just then Bella, roused I supposed by the activity in the kitchen, came in and peered over our shoulders.

  “Oh, I know them!” she exclaimed at once. “Or I knew the girl, anyway.... My, how time flies. It’s terrible what became of them,” she mused. “The baby’s dad took off, I recall, left her without a penny, and not all that long afterward she jumped off the Deer Island ferry, poor thing.”

  Just then Mika came into the kitchen, sweetly pretty in PJs and a pink flannel robe but paler than I liked seeing, and with a wan, not-very-comfortable look on her face. Tossing her glossy black hair back over her shoulders, she got out the olive oil, warmed it in the microwave for a few seconds, and found the eyedropper in the utility drawer.

  “Ephraim’s got an earache,” she explained, pouring the oil into a custard cup just the way I had back when Sam was little.

  “By the way, I went down to the shop and made more doughnuts,” she said, coming over to the table to look curiously at the things we’d found.

  The birth certificate, twenty years old. And the photograph of a woman with children.

  “Chocolate ones,” she said. “And a couple dozen more chocolate wafers. Okay?” she added a little anxiously.

  “Absolutely,” I assured her, when what I really wanted to do was fall down and kiss her feet.

  The Moose would be open tomorrow come hell or high water, I’d already decided, since during a festival there was no such thing as too much sweet stuff; if it weren’t for my daughter-in-law we’d have been up all night baking even more things for the display case.

  Wade got up from the table and went back up to his shop, where after a minute I heard the radio go on; the Sox were in the playoffs again and the game was in California.

  Mika turned to go also, carrying her warmed olive oil dish. “Oh, and I almost forgot. A police detective came by the shop while I was there? A woman detective, wanting to talk with you?”

  A zing of worry went through me. As long as I was busy snooping I could almost forget that I was still in imminent danger of being charged.

  But I was, whether or not I forgot. “She said to meet her in the diner at nine tomorrow morning, if you can. . . .” Mika’s voice trailed off doubtfully. “Why, though, are you in trouble?”

  “Nope. Don’t worry about it,” I replied, so after grabbing a handful of plain saltines from the cabinet, she headed back upstairs.

  “Hmph,” Bella said when she’d gone. “I’m telling you, that girl looks green around the gills.”

  I agreed; Mika’s usual radiant glow had faded to a waxy sallow color, and after what my dad had mentioned, I feared I knew why.

  But the middle of the night wasn’t the time to discuss it, and after a bit more compulsive fussing around with a paper towel and some spray cleaner, Bella went back upstairs to bed, too, to her and my dad’s apartment on the third floor of the big old house.

  “Thanks for not mentioning my unscheduled swimming lesson,” I said as, carrying my brandy-laced coffee, I followed Ellie outside. A few moths fluttered softly around the porch light over our heads.

  “No problem,” she said quietly. “Lucky for me, George and Lee were already asleep when I got there, or I’d have had some explaining to do, too.”

  Faint sounds of ongoing pirate revelry still floated up from Water Street, music and laughter drifting on the fog that had rolled in, haloing the street lamps. But the memory of that dark, mysterious ship floating in the harbor lent the atmosphere an ominous tinge.

  I turned from the thought. “So anyway, maybe we’ve got ourselves a motive of some kind? I mean, what if twenty years ago Henry Hadlyme was the guy who abandoned the Benoit girl, and—”

  “And the baby, yes,” Ellie agreed. “So let’s say for the sake of argument that maybe he left her, and then she killed herself over it like Bella said?”

  She turned to me, her face somber. “But where’s the baby today, I wonder? And who’s that older child in the photograph? And—”

  And what did it all have to do with what was going on now? “No idea,” I said. But those were our next questions, all right.

  “What we can assume, though, is that it wasn’t Lionel out there searching tonight,” I said. “After all, why would he ransack his own place looking for something he already has?”

  From upstairs I could hear Ephraim’s wails subsiding to whimpers as his mother dripped warm oil into his ear. The sound comforted me; I didn’t know how we’d ever cram another human being into this house, but I didn’t like the idea of taking any of them out of it, either, not even a little bit.

  “Jake?” said Ellie as something new occurred to her. Not a good something, from the sound of it. “Jake, what if we weren’t alone out there tonight
?”

  Brrr. But she was right. That flitting figure I’d glimpsed....

  “Okay, so let’s say somebody was there.”

  By now my aching brain felt like something that had been drowned, frozen, and bounced off a rock a couple of times, mostly because it had. Still, after another swig of brandy-laced coffee, I squeezed a few more dribbles of thought out of it.

  “Let’s say somebody gets done searching Lionel’s cottage,” I said. “And Hadlyme’s motor home, too.”

  She nodded unhappily. “And hasn’t found anything. That’s why everything in both places was so torn up. So maybe they’re about to give up, or to search the other cottages. But . . .”

  “Right, but then we show up, and whoever it is has to make sure we didn’t find whatever they missed.”

  “The photograph and the birth certificate . . . so they stayed and watched us. While you were in the cottage, and when we went over the bluff. Spotted Wade, too, maybe, which is why—”

  “Why they didn’t follow us into the motor home,” I finished, “or right up to it, either, so they could pounce as soon as we came out.”

  Right, because if they had, Wade would’ve spotted them, wouldn’t he? “And by the time we did come out, Bob Arnold had arrived,” I concluded.

  Ellie nodded hard, her blond topknot gleaming reddish gold under the porch light. “So whoever it is, if they were there, they probably know who we are and that we did find something.”

  It was a lot of theory based on few facts: that Hadlyme was the runaway father in question, for instance, was only a guess. But it felt right: that strong sense I’d had of being watched out at the campgrounds still hung dankly on me.

  “Is George still home now?” I asked, meaning that he hadn’t gone to work a night shift somewhere. Probably he hadn’t, since he hadn’t called Ellie and he wouldn’t have wanted to leave Lee home alone. Still . . .

  Ellie nodded unhappily. “He’s there. You mean because . . . ?”

  “Uh-huh. If we’re right about the rest of it, then whoever it was out there knows where we are right now, too, most likely.”