Mousse and Murder

by Elizabeth Logan

  I extracted my jacket and keys from the back of the kitchen and headed for the back door. As I approached the exit, I heard Bert take the opportunity to engage in a game of punk-the-tourist.

  The punk always started with a question from a customer, this time one of the young boys.

  “Are there any elk in Elkview?” He smirked, unaware of what was coming, thinking he was the first to ask the question.

  “There’s one in the booth behind you,” Bert said.

  Before they could think about it, both boys gasped and jerked their heads around. Then they laughed, but not as hard as their parents.

  At least some people were having fun.

  FOUR

  My Outback still had that new-car smell. I’d had to wait for my color of choice, black, or “crystal black,” as the dealer called it. I could have had a white vehicle immediately, but even the salesman laughed at that idea for driving in Alaska. Unless you didn’t care that you might lose your car in a snowstorm, a possibility any time except the three summer months, white was a ridiculous idea.

  I took my usual route home, through the main shopping area of Elkview. At another hour of the day, old Lucas would have been sitting on his porch, freezing, but unable to give up his people watching. His souvenir shop sold nuggets, antler buckles, Native American crafts, I SCALED DENALI shirts, quilts, assorted antiques, and maps.

  For an extra dollar you could buy a map that was marked up by Lucas himself, with suggestions for where to see an elk; how to navigate ice; what the best turnoffs were if you were hungry, thirsty, or ready for a spectacular view of Denali itself. I’d lost track of how much Lucas charged for taking your photo with your head through a hole in a board, kissing an elk or a moose, or driving a dogsled.

  I passed more gift shops on both sides of the broad street, made broader for lack of sidewalks. Who wanted a curb, a hidden stepping hazard when the snow came and blanketed the town? As I drove by my go-to coffee shop, I could have sworn I smelled Aly’s famous Nutella crepes. Oliver had once brought a container of the crepes back to the Bear Claw and tried to reverse engineer the recipe, to no avail. Not even a generous pour of birch syrup could save Oliver’s version. I didn’t like competing with our local businesses and had been glad that Oliver’s experiment failed.

  It was not a good idea to think of Oliver while driving on the main road, even though the street was deserted. I took a left at the adults-only explorer’s shop, where every sharp instrument known to climbers was for sale. The side street was easier to navigate, without all the paraphernalia left out by shop owners on the main road—broken wagon wheels, flags, sawed-off barrels, bushel baskets, oversize wood carvings. All odd pieces that passed for lawn decorations and were often left out all night.

  My small house was on a lane parallel to the main shopping street, lined with western hemlock trees. I’d grown up in a four-bedroom, two-story Elkview rarity, where I kept expecting the baby sister or brother who was never to be. Now, every so often, my parents would talk about how they needed to downsize, but it never happened, and once I moved back to town they didn’t even pretend anymore. They assumed I’d eventually move back into my old bedroom. I tried not to dwell on the idea that it might be up to me to populate the old homestead.

  I rounded the corner onto my street, eager to get home to Eggs Benedict, who responded to both his formal name and his nickname. I expected him to bound from his likely spot on the top shelf of my bookcase as soon as I opened the door. If he didn’t, I’d have to think twice about his loyalty.

  I passed the one house that stood between the corner and my driveway, picturing my neighbor Earlene and her family in presumably worry-free sleep. I prepared myself to greet Benny and talk to him, get him up to speed on Oliver’s passing, seek his advice on how to deal with the upsetting situation.

  I had a long list of questions for him: When and how to tell Mom? How to locate Oliver’s family? Who had killed him? That was a big one.

  And an even bigger one: did Trooper Graham really consider me a suspect? No, I convinced myself. The only reason the trooper had asked me to stay in town was that he might need my input. Which was why I needed to gather my wits and pull together all I knew about Oliver’s personal life. First thing tomorrow, I decided, I’d go through the files in Mom’s home office and find Oliver’s job application. Mom never threw anything out, so I was sure there was a folder somewhere from his first day on the job.

  I was surprised to realize how little I knew about my head chef. We overlapped at the diner when I was thirteen and he was in his early thirties, so we didn’t exactly become friends. We almost never interacted outside of the diner, except for occasional chance meetings downtown. And now we never would, I thought, a lump forming in my throat.

  Oliver lived on the outskirts of town, near the airport, while I lived close to the main streets. I recalled a time when a man claiming to be Oliver’s brother came to the Bear Claw looking for him. Of course, I wouldn’t give him Oliver’s address, but I did share his expected work hours.

  When the man finally came in at a time when Oliver was in the Bear Claw’s kitchen, the two had an argument that was over-the-top volatile, even by Oliver standards. Other than that incident, I’d never met any of Oliver’s relatives, if indeed that man was one. The alleged brother was tall, thin, and fair-skinned, none of which could have been said of Oliver, who would never answer any questions about the man.

  I’d met Oliver’s current girlfriend only once besides this afternoon. She’d come to pick up Oliver one of the times his van broke down. I was sure Trooper would have figured that out by now, although I didn’t know when “by now” was, since I didn’t know when exactly Oliver’s body had been discovered. Or by whom. Or where. Tammy had mentioned a police radio saying “outside the town.” Elkview was less than thirty square land miles. According to the tour books I’d had to study for my visitors’ center jobs, the state of Alaska registered more than six hundred thousand square miles. That was a lot of “outside the town.”

  I was ready for the deep sigh of relief I released when I pulled into my driveway. Home at last. But my headlights landed not on my pale green stoop, newly painted for the coming summer months, but on a man, an official guardian of the Forty-Ninth.

  Trooper Cody Graham.

  Trooper was perched on the edge of the Adirondack chair on my porch, bent over, his winter uniform jacket zipped to his neck, his hat on his head. Where was his vehicle? The one with the cartoon bear’s head on the door. Probably parked around by my back door. Did he think I’d flee if I saw the patrol car out front? Start a wild car chase through Elkview and out to where I had a getaway bush plane waiting?

  “Trooper,” I said, exiting my vehicle.

  “Charlotte.”

  Charlotte. This was not a social call, then. As if the hour for the visit wasn’t my first clue. He hadn’t come looking for a leftover bear claw. He wasn’t shivering, so he couldn’t have been sitting out very long in what my car’s dashboard said was twenty-three-degree weather.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Pretending everything was normal. It was one thirty in the morning and my chef was dead, murdered, but the state trooper and I were going to have coffee and a snack.

  “Sounds good.”

  So far, so good. No handcuffs clanked, awaiting my wrists. He didn’t read me my rights. We stepped inside. For all I knew, Trooper had already been inside. I still did not lock my door very often, though an increase in the tourist trade only a block over had changed the habits of many Elkview residents.

  “Can’t trust the rabble from those states,” old Lucas would sometimes say about the people who kept him in business. Never mind that Alaska had been one of those states since 1959, ushered in by President Eisenhower. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Lucas had been one of those who had opposed the propositions for statehood.

  As I’d hoped, Benny was wai
ting on top of my bookcase and leapt down. He made his way to my ankles. He had clearly heard my car and was ready for some serious petting, which usually started with his own expert weaving around my legs. He knew Trooper Graham well enough not to be intimidated by him. I picked him up, giving him a better shot at crawling around my shoulders. I knew that his automatic feeder still had a good supply of food, but with my free hand took a can of his favorite meal from the cabinet anyway. Before I headed for the can opener, I held the can up to Trooper in a silent do-you-mind gesture.

  “Go right ahead,” he said. “He’s the mayor, right?”

  “If Talkeetna can have one, why not Elkview?”

  I got Benny settled with his midnight snack. While I got the coffee ready, Trooper and I spent a few minutes rehashing the story of nearby Talkeetna’s famous cat, Stubbs (he who was without a tail), a pale orange tabby who’d reigned as the town’s mayor for twenty years until his death a few years ago. One legend had it that Talkeetna, an unincorporated Census Designated Place, like Elkview, couldn’t come to a consensus on its human representatives, so someone started a write-in campaign for Stubbs.

  “They were all sleazy pols,” Trooper reminded me, naming a few of his favorites.

  “Stubbs won by a landslide.” I laughed. It was nice to have a shared history, especially when entertaining a law enforcement officer about to interrogate you.

  I arranged assorted cookies on a plate, from the enormous batch Mom had made before she left for the cruise. As if I needed another reminder to call her.

  “Told your mother yet?”

  I shook my head no, wondering how Trooper seemed to always be able to zero in on my thoughts. At the moment, that would be a good thing, I reasoned, since he’d be able to see, quote-unquote, that I was innocent of any harm that had come to my chef.

  “I don’t want to ruin her trip.”

  “What time is it there anyway?” he asked.

  I checked my kitchen clock. “Ten hours ahead, so it’s getting toward noon in Germany.”

  “She’s up.”

  I groaned. “So she’ll be getting news on her phone.”

  “But Elkview news?”

  “I think my dad added a Bugle app before they left.”

  Why was I trying to talk myself out of contacting my mother myself?

  “You don’t want her to hear it from someone on the ship. You have no idea how they get news from home. Your mother mentioned that a couple from Palmer would be on the cruise with them, right?”

  “Uh-huh. Stella and Barney Russell. Dad knows him from a conference panel they were on. Then they all got together afterward and have stayed friends.”

  “Palmer’s only about an hour away. If the Russells talk to their family here, there’s a good chance the crime will be part of that conversation.”

  The crime. Panic was on its way. “I need to call them.”

  “And your mother will have your father, plus the Russells, to talk to if she needs that support.”

  “Maybe if I knew more details.” A ploy, but I needed one badly.

  As soon as he’d finished eating, Benny hopped on my lap. He ignored the cookies—second-rate compared to the gourmet meal he’d just consumed—and curled around my torso like a bulletproof vest.

  I noticed Trooper sliding cookie after cookie off the plate and into his mouth and realized he probably hadn’t eaten since that pot pie hours ago. Unlike me, he didn’t work in a diner, able to sneak a slice of meatloaf here and a slab of pie there. And unlike Benny, he didn’t have an automatic programmable feeder available in his office or patrol car. Besides all that, Trooper’s wife, June, a sometime-deputy to her husband, had been out of town for a couple of weeks, visiting relatives on the Panhandle. He’d probably run out of the meals she’d stocked up for him.

  And still he’d let me feed Benny before feeding him. No wonder I had a soft spot for him, even though he’d practically accused me of committing murder.

  Without asking, I journeyed to my fridge, releasing Benny in the process, and brought out everything that was within its best-by date—deli meat, cheeses, crudités. I added bread and condiments and placed the offerings on the table.

  “Now we’re talking,” he said, constructing what my father used to call a Dagwood sandwich in the days before he started counting calories.

  “Does that include you? Talking?”

  “He was found in the bush, away from his house, around three yesterday afternoon.” He took a wide-mouthed bite of what might have been a three-inch-thick sandwich. I tried not to picture what “found in the bush” was like.

  I was grateful, however, to have some real information. If I’d known that all he needed was food, I’d have fed him a lot sooner. “There’s pie, too,” I said.

  He almost smiled. “Doc guessed it happened a couple of hours before he was found.” Another bite of sandwich while I took in this information. Oliver was killed very soon after he left the diner. Stormed out of the diner, I reminded myself. “Covered with a tarp, some branches,” Trooper continued. “Not a big effort to hide him. Probably in a hurry.”

  I gulped, almost sorry I’d asked for details. I let out a long sigh, struggled to keep back tears. “How—?”

  “Doc says it was more than one bullet to his chest. He says someone who was not a good shot.”

  Which might have been anyone over twenty-one in Alaska. We had no other requirements for owning a gun—no permit, no registration, no concealed-carry law, no waiting period for the purchase of a handgun, rifle, or shotgun.

  “You own a gun, Charlie?”

  Again, reading my mind. “No, I don’t.” But thanks for getting back to calling me Charlie. “You know Mom would never allow it.”

  “Gotta ask.”

  “Look, I know I have a short temper. You know that from back when I was too short to get up on the stool by myself.”

  “That I do.”

  “I feel awful, Trooper. I liked Oliver, appreciated his talent, even though we didn’t always see eye to eye.”

  “Like yesterday.”

  “Like yesterday,” I echoed.

  * * *

  * * *

  Trooper hadn’t quite said I was in the clear, but I felt a lot better about my situation than before he’d eaten about two days’ worth of my food. And he hadn’t cuffed me and taken me away with him. He’d offered to stay around while I called my parents, but I was ready to be alone, which meant with just Benny.

  I sat with Benny for a few more minutes, acknowledged to him and me that I was stalling needlessly, and that I owed it to my mom especially to be the one to deliver the bad news.

  I kept Benny on my lap—as if I could send him off if I wanted to—and rehearsed for a bit what I would say. Slipping my hands around in Benny’s fur, in rhythm with his purring, had the calming effect it always did. I put my chin on top of his head for a while, and then I called Mom’s cell.

  “Hi, kid. How are you?” My dad’s voice.

  “Is this a good time to talk for a few minutes?” I asked.

  “We’re in the middle of lunch with the Russells and some other people. Can you call back in a half hour or so?”

  “Sure. This can wait.”

  “Okay.”

  I was about to end the call when I heard my mom in the background. “I’ll take that.” Then, “Sweetie, it’s the middle of the night there. Is something wrong?”

  It was all I needed. I tore through the story, complete with sobs, hardly stopping for a breath. I told her the few facts I knew, leaving out the part where Trooper had asked for my alibi and whether I owned a gun. When my mom ended up comforting me, I figured I was doing something wrong. Oliver had been her friend for many years. I should have been comforting her.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  “You have to help him, Charlie.”

&
nbsp; “What? Who?”

  “Cody. Trooper Graham. You have to help him. He has no staff to speak of, as you know, and you know how much help he’s likely to get from Anchorage, or even Talkeetna, for a crime in Elkview.”

  I let her go on for a while about the low ratio of law enforcement officers to citizens in our state and how our town was safer than only three percent of the cities in the United States. I made it a practice never to argue about statistics, especially with my mom. I resorted to helplessness as a strategy.

  “There’s nothing I can do. I’m not a detective.”

  “You went to law school.”

  “For a year, Mom. Remember?”

  “That’s a year more than anyone else I can think of right now. And you’re smart. You can pay Trooper back for all those math lessons he gave you.”

  “But—”

  “Charlie, there’s nothing I can do now for my friend. And in all those mystery books I read, the detectives always say that you have to get going on solving a murder right away or the trail goes cold.”

  I had to laugh. I knew my mom read a lot, but I didn’t realize that crime novels were featured, or that she’d adopted the jargon of the crime buffs of the world.

  “Who are you and what have you done with my mother?”

  “A girl, even an old one, has to keep her secrets.”

  “Mom—”

  “Just say you’ll try, sweetie. Promise me you’ll try.”

  Of course, I agreed, emphasizing “try.” I explained it to Benny, back on my lap and determined to challenge me for the mug of hot chocolate I’d brought to the rocker, attempting to hit it out of my hand with his soft paw.

  What kind of help could I give Trooper? Mom didn’t seem to know the difference between a criminal investigator and someone who had spent a harrowing year touching on civil procedure, contracts, property law. A whole class on constitutional law, another on legal methods. We covered a lot of ground, but I didn’t remember hearing the word “homicide.” Ever.