Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  “Miss Blaine?” she ventured through the gap.

  No answer, and call me a pessimist, but by now I wasn’t expecting any. “Ellie!” I whispered loudly at her. “Ellie, don’t—”

  Too late; she’d already gone in. I hurried to follow, cursing the mosquitoes that by now were feasting on every exposed part of me, and on some that I hadn’t known were exposed.

  “Jake!” Ellie’s voice came from inside. With a shuddering swipe at whatever had just brushed past my face—that thing about bats only eating insects is a myth, I’ll have you know—I bounded up onto the deck and rushed inside, slamming the door behind me.

  “Ellie, where are you?” I stopped in the tiled entry. The cottage’s interior was on the open plan, one big room with low-beamed ceilings, pine paneling, and a fireplace whose huge stone-slab mantel occupied one whole wall.

  Small, low-wattage lamps stood on burl-topped tables, casting a warm glow everywhere. Something savory simmered in a cast-iron kettle on the potbellied stove in the kitchen area.

  “Ellie?” I moved cautiously into the big room.

  A radio played: the New York Yankees were beating the Red Sox 3-0. In the Dutch oven at the back of the woodstove some biscuits were burning; I used pot holders to remove them and set them on a trivet.

  A glass of sparkling wine stood on the counter, fresh bubbles still in it. Now I could hear Ellie moving around upstairs and every so often her unhappy voice, calling her old teacher’s name again.

  But the owner of this particular clean, well-lighted place was nowhere in evidence, and considering what we’d encountered on the way in here, I had a bad feeling about that.

  Picking up a flashlight from a table by the back door, I stepped outside again, onto the deck. This felt reasonably safe; probably the bats that had dive-bombed me earlier were still hovering around the front door, chattering amongst themselves about how tender and tasty my throat had looked while hungrily awaiting my return.

  Downhill in the moonlight, the lake’s bright surface lay flat as glass. At the far end, a radio tower’s red light blinked monotonously, its reflected gleam like a blood drop spreading on the water each time it flashed.

  “Anyone here?” I called down the slope, then pulled my phone out. Bob Arnold was on my speed dial, and so was Wade; I’d call Wade first, I decided. But before ruining my night vision with the screen’s glare, I’d just have a quick glance off the wooden dock that stuck out twenty feet or so from the shore.

  By the flashlight’s yellow glow I found my way there on a gravel path. A pair of kayaks floated by the dock, each with a DayGlo orange life jacket stuffed into its cockpit.

  A metal ladder fixed to the dock led down into the water. “Miss Blaine, are you here?”

  Something floated alongside one of the kayaks, low and log-like. But no log I’d ever seen wore a quilted down vest.

  “Ellie!” As I leaned down off the dock to grab the body that was floating there, I saw the tears in the vest’s front, three small ones and a larger one with dark, wet stuff welling up out of it.

  Blood . . . I may have uttered an expletive or three. “Miss Blaine?”

  Her face stared blankly upward, ghost-white under the moon. But she was breathing; the down vest was buoyant, I realized, and she was barefoot, which was also a stroke of luck. If she’d been wearing the hiking boots I’d seen by the back door, she’d have sunk out of sight.

  Ellie hurried out onto the dock. Except for the cottage behind us, it was dark all the way around the lake. If there were any other dwellings here they were unoccupied this early in the summer.

  Then she went briefly back into the house, returning swiftly and very unhappily. “Land line’s disabled.”

  She made a snipping motion with her fingers. “Must’ve been done soon after I tried calling her a little while ago. And there are still no bars on my cell.”

  Mine, either; more expletives from me. Out here in the boondocks, the bears didn’t need cell phone service, or so the phone companies—excuse me, the telecommunications giants—must’ve thought when they were skimping on cell towers. But . . .

  “Miss Blaine has a computer, though,” said Ellie, “and it’s got an internet connection, so I e-mailed Bob Arnold on it. And Sam and Wade, too, telling them where we are and asking for help.”

  I found a thready pulse in Miss Blaine’s limp wrist. “Great. Three cheers for satellite connections.”

  Or whatever it was. At the moment, I didn’t care; I just wished Miss Blaine had had her phone service set up on it, too. “So if anyone checks their e-mail, we’ll be all set.”

  But Sam was asleep; Mika as well, probably, since lately they both spent their wee hours tending the baby. Wade would’ve finished in the workshop and settled into the ball game by now, and Bella thought e-mail had been invented purely to terrify her, and only dealt with it under protest.

  So she wouldn’t be checking it. Meanwhile, Miss Blaine needed to be taken to the hospital right this minute, if not sooner. But at the moment I couldn’t even think of how to get her back up to the cottage, until . . .

  Squinting around, Ellie spied a tarp stretched over a stack of stovewood. Hurriedly we dragged it down onto the dock, where we got Miss Blaine onto it.

  Then we lugged, hoisted, and hauled our waterlogged burden until we had her inside, and got that cold, wet vest and sweatshirt off her.

  “Ouch.” Ellie frowned down at the ugly wound in her old teacher’s exposed shoulder, then went rummaging in the kitchen drawers, where she found gauze squares and adhesive tape, and went to work.

  “Not that it’s going to help much,” she said when she was done. “But I think the bleeding has at least slowed down.”

  Right, it had. But even though Miss Blaine was clearly a sturdy person—even pale as she was now, she had the tanned, weathered skin of somebody who bicycled in all weather just as Ellie had said, and that stovewood hadn’t gotten split by itself, either—she remained unconscious.

  “Ellie, we’re going to have to get her to the emergency room ourselves,” I said, and she agreed.

  So we searched around outside some more and at last found a little red wagon by the larger woodpile stacked out front. Miss Blaine had used the wagon for bringing her fireplace logs inside, apparently, but now we laid a half sheet of plywood from the tool shed atop it.

  Also, there was a length of clothesline in the pantry; we used that to secure her body to the plywood sheet. When we were done, it looked like we were transporting a corpse.

  Which I sure hoped we weren’t going to be doing. “Oh, this is just ghastly,” said Ellie as we set off, me out in front holding the flashlight and pulling the wagon, Ellie trotting alongside watching in case the body on the plywood began slipping off.

  “What’s ghastly is these mosquitoes,” I retorted, gritting my teeth. They’d descended en masse, but with flashlight in one hand and a wagon handle in the other, there wasn’t much I could do about them.

  Then with a whush-whush of heavy wings, something larger than a bat swooped out of the darkness. An owl, but not a stuffed one, this time . . .

  I lurched sideways, the wagon jolted over a bump, and Ellie scrambled to right it while overhead the moon played hide-and-seek among the treetops.

  Miss Blaine moaned. It was the first sound we’d heard out of her. But when we stopped to check, we found it wasn’t for a good reason.

  The bleeding had resumed. “Try the phone again,” I told Ellie while I pressed more gauze squares to the wound.

  But there was still no signal. “Only a little ways to the car,” Ellie encouraged as we slogged forward once more. “And look at it this way, if she’s moaning, she’s breathing.”

  Which was cold comfort. Also, Miss Blaine wasn’t fat by any means, but she was definitely a sturdy woman, so while I didn’t begrudge the effort it took to pull her, I wasn’t at all sure how long I could keep on making it.

  Already my shoulder muscles felt like hot matches were being pressed into
them, and if my neck got any stiffer I’d need to unkink it with a meat-tenderizing mallet. But despite all this, and with the added motivation provided by those mosquitoes, at last we reached the turnaround where we’d left the car.

  “Okay,” I said, opening the vehicle’s rear passenger door . . . which seemed unusually low to the ground, suddenly.

  Ellie groaned, aiming her flashlight. “Oh, no! Jake, it’s a flat tire.”

  Correction: it was all four of them. “And Lee’s going to be home before long, too, I’ve got to—”

  The caps to the valve stems lay in the gravel, one by each tire; I guessed we should be grateful that the tires hadn’t been slashed but instead merely deflated by hand.

  I mean, depending on your definition of merely . . . “Someone wanted to slow us down,” I said.

  “Motorcycle guy, maybe,” Ellie agreed.

  “I hope he’s not still around here somewhere,” I said.

  Oh, did I ever. Because so far tonight we had an elderly woman wounded, our car deliberately disabled, and all three of us stuck out here in what old Eastporters called the pucker-brush, with no way to call for help.

  Except for e-mail, which I doubted was going to do the tiniest bit of good. And the night was still young, so there was plenty of time for even worse things to happen.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to drive on the rims.”

  The dirt road was bumpy and studded with rocks, barely fit for a car to drive on at all, much less on flats. The tires wouldn’t survive it, the rims would be ruined, and the rest of the car wouldn’t exactly enjoy the experience, either.

  Still, I was disappointed when Ellie turned the key and nothing happened, if by disappointed you also mean startled and beginning to be really scared, now. Somehow it just hadn’t yet dawned on me that we could be in serious, possibly even fatal, trouble.

  Or fatal for Miss Blaine, anyway. My mind wasn’t letting me go any further down that path; I mean, toward the notion that it could also end up being fatal for us. But if the phrase “at the mercy” were in the dictionary, it was clear by now that our photographs would be lined up right there next to the definition.

  I got out again and lifted the car’s hood. Under it was a mass of engine parts, few of which I could even name, much less tell if they were in working condition.

  I was pretty sure all those wires and hoses were supposed to be connected to one another, though, not just flopping around loose.

  Ellie peered over my shoulder. “Wow, somebody was thorough.”

  “Yeah.” A whole lot of red, yellow, and green wires had been yanked out entirely; from where, I couldn’t tell.

  Meanwhile, in the trees all around us, things rustled: small cries, scufflings, and faint crackling that sounded like tiny bones breaking . . .

  It was just deer and possums out there, probably, and possibly a moose; not carnivores, in other words. But I’d have felt a lot better about them if I could see them.

  Fortunately, though, by then I wasn’t just scared; I was also pissed off. Ellie, too; I could tell by the grim set of her jaw.

  But neither one of us felt like leaving the other one alone here with Miss Blaine to run out to the lightly-traveled road for help that probably wouldn’t be there. And neither of us wanted to be alone here, either; better we should stick together.

  “All right, then,” Ellie uttered, knowing as well as I did what we had to do next and not liking it, either.

  Bumpy as the dirt road had been on Goodyears, the hard rubber wheels on that little red wagon with Miss Blaine secured onto it would make the rock-strewn surface ridiculous. Still, we put our backs into it, and thirty or so nervous, frustrating, and laborious minutes later, we’d dragged the wagon out onto the main road.

  “Oh, my heavens,” Ellie breathed exhaustedly.

  “No kidding,” I agreed. The smooth, freshly laid blacktop with the bright yellow stripe running down the middle of it gleamed in the moonlight while we stood catching our breaths.

  The silence was so complete here, it was as if a glass jar had been dropped down over us. And no one had leapt out at us or otherwise harmed us, so of course, we were glad for that. No motorcycle-riding stranger had appeared now that we’d reached the main road, either.

  But we were still way the hell out here with a badly wounded woman lying between us and still without cell phone service.

  All we needed now was banjos, I thought sourly, and then I did hear something briefly; not banjos, though. I squinted up and down the road: nothing. So maybe I’d been mistaken.

  “Please,” Miss Blaine murmured faintly, her pale hand lifting and falling again pathetically.

  At least she wasn’t dead, I thought, feeling a cold rush of hardheaded practicality. By then I was so tired and angry, all possible tender sentiment had evaporated right out of me.

  We would get her to medical help in good time or we would not, I thought, and that, as Bella would say, was the long and short of it. Ellie looked heartbroken, though, no doubt thinking the same.

  “You know her well?” I asked as somewhere far in the distance that sort of grumbling sound I’d heard moments earlier began again.

  “When I was in high school,” Ellie replied. “She was our gym teacher and, Jake, she was so great. I owe Miss Blaine big-time.”

  She looked up from where she’d crouched by the teacher’s side as the sound in the distance grew louder, a low boom-badaboomboomboom.

  “Maybe we should start walking. The road’s smoother here, at any rate. And if someone comes along, they’ll help us,” she said.

  That part was true. People in Eastport have been known to lend strangers their cars, or take boats out in the darkness to find idiots lost in kayaks because, as they always tell their rescuers afterward, “We do this all the time in Florida.”

  Go kayaking alone at night, they meant, whereupon the rescuers, of course, don’t grab Florida maps and shove them . . . well. Said idiots not carrying GPS locators, either, or even life jackets, never mind such a silly thing as a working signal flare.

  Because, you know, Florida. But back to our predicament.

  “All right,” I gave in reluctantly to Ellie. “You go, though, and I’ll stay here with her.”

  Because it was like I said before: we’d get help or we wouldn’t. Meanwhile, Miss Blaine was unconscious again now, and I feared it was from loss of blood.

  “You’re right. She should be kept still.” Ellie bounced up and down on the Keds she wore, readying herself.

  “Be careful,” I said, trying not to show how nervous I was. In a few moments I’d be alone with a dying woman. Or, anyway, I hoped I’d be alone, and, of course, the dying part worried me, too. With any luck she wouldn’t manage to complete the process before help arrived.

  But I had no idea how badly she’d really been hurt. All I knew was, she didn’t look good.

  At least the unidentifiable grumbling sound from somewhere down the road had stopped. “I wish we were at home baking a whoopie-pie wedding cake,” I said, trying to smile.

  “Me too. See you soon.” Ellie squared her shoulders. “I won’t be that long. But if someone comes along before I get back . . .”

  “Right,” I replied stoutly. “Don’t worry.” I was doing enough of that for both of us. “If help arrives, I’ll—”

  Take it, I’d have finished. But instead the distant grumbling sound returned, got louder, and then was very loud indeed as from around a curve in the road a yellow light appeared.

  A flashlight, I thought, but when the glow swelled to a bright orb and the rumbling rose to a roar, I knew it had to be a headlight. Another motorcycle headlight . . .

  Really? I had time to think; then the bike pulled over. The figure on it propped the kickstand and pulled his helmet off.

  From beneath it came short red-gold hair, freckles, a face as mild and harmless-appearing as an infant’s. . . . It was Andy Devine.

  “Goodness,” murmured Ellie as he crossed t
he blacktop toward us, wearing a black leather jacket, black gloves, and boots so heavy and sturdy-looking that they could’ve qualified as deadly weapons.

  “What an interesting coincidence,” Ellie added under her breath.

  “No kidding.” If the hairs on the back of my neck had had hairs of their own, they’d have been bristling, too.

  Because as far as I’m concerned, coincidence is right up there with the Tooth Fairy, benevolent dictatorships, and the even-halfway-edible all-you-can-eat buffet in the believability department.

  But I didn’t say anything more about it; she already knew, not that that was going to do either one of us any good. And then...

  Then I remembered the gun.

  The weapon I’d taken from Moran’s place and then forgotten all about was still in my bag; I drew it out, not making a big deal of it, but not hiding it at all, either.

  Andy Devine saw it at once, and the look on his face changed. “Hey, hey,” he said, stopping short, his hands coming up in what I’d have interpreted as a warding-off gesture.

  That is if I’d believed in it, or in anything else about the way he was presenting himself right now. Suddenly the idea of us clearing him of a murder charge didn’t seem like such a slam dunk anymore, not that it ever really had.

  Because with him looming over us in the moonlight on a remote road in backwoods Maine, the charge didn’t seem quite so preposterous as it had, either.

  On the contrary: he was big, he was not pleased that I had the gun, and he wanted it. Like, now.

  Holding out one hand, he took a step. “I don’t know what’s going on, but that doesn’t look safe. How about if you just give me the . . .”

  “Get your phone out,” I said. I just love being patronized. I love it a whole bunch.

  I held the gun level. I might not’ve been a crack shot, but my husband was, and he’d taught me a little bit.

  How not to drop the thing, for instance. “Check your phone,” I told him. “See if you’ve got any bars.”

  Different phone brands use different networks, I’d discovered. And some get better reception than others; it’s the point of the whole “Can you hear me now?” ad campaign.