Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  “Ma, I don’t want to work for someone else my whole—”

  I found my voice, and the only thing that kept me from using it on him was the pair of hands that clapped themselves to my shoulders.

  “Hey,” Wade said pleasantly, squeezing meaningfully. “How about you come on with me?”

  I half-turned just as a look passed between the two men. “Oh, I get it, you two are in cahoots,” I said.

  Wade wrapped his arms around me. “Yes, but let’s not get too involved in that idea. Let me”—he bent to murmur warmly into my ear—“take you away from all this, over there to all that.”

  Which was when the oily engine parts slipped out of the newspaper Sam was clutching and clattered down onto the gleaming-clean hardwood floor all around his feet.

  “Fine,” I said to Wade, letting him lead me out of the dining room. Because wherever that was, suddenly I was all for it.

  * * *

  “So she confessed? Sharon Sweetwater did, I mean. In front of Bob Arnold?” Wade speared a stuffed mushroom with a frilly toothpick and ate it.

  “Oh, she sure did,” I replied, sipping a dry martini.

  Two hours had passed since I’d left Sam moving the engine-repair operation out of the dining room. Now, thanks to Wade’s swift, accurate assessment of what I needed, we were at Fernando’s, an old-fashioned supper club twenty miles from Eastport, way out on Route 9.

  Candlelight flickered in the diamond-paned windows in the cozy dining room, music tinkled from a piano in the bar area, and no one was complaining or worrying at me about anything.

  “In front of Bob,” I added. It was my second martini, which if Wade hadn’t been driving I wouldn’t have had the first one.

  He was drinking Sprite. “So now what happens?”

  We’d ordered: chicken picante for him, veal medallions for me. A basket of breadsticks was on the table, along with some butter pats.

  I crunched into a breadstick. “Now the state cops will question her. But I doubt her word alone will get Andy Devine off the hook.”

  Wade nodded. “Yeah, they wouldn’t have charged him if they didn’t think their case was pretty solid, I suppose.”

  “Nope, they wouldn’t. And Sharon’s story isn’t exactly dense with detail,” I added.

  I had no idea whether it would even make sense, only that she was desperate to clear her fiancé.

  “All she’s really done, besides causing a lot of trouble for herself, is make it even less likely that the wedding will go on as planned.”

  Our food came; the veal was so tender, it hardly even needed a knife.

  “What I still don’t get is why,” I said between bites. “Why would Andy risk everything—his upcoming marriage, his whole career—just for payback about some stupid faked lingerie pictures?”

  Wade ate more chicken, then some scalloped potatoes.

  “Because for one thing they were so obviously not Sharon,” I went on. “I doubt her students’ parents were fooled. And for another, I’m pretty sure that girls in underwear aren’t exactly X-rated, nowadays.”

  I put my fork down. “You can see the same thing in the Lands’ End catalog, for heaven’s sake.”

  Well, maybe not those black lacy numbers, but still. The piano in the bar room finished “Autumn Leaves” and started in on “I’m in the Mood for Love”; it was a romantic little roadside supper club.

  “Why commit murder,” Wade mused aloud, “with all the possible ruination that could cause, when a punch in the nose would’ve done the trick?”

  “Precisely. But what still really gets me is that bug killer in the milkshake.”

  Before Wade and I had left the house, I’d squirted some Raid into a paper towel. Now I described the experiment to him.

  “No way I could even get the towel anywhere near my face, much less into my mouth,” I reported. “I just don’t believe Moran guzzled that stuff down. I don’t care if he was drunk.”

  I took a breath. “Something else happened, and it’s something that involves that cyanide, somehow. I don’t know it yet, but I’m still sure of it.”

  “Okay. And meanwhile . . .”

  Wade was a good listener; also, he hadn’t had two martinis.

  “Meanwhile, mean as he was, you’re also absolutely right. Moran wasn’t worth it,” I finished.

  Around here, there was a phrase for guys like him: all trap and no lobster. So it wasn’t “why kill him?” that I should be wondering about, or even exactly how.

  In Andy Devine’s case, at least, it was more like “why bother?” Which meant . . . I sat up straight.

  “Wade, I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.”

  I began devouring my dinner, talking between bites. “Andy might have gotten the poison, the milkshake, even the cups and the antler-shaped sprinkles,” I said.

  We didn’t know precisely how yet, but nothing we knew so far said any of that was not possible.

  “And we know already that he had the opportunity,” I went on. “But so did Sharon, or, anyway, she hasn’t got an alibi for the time. And she knew Miss Blaine had the poison cartridges as well as he did; she was at the library lecture, too.”

  She’d also said she’d handed the poisoned milkshake to Moran and he drank it without hesitation, not mentioning any cyanide at all. But I’d already tested the insecticide-only idea and come up with a big nope.

  “So . . .” Neither of us wanted coffee. Wade laid some money on the tablecloth and we got up, waving our thanks to the waiter.

  “So the bottom line here is that Andy’s got a motive,” he went on when we got outside, “plus at least as much method and opportunity as she does.”

  “Right.” Under an indigo sky pricked with stars, the breeze had an edge of ice in it. “But not a good motive.”

  Not good enough to commit murder. Something else entirely had happened, so why was he lying about any of it?

  Wade dropped his jacket over my shoulders and got the truck door open; I hoisted myself onto the bench seat. On Route 9, highballing eighteen-wheelers roared by, as massive as locomotives with their big headlights glaring. “And Sharon had a worse one,” I said.

  Motive, I meant. Wade nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. “Let me guess. Something about how she snapped, or some such foolishness?”

  “Got it in one,” I agreed. Warm air blew from the truck’s heater; I rubbed my hands in front of it.

  “And never mind that to do all that had to get done before Toby Moran could even get murdered that way, she’d have had to stay snapped for . . . oh, I don’t know how long.”

  Long enough, anyway, to get the poison, the cup, the sprinkles, the shake ingredients . . .

  “Even Bob Arnold rolled his eyes at her story,” I added.

  But he’d still had to call the state cops. Wade took the Route 214 shortcut past a highway maintenance yard, a liquor store whose sign glowed dingy yellow, and a farm-machinery graveyard, where the jagged outlines of ancient plows and hay-baling contraptions bulked darkly.

  And then it got really dark. No moon, no streetlights . . . only our own high beams broke the velvety blackness crowded in all around us on the shortcut.

  Wrapping Wade’s jacket more closely around myself, I rolled the window down. Through it came a chorus of peeping and croaking and chirruping, as the inhabitants of a nearby frog pond made their early-summer happiness known to anything that would listen.

  Basically, I thought, frogs lived in a puddle, ate flies, and never got warm; still they yelled out their happiness in doing it and I found that encouraging.

  Or maybe it was the martinis. “On top of which,” I said, “Moran really knew how to make enemies. Ellie and I have already met one of them.”

  I summarized our talk with Carrie Allen earlier. “And I’m sure there are more, but like Bob Arnold says, it was Andy who was either there or very nearby when it happened,” I finished.

  As we passed Round Pond, the starry sky shed a thin, pale gleam onto the flat wat
er. “And if he doesn’t work out for them, there’s still Sharon for them to go after,” Wade said.

  “Right. And she’s already confessed, for Pete’s sake.”

  Something else, though, something we didn’t know, kept nagging at me. Past the sawmill at the end of the Route 214 cutoff, we came out of the woods at Route 1 and turned north, back toward Eastport.

  “So has Sam mentioned his new business idea to you yet?” Wade said, accelerating past a tiny post office building and a mom-and-pop restaurant not yet open for the summer season.

  “Yes,” I said, my tone conveying my opinion. “And I really don’t see why he has to—”

  My phone trilled an interruption; anxiety pierced me as I dug the thing from the bottom of my bag.

  “Hello?” I said into it. A familiar voice came from the device.

  “Jake?” It was Ellie’s voice, but garbled. “Jake, she’s gone.”

  “What?” I pressed the phone to my ear. Reception wasn’t great on this stretch of Route 1. “Who is, what do you—?”

  We passed the fish wholesaler’s Quonset barn near the old Shore Road intersection and the connection cleared up.

  “Miss Blaine. Jake, she’s dead.”

  I heard Ellie suppress a sob for her beloved old teacher, and at the news I felt like letting loose a few tears, too.

  Of frustration, that is. We’d been waiting for Miss Blaine to wake up and tell us who’d attacked her. Only now . . .

  “Oh, Jake,” said Ellie sorrowfully. “She took a turn for the worse this evening, Bob Arnold said, and about ten minutes ago—” . . . Now we were on our own. “Also, the toxicology report on Toby Moran just came back,” Ellie went on.

  She summarized what was in it: just as I’d thought.

  I heard her suck in a shaky breath. “Bob knows already because the homicide team called to tell him to go tape off Andy’s locker at the Coast Guard station, and Sharon’s place, too, so they can come back and search them for—”

  Yeah. “Cyanide,” I told Wade when Ellie and I had hung up. “A lot of it.”

  And that settled that, at least. Wade turned off Route 1 onto a curving lane leading down to the Pennamaquan River. In the darkness I felt rather than saw the massive bulk of the big stone dam, whose flow in the old days had powered sawmills, a grist mill, shingle mills, and a lathe.

  All gone, now. Water tumbled down the dam’s venerable old sluice channel with a sound like heavy rain, while Wade looked thoughtful. Finally, “So, can I ask you a question?”

  “Go for it,” I said as we rolled down a long hill between old farmsteads, their outbuildings dark except for the warming lamps in the henhouses.

  A mother fox led a bunch of kits into the road and he slowed.

  The babies were cute, sweetly tumbling and roughhousing. The mother wasn’t, all ratty red fur and feral expression. When they’d crossed: “What would be the point of putting that stinky bug killer in the milkshake at all?” he asked.

  “Well, because . . .” I explained about covering up the cyanide method for long enough to silence Miss Blaine.

  “I see,” said Wade, and we drove along in comfortable silence for a while, until we reached the end of the side road and Wade pulled the truck back onto deserted Route 1 again, aimed toward Eastport. I sat there in the darkened cab with him, leaning against his shoulder, listening to the whine of the tires on the pavement . . . and then I had it, the answer to the question I hadn’t been asking.

  “The method,” I said. “That’s what I haven’t been able to make sense of. I’d been puzzling over it without realizing it. But now . . .

  “Wade, what if the cyanide wasn’t in the milkshake at all? What if it wasn’t only the smelly bug killer that covered the method, but the whole milkshake that covered it?”

  He glanced at me. “To cover some other way of . . . like, what, put the cyanide in a squirt gun or something?”

  It wasn’t specifically what I’d been thinking, but . . .

  “Yeah, something like that. Probably we could come up with a lot of ways to—”

  I stopped, hearing again the heartbreak in Ellie’s voice and feeling a burst of anger rising in me at the memory. She didn’t deserve this, and neither had Miss Blaine.

  None of us did. “Yeah,” I said again as we sailed across the dark causeway toward the lights of Eastport.

  “A lot of ways,” I repeated, thinking about Miss Blaine’s cottage by the lake and her retirement in it: peaceful and well-earned.

  Until someone ended it for her, selfishly and savagely.

  “And you know what?” I went on, feeling those martinis fall away suddenly. “I’m going to figure out what method it was, and whoever used it, I’m going to deliver them to the cops on a platter.”

  Because revenge may be a dish best served cold for some people.

  But in this case, I wanted mine hot and sweet.

  Seven

  The next morning, Ellie and I met at daybreak on the fish pier, on Water Street in downtown Eastport.

  “Oh, I can’t believe this,” she said miserably as the gray dawn grew pink-tinged, then blazed up fiery red.

  On the bay, the dark shapes of fishing boats already well into their day’s work showed as silhouettes, then took on detail: men’s shapes, stacked traps, the sharp, thin lines of chains and winches.

  “Miss Blaine would be encouraging us now, though, wouldn’t she?” I said. “To go on, I mean, not get bogged down in . . .”

  “She certainly would.” Ellie turned to me. “And the two different poisons aren’t even the whole problem, are they?”

  “Nope.” We sat on the pier’s end, looking out over the waves. “It’s all of it that we need to reconsider,” I said.

  She’d brought milky coffee and fresh croissants: plain ones, warm and generously buttered. Legs dangling, we began eating our breakfast.

  “How’s everyone at home?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Bella’s upset, my dad’s dug his heels in, the baby’s fussy, and Sam’s got a new brainstorm.”

  I told her about the yard-care business, how I thought it was risky for him to go out on his own with it. “And if he buys any more junky lawn-care machinery, we’ll have to build a shed for it all.”

  I finished my croissant. “So things are a little hectic.” Which was putting it mildly, but she didn’t need to hear that.

  “Listen, those two guys who showed up at Miss Blaine’s cottage,” I said instead.

  Gulls swooped in for the croissant crumbs and rose with them, flapping and screaming. Ellie dropped our napkins into the bag she’d brought the pastries in and crumpled it.

  “I mean, if they weren’t just checking to make sure we weren’t up to something bad, what would they be doing at Miss Blaine’s place?”

  “I don’t know. But even if we did find out . . .”

  I’d had plenty of time to think about this because the baby had cried every half hour the night before.

  “There are still so many questions,” she finished.

  In the brightening dawn I saw the tear slipping down her cheek, and it fueled my resolve.

  “Look,” I said, dropping an arm around her shoulders. “We could have one more crack at all this.”

  She swallowed hard. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “We could just try ruling those two guys out of any involvement,” I went on. “It might not do any good. But I’m stumped, otherwise, and it might be our only chance to clear Andy Devine.”

  I took a breath. “And Sharon. And get justice for Miss Blaine’s murder, too,” I added.

  “Well,” Ellie said slowly, brightening as she began to catch my drift, “it is pretty early still.”

  That was more like it. We got up, as out on the water a barge glided by, loaded with bales of fish food and headed for the salmon farms in Sipp Bay.

  “Yes, it is early,” I agreed. “So if Lee’s going to be okay—”

  “George came home last night,” Ellie said, answering
my question. “He’ll be up to get her off to school and so on, he loves to do it.”

  Because, of course, as things stood now he rarely got the chance. “We could go out there once more,” she went on, “and . . .”

  We had four hours still before The Chocolate Moose had to be opened. Ellie turned tentatively to me.

  “. . . to Miss Blaine’s cottage again, maybe, but also to the one those guys came from?”

  Pleased at the way her mood was recovering, I watched the idea of further snooping take hold in her. “Yep, we surely could,” I agreed.

  “They might not even be there,” she speculated. “Then it’ll be easy.”

  Which was what I was hoping for. Even though they’d been there during the day, the nights were still chilly this time of the year. They might’ve been out fishing, then gone home to hot dinners, flat-screen TVs, and their own warm beds.

  Meanwhile, if we sat around doing nothing there’d be no wedding, no more Chocolate Moose—and no more Ellie here in Eastport, either.

  “George is already looking at rental houses in Bangor,” she said, reading my thought. “So . . . yes,” she finished determinedly, “let’s go.”

  We tossed the empty croissant bag in the trash can at the end of the fish pier, and moments later we were in my car: out over the causeway, across Route 1, and onto the Lake Road, still murky with night mist that drifted between the trees like pale ghosts.

  On Miss Blaine’s lane, the first real sunlight began sparkling in the cobwebs between the tree trunks. The air was clear and still very cold out here by the lake.

  At the house all was quiet, and although the phone didn’t work here, we were going over there, weren’t we? So I muted my phone in case it betrayed us at some inopportune moment, and Ellie did the same with hers.

  Across the water, the guys’ little camp was equally still, the lake as smooth as glass. “Let’s have another quick look around here first,” I said.

  There’d been two kayaks by the dock, I recalled. “That way we can scout out their territory from a distance, and if they are there we can pretend we’re just out for an early paddle.”

  The cottage doors were still locked, of course. But this time I knew where to place the ladder. Inside, the air still carried a whiff of wood smoke, and the clock on the kitchen shelf ticked hollowly.