Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  Ellie took the downstairs this time, and I went up. The pine-paneled bathroom was tiny but functional and clean; I felt a little pang of envy at the neatly folded towel, the spotless wash basin without even a drop of water marring it.

  Bella rode herd on the bathrooms at my house, but even she couldn’t stay ahead of six adults and an infant for very long. I went on poking around, feeling a pang of guilt at invading the dead woman’s privacy: a guest room, a spare room . . . but nothing interesting in them.

  “Jake!” Ellie called, and I hurried down to follow her excited gesture out the window facing the lake.

  “They’re over there,” she said, “they’ve got a fire going. You can see the smoke from their chimney.”

  A wisp of smoke twirled up lazily. Then two men appeared, and moments later a small boat moved away from the dock.

  “They’re going out fishing,” Ellie said, pleased.

  Perfect, I thought. We wouldn’t need much time. My only worry was, what if they came back while we were there?

  She read my thought. “We could go back out to the road and try calling Bob Arnold. Ask him to—”

  “What,” I interrupted, still watching the small boat puttering on the calm water, “ask him to perform an impromptu and probably illegal dwelling search, based on our cockamamie suspicions?”

  It wasn’t the way I thought of it, but he would. “I don’t think so,” I went on. “Besides, just because Andy’s phone worked out on the road doesn’t mean ours will. And, anyway, you already know what we need to do.”

  At my words I watched her resolve return. “You’re right. Let’s do this thing.”

  Two blue life jackets hung by the door; grabbing them, she ushered me out ahead of her.

  “But we’d better get a move on,” she added as we trotted down the dock path together, “before they catch a fish and decide to come back to clean it.”

  * * *

  In theory, it is perfectly possible to get into a kayak without soaking more than your feet.

  Kayak-entering has never been a talent of mine, however. It goes one way, I go the other, and before you know it the spot I was aiming for with my rear has been cleverly replaced with lake water.

  Cold lake water; so much for dry pants. “Yeesh,” I grated out, repositioning myself, whereupon the floating kayak tipped crazily once more. It didn’t capsize, however, since from the kayak’s point of view why even bother at that point, right?

  Or so I thought while, reveling in the charming sensation of wet clothing clinging cozily to my backside, I settled at last into the kayak’s cockpit and grabbed the paddle off the dock.

  By now the guys in the boat were halfway across the small lake, idling along with a mutter of outboard engine that barely broke the pristine silence.

  “This way,” said Ellie, paddling her own kayak between me and the lake’s thickly treed shoreline.

  “If we stick to the shallows they’re less likely to see us,” she advised.

  Luckily, the kayaks were camouflage green, not highway orange or, God forbid, pink. In the cool, fresh-smelling mists of an early summer morning in Maine, we eased among the lily pads and the marsh reeds.

  “Hey,” I heard one of the guys cry out, and froze; had they spotted us? But it was only that one of them had indeed caught a fish and was leaning over to net it.

  Their boat didn’t turn back, though; I let my breath out.

  Ellie paddled beside me, her cheeks pink and her eyes intent. “I’m glad we came,” she said, her momentary hesitation forgotten.

  “I am, too.” A green frog eyed us unblinkingly, then sprang splay-legged from his rock and swam. A hawk circled overhead.

  “The shoreline by their own cottage is the one they’re most familiar with,” she said. “The look of it, I mean, from a distance.”

  So we should be most careful there, she meant. We slid forward silently some more, until a shallow, rocky place stopped us.

  “Drat,” I uttered quietly, pushing with my paddle.

  But I was stuck. The kayak’s narrow nose had poked forward hard into a crevice between two boulders. And now it wouldn’t come out.

  “Push,” Ellie whispered urgently, maneuvering herself around to the other side of the obstruction.

  I was already pushing with the paddle’s blade, and when that didn’t work I rolled out of the damned kayak and yanked on it, bracing my bare feet on another big rock.

  Which turned out to be slimy. No warning, just splash, feet up and head down like I was going off a diving raft backward, only with less pleasure and a lot more swear words.

  Gosh, that water was cold. I came up spluttering. Ellie hovered above me with her eyes wide, her index finger pressed to her lips.

  “Ssh. Jake, they heard that.”

  She waved out across the water. A thickish stand of last year’s cattails shielded us, their spiky chocolate-brown heads unravelling to wads of soggy-looking wooly stuff.

  But the sound of an outboard was getting louder. Voices, too: not alarmed, but they were interested and they were coming this way, now.

  “Ellie, what’re we going to—”

  Do, I was about to finish, and then it happened.

  “Bow-whonnnk!” The sound nearly startled me out of the water, as yet another frog, this one an enormous green bullfrog with big, googly eyes, leapt muscularly from its hiding place among the cattails right out into the lake, and landed with a huge splash.

  The boat’s engine sound revved, then faded. “They’re going away,” said Ellie in a whisper. “They’re . . . yes!”

  I poked my head up, brushing a mess of wet hair back off my face. In the distance across the water the little boat was indeed heading for the other end of the lake.

  As I watched, it swerved around a small island, then passed a low, barren peninsula with a single pine tree jutting up from the tip of it . . . and then the little boat was gone.

  “Phew,” breathed Ellie.

  Or words to that effect. I, however, was still wet and cold, and by the feel of it something hungry was nibbling one of my toes. Also, I’d lost my kayak paddle, which was probably lucky; if I’d had it I’d have gone after the nibbler with it and likely amputated my foot.

  So instead I just grabbed my pant leg, yanked my foot up, and removed the drowned piece of tree branch stuck to the bottom of it.

  No nibbler. Still seated in her kayak, Ellie observed my antics, very carefully not laughing.

  “Oh, Jake,” she managed. Well, sort of not laughing. I grimaced at the merriment in her eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I groused, maneuvering myself back into the kayak with all the grace of a bunch of drenched cats being herded into a burlap sack.

  A wet burlap sack, and have I mentioned how much I enjoy having soaked clothing clinging to me? Clammy, skin-crawlingly. . .

  Oh, never mind, it was repulsive, was what it was; nevertheless, we made it at last to the cottage’s dock area, got out, and shoved the kayaks in among the pilings under the dock, out of sight.

  Two more kayaks lay pulled up onto the beach. “All right, now,” said Ellie, peering up at the cottage’s empty windows.

  Or at least we hoped they were empty. Glancing nervously back over my shoulder in case the fishermen decided they needed more bait, I followed Ellie up to the house.

  Although house might be too fancy a word for it. Unlike Miss Blaine’s pretty lakeside home, this was more at the hunting-camp end of the spectrum: in the rock-encircled fire pit on the beach, someone had been burning milk cartons and Little Debbie cake boxes.

  Inside—they’d left the door unlocked—the smell was of burnt bacon, damp boots, and beer cans. A couple of sleeping bags hung over a clothesline strung near the woodstove.

  On the wooden card table near the stove lay a deck of cards, an empty bottle of Allen’s, and a loaded .38 revolver with the safety off, a situation I recognized from observing Wade’s gun-repair work.

  Junky little .22 pistols aren’t his style, but this
gun was. “Huh,” I said, plucking up the weapon and disarming it, replacing it on the table, and dropping the bullets into my pocket.

  At Ellie’s look, I shrugged. “They could come back, you know.”

  “Right.” Her expression was businesslike. “Let’s just do what we came for and get out of here, and we won’t have to worry about that.”

  “Agreed.” I glanced once more out the window at the lake; no motorboats. Then I turned to the task at hand: finding . . .

  “Ellie? Any ideas about what we’re looking for?”

  She looked up from where she was already rummaging through an old canvas trunk. Inside were some fishing lures, a boat cushion, boxes of stick matches, and a dog’s well-chewed Nylabone.

  “I don’t know. Just . . . something. Right? Something that might tell us something new or aim us in some new direction.”

  Wherever that might be. I hoped it was warm, though, because I was still wet and cold, and beginning to shiver.

  Luckily the woodstove still had some fire burning in it; grasping the pot holder tied to the stove’s doorhandle, I opened the firebox to get closer to the warmth, then found a last slim stick of kindling in the firewood basket and stuck it in there, too.

  Meanwhile, Ellie began opening and closing drawers and cabinets in the cabin’s open kitchen area. “Nothing so far,” she reported.

  The cabin was plainly equipped, and not decorated at all: two pans, a skillet, and a percolator were the cooking implements, while the plates, cups, and implements were all plastic or paper.

  On the counter between the kitchen area and the rest of the room lay a letter with some official-looking paperwork clipped to it. The letter was about an upcoming court hearing related to a divorce, to decide the custody arrangements for two minor children.

  The ones we’d seen swimming here, maybe, I thought. “Nothing here, either,” called Ellie from the closet under the stairs.

  I put the letter down, wondering if I dared put another stick of wood in the stove. A little more heat and I thought I might be able to get warm, if not particularly dry. But there was no kindling left, and a big log would be a giveaway that someone had been here.

  “Darn,” Ellie said, rummaging through the jumbled canned goods on a shelf over the sink’s hand pump.

  “Maybe there really is nothing here. Maybe we’re wrong and those guys really were just checking us out.”

  “Could be.” I rummaged the wood basket again, hoping for just one slender branch that might burn up in a few minutes.

  That’s how much longer I figured we might still be here, snooping around. But what Ellie said next as she glanced out the window again changed my opinion, fast.

  “Uh-oh. Jake, we’d better—”

  Not what I wanted to hear. “They’re coming back?”

  But, of course they were, what else could it be? She hurried back to the kitchen area and began slamming drawers and cabinets shut.

  “Look around, try to put back anything we’ve moved.”

  Starting with all the firewood I’d pulled out of the basket and set alongside it while I was searching for a small piece . . . I stuck the first chunk of wood into the basket again, then looked down to see where to position the next.

  I wanted it to look as if no one had been rummaging in it. But what I saw then at the basket’s bottom made me dump the whole thing out onto the floor.

  “Ellie?” I whispered. A few sheets of old newspaper were there amidst the splinters and bits of bark. For fire-starting: twist up some newspaper, build a teepee from lengths of kindling positioned over the newspaper spills you’ve made, touch a match to it all, and voilà!

  Or viola, as Sam always pronounced it. But newspapers weren’t all I’d found, and now I could hear the engine on the guys’ fishing boat, getting closer.

  “Ellie? What’s this doing here?” I said, holding up a plastic hypodermic syringe with a needle on it. A capped needle, I was glad to see, not one just lying uncovered there, waiting to stick me.

  But still. A shiver that had nothing to do with the lake water went through me. “Ellie?”

  She was staring. “Bring it. But come on, we’ve got to go now.”

  Voices drifted up from where the guys were already tying up their boat. Crossing the room in a few strides, she seized my arm and kept going, dragging me to the cottage’s rear door.

  It opened onto a sun-dappled clearing. A thick carpet of pine needles from the trees around the cottage made our escape soundless. But we still had to get back down to the kayaks, where we’d hidden them under the dock; that or fight our way through the underbrush, two or three miles around the shore back to Miss Blaine’s place.

  Cutting across the lake had been the short way to get here, like going across the middle of a circle instead of around the outside. And with the sun now high in the sky, the mosquitoes were out.

  Also blackflies, tiny caraway-seed-sized monsters whose painful bite produced red, itchy welts, a headache and swollen glands, and a fever in people who were badly allergic to them.

  As I was, and don’t even get me started on deerflies, ounce for ounce the world’s most ferocious flesh-eaters. At this hour of the morning the lakeside forest was like a diner for biting insects, and I was the main course.

  “Come on,” breathed Ellie, peering anxiously through the trees, and by then I needed little urging; swatting, slapping, and trying not to inhale tiny airborne bodies with stingers, I hunkered beside her.

  The guys mounted the deck; then the porch door slammed. Inside, footsteps stomped the floor.

  “Now,” said Ellie, and we flew downhill to the water’s edge. Cringing, I strode behind her into the chilly water and ducked under the dock to hide.

  The slimy green wooden dock pilings glistened around me; minnows, disturbed by our plunge into their habitat, darted away flashing as Ellie grabbed a kayak and shoved it at me, and swung smoothly into her own while I hesitated.

  “Lean back onto it, drop your butt in, swing your legs up,” she recited just as the guys came running back out of their cottage again.

  That’s when I realized that I’d left the woodstove door ajar. And, of course, they’d noticed; why wouldn’t they? We may as well have left a note: Hi, we invaded your house!

  Thinking this, I leaned back until my body was crosswise over the kayak, dropped my backside firmly into the seat, and swung my legs up over the bow. My feet dropped down into the cockpit, and I was in.

  “Wow,” I said to Ellie, stupidly pleased.

  But she was already gone, pushing from between the pilings and out from under the dock and into a thicket of reeds. Then, just as I was about to follow, a pair of boots strode out onto the dock and stopped right over my head.

  Boots with feet in them, that is, and at the same time I noticed that my paddle wasn’t down here under the dock with me. Instead it was out there on the water’s surface, floating in plain sight.

  But for the moment, whoever was up there had his back to it; I could tell from the way the boots were pointing. I stretched my hand out for the paddle, fingers straining.

  He turned. I yanked my hand down, catching the skin inside my arm hard and painfully against one of the dock pilings. Instantly blood streamed down my arm; also, there was a splinter jutting from it.

  Grimacing, I gave the splinter an experimental tug and it slid easily out. This might not have been my best move, however, since once the splinter was gone the stream of blood from the newly unobstructed puncture wound became a steady spurt-spurt.

  Darn, I thought with a flicker of panic. Meanwhile, Ellie was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t dare call out to her.

  And I still didn’t have the paddle. Holding my breath, I braced myself with my hands against two of the cold, wet, slimy dock pilings, trying not to think about the kinds of things that probably lived down there in the water around them.

  Like leeches, for instance, and just then I suddenly zigged when I should’ve zagged; the kayak capsized, tumbling me o
ut.

  Swiftly and as if summoned by my worst imaginings, through the water a squadron of inky-black, thumb-sized shadows began separating themselves from the pilings they’d been clinging to, then propelling themselves toward me.

  The guy on the dock was walking back up toward the cottage now. The paddle was nowhere in sight, while the kayak itself had somehow gotten shoved up underneath the dock again. To reach it I would have to wade back there, too, through a swarm of leeches.

  “Gah,” I breathed, pushing myself cringingly along with my toes. At least it wasn’t mucky, but this seemed small comfort. A whimper escaped me as I spotted something dark clinging to my left leg: like a streak of mud, but it was long, and it was moving.

  And it was attached. Squeaking with disgust, I grabbed the end of it wincingly between my thumb and forefinger, but instead of coming off it merely . . . lengthened.

  Trying not to imagine the thing’s round, toothy mouth fastened into my flesh—trying, but not succeeding—I gave up on the horrid creature, hustling instead through waist-deep water to the kayak.

  Grabbing it, I gave it a shove and it slipped away from me, and popped out from under the dock. Oh, great . . .

  If those guys were watching, I was completely screwed. “Psst!” Ellie gestured frantically to me from the reed clump she’d been crouched in. “The kayak! Push it over here out of sight, quick!”

  So I did, and then I did something else, too, something I hope I never have to do again.

  I put my face down into that leech-infested lake and I swam underwater to where Ellie and my kayak waited, and never mind the fact that those bloodsucking little monsters might slither into my ears.

  Or up my nose . . .

  “Eeyaghh,” I said when I came up, or something like it.

  The feeling of leeches attaching themselves to me was hideous; by the time I hauled myself into the kayak again it was a wonder my whole skin wasn’t just shuddering itself right off my body.

  “Pick them off me,” I whispered, not wanting to look.

  Ellie was busy doing something to the front end of my kayak. “Please,” I said, feeling that at any moment a maniacal shriek might come out of my mouth. “Please, they’re all over me.”