“Shut up.”
“No. You like listening to me because I figured it out. Maybe I amaze you? Maybe you feel sorry that I got mixed up in this?”
“I like your family. Please . . . shut . . . up.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” My brain was trying to figure out how to get out of this mess. But all I had for a weapon was words. “You like smart people. I’m smart. But Cherry was smart, too. Your career was about to be over because he knew you were spreading chemicals around the countryside and dosing orchards and grapevines so your research could stay on track. You were hoping the feds would renew your grant and your job. Because you’re so smart.”
He turned his head away and I heard him spit off into the ferns. When he turned his face back toward me, the starlight spying through scudding clouds illuminated his forehead, cheeks, and chin in blue light. He looked crazed.
I continued, still conjuring an escape. “You made up some story to get him to meet you at the church Saturday night. Maybe you thought the knife would still be inside the church? You told him it was still there and you were going to report him? Maybe you reminded him that his blood and fingerprints were all over it?”
“I didn’t know he was hopping aboard that tour and would come back or that you’d be there. I drove by a few times while you and your grandma were cleaning the buildings and graveyard.”
“Did it make you nervous to think I might have found the knife, considering I’ve got a reputation for being like a dog on a bone with crimes?”
“I’m sorry, Ava. I have to do this. I don’t have a choice.”
My throat was too parched to swallow in fear. “You killed Professor Hardy, didn’t you, because you knew he was going to report you to the chancellor? Cherry knew that Weaver was scared, maybe scared of you, and didn’t have the guts to stand up to you.”
The only sound was the whispery rustle of leaves in the trees hugging the ravine’s slopes.
“Where is Weaver?” I asked.
“Dead.”
Dread seized me. Anger came next—a hot, molten fountain rising inside me like one of my copper kettles overflowing. We were all going to die because of a selfish, pyromaniac punk.
He put the knife away, then brought out a pistol. Nick parted the twigs he’d stacked over me, then shoved me forward to the ground. My face mashed into trampled grass. Nick then placed the pistol in my hands behind me. He pressed my fingers around it.
I asked him, “You really believe the sheriff will think I killed Weaver?”
“Why not? You were driven to do it to protect your friends and family. I’ll tell the authorities how Weaver was dosing the land around here, how he set the fires. Heck, he even stole clocks and timing devices from our lab to do it.”
After getting my fingerprints on the pistol, he set it aside somewhere on the forest floor. Where Jordy would find it after I’d been toasted to a crisp.
Setting my body up to a sitting position against the car again, Nick said, “Professor Weaver is in the trunk of this car, where you put him.”
I could smell the sour fear on Nick’s body. I spat at him. And missed.
I said, “Tell Grandpa and Grandma I love them. Mom and Dad, too. And Dillon. And Cody. Sam, too. And Moose and Milt. And Lucky Harbor. And—”
“I bet your grandpa can tell me exactly where to find the recipe. He loves a good story. I listened to my share of them when he was visiting on the farm or when I happened to stop by the shop in Fishers’ Harbor. I’ll buy him a beer and console him, tell him I was sweet on you.”
“You bastard. My grandpa knows nothing.” Fear crystallized over every inch of my skin like hoarfrost.
“I’ll tell him about how I’m the one testing your fudge in my test tubes. He’ll reveal where the recipe is. I’ll ask him to donate it to our Belgian collection at the university. The chancellor will reward me handsomely.”
I scoffed. “Then you’ll have to fight over it with the prince and princess coming from Belgium. That recipe was promised to them.”
Nick scowled, clearly confused. If only I could get him to leave for some reason.
I said, “It’s true. My grandfather has an agreement with Prince Arnaud and his mother, Princess Amandine Van Damme, to put the recipe in a museum in Belgium for two years after we find it. Go check it out with my grandpa. The recipe will return here to our Door County Belgian Heritage Foundation in Namur after that. It’s Grandpa Gil, not you, who will be honored by your chancellor.”
He made motions to put the torn fabric back in my mouth, so I grasped at something that had been niggling at me. “Why did Fontana break up with Professor Weaver?”
“He broke up with her. She was going to ruin him. I told him what she was really like. She flirted with everybody, including me.”
“You bastard. Are you stupid enough to think you could be good enough for Fontana?”
“That’s not it at all. Now you’re being stupid. I hate stupid people.” He stuffed the ripped sleeve in my mouth, then twisted more masking tape around my head to hold it in place.
Within minutes, the trickle of chemicals and the thud of plastic containers touched my eardrums. I smelled gasoline, too. And spices.
Nick disappeared from my view. From a rustle I heard, it sounded as if he was to my right and in front of the car. Pauline and I were near the back driver’s-side tire, with the darkness and something like an eagle’s nest worth of sticks between us and Nick. After a sharp slap of his hand on the car hood, I heard feet hitting the ground and branches snapping, receding fast. He had to be running to get away. A chill came over me. He must have struck a match.
The whoosh came. It was at the front of the car. Tongues of fire ignited and skipped along a ring on the ground surrounding Pauline and me.
Within minutes the fire would climb the branches laid over us. Then we’d be smothered in flames when the gas tank exploded.
Chapter 32
The fire fed on the dried branches webbed over us and the car.
I was scared but not a fool. I dumped myself over to lie low below the branches above me that were catching on fire. Pauline went prone, too.
Our only way out was to bust through the branches. But I had to roll right at the fire. I rolled. The branches didn’t give. I rolled back, hoping I’d rolled out anything on fire on my person. My taped-down hair seemed to be okay.
I rolled and shoved again, squeezing my eyes closed. Putrid smoke stung in my nose. Smoky branches slapped across my head, hitting the masking tape.
On the third try, Pauline and I synchronized. Our bulk toppled the fiery mass of branches in our wake as we wiggled and rolled across the ground heading down the slight slope behind the car.
I expected gunshots but nothing came. Nick must have taken off or he simply didn’t see us behind the car.
We squirmed along the ground like inchworms, doing accordion moves to get away from the car now engulfed with branches on fire. I thought about Wes Weaver in the trunk but couldn’t do a thing about him.
The fire’s glow was causing eerie shadows to dance on the nearby foliage and up the smooth trunk of a maple tree. The fire was so far down in the ravine that it would be impossible for anybody to spot its glow. Even if anybody in their houses nearby peered out a window into the night, the black smoke wouldn’t be seen, either.
Pauline and I lay under ferns catching our breath and listening again. No footsteps. Nobody killing us. Yet.
I scratched my face against a root until the masking tape gave way. I spat out my sweatshirt sleeve.
“Hang in there, Pauline. Let me get at your face.”
My hands were still taped behind my back, but I wiggled to her face, then chewed through the masking tape. Once I got it loose, she spat out the fabric and asked, “What do you use for laundry detergent?”
“You want to talk about laundry now?”
“It smells a lot like all the stuff Fontana makes. And did you smell Nick? He smelled like her, too. Like lavend
er and all kinds of pickling spices.”
“My guess is he sprayed a bottle of her stuff all over the trees and bushes around the car, and on us. He wants to blame Fontana for the murder and arsons. He probably sprinkled the stuff over Cherry’s dead body to make sure Fontana was a suspect.”
We wriggled about and even flipped over so our hands were on the ground and under our backs and butts, but we couldn’t find purchase on roots.
I flipped back over onto my stomach. “Who wants to do the chewing first? We have to chew this tape off.”
Pauline said, “I just had my teeth whitened.”
“Crap, P.M., you always have an excuse.”
“A.M., I need excuses for sticking by you. This is not fun.”
The fire was worrying me. I couldn’t bear the thought of Weaver’s body going up in smoke. Maybe he was alive in that trunk. I gnawed on the tape on Pauline’s wrists. I felt like little Titus chipping away on acorns, a sound that never failed to wake me up at two in the morning.
In between spitting out tape, a realization banged inside my brain. “Crap, we have to save Fontana from him.”
“What’re you talking about?”
I spat more tape. “Nick must want her dead or gone, too. He’s going after her next.”
“Because she knows too much.”
“That and because she’s pregnant with Tristan Hardy’s baby.”
“When did you find that out?”
“Just now.” I recalled all the signs and enumerated them for Pauline: the drinking of milk; the episode in the house of rushing to the bathroom—not to cough as I thought, but to toss her cookies.
Pauline said, “But is it Cherry’s baby? She was playing the field.”
I conceded that. And chewed harder.
In minutes, we’d freed ourselves. Panting, we stared at the car engulfed with burning branches. We had no phones.
“We have to get the rest of those branches off that car,” I said.
Grappling in the dark, we snapped off a couple of saplings, then used them to shove at the burning branches. They weren’t too effective.
I wrapped a bunch of fern fronds around my hands for protection and finally pulled and pushed at the burning branches that were too big and not moving. With Pauline’s help, we opened up the space over the driver’s door. The windows had been closed, which wasn’t the brightest thing on Nick’s part because it had saved the interior from catching on fire. I opened the front door and hit the button to pop the trunk.
Pauline and I grabbed Weaver—dead or alive we didn’t know—and then dragged him off, stumbling and falling over him twice before we got him far enough away that any explosion wouldn’t harm us.
Weaver was still breathing, but the breaths were shallow. In the dark, with only intermittent starlight coming through the cloudy night, I couldn’t detect the location of his wound at first. Then my hand found an oozing on his chest. Pauline and I took off his belt and tied it around his chest hoping to stanch the flow of blood.
By then we were drained, almost collapsing. We were scratched and probably bloodied.
We couldn’t head back to the winery where we’d parked, because that was where Nick probably left his vehicle.
“Come on,” I said, dragging myself up off the ground, “we can’t be far from Jonas’s place.”
“What about that pistol he put in your hands?”
In the dark, I looked about but couldn’t see it. I assumed it was under the burning branches.
We pressed into the deep woods.
After we clawed our way up the rim of the ravine and reached the new fencing between Mike’s property and Jonas’s land, we collapsed for good this time, heaving for air.
Seeing the lights on in Jonas’s house revived us. We could call the sheriff from there.
But that thought evaporated when we got close enough to spy through the living room window. Jonas was sitting in a chair while Nick was stalking around him waving a knife in one hand. We crouched down and crawled away from the window’s light.
I whispered, “He’s going to kill Jonas.”
“Because he believes Jonas saw him at the church last Saturday.”
“Nick also knows that Jonas must have gotten an earful from Fontana about Weaver and that whole department, including Nick. Nick’s afraid she’s told Jonas too much.”
Pauline said, “We can run to the Dahlgrens’ place. Should take us only fifteen minutes to get to a phone.”
“That might be too late.”
The pile of old wood from Jonas’s burned shed was illuminated by the yard light. There were splintered two-by-fours and charred chunks of eight-inch beams.
On my nod Pauline and I ran to the woodpile, then raced back to the house, onto the porch, and then we slung our projectiles through the big front window.
The glass crashed in a deafening explosion.
My wood chunk caught Nick on the back of the head. It was like watching one of my three-point shots from center court swish the basket.
Nick turned as Pauline’s big square of wood clocked him straight in the nose.
We ducked and ran.
Jonas tumbled from the house. He hooked up with us while punching at his cell phone. We ran for our lives into the maw of darkness.
* * *
By ten o’clock that night it was all over. Jordy and his backup team had taken Wes Weaver to the hospital. Jordy found Nick in the living room, dazed with a gash across his broken nose and blood streaming down his chin. Evidently, Pauline’s blow to his nose had knocked him out. Nick had the appearance of a bloody wraith when he came out of the house in handcuffs and met the glare of the squad car headlights.
After Nick was hauled away, Jordy stood with Pauline and me in Jonas’s living room interrogating us. Jonas was sitting in the chair where he’d been minutes ago, while Pauline and I sat opposite him on the couch.
To our surprise, Fontana poked her head into the room from the kitchen. She screamed with relief and ran to hug Jonas.
She was saying over and over, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Fontana’s red hair looked as if she’d been pulling at it. Grime sullied a pretty yellow top she was wearing and her blue jeans. She explained that as soon as she had heard Nick’s voice, she’d hidden in the basement by squeezing behind an unused refrigerator.
I got up to let Fontana sit in my place on the couch. “Fontana, we know what’s going on and why you were so scared.”
Jordy was watching us, taking notes.
I knelt in front of her and took her hands in mine. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
Her lower lip trembled.
An awful thought came to me. I made her scooch closer to Pauline, and then I sat beside her. “Is it Nick’s baby?”
“Oh no. Thank goodness, no. I never had sex with him or anybody since my divorce, except for Cherry. It’s Cherry’s.” She retrieved a tissue from a pocket. “I made the mistake of telling Nick about the baby a few weeks ago. I thought I could get rid of him that way. Instead he became obsessed. He kept appearing everywhere with Wes, always ending up at my roadside stand, and he was following Cherry, too. He said . . . Oh my gosh, I just remembered what he said to me once. He said that I had a ‘fiery’ attitude to match my fiery hair.”
All of us stared at her red hair.
Jordy stepped closer, towering over us. “Why did he set the fires?”
Fontana choked up. “Nick was mad and scared.” She glanced my way. “I overheard your grandpa talk about the recipe with your mother while I was visiting Ava’s Autumn Harvest one afternoon. I told Wes about it. I’m sorry. I was mad at Wes for how he was treating Cherry in the university, and I told him off and said Cherry would be rich and famous because he was helping the Oosterlings find the holy recipe. Nick must have overheard me, or Wes told him.”
She worried the tissue in her hands. “I tried to make you leave, Ava. I wanted you to shut down your market and get away from here. I didn’t want to t
ell you everything, Ava. I was embarrassed and I wanted to protect you. You’re like my kid sister. I knew you’d be ashamed of me if you knew I’d gotten myself pregnant.”
I hugged Fontana. “Nonsense.”
“But you and your family thought Wes and Nick were wonderful. I’m so sorry.”
Shame came to me. How had I misread so many things? Dillon’s words came back to me. I was too busy with too many things to listen. I peered down at myself. I was full of grass stains, scratches, black soot, and blood, and one sweatshirt sleeve had been ripped off. There were untold mosquito bites on my face. I touched my hair—it was full of cockleburs.
I asked, because I just had to know, “Fontana, you weren’t really dating Jonas or Mike, were you? I mean, well, you kissed them. I jumped to conclusions and thought you were . . .”
“If I kissed a friend, it was a friendly kiss and nothing more. I was scared. Scared for Cherry, and then scared for me and the baby. I wanted to be sure I was never alone.” She sucked in a big breath and said to Jonas, “Sorry that I used you. But I needed you. Still friends?”
Jonas nodded. “Friends.”
Fontana said to me, “Thanks for saving me.”
On the other side of her, Pauline piped up, “Hey, I was the one who hit him square in the nose with a full-court shot.”
Jonas said, “You saved my life, Pauline.” He came out of his chair to shake her hand.
“What about me?” I said. “Tossing the wood through the window was my idea.”
Jordy held up a hand. “Ava, call me first in the future, okay? You almost . . . got yourself killed tonight.” He choked on the words, which made us all exchange glances. Then he headed to the door. “Stick to your fudge.”
Pauline said, “That’ll be the day she does that.”
Chapter 33
On Sunday morning I felt as if a tractor had run over me.
My skin burned from bug bites and scratches. But I woke to the smell of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and coffee. I had stayed overnight with my parents rather than drive through the wee hours in deathlike shape back to Fishers’ Harbor. Pauline had stayed in my grandparents’ old room.
Five-Alarm Fudge Page 30
