Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  A trio of squad cars and an ambulance screamed down Washington Street past the post office building, fueling my anxiety.

  “She called,” Bob said, looking into my face so I would focus on him. “Ellie had her phone out there, and she heard the explosions.”

  I was gasping, hyperventilating, and those hot dogs I’d eaten threatened revolt. Trying to calm down, I put my hands on top of my head and forced myself to breathe slowly.

  “I told her not to come in here to the boat basin,” Bob went on, “to tie up instead at the old dock at the end of Staniels Street and someone would pick her up.”

  Relief washed over me. “Okay, but I’ve got to go home first and make sure everyone there is—”

  We hurried back up the breakwater together, past Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand and out onto the street. Everywhere people were scanning around and calling to one another, gathering their spouses and kids.

  “Yeah, they’re all safe and sound,” Bob said, and at my curious glance he added, “I was at your house when the first boom went off. I had just talked to Amity Jones a little earlier, see, and—”

  Glancing around, I spotted Amity talking to the drenched young Coastie I’d yanked out of the water. Someone had thrown a blanket over his shoulders and sat him at one of the picnic tables behind Rosie’s.

  “She seems to think you’re quite the hot ticket,” I said. “Like you’re not the country bumpkin cop she was expecting. And what do you know, it turns out you’re cousins, besides,” I added a little acidly.

  Catching my tone, he eyed me sideways. “I might’ve humored her a little on that,” he allowed, and then I got it.

  Because he really was smart, wasn’t he? Oh yeah: “Buttered her up one side and down the other is what I did, actually,” he went on. “Glad to have her expert help on such a terrible crime, etcetera.”

  He looked out over the water toward the black sailboat still anchored off the end of the fish pier. It was strange that her stern still pointed toward us even though the other boats on moorings all aimed the other way, on account of the breeze and outgoing tide.

  Which meant the Jenny was under power, since as Ellie had noted to me earlier and I’d told Amity Jones, a boat needs power—oars, wind, engine, whatever—to have steering ability. And only steering could keep a vessel sitting at right angles to an ebbing tide....

  “Hey, Bob?” I said, noticing something else. “What’s that pale smoke coming out of the . . .”

  Smoke . . . or was it vapor? Whatever it was, little wisps of the stuff hung around the Jenny’s stern.

  “. . . so Amity Jones will maybe give me a hint about which way the wind is blowing, you know?” Bob was saying.

  I’d been foolish to think that flattery or even a family connection would turn his head. “Bob, do you have any idea what’s behind this?”

  I waved at the Coast Guard vessel, still smoking from a ragged hole in its hull; now four blue-uniformed young people were hauling their injured crewmate off the deck, carrying him in an improvised blanket hammock. I couldn’t see the injured man himself, but from the looks on his colleagues’ faces I probably didn’t want to, anyway.

  “No idea,” Bob said, squinting at the black sailboat again.

  The Coast Guard boat was the only vessel in the basin with guns on it, I noticed. But I doubted that they would fire now, all bent and twisted the way they were.

  “I don’t get it at all,” said Bob, still gazing thoughtfully at the Jenny. “Because unless something got planted on Water Street”—something explosive, he meant—“then whatever it was that blew up must’ve come in off the—”

  Water. Right, like maybe a . . . “Hey, Bob?” Something moved on the Jenny’s rear deck again. “Bob, what are those holes?” In the Jenny’s stern, I meant. “Like, are they portholes, or . . .”

  But they were too small for portholes. Suddenly as I spoke, a large gray rubber Zodiac boat pulled from behind the wrecked Coast Guard vessel and headed out of the boat basin at high speed. Two Coasties stood alertly at the Zodiac’s helm, with two more stationed amidships looking wary and holding . . . yikes.

  “Hey, Bob, those guys on the Zodiac have got—”

  “Yeah,” said Bob, pulling out his radio. “Guns. Big ones, too.”

  One of the Coasties shouted through a bullhorn. In response a puff of smoke erupted from one of the small holes in the Jenny that I’d just been considering.

  A line of deceptively small splashes zipped one after another across the water, stopping just short of the Zodiac. The Coastie with the bullhorn put it down fast; then the Zodiac fired something at the Jenny’s hull, a bigger shot than whatever the schooner had.

  Splinters flew, and a wide white gouge showed in the vessel’s dark paint. In the next instant one of those stern holes made a sort of pfft! sound, and an instant later a loud boom erupted from somewhere on Water Street.

  “Damn,” Bob said, and ran toward the mayhem, leaving me alone.

  Six

  Clattering down the metal ramp again, I slammed onto the wooden dock at the foot of it and rushed to the end of the nearest finger pier. No more explosions came from Water Street, only the sound of cars starting and pulling out as people evacuated downtown as fast as they could.

  Meanwhile, Ellie might’ve told Bob Arnold that she’d take the Bayliner over to the Staniels Street pier. But I knew Ellie and I didn’t believe it; for one thing, she’d have had no way to get back to town from there and wouldn’t want to wait for a ride.

  And anyway, even with Lee aboard, thinking that Ellie was going to navigate away from whatever was going on down here was ridiculous. She’d told Bob what he wanted to hear, was all, and then she’d have put Lee ashore somewhere safe before coming to where the action was.

  But now I was getting worried; she’d had plenty of time to get here even with a stop to drop Lee off. Down on my knees on the pier, I inched out and craned my neck sharply to look out around the end of the breakwater.

  To the east lay the island of Campobello, about a mile distant; to the north, the Cherry Island lighthouse strobed faithfully even in daytime. Beyond, Head Harbor Passage spread choppy and blue in the distance, but there was no Bayliner out there anywhere that I could see, either.

  Maybe if I inched myself farther out on the dock, I’d be able to see more toward the south end of the bay. . . .

  Of course there was also a risk that a big fishing boat would come along the end of the breakwater at the wrong moment, just as one of them had earlier, and clip my head off as easily as lopping a flower off the end of a stem.

  But at the moment I hardly cared; I’d have tried calling Ellie, but I still hadn’t found my phone, and if I didn’t see her soon I would have to find a boat that could go out and search for her.

  As I thought this, Tim Franco scrambled off one of the fishing boats tied to a pier and hotfooted it up the metal ladder to the breakwater’s concrete deck, too intent on some errand or other to bother with the ramp.

  Personally, I wouldn’t climb one of those ladders if a whole crew of pirates was after me with drawn swords. But the work on the fishing boats didn’t let up even for explosions, apparently.

  Still clad in the red swim trunks and U Maine sweatshirt he’d been wearing when we towed him in from Head Harbor Passage earlier, he trotted down the breakwater to the street, then turned left toward downtown. I could ask him, I supposed, to take me out on the water to look for Ellie in his little boat.

  That is, if I was willing to trust myself to that fuel pump of his. Even I wasn’t ready for that much adventure quite yet, though, so instead I squinched myself farther along the dock’s edge until my head was all the way out over the water, and then even a little more until my shoulders and half my chest were sticking out over the waves, too.

  Any farther and I’d overbalance myself and fall in. But from where I was—balanced precariously, my gut muscles getting a workout because I had to stay stiff as a board to keep my upper body from collapsing downw
ard—I could see down the bay.

  Almost. A little more and I’d have a good view all the way to Lubec. So I inched forward a little farther, and—darn, maybe now it was too far, since suddenly I was way, way out there, with only my hip bones in solid contact with the dock planks.

  Still, from here I could glimpse . . .

  Nothing. No boat showed through the whitecaps’ snowy foam or the shimmery mists above. Not Ellie’s familiar Bayliner or any others. And then as if to compound my disappointment, I realized:

  I’d been able to squinch myself out here, all right, wiggling forward on my belly an inch at a time until my head, shoulders, and torso were extended out over the waves.

  Squinching backward, however, was another matter. An impossible matter, as it turned out, because there wasn’t enough of my body left on the dock planks to squinch with.

  “Oof,” I said, and then, “Uh, hello? Anybody?”

  But no one was around. Tim Franco was long gone on whatever errand he’d looked so urgent about, and everyone else I could see was either up on the street or way over on the far side of the breakwater, dealing with the shot-up Coast Guard cruiser.

  Meanwhile, those gut muscles I mentioned, the ones that held me stiff as a board so that I could stick out off the end of the dock’s planks? Well, they were getting tired. Any moment they were going to fail me; in fact, the pain already knifed through my middle and back, rising rapidly to the level of a scream.

  But I couldn’t do that, either; right now if I moved so much as a muscle the wrong direction, I’d end up in the drink. And although I could swim, the water was very cold and the dock pilings were seaweed-slimed; I couldn’t promise myself that I could get out without help.

  So I was stuck and on the point of collapsing, the upper half of my body already angled unwillingly ever closer to the waves.

  Finally I closed my eyes and sucked in a breath, preparing for my face to go under. There were no good options available, but maybe I could kick-and-flail my way over to the boat ramp and crawl up to shore.

  Maybe.... A wave slopped up over my nose, startling me. I gagged on salt water, felt more cold waves, and—

  Somebody grabbed my feet. “Jake!” cried a familiar voice.

  I let myself be dragged backward, trying and failing to protect my already-scraped middle from the rough edges of the dock’s planks. Finally I slid back up onto the dock itself, choking and gasping and spitting out globs of thick, slippery seaweed.

  “Jake, what in the world do you think you’re doing? You could have drowned! If I hadn’t come along you’d have . . .”

  It was Ellie’s voice, blowing off steam from the fright I’d just given her. But she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten a scare. Gasping and with my heart hammering the inside of my chest, I rolled over and sat up.

  “Where’d you come from?” I demanded right back at her. “For Pete’s sake, I thought you must be—”

  I waved out at the blue water, for which I’d just acquired a new, even-healthier respect than before.

  “I tied up at the Chowder House,” she said, meaning the dock where the shoreside eatery’s customers could arrive by water, “and sent Lee home from there.”

  Just as I’d thought. She’d been out there on the water, all right, just not while I was looking. I struggled to my feet.

  “Look at you,” Ellie said scoldingly, taking my arm. “Wet and cold . . . come on, though, we’ll go up to the Moose and get some nice hot coffee into you . . .”

  Yeah, sure we would, I thought woozily. My head thudded dully where I’d bonked it the night before on the rocks at the campgrounds.

  “. . . and you’ll be fine,” Ellie said as I let her guide me along the floating dock and then up the metal gangway to the breakwater’s deck.

  At the top, an Eastport squad car with its light bar flashing was parked slantwise across the pavement, blocking access to the outer part of the breakwater. Armed Coast Guard personnel stood sentry at their guard house and gate entrances.

  “Wow,” I said, gazing dazedly at them. “They’re not fooling around, are they?”

  A helicopter whap-whapped overhead. A National Guard group had been training in nearby Quoddy Village and they were arriving now, too, jumping out of their vans and ready to go in their combat gear.

  “No kidding,” said Ellie, pointing at the water. From down the bay a squadron of fishing boats still steamed purposefully toward Eastport. They all had marine-band radios, naturally, and by now they’d have heard about what’d happened just as Ellie had; her radio was still working if you smacked it hard enough, I gathered. If not, she wouldn’t have gone out.

  Probably it would wait until she really needed it and then break for good, I thought pessimistically as we hurried along Water Street toward the shop. I looked around for Amity Jones but didn’t see her. I did see our poor blast-damaged Chocolate Moose sign, now missing one of its googly eyes and both buckteeth.

  “Oh,” Ellie said softly, staring at the shattered window beneath the ruined sign.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re going to have to get some plywood.” And after that about a thousand bucks’ worth of glass . . .

  I peered through the empty frame, sighing at the mess in there. The rest of the shops at our end of the block were damaged, too, and a few of the proprietors were walking around looking stunned.

  Luckily, all our baked goods were still in the cooler in the kitchen. And although the festival would obviously have to be put on hold, very soon more people would be down here, wouldn’t they?

  Covering windows, sweeping up bits of glass, and putting things to rights . . . it would take a lot of work, fueled by—

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” We made our way into the shop.

  The bell over the door tinkled forlornly. Glass crunched under our feet. “Oh, you bet I am,” said Ellie.

  “We’ll get out the biggest coffee urn and the extension cord, gather up the doughnuts and the . . .”

  Back in the kitchen, everything looked normal except for the yellow police tape still stretched over the cellar entrance. I opened the cooler and found that in our absence, Mika must’ve been down here baking even more:

  Another big batch of chocolate doughnut muffins, four trays of chocolate snickerdoodles, enough Toll House cookies for an army, and a large mocha sheet cake with fudge-nut frosting sat under the cooler lights, all positively radiating deliciousness.

  “. . . and we’ll set up a table right out on the street,” Ellie said determinedly, unwilling to let all those expensive ingredients go to waste just because the pirate festival was postponed.

  Besides, people were going to be hungry. So we got to work: trays, a cash box, the power cord, and a table strong enough to hold that coffee urn, for starters. We got it all ready to move out onto the sidewalk, not rushing but not wasting time, either.

  Neither of us brought up Henry Hadlyme’s murder. I didn’t even mention Amity Jones. Instead for an hour or so we put all that aside to focus on what we could understand: chocolate and all the delicious items you could create with it, and how we could best help after the terrible thing that had happened.

  But finally: “They’re going to make us leave sooner or later, you know,” I said. We were in the kitchen, gathering up the napkins and paper coffee cups with our trademark moose printed on them to put on the sidewalk table.

  “The police,” I went on, “they’ll say it’s dangerous, that the boat might shoot at us again, or—”

  “Or what?” It was Amity Jones standing behind me in the kitchen doorway. I hadn’t heard her come in.

  She held out the little bell that had hung over the door. “Found this on the floor.”

  More likely she’d spotted it and plucked it from its hook before its silvery jingle could betray her. That was my theory, anyway.

  “Can we help you with something?” I snapped. I was not in the mood for strangers, and especially not ones whose motives were murky.

  She shr
ugged. “No. I was hoping I could help you.”

  She waved toward the store’s damaged front section. We hadn’t even swept up the broken glass yet.

  “Anyway, you’re right, the county sheriff’s deputies are going to clear everyone out of downtown,” she said. “But if you two want to stay, I can say I need to question you here on the premises.”

  I still didn’t trust her. She’d had my guard lowered earlier, sure, but upon reflection even her story about being Bob Arnold’s cousin sounded fishy to me. And that business about her visiting here a week earlier just by coincidence?

  Yeah, that too, now that I thought about it. “I saw you reviving that Coast Guard guy,” she said. “Nice job.”

  Ellie glanced curiously at me. “I just sat him up and smacked him,” I told her. “He spit up the water he’d swallowed on his own.”

  Just about the last thing I wanted was to be made out as some kind of hero; all I really wanted was to be home in bed.

  Or under it, where it was dark; my head was killing me. I got a headache pill from the cabinet over the sink; swallowed it with more fresh coffee, which was bliss; then stepped outside with Amity Jones right behind me.

  On the sidewalk I let her help me unfold our long table and set it up. “So what are they saying?” I asked her. “The cops, I mean, about what happened.”

  “Nothing. So far, nobody’s got a clue what’s going on.”

  I shook out a red-checked tablecloth and spread it over the long table. Out on the breakwater, men were using a crane to position huge concrete barriers to block off vehicle access.

  “SWAT team is coming. They’ve got an armored truck and some, uh, weapons. Larger”—Amity Jones specified delicately—“weapons.”

  To blow that damned black-painted boat out of the water with, I hoped, stretching out the orange extension cord. A sheriff’s squad car rolled slowly down the street toward us as I worked, and Amity stepped out to talk to its driver briefly.

  Afterward the car rolled on by without stopping, its driver not even giving me any side-eye. I faced Amity questioningly.