First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (14 page)

“That was Cody’s doing, is all.” With a wave of his hand, Grandpa Gil disappeared. The back door banged softly.

My grandpa was obviously in his own bliss about his boat working. Our troubles weren’t about to disappear with a wave of my hand. And I’d forgotten to ask him about John Schultz being on his boat or not. I’d do that tomorrow first thing.

Alone, looking about my nearly empty fudge shop, I almost cried. The sheriff had obviously been busy or he wouldn’t be talking about arresting somebody. He’d confiscated my goods and had been going through them. He also had sophisticated equipment and procedures to analyze everything and to gather facts, and I didn’t. His list of circumstantial or real evidence was likely mighty long while my list was a mere supposition or two.

It would be easy to give up. How could making fudge turn into this much trouble? But being a cheap Belgian myself, I just couldn’t let the ingredients go to waste or be confiscated tomorrow by Mercy Fogg and her gang of inspectors.

In the galley kitchen, pain in my wrist brought tears to my eyes, but I flipped my hair into a twist on top of my head, then slipped on a white apron, fumbling with the tie in back. Next, cream and butter came out of the refrigerator and vanilla off the shelf. Butter went into the microwave. So far, with one hand, I was doing okay and feeling energized.

In the main shop, I scooted a copper kettle next to the boiling apparatus, which I settled next to my register counter and the new shelving unit behind it. My walnut paddles and steel spatulas were at the ready. Everything was pristine clean. Mercy’s inspectors would congratulate me instead of shut me down. The more I worked, the better I felt in my head, though my bruises hurt under my long red sleeves and jeans. I dared not look at any part of my anatomy; I’d be green and yellow by now—Green Bay Packer colors! I chuckled. I was hurting and happy. Indeed, making fudge was a freeing feeling for me; there was no doubting that. I could trust in fudge if nothing and nobody else.

When it was time to gather the sugar, I had to bring the six ten-pound bags off the shelves in the kitchen pantry one at a time. The empty shelf saddened me. Would I ever be open again for another delivery after tomorrow? Every Wednesday was my and Izzy’s last major delivery of each week. In only about three weeks I’d gotten into a routine of sharing the deliveries with Isabelle. I’d miss our camaraderie. I still felt bad about knowing nothing about her mother or her upbringing before today. And I’d miss Cody yelling “Miss Oosterling!” I worried about him, too, even if he had thrown me down the stairs earlier today.

I lugged each sack to the main floor, then opened the first with a fumbling right hand. Using a knee to steady the bag, I poured it into the vat. With the second sugar sack, I had already created a snow-capped mountain of sparkly white crystals.

I froze.

Some of those crystals were rather fat.

Like diamonds.

A few were colored, too, a tinge of amber, even light brown. Chocolate diamonds? The famous Harry Winston jewelry store in Beverly Hills had loaned some to one of our show’s characters for the Emmy Awards. You’d never be able to discern these diamonds if they ended up in dark chocolate fudge.

After taking a step back, I shook my head, thinking I had to be wrong. But when I put my hand in my boiler to sift through the sugar, I came up with several crystal-clear diamonds along with colored ones. What little I knew about diamonds didn’t matter; all women know that colored diamonds are worth a boatload of dough.

I shut off the burner so the sugar wouldn’t start melting into the cream. With a small scoop and a sifter retrieved from the kitchen, I worked with mostly one hand to return the diamonds to an empty paper sugar package sitting on my counter. Now I knew for sure how the diamonds had gotten into my fudge earlier. Somebody had put them into a sugar sack, then carefully glued the sack shut again. Not all my sugar sacks had been filled with diamonds; Jordy would have found those early in his investigation. But somebody had again used the same trick to hide diamonds. Clever, really. Jordy probably wouldn’t come back again checking my sugar sacks after he’d done that once and found nothing.

Now what? What if someone walked in? Like Mercy Fogg or the Earlywines or Jeremy Stone? Or some other suspect? Would they kill me for the diamonds? If they’d killed Rainetta, the answer was yes. With my bad wrist and stiff legs, I was no match. I shuddered, going cold all over.

Rushing to the kitchen, I perused my shelves. Where to hide diamonds? I had no safe, and neither did my grandpa. I didn’t have any of those fake lettuce heads people used in their refrigerators to hide things. All I had was a ceramic cookie jar that looked like a black-and-white Holstein cow. My mother had given it to me. I grabbed it, opened it—and discovered Rainetta Johnson’s lavender necklace!

• • •

That was how it always went for me—something good happened, then something bad. I was happily making my fudge when, bam, I was a disaster. Cuddling the cow cookie jar in my arms, I ventured back to the front of the shop. It was getting darker now, so I flipped on the lights. I could leave the cookie jar in plain sight, but with the way my luck was rolling, somebody would break in and steal the diamonds and amethyst necklace. But I didn’t want to take them home to my rental cottage and carry my bad luck there. If Jordy were getting close to some arrest, such as Cody’s, he might decide to widen his search for evidence and scour my cottage.

After putting the cookie jar down next to my cash register, I withdrew my phone from my pocket. A voice in my head said I should call Jordy Tollefson. But if he were going to arrest Cody or me tomorrow anyway, why tempt him tonight? I’d rather sleep in my own bed than on the cot in a jail cell down in Sturgeon Bay.

Harsh raps at the front door startled me. My heart kicked in double speed, creating a fizz in my veins down to my fingertips.

But it was only Sam Peterson. I relaxed. Only a little.

“I saw your light come on,” he said after I let him in. “I was walking along the docks to see if Cody might be moping around.”

“He’s not here.”

“Baking cookies now? Or is that filled with fudge?”

“Cookies.”

“I’m starving. Chocolate chip? Let me have one.” He took a step to go around me for the cookie jar.

“No.” I stepped in front of him; then, feeling like a fool, I turned away from him to pick up the ceramic cow. I let out a small yelp because of my wrist.

Sam gave me a strange look, his blue eyes darkening a smidge. “Are you all right?”

Words failed me. I needed Pauline with me. I didn’t trust myself to even talk anymore. “I’m fine. These cookies are a surprise.”

“For who?”

“A surprise for . . . Gilpa. Did you hear he got his boat running?” I headed to the front door. “I was just about to put these on his boat so he had them in the morning when he took his first customer out fishing.”

“I’ll go with you. We can talk.” Sam took the black-and-white cow out of my hands. Carrying it in one arm, he pushed the door open with the other. The cowbell jangled.

The air had become danker with evening coming on. The cold waters of Lake Michigan sloshed under the docks. I still wore my flip-flops, so my toes and feet became icicles as we walked down the wood planks toward
Sophie’s Journey
. Indistinguishable voices from Isabelle’s party feathered around us.

In the evening’s half-light and the shadow of the hill, my grandpa’s boat looked decrepit. It smelled of the oil and gas I’d sniffed and seen on Gilpa earlier in the day. It was also pretty much a mess, the open seat area in the back near the engines filled with oily rags, sullied newspapers used to catch dripping oil, tools, a bucket of bolts, and crushed beer cans.

Sam said, “Huh. You sure this tub runs?”

It came to me then that this would be the perfect place to hide the diamonds and amethyst necklace because nobody in their right mind would want to board this boat. I felt sorry for Gilpa, though. He wanted to be proud of me, but I also wanted to be proud of him. And it was hard to be proud of somebody who was foolishly hanging on to an old junker of a boat because he was too cheap to invest in a good one.

I climbed aboard gingerly in my flip-flops, then turned around to take the cookie jar from Sam, who stayed on the dock. I went inside the cabin. Sam was watching from outside, so I couldn’t shove the cookie jar down inside the space where the life preservers were kept and where my grandpa wouldn’t find it. I had to set the jar right on the table in plain sight, making a mental note to come out later to hide it better after Sam left.

Unfortunately, Sam wanted to hang around. He followed me back to the shop, where I was forced to tell him about my need to make up batches of fudge tonight.

He slipped off his jacket, then rolled up his white shirtsleeves. “Put me to work. If Cody sees us both in here making fudge, maybe it’ll entice him to come in out of the cold.”

I didn’t seem to have a choice, so I handed him an apron. “I think he’s scared of Mercy Fogg. So am I.”

“I doubt you really need to worry about Mercy. She’s more interested in fame, but there’s no way she can shut you down. Her bluster is for the cameras. She’s jealous of you and everybody getting more attention than her and her stoplight.”

I trained my eyes on the mixture in the boiler to look for diamonds I might have missed. “Sam, could it be possible that Rainetta Johnson was part of a ring of thieves who stole those diamonds the sheriff mentioned?”

Sam ruminated, his gaze avoiding mine as I handed him the spatula to continue stirring the cream, sugar, and vanilla. I had intended to pop back into the kitchen for the white chocolate, but Sam’s behavior made me pause.

“Sam? You know something, don’t you?”

“I promised Rainetta not to say anything.”

“Like what? She stole the diamonds?”

“No, that much I know. She didn’t steal anything.”

“But . . . ?”

“I met her a year ago, when she vacationed here and stayed at a condo. Mercy introduced us.”

“Mercy was the board president then. How’d it come about that you were introduced?”

“Mercy wanted to get Rainetta more involved here, instead of just vacationing from Chicago. Mercy suggested to me that Rainetta would like giving to a good cause.”

“Like the group home. So Mercy knew Rainetta before last year?”

“I assumed so. Rainetta was a regular visitor here for years, though rarely seen by us ordinary folks. But I’m sure Mercy had seen her now and then, because of her official status.”

“Mercy would want to get close to a movie star. I can imagine it bothered her a lot to lose this spring’s election and not have a proper reason to cozy up to Rainetta.”

I ducked into the kitchen for my remaining bulk chocolate. Fortunately, the bags were small enough to carry with one hand. But when it came time to stir the fudge ingredients as it rose to a rolling boil, I realized in a panic I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hold the long spatula and stir the thick cream and sugar and melted chocolate with only one hand.

“Sam, can you stir for me? I did something to my wrist today.”

“What happened?”

I wrestled with what to tell him, then decided I couldn’t tell him what Cody might have done to me. Sam would feel like a failure, for sure, if he knew Cody had acted in that manner. Something felt wrong about the whole episode anyway. I still didn’t want to believe Cody could do that. So I simply said, “I ran off my front porch too fast and tripped.”

“Maybe you should have it looked at tomorrow. Your wrist, not the porch.”

“Very funny. Yeah, maybe I should.”

Sam and I focused on the rolling boil in front of us. Making fudge was like making old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice cream; you couldn’t stop cranking or you ruined the ice cream—or in this case, my fudge. I expected perspiration to pop out on Sam’s forehead as he kept stirring, but he was still as fit as his football days.

I asked, “Just a few minutes ago you said you promised Rainetta not to say anything. About what? And who couldn’t you say it to?”

Sam stopped stirring. He stepped back from the steaming pot, then ran a finger across his chin, as if weighing his trust in me. “She brought some diamonds with her that she wanted to give to me.”

A lightning bolt zapped my body. “Holy cow. Diamonds? When? Sam, my gosh, but you’re not involved in the murder, are you?”

“Of course not. But I saw her this past weekend. When she arrived.”

“She arrived Saturday night. You saw her before the party?”

His face turned red. My insides felt like a compass with a needle quivering questioningly for a direction to follow. I could tell they’d had some kind of intimate interlude, and I was hoping like crazy it wasn’t sex. But I wanted to ask. My brain felt like one of those teaser commercials for a sleazy talk show.

“You have to keep stirring, Sam, or the fudge’ll be ruined.” He resumed. The aroma was making my mouth water, and Sam’s information was doing the same to my brain. “So she brought you a gift? How large?”

“Oh, just a few. They were in a red pouch.”

The diamonds now secured in Pauline’s purse.
“Sam, what’s going on?”

“I don’t want you getting into trouble.” He stepped back again from the boiling vat.