Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  And what Sarabelle wanted, Sarabelle usually got, mostly on account of her having a voice that could etch glass, the dumb persistence of a housefly bumping against a windowpane, and no shame whatsoever.

  I almost felt sorry for Matt Muldoon. But meanwhile, Ellie had so far admitted to having motive and opportunity. All the homicide investigators needed now was for her to have had the method.

  “Anyway,” she finished, “I let him blather on. He told me he had friends in the health department. Said they’d come and shut us down permanently if he asked them to.”

  “I don’t believe he had friends,” muttered Bella, who’d begun scrubbing the sink with Comet scouring powder even though it was already so clean you could have done surgery in it.

  “Too mean,” she said. “Anyway, could he really do that?”

  “Doubt it,” said Bob. “But he could make you miserable, which it seems to me he had already been doing fairly effectively.”

  Ellie looked glum. “He was the fly in our ointment, all right. Always walking in like he owned the place and looking down his nose at everything. Oh, he just made me so mad.”

  She stopped. Then: “Anyway, he had his say and left. I was taking the cookies out of the oven by then, so I didn’t see which way he turned when he got outside. And that was it.”

  Bob sighed. “Okay. Only look, when I went in, there was a big, thick needle-type thing in the trash, pretty much right on top of everything. Either of you know anything about it?”

  Darn. I’d forgotten about the battle of the cream puffs. Ellie scraped sour cream from her small bowl into my larger one, making sure to include as much of the lemon zest as possible in the transfer.

  “As a matter of fact, I do know about it,” she said calmly. “It’s a pastry needle. I saw it in there . . .”

  . . . Last night, she was about to finish. I’d put it in the trash earlier in the day, with a cork stuck on it for safety’s sake.

  “I threw it out,” I interrupted her. “I’d filled chocolate cream puffs with it and somehow I bent it.”

  Bent it enough so you couldn’t squeeze custard out through it anymore. But not enough so that you couldn’t pop the cork off and stick someone in the back of the neck with it, unfortunately.

  I’d been hoping against hope that the needle wasn’t what Bob meant by “sharp implement.” But of course it was.

  He got up. “All right, I get the picture. The state cops’re on their way here. I put the needle in an evidence bag to give to them. And no doubt they’ll want to talk to you both.”

  Yeah, no doubt. Like the day wasn’t going south fast enough. And on top of everything else we still had the shop to run during this, Eastport’s biggest holiday of the year.

  “How long d’you think they’ll keep us shut down?” I asked.

  Bella had finally run out of things to clean, unless she wanted to start wiping out the insides of lightbulb sockets. And asking her to rest for a minute wouldn’t have worked even a little bit; she wasn’t built for it.

  Now she began crushing chocolate wafers with a rolling pin, mashing them between sheets of waxed paper. From her face I could tell she was thinking of other things she’d like to be crushing.

  Bob moved toward the door. “I don’t know how long you’ll be closed for,” he said. “The rest of today for sure, maybe longer.”

  So as I’d feared, we’d be in my kitchen baking cheesecakes until two in the morning, at least.

  “But one last thing,” Bob went on. “The blood I saw on that pastry stabber. Either of you have any idea how that got there?”

  Neither of us did.

  “Yeah.” He nodded sorrowfully. “I figured. Well, you two just sit tight, then, and when they come to talk to you—”

  “If anyone but you wants to talk to them more than once,” Bella snapped, unable to contain herself any longer, “both these girls will be getting lawyers. I’ll be seeing to it myself, and don’t you even start with me about it,” she added fiercely when I opened my mouth to object.

  So I didn’t, and Bob didn’t, either; he knew better. “That sounds about right, actually,” he agreed instead, causing my heart to sink even lower than it already had.

  “But I’m sure it’ll all work out fine in the end,” he added, the keys and the pepper spray and the pair of steel handcuffs on his duty belt all clattering together as he went out.

  “I’m not sure,” said Bella tightly when he was gone, slamming the rolling pin down onto the chocolate wafers. “I’m not sure even a little bit.”

  Me neither. And then the phone rang.

  A lot.

  Two

  The first call was from Lester Vanacore, junior reporter for our local newspaper, the Eastport Tides.

  The Tides was the easternmost newspaper in the United States, and Lester took his reporting duties seriously. “Hey, Jake, am I hearing this right? You had a murder in the Moose?”

  “Lester, there was a body. But saying for sure how it got to be one is a little above my pay grade, you know?”

  He sighed audibly. “Well, whose was it, can you tell me that much? I mean, sure enough so that I can quote you on it?”

  I didn’t want to be quoted on it. I thought the less any of us got mentioned in connection with it, the better. The Chocolate Moose didn’t need that kind of publicity.

  What I really wanted was for it all just to go away; but of course that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, especially with the easternmost newshound in the United States digging away at it. Fortunately, just then the phone clicked its “call waiting” signal at me, so I got rid of Lester by suggesting very strongly that he ask Bob Arnold about the murder, then picked up the next caller.

  “Mom?” Sam’s voice came through sounding hollow and distant, as if maybe he was calling from an orbiting space station instead of from a Boston apartment. “Mom, are you . . .”

  He’d been staying with friends, enjoying a summer break from his job here at the marine supply store. “I’m here, Sam,” I said. “I can hear you. What’s wrong?”

  If I ever need resuscitating, just play a recording of Sam’s voice sounding unhappy at me and my blood pressure will skyrocket.

  “. . . weather . . . bus schedule . . . canceled . . .”

  He’d left his car parked in Bangor and taken the bus from there. The phone fritzed in and out, his voice suddenly sounding as if it was coming from the bottom of a deep well.

  “What? Say it again, Sam, I think something’s wrong with the—”

  Once upon a time, Ma Bell ran the phone system with ruthless, utterly monopolistic efficiency. Now any fool can start a phone company and provide the kind of high-class personal communication service once offered only by two tin cans and a length of string.

  The phone fritzed back in again. “Mom, I had a bus ticket for tomorrow. Two, actually. But they’re canceled on account of—”

  The phone sputtered. Then it went dead.

  I took the handset from my ear and looked at it, feeling as if more information might issue from it if only I squinted hard enough. But no information did; then the connection ended entirely. When I tried calling back, I got the kind of fast busy signal that can only mean one of the tin cans has fallen off the string.

  I slammed the handset down, figuring that if the phone was going to be broken, I’d give it something to be broken about. Back in the kitchen, Bella was still crushing wafers.

  “Your father,” she said, “is a bullheaded old fool.”

  She had a small mountain of dark crumbs heaped on the table. The bowl of cheesecake batter sat there, too, awaiting its final ingredient; Ellie had gone back to her house for more chocolate to use instead of the stuff Matt Muldoon had fallen face-first into.

  “Right,” I answered Bella distractedly. “He is.”

  I wasn’t really listening to her, though. So far, I had a dead guy in a chocolate pot, a shop shuttered by homicide cops, a close friend under as-yet unspoken suspicion of murder, and a grown son
stuck in Boston by sudden—and I very much feared they were also mythological—weather delays.

  Not to mention those chocolate cherry cheesecakes, upon which the town’s whole Fourth of July fireworks display depended. At least things can’t get much worse, I told myself bleakly.

  But then I spied Bella’s own cell phone lying in the kitchen sink, where she’d apparently just flung it. “Wait, what?”

  She whomped the rolling pin down hard onto another half-dozen wafers. “A stiff-necked, pea-brained old—”

  I snatched the cell phone from the sink. Bella hadn’t turned it off before she hurled it, so the text message she had received still glowed on the screen: See you soon.

  It was from my dad. Moments later I had the nurse in charge of his cardiac care unit on the line.

  “Listen, I’m really very sorry to trouble you,” I told her, “but could you please just check and make sure that . . .”

  He’s still there in his hospital bed, where he belongs, I was about to finish. But before I could, a pair of sharp car-horn toots sounded from the street out in front of the house.

  Familiar car-horn toots. “Never mind,” I said, peering out just as an old dark blue Monte Carlo with four mismatched tires, ominously dark-tinted windows, and Perry’s Cab Service $1/mile stenciled in white across the doors pulled away from the house.

  “Old fool,” spat Bella once more, recognizing the horn.

  She slammed down the rolling pin. That is a good thing, I thought. Since if it had remained in her hand, my dad might have had to go right back to the hospital with a head injury.

  “I told him,” she spluttered, rushing out the back door and down the porch steps. “I told him and told him not to . . .”

  Halfway up the front walk he stopped, swaying uncertainly: a skinny old man with a ruby stud in one earlobe and a stringy gray ponytail tied with a leather thong dangling down his back, wearing a hospital gown and paper slippers.

  Hurrying out past Bella, I grabbed a plastic lawn chair and stuck it behind him. “Sit.”

  He obeyed shakily, his bony hands gripping the armrests. His feet, big and lumpy with arthritis and bunions, had already burst through the ends of the slippers. His IV needle, still taped to the inside of his elbow, oozed dark blood.

  “Hi,” he managed, looking overall as if even he was beginning to realize what a bad idea this whole escapade was.

  “I’m calling the ambulance,” said Bella, turning back toward the house.

  “Wait,” he quavered, raising a trembling hand.

  “Hi, Dad,” I whispered. I’d never seen him tremble before. I’d never seen him look anything but strong and confident and as if he would live forever.

  But he didn’t look that way now. “If it’s all right with you, I’d much rather be here,” he uttered humbly.

  Please, he didn’t add out loud.

  I heard it, though, and Bella must have, too; an odd look crossed her homely old face and I thought she might break down, which I’d never seen her do before, either. But then:

  “All right, you foolish old man,” she snapped, “let’s get you inside before you pass out.”

  Saying this, she took his left arm and I took his right one, startled by how light he was and by how heavily he leaned on me, and we all stepped haltingly together toward the porch.

  Sun-dappled maple leaves shaded our path; a blue jay called from somewhere, its peculiar metallic cry echoing, and the mingled perfumes of lilacs and chamomile hung in the summer air.

  A car went by behind us, and then another. “Just a little bit farther,” said Bella, urging my father forward as best she could. “Come on, now, I can’t do it all for both of us.”

  “I know, dear,” he managed hoarsely. “I’m trying,” he said, and then his eyes closed and his knees buckled abruptly.

  Helplessly, we lowered him to the grass; a vein in his neck throbbed with a pulse, but we couldn’t rouse him. Then Ellie got back, and when she saw us she pulled out her own phone.

  But Bella stopped her. “If he wakes up in the hospital again, he won’t survive it,” she declared, and she was right.

  If we wanted him to live, he needed something worthwhile that he could cling to, needed it right nearby.

  And we were it: family, home.

  “I want to be here,” he managed, his eyes flickering open again. “You send me back to that place and I won’t last a week.”

  Then Bob Arnold appeared, hurrying up the sidewalk toward us. His car had been among those going by on the street, and he helped get my father the rest of the way inside my big old house.

  We put him on the daybed in the sunroom, where a sea breeze made the air pleasant and blooming lilacs shaded the windows. By the time Bob left again, my father’s shape was twiglike under the cotton quilt.

  “Dad, you’re sure you want this?” To stay here, I meant, and take your chances on the result.

  “I’ll get your medicines, and we’ll have a visiting nurse come to put another IV in. I think we can probably take care of it okay.”

  His bushy eyebrows knit; he didn’t like the IV idea.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not having any argument on that one,” I told him. “But Dad, you know it could go either way, right? I mean . . .”

  He knew what I meant: He’d just had a heart attack; he hadn’t recovered from it by a long shot; and he could die here. If he began to, I might not be able to do anything about it. But in reply he only fixed me with a look of such loving acceptance—either way—that I really had no choice.

  “All right,” I sighed, giving in. “Hey, it’s your funeral,” I added, and he smiled, appreciating the dark humor. Meanwhile, Bella would be here soon with clean pajamas, iced Perrier water, and anything else he needed.

  Lucky for me. After all, Ellie and I had all that baking to do, not to mention the little matter of a murder investigation centered around our shop.

  Also I was waiting to hear from Wade. He’d gone out very early on a tugboat to meet the freighter; by now he was on board the big ship, so he’d be calling to tell me so, I supposed.

  I wanted to call Sam back again, too, to find out more about what was actually delaying his return from Boston. Probably I misunderstood Sam, I thought as I left my dad resting quietly and went out to the kitchen again. I hadn’t heard about any storm being imminent, and certainly not one big enough to delay travel.

  But ten minutes later I had, and you know, it’s true what they say:

  It never rains but it pours.

  * * *

  “You’ve got to stop them, Millie. I mean it, and you’ve got to start stopping them immediately,” Bob Arnold said urgently into his phone.

  It was five in the evening—eight hours, now, since I’d found Matt Muldoon’s body with its head in a pot of chocolate.

  “I don’t care if Amber’s a pretty name for a storm,” Bob said with frustration. “It’s a hurricane, damn it, and it’s definitely on its way here. Haven’t you been listening to me at all, Millie? The result’s not going to be pretty,” he emphasized.

  I’d spent all day baking, getting my dad settled, and making arrangements for all the many home-care items and services that a recent heart attack victim required.

  Especially one who’d gone AWOL from his hospital bed, and if you ever want a truly enjoyable conversation, try telling a lot of medical professionals that their patient will be staying home with you from now on, and if he dies, he dies.

  Which was my dad’s attitude. I was just the messenger, and as a result I was the one who got talked to as if I should be getting scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe. To escape, I’d finally come downtown to the Chocolate Moose; now Bob Arnold and I sat at one of the small cast-iron tables outside the shop.

  Leaning back tiredly, I let Bob’s voice drift off and worried instead about the bad weather that had turned out to be imminent.

  According to the Weather Channel, Hurricane Amber had begun as they mostly do, off the coast of Africa. Then, afte
r meandering this way and that across the Atlantic like a drunk staggering home after a colossal bender, the storm veered north and shrank to a tropical depression.

  Which would’ve been fine. But then Amber had changed course again, dipping into the warm gulf stream just long enough to draw energy from tropical currents that swirled there. Lots of energy, and now she was coming here.

  And she wasn’t the only one. “Millie, we’ve got thousands of people headed to Eastport,” said Bob.

  For the Fourth of July holiday, our little island’s population routinely swelled from its usual twelve hundred or so to about five thousand. But this year the third fell on Friday, which always boosted the number even higher on account of the long weekend.

  “That, or they’ve already arrived. You’ve got to call back all those media friends of yours,” he said, “to let them know.”

  Millie Marquardt was the new chairperson of the Fourth of July committee, and on account of her efforts, attendance at this year’s festival was projected to be at least double that of any in the past.

  “Maybe people will believe they ought to stay home if it’s on TV,” Bob went on. “Although half of ’em probably don’t even know what a hurricane is, and if they do, then they think it’s something that happens to other people.”

  Bob took a breath. “So you need to make sure that it gets on TV,” he said. “And that they do understand. Because we are those other people now, okay? We’re getting this big storm right here in Eastport in about . . .”

  He paused, calculating it. According to the TV that we’d set up for my dad in the sunroom, Amber was racing north.

  “. . . about forty-eight hours,” Bob said. “Maybe more, but also maybe less. So I want you to get on this starting immediately, you hear me, Millie? This is a public-safety emergency we’ve got here.”

  He took another breath. “Get it on the radio, online, on TV. Shout it through a megaphone if you have to, but get hold of them, and tell them either to go home if they’re here, or not to come in the first place.”

  I closed my eyes, listening. Inside the Chocolate Moose, the state’s crime technicians still combed over what little evidence they could find. But there couldn’t be much; due to Bella’s strict hygiene standards, in order to find any contamination-type particles in our kitchen you’d have needed an electron microscope.