Read First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery Online
Authors: Christine DeSmet
First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (10 page)
Jeremy scribbled it all down. The room had gone quiet while everybody watched me.
Finally, the consistency was right and a little more than fifteen minutes had gone by. I stopped for a breather.
“Can I taste it now?” Jeremy asked again.
This time I couldn’t be tart with him. There were sixty women staring at me, all my potential fudge shop social networkers whose gossip could bring me customers. “Who wants the honor of helping me lift the copper pot onto the marble table to pour it out and begin loafing this delectable fare?”
The pride in my voice sounded foreign to me. The realization that I could be
that
proud of something as silly as fudge making stunned me.
Dotty Klubertanz strutted forward. “It matches my outfit, so it has to be me.”
The women giggled and clapped. Jeremy photographed us lifting the kettle in front of the picture window. I ladled out half the batch. I’d knead or “loaf” that batch for the amusement of customers and Jeremy’s camera. The other half we poured into pans.
“This will take until late tomorrow before it’s ready to cut and eat,” I explained.
They groaned.
“Okay. Another plan. I’ll teach you how to loaf fudge and you can take as many tastes as you like while you do it.”
That mollified them. My shop became an instant fudge-making school. I handed over my short, knifelike walnut blades to let them scrape across the white marble until the fudge “set.”
As the women converged toward the front of the shop, Isabelle rushed in from the back. “Our delivery is here. I saw all the cars, so I thought I’d come down to help the guy unload while getting a look at what was going on. Wow. Look at the crowd.”
I stood taller. “Did he bring any chocolate this trip?” I’d ordered some online last night from a Green Bay wholesaler who regularly received imports from Belgium.
“Sorry. Just more bags of sugar, some flavorings, and my flour. The driver and I already restocked your shelves for you.”
“Thanks, Izzy.”
We moved over behind Gilpa’s cash register to stay out of the fray. Three women in red hats were doing a fine enough job at my own register, ringing up sales of crocheted pillowcases and felt doodads. Jeremy Stone was interviewing a couple of church ladies.
I must have muttered some doubts because Izzy surprised me by taking my hand closest to her and squeezing it briefly. “It’s going to be all right.”
But sadness niggled me, oddly enough. “It looks mighty fun, but this isn’t what I envisioned for a fudge shop. And Gilpa’s given up.”
That was what made me the saddest. I missed the quiet mornings with just my grandpa and me puttering around selling to one customer at a time. We had time to offer them a cup of coffee. And most of all, Gilpa and I were getting reacquainted. It was like old times, when he and Grandma Sophie had worked on the farm when I was a little. He was always there when I was four and five, ready to eat cupcakes with me or take me fishing.
I realized in this moment that my upbringing was why I wanted our shop to work and why I wanted to share it with Gilpa. This was my soul. And Gilpa had shaped or “loafed” my soul just as surely as I could loaf fudge. I couldn’t lose the shop or his trust and respect. Yet I was in danger of doing just that.
After a deep breath, I gave Izzy a hug. “Thanks for all your help. We’ve known each other for only a couple of weeks or so, but already you’ve been a lifesaver. Thank you.”
“And thanks to you and Pauline for the idea of a cookout. I did a trial run last night outside on the grill with the cherry sauce. It helped to get those people outside. There was less bickering last night.”
“Did Jeremy Stone disappear early again?”
“No. In fact, he and Boyd and Ryann Earlywine became entranced with the history of glass and my Steuben collection. Boyd knows a lot about the history of glassmaking.”
My brain turned on with that fact. “Did you know that when he first arrived?”
“No. I thought he and his wife were merely vacationing when they came last Friday night. And I saw them only briefly for coffee on Saturday and Sunday mornings before they set off for sightseeing, so it wasn’t until last night we had a chance to chat. With the fire pit going outside, we all gathered around and a lot of information came out.”
“Did you talk about the murder?” I was already thinking of a way to sneak back into Rainetta’s and Jeremy’s rooms for a closer look into their things.
Isabelle said, “I steered clear of murder, and so did they. We needed to relax.”
“Well, I can’t afford to relax. I have until Friday before Jordy gets all hot and bothered about putting me in jail after that medical examiner’s report comes out. Maybe I’ll find out something at your barbecue party tonight. What should I bring?”
“I hadn’t really thought about all the dishes yet.”
“I’ll cook something and bring a dish-to-pass.”
“I thought you only knew how to make fudge.”
“True, but don’t tell your guests that. I’ll figure out something.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.” Isabelle seemed to shrink to elfin size, as if she were trying to shrink away from me.
“Please, Isabelle. I need you to do this for me. Don’t tell them I’m coming. Invite some other shop owners from around town and their families for your guests to talk with. That way they won’t run away on us beforehand. I’ll sneak in behind the crowd with my contribution.” I tapped my white chef’s hat I still had on.
“Okay,” she said, skepticism on her face. She excused herself to head through my back door and then hike up the hill to prepare a small lunch for her guests at the Blue Heron Inn.
It struck me as odd that on a nice day she’d even have guests staying for lunch instead of exploring. Jordy hadn’t said they were confined to the inn itself. He’d said they couldn’t leave Fishers’ Harbor. That meant they could still explore the couple of bars and restaurants along the main street. Better yet, they could visit my “church bazaar” and buy microwaved peanut butter fudge and lemon bars, along with a beer hat. What more could a person want while on vacation?
My curiosity sent me over to Jeremy Stone, though I was squeamish about engaging him. “Jeremy, are you going back up to the inn for lunch?”
“No. Why?”
“It seems most everybody stays there for lunch, except you. Why don’t they all get out more?”
He bent his head back in a big guffaw. “Because they’re afraid somebody will go through their rooms.”
I felt caught, though he had no idea I’d traipsed through his room and had plans to do it again. “You mean they all feel guilty?”
“Could be.”
“Except you.”
“I had nothing to do with murdering the lady across the hall from me. I’m trying to figure it out myself. Here’s what I saw that night.”
He showed me photos on his cell phone. There was me in my dirty apron looking freaked out. He had photos of the pink fudge on the table with the marzipan fairy wings. The glass unicorn was in the background.
I asked, “Where’s Isabelle’s unicorn now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.” He gave me a cockeyed look of appraisal, and I knew I’d just scored a point with him. “I’ll look around for it. You think somebody stole it?”
“I do. Maybe somebody involved with the diamonds. Maybe somebody is here to steal some of Izzy’s glass collection, too.”
He gave a low whistle, then handed me his phone for the few seconds it took him to make a note in his pocket-sized notebook.
I asked him, “Why don’t you just use voice activation on your phone to make notes?”
“Because this is a work phone and anybody involved in this murder case—like your lawyer—could try to subpoena what’s on it.”
“I don’t have a lawyer.”
He scrawled another note. “You’re that sure
you’re
innocent?”
“Of course. And you’re that sure you’re innocent?”
After shaking his head in amusement, he showed me pictures taken in the hallway that fateful afternoon. Rainetta Johnson was splayed across the floor on her back. There was a pose of Isabelle gasping and looking down. He had no pictures of the Reeds, who had hidden inside their room. But as the paramedics and Jordy had hauled Rainetta’s body out of the hallway, Jeremy had snapped a picture that showed a door with an empty wine bottle sitting outside it.
“Whose room is that?” I asked.
“John Schultz, the travel agent from Milwaukee.”
“He was on the boat while it happened.”
The way Jeremy blinked gave me pause.
I asked to confirm it, “He was on the boat, right?”
“I think so.”
“Then why’d you blink?”
“I remember there were noises coming from his room. Or maybe it was the room next to him. But that doesn’t make sense. That was Taylor’s room, and she was out on the boat, too.”
“Taylor Chin-Chavez.”
“Yeah. A looker.” He scrolled through more pictures, and one popped up of Taylor in the dining room and another with John Schultz holding on to a wine bottle as he emerged from his doorway near the stairwell; the picture made it look like he’d been drinking straight from the bottle. A prickle zipped up the back of my neck. It was the same kind of wine bottle I’d seen in Jeremy’s room. I didn’t dare ask because that would surely ruin any chances I might have of rifling through Jeremy Stone’s room later. But I wondered what John and Jeremy might have talked about following the murder. I certainly had to talk with John Schultz.
I asked, “Have you concluded anything yet?”
“You mean, do I have a suspect in mind? I think it was somebody from the outside, not the guests.”
That gave me dread. Did he mean Sam? “Who do you have in mind?”
“That kid who works for you.”
His words impaled me like an arrow into my chest. I sputtered, “I left Cody Fjelstad in charge of my fudge shop while I delivered the Cinderella Pink Fudge.”
Jeremy showed me another photo taken from upstairs and looking down on the back lawn—with Cody striding away from the Blue Heron Inn.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
“As I got upstairs, Isabelle came out of the bathroom. My room has a stairwell to the kitchen and back porch, so on a hunch I hurried around her and into the bathroom for a look out the window, and sure enough, Cody was running away.”
“But you can’t prove that he was running from anything or had even been in the inn.”
“You’re right. Maybe he just wished he’d been invited to the party and came up the hill to look through the windows. But I don’t believe that.”
I didn’t either. Cody prided himself on being organized and sure of himself. “Let me look at those pictures again.”
I thumbed to the photos with Rainetta on the floor. The third picture of her made me stop. I had to swallow some bile coming into my throat.
Jeremy asked, “Something wrong?”
I didn’t dare tell him. “Nothing. It’s just all so awful.”
After excusing myself, I hurried out back of Oosterlings’ and away from the prying ears of the church ladies to use my phone. I punched in the sheriff’s number.
“Jordy, I need to know something very simple. What did you find on Rainetta Johnson’s person?”
“I can’t tell you that, Ava.”
“You don’t really need to tell me because I know. I was just calling to confirm it. She wasn’t wearing her amethyst necklace.”
“Uh, I don’t know anything about a necklace,” he said. “Tell me more. Did you steal it?”
I hung up on Jordy. His big oops of a hesitation with “uh” confirmed for me that the necklace was missing and I was way ahead of Jordy in this investigation. Somebody had stolen Rainetta’s amethyst necklace right off her body. The murderer? Or just a plain old thief?
My heart felt heavy as a bowling ball as it descended into my stomach. Had Cody come up the stairs and into her room to steal her jewels? Or borrow them? Had he been on some misguided mission to please his girlfriend, Bethany, with an expensive gift? Was that why he’d been back in the room when I’d found him? Had he come back to steal other things? Had he taken things right out of her suitcases and hidden them in her closet? And had he taken the very fudge he’d helped me make and stuffed it into her mouth to keep her quiet? Maybe she’d tried to stop him and they’d tussled? Cody would never murder anybody, but maybe Rainetta’s death was a tragic accident.
Or was it? What if I was wrong about Cody?
Truth nettled my skin, making me itch all over. I knew one very good reason Cody might do harm to another person.
And I knew where Cody was hiding.
K
nowing I might have solved the murder had my stomach acid hopping. Cody had played into the killer’s scheme quite handily.
I didn’t dare meet up with Jeremy Stone back in my shop because he’d pump me for more information and ruin all our lives. And I couldn’t bear to see Sam yet either; I was sure he had a connection to the stolen necklace and he’d want to stop me from finding it. My best strategy was to make more fudge and wait until Pauline and I could go together to retrieve the stolen necklace. We’d go incognito in her gray, nondescript car that looked like it belonged to a teacher on a yearly salary that amounted to what we had paid stars for one day’s appearance on
The Topsy-Turvy Girls
. A tiny little window inside my heart still remained open to the possibility of my fudge ending up inside the Emmy or Oscars swag bags.
I had to cast aside my fear of Jeremy Stone. Amid the fray of sequined sweatshirts, silver hair, and gossip, I finished helping the church ladies loaf the Cinderella Pink Fudge. It wasn’t my best batch, but the foot-long, six-inch-wide mound of pink on the white marble slab in front of the window was enticing anyway. Maybe I had the touch for success at something in life, finally.
I said to the ladies, “It looks and feels like Cinderella’s cheeks!”
Dotty Klubertanz called it, “The cheeks of Mary, the Holy Virgin, Mother of God.”
Hmm.
Okay, Dotty, a bit over the top, but I’ll go with it if that’ll help sell fudge.
And it did. The sixty church ladies with a speed-dial button on their cell phones to heaven turned my place into the place to be in Fishers’ Harbor by noon. At least for women. Ladies, some with children on a hip or in hand toddling next to them, came in to buy the pillowcases, doilies, beer hats, and hair doodads, but they also insisted on buying all the home-baked cookies and microwaved fudge.
I glimpsed the oddest sight while I was at the marble table at the front window—Hannah Reed’s distinctive choppy black hair across the crowded room. She was at the cash register, making a purchase. I hadn’t seen her pass by me at the front door, so she must have slipped in the back door. Many people used the back door, but she was so out of her element in my little fudge shop and amid homemade doodads that I was immediately suspicious. And a touch triumphant. She was a prime suspect. Did she know that I thought that of her? Was she keeping an eye on me? Probably. She scurried off through the back hallway before I could disengage from my fudge loafing to follow her.
Then I got distracted when Dotty and her friend Lois Forbes took it upon themselves to give away tasty samples of the new loaf of Cinderella Pink Fudge to kids, who promptly fed it to Gilpa’s guppies in the minnow tank.
“Dotty,” I pleaded, “it’s not done yet. Fudge is all about a chemical process. It has to cure for a couple of days, and twenty-four hours at a bare minimum. Even as fish food.”
Lois, her hair dyed red as fox fur and looking wily as a fox, said, “Cure like what? Cement? I hate watching cement dry and I’m not about to watch fudge dry.” She stood on tiptoe and called out, “Anybody who buys something today in the shop gets another and bigger free sample of the movie star’s fudge. Take it home and use it as ice cream topping.”
Topping? My incredible fudge? Given away as if it were equal to that high-fructose syrup used at carnivals? So much for my feeling of success.
Just like that, Lois and Dotty brushed me aside to hand out nibble-sized samples of my unfinished, gooier-than-normal Cinderella Pink Fudge. Some took a feathery glob on paper napkins to taste or feed the fish; others tucked samples in zippered plastic quart bags into their purses for home.
My whole being seized with failure.
But my old-fashioned cash register handle was pumping up and down steadily. Soon the ladies had to move over to use Gilpa’s cash register, too. Unfortunately, my grandpa didn’t return, which worried me. He’d lost his boat and now his shop, the latter because of me. My only saving grace in all this was that maybe I’d made enough in sales this Tuesday to pay for a couple hours’ time of the lawyer he was scaring up for me.
Then Pauline called me to say she had a flat tire at school. Kids liked putting nails under tires or just letting the air out. So instead of driving incognito in her gray car, we ended up in my dandelion yellow Chevy pickup. As we headed south of Fishers’ Harbor on Highway 42, I told her about my theory of who had killed Rainetta Johnson.
• • •
“You can’t be right about Cody killing that woman,” Pauline said, filching about in her big black purse the size of a heifer calf while we hurried down the highway. She came up with her phone.
I panicked. “What’re you doing with that? We can’t call the sheriff. It had to be an accident. I didn’t say Cody killed her. I said he had a part in it, unwittingly set up by the likes of Hannah Reed or her husband.”
“I’m calling Sam Peterson. He’ll know what to do.”
“Sam might be involved in it.”
Her phone spurted out of her hand, hit the dashboard, then landed on the floor under my feet. Pauline scooped it up, then put it away. She was shaking. “I could lose my job. We’re covering up evidence and protecting murderers.”
“Not us. But the person we’re going to see is likely doing just that,” I said.
Neither one of us wanted to say the name. If you say a name, it makes things real. Could the sweetest people in the world really have a hand in murdering somebody? For sparkly diamonds?
My hands held on to the steering wheel so tightly they were numb already.
We continued south on Highway 42 about five miles, heading to doom, though it would resolve the mystery behind Rainetta’s death. I made a left turn onto a narrow, winding, two-lane blacktop road and sped up. My yellow truck pinged and bucked on its springs. I felt a kinship with the tension of being dangerous.
“We’re going to end up in the ditch if you don’t slow down,” Pauline said.
“I just want to be sure we’re not being followed.”
“Why do we care if anybody follows us? If we solve this, won’t that be something to shout to the world?”
“I don’t want Jeremy Stone or any other of the reporters who are sneaking into town plastering Cody’s picture across newspapers and computer screens. He’s a kid.”
“He’s eighteen. An adult. You can’t pretend he’s not.”
“I don’t know everything about him. What if this sets him back in his development? I can’t let him go to prison. I doubt they offer free mental health plans there.” I could still hear Cody’s angry voice excoriating me on the docks near Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge. He hated me for all the wrong reasons. He thought I was a bad person.
“What does Sam say about Cody’s current progress and condition?” Pauline asked. “Sam’s been his social worker all through school.”
“Sam’s acting strange toward me, like everything’s my fault, so he won’t reveal much about Cody’s condition.”
The road flattened out again as we sped under the dark overhang of oak branches.
“Well, Sam Peterson has a right to think things are your fault,” Pauline said. “He wanted to marry you once, after all, and you left him standing at the altar while you hitched a ride with Dillon Rivers to scratch an itch you had.”
A shiver went up my spine at the name “Dillon Rivers.” Not even the spring sunshine coming through the windshield could warm me. Dillon Rivers had been everything a woman could possibly want. But now I would definitely go out of my way to run him down. As a manner of speaking only.
Pauline screamed.
Brown cattail stalks hit one side of the truck. I’d veered too close to the ditch.
Pauline said, “So this is how it is? You’re not over him? After eight years?”
“Oh, I’m over him. He probably made new friends in prison, anyway.”
“I heard they let him out early for good behavior.”
My shoulders flinched. “He was a comedian and a good talker. Figures he’d find a way to charm them out of Waupun.” That was the state correctional facility in Waupun, Wisconsin, a community maybe halfway between Door County and the capital of Madison. Despite myself, I wondered what he was up to these days.
Dillon Rivers had been a civil engineering student when I met him at the university in Madison. Or at least he said he was. I had never verified that, come to think of it. He’d said he was my age when I first met him; he turned out to be six years older, something I found out when he had to tell the truth in front of a judge who was different from the one who’d married us. I had met him one night at a local comedy club on State Street. He was good. I laughed hard. I fell hard for him, too. I was tall, and he was taller. He had thick, wavy chestnut hair and wore a black cowboy hat. That color should’ve been a clue. But it wasn’t. He nurtured the cowboy mystique. He even walked with a swagger. His eyes were so brown they were almost black to match his hat. When he smiled, his eyes glittered like, well, diamonds tossed across a freshly plowed field.
I flung the steering wheel fast toward the left.
Pauline screamed again. “Stop the truck. I’m driving.”
“I’m fine.” I’d just missed putting us into a pond that ran close to the road.
“You’re not fine. You’re worried that Dillon will come looking for you, now that you’re back.”
“He won’t.”
“He might. That’s what Isabelle thinks.”
This shook me. “You told Izzy about Dillon?” We were almost to our destination. I slowed down.
“Sorry, but I thought you’d told her. She asked who you were dating, and we just got into a little of your history. Gosh, we’re all friends. Don’t be so prickly.”
I didn’t know anything about Isabelle’s dating habits, though we’d become friends in the past couple of weeks, which was natural with us running businesses so close to each other and being about the same age. She’d moved into the Blue Heron Inn last fall and had spent the winter sprucing it up before moving in her Steuben collection. I’d met her during the Christmas break when I was home, but that had been in passing on the street when I’d come up from Brussels with my parents to go with my grandparents to a party at the senior center. She had mentioned coming from Arkansas, where it was a lot warmer than Wisconsin in the winter, but neither of us had time for long conversations then, or even now, for that matter; setting up businesses and getting ready for the summer tourist season in Door County had consumed us.
“I’m sorry for biting your head off,” I said. “What is it about love that twists us all up? Poor Cody. Look what he did for love.”
We fell into silence. Could Cody have really been a party to killing Rainetta? I feared so.
Pauline said, “Maybe Bethany will have a different story. Maybe we’re connecting the wrong dots.”
“I hope you’re right.”
As we swung into the Bjorklunds’ gravel driveway, my body tensed. If Bethany had that stolen necklace in her possession, I didn’t know what I was going to do next.
The Bjorklunds lived on a hobby farm. Their big white farmhouse had a welcoming verandah with rockers on it. The house was flanked with pastures holding horses and alpacas, with a big red barn to the right and an animal shed on the left. The Bjorklunds’ dog, a white Great Pyrenees the size of a polar bear, wagged his tail as it walked up to sniff our legs. Cody loved animals. I imagined him gladly hiding here.
Bethany’s father, Hans, came out the front door, letting the screen door slap on its hinges as he met us at the verandah steps. My tongue pasted itself to the roof of my mouth. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. I wasn’t ready to get Bethany involved in Cody’s or my troubles. I hugged my arms, rubbing up and down the sleeves of my white blouse.
Pauline knew Hans from school events. “Hi, Hans. Listen, we’re here to talk to Bethany about the senior prom activities. Is she around?”
“Oh sure.” He turned back to open the inner door, then yelled, “Beth! Prom stuff!”
A faint “I’m coming” echoed from inside the house. Hans excused himself to do chores in the barn. Did he have a role in hiding Cody out here?
While we waited in the front yard for a moment, I whispered to Pauline, “Thanks. I wasn’t sure what to say.”
“I lied for you. So you owe me one. How about tickets to a Packers game together?”
The Green Bay Packers were just about the only football team in America that sold out their stadium for years to come. Needless to say, any available tickets would cost me plenty.
When Bethany joined us, I teared up because I knew what she meant to Cody. She was sweet, all girlie-girl, petite, and short enough to do acrobatic cheerleader tricks. She had long blond hair that hung loose past her shoulders and eyes the color of bluebird feathers. She was everything I wasn’t. She was the young woman Cody wanted to go to prom with. And more. Had he asked her? Did she know?
“Bethany, this isn’t about the prom. It’s about Cody.”
She bit the corner of her lower lip while her eyes dulled to a wary gray.
I pressed on. “You know something, don’t you? Is he here?”
She shook her head.
“But you saw him recently. When?”
She shrugged, her eyes downcast.
“This is serious, Bethany.” I took a fortifying breath. “He didn’t go home last night. He’s run away. Did he give you a necklace?”
