Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  Devine obeyed, his brush-cut hair a curious orangey pink in the moonlight. And as I’d hoped, he had a cell phone signal.

  “Okay, it works. Now what?”

  Ellie knelt by Miss Blaine again. “She’s breathing. That’s all, though. Call 911, get an ambulance out here,” she told Devine.

  He looked vexed. “Look, are you sure you don’t want me to—”

  I took a step toward him, raising Toby Moran’s cheap little pistol. I hadn’t even checked to see if it was loaded, or if it was so junky that instead of firing, it would explode in my hand.

  But it shut Andy Devine up very effectively, and at the moment that was function enough for me; he worked the phone again hastily.

  “Good,” I said, not bothering to sound friendly.

  Because maybe some other cyclist had done all the bad deeds we’d experienced in the last hour or so. Maybe Devine’s being here right now really was what my son, Sam, would’ve called a coinky-dink.

  But I was cold, tired, hungry, scared, hurting in every possible extremity, and thoroughly annoyed, not to mention worried about Miss Blaine.

  So I didn’t care. I could apologize later if I felt like it.

  Or not.

  * * *

  “What in the world are we going to do now?” asked Ellie the next morning.

  It was 5 a.m. The sun wasn’t even up yet. So my answer would’ve been “go back to bed” if we hadn’t still had all that work to do.

  The Chocolate Moose opened promptly at ten, so by then there would have to be brownies and éclairs, pinwheels and chocolate snickerdoodles, and . . .

  “Chocolate croissants,” mused Bella Diamond dreamily. She plucked a bit of semisweet from the table in Ellie’s kitchen and devoured it.

  We’d started the croissant batter two days earlier; now the long strip of much-rolled-and-folded dough lay on the worktable, waiting to be cut into perfect triangles with the aid of a carpenter’s T square.

  “Oh, I can hardly wait,” said Bella. She loved a good croissant, and ours were light and flaky with a solid punch of rich, taste-bud-bedazzling . . .

  Well, you know. If chocolate were discovered now, it would be regulated as a drug, I think; certainly it improved Bella’s mood.

  Short-acting, though. Her look darkened. “Something has still got to be done about that father of yours,” she said. “And it’s got to be soon.”

  We’d spread all our ingredients out in Ellie’s kitchen. We could have done it at my house, but Mika liked having the kitchen to herself in the early mornings, so she could feed Ephraim and get their day started in peace.

  So here we were. “I really can’t abide wondering which way he’ll try to kill himself next,” my stepmother went on.

  Ellie’s kitchen was low ceilinged, pine paneled, and equipped with an antique fireplace so wide and tall you could walk right into it. A cast-iron kettle hung from an old hook set into the brick.

  But the room’s other end boasted an enormous chest freezer, a side-by-side refrigerator, a restaurant-sized dishwasher, and a gas stove with double ovens and a plumbed-in pot filler that Ellie joked could double as a fire extinguisher.

  George had bought it all at a discount from one of the building contractors he worked for and put it all in himself. Now Ellie got the wire egg basket from the refrigerator.

  “How, though?” she asked Bella. “To stop him, without—”

  Bella poured flour into the sifter, then measured in the baking soda and salt; if the butter had been salted, we’d have omitted it from the dry ingredients, but it wasn’t so we didn’t.

  “I have no bleeping idea,” said Bella, but she didn’t say “bleeping.” “That man has me completely blinking flummoxed.”

  Only she didn’t say . . . well. I hadn’t even meant to bring her along with me this morning. But when I’d crept downstairs in the dark, praying that the coffeemaker had gone on the way I’d set it to and the baby wouldn’t wake up, she’d already been drifting around the silent kitchen like some unhappy domestic ghost.

  Angry, frightened . . . While Ellie and I were out at the lake the night before, my dad had at last agreed to visit the ER and had been pronounced A-OK. But she still couldn’t let it go; even in the best of times, she disliked not being in control of a situation.

  And in this case, “Bella, I don’t blame you a bit,” I said. He was being a jerk, and he wasn’t even the worst of my problems; still, those chocolate treats weren’t going to bake themselves, were they?

  “And stopping him would be all well and good,” I said as I creamed the sugar into the butter. Next, I beat in two eggs and dosed them with vanilla extract while Ellie carefully eyeballed the amount of cocoa powder in her measuring cup.

  Cocoa powder is key, and by that I mean good-quality cocoa powder, not chocolate chips or please-God-not-carob, or heaven forbid anything called “chocolate syrup,” either; we made our own. Also, don’t get me going on anything whose label promises “real chocolate flavoring.”

  It won’t be. You have my word on this. “But stopping him’s not the point,” I said. “Him wanting to quit his antics . . . that’s the only real solution.”

  I beat the eggs into the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. “So until that happens . . .”

  Ellie’s daughter, Leonora, appeared in the kitchen doorway still in her flannel pajamas. With huge dark brown eyes and her curly dark hair floofed out around an elfin face, she looked like a wood nymph who was ready to do mischief right after she eats her cereal.

  “Take it in the family room, honey,” Ellie told the child, who scampered away obediently with her spoon and bowl. Then, “Jake’s right,” Ellie said, turning the oven on to preheat.

  “We got to make him think it’s his idea not to be racketing around in that truck the way he has been, and opposing everything else that’s any good for him the rest of the time,” Ellie went on.

  Correction, I thought. It’s got to be his idea.

  And good luck on that one; the smack on the head that he’d gotten by crashing the truck last night had knocked a bit of sense into him, and he’d agreed to hanging around home for a day or so to recover. But once cabin fever redeveloped, what would I say to him, that he was an old guy now so he had to stop having fun?

  Sure, that would work. Naturally, it would. I finished beating the butter and eggs.

  “Anyway,” Bella grumped, changing the subject. Wiping the cookie sheets with an oiled paper towel, she laid them out in a row. The few hours left before the shop opened meant we were in assembly-line mode.

  “Anyway, what happened last night?” Between him getting into an accident and us being AWOL for so long, she’d been in high dudgeon when we finally got home. But by then I’d been in no mood to explain.

  Now I folded the dry ingredients into the moist, mixed them all very thoroughly, and began placing walnut-sized dollops of the result onto the cookie sheets.

  “Well,” I replied, “first the ambulance came and the EMTs got Miss Blaine loaded into it and took her to the hospital.”

  Ellie slid the cookie sheets into the oven. “Bob Arnold showed up, too,” she said, “and stayed until the sheriff’s deputies arrived.”

  “Andy Devine told Bob Arnold that he was just out riding his motorcycle, clearing his head, and that he wouldn’t be answering any questions about it,” I continued the story.

  I hadn’t known what to think. The motorcycle speeding past us from Miss Blaine’s place when we first arrived might very well have been the same bike that Devine was riding when he showed up.

  Or it might not have. Honestly, it had been too dark and the bike had been too surprising, not to mention moving too fast, for me to be sure. Ditto for Devine wanting the gun I’d produced from my bag; maybe it was a sign of guilt, him trying to disarm me.

  Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to get shot. Bella started washing out the batter bowls so we could get more cookies going; the chocolate snickerdoodles, this time around.

  �
��What were you doing out there, anyway?” she wanted to know.

  Ellie got in ahead of me, meanwhile scooping out a serving-spoon full of Crisco. “Okay,” she began, “so do you remember how Wade said that cyanide was used for vermin control?”

  Bella allowed as how she did. “I don’t know why such things have to be discussed in my nice, clean kitchen,” she groused.

  From the window over the sink I could see past Ellie’s chicken coop to where her apple trees’ black silhouettes marched across the bluff overlooking the bay. To the east, dawn filled the sky with red and then the sun peeped up, pouring bright gold onto the water.

  “When Jake told me about that, it reminded me of when Miss Blaine used to live on the poor farm,” Ellie continued. “A sort of supervisor there, she was.”

  Bella’s face smoothed. “Oh, I remember that. A lot of land, some barns, a big bunkhouse, and so on, that the city owned. Out where the public campgrounds is now.”

  Such public charitable institutions are fast passing out of human memory, but back in the old days in Eastport, Maine, if you were poor and had no other way to manage, you could trade work for your room and board.

  “Growing vegetables and raising animals, hammering and sawing or getting firewood, or if you were a woman you could take in laundry or do sewing for people,” Bella said.

  In addition to all your other women’s-work chores, she meant; those animals and vegetables and so on, and, of course, your children. I thumped the final dough ball down onto the cookie sheet.

  “Yes, and Miss Blaine was a sort of an on-site manager there when she was young,” said Ellie, “watched over all the animal care and took the kids and the new widows under her wing and whatnot.”

  Widowhood being a reliable way to get impoverished, and not just in the old days, either. But I digress . . .

  “Later, as the school gym teacher she ran girls’ sports.” Ellie watched the kitchen clock, oven mitts at the ready; she timed baking as if that clock was the countdown timer for a space shuttle ignition.

  “And I remember it very clearly, I was on the track team at the time,” she said, “and she told all the cross-country runners to watch out for those baited spring traps with the cyanide capsules in them, that there might still be some and not to step on one accidentally.”

  Of course, maybe they were illegal now, as Wade had said, but in the good old days, if predators got your animals, you didn’t eat.

  “She’d used them herself on the poor farm,” Ellie went on. “So I couldn’t help wondering if she still had any now.”

  “But, Ellie, why would Andy Devine have had any way to know that?” I asked. “About her, or the poor farm, either?”

  The oven timer went off with a shrill brringg! “And, anyway, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves,” I added.

  We slid the baked cookies out and the unbaked ones in, as Ellie shook her head.

  “Maybe we are. And I’m not sure how he would know, or if it even matters,” she said. “But I do know that she gave a presentation at the library last winter and it was about that poor farm she lived on.”

  She set the oven timer again. “And since Sharon’s a volunteer there at the library, I imagine if he wasn’t on duty he probably went to that presentation. Wouldn’t you think?”

  I would, indeed. The engaged pair were practically joined at the hip, social-occasion-wise. But whether the beloved retired educator had mentioned any deadly poisons at the library event...

  “That I don’t know,” Ellie replied. “I didn’t go, myself. I just thought it might be worth checking. It’s why I wanted to go out there last night and ask.”

  She’d already cut the croissant triangles—zip, zop—and placed them in the warming oven to rise. Now she began working on the éclair filling, a recipe she’d followed so often that she had it memorized: whipping cream, sugar, a chocolate syrup that she’d made earlier from scratch, and vanilla.

  You whip it into soft peaks and refrigerate it: finis. “But when I went upstairs in her cottage I didn’t find anything, and then Jake found Miss Blaine,” said Ellie.

  She began assembling the ingredients for the outsides of the éclairs: flour, salt, butter, eggs, and a measuring cup with water measured into it, plus a large sauce pan.

  “So just then she yelled for me to come, and in all the awful excitement afterward I forgot to finish my search.”

  “Forgot?” Bella looked up impatiently. “How could you—”

  “You know,” I pointed out, “we were a little busy right then.”

  And speaking of pointing out things, may I just say right here that if your éclair recipe mentions pudding mix, and especially if it says instant mix, throw it out.

  The recipe and the mix. Also, just because we used whipped cream in our éclairs, that doesn’t mean you can’t use chocolate custard.

  Or vanilla, for that matter, or pistachio.

  Root beer, even.

  Just not from a mix.

  Five

  Half an hour later after working along in silence for a while, we’d made good progress in the baking department.

  Just not in the murder department. “You’ve got a point,” Ellie admitted, taking up again the conversation we’d been having.

  “There’s no really good reason to think Andy Devine knew about those cyanide-trap thingies, even assuming Miss Blaine did still have any of them.”

  “Or that Moran was killed with cyanide at all,” I agreed. That whole idea had just gathered steam of its own accord, it seemed to me now.

  The croissants were in the oven, filling the kitchen with the kind of intoxicating perfume that can only be produced by butter-pastry. Meanwhile, we were slicing the already baked biscotti logs, readying them for their own last heat treatment.

  “And we won’t know, either, not until the autopsy results come out,” I went on.

  I nabbed a biscotti-log end and bit into it. Ellie had sliced a quarter cup of candied ginger up and put it into the batter with the chocolate chips, and the result didn’t quite blow the top of my head off with its indescribable deliciousness.

  But it was close. “We just couldn’t think of a way to get a milkshake that reeks of insecticide into Toby Moran, that’s all.” I added to Bella, “Not without hogtying him and forcing it down his throat, anyway.”

  And there’d been no sign of anything like that; if there had been, the guys who’d found him dead would’ve talked about it and word would most definitely have gotten around.

  Ellie nodded agreement. “Sure, but remember that burglary report Bob Arnold got called away on earlier yesterday?”

  I used a thin spatula to get another batch of cookies off the trays, sliding them onto a wire rack to cool and putting the trays under hot water immediately. They were the one thing Ellie’s cozy old kitchen was short of, because she’d lent a lot of her cookie sheets to the Moose and hadn’t replaced them.

  “The burglary call earlier in the day was from Miss Blaine, was it?” Bella inquired astutely.

  The one Bob Arnold got while he was talking to me on Water Street, she meant; wanting to distract from anything having to do with my dad, I’d filled her in on all this as we drove over here to Ellie’s this morning.

  “Yes,” said Ellie. We’d both heard Bob saying so to the sheriff’s deputies who’d shown up out at the lake last night, that there’d been a burglary at Miss Blaine’s, earlier. But how that crime fit into any of this, we still hadn’t had much chance to discuss.

  “I see,” Bella replied thoughtfully while she scrubbed the cookie sheets with soapsuds and rinsed them. “But there’s more to it, though, isn’t there?” she asked Ellie.

  Once she finished at the sink and was ready for her next assignment, I handed Bella all the éclair-pastry ingredients that Ellie had gotten together, and she took it from there. If she worked as fast and efficiently as she usually did, the last of the cookies would come out of the oven just as the éclair shells were ready to go in: perfect.

&
nbsp; If by perfect you mean phew. By now it was already 7 a.m., and we’d have to stop soon so Ellie could get Lee ready for school.

  “Yes,” said Ellie to Bella’s question. “There must be more to it. Because the way Andy showed up out there last night, just at the right moment . . . and really, two motorcycles? How likely is that?”

  The one that had raced past us on its way out the dirt road, she meant, and the other on the paved road later, with Andy Devine on it.

  Assuming there’d been two, that is, that it hadn’t been Andy both times. I still couldn’t be sure, nor could I stop puzzling over it.

  Ellie put her batter bowl and spoon in the sink. “But there’s something else, too, that I’ve been thinking about.”

  If it had been Andy both times, he’d have raced out toward the main road, passing us on our way in, then returned not much later to . . . what? Find out what we were up to, whether we’d recognized him?

  Or to learn whether or not Miss Blaine had survived? Which as it turned out, she had.

  “I called, by the way,” Ellie said. “This morning just before you got here, and the hospital says Miss Blaine’s hanging in there.”

  Bella listened quietly. She knew what Ellie and I were up against: no money and not much prospect of having any until tourist season got under way, plus enough unpaid bills to wallpaper a room.

  She also knew that we were counting on the wedding cake job to tide us over. What she hadn’t known was that we now feared Andy Devine might really have killed Toby Moran, but she was quick on the uptake.

  “So,” she mused aloud. “Let’s say he got cyanide from Miss Blaine somehow and used it, then thought about it and realized that the real cause of Moran’s death would surely be identified sooner or later—”

  “If it was the cause,” Ellie reminded her. “We don’t know yet.”

  Bella shot us an oh, please look. I guess she wasn’t a big fan of coinky-dinks, either.

  “So he went out there to get rid of evidence, or muddy it up somehow,” she said. “And Miss Blaine interrupted him, tried to stop him, and got hurt that way. Then maybe he heard you two coming, so he had to get away fast?”