Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery (18 page)

“It’s plausible. But wouldn’t Piers have just stolen the ring and left the box? The ring would give him a down payment on the Blue Heron Inn.”

“Are you sure your grandfather doesn’t know more about all this? He lied about the land contract and lied about owning his building, Ava. And your grandmother’s under suspicion now.”

“Though she tried to save herself by saying Dillon was involved in the murder.”

Rapping at my door sent Titus skittering into the kitchen. Sam was here. Pauline hiked off in the dark toward her car in the harbor parking lot.

I got in Sam’s sports utility vehicle.

The night was chilly, but clear, with a three-quarter moon outlining buildings and making the painted lines on our Main Street and Highway 42 shimmer with an opal glow. Our windows were cracked open. I loved the fresh air here. It was crisp and clean, unlike anything I’d experienced elsewhere. The pleasant scents of cedars and fresh-mown golf course grass greeted us as we drove into Peninsula State Park. Sam had picked up the lighthouse key earlier from Libby. He reported that he hadn’t seen Kelsey there.

We stopped a quarter mile from the lighthouse, parking behind bushes at a trailhead. We got out. His SUV was a dark gray, like my grandmother’s. There were a lot of gray vehicles around. I would have to check on Piers Molinsky’s rental car. But then I recalled that Erik Gustafson drove a tiny burnt orange hybrid car.

“Do you think Erik might have written the orange crayon notes?” I asked, folding my sweatshirt-covered arms against the chilly night. “If he likes orange, maybe that’s a clue. Pauline and I think Erik and Piers have to be in this together. We could check to see if Piers drives a dark rental car.”

“Later. Let’s find that box. I asked Libby about it and she suggested we look in the old privy and oil house.”

“You told her about the box? I thought we were going after my forgotten purse.”

He shrugged. It was hard for Sam to lie about anything.

Lighthouses and homes used to have separate oil houses back in the late 1800s and early 1900s because the kerosene oil was too dangerous to keep inside a house. Kerosene replaced the more stable lard that was burned in the earliest lamps. These days, a solar panel kept the Fresnel light shining.

Sam and I stayed close to the woods as we walked along the park road toward the lighthouse. Once close to the lawn, we crouched down amid the lilacs flanking the clearing. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ears.

The beacon light shone brightly into the inky expanse of Lake Michigan. Pronounced “fruh-nel,” the French Fresnel light’s crystals and prisms could allow the beam to be seen forever—until the bend of the earth itself hid it from view. Looking up at the four-story tower with the light on top was hypnotic. My very own ancestors had come here by ship through the Port of New York and then on steamers through the Great Lakes. They’d left crowded Belgium when times were lean with only hope in their pockets. Belgium was a small country, one-fifth the size of Wisconsin, but was still overcrowded with almost twice our state’s population of approximately six million.

I whispered, “John Schultz thinks he’s going to get rich by bringing up cups brought here by our poor ancestors.”

“There are plenty of wrecks, and many valuable things down there for John to find.” Sam’s eyes twinkled in the moonlight. “I’ll take up scuba diving and find pirate’s gold for you.”

“You’d wear a rubber suit and flippers for me?”

“If you don’t stop talking like that, Ava, we won’t make it to the lighthouse.”

“Get real, Sam. It’s too buggy out here.” I slapped a mosquito on my cheek. “Did you bring spray?”

“It’s back in my vehicle.”

“Then we’ve got to move. I’m going to be weak from blood loss soon.”

We hurried to the oil house and privy, but discovered the keys Libby had given us didn’t work.

“Libby knows her own keys,” I said. “This is odd.”

“Maybe in all her nervous excitement over us looking for this box, she gave me the wrong ones. We’ll have to go back to her house.”

“We’re here, so let’s try the lighthouse before we go.”

Sam slipped the key into the gift shop door’s padlock easy as pie. He popped the latch off. We entered, closing the outer door and inner screen door quietly behind us. I couldn’t see much at first, but I could smell the old wood, papers, and musty, rusty antiques.

The moonlight came through the single window and limned objects, so it didn’t take us long to look through the small gift shop. We went down five wooden steps into the basement next, using our flashlights. We didn’t find the wooden box amid the jumble of supplies kept on boards laid across sawhorses for tables. There were two rooms, and one was empty.

Next, we went up a set of four steps to the second floor, where the family had lived. Ambient light from outside came in through two windows of the dining room, but we had to resort to my small flashlight to poke into murky corners. Protective rubber runners crisscrossed the wooden floors, softening the sounds of our footfalls.

The building was filled with original furnishings, including the rosewood Chickering piano of the William Duclon family. William had been the lighthouse keeper from 1883 to 1918, and he was buried near our town and not far from the lighthouse. I hadn’t been here for a tour since grade school, but I was still impressed by the thought of living in a place with an old wood-burning stove in almost every room. The dining room had tables and chairs, and blue-and-white china hung on the walls, but no box with rusty hinges. We didn’t find it in the master bedroom with the old rope bed.

The parlor next door had a painting of kittens on the wall and another with a child with baby chicks—innocent fare that belied what might have happened here. We found the small hole in the wooden floor made by the rifle bullet, just past the ropes to keep tourists at bay and behind the right side of the small settee. Had Lloyd sat here talking innocently to his captors before going to the top? Or had he been pleading for his life? Had the rifle been shot as a warning to Lloyd? I almost couldn’t stomach being in this room. As I was edging backward, a sparkle glinted under the sweep of our flashlight.

I stepped over the rope to get to the settee. “Oh my gosh, Sam, it’s fudge!” The sparkle came from the edible luster dust on top of my Cinderella fudge. A half-eaten piece nestled at the far end of the settee, as if somebody had taken a bite, then had to leave the rest behind. I’d brought small plastic bags in case we’d found something. I never imagined we’d find fudge.

“What’re you doing?” Sam asked.

“Bagging this.” I was using a tissue to carefully pick up the piece of fudge. “Nobody eats only a portion of my fudge. And that’s not bragging. It’s just a fact. Somebody was eating this and had to leave it behind in a hurry. Maybe Lloyd’s killer.”

“Why didn’t the sheriff find it?”

“Well, it is just fudge. Both times they were here they were looking for more nefarious things like weapons, so maybe this was overlooked.”

“But I still don’t know why you’d want to take that to the sheriff.”

“Hard evidence,” I said, with some satisfaction. “My fudge is very creamy and smooth and hardens just enough to retain fingerprints. Maybe the sheriff can match those to somebody. The bite marks, too, might help. Or Jordy can get saliva off the fudge for DNA.”

“You are so television—did you know that? And smart.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

We left the parlor. I kept my eyes peeled for any other telltale fudge. As we made our way up the black, cast-iron circular staircase to the second floor, a window overlooking the lake revealed dots of lights from ships in the distance.

The children’s room held two regular small beds and a trundle bed where the family’s seven boys had slept. It also had a woodstove and desk. The guest bedroom to the north had beautiful blue-and-white crockery that could hide things, but they were empty. There was no box. No fudge.

On the wall before the final steps would take us up to the platform was a framed needlepoint on the wall with a saying:
Travel East/Travel West/after all/Home’s Best
.

The saying could have pertained to me. With a catch in my throat, I said, “Perhaps that’s the last thing Lloyd saw before he died.”

We continued up the dark metal stairs, taking our time because of the steepness. The stairs were sturdy iron in a cutout design; they didn’t move a bit. Hauling a body up would have taken plenty of time and strength, though I imagined Mercy Fogg could accomplish it alone, as well as Piers or Erik.

When we got to the top, we had to use one of the keys to unlock the padlock on the Plexiglas hatch above our heads. Once that was done, we stepped outside onto the high platform but had very little maneuvering room. Not wanting to look down quite yet, I focused on the beacon sprinkling fairy-tale sparkles on the water. Waves lapped and sucked against the barely visible rocks. It was a dangerous drop-off behind the wall, though once upon a time there had been a steep, ladderlike stairway down to a dock. The remains of a concrete pier still sat in the water. Had someone in a boat committed the crime and left by water, thus not being seen by anybody leaving the park at an odd hour?

As my gaze drew back from the moonlit rock wall and then came closer still to the tower, I shivered. Lloyd had been thrown to his death from where I stood. Had he been conscious? Had he seen the view of the lake over the tops of the trees that we all loved? In my imagination now, he was looking back up at me from below, repeating what he’d told me in his library,
“You have to help people believe that the fudge shop is fine where it is, and so are the cabins on Duck Marsh Street.”
And from the stitchery on the wall, his voice feathered to me:
“Home’s best. Home’s best.”

Lloyd’s ethereal voice startled me. I grabbed at the railing.

Sam pulled me back into his arms, sucking us up against the steel panels below the Fresnel prisms. “Whoa, what’s wrong?”

“Lloyd’s voice was in my head plain as day as if he were still alive.” My skin rippled with a shudder. Had Sam just saved me from falling over the railing?

I turned and wrapped my arms around his neck in my relief. “Thanks, Sam.”

He kissed me on the forehead—at the same time something bit me on the side of one cheek as a crack echoed from below.

Sam crumpled at my feet on the platform.

“Sam!”

A dark spot bloomed on his shirt.

Another crack split the air. My body pitched across Sam’s chest.

A
bullet had grazed the top of Sam’s left shoulder after spraying a chunk of paint off the metal housing under the Fresnel light and onto my cheek.

A second bullet had ricocheted, too, Deputy Maria Vasquez surmised, off the tower’s railing post behind me, and then had hit me in the back of the left leg. It had barely penetrated my flesh, fortunately. Sam, however, needed a doctor to pull a tendon and flaps of skin back together.

Maria held out two plastic bags—one with my piece of fudge with the tissue still clinging to it, and another bag with a bullet. “We’ll analyze the pink fudge later.” Her cocoa-colored eyes were penetrating me, though not mocking. She held the other bag higher. “Looks like a slug for a thirty-ought-six hunting rifle. Pretty common for deer hunting. Except it’s not deer-hunting season.”

It was ten thirty at night. We sat in the blaring lights of the E.R. in Sturgeon Bay still in shock. After being shot at, I had looked up in time to glimpse somebody dressed in dark clothing including a hoodie sweatshirt slip into the woods.

Maria wasn’t pleased with my observation abilities. “Everybody committing a crime wears a dark hoodie. Which direction did the person go in?”

“Toward the east. Maybe one of the hiking trails? It might be the trail Pauline and I chased somebody down yesterday morning. Tramper’s Delight.”

“Who were you chasing?”

“We think Kelsey King.” I told her about the chase and our suspicions.

As Sam was easing his way off the nearby table, Maria asked me, “Does Kelsey have any reason to shoot at you?”

“Besides hating me?”

Sam cleared his throat. “She doesn’t hate you. She hates the fudge contest she got rooked into by John Schultz.”

Maria asked, “Is that the camera guy I talked with the other day?”

“One and the same,” Sam said.

“Are you friends with him?” Maria was looking at me pointedly.

My gut went queasy. “He’s the boyfriend of my best friend. Is there something we should know?”

“Libby Mueller called me.” Maria closed her notebook. “She said John creeped her out. He asked to get inside Lloyd Mueller’s house for videotaping, but she thinks John wanted to plunder the place.”

“I don’t think John would steal.”

“You’re sure?”

The questioning was making me worried for Pauline. “He seems pretty harmless. He’s obsessed with diving for treasure at the moment.”

Maria was writing furiously. “Treasure hunter?”

“He just wants to get rich. The fudge contest is his plan to get on TV and get rich.”

Maria said, “I need to talk with Mr. Schultz.”

Pauline was going to hate me.

Sam asked Maria, “Why would Libby even suspect John Schultz of wanting to steal things from Lloyd? You’re not suggesting John’s a suspect in his murder.”

That was so unexpected I had to grab a nearby intravenous bag stand so I didn’t fall over.

Maria didn’t flinch. “She said that a Professor Faust suggested she be careful.”

I offered, “Professor Alex Faust is one of my fudge judges. He’s a historian. He was at Lloyd Mueller’s house himself this morning when I was there. Libby had given him a key. Obviously to check things out for her.”

“And why were you there?”

“Picking roses for the funeral.” My face went hot, but I hoped nobody would notice in the context of the E.R.

“Did you go into the house?”

“No.” My whole body was on fire with my lies. I was going to burn in Hell, for sure. “I have witnesses. Pauline Mertens, Laura Rousseau, our village president, and Dillon Rivers.”

Sam said, “Dillon? You were picking roses with Dillon?”

Now the fire was in Sam’s eyes, leaping at me.

My heartbeat hammered into my throat. I focused on Maria. “Libby has nothing to worry about. A lot of people are watching over Lloyd’s house, including the professor. Nobody’s going to break in.”

* * *

Sam insisted he could drive, but I knew he was just trying to be macho because he’d found out I’d been picking roses with Dillon. I pointed out, “You’re one-armed and on pain pills. Now please get in.” I still had his keys from the ride here from the lighthouse, so he had no choice.

He stayed mad at me. We rode in silence for about twenty minutes out of Sturgeon Bay on a quiet Highway 42. I focused on the occasional innocent eyes of raccoons reflecting back at us from the edges of the blacktop and prayed they didn’t try to cross the road. The windows were rolled up against the chill that had grown into the damp cold of nighttime. Foggy mists rolled off the lake in the distance, crossing the road in front of our headlights like ghost animals, which made me nervous. My foot kept wanting to jump to the brake. The engine droned on while the tires slapped in perfect cadence across tar-filled highway cracks.

Finally, Sam muttered, “You and Dillon were inside Lloyd’s house together?”

“No, Sam. It was just me. Dillon came to get his dog in the rose garden.”

“What were you doing?”

“Picking roses. Like I said.”

“What’d you find in the house?”

“Nothing.” A part of me wanted to share more with Sam and tell him about my suspicions concerning the cups and rifles, but I also wanted to avoid talking about Dillon with Sam.

“Is it a nice house?” he asked.

“Remarkable, Sam.”

“Better than the one I bought for us?”

He’d impaled my heart. “Don’t go there, Sam. You have a nice house. But it’s your house.” I’d never been inside it.

“Not really. I bought it for our wedding present. And planted the roses for your bridal shower gift.”

“Oh, Sam, please stop this.” I was suffocating. I rolled down my window halfway. “We’re tired. It’s not a good time to talk about us, the past or the future. I’m very sorry I got you into this. It’s not even like you to get involved in illegal, stupid things. It’s why we split up. I knew I would hurt you sometime. Now I have. And I’m sorry you’re hurt. Please forgive me, Sam, and let it go.”

After another minute of the highway thrumming beneath the car, Sam said, “Dillon’s been out in the woods a lot. You said his dog was out there. He hunts. He has hunting rifles.”

I chose to be curious rather than upset. “You think Dillon shot at us?”

“Not at you. Me. He still loves you, you know.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Which part? Him shooting at me? Or him loving you?”

“Sam, stop before I push you out of this vehicle and steal your truck. I need a new one, you know.”

We pulled up to my cabin about fifteen minutes later. I let him drive home alone across the village since there was zero traffic and he’d only be going twenty-five at the most.

Once he left my street, I pushed myself inside, aching all over. I was shaking, too, wrung out. I switched on my kitchen light and kicked off my shoes. Titus stared up at me, acting as if he, too, wanted to know: Who did I love? Dillon? Sam? That chunky fisherman? A dog? Or a mouse?

My head itched, my leg stung, and my cheek felt stiff where the chip of paint or metal had hit me. I could have lost an eye, I realized now. I curled up with my laptop on the couch to check for e-mails. My fingers were still quaking. I clicked on an e-mail from Pauline.

Searched RCC on the ’net. Rivers Construction Company and Riverboat Cruise Corporation both came up the most. Both based in Milwaukee. No people listed for the riverboat one, just contact info.

I trusted Dillon, for better or for worse, so I concluded the Rivers family wasn’t involved with taking over Fishers’ Harbor or my fudge shop. So who owned the Riverboat Cruise Corporation? I’d call them in the morning and ask. By morning I’d know who was skulking about our village. Or worse. Could the owner of this RCC acronym have murdered Lloyd? So that they could get the property cheaper? The thought still brought me back to Mercy and Erik—two people who could surely use money and who knew their way around legal documents. Erik was young enough and perhaps naive enough to think he could borrow Lloyd’s rifles and get away with murder. And Erik liked the color orange.

I couldn’t sleep. There was a buzz in my body keeping me wide-awake and high, an awareness that I’d almost died. I desperately needed to make fudge so that I could think straight. I put my shoes back on, then headed out into the darkness.

* * *

On Tuesday morning, I slept in after my fudge-making night. It was nearly eight a.m. by the time I got to the shop. Cody was already there, of course. The lusty, earthy coffee smell jolted me awake. For breakfast I downed a piece of dark Belgian chocolate fudge as I sipped the dark-roasted brew.

My grandfather was yawning loudly while puttering about his shelves. If he saw the note about the missing twine roll, he didn’t seem to care. Usually he growled about our sheriff’s interference.

Cody was banging about, putting a copper pot in place that he’d brought from the kitchen where I’d washed it last night after midnight. “Miss Oosterling, can I teach Bethany how to make fudge while you’re at that funeral this morning?”

I was tying on one of the fancy-schmancy aprons in a peach color and lost my grip on the bow behind me.

Cody came over to help. “I like this one. It’s movie star shiny. You deserve a star on the walk of fame, Miss Oosterling.” He sauntered to the door to point outside. “We should start our own walk of fame right outside. I could carve stars and names into the wood on the dock and on the piers. We could have a big party every time we chose somebody to add to our walk. But you’d have to be the first. You’re a star from Hollywood for real.”

He was buttering me up, but I liked it. “I worked for a while on a TV show, but mostly behind the scenes. I wasn’t the star.”

“But the apron makes you look like a real somebody. A real peach.”

“You really think so?” The young guy was really working me. I pirouetted in my peach-colored, puffy pinafore apron with its shiny satin interwoven across the bodice. The pockets on top and bottom were satin, sort of like wearing peach mirrors on my boobs and on the skirt, too.

Cody clapped.

I said, “Sure, I don’t mind if you teach her how to make fudge.”

“Can we make more of that new recipe you made last night?” He nodded toward the window where I’d left the new batch made at midnight under a towel on the marble table.

“Did you peek?”

His face turned a shade of red that almost matched his short haircut. “I tasted a nibble. That could win the prize on Saturday.”

“You think so?”

“You bet. That’s destined for Emmy swag bags.”

“Let’s keep it a secret, then. But I have to come up with a fairy-tale name. Plus, I need to come up with one more flavor for the judges.”

“Kelsey King is making dandelion fudge and something else from plants she finds in the woods at the park. Just so she doesn’t pick poisonous stuff.”

As I checked the stock on my shelves, I wondered what poisonous plants were out in our woods. Certainly mushrooms. Had Kelsey poisoned Lloyd? Had she tried to scare him into voting for her and not me? That was silly. More likely, she tried to get him to give her valuable cups and saucers, or to sign something over to her. Instead of becoming groggy, the poor man had died on her. She was in good shape; I could conceive of Kelsey using ropes to winch him up a step at a time. Had she sung that Friday night or early Saturday morning, too? As she had the morning Mercy saw her. I’d have to tell Jordy to ask the campers about that. The singing could have been a cover-up. If somebody asked her what she was doing at the lighthouse, she’d say she was practicing. A lot of people liked singing in a tower or silo.

But if she murdered Lloyd or killed him by accident, why had she cozied up to Libby Mueller, the ex-wife that Lloyd had still loved in a protective way? It couldn’t be, could it, that Libby was in on the murder? She was a slight woman, so I didn’t see her wrestling with Lloyd or dragging his body up those stairs.

If Libby was innocent and Kelsey was a killer, then Libby was in danger from Kelsey, as my girlfriends and I had concluded earlier. The motive was clear: Kelsey wanted to take over Libby’s life and live the high life in Lloyd’s mansion. Libby was fearful of John doing that, but it was Kelsey who was the real culprit perhaps.

I cringed. A fudge contest should be fun. I was determined to get it back to being fun. Lloyd had loaned me books and had encouraged me to make it big and wonderful because that would save Fishers’ Harbor. Again it struck me that Lloyd might have been afraid of somebody.

“Cody, you told Sam that bad guys show up at funerals of their victims. Is that true?”

“It sure is. The FBI takes down car license plate numbers and takes pictures from off in the trees where they hide. Are you thinking of taking down numbers today? The sheriff can run them later for you.”

My fudge assistant was only eighteen, with a definite flair for drama. Still, the “TV” feel of this made me look forward to watching the action at the funeral today.

Moose Lindstrom walked into the shop then. His bulky, tall frame stood in the middle of our floor. First he looked me up and down pretty good with his big ol’ smile; then he winked at me before turning to the other side of the shop. “Hey, Gil, I’ve got a proposition.”

My grandfather came around an end cap on an aisle, looking disheveled. “I’m not marrying you, Moose. Got enough trouble with the marriage I’ve got.”

Moose scratched the whiskers on his chin. “I saw ya sleepin’ on that boat of yours this morning and it got me to thinkin’.”

I rushed forward, my hands wringing my shiny peach apron. “Gilpa, what were you doing sleeping outside? You and Grandma have to patch things up. This is silly.”

He headed to the minnow tank.

Moose gave me a silent plea for help. All I could do was shrug. Grandpa was an immovable Belgian buffalo.

Moose went at it again. “Gil, I got more business than I can shake a stick at lately, what with this good weather. But I can’t be in my boat all day long. Tires me out. I was thinking you could use the
Super Catch I
and just toss me whatever cash off the top you think is fair.”

Gilpa sprinkled fish food across the top of the minnow tank, giving Moose the silent treatment.