First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (8 page)

B
y two thirty, when Pauline’s kindergarten class was done, the three of us headed up toward Sister Bay in the Door County peninsula in my yellow Chevy pickup to catch Highway 57 to Koepsel’s Farm Market. The big barn building houses every product made in Door County. I’d called ahead and they had a modest amount of Belgian chocolate in stock for candy making, enough for a couple of batches of fudge. My stomach was churning already about what tomorrow would bring for my shop with the church ladies descending on me.

Pauline rode in the shotgun seat in my yellow Chevy pickup; pint-sized Isabelle took the slim bench seat in back.

Isabelle cleared her throat behind me. “I know you want to hurry, but you’re going to get pulled over.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, letting up on the pedal. “Thanks, Izzy. Jordy would love an excuse to put me behind bars.”

Pauline said, “Let’s not give him one.” She pulled a ruled pad from her big schoolbag, then clicked her pen. “We know the list of suspects has to include Hannah and Will Reed. We have the New York diamond connection, as loose as it may be.”

So as not to damage my fledgling friendship with Isabelle, I didn’t dare mention sneaking into her inn, where Cody Fjelstad had told me that the Reeds were hoping the murder would get pinned on me. I also didn’t want to hurt Cody in all this mess by revealing he’d broken into the inn. I hoped he returned home tonight.

Isabelle said, “Jeremy Stone worries me. He’s never around.”

“But he’s a reporter, out interviewing, doing his job,” I said.

“He’s creepy,” she insisted. “He was helping at lunch today; then he was gone before we ate. And last night, I suspect he had a woman in his room until late.”

Pauline said, “Having an overnight guest is allowed, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” Isabelle said, “but it’s the way he does it. He sneaks the person in and out the back staircase. His room used to be the cook’s room. There are stairs from his room to the kitchen and the back verandah.”

I knew about the stairs, too, and had to bite my tongue, which was killing me, but the information about Stone was new and had to be pursued. I remembered the two wineglasses and empty bottle in his room. “Who do you think he’s interviewing in his room? Or seeing?”

“I suspected at first it was Taylor. She’s a guest.”

I groaned. “She’s one of them that went out on my grandpa’s boat Sunday and had to be rescued off Chambers Island. Jeremy’s probably writing a story that’s not going to portray my grandpa in a good light.”

Pauline clicked her pen again. “So what do I write down about her on our list? Full name?”

Isabelle obliged. “Taylor Chin-Chavez. Cute girl, in her twenties, fairly new out of college. She’s from Miami.”

“So why’s she here?” I asked, slowing down for a couple of deer that poked their heads out of the roadside sumac bushes.

“She’s an artist—a sculptor, she told me—and had heard about my Steuben glass collection. She said she wants to do what I’m doing, run an inn with an artistic bent, but she’s interested in finding an old lighthouse to live in instead as well as use the lighthouse as her shop.”

The deer leaped across the road, then evaporated into a copse of maples and cedars. I sped up again.

“She certainly came to the right place,” I said. Some of Door County’s ten lighthouses were run by volunteers, and maybe there was a chance one of the lighthouses was looking for a new caretaker. “She doesn’t sound like Jeremy Stone’s type. Or a murderer.”

Isabelle said, “I agree, but maybe she knows something about Stone or his investigation that we need to know.”

The thought of cozying up to the crooked-nosed reporter left me cold. Pauline glanced my way and surely sensed the “ick factor” as I appealed to her with a smile. She said, “No way am I even having the best Belgian beer with that guy to get information out of him.”

I gave Isabelle a look in my rearview mirror. “Who else is staying at the inn?”

Isabelle told us about Boyd and Ryann Earlywine, in their forties, from Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital and a four-hour drive south from us. He was a history professor and she taught music. I didn’t see how they might want to murder an aging movie star. The other person on Gilpa’s boat had been John Schultz, fiftyish, from Milwaukee, who was visiting wineries and breweries and other Door County places prior to setting up tours for travel companies and college alumni associations. The wine aspect intrigued me.

I told Isabelle about the bottle I’d seen in Jeremy’s room. “Maybe John was the one enjoying wine with him.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Isabelle said from the back. “Now that I think of it, John didn’t stay long for lunch today, either.”

“Aha!” Pauline said. “They had agreed to a rendezvous. But where? Maybe we’ll stumble across them today trying to sell diamonds out of the back of a car.”

We had a good laugh; then silence settled around us. I suspected my gal pals were wondering, too, if one of the guests were indeed part of some diamond heist, maybe fencing the diamonds. But it seemed totally unbelievable that such a thing could happen in Fishers’ Harbor, population two hundred. Or was our quiet, quaint locale exactly why diamonds showed up here? Did somebody hope to make a connection without being noticed? Was that somebody Rainetta Johnson? Certainly no phalanx of photographers followed Rainetta Johnson here as they might do in Chicago, where she likely got pictures taken of her just for going for coffee. Escaping to Door County had to feel good; it allowed her to be a private person. She could meet up with anybody she chose here and nobody would notice; there’d be no cell phone pictures ending up on the Internet.

By the time we got to Koepsel’s Farm Market, we’d gone through the list of people at the party, too. As far as we could remember, the only other people who’d gone upstairs ahead of me that day were Sam Peterson and Mercy Fogg. But knowing there was a back stairwell now put a different spin on everything. Somebody could have gone through the kitchen and up the back staircase, through Jeremy Stone’s room, and then across the hall into Rainetta Johnson’s room, where they murdered her. And then shoved my lovely Cinderella Pink Fudge down her throat to make it look like she choked to death. If only Cody had sneaked up then and overheard what had gone on in that room.

None of it really made sense, but I shivered a little for Isabelle. One of her guests could be the killer, and she had to live in the Blue Heron Inn with that killer until somebody solved this crime.

In my rearview mirror, she looked morose, fearful perhaps, her face paler than usual.

I bought her a gift at Koepsel’s—cherry barbecue sauce that came from the same orchard that made the cherries used in my fudge. I reminded her, “It’s that time of year when we have our first cookouts. It’ll get everybody out of your inn and change their mood.”

“Thanks.” Her cheeks pinked a little as she smiled finally. “The atmosphere inside has been a little tense.”

“Because everybody’s scared of turning around and breaking some of your glass figurines worth a fortune!” I said, laughing.

She gasped in a way that told me that was exactly her concern.

I added, “Then my idea is a great one. The guys will love cooking out. I bet even Will Reed will stop arguing with his wife long enough to eat something with cherry barbecue sauce on it.”

Pauline recommended the bison burgers from Koepsel’s for the grill. Door County raised a lot of buffaloes now, which I always thought funny since Belgians called themselves buffaloes, too. Some say Belgians got that name because when there’s trouble, they put down their heads and forge straight into the storm just like a buffalo. Isabelle also picked up sweet potato butter and other exotic items for her guests, all meant to quell fury over being held captive in Fishers’ Harbor.

I purchased all the Belgian bulk chocolate the market had, but it was all dark chocolate; somebody had beat me to the white chunk chocolate. Pauline had an idea then. She’d taken her kindergarten class once to the Luscious Ladle in Sister Bay. “It’s a new bakery and cooking school that focuses on baked goods.”

We called, and the owner had white chocolate! We had to drop off Isabelle, though, so she could make dinner for her guests. As she got out with her big bag of goodies in hand from Koepsel’s, she invited us to come for a cookout tomorrow night at six o’clock in her backyard. I knew the Reeds hated me, and that fueled my answer. “Of course. I’d love to come.”

When Pauline and I got back in the truck, she hissed at me, “What are you thinking? Everybody thinks you’re a suspect. They don’t want you around. You’re going to cause a food fight worse than any I’ve seen in our school cafeteria.”

“But what if something pops out of Will’s or Hannah’s mouth—like a confession?”

“I can’t argue with that logic.”

“And it certainly isn’t a tactic Jordy Tollefson would use to shake a confession out of his perps.”

“We have lists now of possible perps from all the peeps we previewed in this pickup truck. Perfect.” She patted her big bag sitting on her lap, proud of her alliteration. She never quit. That was what I liked about her. It was why her kids loved her, too.

On the way back up Highway 42 to Sister Bay, we had to first pass through the village of Ephraim, where the main street wound closely to the waterfront. The slow twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed gave us plenty of time to talk. Most of the shops were still closed, even Wilson’s Ice Cream Parlor, where I was always tempted to stop in summertime for their “Cherry Berry Delight,” made with Wisconsin blueberries, strawberries, and our Door County cherries on French vanilla ice cream. My mouth was watering while I told Pauline about what I’d found in Rainetta’s room at the Blue Heron Inn—namely Cody with something he’d found.

“What do you think it is?” Pauline asked. “More diamonds?”

“No.” Then I thought about it. “Maybe?” It was a definite question. “He found something mighty precious to him.”

“He was in the closet. Maybe Rainetta kept her jewels hidden in the pockets of her clothes.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Did the room have a safe?”

“No, not that I remember seeing.”

“Then maybe her clothes are filled with jewels,” Pauline said. “I used to hide my stuff from my little sister that way all the time. She never caught on.”

“Holy cow. I have to get back into that room and rifle through Rainetta’s clothes.”

“Nice R’s. Some kids have problems pronouncing R’s. Then there’s the whole rolling R thing they have to learn for Spanish words. We start with growls, though. You can learn how to say a rolling R if you pretend you’re tigers eating each other.”

“You have kindergarten kids pretending they eat one another?”

“Oh yeah. They love gross stuff. Maybe Jordy should hire them to solve this murder.”

I shook my head, but she had made me smile.

Sister Bay was bigger than Ephraim and more people were about. The Luscious Ladle was in an old one-room schoolhouse on the main drag that had been refurbished. The wonderful aroma of freshly baking bread lured us up the walkway.

The chef of the cooking school, Laura Rousseau, was a head shorter than I was, with clear blue eyes and messy curly blond hair cut in a short bob. She was about my age and very pregnant. The condition didn’t hinder her energy. Several fragrant bread loaves sat in rows on her butcher-block counters, and she was pulling more from the industrial-sized stoves. She was pleased to give me her white chocolate. She refused to take my money.

“It’s extra I had from a class that made white bark candy with walnuts in it.”

“You saved me!” I tried to hug her, but then we laughed when her belly got in the way. “When are you due?”

“Two months. We know we’re having twins, but that’s all. We want to be surprised when they’re born.”

She offered us each a loaf of cheese bread as a gift. I tore off a corner right there to try it. My mouth felt like it had rainbows in it made of cheddar cheese, butter, wheat, and oats. I was ravenous; it was all I could do to close up the wrapper and resist eating more.

Laura said, “If you want to experience a great taste sensation with my bread, just go up the street to Al Johnson’s. I’m on my way there now with these fresh loaves.”

Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant was a classic old place with an extensive menu and gift shop. In the summer, goats grazed on the grass roof, which made it a de rigueur spot for tourists. I was surprised it was open for dinner at this time of year. Laura said they were doing a run-through for new staff and menu items, like her cheese bread. I offered to ferry the yummy-smelling bread for Laura in my pickup truck. I also promised to bring her some of my new Cinderella Pink Fudge made from her chocolate.

A smile spiked onto her flushed face. “Please do! We could do some cross-promotion in the future. I’ll give people a taste of your fudge and send them your way, and maybe I could drop off samples of my baked goods at Oosterlings’.”

I’d do anything for the smell of the bread in my arms. We had a pact immediately.

My pleasant, warm feeling evaporated, however, when we got to Al Johnson’s. I delivered Laura’s bread at the hostess stand where I was met by a kitchen staffer, but then I turned around and got a surprise. In the middle of the dining room with all its beautiful, cobalt blue glassware, there sat Cody Fjelstad with Mercy Fogg, of all people! Pauline and I backed up into the entry hall near the gift shop area to stay hidden from view.