Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “Oh.” The word felt punched out of me. Roscoe’s whole shirt front was sodden with dark blood, his right arm streaming with it.

  But he was upright again; so far, anyway. Wade waved us to a halt and stood listening. No sound came from behind us. Then:

  Wham! A load of what had to be buckshot slammed the tree trunk a few feet to my left, splinters flying in the same instant as the explosion of the gunfire hammered my eardrums.

  Wade slung Roscoe’s good arm over his own shoulder and ran; I caught up with them and got under Roscoe’s other arm, hoisting him.

  “Where . . .” Roscoe gasped. “Where’s . . .” Fang burst out of the brush at us, running full-tilt through a small, bare clearing that suddenly looked familiar.

  Or what little I could see of it did, anyway. “Hey,” I said. “I’ve been here before, I think.”

  I squinted around, my eyes finally adjusting to the darkness enough to make out more than general shapes.

  “Ellie and I were here picking blackberries,” I said, “not too long ago.”

  Because if you want to know what heaven is really like, try a blackberry-and-chocolate baked custard with real whipped cream and a candied violet on top.

  I did not, however, want to visit heaven anytime soon, so I peered around at my surroundings very intently.

  “That way,” I said at last. Straight ahead stood an old gray concrete pillar, all that was left of a once-complete building of some kind.

  “The old Exxon station,” Wade commented. “It’s from when the federal government had a base out here, right after the war when the Seabees were going to build a power project.”

  World War II, he meant, and it hardly seemed pertinent, except of course for the fact that gas stations were usually built near roads.

  “I think we go that way,” I said, pointing.

  Nothing more came from behind us, which meant either that whoever had shot at us thought he had hit us and was going away, or he didn’t think so, and was hunting us still.

  “Run,” Wade said. “I mean it, Jake, you’ve got to get out to the road if you can and get help for Roscoe.”

  Then a sound did come. Click-kachunk! It was the unmistakable sound of a shell being racked into a shotgun’s firing chamber.

  “Run!” Wade dragged Roscoe behind the battered old concrete pillar; meanwhile, Fang took off into the trees again. I followed, figuring the dog might know a shorter way to the road than I did.

  Or any way to it, actually; now that I was alone, the woods seemed thicker and more confusing. Struggling along with my ankle shooting darts up my leg, I felt a target prickling on my back.

  My breath came in harsh gasps. But the fear was worse: Was someone watching? Was our attacker still behind me, just waiting for a clear shot?

  I didn’t know, and all I could do was stagger forward while overhead the wind flung the branches wildly about. The bruised evergreens filled the air with their sharp perfume and pinecones dropped around me like small bombs.

  And all the while I kept thinking I’d hear that shotgun fire again. Or I wouldn’t, because I’d already be dead.

  “Oof.” My ankle gave up and then it went out from under me entirely, dropping me. Fang appeared, nosing me anxiously as I lay there in the weeds, cursing through gritted teeth.

  Exhaustion nearly swamped me. But if I gave up, whoever had that shotgun would win. And I’m no hero, but by that point I was so mad, I’d have grabbed that damned gun and threaded our attacker onto its barrel the long way, if I could have.

  The image cheered me. I summoned up similar ones—worse ones, even. And to my surprise they helped.

  All right, then, damn it; if you can’t walk, crawl. So I did, on hands and knees over the forest floor prickly with sharp stuff and sticky with pinesap.

  Fang paced alongside me. Until: Pop! Pop. Pop-pop!

  I froze; the dog too. It wasn’t the shotgun. The new sound was something else, a little handgun or a small rifle, perhaps.

  Then came the fast thump-and-rustle of someone running hard very nearby, followed by the roar of a car starting up, peeling out with a shriek of tires, and speeding away.

  Finally I heard sirens approaching.

  * * *

  “That’s all he said? That somebody told him to keep people out of that area?”

  I leaned back tiredly in my chair. The siren had been Bob Arnold, summoned to the scene where we’d been getting shot at by a passerby who’d heard the gunfire and called it in.

  Now Bob sat across from me at the butcher-block table in my big old kitchen, his hands clasped around a coffee cup.

  “Yup,” Wade answered Bob’s question. Wade had a beer in front of him; I wanted one, but a single sip of alcohol would’ve knocked me out.

  “And you know,” Wade said, squinting as he searched for the right words, “Roscoe is kind of a . . . well . . . He’s not exactly. . .”

  Bob brushed a strand of pale hair back up over his forehead, looking disgusted at all that had happened in the past few hours.

  “Yeah, I know Roscoe. He’s decent enough.”

  At the moment Roscoe was at the hospital thirty miles from here in Calais, the nearest market town to our north.

  Bob had taken him there. “His only worry, other than getting shot in the shoulder and not quite bleeding out from it, was for the dog,” the police chief said now of the challenged young man.

  “He’ll have worries later, though,” Bella put in from where she stood by the sink.

  She was right. That trailer of Roscoe’s was primitive but you could bet he paid rent on it, and the medicines he’d need after getting shot wouldn’t be coming out of a Cracker Jack box, either.

  Also he wouldn’t be able to work. Bella went to check on my dad while I made a mental note to try getting a fund-raiser going for Roscoe. A spaghetti supper, maybe, and the Moose could cater dessert; I knew Ellie would want to be a part of it.

  If she wasn’t in jail. The Fourth of July cake auction was just forty-eight hours away, which was scary enough. But after that the state cops would descend upon us, most likely with an arrest warrant if we didn’t come up with some way to avoid it. The thought sent a thrill of anxiety through me as Bella returned from the sunroom.

  “How is the girl, Marla?” she wanted to know.

  Hearing the name, the German shepherd padded in and went around the table greeting everyone, his tail wagging hopefully.

  Bob Arnold smacked the heel of his hand to his head. “Right. I meant to tell you about Marla. She’s awake.”

  “Good,” said Bella, but the conflict on her face was clear. Because when Marla recovered, she’d want her dog back, wouldn’t she?

  And that would be bad; to my dad, Maxie had been a blessing. He’d taken on the dog’s regular walk schedule and was now even talking about going all the way around the block with the animal.

  Fang, meanwhile, was hanging out in Bob’s squad car for the present. “But Marla’s not exactly alert,” Bob added, and Bella relaxed a little. “I went in to see her after I left Roscoe in the ER.”

  Unfortunately, none of us could describe the car that sped off from the shooting scene. Right now a couple of Bob’s more junior officers were taping off Roscoe’s trailer with yellow crime scene tape and looking with their flashlights for spent shotgun shells.

  “I was on my way up to visit her when your thing happened, in fact,” Bob went on. “But she’s not fit to be questioned yet. Heck, she doesn’t even know her name.”

  He got up. Of course, I’d told him about the money that Ellie and I had found in Marla’s basement. I’d had no choice; people were getting hurt over this, suddenly.

  Now, after telling me very firmly not to poke into any of this anymore, he went back to his policing duties in Eastport, while Wade went upstairs to take another shower and Bella returned to my dad’s side again.

  Not much later I took a shower also, alone this time, the hot water stinging in the cuts and scrapes I’d gotten out at Ro
scoe’s. Then, after applying more coffee and clean clothes, I put on an elastic ankle wrap pulled as tightly as I could stand it.

  The pain was manageable . . . if you’re the type who likes deep, penetrating misery. But what the heck, I figured a little exercise might help loosen the injury.

  Also I was wide awake, my brain percolating with the kind of alertness you can only get by having a shotgun fired at you. So I scribbled a note, then slipped out of the house and hobbled on down to the Chocolate Moose. Ellie, who regularly slept only about five hours out of each twenty-four, had managed a couple of cat-naps in my absence. But now she was back in our bakery’s kitchen working on the dratted cheesecakes.

  The wind had dropped off abruptly again, the late-night hush like a held breath. Downhill on Key Street between the houses with their porch lights still on and their front steps flickering with citronella candles, kids up long past their bedtimes scampered in the yards.

  A cherry bomb went off somewhere nearby and I jumped before realizing that it wasn’t another shotgun. On Water Street a band playing Cajun dance music rollicked at the end of the fish pier, under strings of multicolored Christmas lights.

  “Zydeco,” said Ellie, setting coffee in front of me as soon as I got inside the Moose. “It’s called zydeco music.”

  The smell of baking cheesecakes, mingled with the heady aroma of melting chocolate, was so powerful that it was like a drug; I sagged in the little cast-iron café chair.

  “Great,” I said. “Have they got a catchy tune about spilling your guts to the cops, by any chance?”

  On her way back to the kitchen, where she was shaving more chocolate—you have to stop every so often and put the chocolate in the refrigerator or it melts all over your hands—she paused.

  “Everything?” She turned to me.

  “Yeah. Pretty much. Most of it.” I described to her the many delights of my early evening.

  “I’m sorry, Ellie, but after all that, I had to tell Bob about all the money we found. And our boat trip, too. And I know George isn’t going to be pleased.”

  In reply, she agreed that anytime shotguns started firing in a person’s vicinity, all bets were off. I summarized what Roscoe had said—that someone had paid him to establish a privacy zone out there, and that’s why he’d menaced us.

  “And I’m pretty sure somebody tampered with Wade’s truck,” I finished.

  I plucked a chocolate-covered pretzel, one of the half-dozen kinds of treats that Ellie had made while waiting for cheesecakes to bake, from the display case.

  “And that’s all the news so far,” I finished, following her to the kitchen with my snack.

  The whole trick, when you are making chocolate pretzels, is dipping them twice. “More mayhem, but no more answers than we had before,” I said.

  “Roscoe’s not saying who paid him?” She checked the clock and drew two more completed cakes from the oven.

  “The shooting started before Wade got the chance to ask him,” I replied. “And afterward Roscoe was in no shape for answering questions.”

  The cake pans’ shiny sides gleamed in the kitchen’s overhead fluorescent lights; then the cakes’ beautiful smooth tops emerged into view, lightly browned and without any cracks.

  “Lovely,” she said, and set the pair of gorgeous objects on a shelf away from the oven, where they could cool further. Then:

  “All right, I guess I can face George. Like you said, he won’t be happy. Even though,” she added, “he’d have done the same thing, under the circumstances.”

  I took another bite of pretzel, considering whether or not to give Ellie some extra ammo for the upcoming talk with her husband. After all, Wade’s half of our bargain—that I wouldn’t tell Ellie about George’s tracking device, if Wade didn’t tell George what Ellie and I had done—was already broken.

  But Wade hadn’t broken it, had he? So I didn’t see how my obligation to keep my promise to him had changed.

  Plus George wasn’t home yet and wouldn’t be for another few days; meanwhile, here in Eastport, Ellie already had plenty to worry about.

  So I decided I’d just go on keeping my mouth shut for now, and told her about Marla waking up in the hospital instead. But heavens, didn’t I still feel just terrible about it.

  “Great,” Ellie said about Marla’s recovery. “I’m glad she’s better, for her sake and for ours.”

  She began rolling crumbs for the final cheesecake crusts. She was still doing only two at a time since, as she said, the oven’s interior got too humid if she baked more.

  “Because not to be too hard-hearted about it,” she continued, “but without Marla we’ve got a supply problem, don’t we?”

  I hadn’t even thought about that. “Not much we can do now except cross our fingers, though, is there?” I answered. “But what I didn’t tell Bob was about the photographs,” I went on. “He’d have wanted to see them, and we don’t have them, and I think that would look even more like we’re just trying to muddy the waters.”

  Ellie nodded emphatically. “It’s like all the rest of it, we need actual facts that we can prove, not just bits and pieces that don’t even fit together in any way we can explain.”

  “Right,” I agreed, hearing my own voice tremble slightly, and still thinking about the secret I was keeping from Ellie. I felt lower than swamp muck about it, as Bella would have put it. Why, Ellie had delivered her baby on my kitchen floor, for heaven’s sake.

  Not deliberately—I’ll tell you the whole story some other time—but still. And we’d been through a lot of other things together, too.

  For example, one time when he’d driven up here to torment me, Ellie congratulated my ex-husband on how flexible he must be to be able to get his head so far up there, and to my astonishment it actually shut him up for a minute.

  That was the day my friend Ellie became my personal hero, and nothing since had changed my opinion.

  “Don’t worry, Jake,” she said now, misunderstanding my look. “It’s all going to be okay,” she pronounced, her voice full of the sort of buoyant confidence I’d always loved in her. Saying this, she finished patting the chocolate-crumb crust into the second freshly greased and cocoa-dusted pan, then poured in the batter. Sliding both filled pans into the oven, she looked at the clock and set the timer on her wristwatch.

  Finally she snapped off the shop lights and fans.

  “Okay, we can leave them for a while,” she said, and by then I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Listen, Ellie.” Wade would just have to understand that I couldn’t keep secrets from her, I just couldn’t.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said.

  She wasn’t listening, though, turning to me instead with a troubled expression of her own.

  “Jake. There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

  And then she did tell. And oh, boy, was it ever a doozy.

  * * *

  I couldn’t believe it. “What do you mean, your fingerprints are going to be found on the murder weapon?”

  I stopped on the sidewalk outside the Moose. “Ellie, how could your fingerprints possibly be in the blood that was on that pastry needle?”

  Because that’s what she’d just said. From the parking lot down the street, a string of firecrackers went off in a rat-a-tat burst.

  Ellie looked miserable. “I should have told you right away, I know. But I was so shocked, I couldn’t, and then there just didn’t ever seem to be a right time to say it.”

  We started walking. “Okay, I get it. But never mind that now, what you need to tell me is how it happened.”

  She shook her head, her pale curls gleaming in the light from the neon OPEN sign in the ice-cream shop’s window.

  “I can’t. It’s so outlandish that I’m afraid even you won’t believe me.”

  Inside the shop a long line of late-night ice-cream wanters stretched out the door; so much for Millie’s promise to get the tourists off the island while the getting was st
ill good.

  “What? Ellie, of course I’ll believe you.”

  Tired as we were, neither of us wanted to go home, so we started uphill past the breakwater and the Coast Guard station. Food carts lined the pier on both sides, forming a sort of makeshift carnival midway: blooming onions, sausage rolls, and that ever-popular, only-in-Eastport special delicacy, smoked salmon on a stick.

  “Ellie, please,” I said. “There’s nothing you could tell me that I wouldn’t swear was true, simply because you’d said it.”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Yeah, you say that now.”

  I’d never seen her like this before. We strode on uphill past sprawling Queen Anne houses perched magnificently at the backs of wide green lawns. In its heyday Eastport had been a rich man’s town: lumber tycoons, shipping barons, sardine-canning magnates.

  “All right,” she gave in at last with a huge sigh. “But if you don’t believe me, I forgive you in advance.”

  “Deal,” I told her as four teenaged boys rattled by on their skateboards in a clatter of wheels against sidewalk. It hit me again that no one seemed worried about any bad weather.

  But that thought faded fast as Ellie began speaking. “First of all, I didn’t kill him, of course.”

  That she thought she had to mention this at all sent a chill through me. I opened my mouth to say so.

  “No, no,” she interrupted. We passed the ferry landing and then the Chowder House restaurant, built out onto a wharf strung with bright paper lanterns. Cars filled the parking lot and music drifted from the deck area stretching over the water.

  “I have to say that first, because . . . well, I already told you about Muldoon hassling me,” she said. “That night, him coming into the shop, arguing and accusing. And you know, he just made me so mad.”

  I did know. I said nothing as she went on: “But then he left, finally, just the way I said he did.”

  Her quick, anxious step slowed slightly as she got into her story, and even in the gloom between streetlights, I could sense her relief, that she was telling it at last.

  “Then on the way out I spied that pastry needle in the trash, where you’d tossed it, and I thought I’d ask George to straighten it in his workshop. Because they’re expensive, those needles.”