Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  Her tone said I might as well have asked if she thought I was from Mars, and I didn’t blame her. Ordinarily my looks are the least of my worries in the sense that I’m clean and my clothes are clean, too, usually, and I brush my teeth often and get a haircut regularly.

  But makeup on me looks like paint slopped on thickly no matter how delicately I apply it, so I’ve given it up. As for style, most days I’m a cross between L.L.Bean and our local thrift store, the New to You shop.

  Hey, I’m dressed appropriately for my daily activities, so what can I say? I was fashionable in New York, but in New York I was also miserable.

  “But what brings that question on?” she asked, swinging the car around the long curve past Carrying Place Cove.

  I shrugged impatiently. “My dad’s working on a new painting. And he says it’s of me, but I—oh, never mind.”

  The woman in the painting wasn’t merely attractive. She was lovely. And try as I might, I just couldn’t see myself in her; not that I even wanted to, particularly....

  Except that I sort of did. It was confusing, was what it was.

  “Forget it,” I said. Even talking about it made me feel anxious. So I changed the subject to the other thing that was bothering me.

  One of the other things. “At least we got some protection for Mika.”

  Ellie nodded, her eyes on the road. “Have she and Sam announced their good news yet?”

  Good news. Yeah, maybe. I turned in the passenger seat.

  “No, they haven’t. But I’m pretty sure they’re going to. And Ellie, we do not need any more people in that house. With the six of us adults and a toddler already, it’s a wonder some of us aren’t camping out in the yard, it’s so crowded inside.”

  “Babies are fun, though.” She smiled reminiscently, meanwhile driving like the devil himself was after us.

  “Sure they are,” I replied, glancing into the rearview mirror in case maybe there was one back there, then shifting to double-check that my seat belt was securely fastened. “But . . . Ellie, where are we going?”

  “To check on something that Bella said last night,” she replied. “About the photograph we found, with the woman and two little kids in it?”

  “Anna Benoit,” I recalled aloud. “Who jumped off the Deer Island ferry after some guy abandoned her.”

  Ellie nodded, accelerating toward the mainland causeway. “So I went online and looked her up to see if there was an obituary, and I found it.”

  “And?” On the causeway, a few stragglers out of Eastport were headed the same way we were, some of the cars with skull-and-crossbones banners still flying from them.

  In Pleasant Point, the usual traffic cop sat in his squad car, parked in his usual spot outside the tribal community building. Ellie slowed; the guy ahead of her didn’t, and the squad car pulled out.

  We eased on past, with me trying not to feel smug. The state took the land that the road’s on right out of the middle of the town, and personally I think drivers who speed through there should have their licenses snipped into bits.

  But that’s just me. “And,” Ellie said, “it turns out poor Anna Benoit had relatives around here after all. They just don’t share her last name. And with that information, maybe we can get somewhere with all this. Fix it, even.”

  “Fix it? But how?” She was trying to encourage me, but I didn’t see the usefulness of her discovery. “We’ve got no suspects, no motive, and not even a theory of how exactly the crime was committed,” I went on. “So I don’t see . . .”

  Past the clusters of small brick houses in Pleasant Point, we drove across a wide, tranquil salt marsh where Canada geese flocked among the cattails, resting on their way south. Next came a grassy ball field, last winter’s sand pile, and some metal buildings with trucks garaged in them.

  “Well, other than him being stabbed, I mean,” I added glumly. “We know that much.”

  Small mobile homes on roughly cleared quarter acres dotted the grassy expanse that edged the salt marsh.

  “But how’d they get that parrot?” I went on. “And the sword? And how’d they get Hadlyme down into our cellar in the first place?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ellie cut in as we reached the intersection at Route 1, waited for an eighteen-wheeled logging truck loaded with sixty-foot tree trunks to go by, and then turned north.

  “None of it does,” she said. “All we need to know is why.”

  “Oh, and now you have a plan for finding that out, do you?”

  On Route 1, she glanced in the rearview and hit the gas again, past the Farmers Union grocery, the small white post office, and the New Friendly restaurant. Once we’d left them behind, the hayfields and neatly kept woodlots flew by at an alarming rate.

  I hoped all the cops in the county were back in Eastport, not out here running speed traps.

  “Yes,” she said as, to my right, a small cemetery tucked back among the trees flashed into view: white stone markers, angels and crosses slanting every which way, wreaths and flags and coffee cans holding bunches of fresh flowers.

  “Because while you were helping that Coast Guard kid,” Ellie went on, then stopped talking entirely as something in the rearview mirror suddenly captured her attention.

  “Huh,” she said mildly, and then it was upon us: a white sedan roaring up, keeping pace with us on the narrow blacktop.

  I didn’t have time to do much but gasp at the driver, glaring evilly at us through the eyeholes of a pirate mask with dark arched eyebrows, a scarred cheek, and a wide cruelly curving red mouth.

  “Ellie?” I managed. Then the white car accelerated, pulling past us and swerving back into the right lane again just in time to miss being obliterated by another oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

  The big truck’s horn blared in outrage, the driver in the cab high above us shaking his fist and shouting something in his fury at having just nearly bashed the white car to smithereens.

  Then the truck was gone, too, while my eardrums still vibrated painfully with the aftereffects of being hammered on by an air horn. The white car had already vanished out ahead of us, and now I wished that those Eastport cops really were out here waiting for speeders.

  “Well!” Ellie said brightly when the event had gone by, so fast I could hardly believe it had happened at all.

  Her eyes were wide and her smile looked plastered on. “I guess someone really is keeping an eye on us!” she said.

  Outside, the landscape zipped by like slides run very fast through a projector: fieldtreeshousefieldtreeshouse . . .

  “Yeah, I guess. Unless it’s just some goofball pirate festival person playing a prank. But hey, Ellie? Uh, you can slow down now.”

  Deliberately she relaxed her hands on the wheel, wiggled her shoulders to loosen them, and flexed her neck, wincing.

  “You could be right,” she allowed, letting her foot up a little. But she didn’t sound convinced.

  Me either. Keeping an eye on us. Yikes. Somehow that notion hadn’t sunk in before, but now it did with a vengeance.

  “Ellie, where are we going?” I repeated insistently, meanwhile scanning the side roads and driveways we were passing just in case that white car was lurking in one of them.

  She nodded, swallowing hard. “Right, I started to tell you, I found some relatives of Anna Benoit.”

  Ellie kept glancing in the rearview mirror, but no more cars were roaring up behind us. “But that was her married name,” she said.

  She slowed, then took a sharp left onto a wide unpaved roadway between a row of mailboxes nailed to the top of an elderly sawhorse on one side and a steel drum set at a 45-degree angle into the earth on the other. The drum was for sand and salt, I guessed. The private road was built and maintained by the landowners along it, a common practice in rural Maine.

  No power poles, either, I noticed. Ellie slowed to a crawl as gravel pinged the underside of the car. Trees and brush pressed right up to the edge of the grassy ditch running along both sides of the road.
/>   I didn’t see any evidence that anyone lived back here until a big brown dog ran out barking to the end of a narrow track leading off into the woods. A roughly hand-lettered wooden sign that read CARROLTON was stuck into the ground at the start of the track.

  Beside the sign, a big rubber trash can with a bungee cord over its lid stood waiting for a trash pickup; by some private hauler, I supposed, since there wouldn’t be any municipal services this far out in what the locals called “the williwaws.”

  Nearby, an outboard engine lay rusting, half in and half out of the ditch. “So who do you suppose that pirate-mask guy was?”

  “No idea.” Ellie concentrated on not hitting the biggest potholes in the dirt track. I peered back at the outboard engine. Grass grew up between its corroded propeller blades.

  “Ellie, are you sure this is the right . . . ?”

  We bumped down the weedy track between stands of crimson sumac and yellow goldenrod; here on the mainland, early autumn had already arrived. Next, we passed an ancient garage collapsing in on itself in slow motion, its roof shingles mossy green, and we eased forward into an oak grove, fallen acorns popping and crunching under our tires.

  “I’m sure,” she said firmly, then stopped the car.

  We were in a patch of dappled shade at the end of the dirt track. Nowhere to turn around, I noticed uneasily; when we wanted to get out of here, we’d have to back out.

  “Or at any rate, this is the only Carrolton I could find in the area,” she said, and then to my obvious next question:

  “I asked at the post office,” she added simply.

  Of course. As Wade had pointed out, almost everyone used a cell phone now, which meant that you couldn’t even look up their number in the phone book, never mind an address.

  And in any other place but here, I doubted that you could just walk into the post office and get that information, either. But if you were here and you were Ellie, people knew you; liked you, too.

  So they would tell you things. “Here goes nothing,” she said as she got out of the car.

  Reluctantly I figured I might as well get out, too. But I didn’t like it. Too quiet, too isolated, too—

  “Hey! Who’s out there?” a voice demanded from somewhere.

  “This way,” said Ellie, beckoning from a narrow break in the thick underbrush that was all around us. Recognizable underbrush. . .

  “Oh, good,” I said, “barberries.” Even worse than blackberry bushes in the scratch-you-all-to-hell department, the glossy bright-red berries on long, viciously thorny branches were like little drops of blood in the golden light slanting through the trees.

  “Hey!” yelled the voice again, louder. “I’m warning you!”

  I felt warned, all right, especially since along with the voice came the sound I’d really been dreading: the clickety-ka-chunk! of a slide-action shotgun racking a shotgun shell into the firing chamber.

  I recognized it from trips to the firing range with Wade; they’d been an important part of our courtship. So even though Ellie had already disappeared into the fading greenery ahead, I stopped short, trying hard not to get flayed by barberry thorns while also hoping not to get blasted by a 12-gauge.

  And that’s where I was, wondering where Ellie had gotten to and already bleeding from an uncountable number of small stinging thorn wounds when it hit me that those thorns were . . . they couldn’t actually be jumping out at me, could they?

  But something was. Small airborne forms darted angrily about in the bright late-summer afternoon. And they weren’t thorns, I saw now in horror, they were—

  “Oh!” I gasped as something cold and wet nudged the back of my leg. I leapt forward with a yelp just as I realized that those pale golden shapes in the air, darting and floating around me, were . . .

  Bees. Irritated ones, not liking my intrusion. Flailing and swatting, I burst out from the barberry thicket into a clearing.

  “Hey! Get away from me, you . . .”

  In the clearing, a small A-frame house with its porch set up on cinder blocks was the main building. Around it stood more structures: a whitewashed chicken house and a wire-fence enclosure complete with chickens, an open shed full of split firewood plus more logs dumped in front of it, and an old tool shed, its propped-open door revealing an assortment of carpentry tools and garden implements inside.

  A chicken that apparently had its neck wrung recently—I thought this on account of its head being turned around the wrong way, and also it was dead—lay on a chopping block. A stained ax leaning on the chopping block said that further head-related trauma was imminent.

  And on top of all that, there was a woman standing on the A-frame’s porch aiming a shotgun at me, which as far as I was concerned was absolutely the last straw.

  “If you’re going to shoot me,” I said, marching forward while brushing away bees, “just hurry up and get it over with, will you?”

  “Jake!” Ellie murmured with caution, “be careful, she’s—”

  “Yeah, I get it.” A bee stung me on the wrist. “She’s crazy, I see that.”

  I slapped the bee, squashing it. “Also she’s as tough as any man, hunts and fishes and makes her own whiskey. Shoots the pop-top right out of a beer can at ninety paces, blah-de-blah-blah.”

  I didn’t bother looking at the woman while I said it, and to tell you the truth I didn’t care what she thought of it, either.

  For one thing, the bee that stung me had friends, and they were mad, too. So I was a little busy. But for another, I had pretty much had it up to the eyes with this whole day: drowned guys and explosions and cops who thought I’d killed somebody, not to mention the white car that had just zoomed alongside us.

  And come to think of it, my dad’s painting, too; on my best day I’d never looked that good, so what was he up to?

  Messing with my head, that’s what; all I wanted to know was why. But this was no time to wonder about it. Waving away more angry bees, I discovered that downeast Maine’s answer to Annie Oakley still had that damned weapon leveled at me.

  The brown dog emerged from a thicket and danced around Ellie, bouncing and begging to be petted. Up and down, up and down, as if it had springs on the bottoms of its feet.

  The woman with the shotgun spoke. “Those bees ain’t going to let up until you get out of their territory.”

  “And you’ll shoot me with that shotgun if I get any farther into yours,” I retorted.

  In reply she jerked the barrel sideways, signaling for me to approach. Under her narrow-eyed glare, I hustled across the clearing and up onto her porch. Like the rest of the house it was made of raw lumber slammed together with big nails, many of the porch supports and corner posts still with bark clinging tightly to them.

  Door in the middle, a window on either side, big stone chimney up and out through the center of the sharply peaked roof . . .

  Ellie scrambled up onto the porch beside me. The bees hadn’t bothered her. Go figure.

  A frayed rag rug covered the rough decking boards around the bentwood rocker by the front door. Next to the rocker, a table held an oil lamp with a smudged glass chimney, a box of wooden matches, a battery-powered radio, and a pair of eyeglasses.

  A knitting basket containing a ball of thick yarn and a half-finished sock still on the needles hung from one of the rocker’s arms. The woman with the shotgun peered closely at Ellie and me.

  “What the hell do you two want?” she demanded. She had a plait of thick iron-gray hair and dark eyes deeply set in a lined, weather-beaten face.

  A perennial garden, blowsy with autumn, spread to one side of the cottage. I took a deep breath, introduced myself and Ellie as well as I could, then reached out and pushed the weapon’s barrel more to the side.

  The woman bristled faintly. I shrugged—Hey, what do you expect me to do?—and she relaxed a little.

  But she didn’t engage the safety mechanism on the weapon. “Oh, I know what it must be,” she said, her lip curling contemptuously. “You’re here
to ask me about that little son of a bitch, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Drat. I’d wanted to ease her into it.

  “That dead little son of a bitch,” she added, her eyes glittering with satisfaction.

  “Um, actually—” Ellie began, but I interrupted.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “It’s not about him. Not directly, anyway.”

  Another deep breath. Here goes nothing.

  “We’re here about your murdered niece, Anna Benoit,” I said.

  Seven

  Inside, the house was all one big room downstairs, with knotty pine paneling made from real pine and salvaged steel beams stretching across the ceiling, holding it up.

  I took in as much as I could from where I stood. The kitchen held an old soapstone sink with a hand pump on it and a squat black woodburning stove with a kettle simmering quietly on the back burner. A notch-eared white cat slept in a cardboard box by the stove.

  “Sit.” Karen Carrolton hadn’t turned a hair at my comment about murder, but she’d let us in. Now she waved us to the large cluttered living area, where two plaid-upholstered armchairs and a brown-and-yellow tweed sofa formed a semicircle in front of another stove.

  A coffee table was piled with papers in neatish stacks. Plants in pots on windowsills looked watered and well-kept, and the red and yellow onions, newly harvested and spread out across newspapers on a table, looked nearly dry enough to put away for the winter.

  From her garden, I supposed. The net bags for storing them were all laid out neatly there, too. The brown dog’s bed was near the stove in the living area; when he finished sniffing us he trotted to it and hopped in, turning fussily before settling with a happy groan.

  Karen Carrolton returned with a tray that held mugs and a coffeepot. She set it down, then pulled a creased snapshot from her fray-edged trouser pocket and held it out.

  Different picture, but it was of the same woman we’d seen in the photograph from Hadlyme’s motor home. “That’s Anna. And . . . him,” she added sourly.

  I took the photograph from her. It was Hadlyme, all right, younger and thinner and with a good deal more of that frizzy yellow hair than he had now, but still with a sneeringly contemptuous smile on his face, and those sharply calculating eyes.