Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “Okay.” He thought about it some more, then decided not to say whatever it was that he’d been thinking about.

  “See you back in Eastport,” he said instead, and turned away.

  His expression was disapproving, but not threatening; he knew as well as I did that Ellie was up the creek, probably, if nothing changed before the DA and the state cops got their ducks in a row.

  The vet and his helper came around to the rear of his panel van, ready to depart. The last I saw of Maxie as they slid him in on a stretcher was his tail, still thumping bravely, and his long pink tongue flicking out to lick the veterinarian’s hand.

  Watching, I wished heartily that I felt the same way Maxie did, so certain that the human beings in charge had matters under control and that everything would be all right.

  But I didn’t.

  Not even a little bit.

  * * *

  My husband, Wade Sorenson, is brawny and broad-shouldered, with brush-cut blond hair, a jawline that could give Mount Rushmore a run for its money, and eyes that are blue or gray depending on the weather.

  Also he’s smarter than your average supercomputer, and I needed his brainpower. So when I got home after finding Marla with her scalp split, her dog hurt, and her house ransacked, I told him everything.

  Well, almost everything. The boat trip with Ellie, meeting Marla at the Salty Dog, her thinking that maybe Matt Muldoon had a girlfriend and sort-of promising photographs of the woman . . .

  “Wait a minute,” said Wade. “You and Ellie took the Bayliner out at night?”

  We were sitting on the porch in some wicker chairs that Ellie and I had bought at a garage sale a week earlier. Up and down Key Street, kids on bikes pulled wheelies, stomped on bag bombs, and fired Silly String at each other.

  “Well, yes,” I admitted. I’d left out the part about getting stranded in the fog, and the little detail of Wade nearly running us over with his cargo freighter hadn’t been mentioned, either.

  “And Ellie handled it all okay, did she?” he asked.

  His question triggered a vivid memory of her grabbing me by my life jacket so I wouldn’t slide overboard.

  “Yes. Fine.” I almost praised the fast, efficient manner in which she’d gotten us out of his freighter’s way, but decided not to push my luck.

  “And you still believe this is all going to come down on her? I mean, you think they really suspect Ellie?”

  “Bob Arnold thinks so. He’d told me while we were waiting for the ambulance that it’s what the state cops are saying to him. He said they wanted to know if she might leave town, if they should grab her before she could.”

  Wade smiled, lifting an eyebrow. “Don’t know her very well, do they?”

  It was true, any idea of Ellie running away from anything was ludicrous. But then a detailed mental picture of Marla’s bloodied head sprang to my mind again.

  “Marla will be able to say who hit her?” Wade asked.

  “Who knows? She was pretty out of it.” Inside the house the phone rang and then Bella’s sneakers squeaked across the freshly waxed hall floor to the screen door.

  “For you. It’s Bob Arnold,” she said, handing me the phone, and when I was done hearing what Bob had to say, I wanted badly to pitch that telephone directly into the bay.

  “Marla’s hurt worse than I thought,” I told Wade when I’d hung up. “They’re deciding whether or not to airlift her to the hospital in Bangor, in case she’s got bleeding in her brain.” The dog, Bob had told me, was still being evaluated.

  “Marla might need surgery,” I said. “And . . .” Tears prickled my eyes, surprising me. “They don’t know if she’ll wake up,” I stated.

  Guilt hit me. If we hadn’t gone over there the night before, if we hadn’t gotten Marla involved . . .

  “You think someone overheard you guys talking in the bar?”

  I nodded, my throat suddenly tight. “Maybe. Guys came in and guys went out.” I hadn’t been paying attention. “I guess someone could’ve overheard.”

  Wade nodded silently, mulling this. Then: “Anything else?”

  Like I said, supercomputer. “Yeah, there’s something else.”

  I described the little boat that had harassed us; I hadn’t said anything about it before.

  “We didn’t think much of it at the time,” I said, adding what Marla had said about guys protecting lobster traps. “But now . . .”

  “I’ll track it down,” said Wade. “Marla’s probably right, but I’ll find out for sure.”

  He could do it, too, if anyone could; he’d spent his whole life on the waterfront and knew its characters well.

  “Excellent,” I said gratefully. “But I saved the worst for last. I guess those homicide cops didn’t listen to Bob Arnold when he said Ellie wasn’t a flight risk.”

  Inside, a triumphant “ha!” came from the sunroom where Bella and my father were playing chess. He’d taught her when they first met, and now she whipped him at it regularly. I wondered if she’d still be laughing when I told her she’d be helping me bake those last four cheesecakes that we needed for the auction.

  Since otherwise I’d be doing it alone. “The cops took Ellie into custody just now. They found out she’s got the boat, and they decided it makes her a flight risk.”

  “Ridiculous,” Wade pronounced, which was my thought also. But it was already done; Wade and I went inside, where I grabbed a sweater and my purse.

  “Probably they let her lock up the Moose before they took her, but I still need to check,” I said, glancing around a little wildly. “She’ll need a criminal defense lawyer. I don’t even know where they’re taking her, and—”

  From the sunroom I heard my dad grousing that Bella should quit treating him like an invalid, damn it. So he was feeling better, at least; I, on the other hand, felt terrible, and just as I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, the phone rang once more.

  “Jake?” It was Lester Vanacore, calling again from the Tides. “Good, I’ve got Millie Marquardt for you right here.”

  He’d surely known that I would avoid speaking with Millie if I knew it was her calling. I already had plenty to do getting together those last four cheesecakes, and I didn’t need any more of the Fourth of July committee chairperson’s last-minute, can’t-do-without-it “favors” forced upon me at this point.

  But she had Lester wrapped around her little finger, just like she did any other media professional she’d ever met. I don’t know how, but Millie was a genius at getting publicity for Eastport—and now she was talking a mile a minute.

  “Jacobia, oh, I’m so glad to find you at home. It’s about those wonderful cakes, dear, that you and dear Ellie are being so fabulously kind about donating to the Fourth of July auction?”

  “What about them, Millie?” I asked, hearing my voice weaken.

  Suddenly I felt as if I might need to lie down. Because it had just now hit me forcefully that it’s one thing to create elaborate chocolate baked delicacies with a partner who knows how. But it’s something else again to be fumbling along solo, dropping eggs and spattering cake batter. Unless . . . the gleam of a plan appeared to me as Millie’s voice came through the phone.

  “. . . so can you make extras? Cheesecakes, that is. Because we’ve got the bidders, people are lined up for the—”

  In the Coast Guard auction, you placed your bid in advance by buying tickets; whoever bought the most tickets won the item.

  “How many more cheesecakes are we talking about here, Millie? And why?”

  Because so what if an energetic bidding war drove up the cake prices? The point was to finance the fireworks, and everybody knew the auction was really just a fun way of donating to the cause.

  “Oh, another dozen or so,” said Millie carelessly, as if this (a dozen!) was not at all a big deal.

  “Because,” she explained, “they thought with the extra cakes they’d get even more bidders, and with the extra money they’d add some frills onto the show. Y
ou know, make it something special.”

  Oh, well, if that was the only reason; listening, I relaxed a little. Eastport’s fireworks were already pretty spectacular, much bigger and more eye-poppingly, eardrum-hammeringly elaborate than might be expected from such a tiny island town.

  “Millie,” I began, relieved at being able to turn down this difficult request so easily. But she wasn’t listening.

  “And then on the evening of the fireworks,” she went on, “we thought we’d take the kids from the special-education program out on a barge so they can watch the show from the water.”

  Uh-oh. I’d chaperoned a similar activity one year with a few of Sam’s school friends, and it was magical.

  “It costs a fair amount,” Millie went on, “on account of the boat hire, the insurance, the refreshments, and so on. But we could . . .”

  “Do it if we had more cash,” I thought she was about to finish, steeling myself to resist.

  “. . . give the kids some really wonderful Fourth of July memories, ones they’ll never forget” was what she actually said, sounding as if she meant it.

  Gosh, but she was good at this, mostly because she did; mean it, that is. “Okay, Millie,” I gave in, my resolve collapsing.

  Bob’s dire warnings about a storm hadn’t made much of an impression on her, it seemed, but that wasn’t my problem.

  “You can start selling tickets for twelve more cakes,” I told her.

  And I could start baking them, I realized in near despair when I’d hung up. Even with Bella’s help it would be an enormous chore, on top of which there was Ellie’s imminent jailbird status to deal with.

  I absolutely had to find out what the real story was with Sam, too, before I had a nervous breakdown over it. And there was Marla’s dog to worry about; I’d thought I could leave Maxie’s fate to the veterinarian, but the trusting look in the creature’s eyes when I’d found him had begun haunting me, and I doubted it would stop.

  But before I dealt with any of those things, I had to take care of a Moose.

  * * *

  The door was open, the lights were on, and the paddle fans turned slowly beneath the high, pressed-tin ceiling, wafting the delicious aroma of fresh baked goods around the Chocolate Moose.

  A pile of money stood by the cash register, along with some scribbled notes saying what people had taken from the display case and what they’d left in payment in Ellie’s absence.

  And that in a nutshell was Eastport, where the honor system still actually worked. But Ellie wasn’t there, and without her the whole place felt empty and pointless. I tried finding out where she was and what, exactly, was in the process of happening to her, but the lady on the phone at the county courthouse said it might be hours before she had anything official to tell me.

  Discouraged, I went back to my shopkeeping, tidying the display case, sweeping the floor, and putting coffee on. The way I felt, I should’ve been getting it through an IV like my dad’s, and then Miss Halligan came in.

  “My, aren’t you the local hero?” she observed, buying a dozen pinwheel cookies and the chocolate brioche.

  I thought she looked pale and her eyes seemed a little puffy. But that brioche would revive her if anything could.

  “Those cheesecakes of yours have become quite the cause around town, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” I poured coffee and swallowed some, and felt my brain cells pop open like balloons suddenly inflating.

  News of another dozen cakes had gotten around already, of course. That gossip wire, again, and it was a well-known Millie Marquardt trick that when you’d said you’d do something for her, she immediately told everyone else about it so it would be harder for you to back out.

  “Good thing you’ve got a reliable supply of chocolate,” said Miss Halligan.

  Which I thought was a little odd. After all, why would she be thinking about that? But it wasn’t the truly important thing about what she’d just said.

  Because I was the one who should’ve been thinking about it. Stunned, I just stood there staring at her; she was wearing slim black jeans, a loose white blouse, and a red leather belt. As usual her fragrance was a lemony citrus blend, dry as champagne, and she’d lavender-rinsed her hair so its spiky-short fringes resembled flower petals.

  She was in her late sixties, I thought, or maybe older, but she had enough energy for two thirty-year-olds, some of which I wished I could borrow since oh, boy, did I ever need it.

  I found my voice. “Ch-chocolate.”

  We had enough for four more cakes. Not sixteen, not by a long shot. But that’s what I’d promised.

  Miss Halligan smiled. “Well, of course, dear. That’s the secret ingredient, right? Rich, delicious . . .”

  As I rushed past her, her look turned to puzzlement. “Where are you going?”

  But I wasn’t listening, busy cleaning out the cash register and snapping off the fans, the coffeemaker, and the lights over the display case. Shooing her out the door, I shut it and turned the key, hearing the new lock’s tumblers click solidly into place.

  Chocolate. A dozen more cheesecakes, and not enough . . .

  And no Marla to supply it, either, even if there was time for another trip to Lubec. Nor could you obtain it in any of the local supermarkets; we’d tried, but nothing even came near to the smooth richness of what Marla made from the cocoa paste and the other ingredients that she imported.

  But then it occurred to me suddenly that there might actually be some of what we needed right here on the island. Marla did have a house here in Eastport, after all.

  Not only that, but for all I knew, she could’ve already started asking around about the party snapshots she’d mentioned, the ones that might show Muldoon and his supposed lady friend in the Salty Dog together.

  Someone could even have e-mailed them to her by now. So a few minutes after leaving the Moose, I was at the far northern tip of our little island, where Water Street ends and the view across the bay to New Brunswick, Canada, begins.

  On the racing waves, sailboats scudded and motorboats zipped, trailing foamy wakes. I pulled over in front of Marla’s place, an Arts and Crafts bungalow with shingled side dormers, a screened front porch, and the traditional vintage stained-glass panel set into the dining-room window.

  In the yard shaggy pink peonies in mulched beds flanked the front steps. Inside the porch I found a key under the doormat; in the front hall the phone machine blinked steadily. That and the untouched mail in the box strengthened my notion that just as she had predicted, Marla hadn’t been here today.

  Although, I thought as I moved cautiously through the parlor and dining room—Delft-tiled hearth, a dog bed with a Ny-labone in it, an oaken mantel over a bricked-up fireplace with a Mission-style clock ticking hollowly on it—maybe someone else had been.

  Creak . . . I froze at the sound, halfway into a bright, clean kitchen straight out of a 1950s-era Ladies’ Home Journal. The table and counters were topped with Formica, the chairs had been upholstered in an eye-popping shade of turquoise Naugahyde, and the vintage Frigidaire was robin’s-egg blue.

  I half-expected one of those old TV situation-comedy moms—June Cleaver, maybe—to waltz in. But the other half of me still thought murderer, especially when that odd creaking sound came from somewhere behind me again.

  Swiftly I identified the kitchen door leading to the backyard as my escape route, and tiptoed toward it. Past the dog’s water bowl and a bin full of kibble was another door, low and narrow, that I guessed might hide a pantry.

  Then it hit me: A pantry, where food, maybe even chocolate, can be stored? It’s what I had come for; so on my way past it I grabbed the little door’s china doorknob and twisted it hard.

  Only it didn’t turn. I tried again, whereupon it did what the doorknobs in all old houses do when you try to force them: it fell off in my hand.

  Creeaak! The weird, faintly threatening sound was nearer than I’d thought; too late now to nip out the back door without being s
een by whoever was already nearly upon me.

  Getting seen, though, wasn’t my worst worry; glancing around, I spotted a cast-iron skillet and snatched it up.

  Maybe that sound was the cops here to check out the assault victim’s house, in which case my emergency chocolate requirement would explain what I was doing in it, I hoped.

  On the other hand, possibly it was whoever had hit Marla and hurt her dog, and maybe even killed Matt Muldoon. In which case I planned to bonk first and ask questions later.

  Or just bonk. Nervously I backed up against the wall and raised my weapon. Soft footsteps approached, and the kitchen door opened. Sucking in a breath, I lunged forward, and . . .

  “Oh!” Ellie caught a glimpse of the cast-iron skillet coming down and jumped aside just in time.

  I jumped too, my heart hammering as the skillet fell from my hand. “Ellie, what in the world are you doing here? I thought . . .”

  “I came to find chocolate for the dozen more cheesecakes that someone agreed to bake by tomorrow night,” she replied tartly.

  She sank into a chair. “Since apparently being questioned by homicide detectives isn’t annoyance enough.”

  They’d taken her to the police station in Eastport, she told me, her words coming out in a rush. They’d sat her down in one of the interview rooms there, and if Bob Arnold hadn’t finally managed to convince them that she wasn’t about to take off to Canada in the Bayliner, they would have—

  She stopped. “But enough about that. This big new cheesecake order that I just heard about . . . Jake, what were you thinking?”

  I sighed heavily, feeling my heart rate return to normal. “Millie talked me into it. I tried to say no, but you know she can talk the birds right out of the sky when she wants to.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” said Ellie in exasperation, “but . . . oh, never mind. I guess it’s a done deal now, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head resignedly. “I found out about it when I stopped in to the IGA on my way back to the Moose. And my gosh, Jake, you’d have thought we’d cured cancer, the way everyone in there told me all about how wonderful we are.”