Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  The thought begged another question, though: if it was a cover-up, why bother with it at all, especially when an autopsy would reveal the real method, eventually? But hey, one thing at a time:

  “Cyanide is crazy-dangerous, but it used to be common,” said Wade. “Farmers used it against coyotes and wolves, and you could go into a feed store and buy pre-made baits for rats and other vermin.”

  We’d been home for half an hour; he’d picked us up right near the accident site.

  “The trouble with cyanide is that kids and pets might get a hold of it,” Wade continued.

  My dad seemed fine: walking, talking, not bleeding, and nothing obviously broken, and he’d forbidden us from calling an ambulance. Bob Arnold had shown up, of course, but even he had seemed pretty mellow about it all once he knew no one was hurt.

  Mellow about the crash, that is; not about what Ellie and I had been doing just previous to it, and what we’d found. Because, of course, I’d told him and endured his reaction, then got scolded and shooed impatiently away so he could deal with Mrs. Starne.

  Well, part of what we’d found. He’d have to call the state cops back to look over Moran’s place again, he told me, not sounding happy about this.

  “And cyanide doesn’t smell like insecticide, so someone who doesn’t suspect what it is could get injured or killed by it pretty easily,” Wade added to me now.

  He pulled his other work boot off, sitting in the rocker by the woodstove in our big old kitchen. “And that in a nutshell is why it’s not that easy to get the stuff,” he said.

  Asleep in his playpen, little Ephraim shifted and found his mouth with his thumb. I pulled his fleece blanket up over him.

  “The USDA was using baited spring traps for a while; they’d put a capsule in there and fix it so that when the animal went for the bait, they got a mouthful of cyanide instead,” Wade continued.

  He pulled his other boot off. “Too many people around to do that anymore, though, too. Big ranches out west, maybe, but not where a youngster or somebody’s dog might find it and mess with it.”

  My thoughts strayed back to my dad, who insisted that a deer had jumped suddenly out in front of him and he’d swerved to avoid it.

  Which I believed, but Bella didn’t. “Old fool,” she muttered.

  Standing at the sink, she used a toothpick to jab at nonexistent bits of grime behind the faucet mount. If I’d let her, she’d have been on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with a fingernail brush.

  “So,” continued Wade, “if you did want some, first of all I believe you’d need a permit to buy the spring-trap capsules.”

  He took another pull of his Sam Adams. “That is, if they’re even legal for private citizens to possess anymore at all. As for where to get any . . .”

  The baby stirred, cooed, and fell asleep again. Bella glanced up from getting that kitchen sink so clean you could’ve done bone marrow transplants in it, and her gaze softened.

  She was a tough old bird, but she’d have walked through brimstone for little Ephraim.

  “. . . I wouldn’t know that, either,” Wade finished simply.

  “Hello?” Ellie came in, her arms loaded with baking ingredients. Crossing the kitchen, she deposited her burden on the table across from Wade, who reached for the bag of chocolate chips.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” She swept them out of his reach. “We need those.” But in their place she offered him a biscotti, which he seemed to think was a decent substitute.

  The shower went off upstairs. I could hear my dad moving around up there. Bella’s henna-red hair was in pin curls with a green bandana tied over them, a festive-looking combination that contrasted sharply with her steely gaze.

  He’d just about scared the life out of her, and the bruise on his forehead when he got home didn’t help any. Wade crunched one of the biscotti and tucked another into his pocket.

  Then he skedaddled off to the workshop, where he repaired guns in his spare time; a determined pacifist at least where his in-laws were concerned, he wanted no part of this.

  Ellie caught the drift, too, and while I reported to her what Wade had said she swept ingredients back into her bag and hoisted it.

  Let’s get out of here, her expression conveyed, and I couldn’t have agreed more. Outside, she stopped to use her phone while I waited in the side yard; then a few minutes later we were back in her car on our way out of town, on the causeway headed for the mainland.

  The sky was milky with stars, and on either side of the narrow roadbed the water stretched away pale and metallic-looking. As we drove, I told Ellie the rest of what I’d gleaned from Wade.

  “Huh. That’s interesting, she said. Then: “I’d thought we could work in your kitchen and talk at the same time,” she added, not commenting yet on the info I’d just given her.

  She’d want to think about it first, I supposed.

  “No point trying to talk anymore about cyanide with Bella there, though,” she added astutely.

  “You’ve got that right.” My housekeeper-slash-mother-in-law was a fussbudget at all times, but now she was really angry. “Wouldn’t want to give her any ideas,” I said.

  Not seriously, but still; you knew Bella was really mad when even Wade thought it was safer not to be around her.

  We passed through Pleasant Point, the native American village just off the causeway, where streets full of small redbrick houses as well as some newer, clapboard-sided ones clustered around a community center, a firehouse, a church, and a school, plus tribal government buildings.

  “Um, so where are we going instead of doing our baking?” I asked Ellie finally.

  We’d reached Route 1 on the mainland. Around us tall fir trees with tops shaped like arrowheads loomed dark against the night sky.

  Ellie turned left. “Boyden Lake.” It was a body of fresh water not much bigger than a very large pond, deep in the woods.

  She turned left again. “A friend of mine who lives out here might know something about those cyanide capsules,” she added.

  So she had been thinking about it, and not ruling it out the way I had, either. And it was still early enough in the evening to visit someone, only seven-thirty by the car’s dashboard clock.

  “Because your idea about the insecticide maybe not being the real murder method,” she went on, “is a good one.”

  “It might not even have been poison that did it at all,” I agreed, “and the obviously-smelly insecticide was just a cover for whatever really . . .

  She glanced sideways at me. “No need to go that far, Jake. Like you thought at first, some other poison is what seems likeliest, especially since there were no stab wounds, bullet holes, or other—”

  Right, no other obvious openings that would’ve let Toby Moran’s life leak out of him like water out of a sieve.

  “So what are you suggesting?” I asked, still not quite getting it.

  “I’m saying that if you had a good poison, one like cyanide that’s not so easy to get and that Toby Moran would swallow, but you used it before thinking the whole thing through really clearly, that then afterwards you might want to cover the fact that you’d used it.”

  She took a breath. “Cover it just temporarily with, say, squirts of insecticide, to give yourself a little time to cover the rest of your tracks, too,” she finished evenly.

  I had to think about this for a moment. Then: “Ohh,” I breathed. “You mean cover up how you got it, because whoever you got it from would be able to say . . .”

  She nodded tightly. I’d thought she seemed a little anxious to go once she’d heard about Wade’s thoughts on the matter; about cyanide, specifically. And from there her mind had jumped to—

  “You think the killer might’ve gotten cyanide from your friend?” I asked.

  Another nod, tight-lipped. “It’s possible.”

  “And you think now maybe the killer has realized, too late, that once the autopsy results come in—”

  Which of course they would, but l
ike Ellie said, maybe the killer hadn’t thought quite enough about that before doing the deed—

  “That whoever he – or she – got the cyanide from would probably be talking about it once the results were made public,” I finished.

  And that would end up being a bright red neon arrow pointing straight at the killer, wouldn’t it?

  “But, Ellie,” I began, because this was still all very farfetched and full of loose ends, not to mention theoretical in the extreme.

  Also, we did still have to do all our baking for tomorrow, on top of which if a miracle happened and we somehow managed to clear Andy Devine, we’d be needing a wedding cake, as well.

  But that too was getting to seem less likely by the minute, and meanwhile Ellie was very determined, I could tell.

  For one thing, she was pushing the speed limit, which for Ellie was the equivalent of pedal-to-the-metal and to heck with the consequences; most times, she was a very conservative driver.

  And for another . . . “She’s a very nice elderly lady,” Ellie said, “and we’re going out to the lake right now to check on her and find out what she has to say about all this, and that’s that.”

  “Check on her? But . . .?”

  Then I realized the rest of it: that on the theory of better late than never, our killer might’ve decided to do something about that whole tracks-covering business.

  Something . . . unpleasant. Ellie pressed the accelerator harder, which couldn’t help reminding me—speed, vehicles, et cetera—of my dad.

  Not happily. I said as much to Ellie, then went on: “What’s wrong with him, anyway?” I fretted. “It’s just not like him to be so . . . so . . .”

  “Non-compliant?” Ellie peered into the darkness ahead for skunks, porcupines, or God forbid, a real moose. “Unable to be bossed around for another minute or his head will explode?”

  I turned, stung. “Ellie, this whole past year we’ve been nothing but helpful to him. We’ve supervised his pills and overseen his therapy and engineered his diet and made sure he got . . .”

  I stopped. She was nodding, one blond tendril bobbing up and down over her forehead. “Yep, you sure have.”

  An old railroad trestle crossed the gap between two high bluffs over a grassy salt marsh. In the moonlight, the cattails in the marsh stood motionless as if at attention.

  At a fork in the road, we turned right. “You decide what he eats, what he wears, where he goes,” said Ellie. “What he drives and whether or not he does. Which I gather that’s the part Bella didn’t like even a little bit? His driving, I mean?”

  We were on Lake Road, passing between old farmsteads with cedar fence posts sagging under tangles of bittersweet. NO HUNTING signs peppered with rusting bullet holes hung on the fence posts.

  “You,” she pointed out, “wouldn’t like being told to give up driving.”

  “That’s . . .” Different, I was about to finish.

  But it wasn’t. Through the moonlit trees in the unkempt woodlots on either side of the road, the rank smell of mud from the nearby lake floated richly along with the trilling voices of singing frogs.

  Also, the hum of mosquitoes. I rolled the car window up, wanting to forget what Ellie had just said. But I couldn’t.

  “So that’s how it seems?” Oh, of course, it did. Even I knew it; I just hadn’t wanted to see it. “That we’ve been bullying him?”

  She squinted through the windshield. “The driveway we want is a little difficult to . . . okay, there it is.” She turned, bumping onto a dirt track. Then as we juddered along, “Not at first, no,” she answered my question finally. “I mean, at first it was you guys or a rehab hospital, wasn’t it? And I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  Nor would the rehab hospital. A mental snapshot of my dad in a powered wheelchair, plowing through a crowd of bathrobed invalids and frantic nurses in a wild bid to escape, flitted through my head.

  I shuddered inwardly; it was a vivid mental picture, but not an unrealistic one.

  “Now, though,” Ellie went on, then fell silent. Ahead, light gleamed through the trees as the road narrowed and curved sharply.

  She pulled into a turnaround and stopped, switching the ignition off. In the sudden silence those frogs sounded as if they were getting ready to attack.

  The mosquitoes, too. “Don’t worry,” she said, misunderstanding my anxious look. “The cottage is right through there on the other side of those trees.”

  That wasn’t what I was worried about. Or the frogs, either. I did have concerns about a shadowy figure I’d just glimpsed by the side of the road, though, crouched among the bushes as we went by.

  Or . . . had I? “Ellie?” I said. Out here, it was hard to be sure; shapes slipping through the woods might be imaginary, or they might belong to the large and varied downeast Maine wildlife community: the ones I mentioned earlier plus possums, wolverines, even bears.

  Or they might be people, which when I am in the woods late at night I’ll take my chances with the wolverines, thanks very much.

  As I thought about this, meanwhile swatting at a pesky mosquito that had made it into the car, a sudden peal of wild laughter floated through the forest’s darkness.

  The pitch darkness, because the tree branches stretching overhead now blocked out the moon. Until your eyes adjusted, the only way you’d know your hand was in front of your face was if you punched yourself.

  Which was what I felt like doing, for being dumb enough to come out here at all.

  “Ellie, why couldn’t we have done this in daylight?” I demanded as we got out of the car. This was all going to be a goose-chase, I now felt sure. “Or just called your friend on the phone?”

  That laugh, again; a loon out on the lake, I realized, and why its call had to mimic the mad cry of a ghost who is wandering around swinging its own severed head like a lantern, I had no idea.

  But it did. Also, that shape I’d glimpsed—or hadn’t glimpsed, I still wasn’t sure—went on bothering me.

  “Seriously. Remind me why we’re out here, again?”

  In the dark woods, I meant, near a lake, on a dirt road—from what I could see by the wavering gleam of Ellie’s flashlight, the road had narrowed to a ragged path—approaching a cottage.

  A supposed cottage. So far, all I’d seen was a few lights that might be windows and that shape shrinking suddenly away from our headlights.... “Ellie?”

  She strode confidently ahead. “Because . . . listen, Jake, what Wade said about the traps just now, the ones with bait and a spring-loaded cyanide capsule? It reminded me . . .”

  A low spot on the path turned my ankle. Recovering, I tripped hard over a rock. Somewhere nearby, the hum of a billion bloodthirsty mosquitoes busily sharpening their stabbers grew louder.

  Or . . . wait a minute, that wasn’t mosquitoes. “Ellie?” I said, louder this time, because suddenly it wasn’t dark out here anymore.

  Seemingly out of nowhere, a single bright light was roaring down the path we were on, straight at us. “Ellie, jump!”

  I grabbed her shoulders and leapt sideways, carrying us both into a thorny thicket as what turned out to be a motorcycle howled past.

  Its visored and helmeted rider, crouched over the handlebars, glanced back. But Ellie’s flashlight had hit a rock and gone out.

  So maybe the rider didn’t see us. At any rate he didn’t come back, the bike’s roar dropping to a whine before fading away entirely.

  “Oof,” said Ellie, sitting up. “Are you okay?”

  “Yup.” Actually, I was seeing stars; that rock and my noggin had also met suddenly as I dove out of the bike’s way, and apparently my brain cells hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

  Also, my ears were ringing. But there was no point telling Ellie this, since for one thing there was nothing she could do about it, and for another she’d already gotten up and was marching away again, into the darkness. “Great,” she said. “I’m glad you’re not hurt. And to answer your question, I did call her,” she said ove
r her shoulder as she moved away from me.

  “I called, and I let the phone ring and ring,” she went on as I hurried to catch up. “But there was . . .”

  I knew what must be coming. Brrr . . .

  “. . . no answer,” Ellie finished.

  * * *

  “There it is.” Ellie pointed ahead to where the cottage lights peeped through the evergreens surrounding it.

  As we approached, the gleam from its windows showed its general shape, low and log-built with a deck running around the two sides of the building.

  “Hello?” Ellie called anxiously, looking around.

  A motion-sensing yard light snapped on as we entered the cottage clearing. The dooryard featured a fish-cleaning table with silvery scales clinging to it and a chopping block made from the flat-topped stump of a big old tree, with an ax stuck into it.

  “She usually comes right out to greet visitors,” Ellie said worriedly.

  A pair of solar panels on the shed roof fed electrical wires to the house. There was an outdoor shower, too, and an elegant little cedar-sided building that I was pretty sure must be a sauna.

  “Who lives here, anyway?” I asked, thinking that the number of people who knew something about cyanide and enjoyed elegant saunas must be fairly small.

  Ellie peered around, frowning. The uncurtained windows in the cottage showed no movement inside. “One of my most favorite old high school teachers, Sallie Blaine, moved here when she retired.”

  “Does she not have a car?” No vehicles were in evidence.

  “Nope,” said Ellie. “Never has had. She has a bicycle, she rides that three seasons of the year, and she has friends. They adore her and they take her places when she needs them to. She’s . . . unusual.”

  I tried to imagine living way out here in the boonies with no car, and couldn’t; “unusual,” I gathered, was putting it mildly.

  Downhill past the cottage, moonlit water gleamed. Then came that maniac cry again: ha-ha-ha-HA!

  Ellie stepped up onto the deck to peer inside. “Hello?” she called again.

  My hammering heart rate dropped from a fast rat-a-tat to a more tolerable thud-thud-thud. But it rocketed once more when Ellie touched the cottage’s door tentatively, and it drifted open.