Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

by Sarah Graves

  “You even try going anywhere near my family—” I began hotly, but she cut me off.

  “Because who knows what you might’ve told them? Your husband, especially. Only this time Clark won’t be around to help me.”

  So he’d been the one who’d sabotaged Wade’s truck. Sarabelle went on: “A fire, I think,” she mused dreamily, then met my gaze.

  “Late at night. It’ll be a shame. But all these old Eastport buildings really are terrible firetraps, you know.”

  And that, finally, was when I understood: Marla Sykes and her brother were mercenary, to be sure. Smuggling gemstones was the moral equivalent of selling the enslaved children who mined them; they don’t call them “blood diamonds” for nothing, after all.

  But this woman was scary. She’d killed her husband because he was a miserable son of a bitch and to keep him from fouling up her profitable scheme. And now . . . now she was enjoying this.

  She gestured for me to approach her; a tiny upward jab of the knife at her captive’s throat gave weight to her words.

  “Please,” whispered Miss Halligan, tears sliding down her powdery cheeks.

  “Okay, okay,” I gave in, stepping forward.

  “Oh, please,” Sarabelle mocked cruelly, her voice thick with venom.

  Which was when from behind her a big black cast-iron skillet rose suddenly, then clonked down onto her head with a loud bong! She dropped as if shot.

  “Wow,” said Ellie, looking down at the sprawled form, then peering around the rest of the shop. “Anyone else need bonking?”

  I crouched beside Miss Halligan, whose throat didn’t seem too badly wounded; the bleeding had already stopped.

  “Thanks so much,” she croaked hoarsely.

  She wouldn’t be thanking me when I’d called the cops on her, but whatever. “How’d you get back there, anyway?” I asked Ellie.

  “Heard you through the wall from next door. And you remember that our shop’s trapdoor leads to the cellar, don’t you?”

  Oh, for Pete’s sake, of course. “You went down ours, and up here by . . .”

  She smiled beatifically. “Each shop has cellar access. Has to, right? So tenants can get to their fuse boxes and so on. That meant there had to be a trapdoor in this shop’s floor, too.”

  I glanced at Miss Halligan, who suddenly looked much guiltier than before. No wonder she’d wanted the Moose’s unreliable front door to be noticed, the morning after Muldoon’s murder.

  “You jimmied that door and left it open, and made sure there were scratches in the frame, too. To muddy the waters, so everyone would think it was how the killer got in.”

  It hadn’t been important, as it turned out. But it could’ve been. Miss Halligan looked away as Ellie dusted her hands together in satisfaction.

  “Well, we can figure out the rest of the gory details later. And the phones are back on, so I’ve already called Bob Arnold and he says he’ll be here shortly.”

  She glanced around the Second Hand Rose, whose vintage charm seemed already to be fading without Miss Halligan’s stylish verve energizing it.

  ” And once he is,” Ellie added exhaustedly, “I’ll finish those last dratted cheesecakes, then sit down before I fall down.”

  Just then Mika stuck her head in the door, took in the scene, and pronounced, “I’ll get help,” without missing a beat.

  Which was when I knew for sure, finally, that Sam had been right to marry her, and when Mika returned—not only with Bob Arnold in tow, but also with fresh news of Sam’s well-being (after a quick blood transfusion he was in surgery, but doing well, and likely to be home by tomorrow or the next day) she said she knew how to frost cakes. Elaborately, I mean, the way those remaining cheesecakes really needed decorating.

  “Please?” she asked winningly. “Let me help? You really owe it to me, you know,” she added. “Both of you.”

  After the wild ride we’d taken her on, she meant, and I liked her sense of humor, too.

  “Oh, all right,” I agreed, whereupon the frightening events of the previous few hours all caught up with me very suddenly and my knees went out from under me.

  “Do that,” I babbled happily from where I sat, feeling as if my body had turned to liquid. “Hey, do your thing, Mika. You go, girl. Knock yourself out.”

  In the shop’s big front window it appeared that the storm had blown through at last and the sky had begun clearing, tatters of clouds streaming north toward Canada and the Atlantic. The tourists who’d remained in town gazed wonderingly at the washed blue sky and azure waves.

  Ellie put a cup of hot tea into my hands, and not too much later Bob Arnold formally took Miss Halligan and Sarabelle into custody, and later still Wade showed up and took me home.

  All the while, I kept trying to remember what it was that I still had to do, but to no avail. Not until later that evening in the sunroom, propped up on pillows in a chair next to my father’s daybed, where we were eating our suppers together, did I realize this was it. This familiar old room, my old house, Wade and Bella and my dad, and now Sam and Mika and the beginnings of their family, too . . .

  My dad ate with appetite while the dogs, Maxie and Fang, snored on their mat by the fire. Roscoe sat with us, showered and shaved and looking pleased with himself, while upstairs a pair of still-stranded tourists—their car had been the one washed off the causeway, it turned out—enjoyed the novelty of a two-hundred-year-old bedroom.

  Later, of course, they’d be enjoying the novelty of two-hundred-year-old plumbing, which was a different matter entirely. But that would be later; tucked into the chair with me now was a pillow embroidered by Bella in some of her scarce leisure moments.

  Count Your Blessings, it read. The terse instruction reminded me of the poster in the Second Hand Rose: BE HERE NOW.

  And as I sipped my champagne and looked happily forward to Eastport’s Grand Fourth of July Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake Auction, I knew the poster’s message was right. Be here now....

  The pillow’s too. Count your blessings....

  So I was, and I did.

  Fourteen

  The Fourth of July dawned breezy and cool in the remote island village of Eastport, Maine, the sky a clear, rain-washed blue and the sun’s returning warmth a welcome arrival after the big storm.

  “Last one,” said Ellie as she slid a magnificently chocolate-frosted and cherry-glazed confection onto a wheeled metal cart.

  We were arranging them in the Coast Guard station’s big high-ceilinged garage, crowded with hoist chains, grease guns, power tools, and all the many other items of special equipment needed to keep small-to-medium-sized boats and trailers in tip-top shape.

  Also its concrete apron was full of cheesecakes: twenty-eight of them to be precise, each glistening with Bing cherries simmered in their juices, generously piped with chocolate ganache, and drizzled across the top with a dark, sinfully semisweet version of Bella Diamond’s extra-special homemade chocolate syrup.

  “Do you think they’ll like them?” Ellie asked anxiously, her look taking in the camera crews here for the event: two from the Bangor TV stations and one all the way from Portland.

  “You could ransom an entire shipload of pirates with those cheesecakes,” I told her just as Wade strode in.

  Handsome in his blue denim shirt, weathered work boots, and jeans, he showed no sign of having been up all night, even though he’d sat by Sam’s hospital bed until dawn. Now Sam was en route home, the tourists who’d been staying with us had gone, and our house was back to normal.

  Almost. Wade slung his arm around me. “Hey.” More prospective bidders kept arriving, eager for a look at the cakes.

  “Hey, yourself.” Up on Water Street, city workers were hard at work rehanging banners, flags, and buntings; on the breakwater wooden crates full of fireworks were being removed very delicately from a box truck with scary-looking EXPLOSIVES! icons stenciled on the back and sides.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. Ellie and I had been baking since
four in the morning. The Moose would be open today, so we’d made chocolate chip cookies, fudge-nut pinwheels, and chocolate cupcakes with the rest of those Bing cherries mixed into the batter; Ellie hated waste.

  “State guys’re here,” Wade said. “They’re taking Sarabelle to the jail in Machias. Bob Arnold just unloaded on me about it.”

  She’d sat overnight in the lockup where Roscoe had been billeted, fuming and sputtering but refusing to call an attorney or anyone else, Wade said. Locked in, of course; Bob had policed festivals before and had already prepared the place with male and female deputies, to keep watch and to keep everyone safe.

  “Miss Halligan’s still in the hospital being checked over, but she’ll probably get a state-cop visit real soon, now. Sarabelle’s pretty good at shifting blame, you know?” Wade added.

  Meanwhile, Roscoe had found a room to rent, and a job sorting bottles at Sprague’s Redemption, the local recycling center. So he and his dog, Fang—by now it really was his animal, Bob having learned that its previous owner had abandoned it—were gone there, while Maxie the German shepherd had of course found a home with us.

  “What about Clark Carmody?” I asked.

  Wade eyed the cheesecakes. “Oh, he’s in a cell, too. Waiting for some federal guys, they want to talk to him about a whole long laundry list of his recent bad deeds. Including his latest racket, diamond smuggling.”

  Besides hiding them in cocoa paste, they’d been bringing them into Halifax, Nova Scotia, on cruise ships, and then spiriting them over here to the U.S. side of the border by small boat, Sarabelle had said.

  From what I’d heard, she was talking a lot. She was hoping for leniency, maybe, or simply dazed by the bop on the head Ellie had given her; if it was the former, I doubted it would work.

  But that was not my problem anymore. A pink-cheeked, blue-uniformed Coastie in shiny black boots strode up to me, all spit-and-polished to within an inch of his life.

  “Here’s the check for the fireworks,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I glanced at the slip of paper he’d handed me. But then: “Wait. This is too much money. Way too . . .”

  The check amount had an extra zero on it.

  “No, ma’am.” The Coastie looked resolute. “Captain said that whatever’s extra, you should put toward the cost of the fireworks for next year.”

  He thought a moment. “But if you wanted to send over some of your Toll House cookies in return,” he added, “nobody would mind.”

  Then with his boot heels clicking sharply together, he favored me with just about the snappiest salute I’d ever seen and went back to his duties.

  Wade grinned. “Looks like you’ve got some fans. They were impressed by the way you guys nearly had Sam pushed up that cliff. And since you and Ellie seem to have everything well in hand now, too, I’m going to go help rerig a guy’s sailboat.”

  So he did, and then Ellie hurried up. “We’re starting!” she exclaimed, looking pretty in a pink cotton shirtwaist and clean white apron. “Oh, I’m so excited.”

  Me too, and the next hour was a blur; first the already-won cakes’ top bidders were announced and then the remaining ones were auctioned. The bids fairly flew in; a homemade cheesecake, freshly swathed in gourmet chocolate and cherries, was a desirable item as it turned out.

  Finally: “Sold!” cried the auctioneer for the last time, and it was over. The cake winners carried off their prizes to general applause.

  Which was when Bob Arnold stomped up to me. “Now let me get this straight,” he demanded.

  “About what?” Ellie asked sweetly. Not being suspected of Matt Muldoon’s murder had improved her mood tremendously, and so had the half-dozen interviews she’d done today about the Chocolate Moose: four with newspaper writers from all over New England and two on camera.

  Bob held up two fingers. “First Marla threatened to blackmail Muldoon so he did it back to her. But what he found out, that Marla and her brother were in a smuggling scheme together—”

  “Threatened Sarabelle,” I finished for him, “who was in on the scheme, too. And she despised Matt, anyway, so—”

  “So she killed him and framed me for it,” Ellie added. “And in the process lost one of the diamonds she’d taken for herself.”

  “So those long, dangly earrings of hers . . . ,” Bob began.

  “Worth big bucks,” I agreed. I’d had to get the rhinestone-that-wasn’t back from Ellie, of course. “Also I found out about the shop lights being off that morning, and then going back on.”

  The fuses, it turned out, weren’t fuses at all. Instead they were circuit breakers; just big switches, in other words, that you could flip up and down to turn the power on and off.

  And as it happened, Morris Whitcomb had been working in our cellar at the behest of the landlord, after he replaced our door’s lock set. He’d flipped the wrong switch without realizing it, then had gone for coffee. So the power in our kitchen had been out for . . .

  “About ten minutes,” I finished to Bob. “Just long enough, and coincidentally enough, for me to think it must’ve been deliberate.”

  But there was one thing I didn’t quite get: the timing of it all. “How’d Sarabelle know Matt would be in the Chocolate Moose? I mean that he’d be there alone, so she could kill him?”

  “Hell, never mind that,” Bob retorted. “How’d Sarabelle get in on the scheme Marla and Clark had going in the first place? That’s what I want to know. And when you get done answering that, how’d a mutt like Clark Carmody ever get anywhere near a diamond-smuggling operation?”

  To which I had a one-word answer: “Jail.”

  Bob raised an eyebrow skeptically; I went on, having gotten a good deal of this from Miss Halligan when we visited her in the hospital the evening before.

  I hadn’t meant to go. But when Ellie stopped by and mentioned that the vintage-clothing maven might like company, I knew that what she really meant was “let’s talk to her while we’ve still got the chance,” and jumped at it.

  “A New Jersey jail, to be precise,” I went on now to Bob. “While he was in it, Clark met a guy who knew another guy who knew a shady gem merchant in Manhattan. When Clark got released, he went to the city and found this gem merchant, and hijinks ensued.”

  “Yeah?” Bob’s eyes narrowed. “Fine, but what about Sarabelle? Don’t tell me she and Marla met in the slammer, too.”

  I had to laugh. “No. They met when Marla was visiting her brother, and Sarabelle was visiting Matt. He was in for stalking and harassing the owner of a health food store, also in Jersey.”

  The only coincidence was in both of them ending up here. But it wouldn’t have been the only such recrossing of paths ever to happen in Eastport, Maine; I know a woman who bought an old house while she was vacationing here, only to learn, over a year later, that her own great-great-grandfather had built the place.

  Anyway: “Sarabelle didn’t know Matt would be there the night of the murder. But when he showed up in the Moose while she was next door with Miss Halligan—who, by the way, still won’t admit they were planning a murder attempt at all—Sarabelle seized the moment.”

  Bob nodded. “Okay, so they saw Muldoon going into the Moose.”

  My turn: “Yes. Then Sarabelle went down to the cellar from Miss Halligan’s shop, and up into our kitchen.”

  Bob: “Grabbed the pastry needle, stabbed him. But then she saw Ellie, here, coming back in through the Moose’s front door?”

  I agreed; he went on. “So Sarabelle hauled him down onto the cellar steps and pulled the trapdoor down over them both. And once Ellie was gone again . . .”

  “Right,” I said. “Sarabelle Muldoon hauled her dead husband up out of the stairway and . . . and don’t ask me why about this part, all right? But she propped him up there, braced his feet so he’d stay—his own weight kept his middle flat on the table—and stuck his head in the chocolate. I don’t know, maybe for a joke?”

  Some joke. Or to sweeten him up, finally. Likely, we’d
never know, but all of Sarabelle’s exercise equipment had come in handy, at least. She’d had to be in good shape to pull all that fast, heavy lifting off successfully.

  Ellie’s look darkened. “You know what? I’ll bet he didn’t come back to yell at me again at all. He meant to sabotage our cheesecakes somehow, that’s what I think.”

  Suddenly I recalled the empty salt container I’d found on the shop floor that morning. In the melted chocolate, probably . . . but I could tell Ellie about it later. I thought, too, about mentioning that Marla had tried casting suspicion on her own mother as soon as it started looking as if Ellie and I might cause difficulties. That’s what telling us about the photographs of Muldoon and Miss Halligan had been in service of, I felt sure.

  But that thought was too sad, so I didn’t mention it, either.

  “So if they’re her kids, how come Marla and Clark have different last names from Miss Halligan? And from each other, too, come to think of it?” Bob asked.

  “We asked her about that,” I replied. “And it’s simple: she was married when they were born, but went back to her maiden name after she got divorced. Marla was briefly married, too, but when she got divorced, she didn’t take her old name back.”

  Bob frowned. “And Clark never changed his name at all,” he concluded correctly. Then:

  “Oh, one other thing,” he said, pulling a familiar garment from a bag he’d been gripping. “Miss Halligan wants you to have this.”

  He held it out. It was the shimmery gray wool shawl from her shop window, the one I’d coveted.

  My eyes prickled with sudden tears. “Oh. She . . . You’re sure?”

  He nodded firmly, pressing the thing into my hands. It was as wonderfully warm and soft as I’d thought it would be.

  “Bob, please tell her . . .” I didn’t know what to tell her. She’d been so grateful for company at the hospital, not realizing we were there to get information from her while we still could.