Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  “So, she shot at us,” I said while chopping candied ginger into slivers. Now that I’d had a chance to think about it, I was more shaken by the event than I’d realized. “With a shotgun.”

  “Yes. She just missed us,” Ellie replied somberly as she got out the butter and eggs. “Or someone did. So now the question is—”

  “Ellie, the question is whether we should go on with any of this at all,” I interrupted, because I wanted to keep myself out of a jail cell, sure, but not at the cost of my friend’s life.

  Or my own, even. “I mean, come on, someone shot at us—”

  “Who shot at you?” Bob Arnold stood in the kitchen doorway. We hadn’t heard him come in. I made a mental note to put the little bell back up over the door as soon as possible.

  “Who?” Bob repeated the word pleasantly but his round pink face didn’t match his tone. He wanted answers, he wanted them now, and—

  “I’m not kidding. I want to know who shot at you, I want to know why, when, where, and how”—he took a breath—“and if either of you knows anything else about any of this whole damned-fool mess that you haven’t been telling me, I want to know that, too.”

  He was wearing his blue uniform, boots, and all of his duty-belt paraphernalia, including his sidearm.

  Especially his sidearm, actually. “I mean,” he finished, “like right-the-hell now.”

  Even though he didn’t look much like a tough cop with that thinning blond hair and those pink rosebud lips of his, when he wanted to, Bob Arnold could be very persuasive.

  “Or maybe I should just run the both of you in for obstructing,” he added with a frown.

  He was our friend, but right now he was absolutely all business, and we could forget about letting anything slide even an inch. And just nearly getting shot drains a person emotionally, as it turns out; I still felt as if I’d had a large hole blown through me, frightwise.

  “Okay,” I sighed, glancing at Ellie, who nodded agreement. So she got him some coffee from the fresh pot she’d started the moment we’d walked in here, and I got him a piece of fudge cake from the few left in the display case, which by a miracle had not shattered.

  And while he devoured what was probably the first solid food he’d had since breakfast, we told him the whole story: about how we’d searched Lionel’s cottage and Hadlyme’s RV, about finding the birth certificate and photograph, and about our visit to Karen Carrolton’s rustic compound way out in the puckerbrush.

  “So you think the girl in the picture got abandoned in Eastport by Hadlyme twenty years or so ago,” he said. “Then she fell off the ferry. Or jumped or got pushed, whatever, and now you think that back then has something to do with this here now,” he summed up neatly.

  “Yes,” I said, using a wooden spoon to cream finely minced candied ginger into some butter, along with a cup of sugar.

  “We think it must,” said Ellie, “because first of all, obviously Jake didn’t kill him, which means that someone else did.”

  I loved her for saying this. “And,” she went on, “it had to be someone with a motive, also obviously, and here is one: somebody here with a reason to hate Hadlyme, and if you ask me the guts to do it.”

  Karen Carrolton, she meant, and I couldn’t deny that all of that was true, but—

  “Karen doesn’t know her ass from page eight,” Bob said flatly, holding out his cup for more coffee.

  Ordinarily Ellie might’ve let him get his coffee himself, but right then it felt good to have a cop sitting there in the shop with us. We’d serve him coffee, he’d protect us . . . hey, it worked for me.

  “I mean, I like Karen,” he added, sipping. “But you just can’t believe everything she says.”

  Sighing, he put the cup down. “But let’s say for argument if it did happen, then it all must’ve been just before you moved here, that right, Jake? And Ellie, I figure that’s when you’d have been away at school?”

  Ellie nodded. Her boarding school career had lasted only two semesters; after that, as she’d described it, she’d never looked for happiness beyond her own backyard again.

  “Well, I’ll ask around about it,” he allowed reluctantly, “but I’m telling you, if she’s firing off shotguns at people, then she’s gotten even wackier out there in the woods than I realized, so don’t get your hopes up.”

  He harrumphed, ending discussion on the subject. “Anyway, I want to know more about this shooting business.”

  She hadn’t seemed that wacky to me—not until the gunfire part of the program, anyway. But who knew what info might get me off the hook, suspicion-of-murder-wise, and hoist the real killer onto it?

  So while Ellie and I finished getting those double-chocolate ginger wafers whipped up and into the oven—melted chocolate, eggs, vanilla, and the dry ingredients—we told him about Karen Carrolton being armed when we got to her place.

  “But once we introduced ourselves, she got comfortable with us and so on, we didn’t feel threatened,” I added.

  Bob raised one eyebrow.

  “Well, not until the end,” I corrected myself. “I’d asked her some questions she didn’t like, I guess.”

  I went on beating flour, baking powder, soda, and salt into the chocolatey mixture in the bowl. “When the shooting started. But . . .” I hesitated. “But before that there was a car. A white car, it came up behind us very fast on our way to Karen’s.”

  So the white car’s driver couldn’t have known yet where we were going. “Maybe there’s no connection,” I added, not believing it. But how could there be? Ellie hadn’t even told me where we were going, I thought, which was when it finally dawned on me that somebody had been following us.

  Bob sighed as he got up. “I haven’t seen any car like that out here on the island. You didn’t get a plate number?”

  I shook my head; Ellie, too. “No, there wasn’t time.”

  “And if I ask Karen about shooting at you, she’ll just deny it,” Bob pronounced with a grimace. “I swear she’d take the bull in the china shop by the horns, throw him into the glassware just to hear the crash,” he went on, pausing in the shop’s shattered doorway.

  He went on: “Fact is, the only illegal stuff in that story you two just told me is the illegal stuff you did yourselves.”

  Searching people’s cabins, rooting through their mobile homes . . . His pale blue eyes fixed on me.

  “And none of it’s going to save you from an arrest warrant once Amity Jones collects a case against you, talks to a D.A.”

  Hope pinged me. He didn’t sound very friendly toward Amity Jones. Earlier he’d seemed more neutral about her, but now . . . what the heck, I gave it a shot.

  “So,” I began tentatively, “do you . . . are you sure you have to tell her about it? The illegal stuff, I mean.”

  Another snort. He eyed me sternly. Of course he would tell her, why wouldn’t he? But then, “Nah,” he said.

  He shook his head ruefully, as if even he couldn’t believe it. “I ought to. It’s my job to, and it’d serve you right if I did, you pulling a bunch of stupid stunts like that.”

  He was getting wound up just thinking about it. “Did either of you even think about how somebody might get there ahead of you? And catch you there, and maybe decide to get rid of you?”

  At the campgrounds, he meant. “No,” I said. “We didn’t think much about that. Not in advance, anyway.”

  I stopped because something else had just then occurred to me, too. Before I could say so, though, Bob made a face of disgust.

  “Of course you didn’t think about it in advance. Do you ever?”

  “Well—” I began, because sometimes we did. Not very often, I had to admit, but . . .

  Bob cut me off again. “And like that wasn’t enough, the next thing you do is go tear-assing off into the woods, meet up with Karen Carrolton and her shotgun, and she nearly blows your brains out . . .”

  “Bob,” I interrupted him firmly. “Now that you mention it, I’m not a hundred percent s
ure she’s really the one who . . .”

  But he’d already stopped talking and was frowning. Something about that last part hadn’t sounded quite right to him, either.

  “Yeah, well, just stay away from her, okay?” He backpedaled a little. “What happened to her niece was twenty years ago, if it did, and it could be that Henry Hadlyme had nothing to do with it at all.”

  He was cooling down a bit. “But like I said, I was away in the service, deployed. And anyway, I don’t see how Karen Carrolton could be involved in all this business going on now.”

  He gestured at the empty window frame, the street outside with dusk beginning to darken it, and the water beyond, the dark sailboat sitting there, though we couldn’t see the boat from this vantage point in the store.

  “You’re right,” I conceded, “she’d had to have hitchhiked into town, gotten herself and him into our cellar just at the right moment, and stabbed him to death with a cutlass that belongs to Wade.”

  “And how would she have gotten that? Not to mention the stuffed parrot,” Ellie put in. “I mean, how would she even get—?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bob said, pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly. “Or arrange to have Eastport attacked from the water, for Pete’s sake.”

  He picked up a chocolate doughnut from the plate of them that Ellie had quietly brought out and applied himself to it.

  Chewing, he continued, “State cops have ammunition experts here trying to figure out what kind of ammo could explode like that,” he said around the last of the confection.

  “Wait a minute, what?” I said. “They think the sailboat and the explosions are somehow connected to Henry Hadlyme’s . . . ?”

  Bob sighed heavily. “I don’t know what they think. They’re not running everything they do past the local police chief, believe it or not,” he added sarcastically.

  He licked chocolate off the tip of his finger. “But a very smart man once said that coincidence means you’re not paying attention to the other half of what’s happening, and I’ve never forgotten it.”

  I looked at Ellie, and she looked at me. He had a point, that maybe we hadn’t given the idea enough thought.

  “Have they found out whose boat it is yet?” I asked, because the answer to that would go a long way toward sorting this all out.

  Bob shook his head. “Maybe there’s some paperwork on the boat that says, but getting on is still a no-go.”

  Getting up, he let Ellie put a white paper bakery bag full of more doughnuts into his hands. “State folks are right about not wanting to trigger more gunfire, though,” he went on, “or anything else.”

  He cast a sour glance at the dusk gathering outside. “Not too much damage yet,” he went on, “but we’ve got some pretty old structures here, not built to modern standards in the first place, and now the brickwork’s fragile, besides.”

  Pushing a few strands of hair back from his high forehead unhappily, he added, “Another barrage of whatever that ammo is could take down a row of buildings.”

  Or start a fire, I realized with a shiver, and if that happened the entire downtown could go up before anyone could do much about it.

  “Whole damned vessel could be wired like a booby trap for all we know,” he finished before swallowing the last of his coffee.

  “Anyway, you asked me, so I’ll answer. I’m telling our visiting state homicide cop exactly zilch about what you’ve just told me.”

  Relief washed over me that he wasn’t going to rat us out to Amity Jones for meddling in her investigation.

  “’Cause, yeah, she floated me a tale about us being cousins,” he said as he moved toward the door. “And maybe it’s so. Lotta people in Maine are related to one another.”

  Maine family names were linked all the way back to the early 1800s; it was what made Amity Jones’s kinship tale so plausible.

  “But even if we are related, I still think she’s just trying to get me to tell her things,” he said from where he stood at the empty window, gazing out to where it was getting dark.

  Not dark dark, but shadowy enough so that even when I stepped out past him into the street it was hard to catch sight of the Jenny. Her murky shape in the harbor blended with the fast-deepening hue of the waves so thoroughly that she’d become invisible.

  Or . . . had she? I squinted puzzledly as Bob went on. “Uh, Bob?”

  But he didn’t hear me. “Whatever she says, what she thinks is that the local cop’s too dumb to live and she’s got me wound around her little . . . Hey.” He interrupted himself as he caught sight of what I was watching.

  Down the street, things were moving, armored vehicles jockeying themselves around as if getting into position for something. Radios crackled, men called out to one another, and quite a few previously unseen law-enforcement personnel began scurrying around until all of them were inside the vehicles.

  “What the hell?” Bob pronounced as the vehicles began pulling out, a parade of them rolling by the Moose, turning onto Washington Street, and rumbling uphill on their way out of downtown.

  When they had all gone and we could see across the street to the water again, a set of enormous floodlights on the breakwater now illuminated the dark waves.

  “Wow,” I said as Ellie came out to stand beside me, wiping her hands on a clean dish towel.

  “Wow,” she echoed. Then: “Listen, about what happened back there at Karen’s place.”

  “Yeah.” I’d been so shaken up by Karen’s shotgun—if it had been hers—that I never asked Ellie why she’d been in such a hurry to leave.

  Bob had already set off down the block toward where a few of the state cops were still milling around, talking on cell phones or into their radios and getting themselves ready to leave, too, apparently.

  “You looked around Karen’s yard and the outbuildings and so on, I assume,” I said, and Ellie nodded.

  “And something about what you found—”

  Once Ellie made her discovery, whatever it was, we’d gotten out of there like our hats were on fire and our backsides were catching, as Bella would’ve put it.

  She nodded again. She had her bag over her shoulder, I noticed—the same one she’d been carrying out at Karen Carrolton’s.

  “So what’d you find there?” I asked. “I mean, come on, do I have to guess, or—?”

  She pulled something from the tote bag: a pirate mask. The dark arched eyebrows, hash mark scars, and thin red lips drawn back in a leering grin were the same as I’d seen on the mask worn by the driver of the white sedan that had menaced us earlier.

  “Oh,” I said softly. “So unless this is yet another coincidence, whoever was in the white car must’ve followed us to—”

  “Or was on his way there, anyway,” said Ellie. “Which means maybe Karen Carrolton really is in on all this bad business somehow, even if she wasn’t the one who killed Hadlyme.”

  Just then a straggler from the now-postponed pirate festival staggered by with a hook sticking out of one ragged sleeve and a rum bottle clutched in his other hand; a fake gold tooth gleamed from his grin, and a plumed hat sat crookedly on his head.

  “Ahoy!” he shouted at the dark water. Across the bay, the lights on Campobello had begun glimmering in the dusk. “Ahoy, there!”

  But only a distant foghorn answered, moaning a warning at a fog bank now blurring the horizon to the south.

  A bell buoy clanked, and down in the boat basin a diesel engine idled grumblingly. The evening’s last few gulls sailed in, crying and circling to settle for the night in their roosts under the wharves.

  But no anchor chain rattled and no small noisy waves slopped the sides of the mysterious dark sailboat Jenny.

  Not here, anyway; in the spot where she’d floated all day in the harbor, only an unbroken expanse of dark water remained.

  The Jenny was gone.

  * * *

  “Easy,” said Wade at our dinner table after Ellie had dropped me off. “After dark they could get out of the harbor with no trouble.�
��

  He drank some beer. “Drop the lines, start the engine, is all.”

  “But wouldn’t somebody hear them?” Sam objected, forking a slice of meat loaf onto his plate.

  It was leftover meat loaf, but the way Bella made it—sliced, with leftover gravy poured over it, then baked again until the meat loaf sizzled and the gravy bubbled—that stuff was heaven.

  I ate a bite of my mashed potatoes, then another. After the day I’d had and the little real food I’d eaten, it was a wonder I wasn’t just shoveling it into my mouth with both hands.

  “Ellie said there was a diesel engine idling down in the boat basin,” my father remarked. “Could’ve masked the Jenny’s.”

  Wade nodded, forking up some more steamed green beans from fresh out of the garden, so delicious you could eat them like candy.

  “Could ask Tim Franco. He’s always down at the boat basin or on a boat. Back in town, I noticed. Maybe he knows something about it.”

  Bella nodded. “I know his grandmother. I saw her in the IGA today, and she said that he’s back. He had work for a week, but then . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, perhaps echoing Tim’s grandmother’s disappointment. Then Mika piped up from where she sat patiently encouraging her toddler son to eat some of his yummy meat loaf.

  “Why can’t he keep a job?” she asked as Ephraim turned away, wrinkling his nose.

  She hadn’t known Tim for years the way we all had. Everyone liked him, but . . .

  Wade spoke up. “Tim gets . . . bored,” he said gently. “Hard enough to find work in our”—he put a twist on the words—“economically depressed area.”

  Oh, it was that, all right. People worked hard and helped one another out, but there wasn’t much spending cash floating around.

  But Tim was a special case: a good starter-outer but with no grit for the daily grind once the novelty wore off, and as I’d heard from his own mouth, with not much insight into the problem, either.

  As a result, he never had money and always had grievances on the topic. I put some blueberry chutney on my meat loaf.

  “Surely the Coast Guard will find them and apprehend them, though,” I said, returning to the subject of the Jenny. “Now that they’re not sitting there threatening the downtown.”