Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  Also I’ll find some good way to tell Wade about the lost-in-the-fog portion of our Bayliner voyage, ideally without making his head explode.

  And we’ll finish these cheesecakes.

  “Here,” Ellie said gently when I’d finished with the batter, pushing a pile of chocolate wafers, sheets of wax paper, and a rolling pin at me. “Crush ’em.”

  The wafers crunched satisfyingly between layers of the waxed paper as I pressed the rolling pin down. And I knew it wasn’t true, but it seemed to me then that as long as I just stayed right here in this kitchen—and Ellie did, too—nothing could hurt us.

  And as long as we kept feeding people chocolate delicacies, no one would want to. But in order to be fed, people had to visit the shop, and sure enough as soon as we’d opened the Moose’s front door, people did:

  First came a crew of tourists wanting dream bars: coconut, vanilla cream, dark chocolate, and walnuts, so delicious that even Bella said that you could float right up to heaven on one of them.

  Then a bunch of local kids clamored in demanding biscotti, which I supposed must have reminded them of teething biscuits. Chocolate teething biscuits, favored by infants of all ages.

  Finally, just when Ellie and I had gotten our pair of cheesecake crusts built up, Miss Halligan came in.

  And considering the photos we’d just found of her buddying up to our recent murder victim, I suppose I should’ve thought more in advance about what I was going to say to her.

  But I hadn’t. “Hi, Miss Halligan,” I managed. “What can I do for you?”

  Brushing my chocolate-crumbed hands on my apron, I leaned on the front counter by the cash register, hoping this looked casual and not as if my heart was suddenly thudding in my chest again.

  “Just wondering if there’ve been any developments,” she said.

  For her afternoon in the Rose she’d changed into a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt and skinny jeans, and her eye makeup was elaborate as usual: thick, dark eyeliner, lash-building black mascara, and pearl-blue eye shadow.

  On another woman in her sixties—or possibly even beyond; it was hard to tell—the outfit might’ve looked too youthful. But on her it was perfect. Spying the items in the display case, she enthused, “My, don’t those look good!”

  Saying this, she gestured at them, sending a whiff of her lemony cologne floating at me, and my mouth went suddenly dry.

  “Y-yes,” I managed. Somehow I just didn’t feel like making small talk with her; maybe it was that suddenly I couldn’t look at her at all without thinking about Marla Sykes’s dog, Maxie.

  Because that perfume Miss Halligan was wearing was the one I’d smelled faintly in Marla’s house; there was no question about it.

  “I’ll take two dream bars and half-a-dozen biscotti,” she said, pointing. Another whiff of perfume assailed me as I handed over the bag of baked goods.

  “Nothing new,” I replied to her earlier question about new developments in the murder investigation.

  Not honestly, but I had to say something. Her eyes, gleaming from between curled lashes, were watching me carefully.

  She turned to go. Then, as if this had just occurred to her at the last minute:

  “Jacobia, that gray cashmere shawl I’ve seen you admiring, the one in the window?”

  Of her shop, she meant, and “admiring” wasn’t really the word. “Coveting” was more like it. Her glance at me was calculating.

  “I wonder, might you accept it from me as a gift?”

  I blinked in surprise.

  “You and Ellie have been such good shop neighbors,” she went on. “I’d like you to have a token of my appreciation, and maybe Ellie would like to come over and pick something out as well?”

  Ellie was still back in the kitchen. Speechless, I could only nod. Finally: “That’s . . . that’s very kind of you. I’ll talk to her about it, and we’ll be sure to . . .”

  I looked down, trying to think of something else to say, and saw her feet below the jeans hems: no cute ballet flats this time. Instead she wore stylish ankle boots in wine leather, with a small brass buckle over the instep and low wooden heels.

  The kind of heels that would thud on a wooden floor . . .

  My voice deserted me. Had Miss Halligan been there earlier today in Marla’s Eastport house? Had she known we were there, too, and was she actually now trying to bribe me with an article of used clothing? And if so, bribe me about precisely what?

  Popping out of the kitchen, Ellie rescued me. “Jake, we need to pour this batter before . . .”

  Suddenly the Moose, with its so sweetly secure feeling just moments earlier, felt way too private and hidden away from the lively street outside.

  As if, now that one very bad thing had happened in it, more things might.

  Six

  The rest of our afternoon was a blur of crushed chocolate wafers, buttered pans floured generously with cocoa powder, and the arm-aching labor of beating enough sugared cream cheese to sink a battleship into a chicken coop’s worth of eggs.

  But by late afternoon we had four cakes in the oven and four more with their crusts made and their remaining ingredients all set out and measured for the next batch.

  “Miss Halligan was in both of Marla’s houses today,” I said. “The one in Eastport, and the one in Lubec.”

  I’d been thinking about it for several hours, and now I was sure; no one else in town wore that sharp, recognizable lemon cologne, so champagne dry and spicy that it resembled aftershave lotion.

  Ellie pushed back a stray blond curl with the side of her arm. “Seems likely, doesn’t it? The perfume, the boots . . .”

  She was carving curled ribbons of dark chocolate from a big chunk of the stuff, for the cakes’ tops.

  “But they’re not proof of anything, are they? So I don’t know what we should do about it,” she went on. “And we can’t very well ask her about it, can we? Since for one thing, we don’t want her knowing that we know.”

  “Correct.” I checked the oven temperature again. Too hot and the cake tops would scorch, too cool and the batter wouldn’t bake. “We need to keep our mouths shut until we know something for certain,” I added. “Insinuations won’t do the trick.”

  Outside, the late afternoon shimmered, the slanted light of oncoming evening once again making the island across the bay into a low, gold bar. But overhead the sky’s thin, milky look of earlier had thickened to clotted cream, with towering clouds on the horizon to the south.

  “We could go home and take naps,” I suggested. We had about two hours before the next cakes hit the oven.

  Ellie put the tray of chocolate curls she’d been making into the cooler. “Or we could go find out what Miss Halligan was really up to,” she said. “Because,” she added before I could reply, “the more I think about it, the surer I am that whatever she was doing at Marla’s today, it wasn’t about those snapshots of her at all.”

  Which was true: As we’d thought earlier, Miss Halligan must have known at the time that somebody was taking her picture. The camera had been right in her face at that party at the Salty Dog.

  So why go to such lengths trying to get hold of the snapshots now? And why hurt Marla in the process?

  Not to mention her dog, I thought yet again. Somehow this seemed like the worst part to me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “The pictures don’t clear you, and they don’t hurt Miss Halligan, either.”

  So all this searching of houses and clobbering of people . . . it was about something else, but what?

  Frowning, Ellie opened the cooler again, surveying the dark chocolate curls she’d placed there.

  “Oh, maybe just a few more of these,” she said, and began unwrapping another of the chocolate blocks we’d scored in Marla’s cellar.

  And unwrapping it and unwrapping it. “Ellie, how much plastic wrap is on that thing, anyway?”

  Yards and yards of the stuff, it looked like. “You can’t even see through it, it’s so thick on there,” I sai
d.

  At last she finished, and stared at the result. “What?” I said. “Is something wrong with the chocolate?”

  Because if it turned out to be no good, we were screwed, you should excuse the expression, and so were the little kids who’d been promised a fireworks show, viewed from a real, out-on-the-water boat! At night! On the Fourth of July!

  It sounded like so much fun, even I wanted to go. “Ellie? Is it spoiled? Moldy? Infested somehow?”

  “No,” she said mildly, a bemused expression spreading on her face. “The chocolate’s fine.” She looked up. “Lock the door, please. And pull the shades.”

  I must’ve looked perplexed. Our door shade existed; I’d never pulled it, though, and ditto for the front windows. But Ellie only nodded emphatically at me again, so I did as she asked.

  She carried the bundle back out into the kitchen and set it on the worktable. “I think I might know now what someone was looking for at Marla’s place in Lubec.”

  With the shades down, the front of the shop had a comfy, low-lit atmosphere, but in the kitchen the fluorescent overheads made it as bright as an operating room.

  So there was no mistaking what I saw when Ellie finished the unwrapping. “No,” I managed. “Tell me that’s not . . .”

  But it was. “. . . money,” I finished. A big, thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. Was it ten thousand dollars? Or even more?

  Ellie let out a breath. “Jake, have you noticed that anytime we get an answer to something . . .”

  Such as the question of what someone had really been looking for at Marla’s, for instance. Ellie went on:

  “Whenever we get answers, somehow they always come equipped with a lot more . . .”

  Right, questions. Like where the heck did all that money come from?

  My cell phone trilled; I fumbled in my bag and found it.

  “Ellie, get a paring knife and cut the rest of those bundles open,” I said, hoping it was Sam calling. It wasn’t, though:

  “Jake? Bob Arnold here.”

  Disappointment washed through me, along with a pang of fear. It was so unlike Sam to go radio silent this way. And what could Bob want now?

  “Jake?” Bob repeated. The cheesecakes were still in the oven, now giving off an aroma so sweet that it practically seized me by the nose and floated me back out to the kitchen.

  Also I was curious to learn just how much money Ellie was unwrapping. But:

  “I’m here, Bob,” I said. Because I don’t care how friendly you are with a police officer, when you’ve just found ten grand in a package you stole while breaking and entering, you’re polite.

  Well, not technically the breaking part, but you know what I mean, especially when you found the money in an assault victim’s house and your best friend is a prime suspect in a recent murder.

  You talk to that cop, that is what I’m saying. Nicely. “What’s up, Bob?”

  Hey, maybe he’d report a confession. Ellie brought me a fresh coffee fixed just the way I like it, meanwhile waving another ten grand in my face. I grabbed at it, but she danced away from me; fatigue and nerves were making us both a little giddy, I guessed.

  “Listen, it’s about Marla’s dog,” Bob said, and I got not giddy, quick.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” he went on. “Dog’s pretty stiff and sore, but he’s fine. Bruises, but nothing broken.”

  “Really? That’s great news,” I said as Ellie unwrapped yet another fat bundle of money.

  “Thing is, though, the dog needs a place to stay. Vet doesn’t have boarding space and he’s all full up at the clinic.”

  Uh-oh. Now I knew why Bob was calling me. He went on: “So I figured I’d bring the dog over to your house, maybe.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said at once, and at my tone Ellie looked over at me inquiringly. Don’t worry about it, I waved at her.

  Bob went on without seeming to have heard me. “I know the dog would be safe with you, Jake, so could you help me out?”

  I couldn’t take the dog. Bella had enough to worry about, Sam wasn’t here to help, and Wade didn’t want a dog.

  When I opened my mouth, though, what I heard coming out of it was, “Okay, bring him over.”

  Because I still couldn’t forget how the dog had looked at me: Help. And my heart had already answered.

  So I’m a dog person, so sue me. Hanging up, I explained and then spied a familiar look in Ellie’s eyes, although she hardly giggled at all.

  “Jake, you’re such a softy,” she teased.

  “Oh, hush up,” I said crossly, raising the window shades and the one in the front door once more. Thinking Leash, collar, dog dish, water bowl . . .

  I’d compiled quite a list—biscuits, chew toys—by the time Bob pulled up out front, then went around to assist the big German shepherd in easing itself stiffly down from the front seat.

  No leash. The dog didn’t need one, calm and self-possessed despite the festival noise, people, music, and the occasional pop!-pop! -pop! of firecrackers exploding.

  “Maxie,” I said from the doorway, and he looked up at me, his brandy-colored eyes alert and watchful. He paced alongside Bob up onto the sidewalk.

  “Maxie,” I said again, kneeling by him. When I let my face rest in his thick, soft fur, he leaned trustingly against me, and so of course I was doomed.

  “Oh,” I sighed helplessly; the dog was warm and clean and smelled faintly of Betadine from the vet’s office. “Good dog.”

  Bob looked relieved. “Vet says to give him these.” He handed over a pill packet. “For pain. Says to call, any problems.”

  I didn’t think the vet wanted to hear my problems, the number of which had just increased exponentially. Meanwhile the dog, although he was behaving very stoically now, looked as if he could use one of those pain pills.

  Around the eyes, especially. That same expression I’d seen earlier was in them: Help. So Ellie went home and got my car; after loading him into it . . .

  . . . and synchronizing our watches because the cakes needed another hour of baking, and then an hour of just sitting there in the turned-off oven....

  Ellie and I headed up Washington Street toward my house, threading our way between costumed Uncle Sam figures, kids waving squirt guns, Pokémon Go players, and babies patriotically wrapped in red-white-and-blue blankets to keep them warm against the breeze now freshening from the south.

  “Do you suppose they could pack any more people into this town?” she went on. “They’re everywhere.”

  We rolled into my driveway, where Ellie let the dog out of the backseat. “If that storm really hits, it’ll be a mess,” I agreed, but then my whole attention turned toward the animal again.

  Or rather where he’d been. “Maxie?” I peered around anxiously for his large black-and-tan shape. “Maxie?”

  “Here he is.” Bella stood on the porch with her arms folded across her chest. From the foot of the steps the big dog eyed her, then sat, his look inquisitive.

  “Now, Bella,” I began placatingly as she fixed me in her huge grape-green eyes.

  “I guess I’ll be taking care of it,” she said flatly.

  I climbed the porch steps. “No, not at all, I’m going to be. Well. Except this evening,” I elaborated, “we do have the rest of those cakes to bake, and maybe some tomorrow. But after that—”

  “I heard,” she interrupted. “Another dozen.” Her tone was exactly like biting into a grapefruit. Then:

  “Your father is fine. Sam hasn’t called. Wade ate and left again.”

  I absorbed the information humbly. “Thank you. Really, Bella, I do very much appreciate all your assistance.”

  “You’re welcome,” she replied, not softening a bit. But she was still looking at the dog, and although I couldn’t read her expression when she nodded at him, in response he got up and padded toward her. Then, climbing the porch steps very stiffly but purposefully, he followed her inside.

  “You lie down here,” I heard her telling him in the kit
chen. “And you stay here, too, there’s a sick man in the other room and I don’t want any of your dog hair getting all over him, you hear?”

  Or dog drool, or dog dander, or any other doggy by-products whatsoever. If she could have, she’d have dipped the poor creature in Lysol before she brought him into the house.

  “Let’s go back and get its things from Marla’s place,” said Ellie, still tactfully not mentioning what a complete pushover I’d just been in agreeing to take the animal at all.

  “Its own bed and dog dishes and food, and so on,” she said. They’d been in Marla’s kitchen, I recalled now.

  “Oh, but I’d thought I would—” I had meant to buy them. But then it hit me, how brilliantly sneaky and determined Ellie was.

  “Yes,” I turned to her appreciatively, “and that’ll give us a really great reason to go back to . . .”

  She nodded briskly at me. “You got it,” she said.

  So I ran inside and gave Maxie one of the pain pills, which he took willingly, even eagerly, as if he understood what it was.

  And then we went.

  * * *

  “What we need is the one thing that makes sense of all the rest of it,” said Ellie.

  It was late afternoon as we once more approached Marla’s place at the end of Water Street.

  “The problem is that we know a lot of facts. But not how they fit together,” she went on, “or what they mean.”

  Long shadows crossed the green lawn as we pulled into the driveway. Ellie had retrieved her car; I wasn’t sure when.

  “We think Marla took those snapshots. We think Miss Halligan was in Marla’s house,” I said.

  “But we don’t know for sure, and we especially don’t know how that money got into her cellar, or why,” Ellie agreed.

  I checked the rearview mirror. No one was pulling in behind us, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

  The house looked deserted, just as before. “So do we care if someone sees our car here?” I wondered aloud as we got out.

  “No.” Ellie slammed the passenger-side door. “Why should we sneak around?” She strode toward the house.

  “We need the dog’s things, so we’re going to get them. I don’t see who’d have a problem with that,” she declared.