Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “. . . three!” Mika and I straightened together, heaving Sam’s body upward on his makeshift stretcher . . .

  . . . which crumbled immediately into rotten black pieces that fell from their woven rope fastenings to swirl away in the tide.

  “Oh.” Mika was nearly weeping, trying not to show it. We held Sam up out of the surf, but I didn’t know how long we could do it.

  Forever, as far as I was concerned. But the water, already up to my knees and rising fast, would have its own ideas about that; it was so cold that I couldn’t even feel my feet.

  And that was that. We were going to drown, here, and there was nothing more I could do about it. A burst of fear filled me, mixed with an awful rush of grief. Good-bye . . .

  Ellie screamed again, and I thought it was in frustration, an emotion I surely shared. But then I heard what she was screaming:

  “Boat!”

  I turned in disbelief, barely able to make out a shape through the sheeting rain. Surely, it was my imagination, conjuring up our rescue, even though there was no hope of it remaining.

  But when I looked again, I realized: someone was coming in a boat, a real boat with an engine, running lights, and a hull that didn’t have holes shot into it.

  “Sam,” I whispered. “Sam, look.”

  Into the inlet’s rocky mouth the approaching vessel motored slowly until it nudged what remained of the dock’s rotted pilings.

  And now . . .

  I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

  Now it was here.

  * * *

  “But I don’t understand. How did you know where we were?”

  The boat was the Zodiac, a massive inflatable vessel out of Eastport’s Coast Guard station, and on it were my husband, Wade Sorenson, plus four Coasties, whose piloting of the ungainly-looking craft through the storm had looked like fun.

  For them, anyway. Thump. Thump. Thump. The thing didn’t cut through the waves; it more like belly flopped across them.

  Still, it was better than being under them. And the Coasties knew their stuff; within a few minutes of their arrival, they’d had us up and aboard the Zodiac, and headed for home.

  Now Wade looked at me a little shyly, as if unsure how I might react. “So, do you remember the tracking module that George put on Ellie’s boat?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t set up to . . . Oh.” The truth dawned as a few feet away the Coasties worked on Sam, using a first-aid kit that made the Bayliner’s look like a toy.

  Sam’s eyes were open, he was responding, and he even accepted a hot drink; relief flooded me as Wade went on:

  “Last night when I went to the dock to check on the Bayliner, tighten the lines and so on, I remembered that little gadget.”

  “Uh-huh.” I let him continue, though now I thought I knew what must be coming.

  “So I took a look at it, and when I did, I found out it wasn’t wired up.” Just as Ellie had said.

  “And considering what was going on around here,” he went on, “I figured you’d get that tracker operating yourself, if you knew it wasn’t and you had time.”

  Correct. If I’d thought of it, and could figure out how, I probably would have; it would’ve been prudent. Like Wade.

  “So I did it,” he finished. He spread his hands in half apology, still watching warily for my reaction. “I figured what the hell, it might come in handy. I wasn’t going to keep it secret, though. I’d have told you as soon as I got a chance,” he added.

  “The way I would’ve told you about our fog delay,” I said, “and about nearly being hit by your freighter when we were out on our boat trip to Lubec,” I said.

  “Yep. So when you didn’t show up at home, I got the satellite signal onto a screen down at the Coast Guard station, and here we are.”

  He looked at me again. “You’d have done the same. Set up the GPS. If our situations were reversed, I mean.”

  I let a big breath out. “Yeah. Yeah, I would’ve. So . . . where’s Marla? Has the Coast Guard already picked her up, too?”

  Because we were out on the water now, and the visibility here wasn’t terrible anymore; I could see land.

  But I didn’t see the Bayliner, only gray waves surging and subsiding. I glanced back around the Zodiac’s deck.

  Mika sat by Sam, her hair in a thick towel and a Coast Guard blanket wrapped around her. Ellie looked up from where she sat on a bench, with her arms wrapped around her knees.

  “She sank, didn’t she?” I said, staring back out again at the cold, empty water, where the Bayliner should be. “I knew it. That bilge pump just couldn’t keep up with so much leaking.”

  Wade nodded gravely. “We saw her go down on our way out here, actually, or we’d have gotten to you sooner. Got right to the spot where she was foundering. The bow went under and we were all ready with a life ring.”

  He sighed heavily. “But the water’s pretty cold and choppy, and . . . anyway, it happened fast, and Marla never came up. I think that’s the search-and-rescue helicopter I hear now, in fact.”

  A moment later I heard it, too, then saw the big orange-and-white aircraft circling, because, of course, they would keep looking for Marla until no hope remained for her.

  “Her brother’s in custody,” Wade said. “Bob Arnold grabbed him up, trying to get off the island by driving around a roadblock on the causeway.”

  Ellie got up, making her way unsteadily to the inflatable’s rail. By now we’d reached the inside of Eastport’s boat basin, where an ambulance waited on the dock for us, its cherry beacon haloed in rain and fog.

  But something kept bothering me, something I just couldn’t put my finger on as the Zodiac’s plump rubber side bumped the dock rail. The EMTs off-loaded Sam; then over his protests they fireman-carried him up the steep metal gangway to the ambulance.

  Mika went, too, and the rest of us followed; Bob Arnold met us at the top, looking apoplectic.

  “Now wait just a damned minute,” he said when Ellie tried to brush by him.

  She turned. “Bob,” she said calmly, but she wasn’t. “Bob, I love you. I really do. But in the last couple of days, I’ve been stalked, chased, menaced, and kidnapped. Jake’s been shot at, and Sam’s actually been shot. Meanwhile . . .”

  She sucked in a breath. “Meanwhile, all suspicion has remained squarely on me, and the people who have been doing all the chasing and shooting and menacing have been scampering around the island scot-free.”

  When Ellie gets mad, she actually uses words like “scot-free.” Also I hadn’t known eyes the color of violets could blaze like that.

  “But now we know who, at least, one of the culprits is, on account of she nearly drowned us out there. And she sank my boat, damn it.”

  Oh, but she was hot. “So listen, Bob,” she said. “You’re my friend, and you have been for a long time. But right now I’m going back to the Chocolate Moose and don’t you dare try stopping me unless you’re arresting me for something, ’cause I have other fish to fry.”

  Whereupon she actually did turn on her heel, stalking away up the breakwater toward Water Street and the Moose.

  “Me too,” I said into the silence that followed.

  The big family dinner I’d planned would have to be postponed, I decided. Instead we’d ask Bella to bring us dry clothes; that way we could get those last few cheesecakes finished.

  Which I was now even more determined to do. So I left Wade bringing Bob Arnold up to speed and dealing with the Coast Guard’s incident report paperwork.

  After they rescue you off a deserted island, after all, you can’t just walk away as if nothing at all had happened; facts must be gathered and reports written. But they all knew us, and knew we weren’t going far, and they were hungry for cheesecake, too.

  I hurried to catch up with Ellie, who’d already gotten a big head start. In the dying storm Water Street was sodden and deserted. A red-white-and-blue banner hung in shreds from a lamppost; a flag lay across a puddle.

  In
side the Moose all the lights were on. “Ellie?” I called.

  She’d been here, if only briefly; the coffeemaker was burbling and the CD player oozed that damned syrupy Celtic harp music, so sweet I could feel my blood sugar skyrocketing.

  Somehow I didn’t mind it so much anymore, though. Gazing around, I felt a familiar contentment come over me, a sense of purpose mingled with the delightful smell of chocolate. Home . . .

  A soft thud hit the wall from over on Miss Halligan’s side. Then a voice cried out weakly: “No!”

  I ran right over there, of course, but when I got inside the Rose’s front door, I stopped, gazing at all the many sequined and embroidered and pearl-beaded dresses, sweaters, and shawls arranged on the racks, hangers, and shelves.

  Miss Halligan was a genius at using space; she needed to be, with what little of it she had. Even in this tiny storefront area, every item for sale was clearly visible, and there wasn’t an imitation jewel on any of them, I realized suddenly.

  No cubic zirconia, no moissanite, no rhinestones.

  “Where is it?” a harsh voice demanded from the tiny back room, where the shop’s elegant owner had been living recently.

  “It’s not in the Moose, I’ve checked every inch, and your shop’s the only other place I went after I—”

  After she killed him. It was Sarabelle’s voice, and now I did remember what had been bothering me: that rhinestone Ellie picked up.

  The one Sarabelle had been scanning the floor for, probably, the other evening in the Moose. Now she appeared in the doorway to the Second Hand Rose’s back room.

  Only it wasn’t a rhinestone she’d found, I realized too late. And what do you know? Sarabelle didn’t have a gun in her hand.

  She had a knife in it. “Hello,” I said quietly. “Looking for something?”

  She had her other arm clamped tightly around the front of Miss Halligan’s neck.

  “Hello, yourself,” she snapped impatiently.

  Miss Halligan’s dark eyes gazed helplessly at me, the knife glittered wickedly, and where was Ellie, anyway?

  “Where’s my diamond?” Sarabelle demanded. “I’ve looked for it everywhere, one of you must have it.”

  “It must’ve fallen out while you were killing your husband,” I said, unable to repress my sarcasm.

  Hey, I’d had a bad day, all right? Including the hard mental kick that I gave myself now for my stupidity. I’d been sure that Sarabelle didn’t care enough about her cheating husband to kill him, and even if she did, she didn’t know about the trapdoor in our kitchen.

  But she hadn’t needed to know. When push came to shove, Miss Halligan had known enough for both of them.

  Biting her lip, the proprietor of the Rose looked away from me. “She promised to get rid of Clark for me,” she said dully, “to get him out of my house.”

  A sob escaped her. “I had to do something about him, I just had to. I couldn’t live like this anymore. So . . . I told Sarabelle about him.”

  “So the two of you planned it together?” I asked. “You helped Sarabelle kill Matt Muldoon, in return for her evicting your son from your house, somehow?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” snapped Sarabelle, “we couldn’t have planned it the way it happened. We’d talked about it, how to get rid of Matt’s body and maybe even pin it on someone else.”

  She eyed Miss Halligan contemptuously. “And how in return I’d get rid of her son for her, since she didn’t have the nerve to.”

  “Make him go away, though, that’s all. Not hurt him,” Miss Halligan protested.

  “Yeah, right.” Sarabelle rolled her eyes. Clearly, her plan had been more permanent than that. She’d known, too, that before the lock set was replaced, the Moose’s door had been so loose, it could be unlocked by digging at it with the tip of a knife blade.

  Like the one on the knife she was holding right now.

  “It wasn’t so bad when only Marla was here,” Miss Halligan said. “She’d want money from me now and then, or to push me around just because she could. But mostly she wanted nothing to do with me.”

  The sad, self-justifying words fairly poured out of her, as if she thought she could excuse all this somehow.

  “I don’t know why she decided to come here from Connecticut when she got fired from her job, except that I guess when she did need money, it was easier to get it out of me in person,” she said.

  “I see,” I managed, half-choked with fury. But I had to keep them talking. Sooner or later someone would show up and get me out of this.... Wouldn’t they?

  “And then your son, Clark, got out of jail and came here, too?” I asked. “He must’ve decided that what worked for Marla might work for him as well?”

  She nodded; Sarabelle just rolled her eyes long-sufferingly. The widow Muldoon was waiting for something, I realized, and then with a chill I knew what it must be.

  “He barged in, took my house over, and the two of them teamed up together,” said Miss Halligan. “Marla and Clark . . . she’s just like him, selfish and bad. Only not so obvious about it, is all.”

  I imagined what it must take for a mother to say that about her kids. Clark especially is a piece of work, I thought. Marla’s sudden retirement from teaching took on a new look for me, too. What had she done, not only to be fired, but afterward to want to leave the area entirely?

  Meanwhile, Miss Halligan didn’t know yet that Marla was dead. But I hardly thought now was a good time to tell her or Sarabelle; and when she spoke again, she confirmed my decision.

  “You have such high hopes for them,” Miss Halligan murmured. “You want everything for them when they’re small. Don’t you?”

  I couldn’t reply to this, on account of the lump suddenly in my throat. But Sarabelle could.

  “Hush up, you old witch. To listen to you whining, a person would think you weren’t hip-deep in all this yourself.”

  Miss Halligan went silent, which I thought was a fine idea on account of the knife.

  “So just out of curiosity,” I asked, hoping to distract Sarabelle further from her captive’s vulnerable throat . . .

  . . . and before it occurred to her that Miss Halligan could testify against her, too.

  Oh, this is a fine mess we’ve gotten into, and where the hell is Ellie, anyway?

  “What did Matt have to do with any of this?” I finished.

  Because part of it was now clear to me: Marla Sykes and her ne’er-do-well brother had been in together on something lucrative and illegal, I still didn’t know what.

  But it was, like, gobs-of-money lucrative. What Muldoon’s murder had to do with it, though, wasn’t obvious at all, so I asked about it, still playing for time.

  “That fool,” said Sarabelle, with a grimace of disgust. “The whole thing was stupid. It all started when Marla saw him at some dive bar in Lubec.”

  “And I was with her,” Miss Halligan put in earnestly; she did not, apparently, have the sense to shut up.

  “I’d driven over to meet Marla that evening, she’d demanded it,” she went on. “Like I said, she liked to push me around, and that night she decided it would be fun to pretend we were pals.”

  She sighed, remembering. “Which might not have been so bad, but right away Marla got tipsy on those Irish coffees she likes so much, and started fooling around with her phone.”

  “Taking pictures. Including one of you and Matt,” I said.

  She took a shuddery breath. “Yes. And she teased him with it, telling him she’d show it to Sarabelle. I don’t really think she would have, she was just . . . well, mean, actually.”

  Yeah, I’d noticed. “But she didn’t know Matt very well, did she?” said Sarabelle tightly.

  Still no Ellie, but by now I was starting to be glad that my friend hadn’t shown up, because I was beginning to be sure that’s who Sarabelle Muldoon was waiting for.

  One fell swoop, in other words. And then she would . . . what, try to run, the way Clark Carmody had? Probably, but if she did, it wou
ldn’t matter to me because I’d be dead.

  “The very next day Matt started looking for something to use against her,” Sarabelle said. “He took it personally, her having the nerve to threaten him even as a joke, and you know when he got started on something, he was a madman about it.”

  Yeah, I’d noticed. “Although,” she added, “breaking into her house was a little over-the-top, even for Matt. The one here in Eastport, where she was keeping the money before depositing it.”

  She was relaxing a little; being able to talk about this must have been a relief. I measured the distance between us, calculated how long it would take me to cover it in a single bound. But Miss Halligan’s throat would certainly be slit before I got there.

  “So he found the money she’d hidden?” I asked, and Sarabelle nodded.

  “There are limits on how much you can deposit at one time and not trigger the bank’s interest as to where you got it,” she confirmed. “So she often had quite a lot of cash on hand.”

  “But when he found it, he didn’t take it,” I said. “Instead he must’ve watched her and her brother until he found out where it came from?”

  I was just guessing, but Sarabelle nodded again. “Diamonds,” she answered my unasked query. “In the cocoa paste she imports.”

  Of course, it would be something like that: small, valuable, easy to carry around. You could even put it into costume jewelry, replacing the rhinestones and cubic zirconia with real precious stones, and nobody would suspect you were wearing a fortune.

  Sarabelle’s masses of rings and bracelets glittered wickedly, reflecting the light of the shop’s front window.

  “But what Matt didn’t know was that you were a partner in the operation as well,” I hazarded, still trying to keep her talking. “Your job was to take the stones to the city and bring back cash?”

  She already had contacts in New York’s gemstone industry, I recalled, from her previous life in Manhattan public relations.

  She nodded smugly. “It was easy. And if I ever wanted to get together enough money to finally leave him, I couldn’t have Matt spoiling it.”

  Her face hardened. “Anyway, it’s all over now. And I guess your pal Ellie’s not coming to save you,” she added meanly, “so when I’m done with you two”—she meant Miss Halligan and me—“I’ll deal with that clan of yours,” she finished to me alone, “then get out of here for good.”