Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

Ah, yes, the inevitable “until.” And now I was pretty sure also that I knew until what. “Until he found out you were getting married.”

  She glanced gratefully at me. “Yes. I didn’t tell him, but how could he not find out? With all that’s going on about it around here, you’d think we were Prince Charles and Diana.”

  She had a point. A pretty, popular, young teacher and a dashing young Coast Guard officer . . . in Eastport, you could hardly get any more royal than that. Ellie took the white paper bakery bag that Mika had given me and opened it.

  “Oh!” she said, pleased, pulling out a Toll House cookie and then two more, handing one to each of us.

  But the sweet taste of the chocolate did nothing to squelch the sour suspicion growing steadily in me.

  “So what did he do then? Toby Moran, when he found out about the wedding, I mean?” Because, of course, it hadn’t really been about money.

  Sharon looked uncomfortable. “Well,” she began slowly.

  I glanced past her at Ellie, who returned my look; both of us hoped very much that everything was going to turn out all right for Sharon and Andy.

  But we also hoped they would turn out to be all right for us, and at the moment neither of those things was looking likely.

  Sharon bit her lip. Then said, “He sent me some photographs. E-mailed them to me.”

  Uh-oh. A gull swooped down at the clutter of little birds on the beach, scattering them.

  “What kind of photographs?” Ellie inquired gently, as if this wasn’t already obvious.

  Because when your nutball ex-boyfriend’s got a mean streak as wide as a superhighway, nowadays you can pretty well be assured that any photographs he sends you—especially on the occasion of your marriage to somebody else—won’t be G-rated.

  And with her next remark, Sharon confirmed this. Only there was a twist....

  “Bad ones,” she admitted. “Lingerie, and . . . poses. Not obscene, but shocking enough if they’re of your kid’s teacher, you know?”

  She sat up straight. “The thing is, though, they’re not really me. As near as I can tell they’re of models, pictures he got on the internet, advertising for lacy underwear and so on. And then he got other pictures of my face, normal ones, and put them together.”

  “Like with Photoshop or something?” Ellie asked. Her little girl was a budding computer nerd, so she knew about such things.

  Sharon nodded hard. “Yes, some program that lets you move parts of photographs around and combine them. Not that he was good at it.”

  She sucked in a breath of fresh, salt air, blew it out again. “They’re amateurish. No one who looked at them for more than a minute would think that they’re really me. But the effect is still . . .”

  Uh-huh, like a handful of mud smeared on everyone’s idea of her, and right before her wedding, too. “Can you just imagine,” she went on, “what all my students’ parents must’ve thought?”

  It was the second time she’d mentioned this, and now it hit me. “Wait a minute, how’d they get to see the pictures?”

  I crumpled the white paper bag, then shoved it into my satchel under the glinting eye of the seagull that was watching for crumbs.

  “Because he sent them to the parents of every student in my class,” she replied. “I don’t know how he got their e-mail addresses; he must’ve worked hard compiling the list. But he did it.”

  “And then Andy found out about it?” Because that had to be it.

  Her lips tightened. “Yes. First the principal came to me and showed me what some of the mothers had brought in.”

  “Printouts of the pictures?” Ellie tossed a cookie piece at the seagull, which snatched it up greedily and flapped away.

  “Yes, and I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” Sharon said. “I couldn’t even promise it wouldn’t happen again, of course, because how in the world could I possibly control what Toby might do?”

  I could think of one way. And the cops already had, it seemed.

  “And while I was in the middle of trying to talk with the principal, Andy was outside sitting in his car, waiting for me. He’d come to pick me up after work, you see, we were going to Bangor to pick out our—”

  It didn’t matter what they’d been going to pick out. This whole story was giving me the heebie-jeebies.

  “But he got tired of waiting,” I interrupted. “And this was when, just recently that all this happened?”

  Sharon nodded, finishing up her cookie. “Few days ago.”

  There wasn’t much coffee left in the thermos. To give myself a minute to think, I swallowed what remained and screwed on the cap.

  “Everyone up there likes Andy,” I said. At the school, I meant, but it was the same all over town.

  “While he was waiting he figured he’d get buzzed in himself and say hello to everyone, I suppose.”

  It was the kind of thing he would do. “Yes,” Sharon confirmed. “And I was upset when I came out of the principal’s office, so he wanted to know why.”

  She turned to me. “We tell each other everything,” she added.

  Yeah, maybe, I thought. “That’s when Andy learned Toby was still harassing you? And you didn’t end up going to Bangor, after all.”

  We got up and made our way toward the car, up the weedy slope past the sea lavender and the driftwood.

  “Yes, it was, and no, we didn’t,” said Sharon. “We didn’t feel like it anymore, so Andy just took me home.”

  She glanced puzzledly at me. “But how’d you know that?”

  “Oh, just a feeling.” A feeling that now I knew Andy had already been very upset with Toby even before their argument in the Duck; the one, I mean, right before Toby had his arguing days ended for good.

  But I decided not to say so; Sharon already felt bad enough about it all. Instead Ellie got behind the wheel and we started back toward downtown. Mika would want to be getting home to check on the baby, and Ellie and I had things to talk about by ourselves.

  “But them arresting him was a mistake,” Sharon said, “I’m sure it was. Andy hasn’t even seen Toby since he found out about the—what?”

  She’d caught sight of my expression. “Might as well tell her,” said Ellie.

  Yep. There was no avoiding it now, really, or not without a lot of conversational gymnastics that I didn’t feel up for.

  And she’d find out sooner or later. “Listen, Sharon, what did Andy say he was going to do last night?”

  She blinked puzzledly. “He said he was going home to study for a class he’s taking. For his promotion, he has to pass some technical examinations.”

  She turned again to where I sat in the backseat. “What do you mean, though, what he said he’d be doing. Of course he—”

  I took a deep breath. “Sharon. You were home last night, but I wasn’t. I was in the Pickled Herring with my family.”

  “So?” Sharon demanded a little shakily; by now she knew something bad was coming, too.

  “So . . .” I replied, then described what happened: first Toby getting tossed out of the Rubber Duck, and then a little later Andy Devine coming out and going the way Toby had gone, into the shadows on the path overlooking the boat basin and the harbor.

  By now we were back on Water Street, where a few early-season tourists in hats and windbreakers strolled in the sunshine. Ellie pulled into a parking space outside the Moose.

  Sharon looked aghast as we got out. “He lied to me? Andy lied about where he was going? Oh, no, you must’ve made a—”

  Outside our shop, someone had tossed aside an emptied Chocolate Moose milkshake cup. The moose depicted on it had a wide, toothy smile, googly eyes, and a big brown cartoonishly exaggerated moose snoot.

  Plus the antlers, of course. Only on this cup, someone had scribbled out the moose face with black magic marker and replaced it with the word POISON!

  “No.” Ellie spoke firmly. She’d spied the cup, too; I saw her eyes narrowing at it. “No mistake,” she went on to Sharon, snatching up the
offending bit of litter.

  “But probably he didn’t lie, you know, most likely he just got done studying and decided to change his plans.”

  It seemed that word about the probable murder method had gotten around town. She stuffed the cup into her satchel.

  “But,” she went on, “the fact is, he was downtown last night and he did see Toby, whether you knew it or not.”

  “But that doesn’t mean anything!” Sharon exclaimed. “Just because he saw him . . .”

  “Right,” I said. “Not to us. For one thing, we know that if Andy wanted to do something to someone, he’s the kind of stand-up guy who would do it in plain sight.”

  Seriously, and speaking of vintage cartoon characters, you never met anybody more like Dudley Do-Right in your life than Andy Devine.

  “But the state police don’t know that about him,” Ellie went on in gentle agreement, “so to them he’s just a guy with a motive.”

  Up and down the street, storekeepers swept sidewalks and washed windows in preparation for the imminent tourist rush. Eastport had become a legitimate sightseeing destination in recent years; the few visitors who were here now were only a preview.

  “A motive?” Sharon repeated. “But . . . oh, no.” She looked stricken. “You mean the cops think Andy killed Toby Moran on account of me?”

  Her voice rose. “But what’ll happen to him?” she demanded. “Do you think . . . do you mean we might have to cancel the wedding?”

  It was a question upon which the whole future of the Moose depended, as well as her own. But there was no way to know the answer for sure, and anyway, just then out of the corner of my eye I spied my father.

  Ye gods . . . He was driving a brand-new, bright red pickup truck, and right behind him was Bob Arnold’s squad car with its siren whoop-whooping and its cherry beacon whirling.

  My dad pulled over. The grin on his face was wider than the one on the Moose’s mascot, and if his eyes had been twinkling any brighter you could’ve used them for a pair of headlights.

  “Hello, ladies,” he greeted us cheerfully, his gnarled, liver-spotted hands resting on the steering wheel as if they belonged there.

  Which as far as he was concerned, obviously they did. But I didn’t agree and neither did Bob Arnold seem to as he got out of his squad car and approached us.

  “Okay, Jacob, let’s see some paperwork. License, registration, insurance card, you know the drill,” he told my dad skeptically.

  And you could’ve knocked me over with one of the éclairs that Mika was just then putting into our shop’s display window when my dad pulled out his brand-new driver’s license and his truck registration and temporary insurance card, none of which I’d known he had.

  Heck, I hadn’t even known he’d bought the truck. “How’d he do that?” I mouthed incredulously at Ellie, but she just shook her head, shrugging.

  “Everything all right?” my dad asked Eastport’s police chief, smiling like a cat that had swallowed a whole flock of canaries.

  Bob stood frowning over the paperwork my dad had given him. Then he handed it back; reluctantly, but he did it. He had no other choice.

  “Yes, Jacob, I believe it is.” He paused once more, seeming at a loss for what else to say.

  I knew what I wanted to say, starting with all the profanities I hadn’t used since the last time my dad pulled a wild-hair stunt like this. But first . . .

  Bob’s rosebud lips pursed. “Your temporary license plate needs to be visible,” he advised my father. “Yours is kind of folded down there in the rear plate holder, that’s why I pulled you over.”

  “I’ll go fix that little difficulty right now,” my dad said, just as Bob’s phone trilled.

  “Darn,” he frowned at it. “Burglary, out at the lake. Gotta go.” He drove off in his squad car while my dad was still climbing down out of the new truck’s cab.

  He wore a blue chambray work shirt, jeans, and leather sandals on his knobby feet. As usual his long gray hair was tied back in a leather thong; a ruby stud gleamed in his earlobe. The blood-red stone had been my mother’s; I had the twin to it in my own ear.

  Crouching to smooth and straighten the temporary license plate on the truck, he caught sight of me again and winked.

  * * *

  Ellie took Sharon into the Moose while I talked to my father.

  “Dad,” I said, struggling to keep my temper. “Look, I realize you’ve been feeling a little confined lately. But—”

  Between all the medicines he’d been taking and the doctor visits he’d been enduring since his cardiac event last year, “confined” was probably not the right word for it.

  Imprisoned, maybe. Or entombed; he’d been complaining about it for months. Now he dusted his hands together.

  “Between you and your stepmother, if I were any more confined I’d be wearing an orange jumpsuit.”

  The twinkle in his eyes flared. “Walkin’ along the highway with the rest of the work detail, digging out culverts, pickin’ up trash.”

  He sucked in a breath. “Stabbin’ it with a stick, there, the bags and the plastic soda cups. Which at this point I might not even mind, you see, if it just got me out of the damned house!”

  “Dad,” I began, but he wasn’t having any; this outburst had been a long time coming.

  “The heart attack I had was a bad one, but it wasn’t fatal, all right? I’m an old man,” he added grumblingly, “not a dead one.”

  Seized by the sort of wisdom that comes over me only rarely, I let him go on.

  “‘Jacob, don’t do too much,’” he mimicked. “‘Let me lift that for you. Jacob, take your forty million pills, now, or you’ll keel over.’ ”

  His bushy eyebrows bristled at me. “Listen, this business of me being the household invalid—it can’t go on.”

  Then he stopped, his kind, old eyes crinkling as his temper cooled. “I know you mean well, and I love you for it. And your stepmother, too.”

  The part about the forty million pills hit me especially hard. I’d been setting out his medications every morning for a year now, and watching to make sure he took them, too, I’m embarrassed to say.

  And driving him everywhere, anytime he wanted, but that wasn’t the same as just taking off in your own pickup truck and coming home when you pleased, was it?

  No, it certainly wasn’t. “Jacobia, listen to me,” he said gently. “People don’t turn into infants when they get old, all right?”

  I swallowed hard, wondering when being a good daughter had turned into . . . well. The truth was that I really didn’t want to think too deeply about what it had turned into.

  But if my dad had to go out and buy a pickup truck to escape it, then I wanted it to stop, too. “I see,” I murmured shamefacedly.

  He wasn’t finished with me, though. “Eye test,” he recited, “and a new driver’s license, written and road tests. All,” he emphasized, “passed with flying colors.”

  He tucked his driver’s license back into his old leather wallet. It crossed my mind to wonder how he’d even gotten to the Motor Vehicle Department until I recalled that he’d visited Walmart with the Senior Center group a week earlier.

  I guessed he’d managed to play hooky from them somehow. Thinking about how good at it he’d probably been, I couldn’t help smiling.

  He saw it. “All I need,” he added, relenting a little, “is to get out now and then. On my own,” he added before I could reply.

  The money to buy the truck wasn’t a problem; he had enough. It was the prospect of him driving alone in the vehicle that bothered me.

  “I don’t want you getting into troubles you can’t get out of,” I said, which the minute the words left my mouth I knew was ridiculous.

  He’d been in trouble all his life, since before I was born. It was why he had money to live on now; his homemade explosives hobby had become, back in the 1960s, a profitable, if entirely illegal, business, and not all his gains had been lost when that old world came crashing down on him.
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  Starting with the death of my mother. Behind him the door of The Chocolate Moose flew open and Sharon stepped out, tucking her cell phone back into her bag as she peered up and down the street.

  Then I spotted another familiar figure. The tall man in the navy sweatshirt and khakis hurried down the sidewalk toward us.

  Or rather, he hurried toward Sharon; from the look of him, you’d have thought there was no one else in the world.

  “Jacobia,” my dad said, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the pair. It was like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fitting perfectly together when the man bent to wrap his arms around Sharon.

  “Jacobia,” my dad repeated. “I’m doing this, all right?”

  The truck, he meant, and he wasn’t asking permission. He’d been down but not out, and now he’d recovered, was his message to me.

  Or he had as far as he was concerned, at least; as recovered as he could get.

  “Okay, Dad,” I conceded, since clearly there was no arguing with him.

  Nor did I want to try prying the truck out of his hands; not now, anyway. Maybe when the novelty of the thing had worn off a little, not that I was feeling a whole lot of optimism about that, either.

  My dad hopped into his shiny new vehicle and backed out. I saluted him in farewell, hoping this really was the Jacob Tiptree we all remembered, fully healed after his illness and now once more, as Bella would’ve put it, as independent as a hog on ice.

  The red truck cruised away down the street. Behind the wheel, my father gazed around happily, lord of all he surveyed. You could tell that in the back-in-the-saddle department, he felt no doubt.

  But I did. On the sidewalk, the big, redheaded guy set Sharon carefully back down on her feet and beamed at her. It was Andy Devine, of course, but how?

  “Man am I glad to see you,” he was telling Sharon as I walked over to them.

  Her eyes shone with joyous relief but narrowed as she reached up to touch the Band-Aid over his right eyebrow.

  “Andy, the police . . . did they hit you?”

  A bit of black suture material stuck out from under the Band-Aid. Whatever had happened to him, he’d needed stitches for it; recently, too.

  “Oh, no,” he brushed off her concern, “that’s just . . . but never mind, it’s got nothing to do with what’s happened. I mean, you are not going to believe what—”