Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  “Don’t be silly,” said Ellie. “That’s not going to—”

  “If I’m not,” I persisted as I dripped hot milk into the frosting, loosening it just enough to spread, “then I want you to run the shop, tell Bella she’s in charge of everything at home . . .”

  Bills, taxes, banking, insurances, and all the various permits, licenses, and registrations that Sam and Wade need for their work—all of that was my job in our large, many-faceted household.

  But Bella was smart, and I happened to know she could focus like a laser when the occasion demanded it, so if she had to, she could do it all just as well.

  “. . . and find me a lawyer. A mean,” I emphasized, “lawyer. A lawyer with teeth.”

  Ellie shook her head vehemently, but she didn’t argue anymore. She might not like it, but she knew the lay of the land as well as I did, and it was about to get bumpy.

  “And just tell everyone else at my house to go on doing their part,” I said. “Whatever they’re good at, just pitch in and do it, and what they’re not, let someone else help.”

  Because teamwork was what made our household a success, and it would keep things together in my absence, too, or so I hoped.

  We worked in silence for a while. “But maybe you won’t need to,” I relented when we were finished with our tasks, everything put away, the freshly made baked goods laid in the cooler all ready to be set out tomorrow.

  I switched out the light over the worktable. “Maybe we’ll come up with an answer for what’s going on around here, and that’ll save me a lot of trouble,” I said.

  But I didn’t really believe it. In the faint yellow glow of the small lightbulb over the sink, the bakery’s kitchen was as still as a held breath, all its familiar shapes turned to what Sam used to call night animals.

  I’d always told him they were friendly animals, but now I wasn’t sure. Outside, I stood on the sidewalk while Ellie locked up.

  “You’ve told me many times, though, that it’s good to have a plan for if things don’t work out. Just a backup plan, is all.”

  Ellie looked up, her expression defiant. Her car was still right there, but I’d already told her I meant to walk home; for all I knew, it was the last evening walk I’d be getting for a while.

  But she had other ideas. “You’ll go to jail for that horrible man’s murder,” she said flatly, “when hell freezes over.”

  And that was Ellie. She’d be fierce on my behalf for as long as she could, no question about that. But there wasn’t a thing she really could do about any of it; besides, when I glanced around at an oddly familiar sound coming from down the street, I saw that it was already too late.

  Ellie’s hand was already on the car’s door handle. She squinted toward the odd sound, a liquidy burble that went on repeating itself.

  “What the . . .” Halfway down the block on the sidewalk in front of the Quoddy Crafts store lay a small black object. Trill! Trill! it insisted as I approached it with my heart sinking.

  Lying there all alone as if someone had accidentally dropped it was a cell phone. I grabbed it up.

  My phone; I knew it from the SpongeBob sticker that Ephraim had insisted I put on it. “Hello?”

  The caller ID screen said the caller was unidentified. Then the screen went dark; someone had hung up.

  Water Street was still deserted except for us. I put the phone back into my bag where it belonged and got into Ellie’s car, and the ringing began once more.

  Unidentified, the screen said again. “Who is this?” I demanded into the device. “What do you—”

  “Just listen,” said an unfamiliar voice. “If you want to know what’s going on and find out who murdered the late, unlamented Henry Hadlyme, get onto the Jenny. Do that, and all will be revealed.”

  Ellie backed out and began driving up Water Street. “The Jenny?” I repeated. “But we don’t even know where—”

  The voice hardened. “Just do what I say. Get on that boat and do it soon, unless you like your revelations . . . explosive.”

  The phone went dead. “Damn,” I breathed as Ellie kept driving out Water Street toward the south end of the island, until the pavement ended in a turnaround overlooking the bay.

  “So. My phone wasn’t lost,” I said as the dark water to the north spread out before us. In the distance, a few lights on faraway New Brunswick’s shoreline gleamed.

  “Someone got it either out of my bag or off your boat after I dropped the bag there,” I said.

  Ellie’s nose wrinkled puzzledly. “But why?”

  Good question. What I wanted was a little sign with the answer on it to drop out of the sky. But no sign appeared; instead, out on the water a flotilla was gathering, local boats getting into good viewing spots for the pirate festival’s traditional fireworks show.

  The show had been scheduled for midnight. “Oh, I’d forgotten all about that,” said Ellie when I pointed out the probable reason for all the marine activity.

  “Me too. I guess the state cops must have given the okay for it to go on once the Jenny left,” I said.

  Or possibly, seeing as this was Eastport, where in general the authorities from away could walk east till their hats floated for all we cared, no one had asked.

  Then suddenly the answer did appear; I should wish for things to come to me out of the blue more often, I decided.

  “To get the number,” I said. Once I’d thought of it, it was obvious. “They couldn’t look it up. They got the phone’s number off the phone, then put it where I’d be sure to find it, and then they called me on it.”

  While watching from somewhere nearby to be sure I did find it . . . and I would have, no matter what, I felt certain. Instead of on the street, it would’ve been on my back porch, or on my kitchen table.

  Whoever had just called me on it would’ve made sure of it. “But why not tell us what we’re supposedly going to learn,” I wondered aloud, “not put us through all the trouble and risk of—”

  “Because it’s a trap,” Ellie interrupted. “Baited with a promise of learning who killed Henry Hadlyme, if I’m reading all this right.”

  “Because we’re getting too disruptive? Poking around into too many . . .”

  She turned to me in the gloom of the passenger compartment, her face gravely still.

  “Maybe. But now we need to know what else is going on . . . what’s going to go on. Because you’re sure they said it was an explosive revelation we’d be preventing?”

  Which was when it hit me: the bombs fired earlier off the Jenny. Or they’d been as good as bombs, anyway—that is, explosive.

  She put the car in gear. “Anyway, now we can be sure Hadlyme’s murder and the gunfire from that boat really are connected.”

  The car’s tires squealed as she pulled out. “And it’ll happen again,” she said, “unless we do something to stop it. That boat will be back and it’ll fire those guns again, I’ll bet, and this time . . .”

  Urgency gripped me; what she said made sense. “Right, but do what?”

  Not to mention, How? Ellie drove away from the view of the dark bay, out County Road past the tennis courts and the fire station.

  “And if the cops haven’t found the Jenny,” I went on, “how in the world are we supposed to—”

  At Washington Street she turned right, down toward the harbor again. Here the houses were sprawling old family homes broken up into apartments, their mailboxes hung in rows on the porches.

  In some of the windows, TV screens flickered; others were dark, their tenants tucked up in bed. I wished that I were, too—the inside of my poor aching head already felt as if fireworks were going off in it—but instead, moments later we pulled into a parking spot on the breakwater, high above the boats in the boat basin.

  There weren’t many tied up down there. Instead most boats were out on the water readying for the fireworks, loaded with friends and family all bundled up in warm jackets with life preservers tied over them, waiting for the show to begin.

&n
bsp; “Good,” Ellie commented at the sight of the deserted piers. She turned off the key, then got out of the car and hurried toward the sharply downsloping metal ramp.

  “No one’s around to try to stop us,” she said, starting down the ramp.

  I hustled along behind her, trying to think of an argument that would dissuade her from what she was obviously bent on doing.

  That is, finding and boarding the Jenny. The more I thought about it, the worse an idea it seemed. “Ellie, what about—”

  “Lee’s at a sleepover with her cousins on the mainland,” she recited. “George is in Bangor taking a class for his electrician’s certificate, so no one’s sitting home worrying about me.”

  At low tide, the metal ramp was nearly as steep as a ladder. I put a hand firmly on each rail. Just watching her scampering down ahead of me made me dizzy, until at last with a deep sigh of relief I stepped onto the floating dock.

  The operative word was floating. This naturally caused a lot of swaying, bobbing, and bouncing, and none of those are things I’m good at handling.

  “Yeeks,” I said, and Ellie took my arm, guiding me forward to the finger pier where her own boat was tied. After hopping aboard, she took my hand firmly and yanked me on, too.

  “If I’m right about all this, we’ve got a couple of hours,” she said.

  “Why?” The water rippled and heaved. I found a good sitting spot and plunked myself down on it so as not to topple overboard.

  “I mean, why do we have a couple of hours?”

  A zillion other questions filled my head. Whether I would drown tonight was the first one, of course, but phrases like why didn’t I become something sensible like a lion tamer or a sword swallower were in there, too.

  Meanwhile, Ellie went through her departure routine: turning the batteries on, trimming the engine so that the propeller was all the way down in the water, firing up the GPS screen so we could see where we were going and whether the water underneath us was deep enough, and last but not least, turning up our radio and then smacking it until the speaker spat static before turning it back a little so it was silent.

  Then she turned to me. “So tell me, Jake, if you were going to fire weapons at Eastport and you didn’t want people to realize what was happening right away, when would you do it?”

  Back in the streets somewhere, blocks from the harbor, a cherry bomb popped, and then a second one. And a third. “Ohh,” I breathed, catching on. “I’d do it when there are a whole lot of other . . .”

  My mouth went dry suddenly with the awful likeliness of what she was saying.

  “Other explosions,” I whispered while she busied herself in the boat’s little cabin. She came out clutching a pair of bright orange life jackets and thrust one at me while pulling the other one on herself.

  Next she started the engine, the big Mercury outboard coming to life in a watery rumble on the first key-turn, and finally she hopped back out onto the dock again and cast off the lines.

  One from the bow, the other from the stern. Nervously, I got up. “Ellie, you know I hate being alone on the boat when we’re—”

  “Drop it in reverse,” she snapped, glancing up at the breakwater where we’d parked the car.

  “Besides, never mind that we don’t even know where the sailboat is,” I said, “but if it’s a trap like you think, why are we even—”

  “Jake? Reverse, please. Right now, please. I mean like really right this minute, okay?”

  I still didn’t like it, but I got the message and did it. She already had a hand on the boat’s rail, guiding it away from the dock; then she jumped in.

  The boat was by then moving backward very purposefully. “Um, Ellie?”

  Moving fast. Also, it was dark back there on the water behind us. “Ellie.”

  She was watching the parking area. A car pulled into another of the parking spots up there, its lights strobing the water briefly.

  “Start your turn now,” she said, meanwhile paying a good deal less attention to my predicament than I felt it deserved.

  To the fact, I mean, that we were moving. Backward. With me at the helm, and have I mentioned that I hadn’t done this very often in the dark?

  Never, actually, was the number of times I’d done it. “Now,” Ellie said, and I really had to do something or we’d be on the rocks.

  So I turned the wheel, and you can imagine for yourself the many profanities I uttered while I tried remembering which way to turn it. But at last I guessed correctly and the boat’s stern swung to port.

  “Straighten her out.” She said it absently while fiddling with something in one of the lockers near the engine.

  I obeyed that command, too, and the boat quit turning, only now it was backing toward a forest of dock pilings, as big around as tree trunks and thirty feet tall, and this would have unnerved me even more than I already was except that suddenly two figures got out of the car up on the breakwater, capturing my attention.

  The white car . . . it was a white sedan. Which was when I said the heck with it, shoved the gear shift lever into forward, and hit the throttle hard enough to make Ellie look up in surprised appreciation.

  “You go, girl,” she said approvingly as we . . . well, we didn’t exactly shoot out of the boat basin, but we moved very efficiently past various obstacles: a barge with an industrial crane perched on it; a big concrete block with a massive steel loop set into it, used for tying up really large visiting vessels; some old wharf pilings collapsed teepee-style on top of one another . . .

  A lot of things, in other words, but we didn’t hit any of them, and in just a few moments—even though it certainly seemed like years—we slid smoothly between the massive concrete breakwater and the wooden fish pier out into the dark open water.

  Nine

  Out on the bay, the sky and the water merged: dark above, dark all around. Behind us, Eastport shrank to toy-town size, while across the water on the island of Campobello, TV screens flickered in distant living-room windows.

  I stood at the helm with the cold salty air and the spatters of icy spray striking me in the face, black sky spreading overhead, and a big engine surging with power under my hands. For a moment I felt like a million bucks, as if I could drive the Bayliner all the way to China if I had to.

  Ellie came up behind me suddenly. “Listen, get out on the bow for a while, will you?”

  “Out on . . . what?” But I let her take the wheel.

  “There are lobster buoys out here, remember? They are all over the place just like before, only now in the dark we can’t see them.”

  She handed me the flashlight she’d dug out of the storage bin. “Take this, get out on the bow, and watch for buoys ahead. If you see one, say what o’clock it is. Like, straight ahead’s noon and so on.”

  “Oh,” I said, hefting the flashlight hesitantly; I understood the o’clock part. It was the “out on the bow” part that—

  Oh, what the heck; I’d already nearly scuttled us on the corner of that damned barge, and after all, what was a little more mortal danger among friends, right?

  “I’ll save you if you fall in,” Ellie said, meaning don’t, and I understood; in the cold waters off Eastport, my life jacket probably wouldn’t do me much good, and plucking me out of the water wouldn’t be the problem, anyway. In the dark, finding me would be the problem.

  Still I scrambled out there, stepping along carefully until I was perched as far forward on the front part of the boat as I could get. Think of the flying scene in Titanic and you’ll get the idea.

  Not until I was down on my belly with my head sticking out over the surging water, though, did I realize how crucial my job here really was. There were dozens of buoys out there in the water, each attached by a line to a lobster trap sitting on the bay’s bottom, many fathoms below.

  And snagging a lobster buoy on our propeller was a disaster that I didn’t want to confront right now....

  “Two o’clock,” I called back urgently.

  Ellie chan
ged course and avoided the red-and-green-painted buoy bouncing in the waves, and after that we repeated the process a dozen more times, until my eyes were nearly bugging out of my head.

  Finally only a few lonesome buoys still bobbed like brightly painted bits of mischief, and I made my way back to the cockpit.

  “Everything okay?” I asked. Ellie stood at the wheel, calmly piloting us through the night.

  “So far,” she replied, not very comfortingly. But it was better than nothing, so I went below, where I switched on a few of the cabin lights and plugged our handy little two-cup coffeemaker into the accessory panel.

  Busying myself didn’t make me feel any less anxious, though.

  “So listen. What if it really is a trap?” I handed a steaming mug to Ellie while she steered us I-still-didn’t-know-where.

  “And where are we going, anyway? What makes you think you know where the Jenny might be?”

  “Well, if you were a sailboat,” she replied, “where would you hide? With a lot of other sailboats, that’s where. And with other small boats in general.”

  “Huh?” I drank some hot coffee and felt my brain cells start bouncing around like basketballs until a few of them went through the hoop; painfully, but they did it.

  Then, “Ohhh.” In the salt-smelling darkness and the roar of our engine, we passed the channel marker off Buckman’s Head, a high bluff at the island’s south end. From here we could continue south to the shoreline town of Lubec, or—

  “Skeleton Cove,” I pronounced, and she nodded approvingly; it was a popular anchoring spot for boats that couldn’t—or preferred not to—tie up in the boat basin.

  “All those boats sitting on moorings there,” I said, “you think the Jenny might’ve—”

  “That’s where I’d go,” Ellie agreed, keeping her eyes on the GPS screen as the cross-currents past the channel marker started shoving the Bayliner around.