by CoCo, Nancy
“Okay.” I looked at the microfiche, and then something occurred to me. “Excuse me.”
He turned toward me and narrowed his eyes, giving me a look that definitely said why-are-you-bothering-me-again. I tried not to laugh. “Listen, you’ve lived here on island a while.”
“Now how the heck do you know that?” he asked. “I said I was retired. I could have moved here this season.”
“Well, if you lived and taught here on island,” I pressed on, “you wouldn’t happen to know anyone who’s looking for a job, would you?”
“Now that’s a stupid question. In this economy everyone’s looking for a job.”
He had me there. I swallowed and tried again. “I’m looking for a new handyman. You know, someone who’s really good at fixing things.”
“What’d you do, buy one of those fixer-upper cabins? Fool. Sell it back while you still can.”
I did smile then. “No, I’m Allie McMurphy. I’m the new owner of the historic McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shoppe downtown.”
“Didn’t that place have a handyman?”
“When he decides to come to work, which isn’t often.”
“Then it’s your own fault you don’t have one, now isn’t it?” Mr. Delaney turned away. “Fire him and put up a sign on the library bulletin board.”
“He’s my Papa’s friend.” I had to say it. “Besides, I can’t fire someone I never see.” The old guy kept going. I looked around. One of the other ladies glared at me. I turned back to the microfiche. Putting a sign up was probably a good idea. I’d put one up at the grocery store as well.
Now then, searching the police blotters from the weekly newspaper in the early 1950s for any mention of our family hotel or a murder was a two-hour exercise in futility. The closest I got was a neighborhood column verifying that the hotel installed the newest in wall-to-wall carpeting straight from Georgia. I knew from experience that the cotton carpet fibers didn’t hold up well. Papa had fixed that by tossing a wide variety of rugs on top.
Thank goodness whoever had had the place built had installed good hardwood floors. It wasn’t always the case.
I dug deeper, searching for any news on my family. Up popped a news article about two boys finding some wine bottles washed up on shore. The picture with the story was familiar. It was Papa Liam when he was young. The story was interesting because the find occurred during the Prohibition era. The headline read: Boys discover French wine bottles. The article went on to say that the bottles were disposed of per protocol. After that, the trail went cold.
I got up, stretched, and carefully took the microfiche film off the machine and placed it in the box. I dropped the boxes off at the volunteer desk. Mr. Delaney was no longer there. I guess his shift was up. Too bad, I would have liked to know his first name. It would have been one more person I’d know on the street and one step closer to being a true local.
I hitched my purse up on my shoulder and stepped out into the street. It was a nice walk back to the hotel. Today I wore my favorite jeans and a white peasant blouse under my blue spring jacket. I figured Mike and his crew would be done with the refinishing by now. The wind blew cold against my back. The light jacket I wore seemed ridiculous now. I’d forgotten how far north Mackinac was. The surrounding lake tempered the weather, but that didn’t mean there’d be spring flowers in April. The scent of sea and fudge filled the air as I walked downtown.
I had competitors who were open year-round. It was something I considered. Papa had said he was fine with the May-to-September season. It gave him time to be retired. Still, I had to wonder how he could afford it. Then again, he did have a nearly seventy-year-old carpet on the lobby floor and a handyman who showed up so rarely that Papa had done most of the work himself.
I didn’t have time for that. What I wanted to do was make fudge. I glanced in the window of the Hay’s Candy Shoppe. There the baker wore a full white chef’s suit and apron as he chopped up chocolate and nuts for the latest batch. I had to go in. I’d spent the last two years at culinary school during the day and perfecting my candy-making techniques at night, but I’d never worked in front of an audience. This was fudge making as show. I realized I had some things to learn.
Their fudge master chopped and smiled and dished up chocolate as if he were a god and the people inside were drawn to his smile and his flashing green eyes. What did it matter if he was a little chubby? With the smell of heaven around him he was every girl’s dream. How was I going to compete with that?
I watched as he poured the fudge on the marble cooling table and stirred it with a sharp long-handled spatula. “The table cools the fudge and the mixing adds air to it—that way it keeps its creaminess as it cools,” he said. He tossed a ribbon of fudge in the air and the crowd reacted with oohs and aahs sort of like when a pizza man tosses a pizza crust. “This is a crucial step,” he went on. “A good fudge maker knows when the fudge is ready to fold by the color and texture.” He scraped off the long-handled scraper with a short-handled one that was wider. Then he meticulously scraped and folded the candy, creating the long loaf in the middle of the table. It was that loaf that would eventually be sliced into pieces and placed in boxes and on trays.
I bought a pound of this year’s flavor and walked out, thinking hard. I tried to remember Papa Liam as a master fudge maker. It was what he was known for after all. The smell of the candy shop reminded me of being a little girl, wearing a big cotton apron with pink-and-white stripes, a tiny chef’s hat, and watching Papa work his magic on the candy he poured out onto the marble counter. He would tell stories while he shifted it with a silver blade and cooled it down before cutting it and placing the fudge ever so beautifully in the trays in the big glass counter.
Papa made fudge making an event. Could I do the same?
A tear of nostalgia came to my eyes and I blinked it away. I was usually more practical than that. I don’t know what had gotten into me.
“Your grandfather would have a fit seeing you with a Hay’s Candy box in your hand.” Mabel Showorthy power walked by. Today she wore a peacock-blue velour tracksuit and her trademark white shoes. Her hand weights were white to match.
“Hello, Mabel.” I put my chin up. “Papa knew it was good to check out the competition.”
She must have done a quick turn because suddenly she was beside me. “I heard you found blood stains under the carpet in your hotel lobby.”
I knit my eyebrows together. “Where’d you hear that?”
She shrugged. Her tiny legs took two strides to every one of mine. “Word gets around. Are you going to sell the place now?”
“What? No. Why would I?”
“Well.” She shrugged. “There is some implication that perhaps someone in your family murdered someone. That can’t be a good thing to bring in customers.”
I sped up my pace to mess with her. She now took three strides to every one of mine. “No one in my family killed anyone. In fact we don’t even know if the stains are blood until the forensic tests come back.”
“Huh, I heard you brought Mike Proctor and his crew in as soon as possible to refinish the floors and hide the evidence.”
That stopped me. “What?”
She missed me by two strides and had to back up. “Are you saying you didn’t rush to refinish the floors and hide the evidence?”
“I am not covering evidence. I have Officer Manning’s permission to refinish the floors.” I put my hands on my hips. The fudge box dangled in its bag on my wrist. “The season starts in a few weeks.”
She peered at me thoughtfully. “No cover-up?”
“No cover-up.”
“Darn.” Her mouth made a thin line. “I had a hundred dollars on a cover-up. Bill’ll be mad. He had a hundred that Liam killed someone.”
I shook my head and took off. The old folks were betting on a murder? “Weren’t you around the year that carpet was put down?”
“Certainly,” Mabel said with a firm nod. “I remember the big hoopla about the cotton w
all-to-wall carpet shipped up from Georgia.”
“Then if someone was murdered around that time—and their murder unsolved—surely you would remember it.”
“Well, now I was only in high school . . .”
“Okay, when was the last murder on island?”
“1973, I believe. Ken Sutton killed his brother Harold over a pretty tourist. Both boys were drinking at the time and Ken swore he didn’t mean to do it. Do you know what the sad part was?”
“No.” I shook my head.
“Neither one of those boys got the girl. She ran off with one of the RBs up from Detroit.”
“RBs?” It was the second time I’d heard that reference.
“You know, Rich Bastar—it doesn’t matter. The important part is she ran off with a tourist.”
“Hmmm, it certainly seems to me if you remember that kind of detail from a murder that happened in 1973, then you would remember, at least vaguely, anyone being murdered the year the carpet was put down.”
Mabel’s fast walk took a small hitch. “You might be right.”
I felt vindicated. “Which means no one in my family is a murderer or you would have figured it out by now.”
Mabel pursed her lips and swung her weight-filled hands. “Maybe no one knows about the murder,” she suggested. “Maybe the victim went missing and was never reported. There were a lot of tourists that season. I’d be hard-pressed to know if they all got off island.”
“I checked the papers from that time period. No one reported anything more than a purse snatching and a dispute over a fence line.”
“Something happened in that lobby.” Mabel pointed at the McMurphy’s door. “And there’s a police report to prove it.”
“Good-bye, Mabel.” I waved my fingers at her. “Enjoy your workout.”
“I always do.” She lifted her chin in the air and power walked off.
I stepped into the lobby and onto a large sheet of brown paper. The room was quiet and smelled of floor finish and new paint. The first floor of the hotel consisted of a large lobby with a brick fireplace against one wall. The wide painted stripes were pale enough to barely be noticed. There was plenty of dark woodwork surrounding the front windows and the ten-foot ceilings, drawing the eye toward the receptionist desk. Behind the desk were the old wood cubbies from when the hotel was first built, one for every room. Even though we now had modern keys, the original skeleton keys still hung by the corresponding cubbies as decoration and a remembrance of simpler times.
The receptionist desk was snug against a staircase. In the center of the lobby stood the double elevators. They were the old-fashioned kind with wire metal accordion doors on the inside. To my right was a half wall that enclosed the fudge shop area, allowing the sights and smells of the shop to flow into the lobby, inviting people to stay. The hope was the longer they stayed, the more candy they would buy. I also installed a coffee bar against the matching stairway on the opposite side of the room from the receptionist desk. There would be free coffee for guests and a barista for fudge shop customers or anyone who wanted a drink.
My idea was to create a space where people would gather for free Wi-Fi, and purchase coffee and fudge. It was the candy and atmosphere that brought people to Mackinac Island. I wanted the McMurphy to become a place that made them want to linger.
The fudge shop itself continued the pale pink-and-white color scheme. Against the wall were the old cabinets and counters where I would work. It had a galley-kitchen feel. Unlike the Hay Candy Shop, where they had two candy makers and a staff to sell the candy, I was the sole candy maker. My kitchen was smaller, my presentation would be less dramatic, but I still had the marble table in full view where I would cool and scrape the fudge and fold in amazing fresh ingredients before my customers’ eyes.
In front of that was the ancient original glass cabinet that held the trays of fudge and on the edge stood the old-time cash register. Papa had spent money to put up-to-date electronics into the gleaming old machine. The outside was for looks, but the inside was pure twenty-first-century magic. We even had a card swipe for debit and credit cards. I paid a hefty fee for the privilege but it kept the customers happy.
The glass walls and front windows held shelves that also contained trays for fresh fudge. These were rotated out when the sun came in the window, and replaced with a sign that said “free smells inside.”
The fudge shop floor held black and white tiles that were easy to clean. I remember mopping them every night as a teenager. How I hated them then. The thought made me smile. I appreciated their efficiency now.
Finally, I included an old-fashioned watercooler in the corner next to the door, along with paper cups. The idea was to offer tourists a free drink and a respite from the busy street, while the hope was that they would wander into the fudge shop and find they had to take at least a quarter pound home.
Mike Proctor walked on the paper carpet runner that stretched from the bathrooms behind the elevator to the front door. He was tall, over six foot two inches, with sandy-colored hair and a large nose. Today he wore painters’ Dockers in khaki and a blue uniform shirt. His shoes were thick brown boots covered in multiple paint colors and a variety of stains. “There you are. What do you think of the floors?” he asked, waving toward the uncovered portion of freshly finished hardwood. “It took some sanding but I was able to polish out those stains.”
“It looks great,” I said. He was right. There was no sign of the reddish-brown stains left. Only the gleaming narrow-planked wood floors remained.
“You should be able to put the rugs and furniture back down in twenty-four hours.”
“Good.”
“Frances said to tell you that the puppy is in her crate in the office upstairs. You’ll need to walk her later.”
“Thanks.”
Mike shoved his hands in his pockets and studied me. “You’re really going to take on this monster all by yourself?”
“Yes.” I gave him a firm nod. “It’s been my dream since I was a little kid. Besides, I promised my Papa.”
“Well.” Mike shook his head. “Good luck to you. A building this old needs constant upkeep and the fudge shop business here on island can be a little cutthroat.”
“I know.” I raised an eyebrow and lifted the bag hanging from my wrist. “I’ve been scoping out the competition.”
Mike gave a hardy laugh. “Call me if you need anything else. Unlike you, we’re the only game on island. Besides, Emily can find practically anything you might need from antique fixtures to pictures and hat racks. She loves the thrill of the hunt.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
I walked him to the door and held it open. He stopped at the entrance, his brown eyes twinkling. “Don’t let the ghosts drive you out.”
Chapter 13
“What rugs did you decide on?” Frances asked.
“Excuse me?” I looked up from my work arranging the kitchen portion of the fudge shop.
“Did you meet with Emily Proctor this morning?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Yes, I’m getting three area rugs to define the space. One by the fireplace, one in front of your reception desk, and the final one is going in the small conversation space in front of the elevators.”
“Do I get to see the color and patterns you picked out?”
“Sure.” I pulled the samples out from under the cash register where I had temporarily put them down. “Here, what do you think?”
Frances took each pattern and eyed the spaces they were to create. “I like it. You and Emily have good design style.”
“Thanks, it was easy. I’d been looking at Victorian rug patterns for months and Emily had samples very close to what I was looking to buy.”
“Nice,” Frances said and handed me back the samples. “Just one thing. How are you going to keep the dog from chewing up your carpets?”
“She won’t chew them. We’ll watch her like a hawk and crate her if she ever thinks about it. I can’t afford to put thousands of dol
lars into wool rugs and then let a puppy chew on them.”
“Speaking of the puppy, have you decided on a name yet?” Frances asked as she grabbed a can of wood polish and a lintfree rag and polished the receptionist desk.
The puppy was under my feet, chewing on a toy that was a ball with a tail. The toy had a face and long ears. There were squeakers in the tail and in the ball. I wish I hadn’t gotten a gray toy, I thought. It was better not to think of mice while working in the McMurphy. I made a mental note to buy only neon-colored toys from now on. Some simply were too realistic for my frame of mind.
“Not really,” I said as I rearranged plastic tubs filled with the ingredients necessary to make fudge. A glass candy display separated the candy making from the rest of the lobby. It was important that people could see in, but just as important that they couldn’t crowd the kitchen. Hot sugar was lethal in the wrong hands. Inside the glass counter were glass shelves that held trays of fudge.
A scale sat on the top of the counter ready to weigh the pieces as they were wrapped in wax paper and placed in long boxes. A box of fudge could carry up to five pieces and cost upwards of twenty-five dollars. The key to surviving in the fudge shop business was to put on a good show and have a large selection. The bigger your selection, the more people bought. They got caught up in the idea of tasting every variety.
It was a great business if you were good at what you did. I promised Papa Liam I would be good. All my professors thought I was, if that counted for something. Now all I had to do was convince the people of Mackinac.
“I’ve thought of several but they don’t seem to really fit her.” I walked over and got down on the floor with the puppy. “Hello, what is your name?” I drummed my fingers on the tile floor and the puppy pounced on my hand. “Ow.” I laughed and wiggled my fingers in the air. The puppy tried to hold my hand with her paws and bite my fingers. “Silly little dog,” I said. “Whatever should I call you? Hmmm?”
“How about Killer?” Frances came over and watched us play together. The pup decided it was so exciting she had to piddle. I grabbed her up quick and put her on one of several piddle pads that worked their way out the back door.
