Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  Detectives from the Maine State Police homicide squad had also spoken to Muldoon’s widow, Sarabelle, and afterward to Ellie and me. And it hadn’t gone well; I’d kept trying to explain that we were a food shop and thus had to abide by the health department regulations, even without Muldoon’s harassment.

  But because the Moose’s kitchen floor had failed to offer up even a stray cookie crumb, they still thought somehow we’d cleaned it up after the murder, and that of course made us look even more suspicious.

  “Yes, I know the Fourth of July is a big day for everyone in Eastport,” said Bob into the phone.

  For the restaurants, the whale-watching tour boats, and all the little gift shops on Water Street, the holiday brought in half the year’s sales, and losing it would be disastrous.

  Although not as disastrous as having most of their customers blown into the water and drowned, of course. “Good for merchants, and good for the whole town, yes,” Bob went on. “Yes, I absolutely agree. Makes fine publicity for us all, too.”

  The long purple shadows of late afternoon crept stealthily between the quaint downtown buildings, their redbrick facades glowing rosily on the sunny side and darkening on the other to the color of old blood. Tourists strolled the breakwater, and out on the bay a few fishing boats tootled along prettily.

  “Yes, Millie,” repeated Bob with heavy patience; by now I could almost hear the steam hissing out of his ears. “I do very much agree, this hurricane is inconvenient, that’s for sure.”

  Across the street the amphitheater-style stone seats of Overlook Park edged down to a lawn, where a free movie (tonight it was Finding Nemo) was being shown to a crowd of youngsters.

  “Yes,” said Bob. “Yes, Millie, I . . .”

  On the portable screen, bright tropical fish cavorted. To the east, the day’s last ferry full of tourists chugged over the waves toward the Canadian island of Campobello, gleaming like a gold bar in the sun’s angled rays.

  “But,” Bob said evenly, clearly struggling to keep his head from exploding, “we don’t want all of those wonderfully lucrative holiday guests of ours to float away, now do we, Millicent?”

  He stopped, listening with his eyes half-closed. I could hear his teeth gritting as he fought manfully to hold on to his temper. Then:

  “All right,” he conceded finally. “The vendors can stay one more day. Until sundown tomorrow, they’ll want to be out by then, anyway, so they don’t get blown into the bay. And if the storm’s passed—if it has, mind you, and the cleanup’s gone okay, too—then on the evening of the fourth we can still have the fireworks, probably.”

  Oh, great, the ones our cakes are supposed to finance. I’d been thinking that really, a huge storm might be just what the doctor ordered. Or in the baking department it could be. Ellie was working on the third pair of cheesecakes right now, so by tomorrow we might have finished baking them all....

  “But you start discouraging those visitors right now, Millie. I mean it,” said Bob. “And get the ones who’re already here turned around and headed west, back onto the mainland.”

  But even after the cakes were baked, we’d still have to decorate them, which first meant shaving a ton of chocolate curls off a big block of the stuff using a vegetable peeler. Later we’d add the cherry topping, pipe the frosting on, drizzle a satiny chocolate glaze over the top, sprinkle the curls over it all, and voila!

  Or “viola,” as Sam would’ve put it. Among his many other difficulties, Sam had a weird and quite severe form of dyslexia, although that wasn’t the problem I was worried about him battling just at the moment.

  “Now, Millie, I know you won’t be able to stop ’em all,” Bob said patiently.

  Across Water Street, a tall woman in a long white sundress and strappy sandals glanced furtively over at me. The woman wore sparkling drop earrings, glittery charm bracelets, and a swathe of gold chains around her swanlike neck.

  It was Sarabelle Muldoon, her platinum hair swirled smoothly into a loose chignon and her expression fixed in a scowl. Bob spotted her, too, and raised an eyebrow at me while still talking.

  “But unless you want a lot of tourists bunking at your house for a week,” he said, “’cause that’s how long it might take . . .”

  To get the causeway back open and all those holiday visitors out of here again, he’d have said. But instead at this last awful suggestion—houseguests! for a week!—I heard Millie’s alarmed squawk come from the phone, followed by frenzied babbling.

  “Fine,” said Bob, satisfied at having gotten the reaction he wanted at last. “That’s swell, and if it turns out you need any assistance . . .”

  He stopped short, having apparently just remembered that offering to help Millie with anything generally resulted in your having the whole job dumped in your lap.

  “. . . call Jake,” he finished, and of course I didn’t bop him over the head with a café table.

  Just then a pair of crime scene technicians exited the Moose, rummaged in their white cargo van parked right outside, and went in again.

  “We need to get back to work in there,” I told Bob. “Ellie and I do, I mean.”

  My old kitchen was already proving inadequate to the task we’d set for ourselves, and we were driving poor Bella bonkers as well. “What’s taking the technicians so long?” I asked.

  Bob spread his hands. “Dunno. I doubt it’ll be much longer, though.” Another thought hit him. “So how’d Ellie know so fast that the dead guy was Matt Muldoon, anyway?”

  I blew out a breath. The state’s homicide investigators had asked that, too, noting that Muldoon’s face and hair had been hidden under all the chocolate and that his clothes and physical build were too common to use for identification purposes.

  But the answer was simple. “His shoes had orange reflectors in the heels,” I told Bob, “and she recognized them from when he’d come in to hassle her the night before.”

  She’d seen them, she’d told investigators, when he turned and stomped out of the shop.

  “Hmmph.” Bob’s rosebud lips pursed consideringly when I’d reported this to him. “Lucky.”

  That she’d had a good answer ready, he meant, and I had to agree. The cops hadn’t arrested anyone or even been particularly pointed in their questioning, other than the part about our shop being dirt-free right down to the subatomic level.

  But I thought it was only because Ellie and I weren’t flight risks; for one thing, with all those cheesecakes left to bake, we obviously weren’t going anywhere. Probably they believed that as a result we were both sitting ducks for any charges they might want to bring, whenever they wanted to bring them.

  Murder charges, for instance. Which we weren’t—sitting ducks for them, I mean; but hey, they were the hotshot investigators, so I figured I’d just let them find that one out for themselves.

  As if overhearing my thought, Bob squinted narrowly at me. “You and Ellie aren’t planning on doing anything on your own hook about any of this, are you? Tell me,” he added seriously, “that you are not.”

  By “anything,” of course, he meant snooping, a notion he could be forgiven for entertaining. Ellie and I had a reputation in and around Eastport for being . . . well, not nosy, exactly.

  That word implies wanting to know things merely for the pleasure of knowing them. We were more results-oriented.

  There was the time, for instance, when we’d found a local butcher cut into steaks and chops, wrapped up in white paper, and stuffed into his own freezer. If Ellie and I hadn’t looked into the matter, the fellow’s wife would’ve gone to prison.

  Not that she hadn’t been happy to have her better half literally cooling his heels. He’d been a batterer for a long time, as it turned out. But that was then and this was now.

  “I mean it, Jake. You give ’em time, the state homicide cops will realize Ellie wasn’t involved. Or you, either,” Bob added.

  I wasn’t so sure. But the last thing I needed, just in case Ellie and I did decide to do a little
freelance poking around, was the police chief keeping an eye on us.

  “Fine,” I told him as the evidence techs exited the Moose yet again. “We’ll stay out of it.”

  And if he believed that, I had some clam flats in Arizona that I could sell him. The crime scene technician held out the new key I’d lent him.

  “The place is all yours again,” he said.

  Bob looked unconvinced by my no-snooping promise; as I’ve mentioned, he knew me and Ellie well. But he had his hands full; between the influx of tourists, Maine’s recent legalization of personal fireworks, and the number of beer and liquor trucks unloading at the island’s restaurants in advance of the holiday, this year’s Fourth of July would be hard enough to police even without hurricanes.

  And even without murder. “Guess I’ll just leave you to it, then,” he said, hauling himself up tiredly.

  To the Moose, he meant, and to the unfinished cheesecakes and my invalid father, my absent husband, and my still-silent son. My attempts at calling Sam back had gone straight to voice mail.

  Now all I wanted was to go home and catch a quick nap before I took over the baking duties from Ellie, this time here at the shop. But instead, from where she loitered across the street by the film projector, the widow Muldoon shot me another dark look.

  From the way she’d hung around with her masses of jewelry sparkling and flashing, I thought she must have more on her mind than the animated fish cavorting on the portable movie screen looming behind her.

  And after Bob Arnold got into his patrol car and drove away, she proved me right.

  * * *

  I didn’t like her, and I didn’t trust her any farther than I could throw her. But I needed to talk with Sarabelle, if only to rule her out of having killed Matt Muldoon herself.

  Or better yet, to rule her in. Because when one spouse gets murdered, the other one . . . well, you know the drill. It was why that butcher’s wife had nearly landed in the cooler herself; after all, who’s got better reasons than the nearest and dearest?

  Right now, though, Ellie was in the crosshairs instead. So I let Sarabelle follow me into the Moose, where the usual delicious aromas blended with the sharp, penetrating scent of chemicals from the crime techs’ kits. With any luck, I thought, she’ll incriminate the hell out of herself.

  But she sure didn’t start out that way. “Ellie did it, you know. Your little friend,” Sarabelle added nastily, “that everyone in town thinks can do no wrong.”

  She was a decade or so younger than her late husband and still strikingly lovely with deep-set brown eyes, perfect makeup, and the kind of small, evenly-distributed facial features that suggest a pleasant disposition. But in her case looks really were deceiving; Sarabelle Muldoon’s disposition was about as pleasant as a piranha’s.

  And dear heaven, that voice, like a cross between a banshee and a rusty hinge. “Little Goody Two-shoes,” she grated out. “That’s what she is. Thinks she’s so clever, too. But she’s not.”

  Yeah, Sarabelle was a sweetheart, all right; she went on blathering acidly while I looked around the shop. Nothing in the front area had been too badly disturbed by the crime scene techs, and my first goal was to get us ready to open again in the morning.

  So I started by wiping down the glass-fronted display case. Sarabelle, meanwhile, plunked herself down at one of the little café tables.

  “I told him to be careful, but he came down here again last night, anyway,” she declared.

  Good, she was feeling chatty. “And why was that? I mean, he’d already talked to her about all the dog hair he supposedly saw,” I said, spritzing the glass with Windex.

  Sarabelle looked affronted, but I didn’t care. She didn’t seem at all grief-stricken, just angry and arrogant as usual.

  And . . . curious. It was in her eyes, as if there was something she wanted to know from me, but couldn’t risk mentioning.

  “So why did he come back here last night?” I asked again.

  “First of all, it absolutely was dog hair,” Sarabelle said. Although from her tone it might as well have been ebola virus. “I saw it, too, right there on the floor yesterday morning.”

  She pointed a manicured index finger. “I tried to say so, but Ellie denied it. So my husband came down and tried telling her.”

  I already knew this part; Ellie had come to my house spitting mad about it afterward. She was worried, too, because if the Chocolate Moose got cited for health code violations, we could be forced to close.

  And that could ruin us. Our money situation was dicey already and the hit to our reputation would be worse. Then the door would be open for Sarabelle to take over the place herself.

  I ran a damp paper towel over the cash register, coming up with not a speck of anything visible, as she went on resentfully.

  “Ellie could have just admitted it, of course, but no. She had to be stubborn about it.”

  This was also true, and I understood why. We didn’t even have dogs, for heaven’s sake, and Ellie had been too fed up to humor the platinum pest’s annoying husband any further.

  “Still,” I persisted, “why did he bother last night—”

  “Coming back here that one final time?” Sarabelle lifted her beautifully groomed head and blinked imperially at me.

  “Maybe,” she said slowly, “it was to give her one more chance at setting things right. He was,” she added, “a forgiving man.”

  “No doubt,” I replied evenly, and if she noticed the sarcasm, she didn’t comment.

  The chocolate delicacies I’d put into the display case hours earlier still looked delicious on their white paper doilies, but I doubted that anyone would want to eat them now. People would think they had murder cooties on them; I swept them into a paper bag.

  “Or maybe he’d just had enough of her foolishness,” Sarabelle added, and in reply I certainly did not stuff my Windex-dampened paper towel into her mouth.

  “She wouldn’t listen to him the first time, so he had to come back,” Sarabelle went on indignantly. “Why should he let her make a fool of him?”

  Muldoon hadn’t needed anyone else to make a fool of him. He’d managed that very effectively all on his own, but I didn’t say so. Sarabelle herself was a deeply unpleasant person, and as I say, I’d disliked her even before recent developments.

  On the other hand, those recent developments had made her a new widow, hadn’t they? And it was entirely possible that she hadn’t caused them; plenty of people disliked Muldoon.

  “Do you have anyone to help you make the arrangements?”

  I tried to sound sympathetic. The Muldoons had no children or other relatives that I’d ever heard of, and if she hadn’t killed him, then it must be awful to face such sudden bereavement alone.

  But she only looked puzzled. “Oh, you mean for a funeral? No, he has a sister back in New Jersey, but they weren’t close. My family’s there, too. I visit them quite often actually, but they’re not . . . not very supportive.”

  For a moment she’d nearly seemed human. But then: “Don’t think you can get out of this by being nice to me,” she snarled.

  Her default mood, apparently, was evil. “That friend of yours killed my husband, she’s got a terrible temper, and she’s going to pay for it.”

  My sympathy vanished; Ellie no more had a terrible temper than I had two heads. “So when did your husband leave the house last night to come back down here to the Moose?”

  I snapped the question out and she answered as if by reflex, just as I’d hoped she would.

  “Late. After the TV news ended. I could see he was still very upset after his bad day, so I told him he should try to get some sleep.”

  The bad day being Ellie’s fault, too, of course. Sarabelle glanced peevishly around the shop again, her gaze raking the floor as if she might spot something incriminating down there.

  “That’s when I went up to bed,” she went on. “Later when I realized he hadn’t come upstairs, I looked for him, but he wasn’t in the house. I t
hought he must have gone out for a walk.”

  “You didn’t worry when he didn’t come back?” In Eastport you aren’t going to get mugged for your wallet, but you can fall off a pier, get trapped by the tide, or tumble over a granite cliff’s edge at any number of locations around our little island.

  Sarabelle shook her head. “I sleep soundly. And this morning by the time I figured out that Matt still wasn’t there, Bob Arnold was already at the door.”

  So far, plausible. “Okay. So all you know is that he went out shortly after eleven-thirty last night.”

  And sometime afterward wound up with his face in a pot of chocolate. “I wonder, how did he know that Ellie would even be here at that hour?”

  It wasn’t a regular thing, her staying so late. She’d wanted to clear the decks for our big project by doing today’s baking for the shop, then starting the chocolate melting for the cheesecakes’ batter and decoration.

  Chocolate we still have to replace somehow, I recalled with a pang of anxiety. The stuff we used was the real gourmet deal, not the grocery store variety. Sarabelle shrugged impatiently.

  “Maybe he didn’t know,” she said. “He might not have meant to come here at all, I suppose, but then he could have seen her as he was passing by, saw the lights on, and . . .”

  Her gaze swept the floor again, as if she just knew there was dirt down there somewhere and she’d find it if she searched hard enough. “But what I do know is that if she hadn’t been here, he’d be alive right now.”

  She got up. “Ellie killed him, I’m sure of it. She lost her temper, or maybe she knew he was right about the dog hair and panicked over what he was going to do about it. And you must know that, too, so don’t pretend you don’t.”

  I knew just the opposite, in fact. But after the day I’d had, I was too tired to argue about it, and anyway it would’ve done no good. “Okay. Whatever. I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.