Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “Oh, you think?” The woman had hurt herself so badly that she had nearly needed brain surgery, and even injured her own dog; of course, I hadn’t suspected her.

  Not until Roscoe told me she’d been the one who’d paid him to be a lookout. “The two of you,” I said. “You and . . . Clark, is that right? Making it seem like he was after you . . . oh, that was clever.”

  I scoured my mind for some tactic that would keep her from shoving us both down in that hatch; the puddle Sam lay in was now as dark as wine with his blood.

  “Who is he to you, anyway?” I took a step nearer to my son, his face now gray with pain. “The guy in the muscle car, I mean, who you’re in on all this with?”

  Sam groaned, and if she hadn’t had that gun in her hands, she would already have been in the water.

  Drowning, ideally. But she did have it, as well as a large canvas satchel, which she’d stowed in one of the boat’s open gear compartments.

  “He’s my brother, all right?” she snapped angrily, squinting out to where the patch of sunlight moving over the bay was nearly upon us.

  Oh, man. I hadn’t even thought of that possibility. “But if that’s true,” I began, meanwhile scanning around desperately for anything I could use as a tourniquet.

  “Right, it means your sweet little pal Miss Halligan is our mother,” Marla snarled. “For all the good it’s ever done us,” she added bitterly.

  She threw two more life jackets at me. “Get ’em on.”

  So at least she didn’t plan on dumping us overboard. But Sam didn’t need a jacket—he needed medical attention.

  And he needed it now. “Marla, please. Leave Sam here on the dock. We can radio for help for him once we’re away from here.”

  Since that was what she’d said she intended, to take the boat somewhere. She jerked the gun sharply at me again.

  “Forget it. And the life jackets, too, on second thought. Just get below, both of you. I don’t want to see any of you again till we get where we’re going.”

  “Which would be where?” I wanted badly to ask, but she aimed the little gun purposefully once more, this time at Sam’s head.

  So I hurriedly helped him up and toward the cabin hatchway. “Okay, just tell me one thing, then. Why’d you kill Matt Muldoon?”

  Her face changed. “What? Why did I . . . Oh, hell, you don’t know anything, do you?”

  The boat bucked and yanked on its lines in the towering waves. “Get down there,” she repeated, hauling the hatch door open and slamming it once we’d obeyed.

  In the cabin I squinted around, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness of the small enclosure. Mika and Ellie, tied in the straps from spare life jackets, stared up at me with fear in their eyes. And sprawled beside them was my son, Sam.

  Who if I wasn’t mistaken was now very actively in the process of bleeding to death.

  Thirteen

  “Okay, lie flat. I’m cutting your shoe off.” Sam’s wife, Mika, crouched over him while I aimed the flashlight down at him.

  With the box cutter from the vessel’s toolbox, I’d made quick work of the life jacket’s straps; by now Marla was too busy handling the boat to check on us.

  Mika used the sharp tool on Sam’s sneaker. The blood-soaked shoe fell away, and then his sock. Dark red blood bubbled from the round purple wound in his foot.

  “Huh,” said Mika unflappably.

  She’d turned out to be not only a nurse, but also a surgical nurse-practitioner. “What’s that, a needle?” she asked when I pulled the gleaming implement from the toolbox. Huge and curved, it was intended for mending the boat’s seat cushions.

  “Gimme that, will you? And how about some of that nice nylon thread fraying out of that pillow’s seam, too,” she said.

  Then, “Sorry this sucks,” she told Sam when she’d threaded the needle with the stuff.

  She’d already probed the wound and found no bullet still in there to complicate matters. Now the rough seas we’d been bouncing through calmed briefly just enough so she was able to put the first stitch in.

  Sam grimaced. “Oh yeah, it definitely sucks,” he managed.

  She put the needle in again; I’d have given him what was left of the rum from the galley, but of course I couldn’t. Then after a few more stitches it was done, the bleeding mostly stopped and the wound itself dressed with the bandages from the first-aid kit.

  Sam sat up, the color already returning to his face. “Yo,” he said, fist-bumping his wife. I’d have done that, too, if I hadn’t been so busy ransacking the rest of the boat’s emergency supplies.

  “You know how to pick ’em,” I told Sam approvingly instead, and he beamed happily through his pain. But not for long:

  “Hey, where are we?” I said as sunlight streamed through the portholes suddenly.

  Ellie edged over to me, her face tight with anxiety. “We’re in the storm’s eye, I guess. But we’re headed for the rocks again. Where we anchored the other night,” she added to me.

  Only this time nobody was watching the depth finder, to keep us off them. Not that it would’ve helped much; from the sound of the engine and the way we were slamming the waves, thud-thud-thud, the throttle was full out.

  At that speed, the sharp underwater granite ledges we were approaching would take out the Bayliner’s bottom like an ax blade through sawdust, before the depth finder even had time to notice them.

  And before the GPS tracker’s signal could bring help. But we’d notice, all right.

  “Shit,” said Ellie, which was very unlike her. And she wasn’t talking about our speed. No, she was talking about . . .

  “Damn,” I agreed, peering past her to where she’d dug between two of the cabin’s cushions to expose one of the bilge compartment hatches.

  Sloshing sounds came from it, not a good sign. I took Ellie’s flashlight from her and dragged the hatch cover off completely.

  A salty smell rose up, the smell of seawater. Nice fresh seawater. “Oh, dear,” I said weakly.

  See, all boats leak. It’s why they have bilge compartments at all, to collect what’s always hoped will be only a minor amount of seepage. But now way more water was coming in from somewhere than the bilge pump could handle.

  “The gunshot.” It had gone right through Sam’s foot. I looked around at the others. “Marla shot a hole in the boat, I’ll bet.”

  “You mean we’re sinking?” Mika demanded.

  “Not yet,” said Ellie, which I personally thought was a less-than-reassuring reply, but since I couldn’t come up with anything better, I kept my mouth shut.

  “But if we take on much more water, the boat’s handling will deteriorate, and at this speed, especially in any rougher seas than this, we’ll be in trouble for sure,” she said.

  As far as I was concerned, we were already in trouble. Then we did hit rougher water, much rougher. And as she’d predicted, each time the boat’s bow hit a wave, it shimmied hard before settling again.

  “Or the bullet could’ve fractured the fiberglass, like in a star pattern,” Ellie said. “If it’s bad enough, that’d mean the hull could fail.”

  By “fail” she meant “disintegrate.” Oh, terrific.

  “So let me get this straight,” said Mika. “She’s going to kill us . . . Why, again?” Sam’s new wife still looked scared, but now she was starting to look pissed off, too.

  “Marla killed somebody we knew and framed Ellie for it. Or her ex-con brother did the killing part, we’re not sure,” I said.

  “And we were just about to figure that out, plus some other things, so she grabbed me, meaning to shut me up by killing me as well,” Ellie told Mika. “She’d have gotten Jake, too, as soon as she showed up at the Moose. Only you were there instead.”

  Mika nodded slowly. “And now? I mean, how’s she ever going to explain all of us being gone?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “But I’m guessing she doesn’t plan to explain anything. That big satchel she’s got probably has money in it.�
�

  Probably she was the one who’d removed it from the cellar in her Eastport house, once her brother told her we’d been down there.

  “She could just split with it. And meet her brother somewhere far away from here. We still don’t know where he is,” Ellie said.

  She peered down into the bilge again—just as, without warning, the boat heeled over sharply. The engine lugged sullenly, a low gargling sound, and we all froze until the vessel righted itself.

  But the fun wasn’t over. Soon the water was liquid hell again; a gust slammed us, putting us into a sideways dip-and-shudder that I disliked very intensely.

  The engine throttled down. Sam moved aside so the rest of us could see out as a row of islands slid by, their scant vegetation bent flat by the wind.

  “We could maybe jump over onto one of those islands?” Mika suggested. “If we could get up on deck somehow?”

  And overwhelm Marla with our superior numbers, I gathered she meant; I liked her thinking. Too bad Marla had the firepower.

  Swiftly I explained this: “She’s got a gun, see, and we . . .”

  “Don’t,” I’d have finished, but I didn’t say it because Ellie’s eyes had just lit up, staring at the hinged metal box that hung above the galley sink.

  CAUTION! the box read, and then some finer print I’d never bothered working my way through. Luckily, though, Ellie had.

  “Okay. If I’m right about where we are . . . ,” she began.

  Which of course she was. Based on her fog-navigating feats of the other night, I thought she must have a GPS sensor built right into her brain.

  Which reminded me again suddenly: “Ellie.”

  “. . . then I think she must mean to dump us on Cemetery Island and just let the tide come in and . . . What?”

  “Ellie. Ellie, listen to me. There’s a tracking module in the emergency bin. I found it. I meant to tell you about it, but . . .”

  They were all looking at me. I swallowed hard.

  “. . . but somehow I never got the chance,” I said. “Anyway, I’m afraid George must have been . . .”

  “Keeping tabs on you,” I was mustering up the nerve to finish. But then I’d tell her the good part: Sooner or later someone would come for us, because Wade knew about it. As soon as he realized the Bayliner was gone, he would start monitoring it.

  But before I could say anything at all, Ellie laughed.

  Not amused laughter. More like sad. “Oh, Jake, I knew about the tracker. George and I talked about it, okay? But it was disconnected. Or partly, anyway. It needs to be told where to send its data so it can work, and we undid that part of it.”

  What Ellie had just said made perfect sense to me. Of course they would end up discussing it; any idea of George hiding things from Ellie, or vice versa, was ridiculous, obviously.

  Or it was obvious to me now, at any rate. “Oh,” I said, feeling as if all the air had been let out of me.

  So nobody was tracking us. Nobody would save us. The engine noise fell to an idle.

  Another idea struck me. “Phones?”

  But they were all dead, too, not a single bar on any of them. Which was no surprise; once a tower went down for good, it could take days to get it operating again.

  Ellie took the flashlight and checked the bilge compartment once more, looking unhappy with what she saw. “The pump’s still not keeping up.” This was another way of saying that yes, we were indeed sinking, just very slowly.

  The boat’s hull brushed heavily against a half-rotted wooden piling that slid past us, black and dripping, so near I could’ve reached out through the porthole and grabbed it.

  But I didn’t because I’d tried that once before with another old piling, on one of my earlier trips with Ellie, and it’d nearly taken my shoulder off.

  The hatch door opened and Marla peered down. She still had the gun. “Okay, all of you, up and out.”

  She waved us onto the deck under a sky still pelting rain. Sam hopped on one foot, leaning heavily on Mika and me. We were in a tiny cove with rock cliffs thrusting up on three sides, and a narrow inlet leading in from the open water on the fourth.

  “Where are we?” Mika murmured. To our right the black stumps of additional old pier supports broke the water’s churning surface; to our left stretched a thin strip of beach.

  Marla jerked the gun at us, urging us toward the rail. When I realized what she meant to do, I couldn’t believe it. “Marla, come on. You’re really going to leave us here?”

  No reply. The tide was still on its way in, creeping steadily a little farther across the rock-strewn sand with each foamy wave; when it reached its height, that little beach was history.

  And so were we. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled overhead as we all hauled ourselves over the rail. I dropped to the sand and fell heavily, but I managed to get myself back up again, while Sam eased over and let himself be lowered slowly and painfully by Mika and Ellie.

  Then with a long boat hook, Mika pushed the boat off from the dock piling again and motored away, not sparing us a word or glance. The Bayliner moved, sluggish as an old barge, out into the heavy chop. Then, wallowing uncertainly, it nosed toward the cove’s mouth and around it and was gone.

  Mika crouched where Sam lay. The dressings she’d taped around his foot were soaked with red.

  “There’s still bleeding deep inside there. He needs a real OR and a trauma surgeon,” she said, looking up worriedly.

  Miserably we dragged him farther back from the water’s edge, then huddled with him in the lee of the cliffs, out of the wind while the storm let loose on top of us.

  No one spoke, but it was obvious to all of us what Marla had done. Maybe not directly, with a gun or a knife . . . or with a pastry needle, either.

  But we were still being murdered.

  * * *

  “The tide’ll be all the way in soon.” Ellie looked scared, and she wasn’t the only one.

  “But . . . I don’t know,” she went on. “Maybe if we could find some dry brush or something, we could manage to start a signal fire? Sooner or later someone would see the smoke, I think,” she finished, sounding discouraged.

  There wasn’t any brush. Also it was windy and pouring rain. Even if we could start a fire, which we couldn’t, it wouldn’t stay lit. And nobody would see it if it did.

  But I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t have the heart to, especially after Mika spoke up. “The way Sam seems now, I’m honestly not sure he’ll last that long,” she said. And at the look I gave her: “Well, I’m sorry, but his pulse is thready and he’s not fully alert,” she retorted. “What do you want me to do, lie?”

  I opened my mouth angrily, then shut it again; she was right. “Sorry. It’s just really hard to hear.” And when she’d accepted my apology:

  “So, any other ideas?” I asked Ellie.

  She shook her head. “The only way off this beach is up,” she said, waving at the steep rock face looming over the sand.

  “But even if we could climb one of these cliffs, which we can’t,” she emphasized, “a million Eastport kids have come over here over the years and tried, and nobody’s done it yet. . . .”

  She took a breath. “Even if we could, there’s nothing to burn there, either. Just bare rocks, and not only that, but in case you haven’t noticed, it’s drizzling a little.”

  So she knew it, too, that we were grasping at nonexistent straws. Meanwhile, each wind-driven wave rolled a few inches higher up the beach. Soon the tide would be splashing at the foot of the cliffs and then crashing there; judging by the dark line on the granite, the high-tide depth here was about fifteen feet.

  Drowning depth, in other words. “I’m not talking about signaling, I’m talking about not dying,” I told Ellie, measuring the cliffs with my eyes.

  It looked steep and slick. But... “How high did the kids get, anyway? Halfway? Or even farther?”

  That got her attention. “Huh, you’re right. We wouldn’t have to get all the way up,” she con
ceded.

  She glanced back at the ruined dock, with its rotting planks and the ancient lines dangling from it. “And I guess if the three of us could manage to push Sam up ahead of us somehow—”

  “Ellie, how high?” Because if agile young high-school kids couldn’t make it on a dare as far as we needed to go to save our lives, then we needed another plan.

  “High enough,” she called back, already heading for the dock with its loose planks and ropes. Mika and I followed, hurrying to yank planks off rusted nails, gather up as much usable line as we could, and haul it all over to where Sam still lay.

  “Lash the planks to him the long way,” said Mika. In addition to the many other wonderful qualities I was beginning to notice in my new daughter-in-law—courage, determination, even the ability to clean and suture gunshot wounds, a talent I always find attractive in a person—it turned out that for her job she’d taken a wilderness-medicine class recently.

  “Wrap the rope over and under the slats, like weaving,” she shouted over the wind. So we did that, too, and it took quite a while, but when we were done, we had Sam trussed tightly to three of the dock planks, laid side by side the long way under him.

  By then the foam-capped waves nearly covered the beach. The tide around here didn’t creep in; it was more like a gallop. Soon those green waves would be washing us off our feet.

  “Don’t try to carry him by the planks, though,” Mika advised. “They’re not strong enough. They’re just to keep him straight.”

  Right, that made sense. So Ellie and I each took one of Sam’s shoulders and Mika took his feet, and we shuttled him to the cliff base, where Ellie clambered up onto a jagged outcropping.

  “Okay, get him vertical. Then you two push from below, and I’ll pull. We’ll start by hauling ourselves up as far as we can.”

  The wind snatched her words, but we got the idea. Half-blinded by cold raindrops smacking into our faces, Mika and I seized Sam’s board-splinted legs.

  “One, two . . . ,” she shouted into the gale. The waves rolled nearer, their chilly edges now puddling around my feet.

  Ellie screamed something at us, I couldn’t hear what. But it didn’t matter: