Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  “What?” My eyes were squinched shut, but her voice came nearer. “Jake, what in the world are you even talking about? There’s nothing all over your . . .”

  Then she stopped, and I could feel her staring. “Oh, my—”

  I opened my eyes. The spot on my leg where the leech had been attached was a small, inflamed circle, courtesy of the creature’s raspy teeth; apparently I had dislodged it, after all.

  And there were no other leeches anywhere else. My arm, though . . .

  Ellie looked scared. “Oh, Jake, we’ve got to do something about this.”

  The arm where the dock splinter had been stuck streamed with red. The hole, small and purple, pumped fluid steadily, each crimson bloop! looking to be about a tablespoonful.

  And being a morbid little twit, I happened to know that there are approximately ten pints—or only about 320 of those tablespoonsful—of blood in a person my size.

  Luckily, Ellie was already stripping one of the straps out of her life jacket and wrapping it around my forearm. Scanning around, she snatched a floating stick up out of the water and twisted it through the strap.

  “There,” she said. Turning the stick, she tightened the strap on my arm until the blood spurting from the hole lessened and stopped.

  “Hold that,” she instructed me. I was too scared to talk, still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was injured at all.

  Gradually, though, it dawned on me that this thing wouldn’t heal by itself. From the way the wound bled, it was obvious that I’d poked a hole in an artery.

  Not a big artery, but still. “Jake, you’re going to be fine,” she said. “You just sit there and don’t lean over at all, okay?”

  Oh, you betcha. By now if I leaned over, I might fall over.

  “And I’m going to get us home,” she went on, looping the line on the front of my kayak through a cleat on the rear of her own. Then she paddled, sticking close to the shore but otherwise moving right along.

  And for a wonder, no one spotted us doing it. We’d been lucky not to get caught and it just didn’t occur to the guys, I guessed, that their home invaders had been water-borne.

  Even the paddle I’d left behind might’ve come from one of their own kayaks. So five minutes later we were at Miss Blaine’s dock, and on our way to the hospital not long after that.

  And whether it was because I was in shock or just anxious in the extreme by then, time seemed to pass swiftly; moments after I walked into the emergency room I was waking up from IV anesthesia.

  “Ptthhh,” I said, reaching for the glass of water someone held out. But the arm wouldn’t work right, and when I looked down I saw the white gauze wrapping my arm from elbow to wrist.

  “So much for keeping all this just between us,” I joked to Ellie, letting my arm fall back down onto the bed. The anesthesia I’d had was wearing off swiftly and I already felt clearheaded again.

  Unfortunately, its painkilling properties were fading fast, too, and from what the wound felt like now I gathered they’d had to dig around in there quite a bit.

  Like with a steam shovel, maybe. “Ouch,” I said calmly. Then: “Ellie, do you know where my clothes are?” I kept my voice mild. Right now, I was in a hospital gown and socks. “I left some things in them,” I enunciated meaningfully.

  Like, for instance, the hypodermic syringe that I’d swiped from the guys’ cottage. Luckily, Ellie caught right on.

  “Anything that was there, I’ve already taken,” she said. “Don’t trouble yourself about that.”

  You’ve got worse things to worry about, her tone implied, and I couldn’t disagree. My coming home from the hospital with a ripped-to-bits forearm, for example, would interest Wade very considerably, and Bella hadn’t heard from either of us for hours; she’d be amused, too.

  At last when my vital signs suggested I could be discharged, the nurse took my IV out and I started pulling clothes on again, stopping when I got to the part about my wrapped arm fitting through a sleeve.

  Luckily, the bandage kit on the bedside table contained scissors. Ellie slit the shirt sleeve, then fastened it again with adhesive tape from the same kit. Finally, with instructions and prescriptions, I was let go, and from the car I did call Bella, to give her a much-edited version of what had occurred.

  “But I’m fine now,” I added when I’d finished, figuring that the survival portion of the program was the angle that I should pursue.

  “Oh,” Bella replied distractedly, not sounding as if she’d really heard me, or if she had, she wasn’t impressed.

  “Good,” she added, and then to someone else there with her, “No! Don’t do that! No, I said I’ll take care of it when—”

  Sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, Ellie heard the sounds coming out of my phone and looked quizzically at me.

  “It sounds like something’s wrong,” I said, “but I can’t—”

  Then Sam came on. “Mom?” He sounded bad. “Mom, they took him.”

  A shot of fear went through me. “Who, Sam? What’s going on?”

  “Mom, we can’t find Ephraim. He was here asleep in his playpen, only alone for a couple of minutes. But when I came back just now . . .”

  His voice broke. Ellie started the car and pulled hurriedly out of the hospital’s parking lot.

  “When I came back to the kitchen the back door was open and the baby was gone,” he said, then sucked in a ragged breath.

  “Mom, I think someone must’ve taken him!”

  Eight

  All the way home, I kept beating myself over the head with it. “If I hadn’t just taken off without telling anyone, and if I hadn’t turned off my phone . . .”

  “What?” Ellie countered, speeding us skillfully up, down, and around the hilly curves on Route 1.

  “You think even if the phone worked, some kidnapper was going to call you, give you a fast heads-up on what was about to get done?”

  We slowed for the turns in Red Beach, then shot up out of the shoreline hamlet and along the straightaway to Mill Cove.

  “So you could rush right home and prevent it?” Ellie went on.

  At low tide, on the wide, sandy beach, small black-and-white birds skittered between tide pools.

  “No.” We sped past the Red Sleigh gift shop, and after that the convenience store with the gas pumps out front.

  “But I should’ve been there,” I repeated stubbornly. “Besides, you know darned well this is probably because of us.”

  She glanced at me, frowning. But I noticed she didn’t deny it. We drove between stands of white pine, balsam fir, and the remnants of ancient apple orchards, their gnarled branches exuberantly in bloom.

  “Okay, though, so what if you’re right?” she said eventually. “Someone took Ephraim to do what, divert our attention?”

  The painkillers I’d gotten at the hospital had worn off all the way by now; my arm felt like somebody was simultaneously blowtorching it and chopping it to bits. Through gritted teeth I replied, “Something like that.” We sped past the airport, then on into town between the bank building and the hair salon.

  “If the guys at the lake figured out what happened in their cabin,” I went on, “maybe they called someone. Whoever they’re in on this with. Whatever this is,” I added miserably.

  “I guess it could be possible,” Ellie gave in reluctantly. “If they also figured out somehow that we were the intruders. And who we are, even. Our names and so on.”

  She swung us onto Key Street. “But it’s a lot to accept. How would they know who we are? And they’d have to have done it fast.”

  We pulled up in front of my house. Bob Arnold’s squad car was in the driveway, and when we crossed to the front porch we found my daughter-in-law, Mika, sitting on the front steps with her face in her hands, her glossy black hair shielding her sobs like a curtain.

  In the doorway, Bob stood waiting for us. “If it’s true, though, and someone’s got the baby on account of it,” I went on quietly.

  �
��Then I guess we can probably figure out what they want for him in return,” Ellie finished for me.

  “Yeah, for us to quit snooping and shut up,” I said, mounting the steps. “I hope that’s all they want, anyway.”

  Oh, this was all my fault.... A wave of pain rolled through my arm and up my neck, so intense that I stopped, gripping the porch railing.

  “Ellie, I’ve got to take something for this.” With my good hand I dug in my pants pocket for the small orange bottles we’d gotten at the hospital. But shoved down there with them I also found something else.

  “What is that?” said Ellie, just as Bob Arnold turned from the door, looking as if steam was about to start boiling from his ears.

  Meanwhile, Mika just went on weeping, and I wasn’t sure which hurt worse: my arm with the fire exploding in it or seeing her so wretched.

  “This,” I said, pulling from my pocket the syringe and needle I’d taken from the guys’ cottage.

  Ellie had given it back to me. “I’ll bet this is what they want.”

  “Because it’s proof of something?” Ellie wondered aloud. “But of what? And even if all they want is to get it back, how would we—”

  Get it to them, I knew she’d been about to say, but just then I looked past her, across the street.

  In the big front yard there, another old apple tree shed creamy pink petals onto the green grass. But something else was on the soft grass, too, amid the apple blossoms....

  Someone, rather. “We won’t have to,” I said as across the street, the small shape on the lawn rolled over and kicked its feet happily.

  “All we’ve had is a warning,” I added, rushing toward the figure.

  By now Bob Arnold had seen it, too, and was hustling down off the porch. “All units,” he began into his radio.

  I raced across the street. The house belonged to the family of the young teenaged girl who’d been babysitting for Mika. In the yard a fenced area made of picket sections enclosed a square of the lawn.

  Little Ephraim lay inside the fence, on a blanket with pink and blue moons and stars embroidered on it. “Gah!” he greeted me.

  Bob followed me. “. . . has been located,” he was saying into the radio, and when he was done: “That arm,” he said furiously when he reached me, “had better be broken. I mean, you’d better have a no-kidding compound fracture there, Jake, or—”

  On the carpet of fallen blossoms beneath it, the baby looked puzzled to be alone in the great outdoors but otherwise unharmed.

  “Glrp!” he said brightly when I picked him up. Gazing around, he spotted Bob Arnold and grinned toothlessly, waving a tiny fist.

  “Glrp, yourself,” Bob retorted as his radio sputtered. “Yeah,” he pronounced into it, “the searchers can stand down.”

  As he spoke, his index finger moved as if drawn toward the baby’s grasping hand, then was seized by it.

  “Yeah, he’s fine,” Bob said into his radio.

  By then Mika had seen us and come scrambling across the street at us. She took the baby from my arms and cradled him, sobbing.

  “What happened?” she managed through her tears. “How did he get there, who—”

  Bob Arnold was pounding on the door of the babysitter’s house now, but no one answered and it seemed clear that no one was at home. I put my good arm around Mika and guided her back across the street to our place, where Sam and Bella had come out, too, with my dad and Wade hurrying behind them onto the porch.

  Ellie’s daughter was there as well, her dark hair pulled back into an elastic and an apron tied on over her school clothes.

  “I called her from the ER while you were still out cold,” Ellie explained as we all went inside, “and told her to come here if George had to leave before I got back.”

  Which made sense; George rarely got more than one night at home, and the little girl was familiar with Bella, and with my kitchen. Now while Mika took the baby upstairs, the others began peppering Ellie and me with questions.

  But I had no good answers. It was all I could do, even with my arm now pulsating with anguish, not to rush out and find whoever had dared even to touch my infant grandson.

  But those feelings would have to wait, along with the guilt that I still felt like a dagger in my heart. Because this was my fault, I was certain.

  Going out to the lake at all, then across it to a place we had absolutely no business being, and taking the syringe and needle . . .

  All my idea, I berated myself, every foolish bit of it. And now, of course, here was my comeuppance, wasn’t it, since, after all, what in the world else could have provoked an awful incident like this?

  “Any word from Sharon or Andy?” I asked Bob Arnold before he could start in on me. I’d explained by then the basic details of what had happened to my arm, and he’d calmed down a little.

  “Murder cops’ve got ’em in separate rooms at City Hall,” he said. “They both turned down having an attorney. Nice kids, but neither one of them’s exactly a Rhodes scholar,” he added in exasperation.

  The rest of my family were in other parts of the house. Ellie shot me a look that said talk to you later, then took off as well, to get Lee back to their place in time to do her homework before supper.

  Grabbing the chance to speak with him in private, I told Bob the truth about where we’d been and what we’d been doing, then went on.

  “So I’m responsible for this, Bob. Whoever feels threatened by what Ellie and I have been doing, this was a message from them.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He eyed me skeptically. “Well, I’m not so sure about that. But if it is true, it just makes it plain that whatever you’ve been doing, you need to stop doing it.”

  Like that wasn’t obvious, right? “Oh, I know. Believe me, I . . .”

  “I’m responsible, too, though,” he added. “I should’ve laid down the law in the first place, that you two should—”

  “Right,” I agreed humbly. “Mind our own business.”

  Because for one thing it was all over, our chance of clearing Andy Devine or his fiancé, Sharon Sweetwater.

  And once I’d admitted this and promised to keep my nose out of Toby Moran’s murder from now on, Bob departed the house, too. His look on his way out wasn’t comforting; there was, he obviously knew, more going on than we’d told him even now.

  Then when everyone else was gone: “Here.” My dad’s voice startled me. I looked up; he held out a whiskey glass.

  With whiskey in it. “Down the hatch,” he commanded.

  Warmth spread through my chest, loosening up a bunch of tears that had been stuck there. Struggling against them, I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood.

  He put his arm around me comfortingly. “Hey. Everything’s okay. The baby’s back.”

  He poured me another shot. This time I only sipped at it, still thinking I might get a chance at another one of those pain pills.

  “No harm,” said my dad, “no foul.”

  But that was the thing I was least sure of right now, wasn’t it? The no harm part . . . And even without knowing any details he saw that much, his bushy eyebrows rising in comprehension.

  “Feeling rotten, huh?” he asked sympathetically.

  In his younger days, if you got on my dad’s bad side he’d build a small explosive device and set it to go off in one of your trash bins. Or if you were very unpleasant (and he was going to be around to make absolutely sure that nobody got hurt), he’d put it under your porch.

  And there were other things; bigger ones. I’m not excusing any of it, you understand; I’m just saying that it was a different time, back in the radical 60s.

  Also, he’d paid for it all, legally and in other ways. Now as he poured a drink for himself and pulled a chair out, waving me into it, his gaze fell on my bandaged arm once more and I saw his mind working on the idea of finding out who’d hurt me.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I told him, “I did this to myself.”

  “Oh, you did, hey?” he replied skeptically. He sat a
cross from me at the kitchen table, clasping his gnarled hands on it.

  Someone turned the heat up on the blowtorch they were holding to my arm. I pulled the pills out, shook a tablet from the bottle, and swallowed it while he watched calmly.

  “Well, then, maybe you’d better tell your old dad all about it,” he said, whereupon I finally did just burst into angry tears.

  * * *

  A couple of hours later, after another one of those damned pills and a good dinner, I felt better.

  Wade had inquired kindly about my injury and had accepted my explanation; that I’d been retrieving one of Miss Blaine’s kayaks and snagged my arm on the edge of the dock.

  Hey, so it wasn’t a detailed explanation; so sue me. Meanwhile, nobody blamed me for getting little Ephraim kidnapped; they couldn’t, because they didn’t know.

  Only Bob Arnold and Ellie did. But no one had to blame me because I still felt bad enough about it all by myself.

  And about something else, too; so bad, in fact, that by eleven o’clock that night with everybody else in bed and asleep, I slipped fully dressed downstairs carrying my shoes and a flashlight.

  Past the dark living room and dining room with their massive old cast-iron radiators looming like strange zoo animals, I tiptoed like a cartoon burglar toward the back door. I had no excuse—or at least not one that I wanted to tell anyone about—for going out.

  Still, I had to. So it was crucial that I not wake anyone. But as I passed the kitchen, where a night-light glowed over the old soapstone sink: “Going somewhere?”

  My dad sat at the kitchen table, dressed in a dark sweatshirt and navy pants with a black knit watch cap that his stringy gray ponytail snaked out the back of.

  He got up, pushing his chair in soundlessly; black high-tops on his feet, I noticed. Like the rest of his garb, they’d be less visible in the dark; he hadn’t known what I might be planning, I supposed.

  But he must have suspected I’d be going out, and wanted to be dressed for it.

  “Hey,” he said, crossing the room toward me. Not as lim-berly as he used to, maybe, but he looked plenty spry.