Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  But no bars showed on the device. “Phones are out.”

  Probably the wind had damaged a cell tower. Even way out here it didn’t happen often. But it did sometimes, mostly in the middle of bad storms, and now it had.

  Sam sagged in the passenger seat. “You know where you’re going now, though, right? I mean you have some idea of where—”

  “Yeah, Sam, I’m not just driving around for the fun of it.”

  Saying this, I turned onto a narrow lane running down toward the bay, then turned again between granite boulders serving as driveway markers. Because there was one person still left that I hadn’t really pressed about all this: the grieving widow.

  And her house, perched at the edge of a cliff overlooking the bay, was plenty isolated enough for what I’d begun suspecting: the nearest-and-dearest theory of identifying murder suspects might have some usefulness here, after all.

  MULDOON, said the sign at the end of the driveway. I followed it between beach-rose hedges to a low, glass-and-steel structure built into the side of a steep granite ledge.

  “Ma,” said Sam, “this is a dead end. They’re not here. Mika and Ellie, I mean.”

  Then, squinting around, he added, “The place is pretty snazzy, though, huh?”

  “No kidding.” We got out and ran for the portico angled over the slate-tiled front terrace. “The Muldoons had it built here.”

  I pounded on the massive pine-slab front door. Until now I’d thought subtlety was our best strategy; for one thing, our snooping seemed always to be triggering someone’s chasing and/or shooting behaviors.

  But subtlety hadn’t worked, and if the alternative included me at my pushiest, so be it. Ellie and Mika were in danger, and so was Marla, I now believed.

  And they might be here. I hammered again and finally the sound of footsteps pattered from somewhere inside. Then the door opened and Sarabelle Muldoon stood there in a satin dressing gown and slippers.

  With her pale hair pulled back and her face in disarray, she’d obviously been weeping. “What do you want?” she demanded harshly.

  Good question, and I didn’t know the answer for sure. But by now I was convinced that her husband’s death had something—maybe everything—to do with Marla’s hidden money and Miss Halligan’s criminal son.

  So it was truth-telling time, or as much of it as would get us into the slate-tiled foyer, anyway.

  “Ellie didn’t kill him. I’m trying to find out who did,” I said.

  There was no muscle car parked in the driveway and nowhere to hide one, I’d noticed. Sarabelle’s eyes gave away nothing, but she stepped aside. We followed her into a large, dim-lit sitting room so devoid of any personality, it was like a doctor’s waiting area: beige rugs, nubby tan upholstery.

  The only color in the place was in an elaborate wall hanging over the modern white-brick fireplace. It featured yarns in fantastic hues, with beads and feathers worked into the weaving.... My eyes fairly danced over the thing, as they were meant to do.

  “Pretty, isn’t it? I made that,” she said wistfully. “A long time ago.”

  “‘Pretty’ isn’t the word for it. It’s beautiful.”

  More like tragic, actually. It showed me who she’d been, and perhaps still was behind all the determinedly applied makeup and jewelry she usually wore. Seeing it, you had to wonder what else she’d given up or lost, and under what kind of pressure.

  But that wasn’t what I was here for. “Sarabelle, I need to ask you a few things—”

  Sam cut in. “Ellie White and my wife are missing from the Chocolate Moose. So’s Marla Sykes. We need to know if you have any ideas about where they are, or who might’ve taken them.”

  “Or if they’re here now,” I might have added. But my probing gaze got that point across; Sarabelle’s own dark eyes narrowed.

  “I know nothing about them.” Rain sheeted down the big plate glass windows at the far end of the room, where an elaborate exercise area included a gym-quality stationary bicycle, a weight machine, and a mat with a collection of free weights alongside it.

  Sarabelle stood looking at the fancy apparatus for a moment, seeming not to have heard Sam. Then: “I’m sorry about the trouble Matt caused you. My husband just wasn’t a very nice man—”

  “Sarabelle, please,” I interrupted. “First of all, you were the one behind the trouble he caused us. You wanted Ellie and me gone from the Moose so you could move in and have a bakery of your own. Why, you even looked at the shop space before we did.”

  Her brittle laugh rang out in the chilly room. “Is that what he told you? Oh, that’s rich. He would blame it all on me.”

  She faced us, her dressing gown wrapped messily around her body, the satin slippers on her feet scuffed and worn.

  “Matt wanted that shop space, not me. He took me down there and pushed the whole bakery idea on me because I didn’t want to. But I never even went inside the place until the Moose opened.”

  She took a breath, shifting a strand of glittery white stones resting on her collarbone; even in her distress it seemed she just couldn’t do without jewelry.

  “As for what he did to you . . . like I say, he enjoyed making trouble for people. I mean, please,” she added, “do I look to you like someone who wants to work in a bakery?”

  She had a point.

  “Right,” I said, “but never mind that. I need to know if—”

  She shook her blond head tiredly. “No. I already told you and the police, too, I don’t know a single thing about Matt’s murder, or about Ellie or whoever was with her being gone, or who took them.”

  It was all Sam needed to hear; he edged toward the door. I’d been hoping for a hint of that lemon cologne in the air, but there wasn’t one.

  So probably this was a wild-goose chase, as Sam had thought. But I wasn’t done yet. “Sarabelle, please. I know I haven’t been friendly.” I nearly choked on the words. “But I’d appreciate your help. I need to know where Ellie and Sam’s wife, Mika, are right now.”

  Stepping forward, she kept on moving me back toward the foyer, while the wind whistled crazily outside. Her lean, toned form wielded some surprisingly forceful body language.

  “I told you I don’t know anything. Except that your friend killed him and you want her to get away with it,” she pronounced, edging Sam and me out onto the front terrace.

  “Okay, then, just tell me this,” I tried as she began closing the door. “Do you by any chance think Matt might’ve been seeing Miss Halligan? I mean . . . romantically?”

  “What?” The door came open once more; her earrings sparkled like the falling raindrops behind us.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ve got Matt all wrong.”

  “Ma,” Sam called impatiently from behind me. “Ma, come on.” He climbed into the car and slammed the door.

  Sarabelle looked pityingly at me as a new downpour rattled on the portico overhead.

  “My husband was a hound, all right? Always sniffing around. Just not here at home in Eastport, where someone might catch him at it.”

  His trips for “meetings” at the health department in Augusta sprang to mind; she saw me thinking it and I realized suddenly that I’d misjudged her, that I’d been selling her short all along.

  “Right,” she said, comprehension in her eyes. “You don’t know anything about me, do you? But since you’re so curious . . .” Her look hardened. “Matt liked them young. That’s what I put up with all the time I was married to him. Miss Halligan’s a doll, all right, but she’s out of the running by several generations,” she said, and with that, she did close the door on me finally.

  Out in the car Sam had the engine running and the defroster blower on, so I could see to back out. Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do or where to go now.

  “The only way I can see any of this working,” I told Sam, “is that Clark Carmody convinced Marla Sykes to do more than just launder the money he was getting illegally, somehow.”

  Because a
one-third share argued for more than bookkeeping duties. And where had the other third gone, anyway?

  Yet another question I didn’t have the answer to. “And then what? He turned against her?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I think. He’s probably got all three of them stashed somewhere by now. And if he killed Muldoon, he’s surely desperate to get off the island, either with them or . . .”

  Or without them, because he’s already killed them, too, I finished silently; I couldn’t say it to Sam. He knew, though, I could tell from his face.

  Around us a few last stragglers of the tourist variety crept out of town with their headlights on and their windshield wipers slapping. But others had already turned around, their cars coming back in a steady stream.

  “Anyway, whatever was going on, Muldoon found out about it,” I theorized, “and made trouble about it, as he always did. So he had to die, and then Ellie and I started poking around.”

  A blown-down branch smacked the windshield and flew away; a flag sailed like a kite. “He probably thought I’d be at the Moose with Ellie just now,” I said, “instead of Mika.”

  A makeshift sign on Washington Street said the causeway was still out; it was why all those cars were coming back.

  “Sam, I’m so sorry. I just don’t know what else to do.”

  Visiting Sarabelle had been especially useless. She hadn’t cared much for her husband, but that cut both ways, didn’t it?

  Because I got the strong feeling she hadn’t cared much about his infidelities, either, or at least not enough to kill him over them.

  Sometimes the nearest really aren’t the dearest. Sometimes, as with Sarabelle Muldoon, they just don’t give a damn anymore. Sam sighed heavily as we pulled up in front of the Moose. Then he trotted through the drenching rain to peer into the shop.

  “Nobody,” he reported when he returned to the car, and when we checked Marla’s Eastport house again and then Miss Halligan’s, they were deserted also.

  I thought briefly about the cheesecakes still waiting to be completed, but decided to forget them. After all, why bother? The auction, Ellie’s catering business, probably even the chances of our continuing in the Chocolate Moose at all . . .

  None of it means anything if something bad has happened to Ellie or Mika, I realized miserably.

  “It’s not your fault or Ellie’s, either,” Sam said. “It’s whoever took her and Mika that I want to get hold of, and damn it, I’m going to.”

  Which was my feeling about it as well. I just didn’t see how as I started back up storm-lashed Water Street, where wind-frayed Fourth of July banners hung like sodden laundry under the streetlamps glowing sullenly in the cloud-darkened daytime gloom.

  But as we made our slow way up Key Street under power lines whining and whipping in the wind, Sam sat up straight, suddenly.

  “Hey. I just thought of something. Ellie still has a boat, doesn’t she?”

  He’d been living right here at home back when she first got it, even helped with the launch the previous summer.

  “Yes,” I said. “But how would a stranger like Miss Halligan’s son know that?”

  My old house rose up ahead, lights glowing in the windows and a curl of smoke streaming sideways off the brick chimney-top.

  Sam punched a bunch of numbers into his cell phone, which for a wonder was operating again, at least temporarily.

  “Bella? Are Ellie and Mika there? Or Marla?” he said into it.

  He shook his head at me, listening. Then: “Okay. And you have not heard from them. And Wade’s not home yet, either?”

  He was still working, probably; the boat basin when we passed it downtown had looked wilder than ever.

  Sam hung up, then turned to me, looking thoughtful. “A boat,” he said as if there had been no interruption, “that you could get off the island on. So . . . does Marla know about it?”

  Like I said: That’s my boy.

  I stomped the gas pedal hard.

  * * *

  Debris littered the road to the boat dock: tree limbs, trash cans that had blown out of people’s yards, some boat cushions and a big blue tarp, complete with the lines somebody had tried using to tie it down, all flew and tumbled as if possessed.

  “Gnarly,” Sam observed as we passed the low wooden Youth Center building. A hand-lettered cardboard sign in the window said BINGO TONITE, but from the way the building’s shingles flapped in the gale, I thought the games would probably have to be postponed.

  Then the lights inside the building—it was being readied to provide emergency shelter, I realized—went out. And stayed out.

  “Try your phone,” I said, and Sam obeyed.

  “Nuttin’, honey,” he reported, so not only had the power gone out, but now apparently the phones had failed again, too.

  The good news, though, was that no one would take a boat out in this mess; not unless Davy Jones’s locker looked viable as an escape route to them . . . or so I hoped.

  At last we reached the dock, where the floating sections and the boats tied up to them seemed to fly up into the air in a slow, rippling motion each time a massive wave rolled in.

  “I’m going down there,” Sam said.

  Wind shook the car. Out past the boats visibility was almost nil.

  “I’m coming, too,” I told him, spotting the Bayliner among the other vessels bouncing and lurching. Before he could object, I was out of the car and staggering toward the metal gangway right behind him.

  Probably there was no one here. The dock, what little I could see of it through an atmosphere that was now mostly water, looked properly deserted, and there were no other cars around, either.

  All of this seemed normal, given the weather conditions. But what did not seem normal, suddenly, was the sky brightening all at once and the wind dropping abruptly. There were no more of those intermittent storm bands coming in; this was the real deal now.

  Sam pointed south toward where a break in the roiling clouds sent freakish-looking shafts of sunlight slanting onto the waves. “It’s the eye,” he said cryptically, but then I got it.

  The eye of the storm. The thing was so powerful now that it was actually forming hurricane features. An odd sound came from somewhere, barely audible over the waves’ crash.

  Also a faint light gleamed in the Bayliner’s cabin. Sam saw it, too. “Come on,” he mouthed, charging forward.

  Ahead lay the metal gangway, wet and slippery, slanting down to the water. At least, it wasn’t low tide, so it wasn’t vertical this time.

  But high tide meant the water here was deep, cold, and likely fatal if you fell in when it was this wild. I gripped the railing with one hand, Sam held my other arm, and we proceeded down the ramp side by side like some fragile old couple, tottering and weaving.

  At the bottom the dock’s planks heaved wildly, trying to hurl us off. But we persisted, scampering to the Bayliner and gripping the boat’s side rail to keep our balance.

  “I don’t understand,” came a voice from inside the cabin. It was Ellie’s. “How do you expect to get away with it?”

  Then a new voice, recognizable also: “What do we care how the plan’s supposed to work? This is ridiculous. Let me go right now!”

  Sam grinned in spite of himself; it was Mika, sounding every bit like the no-bullshit woman I’d always hoped he’d marry.

  But the grin didn’t last. “You don’t have to know my plans,” another voice said.

  My heart sank. It was Marla sounding as if she’d recovered very nicely from her head injury.

  “Just rest assured I’m not going to let a bunch of dimwits like you screw them up.”

  There was the sound of metal snapping against metal. “So you two just sit there while I get this tub to where we’re going. And be aware, if you stick your heads up out of the hatch,” she added, “that I will shoot them right off your bodies.”

  So at some point she’d apparently gotten the handgun out of the lockbox I’d seen in her warehouse space. Wad
e probably still had his weapon, too.

  And so did I. But it wasn’t time to use it, yet, and now another idea struck me: that GPS tracker that Ellie’s husband, George, had put into the Bayliner.

  I hadn’t turned it off. I didn’t even know how to open the small black plastic box that held it, in the Bayliner’s emergency gear compartment. That meant it was still there; now, once Marla set off in the boat for whatever her destination was, all we had to do was survive long enough for Wade to realize we were out on the boat, and start tracking the device’s signal.

  Without warning the hatch door flew open. But by now Sam and I were over the rail onto the Bayliner’s deck and then scrambling out to the heaving bow, where we dropped to our bellies out of sight between the rail and the cabin.

  “They’re okay,” I mouthed at Sam, wanting to be encouraging.

  “So far,” he said silently back, not looking happy, and for a moment I saw his father in him: angry, stubborn. Meaning to get his way. But he’d forgotten that I had the gun and before I could stop him, he leapt up, rocketing off the bow to launch himself at Marla.

  Spotting him with an ugly curse, she shot him in the foot, which of course launched me up. “Sam!”

  I pulled out my weapon as he fell to the deck, a puddle of blood and rainwater sloshing around him. Marla cursed again, recognizing me.

  “You guys just don’t know when to quit, do you? Okay, gimme that.” She gestured at my gun while keeping her own aimed at my son. “I mean it. Give it here, right now. Or I’ll kill him.”

  Biting my lip, I obeyed. When I had and she’d tossed the weapon overboard, she crossed to the controls and dropped the engine into operating position.

  “Darn,” Sam managed through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, shut up,” said Marla, starting the engine. She pulled on a life jacket. “Be glad it’s not your knee.”

  She gripped her own weapon, an ugly little metal pistol, in a way I found deeply unnerving; partly because she looked so comfortable with it, but mostly because now she was pointing it at me.

  “Yeah,” she said, seeing me putting two and two together: the gun, her comfort. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”