Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “This thing hits”—he waved at the view from the kitchen windows, rain-splashed and sodden gray—“and they could lose the whole fishing fleet.”

  He got up. “Hey, ask Ellie if she hears from George, let him know I went down and checked the Bayliner, okay? Tightened up the lines and so on.”

  He hauled on his boots. “But she should also let him know we could use his help here,” he added from the back hallway, “if he can get away.”

  I agreed that I would tell her, and then as I was pouring my own coffee, a sound from the street caught my attention. It was a car going by, and then another.

  And another. Meanwhile, Wade hadn’t said anything about our narrow escape of the night before. The getting-into-trouble part of it was what mostly I expected comment on, not the getting out.

  On the other hand, what he’d be doing this morning was pretty dangerous, too, so maybe he just didn’t want to hear any warnings, himself: sauce for the gander, et cetera.

  Anyway, by the time he had the rest of his storm gear on, a steady parade of vehicles was passing on their way out of town.

  “About time,” Wade said of the fleeing visitors as he zipped up his rubber raincoat. “Like I said, if this thing does hit . . .”

  “You mean it might not?” The first swallow of coffee had only reminded my brain cells that they existed at all.

  The second one, though, had started to wake them up. Wade crossed his fingers in reply.

  “S’posed to just-possibly-maybe jog east out to sea, they’re saying now. At the moment, it’s giving Massachusetts a hell of a pounding.”

  He saw my face, crossed swiftly to me, and wrapped a rubber-raincoat-swathed arm tightly around me.

  “I didn’t mean Sam’s out in it. He’s a smart guy, you know? You didn’t raise any dumb kids, Jake, Sam’ll know enough to stay put till it’s over.”

  Sure he would. I just wished I could be certain of it.

  “What’s happened to Roscoe?” I asked as Wade opened the door to go. “That beat-up little trailer of his won’t be any match for this mess, even without all the bullet holes.”

  The wind nearly tore Wade’s hat off. “Yeah, Bob Arnold put him in the drunk tank last night. Not locked in, you understand, he just gave the poor guy a bed for the time being.”

  Another few cars went by. Through the streaming rain I could see that they were packed full of families, pets, and luggage, the unhappy-looking drivers gripping steering wheels, peering ahead into the murk.

  “He’s happy as a clam in there for now, and Fang’s with him, too,” Wade called back through the rain. “Dog bounced right back as soon as it didn’t have a butt full of buckshot,” he added as he climbed into his pickup truck.

  So the veterinary surgery wasn’t major, I gathered, and the damage to the truck from the accident couldn’t have been too bad, either, if it was already driveable again.

  But Sam was still incommunicado, and my dad had seemed so tired and tentative on our excursion together that I thought his recovery must be faltering, if not failing entirely.

  And then there’s Ellie, I thought as I went upstairs for a shower at last. If we hadn’t figured out who’d killed Matt Muldoon by the time the Fourth of July holiday ended, she was toast.

  Which was why, half an hour later with clean clothes on the outside of me and a big piece of Bella’s pie and a whole lot more of her industrial-strength coffee on the inside, I was hurrying back downtown to the Moose.

  A few hours of sleep had done wonders for me. But the weather had already started being unkind to Eastport; on Water Street I pulled into a parking space, noting that our shop’s moose-head sign no longer hung from its sturdy chains over the front door.

  “Blown down,” Ellie confirmed when I got inside, the little bell ringing over my head. As usual the shop smelled like heaven, if heaven is built mostly out of butter and confectioner’s sugar thinned with a little vanilla.

  “I baked,” Ellie explained, “a few cookies.”

  By which she meant two dozen chocolate chip, a couple of pans of oddballs (nuts, coconut, raisins, and Rice Krispies mixed with melted chocolate) and a few trays of needhams, chocolate-dipped potato confections that are a traditional Maine treat.

  She’d caught a few hours’ sleep, too, she assured me, and never mind that it was twelve minutes at a time while the cookies baked. Swiftly I summarized what Marla had told me after I’d tortured her by feeding her ice cream and raspberry pie topped with chocolate.

  “Nice work,” said Ellie. “But you’re not the only one who’s come up with new facts. And I’ve been thinking about them, too.”

  She stood by our dish sink, scrubbing out mixing bowls. I started arranging a dozen of each cookie variety on doily-covered plates. Customers would be arriving here soon; in my experience bad weather makes people need more chocolate, not less.

  That is, they would if the huge storm cranking up its romping-and-stomping act outside now didn’t end up blowing us all away. “And what I think,” said Ellie, “is that Miss Halligan sleeps here at night.”

  I put down the needham I’d been about to bite into; potato being a vegetable and vegetables being okay to eat even this early in the morning, right?

  “I beg your pardon?” I said. I’d been wondering why Ellie was speaking so softly.

  She nodded, her curly blond head angled toward the thin sheet of drywall between the Moose and the Second Hand Rose.

  “She’s over there right now,” said Ellie, rinsing the final mixing bowl—a thick white pottery one that she’d inherited from her great-grandmother, along with all our recipes—and leaning it in the dish rack.

  “Quiet as a mouse, but once in a while I still hear her moving around.” Ellie dried her hands on a clean dishcloth. Under her baking apron she was wearing stonewashed jeans and a purple T-shirt, which her daughter had tie-dyed at camp the previous summer.

  The sight of it reminded me: “How’s Lee? Have you heard from her?”

  “She’s fine.” Ellie made worry-tamping-down motions with her hands. “She called. They’re not even going to get rain.”

  The camp that Ellie’s daughter attended with her young cousin was way over in Maine’s western hills, a completely different part of the state, weather-wise.

  “Seriously, though, Jake.” Ellie grabbed a water glass off the shelf and pressed the open end of it tightly to the drywall partition.

  Making a face at the corny spy-vs.-spy tactic, I nevertheless put my ear to the glass that Ellie held and heard . . .

  Voices. Music. “She’s got a little TV over there,” I said.

  Ellie pressed a finger to her lips. “And she’s watching the Weather Channel,” I finished in a whisper.

  “Or she was when she went to sleep,” Ellie agreed softly. “I haven’t heard anything else in quite a while.”

  I stepped back. “Ellie, you know that if she was over there when Muldoon got killed, she might’ve heard something, right?”

  “Yes, but she hasn’t said she was. Which she would have, don’t you think? Besides, what I want to know is why is she here? Because she has a house of her own, you know.”

  Right, so why sleep in her shop? And now that I thought about it, why did Miss Halligan dislike Sarabelle Muldoon so much, anyway?

  The speed and intensity of recent events had pushed that latter query right out of my mind, but now I realized it shouldn’t have. Miss Halligan had been in those pictures, after all, and Marla must have had a reason first to take them, and then to keep them on her computer.

  And to suggest their existence to us that night in the Salty Dog, too; as I looked back, it seemed to me that she’d been eager to mention them. I’d have to ask her that when I got back home.

  “But what’s any of it got to do with Marla getting beat up, or Roscoe and his boat, or the guy chasing us last night?” Ellie wondered aloud.

  “No idea. I suppose we could try to find out, though,” I said slowly, and in reply Ellie’s smile looked a
s if it should be on a cat’s face and have canary feathers stuck to it.

  “Uh-huh.” She glanced around the kitchen purposefully. “We do have all the cheesecakes left to decorate, but we can’t do it yet.”

  Because the last two weren’t cool enough, and you have to do them at the proper temperature. Otherwise, the top is too hot to take the cherry glaze correctly, the chocolate shavings wilt, and the ganache melts down the side of the cake.

  None of which we could afford to have happen. “So I think we’re free for a couple of hours,” my friend added, “until it’s time to open the shop.”

  “And?” I ventured cautiously as she snapped out the lights and turned off the ceiling fans.

  Outside, we sprinted through the rain to my car; by now it was full daylight, but the sky was low and lead-colored with clouds looking as heavy as boulders rolling across it.

  In the car I turned on the defroster fan, the heat, and the headlights. “And if she’s here at the Rose,” said Ellie, “then she’s not at her house.”

  The streetlamps still on in the gloom showed the wind damage overnight; more blown-down store signs, open trash barrels rolling, a long ragged swathe of black roofing paper torn from somewhere, tumbling along.

  “So I want to go there and have a look around if we can,” Ellie pronounced, frowning at the mess all around. “Because first of all, there’s got to be a reason why she sleeps in her shop instead of in her own bed.”

  Her comment reminded me that with Sam on his way home—or at least I hoped he was—and Marla now apparently my houseguest for I didn’t know how long, beds in our house were getting scarce.

  After all, when you haul someone out of the hospital where they’re recovering, you’re responsible for them, aren’t you? So I’d been wondering, if even one more person showed up, where would I put everybody? Perhaps Miss Halligan had the same problem.

  “Maybe because someone else is there?” I said. And now that I had said it, I was so sure it was true that I just nodded silently when we reached Miss Halligan’s house and found a car parked in her driveway.

  Which one it was, though, did come as a surprise, although by that time maybe it shouldn’t have: the dark-colored sedan had a very distinctive front grill and big double-barreled round headlights.

  It was the car that had chased us the night before.

  Ten

  Miss Halligan’s house was a sweet little bungalow on Prince Street. With its low roof and gingerbread-trimmed gables nestled under an ancient pair of copper beech trees, it wore its green lawn gathered to it like a skirt, white-trimmed at the mossy hem by a neat wooden picket fence.

  No light showed from inside. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked Ellie.

  The dark car hunkered alongside the house. Looking at it gave me the creeps, as if the headlights might snap on by themselves or the engine fire to life of its own volition.

  But Ellie was resolute. “She had to have heard or even seen something if she was there when Muldoon got killed, and I think she was. I think she’s been there every night for quite a while, and that’s why she’s always there so early every morning.”

  She frowned at the car again. “Yet she hasn’t said a word. Also those pictures of her have something to do with it, I’m sure of it. Why else would Marla be keeping them, and trying to get us to pay attention to them?”

  “That lemon cologne of Miss Halligan’s isn’t drifting around by itself, either,” I agreed, remembering the whiffs of it that we’d been encountering in places where it shouldn’t be.

  The storm was sending squall lines over us as its outer bands began swirling in; now as the one we’d just had pulled away, the sky brightened abruptly.

  Well, not that much brighter, but it made me like sitting here out in the open a lot less. The house glowered silently at us. “So you don’t think it’s all about the money?”

  Ellie shook her head stubbornly. “That money’s been there all along, I’ll bet. What changed was that right after Muldoon died, we talked to Marla about him, and the next thing we knew, whammo.”

  But how would anyone know that we had? I wondered. “Ellie, when we were with her in the Salty Dog the other night, did you notice anyone who might’ve been listening to us?”

  Ellie stared at the house. Nothing moved, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone inside watching us.

  “Eavesdropping? No, I didn’t. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, though.” She sat up straight, gathering herself. “I’m going in.”

  Yikes! That sure hadn’t been in my game plan, or at least not after I saw the muscle car. Peeking in the windows had been about as far as I’d meant to go, but Ellie was away and across the lawn before I could stop her.

  By the time I’d caught up, she’d reached the screened-in side porch, which ran along the short asphalt driveway. Overhead, sneaky breezes shivered the beech leaves, releasing showers of droplets. The screened-in porch extended around to the rear of the house, where it overlooked a weedy, stream-cut ravine.

  “Ellie!” I whispered, but she wasn’t listening and I couldn’t very well let her go alone, could I? The porch door opened without a sound. Inside, an ashtray overflowed onto a low table.

  Miss Halligan didn’t smoke. A calico cat slid in through a flap door to twine around our ankles.

  “What are we even looking for?” I whispered nervously as Ellie tried opening the door to the kitchen.

  The door swung wide. The kitchen was a complete mess: dishes, opened cans and packages, another loaded ashtray. The whole place smelled of burned grease, cigarette smoke, and rather strongly of the lemon cologne its owner wore, even though she wasn’t here.

  “I don’t know.” Ellie tiptoed across the kitchen toward a glass-beaded curtain in the arched doorway to the room beyond; a parlor, it looked like.

  A lamp was on in there. It hadn’t been on a moment ago. I grabbed Ellie and yanked her back, just as a shadow appeared on the other side of the beaded curtain.

  “Shh.” We ducked down quickly below the level of the kitchen counters, then moved backward as best we could toward a door that led . . . Well, I didn’t know where it led, but at the moment anywhere was better than here.

  We could have gone back out the porch door. But Ellie wasn’t having any of that.

  “She must have a desk here,” Ellie whispered, “or even just a file box. There’s no room for business records at the Rose.”

  I didn’t understand how the records of a tiny secondhand clothing store in remotest downeast Maine could have anything to do with murder.

  Not that I had to understand it, or anyway not right now. What I had to do now was hide; Ellie, too, because the shape on the far side of the curtain was now pushing through it into the kitchen.

  The beads rattled dryly as I found a doorknob behind me and turned it. “Go,” I whispered to Ellie, nudging her backward, then slipped through the door after her.

  I got it closed again, just as the kitchen light snapped on; I thought we’d made it without a hitch until I felt something soft moving by my ankles and realized the cat had come with us.

  “Prutt,” the cat said, sounding pleased, and now of course the guy out there was calling the cat.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” My lips moved, but I didn’t dare make a sound. The guy was standing just outside the door.

  The cat’s name was Kitty, apparently. “Come on, damn it. You flea-bitten sack of . . .”

  The cat head-butted me. It wore a thin collar, with something metal dangling from its . . . Oh, dear heaven, it’s a bell. Luckily, it was stuck in the collar at the moment, so it wasn’t ringing.

  Yet. Hastily I captured the feline, snagged the tiny silver bell between my frantic, grasping fingers, then swiftly slipped the whole collar over the animal’s head.

  Kibble clattered into a bowl; hearing it, the cat struggled in my grip, but didn’t yowl. Instead he went straight to the biting portion of the program, sinking his sharp teeth into the tender skin b
etween my thumb and forefinger.

  “Mmphh,” I said. Based on the sound of it, the guy out there was making himself some coffee. A trickle of warm wetness slithered across my palm as the cat let go. The more it bleeds, the better, I supposed, but, boy, that hurt.

  We were in a little office with pine-paneled walls and a small wooden desk, plus some filing cabinets. A brass lamp stood on the desk, which had a green blotter on it, and a straight wooden chair whose seat was padded in green plaid was pulled up to it.

  The guy in the kitchen belched loudly as smoke from a pan of something frying seeped under the office door. He hadn’t left the kitchen at all, so we couldn’t let the cat, now pacing and looking terrifyingly ready to yell in feline protest, out there to where the cat food was.

  Ellie tried one of the windows that opened onto the porch. It slid up easily, the feline leapt through it, and the cat door in the kitchen flapped; we heard kibble being crunched.

  “Phew.” Ellie mimed her relief; in reply, I mimed vamoosing out that very same window, pronto.

  But she had other plans. Angling her head at the file folders stacked atop the cabinet, she made a move toward them. She never was one to run away prematurely; the opposite, actually.

  “Ellie,” I whispered urgently. Because that guy wouldn’t be busy eating breakfast forever, would he?

  Ignoring me, Ellie plopped down onto the cozy little room’s green braided rug, placing a manila folder open on her lap. Calmly she began turning pages from it. And I had to admit, the room’s air of cleanliness and order suggested strongly that homeboy out there didn’t visit very often.

  So Ellie’s calm attitude began to seem more sensible to me; if we stayed reasonably quiet, I supposed we could hunker down in here until the guy left the house and then—

  Well, then two things happened: first, the cat’s rubber flap door slapped shut as the animal exited the kitchen, back out to the porch.

  Next, with what looked like a breakfast sausage in his jaws, the creature jumped into the office again, through the window we had unthinkingly left open when we’d let him out.