Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

As I mentioned, news travels fast, which brought her around again to what Marla Sykes had said.

  “Meanwhile, I still don’t get why no one else knew about this girlfriend that Matt Muldoon is supposed to have had,” said Ellie.

  “Well, I guess if they wanted to keep it a secret, maybe they were just very careful,” I proposed. “Or . . .”

  The other possible explanation for the story was just hanging there in front of us like ripe fruit, so finally I picked it: “Or because Marla made her up, maybe?” I ventured.

  As for a reason why Marla would want to do that, maybe she was the girlfriend herself, I theorized, and thought she was getting ahead of the story by suggesting Muldoon’s love interest was someone else.

  But that didn’t really fly. Why not just keep her mouth shut and hope the information never came out at all, then deal with the problem if and when she needed to?

  It was among the many questions to which I had no answers. “Let’s just look around for what we need here,” said Ellie at last, “and worry about the rest later.”

  So we did, rummaging through cupboards, the refrigerator, and even the chest freezer cleverly tucked into a closet under the front stairs. But when we were finished, we had discovered not even an M&M, and although the little door in the kitchen did open onto a pantry (naturally the knob worked just fine when I didn’t need it to), the shallow space inside was empty.

  Strangely, we also found nothing to suggest that Marla was running her chocolate business out of the house, and there’d been no such evidence at her Lubec cottage, either.

  “All the paperwork there was personal stuff,” I told Ellie. “Phone bills, check registers, receipts . . . nothing work-related.”

  “Maybe she keeps her business records down at the fish plant workspace,” Ellie suggested as we climbed to the bungalow’s second floor.

  “Mmm, maybe.” I’d seen no desk, computer, or paperwork in the old canning factory, either. “Could be, I suppose.”

  But what we still really needed to find now was a stash of chocolate: blocks of it, dark and luscious, rich with cocoa fat and suitable for gourmet cake baking and decorating. Surely it was here somewhere, or so I desperately hoped.

  We made our way down an upstairs hall with four rooms opening from it. In the first a set of free weights lay on a floor mat flanking an exercise bicycle. A video screen, CD caddy, and player stood on a shelf, the screen angled so the bike’s rider could see it. The CD in the player was a French-language learning course.

  Ellie’s discouraged-sounding voice came from one of the other rooms. “Okay, maybe there really is no chocolate here, and we’re out of luck. Because if it’s not down in the kitchen or the pantry, then I don’t exactly see where else it would . . . Hey.”

  Hurrying toward her, I passed the bathroom, retro-decorated like the kitchen with silver-swan-printed wallpaper, pink floral curtains, and pink chenille throw rugs, and found Ellie in a tiny alcove at the end of the hall.

  “I opened this linen closet door,” she said, gesturing at it, “and look what’s inside!”

  Not linens, definitely. Instead it was a cleverly designed tiny office unit: the desk folded down out of it. Built-in shelves at the back held ledgers, folders, stamps, and envelopes. A shaded lightbulb hung on a cord from the ceiling, and on the desk, secured by Velcro strips so you could tuck it back up again when the door closed, stood a laptop computer.

  A password-protected laptop computer, as it turned out, but my first guess—MarlaSykes1—took care of that little problem. And because the machine was Windows-operated like my own at home, I knew how to bring its files up onto the screen.

  And there, after a few swift clickety-clicks on the keyboard, they were: recipes, household bills, her taxes for the previous year, a folder labeled MAXIE that probably held his veterinary information....

  She kept records for the Lubec house in Lubec, apparently, and the Eastport-related ones here. It wasn’t the way I would have done it, but hey, whatever worked.

  Unfortunately, no folder labeled CHOCOLATE STORAGE LOCATION appeared on the screen. An icon of a trash can did show up, but when I clicked on it, there was nothing in it. And I still saw no chocolate-business records or anything resembling them.

  “Huh.” I frowned at the screen. The trash on my own laptop at home was spilling over, as usual. But not on this one.

  “Ellie,” I began, “when’s the last time that you—”

  “Emptied my computer trash?” She saw it, too. “Don’t remember.”

  Saying this, she made impatient typing motions at me; moments later I’d restored the contents of the files Marla Sykes had discarded. (Whenever I do finally get around to emptying my laptop’s wastebasket, I always immediately and urgently need something irreplaceable from it, so I knew how to retrieve items.)

  “So they just let you go?” I asked while I arranged the dozen or so restored icons on the screen.

  The detectives who had been questioning Ellie, I meant, and she nodded in reply.

  “Bob stuck up for me. That’s what turned the trick. But you know, me not having an alibi still makes me look awfully good to them.”

  “Well, that . . . and you hating him,” I agreed, opening and closing the files on the screen one after another.

  “And the body and the weapon both being found in our shop,” I added.

  The files on Marla’s laptop computer were mostly the standard stuff: There was a complaint note to the exercise bike’s maker about the handlebars, which were too flimsy. She had written a summer job recommendation for a Lubec high-school student whom she’d once employed. But also:

  Photographs. A dozen thumbnail miniatures were in a folder labeled MM; I clicked on the first one to enlarge it and then on all the rest, so they overlapped on the laptop’s screen.

  “How come the detectives brought you in at all?” I asked. “I mean if they weren’t ready to charge you with anything? . . .”

  Ellie gazed over my shoulder as my voice trailed off. Neither of us could quite believe what we were seeing, but there it was.

  “Hoped I’d say something dumb,” she replied absently, still staring. “Or that I’d confess, I imagine. But I didn’t. Do either of those things, I mean.”

  She pointed at the third photograph. “That’s the best one of them, isn’t it? The clearest.”

  “Yup.” Of course she hadn’t said anything dumb. Because she wasn’t: dumb or guilty.

  But I was starting to think that Bella had the right idea. “I think you should talk to an attorney before you say anything more at all,” I told Ellie firmly.

  She shook her head. “Lawyers cost money. And since I was home alone, and don’t have anyone to vouch for me, the only way to prove I’m innocent is to find out who really did it. Right?”

  It wasn’t the way an attorney would see it, but she was right about one thing: no lawyer could guarantee that she’d be found not guilty if it ever came to a trial.

  So being the star attraction at one would be risky in the extreme, and she had her mind made up, anyway. “That was taken in the Salty Dog,” she said, pointing at the screen again.

  I nodded; all the photographs had obviously been taken there, and on the night Marla had mentioned, too. Around the pickled eggs jar on the bar crowded the laughing faces of a dozen party-goers, under a homemade banner: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

  “So she must’ve got right on it after we talked last night,” Ellie theorized. “Found someone who was there at the party and they sent her these? But then how did they get in the computer’s trash can?”

  I clicked more keys, opening Marla’s e-mail account. We’d only asked for the pictures the night before, so this was fast results. And sure enough, she hadn’t received any e-mail with photos attached, not in the past few months.

  So how she’d gotten these was my big question now. We looked at the party shots again; in them, Muldoon’s face showed clearly. His thin, downturned lips, narrowed eyes, and sour expression said that the hila
rity all around him was . . .

  Annoying? Not up to his high standards, apparently. But that attitude was par for the course for Muldoon, and anyway, it was the petite, elegant-looking woman beside him that neither of us could stop staring at.

  That fashionably snipped white hair, those kohl-rimmed eyes, and the little black T-shirt with the jewel-toned embroidery at the neckline were all utterly recognizable. Muldoon’s companion that night at the Salty Dog had been our own Miss Halligan, owner of the Second Hand Rose.

  Ellie looked up at me. “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither. It’s like Marla had these photos all along.”

  “And wanted us to think those two were a romantic pair. But why?”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said. “Not only that, if these pictures weren’t e-mailed to Marla . . .”

  I scrolled back through more of the chocolate maker’s e-mail history. They hadn’t been. Not ever.

  “. . . then there’s only a few other ways for them to get onto her computer like this,” I said.

  “She could’ve downloaded them from an online site, or been given them on a thumb drive or CD, or . . .”

  “. . . Marla could’ve taken them herself,” said Ellie.

  A door slammed hard downstairs.

  Five

  I’d known that my friend Ellie White was quick-witted, but I’d had no idea she was so remarkably fleet-footed, too. Instantly she nudged me aside, closed up the laptop, and shut the computer desk so that from the outside it was nothing but a linen closet again.

  Then she hustled me down the hall and through the door to the back stairs, putting a finger to her lips. “Shh.”

  No kidding, I thought as we huddled on the stairway landing. Below us we could hear someone moving stealthily around, first in the kitchen and then returning toward the front of the house.

  Beckoning me along, Ellie started down the stairs. I followed, with my heart pulsing crazily in my throat, thinking that if only I’d known how exciting the baking business would be, I’d have taken up some more sensible activity.

  Sword swallowing maybe, or milking poisonous snakes for their venom. At the foot of the stairs Ellie waved silently at me again. And since the footsteps had already finished climbing the front staircase and were slowly but surely making their way to where we were now, I decided to obey her again, too. But:

  Had I closed that second-floor stairwell door firmly behind me? I wondered suddenly. Or did it now stand wide open like a neon sign: THIS WAY TO YOUR NEXT VICTIMS?

  The footsteps started down toward us. Ellie slipped out into the kitchen with me right behind her, and some faint sound we made must’ve alerted someone because there was a pause, and then the footsteps thumped down hurriedly at us.

  The back door was over on the other side of the kitchen and so was the dining-room entrance. We had no time to get to either of them. I hauled desperately on the pantry door and it opened.

  I shoved Ellie inside and crowded in there with her, pulling the door shut once more until the latch clicked, then leaning back hard against the shelves to make more room for us both.

  Whereupon the shelves behind us moved: smoothly, soundlessly, pivoting away to reveal old stone steps. Slipping past the shelves, we hustled down as fast as we could into a cellar that seemed much older than the rest of the house.

  Feeling around, Ellie found a lightbulb string and pulled it. A bare bulb glared on.

  Large granite boulders formed the old stone foundation, and the beams overhead showed the adze marks from where they’d been hand-shaped decades ago.

  “Look,” Ellie whispered, pointing to where an archway in the old foundation wall had been filled in with brick.

  “Where’d that lead to?” I wondered aloud. Clearly it had been an exit at one time, but to where?

  “You know,” Ellie said thoughtfully as she gazed at it, “this whole island was a huge smuggler’s nest, once upon a time.”

  Of course it was; first when the British were still levying taxes on trade, and the locals evaded the levies in their small boats, by dark of night. Prohibition in the 1920s made rich men out of Eastport mariners, too, whiskey being the contraband then.

  And that stone archway, back when it was open, would’ve led straight out toward the water, where I happened to know there was a beach below the very cliff this house was built on.

  Imagining booze casks from Canada and the West Indies being hauled up and stacked here, I jumped at another sound from above.

  Ellie hissed at me from behind the furnace. “The light!” she whispered urgently, pointing at the bulb dangling in the stairway, still swaying a little.

  Swaying and shining; weird shadows wavered unnervingly on the cellar’s old stone walls, but that wasn’t the worst part.

  The worst part was that glowing lightbulb itself, its lit status shouting our presence here as if through a giant megaphone. While Ellie stared big-eyed from behind the furnace, the door at the top of the steps we’d just rushed down rattled angrily.

  The stuck doorknob, again, but this time it was working in our favor. The light must be leaking under the door; I peered around for something to use as a weapon.

  Because if that had been Bob Arnold stomping around up there, he’d be ordering us to come out by now. Instead: ominous silence.

  A brick will do, I thought, or maybe a stone fallen from one of the cellar walls.

  But there were no fallen stones down here. Unlike my cellar at home, here the elderly masonry was patched and whitewashed, and the floor, level and equipped with a drain, was coated with paint and sealer.

  Even the brick in the smuggler’s archway was in good shape. No tools anywhere, either. “Jake!”

  It was Ellie again, this time from the cellar’s far corner. She was peeking out of a smaller room, one I hadn’t noticed; hurriedly I joined her in there and flashed my penlight around.

  The cubicle had a low ceiling, one small window, and steel shelves lining three of the walls.

  “Listen,” Ellie whispered. “Is anyone coming?”

  I didn’t hear anything. The light from the main cellar room cast a triangle on the floor in here, reflecting up dimly to the wrapped parcels on the shelving.

  Still no sound from upstairs. I crept back out to the foot of the steps and peered up.

  “He’s still up there. Or she is.” Two shadow shapes stood side by side on the pantry door’s other side, visible in the crack of daylight between the door’s bottom edge and the floor.

  Shoes, I thought. Shoes with feet in them. Waiting.

  We waited, too, barely daring to breathe while one wildly impossible plan after another—break out through a cellar window (too small), cut a hole up through the floor (see no tools, above)—flitted uselessly through my head.

  And then . . . puzzled, I squinted, hardly daring to believe it. The shoe shapes moved away from the door; then footsteps crossed over my head.

  I held my breath, sure it must be a trick. But the front door opened and closed, and then someone scuffed away down the front walk, out to the street. A car started up with a low rumble, and . . .

  “Gone?” Ellie whispered from the little room, where she still huddled.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” There was one way to find out. “Okay,” I said, “stay here. Whatever happens, don’t make a sound.”

  I put my foot on the bottom step. “If I run into trouble, you stay until the coast is clear. Don’t come up until I tell you.”

  Yeah, sure, like that was a possibility. If anything happened to me, she’d be throttling someone with her bare hands.

  But I didn’t have time to argue about it; the door at the top of the stairs waited silently for me. Besides:

  “Well,” I amended, “if someone’s actively dragging me out, do please try to see if you can get a look at whoever it is.”

  I took another step up. “Or if, you know, you can do anything to stop them from . . .”

  “Oh, get on with it,” said Ellie impat
iently. “If I have to, I’ll just hit them over the head with one of these.”

  She emerged from the room with her arms wrapped around some of the bundles from the steel shelves. Each bundle was the size of a shoe box. They were shoe boxes, I saw now, each thickly wrapped with plastic.

  But whatever was in them would have to wait, I decided, as from above, that damned little door smirked at me. And if there’s an expression in the world that I don’t like even a little bit . . .

  “Fine,” I snapped, taking the rest of the steps in a fast upward rush. It was probably foolhardy, but I preferred to think of it as determined. Then:

  “Gah!” First I tripped, my knee slamming the stone step; then the door stuck again. But finally it opened and I charged through.

  The kitchen shimmered vacantly. So did the parlor, the dining room, the front hall . . .

  No one. On the stairs a few dust motes gleamed redly in the light from the landing’s stained-glass window panels.

  “Hello?” I whispered. Nobody answered.

  Ellie appeared beside me, causing my heart to lurch nearly to a stop for the second time that afternoon.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I’ve had enough. If only we had chocolate, I’d be glad just to stand in our nice, peaceful shop and bake cheesecakes until they’re coming out of my—”

  “Oh, but we do.” Ellie smiled. “Have chocolate, I mean.”

  She held out one of the shoe boxes she’d brought with her from the cellar. She’d already opened it, tearing away the plastic wrap it had been bundled in; now when she lifted its cardboard lid, a gorgeous aroma floated from it.

  Chocolate. “Ellie! How did you—”

  “Know what it was?” She finished my question for me. “I didn’t, I just hoped.”

  She pulled out a chunk of dark semisweet, its tantalizing fragrance unmistakable. All the bundles were neatly labeled in Marla’s distinctive back-slanted handwriting.

  “This’ll do it,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of chocolate now.”

  “And if someone sees us carrying it out?” I asked, glancing around nervously.

  Before we found all this dark, rich loot, just coming in and taking it had sounded reasonable. But now that we might actually end up having to explain ourselves, I didn’t feel quite so blithe.