Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  But we persevered, or I did; Sam took to it as if he’d always been here, buying himself a slicker and some high boots to go with the black oilcloth squall hat he’d acquired at the marine store.

  Meanwhile, I bought plywood, plaster, tools, Band-Aids . . .

  But that’s all in the past. Now, with Sam grown and married, my own life squared away, and the house rehabilitated (by which I mean no longer openly plotting to collapse onto us), I’d needed a new challenge.

  Which turned out to be The Chocolate Moose. It was Ellie’s idea, but I ended up loving the place: creating delicious chocolate treats and selling them to locals and tourists was right up my alley.

  For one thing, it rarely involved guys wearing shoulder holsters; also, a mistake wouldn’t earn me a one-way river trip. After a while I got so I could even look at a bag of concrete mix without breaking out in cold chills; funny how those old memories can stick with you.

  But running the Moose was turning out to be stressful, too, I reflected as Ellie and I hustled back downtown to the Rubber Duck on the morning after Toby Moran was murdered.

  “Why’d Sharon hit the Duck instead of coming up to your house like she said she would?” Ellie wondered aloud.

  Sharon had been so distraught and without other immediate resources, I hadn’t known where to send her but to my own place. But I should’ve known she wouldn’t go; it wasn’t as if we were close pals.

  “I don’t know.” I said. “Marienbad told Bella that Sharon was crying too hard to talk. And,” I added, “drinking too fast.”

  Probably that was why. Bella would’ve given her a whisky or even several if she asked but Sharon didn’t know that. Crossing the street by the cheerfully spouting fountain that was once a public horse trough, we quick-stepped toward the Duck.

  “Anyway, you gather her up and I’ll pay,” I told Ellie when we got there. From what Marienbad had described, it sounded as if Sharon might’ve run up a sizable bar tab.

  Despite the ghastliness of her day so far, I couldn’t imagine what else besides too much liquor would have her weeping into a bowl of the Rubber Ducky’s habitually stale peanuts at this hour of the morning. Or at any time, actually; in Eastport the young teacher was a well-known paragon of all kinds of virtue.

  Except maybe not right this minute, I decided as we pushed open the Duck’s front door and a billow of stale beer fumes hit me in the face. At the bar, a man his forties wearing a shirt-tie-and-vest combo over a pair of brown corduroy slacks stared down into an empty glass.

  “Hi, Norman,” I said, but he didn’t look over at me. Norm McHale was a veterinarian, or he had been until he lost his license; turned out he’d been embezzling heavily from the animal hospital he’d worked at, a crime the licensing board thought worth suspending him over.

  Now he was waiting for an upcoming licensure hearing, to see if he’d get it back. I looked past him to the small wooden table where Sharon sat, drinking. Or she had been; Marienbad had cut her off.

  “Have you heard what they’ve done?” Sharon cried when she caught sight of us.

  She was still wearing the white slacks and pale-pink embroidered T-shirt with a lacy white cotton cardigan thrown over her shoulders, just as she had been when we talked with her in the Moose earlier.

  But the outfit didn’t look sweetly spiffy anymore, and neither did she. Glancing around the Duck’s interior—low, whitewashed ceiling, a long row of windows overlooking the boat basin, masses of paper lanterns in bright colors hanging from the dark, heavy beams overhead—she pounded the table with her fist.

  “. . . not fair. How could they think such a—”

  “Thanks for coming down,” said Marienbad Jones, a handsome, big-mouthed brunette who resembled a ’40s pinup model and had more smarts than your average supercomputer.

  “No problem,” I told her. For her barkeeping duties today, she wore denim shorts and a midriff-baring red halter top with big white polka dots on it, and if you thought her outfit made her vulnerable to any unwanted advances from customers, you’d have thought wrong.

  Because remember that housefly that Sharon wouldn’t have swatted? Splat was its middle name here in the Ducky, and that went double for grabby patrons. Anyway . . .

  “I figured I’d better get her out of here,” the bar owner went on. “She’s done for, and the lunch crowd is due in soon.”

  “Okay,” I told Marienbad, not particularly well pleased to be nominated the drunk rescuer of last resort. Still, this was Sharon we were talking about here, and probably she hadn’t realized how that much Bristol Cream Sherry would affect her.

  But I did, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. “I hear you had a little excitement here last night,” I added, meanwhile sizing up the project of moving Sharon.

  Marienbad grimaced. “That jerk. I don’t see why he couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

  A couple of regulars wandered in looking thirsty and she drew them both draft beers, then went on. “You’d think Sharon was the love of his life or something, the way he wouldn’t just give up on her and move on.”

  She looked sour. “It’s not like he couldn’t find anyone else, he always managed to have a girlfriend.”

  Sharon had said so, too, that Moran was a charmer when he wanted to be. And we all knew his history; just not every single little bit of it, which coincidentally was the amount I thought might come in handy to us now that Andy was under suspicion.

  “So who was the girl before Sharon?” Ellie asked casually.

  “Carrie Allen,” said Marienbad. “And she didn’t get out of it so easily, either, come to think of it. From what I heard, before she got rid of him he’d broken her nose.”

  “Sharon says he harassed her pretty badly,” Ellie put in. “I can’t help wondering if that’s what Toby and Andy Devine got into it about last night.”

  Marienbad nodded grimly. “That’s what it was, all right. Norm can tell you, he was here, and . . . oh, Jenna Waldrop was here.”

  The bar owner shook her head. “Poor Jenna, if I were her I’d want a drink, too. That mother of hers . . . but now that I think of it,” she frowned, “maybe Jenna left earlier? I’m not sure.”

  More customers came in; Marienbad went back behind the bar to serve them. While she was there I looked around some more, noting the emergency exit at the far end of the room.

  It was new. I brought Ellie’s attention to it. “So we’re not the only ones,” she said, sounding vindicated.

  Six months earlier, we’d taken a lot of guff for putting our own emergency door in; it wasn’t even our building, people said. But with our landlord’s happy approval, George had volunteered the labor and afterward we felt better, knowing we could get out in an emergency; now lots of the businesses downtown were doing it.

  “Goes right out onto that fire escape there,” Ellie commented approvingly of the metal structure outside the windows.

  I quietly thanked my stars we hadn’t needed one of those; the cost would’ve been exotic.

  Then Marienbad returned. “So, you going to take her with you?”

  “Yeah, we’ll take her. Let’s get her under the arms,” I told Ellie, and together we hoisted Sharon, guiding her past the rest room doors and the old phone booth toward the exit.

  On the way we passed a supply closet whose open door revealed paper towels, hand soap, a mop bucket, and a clutter of what looked like very large mousetraps.

  “Rats,” said Marienbad darkly, seeing my raised eyebrows. “On a waterfront like this there are always . . .”

  “Oooh,” Sharon moaned wretchedly, so we left the topic of vermin for another day and urged her forward some more. But we’d only gotten to the stairway that led to Marienbad’s living quarters upstairs when the inebriated young teacher’s legs went out from under her and we had to let her down onto a chair.

  “Oh,” she gasped shudderingly. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Her hand reached out blindly; Ellie put a wad of tissues into it. “But have you hear
d?” Sharon demanded again after a long blow. “Have you heard what those awful homicide investigators have done now?”

  She sat up, blinking owlishly at us. “Jenna was right! I was on my way to your house when I saw Andy getting into a state police car with two officers.”

  Norm glanced over at us, then went back to staring into his shot glass. “They arrested him,” Sharon went on, “they must’ve! Oh, what are we going to do?”

  Well, the first thing we did was get her out of the tavern and across the street, then down the sidewalk and back into our own shop. People stared as we went by, and I happened to know that one of them—Quelle horreur!—was an Eastport School Board member.

  But we just kept hustling her along, supporting her when her legs went rubbery and muttering a hasty “she doesn’t feel so well” to each curious person we encountered. The bell over the shop door tinkled sweetly as we muscled her inside and lowered her into a café chair.

  Mika came out from the back, wiping her hands on a towel and looking puzzled as I pulled the shade in the bay window and turned the sign in the door to CLOSED. Catching sight of Sharon, she wrung out a cold cloth for the girl’s forehead and poured her a glass of water.

  Then, once Sharon had stopped sobbing and hiccupping and begun sipping, we got the whole story out of her.

  I’d known something more must be coming. But when it did, it was even worse than I’d feared.

  * * *

  Eastport, Maine, is home to the easternmost Coast Guard station in the United States. The big white building with its red tiled roof and green lawn sloping down to black iron gates is well positioned to watch over the harbor, the bay, and the entire sector from Jonesport to the Canadian border.

  Everything from massive freighters to the piddliest of rowboats comes under the Coast Guard’s supervision, which you may resent a great deal when they are boarding your fishing boat, hassling you about life jackets and flares, and wanting to know whether or not your radio is working properly.

  But you will like them a lot when you are sinking. That big orange Zodiac inflatable they zip around in will pluck you out of the water so fast, you’ll hardly know you got wet.

  Well, except for the shivering, of course; right now, the water temperature off our shores was about 50°F. But back to Sharon again, and to her fiancé—or as Jenna had called him, the golden boy.

  The Coast Guard is a military organization, so, of course, it has officers, and in Eastport the most well-known of them was Andy Devine. Smart, level-headed, and as reliable as the dawn, he had a string of glowing references and commendations from peers and superiors alike.

  As a result, it was likely he’d be promoted again by the end of the year if nothing got in his way. But now it seemed something had.

  “Ohh,” Sharon moaned again, putting her neatly manicured fingertips to her temples.

  She hadn’t drunk as much sherry as I’d feared. Four small glasses were all it had taken to turn on the waterworks.

  So at least she wasn’t stomach-sick; bending solicitously to the girl, Mika, who before moving here and marrying Sam had been a nurse, assessed the situation.

  “Fluids and fresh air,” was her unhesitating prescription. “Some caffeine, possibly, and maybe a sugar boost.”

  She placed a white paper bag into my hands. A sweet smell rose from it.

  “No peeking,” she admonished me, her dark eyes twinkling. “Take this with you.”

  Still at the café table, Sharon sat up straight and used the cold cloth we’d given her on her face and hands. So she was recovering, I saw with relief. But she still looked like half the blood had been let out of her.

  “My car’s out front,” Ellie reminded me, so we guided Sharon into it, got her settled beside Ellie, who was driving, and took off.

  Whereupon the whole story finally came out. “Okay, so you know about Toby and the milkshake, right?” Sharon wanted to know first of all.

  We confirmed that we did. “And we know about the poison, and that it was in a Chocolate Moose cup,” I added. “With sprinkles.”

  I sat in the backseat with the bag of sweets Mika had given me, plus a thermos of coffee I’d liberated from the carafe in the shop.

  Ellie turned left, past the high school and the ball field. “Why not tell us something,” she suggested, “that we don’t know.”

  Because we were both up for hearing the story, all right, but not for hauling the words out of the young woman one by one.

  Sharon caught our drift. “Okay, so here’s the thing,” she said. “I didn’t just date Toby Moran. I borrowed money from him. Not that it was a loan at the time,” she amended, “he said it was a gift. But then he wanted it back.”

  She sucked in a shaky breath. “And before you say it, I know. It was stupid. I was stupid. I needed it to finish up some courses to get my teaching license, and I thought—yeah. What an idiot I was.”

  She half-turned to face me. “Please don’t laugh. I knew almost right away what a mistake it was. A few thousand dollars . . . it might not be that much to some people, but to me it was. And he held it over me, of course. It was bad enough at the time, not being able to tell anyone I was dating him at all, and you know how hard it is to keep a secret around here.”

  Right, having the town know she was seeing a guy like Moran wouldn’t have done much for her kindergarten-teaching career here in Eastport, would it? And putting money into the mix would’ve just made it all sound that much worse.

  So she was right, the whole situation had been a mistake on her part, one she was suffering for now. But . . .

  “I’m not laughing,” I said. No way was I going to tell her that I knew just how she felt. The less anyone here in Eastport knew about my romantic history, the better.

  But my late ex-husband, Victor, had been a mistake, too, and even though I knew very well who’d been the villain that time around (hint: not me), I still felt guilty about it all.

  “So what did he say about the money when you broke up with him?” I asked.

  As I recalled, that had been about six months ago according to the town’s gossip wire, which was where it ended up because, of course, people found out about the relationship eventually and then followed it avidly.

  “Oh, he went nuts,” Sharon replied.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Ellie murmured. She’d been driving while we talked; now she angled the car down a sandy track leading toward the water, pulled into a grassy parking spot, and stopped.

  “Let’s get out,” she suggested, so we did, making our way past heaps of driftwood and patches of sea lavender to the beach.

  Protected from wind on each side by granite outcroppings, the narrow strip of small stones mingled with bits of beach glass gleamed freshly, lapped by wavelets that had already crept as high as they would go with the tide.

  Three weathered wooden Adirondack chairs were lined up just above the high-water line; we settled in them. “I mean, he took it well at first,” Sharon went on when we’d arranged ourselves.

  “But then he must’ve figured out that I really meant it, that his jealousy and his anger and his threats . . . well, that they were all just too much and I was ending it with him. Permanently.”

  “What about the money?” Ellie wanted to know. “Did he demand it back right away?”

  “No,” Sharon said. “I think he figured it gave him some sort of leverage over me, that it was a way to get me back to him.”

  Her black curls fluttered prettily in the breeze off the water as she spoke, and her face, turned up into the pale spring sunshine, was regaining some of its color. But then her look darkened.

  “Once he saw I wouldn’t cooperate, though, he started stalking me. Following me, lurking everywhere, texting and phoning. One time he started yelling at me in the grocery store, and another day he grabbed me as I was leaving school. By the wrist, pulling me toward his car.”

  Her cheeks reddened as she remembered. “It was awful, some of the parents saw and called the sec
urity guard, and he shooed Toby away.”

  I passed her the thermos and she took a long swallow from it; the amount of sherry she’d drunk had been a stroke of luck, as it turned out, not hurting her seriously but loosening her up so she could talk about this.

  Because those flushed cheeks of hers, I realized now, weren’t pink with embarrassment over having to be rescued out of the Duck.

  They were burning with an earlier shame. “What a stupid mistake,” she repeated, “getting involved with him at all.”

  “Oh, stop,” I admonished her. The retreating wavelets made faint slopping sounds against the stones as the tide went out. “That’s what they’re good at, these guys, they fake it until they trap you.”

  I ought to know, I thought as I watched the birds skittering at the water’s edge, cheeping softly while scanning the shallows for edibles.

  “I’m sure he was lovely all the while he was luring you in,” Ellie said. “Like the spider and the fly.”

  “I guess.” Sharon seemed to be getting her wind back.

  “But once I did end it with him, he got so bad I finally had to tell Bob Arnold.” She turned to me, her look earnest.

  “I was afraid to go out of the house. I even borrowed the money from Andy to pay Toby, finally, but that didn’t stop it, either.”

  So that’s how Andy learned about Toby Moran, I guessed at once, and at my look, Sharon’s answering glance said I was right.

  “Uh-huh, and you can imagine how he reacted,” the young teacher said. “He was furious, it was all I could do to keep him from—”

  She stopped suddenly. Then, “And I won’t even tell you what all was in the awful text messages Toby would send me. Disgusting.”

  She shuddered, pulling the lacy white sweater closer around her shoulders, although at nearly noon the day was getting warm.

  “And Bob took care of it?” Ellie asked.

  Sharon nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes. I don’t know what he said to Toby, but whatever it was stopped the nonsense. Until . . .”