Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “We’ve bought from her often. She knows we’re good for it, and she’d have sold it to us herself if she could and she knew that we needed it,” Ellie replied confidently.

  Which wouldn’t stop a breaking-and-entering charge if it came to that, or make our presence here look any less suspicious. But when I said as much, Ellie had an answer for that, too:

  “Everyone knows we’re doing those extra cheesecakes by now. We have the perfect excuse. It’s in the town’s best interests that we’ve come in here and gotten this stuff . . . right?”

  “Right,” I conceded. Still, I was fairly sure whoever’d been in here with us hadn’t had our best interests in mind; overall, this whole stunt was not only illegal, it was reckless.

  Together with some very confusing information, though, it had gotten us what we needed. So Ellie and I hauled our booty out Marla’s front door and stowed it in my car.

  “What do we do about the pictures of Miss Halligan and Matt Muldoon?” Ellie asked as we drove toward my house together.

  Upon reaching my car, we’d decided to get going while the going was still good, and pick hers up later.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Before we found them, I thought him having a secret girlfriend would take the suspicion off you. Or at least dilute it.”

  We turned up Washington Street past the massive old granite-block post office building, draped with red-white-and-blue bunting from its windows and with flags flanking its wide front doors.

  “But now I’m not so sure about that,” I said.

  In the post office’s parking lot the holiday activities had already begun; a sign invited passersby to TRY YOUR LUCK! at a ring toss, a GUESS YOUR WEIGHT! booth, and a shooting gallery.

  “Because now what’s bugging me is how those pictures of Miss Halligan got onto Marla’s computer at all, not to mention why.”

  Ellie nodded. “It seems like Marla must’ve had them all along. That she took them, even. So why say otherwise?”

  We passed the white-clapboarded Center Baptist Church, now transformed into the Eastport Arts Center. The sign outside read PATRIOTIC CONCERT! MUSIC OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

  “And since I’m the one with the murder motive,” Ellie went on, “and Muldoon was found in our shop, not Miss Halligan’s, I don’t think those snapshots will unincriminate me at all.”

  Right, and on top of that we didn’t have the pictures, did we? We’d been chased out of there before I could get them out of Marla’s computer trash and e-mail them to myself.

  “The main thing, though,” Ellie mused aloud, “is why’d Marla lie about them? I mean, if she had them all along?”

  Yet another good question. We turned onto Key Street and then into my driveway, between a bed of orange daylilies and a pair of ancient lilac bushes, their gnarled branches covered in blooms.

  I switched the car off. “Beats me. And not only that, but if we did have them and we showed them to anyone, then we’d have to explain in detail how we got them, wouldn’t we?”

  I’d told Wade most of it, but she hadn’t told George any of it, and I wasn’t eager to let Bob Arnold in on it, either.

  Not unless I had to. “Oh, I’m so confused,” said Ellie as we got out of the car and crossed the lawn.

  Me too. As we approached the porch, Bella came out, gripping a dust cloth, looking as if she’d like to strangle someone with it.

  “Uh-oh,” said Ellie, which was when I realized my dad’s old pickup truck wasn’t in the driveway where it belonged.

  “Your father,” Bella stated, waving at the vacant space where the truck should be, “has gone out for a ride.”

  By himself. Driving the vehicle. “I tried medicating him,” she said. “That calming pill that the doctor prescribed.”

  I knew the kind of pill she referred to; I’d been given one myself once in advance of major dental work and wound up telling the dentist to go ahead and pull the rest of them because what the heck, I was already in the chair.

  That was not at all the attitude I wanted my father having while he drove an antique pickup truck around Eastport. “When did he leave?”

  Bella followed us in. “A few minutes ago. He shouldn’t be driving, even without those pills, I was about to call . . .”

  Yeah, Bob Arnold. I was tempted to call him, myself. But that wouldn’t end well for my dad, as driving under the influence was a crime Bob never took lightly.

  “I’ll go look for him,” I said. He couldn’t have gotten far. His idea of speed had been formed long ago in Manhattan, where two green lights in a row were thought of as zipping right along.

  “Leave your car in case I have to go get him from somewhere,” said Bella. Since Ellie’s vehicle was still parked out near Marla’s, I set off on foot, leaving them both in the kitchen busily unwrapping the chocolate.

  Up and down Key Street flags rippled bravely from flagpoles and banners fluttered from the tops of picket fences. Kids yelled, racketing downhill on bikes and skateboards; the Fourth of July was family reunion day in Eastport, and now there were more cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents in town than you could shake a stick at.

  Which I guessed accounted for all the freshly laundered sets of bedsheets billowing on wash lines and the unfamiliar late-model cars parked everywhere. Among these my dad’s truck would stand out without much trouble, on account of it being a 1949 Dodge with a busted tailgate and mismatched tires.

  But the vehicle wasn’t downtown where tourists and locals thronged the waterfront in the July sunshine. There was still no big rush for the causeway, I saw, despite the ongoing storm predictions; gale-warning flags already fluttered atop the Coast Guard station but no one was paying attention.

  My dad was here somewhere, though, I was sure of it; he loved this sort of thing. Among the pennywhistles tootling “Yankee Doodle” and the buskers with their guitar cases lying open on the sidewalk I peered around for him, the music and the smell of cotton candy filling my head.

  Ladies in short sets, flip-flops, and visor hats passed, and men with dripping ice-cream cones in their hands hustled toward waiting kids. Down the street outside the Chocolate Moose, a few prospective customers stood, looking disappointed.

  Then I spotted Miss Halligan in her own shop’s doorway, alternately waving at me and pointing urgently at something across the street.

  “Dad!” Hurrying toward him, I spied his pickup pulled up onto the sidewalk. He’d installed flashers, a new suspension, and seat belts when he bought the thing; now the flashers blinked steadily.

  I sat by him. “Hey, what happened? Did you get restless?”

  He smiled ruefully, and I noticed he’d taken the trouble to cap his IV tubing, not just leave it hanging open unhygienically.

  “Yeah, it was dumb,” he said, turning back toward the waves glittering beyond the breakwater. A small red tugboat was bouncing around out there, jaunty and bright.

  “But I wanted to do something, you know?” he said. “Just . . . something. So I did. But I got tired,” he finished sadly.

  The tugboat’s whistle sounded a decisive toot! as my father got to his feet a little unsteadily. He’d pulled on some navy track pants and a clean gray T-shirt; so except for the silver ring on one big toe, the venerable old braided leather sandals on his knobby feet, and the stringy gray ponytail tied in a leather thong, he looked just like everyone else.

  Oh, and the ruby stud earring in his earlobe, too; he was the absolute gold-standard definition of old-school cool, and I loved him terribly.

  “Hey, Dad? Do you want to go home now? Bella’s worried about you.”

  A town squad car rolled toward the pickup truck my dad had left parked there illegally; the cop in the car—not Bob Arnold—looked purposefully at me and made a brisk gesture to move it.

  My dad saw this. “All right,” he said cooperatively.

  I’d have thought it was on account of the tranquilizer Bella had given him if he hadn’t been rolling a familiar-looking pill between his f
ingers, over and over like a worry bead.

  “I am,” he confided when he saw me noticing it, “already very tranquil. I didn’t need this pill.”

  So he’d spit it out instead and hidden it. Repressing a smile, I replied, “I see. Maybe Bella should’ve taken it.”

  His faded blue eyes twinkled at me, but he didn’t comment. “I hear we’re getting a storm around here soon,” he said as we got into the truck.

  I drove; he didn’t argue and I wished he had. It would’ve been more like him. On impulse I turned left on Battery Street, past the blackened bones of old wharves jutting up from the rocky mud of the inlet.

  “Good,” he said, meaning the detour. Rounding the curve, we drove slowly through the small beachside enclave of tiny wooden cottages called Bingville, then climbed to Bucknam’s Head, with its panoramic view across the water south to Lubec.

  Seeing it all reminded me of Marla once more, and of her big dog Maxie, who I hoped wasn’t in even worse shape than his owner.

  And speaking of not knowing what shape someone was in: “You heard from Sam yet?” my dad asked out of the blue.

  “No. I wish I knew what’s happened to him.” I let the clutch out and the truck eased forward. “I’m very worried,” I admitted.

  To emphasize this I gestured as we rounded another curve, then wrapped my fingers around the steering wheel again hastily. It was a good old truck, but it handled about the way you’d expect from a ’49 Dodge.

  “He’ll turn up.” My dad gazed out at the water with a faraway look in his eyes, like maybe he was seeing it for the last time.

  I didn’t want to think about what that meant. “Right, I hope so,” I said instead. “But in what kind of shape?”

  Most of Sam’s biggest troubles had happened before my dad and I reconciled, after a long estrangement extended on his part by fear of being rejected and on my part by the belief that he had murdered my mother.

  The incorrect belief, I mean, which is a whole other story that I’ll get into some other time. But the short version is that she was lovely, and he’d adored her; the ruby stud he wore now was the one he had given her all those years ago.

  Leonora, her name was. I was three when she died, and now I didn’t want to lose him, too. “Beautiful out here,” I said.

  Well, except for a mild milkiness in the sky and a glimmery softness on the water to the south where the bay, cozily hemmed in by peninsulas and islands, met up with the Atlantic Ocean.

  My dad nodded. “Beautiful. Maybe so.” But as we rounded the next curve he peered back over his shoulder again, at the water and sky to the south.

  “You know, I’m an old man.” A wind gust came out of nowhere, rocking the truck as if it were a toy. “And when the barometer’s just right, I’ve got sciatica.”

  The round, rubberized lid of someone’s trash can tumbled bouncingly down the road, the can rolling along behind.

  “Which I’ve got now,” he added. He craned his neck to peer up at the sky through the pickup’s windshield, and what he saw there made his weathered brow furrow.

  “When we get back to the house, you might want to go around lowering a few storm windows,” he said.

  * * *

  By the time we got back to Key Street, a sense of emergency had already begun spreading. Up and down the block cars pulled out hurriedly, heading for the IGA and returning full of bread, milk, and enough Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy to float a barge, I was willing to bet.

  People with company for the Fourth were especially loathe to run out of that latter substance, I imagined; also the lawn chairs got dragged in and the trash bins stowed, and all those flags flapping everywhere were getting hauled down, one right after the other.

  Climbing the porch steps, I noted that Bella had carried in the potted geraniums and tied a plastic bag around the mailbox so it wouldn’t get wet and rusty inside.

  Inside, Bella had thought of the storm windows, too, and lowering them seemed to have used up some nervous energy; at least, when I handed my Dad over to her in the kitchen, she kept her cool.

  She was so glad to see him, she’d have swallowed any amount of exasperation, I thought as I surveyed the rest of the bustling kitchen activities.

  Of which there were precisely none.

  Ellie sat and read an old issue of the Tides, taking her usual intense interest in the local obituaries. (“Like novels,” she always said, “so full of facts you hadn’t known about people.”)

  But right now our kitchen was as dead as the departed folks. “Ellie?” I spread my hands. “What about the cheesecakes?”

  The stove was stone cold. No chocolate was melting. “Because I thought that’s why we went to all that trouble to get . . .”

  She put the Tides down and slid off her chair, looking as serene as if all those cakes we’d promised were already in the Moose’s cooler, which they most definitely were not.

  “We have a shop,” she said, “with a kitchen in it. All our tools. And an oven big enough to bake four of them at once, while we do business. You know, retail sales? The money-earning kind?”

  She stopped to take a breath. Clearly, she’d been thinking about this. “And I know you’re going to start talking about Matt Muldoon, and how at least one of us still ought to be . . .”

  Bingo. You bake, I’ll snoop. That had been the plan I’d been about to lay out for her. Because we both knew that although the state cops hadn’t descended on us yet, it was only a matter of time.

  That is, unless somebody else confessed: not a hope I was hanging my hat on at the moment.

  “I know,” Ellie said calmly at my expression. “I’m not in the clear. Far from it.”

  I could hear Bella fussing over my dad in the sunroom, and it seemed that he accepted it better than he had before, as if his escapade had satisfied something in him.

  Not for long, though, I suspected. If I had to boil down the meaning of the look in his eyes, I’d say, “Gangway!” But whether it meant out of this house or out of this life, I didn’t know.

  Ellie was still talking. “Think about it, though. We don’t need to snoop. Not right now. What we need to do is think.”

  She cocked her head at me. “For instance, d’you suppose that whoever killed him had never been in the Moose before?”

  Huh, she has a point. I stood there thinking about it while green-leafed forsythia branches with a few shriveled yellow blooms still attached to them tapped the kitchen windows insistently.

  “Okay,” I gave in finally. “Maybe less running around is a good idea. And you’re right, we do have to bake sometime.”

  But she was way ahead of me there, too, already stowing our chocolate bundles into a drawstring tote bag.

  The bag had a big brown moose happily devouring a chocolate cupcake printed on it; we’d had them made when we first opened.

  “Muldoon said these bags were unsanitary, remember?”

  I gave the kitchen a final glance to make sure we weren’t leaving a mess. Bella had scrubbed, polished, and waxed it until the pumpkin-pine floor glowed and all the cut-glass knobs on the antique tongue-and-groove cabinet doors glittered like jewels.

  “And of course I didn’t pull one of the bags over his head and yank the drawstrings when he said it,” I recalled, plucking a stray crumb from the table. “Although maybe I should have.”

  Wade was back down at the marine terminal today, and wouldn’t return home for hours. Meanwhile my cell still hadn’t rung, and in the telephone alcove no messages blinked on the machine.

  Which meant that Sam still hadn’t called, and I still didn’t know what to make of it, but I knew one thing: when that son of mine did finally get home, I was going to—

  “Come on,” Ellie interrupted, swinging the bags of chocolate. “Let’s go do this thing.”

  So we did. I left Bella my car again, since she thought stick shift was an invention of the devil. Marching determinedly down Key Street we dodged flying Frisbees, Super Soakers, dogs wearing flag banda
nnas, and a skateboarder zooming and swooping as graceful as a swan between groups of tourists.

  It seemed now that the essential storm supplies were laid in—and especially the Allen’s brandy, official tranquilizer of Maine summer-visitor-havers since time immemorial—the holiday was in full swing again. “Weather be damned” was the slogan for the day, at least until it drove everyone indoors; see brandy, above.

  “Who do you suppose it was?” Ellie wondered aloud.

  “In Marla’s house? Well, not Miss Halligan, I know that much. Those ballet flats she wears wouldn’t thump.”

  And not Marla, of course; I spared a hopeful thought for her and her dog. Meanwhile the sky’s eerie milkiness had thickened; also—and this seemed particularly ominous—seagulls were flocking by the hundreds atop the Coast Guard building and on the wharf.

  But none of it fazed the holiday revelers—not yet. “All right, now,” said Ellie, unlocking the front door of the Chocolate Moose and swinging it open with a flourish. “Let’s get to work.”

  Outside the shop the Fourth of July was in high gear on Water Street, too, with a fiddle-and-dulcimer duo slinging tunes on the library lawn, jugglers tossing candlepins to each other, and food vendors enough to stuff the whole island with fried dough and onion rings.

  All of which meant our cake deadline was fast approaching. So I snapped the lights on and set up the cash register as Ellie organized our worktable, and soon we were in the thick of it:

  Sugar, cream cheese, eggs, vanilla . . . perched there on a tall kitchen stool with a wooden spoon in my hand, I felt my breathing slow and my heart rate drop steadily from the panicked gallop it had been stuck at.

  Everything will work out, I told myself as Ellie stirred a lump of butter the size of a pigeon’s egg (that’s what it said in her great-grandma’s old recipe, scratched out in fountain-pen ink) into the chocolate she was melting.

  Sam is fine, I told myself.

  My dad will surely regain his independence completely, not just that frantic grab he exhibited today.