Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  Bella was busily stowing away her dinner while sneaking tiny morsels of her own meat loaf to Ephraim. These he ate happily while supervising us from his high chair.

  “With all the Coast Guard’s fancy electronics, I don’t see how anyone could hide from them for long,” she agreed between bites. But:

  “If the boat’s out on the water, that’s true,” said Wade. From his work as a harbor pilot, he knew all about this stuff.

  “You can’t slide much past ’em in their own territory,” he went on. “But once a vessel gets outside of U.S. waters—”

  The U.S.–Canadian border ran down the bay’s middle, an invisible line that only fishing boats bothered about, usually: we didn’t poach their lobsters and scallops, and they didn’t poach ours, etcetera.

  But when it came to nonfishing law enforcement... “Do you mean they can’t be chased across the line at all?” I said.

  Wade brushed back his hair with a calloused hand. “The Coast Guard, or any other U.S. law enforcement authority, can’t just barge into Canadian waters and apprehend the Jenny or anyone else.”

  Sam took a break from eating steadily and silently, replenishing the calories he’d expended all day on mowing lawns, tending gardens, lopping dead tree branches, and giving shrubs their autumn pruning.

  “If I were them, I wouldn’t go that far, anyway. Too risky. I’d just pull into some little cove and lay low,” he said. “Wait till not everybody was looking for me. And then—”

  He snapped his fingers lightly in front of Ephraim, who blinked and grinned after a startled instant.

  “Presto! I’d vanish,” said Sam, smiling back at his son. “Slide off like a ghost some dark night when no moon’s out, get clean away.”

  Ephraim giggled, but I didn’t. “They’d have to know about where the little coves are,” I said slowly.

  Around the kitchen table, people were having just one last forkful of potato or a final dab of meat loaf before downing the last of their beer or ginger ale and crumpling their napkins.

  “Which means,” I went on, “that it would need to be someone from around here. Or that someone’s helping them, knows about . . .”

  Mika got up and slid Ephraim from his high chair. She looked peaked again and hadn’t eaten much, the half slice of meat loaf and spoonful of potato she’d taken all mostly still there on her plate.

  As if to forestall comment about it, she smiled brightly at me while hoisting Ephraim onto her hip. “At least they are gone,” she commented quietly. “So the festival can go on as scheduled, maybe?”

  “Yes,” Bella agreed, taking the baby and jouncing him gently so he crowed with delight. “And life can get back to normal.”

  After depositing him in his playpen, she began clearing plates. The men had already made quick work of utensils and serving dishes, and at the sink Wade was up to his elbows in soapsuds, washing glassware.

  “Um,” I said. “Not exactly normal. Not quite.”

  I’d already asked her if she knew who around here—besides the shotgun-happy Karen Carrolton, that is—might recall Henry Hadlyme’s tragically abandoned sweetheart, Anna Benoit.

  “I wish I could remember more,” she said now, “about what you asked me. There’s a name on the tip of my tongue, but . . .” Her big grape-green eyes fixed troubledly on me.

  “Don’t worry about it. This will all turn out fine,” I assured her.

  I wished I were as sure of that as I’d made myself sound, though, and she was still eyeing me suspiciously. So I changed the subject.

  “Bella, you’ve seen the painting my dad’s working on, right?”

  Dad was busy helping Wade with the glasses, and the clatter they made while going about their chore made this my chance.

  “The one he’s got on the easel now,” I specified, “of the girl in the green sweater?”

  Her expression softened. In the artistry department she believed that my dad was a cross between Rembrandt and Picasso with possibly a touch of Michelangelo thrown in for good measure.

  “I’ve seen it. And isn’t it elegant, though?” she asked, beaming proudly. “I think it’s the nicest likeness of you I’ve ever seen. Who knew your father was so talented?”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said noncommitally, and she scurried away looking satisfied, back out to the kitchen to supervise the menfolk in their attack on the glassware.

  I, however, was not satisfied, since as I’ve mentioned, the best I can say about my own looks is that I clean up okay, given enough time and effort.

  So instead I went to the front parlor, meaning to ask Sam and Mika about the painting but stopping in the doorway when I found them in quiet conversation about something else.

  “. . . rent a place,” he was saying, and she was shaking her head.

  “. . . afford it?” She sounded doubtful.

  “I think we have to,” he said, “there’s not going to be enough room for . . .”

  Which was all I needed to hear. Oh, of course she is pregnant, I thought as I backed from the doorway and headed upstairs. They just didn’t want the rest of us concerning ourselves about it yet.

  But sooner or later we would have to, because Sam was correct: there wasn’t enough space in their room or in the one we’d planned to turn into Ephraim’s tiny chamber, little more than a broom closet at the top of the stairs, for another child.

  At this point I’d have vetoed getting a parakeet, we were so jammed. And there were no other rooms in the house, which was what I was fretting about yet again when it hit me from out of left field:

  “Before my time,” Bob Arnold had said about the tragedy of Anna Benoit’s abandonment and subsequent drowning.

  Bella hadn’t remembered it, either; she’d been living in Lubec with her horrible first husband in those days. But now I recalled the sister Karen had mentioned, saying that the sister had been around here back then and getting angry when I had pursued the subject.

  Back, I mean, when Anna Benoit jumped, or fell, or was pushed off the Deer Island ferry—

  The phone rang. “Mom!” Sam called to me. “It’s Ellie!”

  Eight

  I picked up the extension, and from the sound of Ellie’s voice I knew at once that she had just come to the same realization I had.

  “Jake,” Ellie said, “I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it earlier, but—”

  I could. Someone had been shooting a shotgun at us, for heaven’s sake, scrambling our brains with the sudden awareness of our own mortality. Even now, after several hours had passed, I still felt as if I could barely remember my own name.

  “—there’s someone else who might be able to tell us—”

  The happy clamor of the tail end of dish-doing floating up the stairs, and I happened to know that there was an important baseball game that Wade was eager to watch on TV tonight.

  So I was, as they say, at liberty. “So maybe,” Ellie said, “we should take a ride tonight and—”

  My dad went upstairs to his painting studio and shut the door. The shower in Sam and Mika’s bathroom went on, as did the TV in the front parlor, and Ephraim began fussing from his playpen until Bella went in to soothe him.

  I leaned against the wall exhaustedly. “Ellie,” I said, “it’s a good idea, but . . .”

  Outside, one of Sam’s lawn machines roared to life as he began working on the only yard in town that he hadn’t cut yet: ours. Lucky the riding mower he’d chosen had a headlight, I thought.

  “. . . to fetch himself a rabbit skin to wrap the baby bunting in,” sang Bella in a voice that sounded exactly like a creaking hinge; hearing it, Ephraim’s crying shut off like a switch.

  Everyone in the house seemed well settled in for the evening, in fact, just as I wished to be. “Ellie, all I want is a bath and a nice glass of—”

  Outside, the mower’s engine fell silent. “Jacobia,” Bella said quietly from behind me. “I just recalled who it is that might—”

  “Wade?” Sam called from the back door. “
Hey, Wade? Didn’t you leave that little cannon of yours on the porch out here?”

  He had left it there to let the cleaning solvents he’d used finish drying before he brought it inside; I knew this because I’d nearly tripped over it, bringing in the green beans from the garden.

  He’d prepared it for another weapons demonstration, too, I had gathered. I’m no expert, but after years of being married to Wade I’d at least been able to tell that the cannonball, explosive charge, and fuse were already in it.

  “Willetta Beck,” pronounced Bella.

  “Willetta Beck,” Ellie said simultaneously. “I just now recalled the name. She’s Karen Carrolton’s sister.”

  “. . . ’cause that cannon’s not out here now,” Sam finished, and I heard Wade rising hastily from his chair in the parlor.

  So the cannon was really gone, and I didn’t like that a bit; for one thing, the last time someone stole one of Wade’s weapons, it hadn’t ended well....

  Ephraim let out a wail they could probably hear over on Campobello. Not for the first time, I wondered if a nice, quiet jail cell might turn out to be a relief.

  On the other hand, jails—and prisons, heaven forbid—are the noisiest places on earth. I contemplated this fact for a moment while the baby’s cries subsided to wretched sobbing.

  “Pawwot,” he wept. “Pawwot.”

  Parrot. I’d ordered a new one online, but it hadn’t arrived yet.

  “Yeah, you know what?” I said into the phone. “I’ll meet you at the Moose in five minutes.”

  * * *

  When I got there, the glass had been replaced in the front window and the door was fixed, right down to the little silver bell hanging over it once more.

  Even our poor battered moose-head sign had received first aid and now looked only slightly more googly-eyed than before it got blasted.

  “I got George to come down and fix all that,” Ellie explained.

  In Eastport, George was the one you called in case of sparks in your chimney flue, leaks in your cellar, or a skunk under the front porch. Now Ellie was putting the finished double-chocolate ginger cookies into the cooler; the white chocolate slivers stuck into their glossy dark-chocolate frosting were the delicious finishing touch.

  “Willetta Beck,” she repeated, stripping off her oven mitts.

  I gazed around at all she’d accomplished. A chocolate brioche and two dozen more Toll House cookies were cooling on the counter.

  “Do you, like, operate at warp speed when I’m not around? Is that your superpower?”

  She laughed. “No, I got Lee to do some this afternoon at home.”

  Ellie’s daughter was a terrifying little paragon of just about any virtue you could name: good student, decent violinist, team member for three sports, volunteer at the animal rescue, etcetera. She even sang in the church choir.

  I kept waiting for her to bust out and show her punk side, to dye her hair fuchsia and get nose piercings or something, but she never did. She just kept motoring along like a kid with her eyes on the prize and her head screwed on straight.

  The prize, at this moment, was a stash of saved allowance money big enough to augment the college scholarships she meant to secure.

  “Turns out that if you pay her, my kid’s a pretty decent little chocolate-themed baker,” Ellie added, smiling.

  Which was good to know, because that baby-bunting business might be sweet, but it was going to put quite a crimp in Mika’s helping-in-the-shop schedule, especially if she and Sam no longer lived in the Key Street house with us.

  Although if they stayed, someone would have to start sleeping in a hammock on the porch.

  “Who’s Willetta Beck?” I asked.

  Ellie plucked two fresh cookies from the cooling rack, poured two coffees dosed with cream, and settled us at a café table.

  “Willetta is Karen Carrolton’s sister,” she said. “I recalled the name when I pulled this out of the mailbox a little while ago.”

  The latest issue of the Quoddy Tides, Eastport’s biweekly local newspaper, lay on the table between us. PIRATES! screamed the headline, but there was nothing about the murder or the explosions; it had gone to press before they happened.

  “Huh.” I bit into my cookie. As the flavors of ginger and chocolate mingled on my tongue, the happiness centers in my brain jumped up and started dancing around.

  Which is, of course, exactly what those cookies are for. “So where’s Willetta, and what is she doing now?”

  Ellie shrugged. “Don’t know what she’s doing. She used to have horses, I think. Went to shows and gave riding lessons and so on.”

  “And you think she’ll be able to help us . . . willing and able,” I amended, squinting at the newsprint some more, “because why, again?” Then I looked up from the paper. Outside, the fog had rolled in at last, blurring everything to a romantic, streetlight-haloed softness.

  “I have no idea whether she will or not,” said Ellie. “I just thought, especially since Karen seemed so upset by the idea, that we could go visit Willetta and ask.”

  The Jenny was still out of the harbor. All the state cops had departed, too, or at any rate their big armored vehicles weren’t clogging up downtown anymore. Which meant—

  Which meant we were alone here with whatever—whoever —was out there now, lurking in the gloom. Because—

  “What?” demanded Ellie, seeing the look on my face.

  “Did you read the article?” I held the paper up. A short one-column piece below the fold was titled LOCAL WOMAN ESCAPES CRASH.

  The local woman being Willetta Beck. Ellie shook her head. “No, I got as far as her name and then the oven timer went off, so . . .”

  I slid the paper across the table. “Yeah, well, I think somebody else got the same idea that you did. That she might know something.”

  Ellie took the paper and read aloud: “. . . escaped serious injury after another vehicle forced the car she was driving off the River Road in . . .”

  She looked up. “Jake, it says the car that forced her off the road was a white sedan.” Like the one that had menaced us.

  Ellie stuffed the newspaper back into her satchel and cleared our cups and napkins. In the kitchen, she went around making sure things were turned off and put away while I peered out the window again.

  We didn’t need anybody stopping us to ask where we were going. “Nobody out there,” I reported. “Except for a few more pirate wannabes staggering out on the fish pier,” I added.

  I could see the plumes on their hats waving under the yellowish dock lights that illuminated the wooden pier like the setting for a stage play.

  “Good.” She came out with her sweater and bag over her arm and hustled me to her car. Twenty minutes later we’d crossed the causeway to the mainland and were on the part of Route 1 known as the River Road, headed north toward the town of Calais.

  “Willetta was in the phone book,” Ellie commented. “So now I know where she lives.”

  “I see.” The St. Croix River gleamed at intervals between the trees along the road, and beyond it lay New Brunswick, Canada, dark and forested.

  I changed the subject. “Someone took Wade’s antique cannon off the porch,” I said.

  Ellie glanced at me without comment.

  “We’ve never had anything stolen off the porch before.” Or from the house, or out of the yard . . . “Wade called Bob Arnold to let him know. Of course, there are a lot of strangers in town for the pirate festival,” I said. Meaning that the thievery didn’t have to be linked to Hadlyme’s murder, or to our snooping into it. “But—”

  “But coincidence,” said Ellie, “and the other half of whatever’s happening?”

  “Precisely.” I leaned back in the car seat as more slivers of the St. Croix flashed by between dark stands of trees.

  “To spot that cannon, someone would have to have paid pretty close attention.”

  To our house, Ellie meant. “But maybe somebody just wanted an authentic pirate festival souven
ir,” I replied hopefully.

  But I wasn’t convinced. Along the road, the dark stretches began giving way to a few yard lights, small houses with cars parked on them, and here and there a row of mailboxes on posts. After that came a hilly S-curve with dark granite rising straight up on one side and dropping off sharply toward the river on the other.

  “This must be it,” said Ellie at last, as a narrow driveway opened between two big maples. Pea gravel crunched under our tires as Ellie turned in, and we made our way slowly along the narrow track.

  A faint light flickered ahead, brightening as we turned into a circle drive with another massive maple towering at its center, its branches overspreading the driveway.

  At the circle’s far side, a moss-lined brick walk curved toward a small white cottage with dark shutters and a brick chimney. Smoke twirled from the chimney in pale wisps, ghostly against the dark sky.

  Pink geraniums bloomed from tall clay urns at either side of the door and from the window boxes at the windows shedding warm yellow light onto the bricks. When Ellie rapped the horseshoe-shaped brass door knocker on the red-painted door, excited barking erupted inside, followed by the sound of footsteps scuffing along a bare floor.

  “Hello?” The woman who answered peered out at us, surprised by two strangers at her door but not seeming displeased. “Can I help you?” she asked sweetly, her faded blue eyes moving from my face to Ellie’s.

  Her hair, white and fine as spun glass, stuck out in careless tufts from her head. The dogs peered from behind her, one white-faced old golden retriever on either side.

  Ellie introduced us. “We met your sister, Karen, earlier today, and we’d like to ask you a few questions. May we come in?”

  I expected we’d be refused. But, “Oh, of course, why don’t you come into the parlor? I’m having a drink, perhaps you’d like one?”

  Oh, dear heaven, would I. After the day I’d had, I felt like a mile of bad road. We followed Willetta Beck down a narrow red-tiled hall made narrower by the overflowing bookcases on both sides.

  “Pretty horses you’ve got out there,” I remarked, just to have something to say. We’d parked by a rail-fenced pen where two blanket-draped ponies stood peaceably munching something out of the feed bags they wore.