First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (12 page)

Pauline slowed me down to whisper, “I’m surprised you haven’t tackled a TV cameraperson and stuffed a piece of your fudge in his mouth. This is your chance to be a star.”

The thrilling hope of being a success sparkled like diamonds inside of me, but it was as fragile as all the glass inside Isabelle’s B and B. “I want my fudge to be the best in the world. Do you think it is?”

She waved off my self-doubt. “I’m helping myself to that cherry wine. Want a glass?”

I was about to say “no” when I spotted John Schultz across the lawn with a glass of red wine. The memory of the wine bottle in the photo on Jeremy Stone’s cell phone made me change my mind. “Yeah, I’d love one.”

With the glass of wine in my good hand and Pauline in tow with a piece of my fudge, I proceeded across the lawn.

“Hello,” I said, nodding for Pauline to hand John the piece of pink cellophane-wrapped confection. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Ava Oosterling, of Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers and Belgian Fudge just down the hill here at the docks. Please accept a sample of my new Cinderella Pink Fudge.”

With trepidation, I waited for him to react to the gift in his big palm. He was a man my height and stocky but in athletic shape under the soft edges. He had thinning brown hair graying at the temples and wore a Hawaiian shirt, sturdy sandals, and fashionable tan men’s shorts with several pockets. He had the look of a tour guide.

To my surprise, his brown eyes lit up at the fudge. He handed his wine to Pauline, then pulled off the ribbon to reveal the pale pink prize inside. The cellophane blossomed like the petals of a flower.

He chuckled. “This is a downright beautiful presentation. The ladies’ll love this. You say you’re just down the way?”

“Yes, on the docks. We used to be Oosterling’s Live Bait, Bobbers and Beer, and we still have plenty of beer there, but now we also have fudge.”

A scowl planted on his face. “You’re related to that Oosterling who got us stranded for a day out at the lighthouse?”

“I’m so sorry.” My stomach did a flip-flop. “That was my grandfather.”

Pauline edged forward to touch his arm. “It’s great fudge. The greatest. Don’t blame Ava at all for the broken boat engines. She and her grandfather actually don’t get along.”

I gave her a look, but it didn’t matter.

John addressed only her and with a big smile. “And what do you do there? Just look pretty like you’re doing now?”

I held back from rolling my eyes at his almost-sleazy behavior. Pauline was still dressed in her school clothes of chinos and black blouse covered with stains from kids, with her jet-black hair in a braid.

Pauline giggled with an odd twinkle in her eyes and said, “I’m the taste tester. I’m still here, so you know it’s not poison!”

He leaned forward toward her, lip-lock close. “Is this another lucky batch of fudge? Filled with diamonds?”

“No,” I interceded between them. “I have no idea how the diamonds got in there. The sheriff is still figuring that out. We assume somebody hid them in some of my ingredients.”

John looked about. “He’s here somewhere. Let’s ask him what he’s found out.”

Pauline must have seen me turn white. She said to John, “Try the fudge. The vanilla flavoring creates a villainous vector of vivaciousness on the tongue. Your vote, too?”

John stuffed the small piece into his mouth, smacking his lips. Pauline handed him his wineglass. He sipped, making an art of savoring the flavor cocktail in his mouth. Then he wiggled his lips, like a bunny sniffing a carrot. Finally, he held up his half-empty wineglass in a toast to me and Pauline. “Cataclysmic creation! The cherry wine cleaves to the cherry-vanilla fudge. Exquisite, exciting, enchanting!”

Pauline, practically panting over his C’s and E’s, reached out again to tenderly touch his forearm. She smiled in a comely way I hadn’t seen since college when she’d flirted, half-buzzed, in a campus bar.

She said, “You must add the winery and the Oosterlings’ shop to a tour. You could be paid extra for this tour because there’s a show involved. Ava makes fudge by hand in copper kettles. Nobody else does that in all of Door County. Your tour ladies could stomp grapes with their own feet and then stir the fudge goop with their own hands.”

Fudge
goop
? I was offended but kept quiet.

John chortled. “I love it. You’re in tour sales, right?”

“I teach kindergarten, which makes me an expert in field trips and tours on a different level. There’s less drinking on my tours.”

John laughed heartily again.

I flashed Pauline a sideways and meaningful glance. She was never this impulsive; I had always been the impulsive one. Before she had tour buses of tipsy women stopping by to stomp fudge instead of grapes and stir grape juice in my copper kettles, I said, “John, what did you see and hear Sunday morning before you left for the boat tour? You were in your room, right? Your room is . . . which one?”

He sobered fast. “Next to that old actress’s when I first got here. I had to move.”

“Why?”

“I laugh too loud. Can you imagine somebody complaining about laughing?” He spewed a bawdy guffaw before shaking his head.

I was wondering if his disagreements with Rainetta ran deeper. “Rainetta Johnson complained that you laughed that Sunday morning? You two weren’t arguing about a bottle of wine, let’s say?”

Pauline threw me a daggers look, then smiled for John. “You have a good laugh. The world needs more laughter.”

“Not my kind,” he said. “She told the owner to get rid of me. Isabelle Boone just shook her head but asked me to trade with Taylor.”

Isabelle had said Taylor Chin-Chavez was a twentysomething artist looking for a lighthouse to live in and use for displaying artwork. Probably not John’s type. Maybe she was somebody in need of money, though.

I asked, “Is Taylor here?” I’d never met her, and though I’d seen her in a photo, I wanted her pointed out to me in case she’d changed her looks for the party.

John looked around. “Oh yeah. I see her over with the sheriff.”

Which meant I wasn’t going to talk with her right now. She had on heavy eyeliner. Her black hair flowed over one shoulder and she wore a caftan, creating an exotic appearance—like someone who would never fit in here. Was hunting for lighthouses merely a euphemism for hunting for diamonds? I was going to ask John more about her, but the TV camera people were coming through the back porch area led by Isabelle on their tour. They’d be chowing down on the grilled food and my Cinderella Pink Fudge within a minute, and thus occupied.

“Excuse me. I need to use the ladies’ room,” I said. “Pauline, would you like to come with me?”

John said, “And leave me? Stay here and tell me where teachers like to go on their summer tours.”

I gave Pauline a look that said,
If you don’t want me to kick you in the shin, you better come with me now.

She excused herself with an annoying touch again on the man’s arm. “I’ll be right back, John.”

A few feet from him, as we were heading fast around the side of the Blue Heron Inn for the front, Pauline huffed at me. “You don’t like him.”

“Pauline Mertens, what are you doing flirting with somebody who doesn’t like my grandfather?”

“He was on the tour with your grandfather, though.”

“He was probably swilling wine the whole time. He didn’t say a word about the harrowing trip.”

“He was being polite in front of you.”

“I tell you, Pauline, he knows something pertinent to the murder. That was nervous laughter.”

“Well, he was out on the boat. He didn’t do it.”

“Then why is he acting guilty? He’s drinking too much. And you better not be falling for him.”

“Sheesh, Ava. Can’t I at least use him to practice my rusty skills? You know, it’s been eight years since you washed yourself of Dillon Rivers. Isn’t it time to get back in the waters again yourself?”

“Just now you made dating again sound unsavory.”

We reached the front porch. I looked about to see who might be watching. “Jeremy Stone and John Schultz shared wine together in Jeremy’s room. I’m thinking that John is too much of a party animal to go out on that boat. Besides, wouldn’t he have had a hangover on Sunday morning?”

“What are you getting at? Your grandfather can verify if he was on the boat. So can others.”

“What if he had been here on Sunday and has been lying about it all this time and nobody’s bothered to verify who was on that boat?”

“Call your grandpa.”

“Indeed. I’ll call him later. Something about John doesn’t add up.”

“He gave you a dirty look and now you don’t like him. That’s your grandfather’s fault for having a crappy boat that broke down.”

“All right. But Jeremy Stone said he heard sounds coming from John’s room, or maybe Taylor’s. What if the killer struck, then hid in that room? Listening? And trying not to laugh at all of us in the hallway?”

“Now you’re giving me the creeps. So the killer ducked into Taylor’s room when all hell broke loose. I refuse to believe it was John. He’s just too nice.”

“I saw the Reeds pop their heads out of their room, but it was quiet on Rainetta’s side of the hall, except for what Jeremy says he heard.”

“Maybe the Reeds had been in John’s room before and that’s what Jeremy heard.”

“Hmm. So maybe there was a game of musical chairs going on upstairs on Sunday. But who was there?”

Pauline shook her head vigorously. “There’s no way John Schultz killed a woman even if he was there.”

I gave her the fierce look I used when I was about to steal the basketball from her on the court. “You were drooling. Pauline. The guy is maybe twenty years older than you. And he’s shorter than you. What are you thinking?”

“That nobody’s flirted with me like that for at least five years.”

I pulled her inside the inn, closing the front door behind us. My eyes had to adjust to an onslaught of crystal-refracted light. The glass Steubens sparkled with extra vibrancy. For the tour and TV cameras, Isabelle had turned on all the chandeliers, sconces, and lamps. Sequins seemed to float through the air. I couldn’t get over how grains of sand could create such beauty.

Pauline murmured, “I bet some of these pieces are worth more than my annual salary.”

“No time for thinking about it. Our job is to sneak upstairs into those rooms and see what we find.”

Just then Isabelle walked in through the large dining room. “I thought I heard voices.”

I gulped and said, “Hi, Izzy. We thought we’d use the ladies’ room while the lines were long at the buffet but not in here.”

Pauline and I shared a nervous laugh.

“Smart thinking,” Izzy said. She hugged us both. “Can you believe all the cameras? My collection’s going to be famous. One of the guys mentioned it’ll probably end up on a network morning show.”

“That’s wonderful! Any word from Rainetta Johnson’s relatives?”

“Well, no. She’d been estranged from her family for quite some time, according to her manager. He called to say he’ll be coming soon to collect her things and make arrangements for the body to be transported for the funeral.”

“Where is that going to be?”

“Some small town in New York.”

“New York? An amazing and unfortunate coincidence with that diamond heist being there, too. Has the sheriff said anything more to you about that?”

“I asked. He says that maybe her body will be released by tomorrow, and then he’ll issue more details.”

Tomorrow? Wednesday instead of Friday? Jordy had said he’d be making arrests by Friday, but would he be doing that sooner? My left wrist pulsated with sharper pain as my heart raced. “Has he said anything more about how she died? Who he suspects murdered her?”

“No.” Isabelle teared up. “It’s so unfair. She was a lovely lady.”

A lovely lady who hated laughter. I could tell Pauline was ready to lay that alliteration on us, so I stepped forward to give Izzy another hug. “It’s unfair to you to have a death happen here amid all these beautiful things. How did you ever amass all these pieces? Did you inherit them?”

Her tears flowed like rivers down her cheeks. Pauline and I stood like statues at first. I offered Izzy a tissue I ripped from a box on a table near the entryway.

“I’m sorry.” She sobbed.

“It’s okay. The Steubens obviously mean a lot to you. And the death upstairs was a shock to all of us, but you especially.”

She nodded, finally sighing as she looked about the grand hall with its glass menagerie. “I feel close to my mother here. That helps.”

“You inherited these things from her?”

“No. We were way too poor for that. But when I was little, back in Arkansas, she took me once to a field where you can mine diamonds.”

“Like mining gold?” I was incredulous.

“Yeah,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the tissue. “Near Murfreesboro, there’s a place where tourists can go. You get to keep anything you find in the fields.”

Pauline said, “And you found some?”

“One tiny one is all, but it meant everything to me. I kept it under my pillow. Until my mom took it.”