Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  I considered what to say next. I did not want our police chief to know that we had been snooping more on our own. And I certainly wasn’t telling him about Miss Halligan’s houseguest: He’d most likely been the shooter at Roscoe’s trailer; he’d tried running us off the road the night before. And that Ellie’s fingerprints would soon be found on the murder weapon.

  Because all those things were facts, but we still didn’t know the reasons behind any of them. Also, even if we did know what they meant, they weren’t proof of anything.

  And that was still what we needed to keep homicide detectives from arresting Ellie first and asking more questions later.

  What happened next made me think Bob didn’t much want to hear about any of it, either. He had something else on his mind.

  “Seems that Marla Sykes checked herself out of the hospital,” he said casually. He put some cash down. “Friends picked her up, hustled her away from the place, and she hasn’t been heard from since.”

  “Really,” I murmured, blessing Ellie’s closemouthed nurse acquaintance while trying to sound surprised.

  “The whole situation needs a good, hard looking-at,” he added as we shouldered back out into the wind-driven rain. “Too bad I’m so busy with this other stuff.”

  The Fourth of July tourists, he meant: getting them out of town, or keeping them safe here. Either way, he had his hands full.

  I glanced at him, wanting to be sure I understood, and found his bright blue gaze already fixed intently on me.

  And that’s when I realized: He already knew we were snooping more. Not the details, maybe, but he understood that getting Ellie off the hook meant putting somebody else on it.

  The somebody who’d really killed Matt Muldoon. But on account of the storm, and because state cops weren’t eager for advice from small-town police chiefs, Bob couldn’t help us much.

  That didn’t mean he was going to stop us, though, I gathered. “Don’t screw up,” he called as he crossed to his squad car, parked across Water Street in front of the hardware store.

  I’d followed him down here in my own vehicle. As I approached it, he said something more:

  “Your pal Roscoe’s in the lockup, still. Fang’s with him, doing just fine,” Bob added to my unasked question. “But he’s talking about hitting the road. Nothing left of his trailer, so he might just leave any minute. That’s what he says, anyway.”

  He gestured toward the lower level of the old bank building, where the holding cells were located.

  “You might want to visit him,” Bob said. “Say good-bye, before he leaves town.”

  Delivering this large hint, Bob smiled pleasantly at me, rain plastering his thinning yellow hair to his pink forehead. “Might be he’s feeling lonesome. And lonesomeness can make a guy chatty, my experience. I mean more than he was before.”

  Under the sign swinging wildly in the wind over the hardware store’s entrance, Bob got into his squad car.

  Probably that sign will be the next to go, I thought.

  “Don’t forget trying to line up some vacant guest rooms,” Bob called from the squad car’s rolled-down window.

  “I’ll try,” I called back as customers hurried from the store to their vehicles, carrying materials and tools to snug down, box in, or shore up anything that might still blow away.

  Driving home, I wondered what in the world I’d just promised. After all, rooms meant beds, linens, food, conversation, plus all the many other items that unexpected guests might need: Shampoo! Toenail clippers!

  That was what I’d . . . well, not guaranteed, actually. Not quite. But Bob had just done me a solid, as Sam would say, by not pressing me on the Marla Sykes business up at the hospital; two, if you counted the little tip about Roscoe.

  And I could hardly fail to repay him; meanwhile, I had other reasons for wanting everyone in my family all sitting together in one place as well. So even though it was not yet the weekend, I decided to kill about eleventy-seven birds with a single stone by reviving an old family tradition: the Sunday lunch.

  * * *

  Bella fussed miserably while getting out the good china. She also dug venerable crystal and silver from the butler’s pantry and napkins from the linen closet, grousing about it all the while.

  A meal in the dining room with everyone at the table was her favorite thing, usually. But she didn’t like it now, and even the chocolate brioche I brought her hadn’t helped.

  “Some people,” she fumed, “have the sense to go lie down when they’re tired.”

  Me, she meant. In the kitchen Maxie looked up interestedly, wondering if he’d just heard a command, then let his big tan head back down onto his crossed paws with a low “wuff.”

  Which reminded me: “Where’s Marla?” The happy couple wasn’t anywhere around, either.

  “And where’s Dad?” He wasn’t in the sunroom, where I’d gotten used to seeing him. “He’s not out driving his truck again, is he?”

  Bella floofed the tablecloth out over the dining-room table, smoothed it with a bony hand, then plunked candlesticks onto it.

  “Your father’s upstairs. Shaving and dressing. Wouldn’t take help.” Her sour face said what she thought about this.

  She angled her head at the ceiling. “Sam’s upstairs, too. And his”—she hesitated minutely—“wife.”

  “Now, Bella,” I replied. “I’m sure they’ll be down soon. And it’s great that Dad feels well enough to shave and dress.”

  Thinking, Good, they’re all out of the way. Not, in other words, wandering around downtown where they might catch sight of what I meant to do; for one thing, I hadn’t forgotten about Roscoe.

  “So,” I said, turning back to Bella, “rare roast beef with garlic mashed potatoes, new peas, and some of those dinner rolls you make, the delicious ones. You know the ones I mean?”

  Well, of course, she did, and she liked my remembering them, usually. Just not right this minute.

  “And once you’ve got the lunch going, please try to get some rooms lined up right away,” I went on.

  Bob Arnold needed enough sleeping space for a battalion. When I got everyone together at the dining-room table later, I planned on pressing them all into service in this matter.

  “Call everybody we know,” I said, then caught Bella dragging the back of her bony wrist over her eyes.

  I peered closely at her. “Bella, what’s . . . Are you crying?”

  Pressing a wadded-up tissue to her eyes, she nodded brokenly. “Only while you were out this morning, Millie Marquardt stopped by here, and she said . . .”

  I put my arm around Bella’s skinny frame and she allowed me to, which right there showed how much distress she was in.

  “She said Ellie’s a-goin’ to jail! For murder, she said, as soon as those police get here again and manage to get their way.”

  Oh, drat Millie Marquardt, anyway, for scaring our dear Bella and for reminding me of my own worst fear as well.

  “Now, now. Ellie’s not going to jail.” I pulled a fresh tissue from Bella’s apron pocket and handed it to her. “Especially if you do what I ask of you, and help me,” I said. “Now blow.”

  Bella obeyed honkingly, which made Maxie raise his big head again. “What else,” she asked, “can I do?”

  A sick husband, a house full of people, and a storm that at the moment seemed bent on tearing the shingles off the roof.... She was a brave little body, and I loved her.

  “First of all, when you see Mika again,” I began, triggering another frown. “No, we need her,” I insisted. “Tell her that if Sam drives her down to the Moose, Ellie would be glad for some help there.”

  Bella’s face softened, but the doubt in her eyes remained. “You mean to say we’re just going to let some strange girl get her hooks into him?” she demanded.

  “Whether or not she’s strange is unknown,” I said firmly. “But the ‘hooks’ part is already a done deal, so let’s make the best of it and try to help Sam out while we’re at it, too, okay?”<
br />
  Whether or not Mika took my suggestion about the Moose was up to her, I decided, leaving Bella to get on with things. She was happiest when captaining her own ship.

  Although none of us would be truly happy until Ellie was out of trouble. And what was going on right now would surely end very unhappily for everyone, if I didn’t hurry up and do something about it. The question was: what?

  Luckily, I was beginning to have an answer. But before I acted, I wanted to sort things out quietly in my head. So I drove through the slashing rain down to the breakwater again, to think in silence. But after only a few minutes of sitting there, I saw Sam pulling into one of the parking spots in front of the Moose.

  Climbing out, he ducked through the downpour around to the passenger side, holding an umbrella, which he used to shield Mika, and taking her arm protectively in his own. He accompanied her inside, and by the time he came out again, I was at the shop, too.

  “Get in,” I said, and finally, now that I had him alone, I let loose on him: How could you? When did you? Why did you?

  Sam stared straight ahead until I’d finished. Then: “You and Ellie were right about Mika. She says she’s an amateur baker, but she’s too modest. She’s won competitions, even.”

  I drove up Water Street through the rain. “It’s not mine, by the way,” he added. “The baby. I mean, not biologically, anyway.”

  “But she said . . . How did you . . . Why, then?” I demanded.

  He stared out at the churning bay. “We were friends. I hadn’t seen her in a while. But we reconnected in Boston not long after I got there, right after the guy dumped her.”

  He’d been in Boston for a month. When he got back, he’d meant to take back his job at the marine supply store. “As soon as he found out about her being pregnant, he was history,” Sam said.

  “I see.” I could imagine the rest of it. For all his problems and challenges, Sam was a good fellow; I just hoped his kindness hadn’t put him into something life-ruining.

  He leaned back in the car seat. “Her parents dumped her, too, when they heard about the baby. They are very . . . um . . . traditional.”

  On the water the wind blew foamy wave tops to smithereens; I drove uphill past the Coast Guard station.

  “So you got married so she’d have . . .”

  He nodded hard, biting his lower lip. “Somebody. Not that she couldn’t do it by herself,” he added earnestly. “She’s extremely capable, makes plenty of money. She’s a nurse. The baking is just a hobby.”

  Well, that was promising, at least. “But she’s still nervous about the baby,” he went on. “Anyone would be.”

  I thought back to when I’d learned I was having Sam: oh, “nervous” wasn’t even the word for it.

  “And, anyway, she shouldn’t have to do it alone,” he finished stubbornly. “Neither should the kid.”

  He turned to me, possibly remembering life without his own father. (And with him, too, perhaps, but that was another story.)

  “Mom, she’s generous, and funny, and she’s really smart,” he added in appeal.

  All good qualities. But he hadn’t yet said he loved her, had he? No, actually, he hadn’t, and I was afraid to ask. He’d always been a sucker for the grand gesture, I knew that much about him. Like his mom.

  “I didn’t call because we were in the process of getting married, and I knew you’d try talking me out of it.”

  So he’d waited until it was done, then showed up here: fait accompli.

  “Okay,” I said, with a sigh, “I understand. Just let me know if—”

  “If I can do anything to help,” I’d have said, but I didn’t get to. Suddenly his arms were around me, his curly hair soft on my cheek, and his beard scratching my neck as he hugged me.

  “Thanks, Ma,” he replied, and I realized how hard this must have been for him. Then I noticed where we’d gotten to: all the way out to Marla Sykes’s house at the end of Water Street.

  I pulled into her driveway and parked. “Sam, open the glove compartment, will you, please?”

  He looked puzzledly at me, but did as I asked and came up with the small, soft leather pouch I’d stuck in there when I left the house.

  He loosened the pouch’s drawstring. “Mom, there’s a gun in here!”

  A loaded .22 pistol, to be precise. “Oh, good, because that’s where I put one.”

  Living with Wade has benefits besides the obvious ones. He’d taught me to shoot, to handle a weapon safely, and how to make the right choice about whether I needed to carry it or not.

  Today I’d decided I did; I mean heck, there was a killer running around loose. “‘Don’t leave home without it, right?’ ” I joked, but Sam wasn’t amused.

  “What do you need this for?” Sam didn’t know anything about the murder, of course, and I didn’t have time to enlighten him.

  Rain slapped the windshield, unfazed by the flapping wipers. I had no business being here, but it occurred to me that right now Marla was back at my house.

  Which meant she wasn’t here. Sam was, though.

  “Stay in the car,” I told him, “and keep your eyes peeled. If anyone else shows up, you come and get me, and do it fast.”

  Because sitting there on the breakwater before I ran into Sam, I’d been thinking about Roscoe and what I should say when I visited him in the holding cell. But creeping into my mind also had been another question: Could a house with so much illicit cash hidden in it hold other secrets, too?

  And now was my chance to find out.

  * * *

  Hustling across Marla’s yard was like running through a wind tunnel with spa jets in it. On the porch steps I fumbled the key from its familiar place under the mat and went in.

  Moments later Sam came in, too, to my annoyance. Some lookout he’d turned out to be. “Hey, I needed you to keep watch.”

  “Windshield’s fogged. Can’t see out.” He followed me down the front hall. The house felt cold and damp as the inside of a tomb.

  “Okay.” I tucked the pistol into my pocket. “Go look out the front-porch window, then, and if you see anyone coming, let me know.”

  Sam sloped off cooperatively, leaving me to ask myself: If I were the kind of deep, dark secret that could get Ellie out of a murder charge, where would I be?

  Which was how I found myself in the cellar again. A bare bulb dangling over the steps cast my shadow ahead of me as I descended; once I was down there, I shivered in the damp and peered around.

  Rusty old tools looked like murder weapons. The open end of the slat-walled coal bin, long unused, gaped like a dark mouth.

  Swallowing hard, I crossed to where the old chimney sported an ash-cleanout hatch. Ellie and I had gotten chased out before we could snoop around here; now I scanned the wall, looking for loose bricks or other signs of possible hidey-holes. And then I saw it:

  Black grit speckled the floor beneath the chimney’s cleanout hatch. Fresh grit, as if someone had opened it lately. But the fireplace upstairs was closed up, so why clean that hatch at all?

  I lifted the door. Inside was a pile of old fireplace debris so charcoal black that it seemed to be sucking light into itself instead of reflecting any.

  “Ma?” Sam’s voice came urgently from the top of the cellar steps. “Sorry to rush you, but I think we’d better scram.”

  On the pile lay a large unsealed manila envelope, ash-smeared but otherwise intact. Newish-looking, even, as if someone had just put it there recently.

  Sam came to the stairwell door. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

  Just because I had a weapon, that didn’t mean I wanted a confrontation, and Sam being here with me made me want one even less. So I grabbed the envelope, stuck it up under my shirt, tucked the shirt in tightly, and took the stairs in a couple of big leaps, letting Sam haul me upward by my arm for the last few steps.

  Through the kitchen, out the back door, and across the sodden grass we galloped, hurling ourselves into the car, backing out the driveway in a spew of g
ravel and rain.

  “Was somebody actually in the house? Did you see who it was?” I slowed as we drove back downtown.

  Sam shook his head. “Not inside. Big black car, went by real slow, then turned around and went by again the other way. Didn’t seem right to me, was all. I got a bad feeling about it.”

  That’s my boy, I thought with a burst of pride. “You see who was driving?” Although I was pretty sure I already knew.

  “Nuh-uh. Tinted windshield.” He turned. “Ma, what’ve you and Ellie got yourselves into?”

  So of course I had to explain everything, and when I was done, he quite naturally wanted to know why we didn’t just dump all we’d found out so far into Bob Arnold’s lap and let him deal with the state police?

  So I explained that, too: “Because it’s going to sound like we’re just trying to shift blame. Nothing that we could say gives anyone else a better motive than Ellie’s, or puts them more on the spot than she was when Muldoon got killed.”

  He nodded slowly. “So as it stands now, something must link some of what you know to the murder in your shop. And if you knew what those particular somethings were . . .”

  “Right. Some of it’s pertinent, some’s probably not, and we don’t know which is which.” I took a breath. “And I’m not sure she realizes it yet, but if Ellie goes to jail over this, even if she’s cleared eventually, it could wreck her life.”

  And her family’s, too. For one thing, there’s no bail on murder charges in Maine, so the accused can sit in custody for a long time—long enough for George to have to give up his Bangor job and stay here to care for their daughter, for instance.

  “Then there’ll be attorney costs, travel and lodging expenses for visiting her. And if I know George, he’ll be there every minute that’s allowed, so he won’t be working. And who knows what else?”

  And that didn’t even begin to cover the dreadful possibility of her being convicted. Sam nodded. “Okay. So where do we go now?”

  I shot him a sideways smile—That’s my boy, for sure—and he grinned at me in reply. But then he glanced back and frowned.

  “Hey! Somebody’s following us, it looks like.”