First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (23 page)

T
he main show by noon that Thursday was the mansion on Main Street in Fishers’ Harbor. Gusty winds frustrated three news vans that were trying to set up their satellite dishes along the street. Camera people braced themselves against the cold May breezes. The sun was out, but the temperature was in the fifties. Jackets flapped on everybody, and a couple of women reporters were constantly removing their coiffed hair from their mouths as they talked to unknown millions. I saw a network’s peacock logo on a microphone.

Isabelle and I had run back to our respective places after finding the body. I’d called 911 on my cell, but the sheriff was at the Blue Heron Inn already so everything happened quickly. The medical examiner was inside the mansion now. Izzy and I stood on the porch, me in my red jacket and her in a stylish cobalt blue trench coat. We were a “Mutt and Jeff” team adrift between the camera people on the lawn and the sheriff and ME in the house. Jordy had asked us to come back to the place with him to retrace our steps.

I’d also called Sam Peterson. He was wending his way through the growing crowd on the lawn, where spooky shadows were made by the noon sun being blocked by the limbs of craggy oak trees. Once Sam finally reached the porch, I fell into his arms.

“Oh, Sam,” I whispered. “There’s a connection to Cody again.”

“He’s not a murderer.”

Izzy whispered, “But he was here.”

With grave concern casting a shadow over Sam’s face, he asked me, “When was he here? Just now?”

“No,” I said, my teeth chattering more from nervousness than the cold. “A couple of days ago.” My brain could barely process the horror of it. “No, three days ago now. He said he was here Monday afternoon and heard noises in the basement. It spooked him out so much he said he didn’t want to live here after all.”

“But he was thrilled that the prom party would be held here.”

“Probably because I volunteered to chaperone it. He knew there’d be others around. This place wouldn’t be scary because he wouldn’t be alone.”

“Where is he now?”

“I assume at school. He was excited about showing Bethany his new haircut.” Tears stung my eyes. “Do you think he could have harmed Rainetta and this man and not realize he killed them? They were accidents? Maybe he was stealing something and they tried to stop him and he panicked?”

“Stop talking, Ava. Trust me. He’s not capable of these things.” But his Adam’s apple bobbed. He’d swallowed hard, as if he wasn’t so sure about Cody anymore. “I’ll go inform his parents right now before they get another call from the sheriff’s department. Arlene and Tom are going to want to move away after this.” Sam gave me another hug. “Hang in there, Ava. Cody didn’t murder this guy. Or Rainetta. Cody needs you to believe in him, even if he changes his story to suit the day of the week. That’s just him. Okay?”

“Thanks, Sam.”

After he left, Isabelle and I stood with our arms around each other, visibly vibrating with our shivers, waiting for the sheriff to come out. I stared at the broken window, realizing now that a dead man had been lying in the basement when I’d fallen down the stairs on Tuesday.

The front door of the mansion creaked open. The sheriff’s deputy held open the door. Volunteer EMTs Nancy and Ronny Jenks were on each end of the stretcher, which carried a body bag. We moved aside, then watched them navigate the few steps to the lawn. The ambulance was only a few feet away, parked on the meager spring grass. Within a minute, Ronny and Nancy steered the vehicle through the quiet crowd, finally wending around the news vans to get back onto Main Street.

But as soon as the ambulance disappeared, the newspeople crushed up the porch steps toward Sheriff Tollefson, Isabelle Boone, and me.

The reporter who’d called me a fudge “sculptor” days ago, yelled out, “Was your fudge involved this time, Miss Oosterling? Was fatal fudge found in the basement?”

So much for being my friend. Sheriff Tollefson herded Izzy and me inside the mansion and closed the door.

Izzy gasped, “Did you hear her?”

“Fickle-faced,” I said, “and it’s too bad Pauline isn’t here. She would have loved the ‘fatal fudge found’ question.” I noticed Sheriff Tollefson acting oddly. “Don’t tell me my fudge was found down there?”

“Unfortunately for you, it was.”

• • •

I couldn’t believe it. Cinderella Pink Fudge was found in Conrad Webb’s jacket pockets. He had two pieces, both with diamonds in them.

After Sheriff Tollefson mollified the news hounds by speaking to them on the front porch, he escorted me back to Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge. Isabelle hurried back to the Blue Heron Inn to face her angry guests.

Harbor was gone, which made me panic until I rushed back outside to look down the pier. He was with Gilpa in
Sophie’s Journey
. I heard lots of cursing, which Harbor seemed to like. He was wagging his fluffy puppy tail rapidly.

When I ducked back inside, I couldn’t think. Not with the sheriff standing there in his uniform and shiny star, hanging on to his hat in his hands and with his gun on his belt. So I grabbed a fresh apron for myself and tossed another to Jordy.

“What’s this?” he stammered, catching it with one hand.

“I’m making fudge before you take all my ingredients again.”

“I won’t be doing that this time.”

“Why not?”

“The fudge he had was old, likely from the batch you made for Sunday.”

I was curious. “Did you taste it?”

“Now, why would I put evidence in my mouth?”

With a sigh, I said smoothly, “I was hoping to know what kind of shelf life it had, which could help you pinpoint the time of the murder. Working with cocoa butter and cream is tricky. White chocolate is made mostly from cocoa butter and it melts easier. But white chocolate holds flavors longer, and it coats the mouth more than dark chocolate. The taste sensation is more intense with white chocolate. The ten thousand taste buds inside your mouth send a big flag to the anterior cingulate in your brain, and this explosion creates emotions and your mood, Jordy. Are you in a white chocolate mood today or a dark chocolate mood? That’s why infusing taste sensations into white chocolate is like nuclear science. The whole thing is either perfect or it blows up. Do you want me to draw you pictures again?”

“No!” He was sweating. “Stop it.”

“You weren’t good with science in school, were you?”

Jordy shook his head in derision that tickled something inside me. He said, “No more diagrams of chemical formulas. This is a murder case, not kindergarten drawing time and not science class.”

“Cody didn’t murder those people. And neither did I.”

“Everybody’s a suspect until I hear a confession.”

“Did you get anything close to that earlier today from Will and Hannah Reed?”

“Well, no.”

“You didn’t try hard enough. This murder case is all about simple crystals—diamonds or fudge. Let me show you what it takes to make fudge. Maybe if you understand the process, it’ll help you see how ridiculous it would be for me, Cody, or Gilpa to be involved with a murder using fudge. But maybe we can come up with some angle on the diamonds that will help us.”

“Us?”

“Jordy, the diamonds were found here in my fudge, so come into my ‘science lab.’ You have no choice if you and I want to solve this case.”

I led Jordy back to my kitchen and pantry. I held up my wrapped arm. He got the picture—I needed help. He collected the cream, butter, and the kilos of white chocolate bars that had come in yesterday. I was used to working with chocolate in the form of chips or coins, but I liked the bars better.

“They look like bars of gold,” he said.

“I like to think my fudge is that valuable. Have you checked the commodities market recently for the price of gold?”

He looked afraid of my facts again, so I added, “Gold bars are worth thousands of dollars.”

“We’re here to talk about diamonds.”

“And people like the Reeds and Earlywines who might be in the market for such things.”

By now he had his arms filled with “gold” bars, pounds of butter, and containers of cream.

“Where do you get all this stuff?” Jordy asked. “There’s still a chance that your suppliers had something to do with the diamonds.”

“The dairy products are from our farm, Jordy. Mom and Dad aren’t getting diamonds out of those udders. This chocolate came straight from Belgium in five-kilo boxes containing foil-wrapped bars—like gold. The luster dust came from France, not New York where the heist was.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“We’ve been tracing the paper trail and Internet trail of the deliveries coming here.”

“Looking for a connection to the diamonds? I’m impressed, Jordy.”

He heaved a shoulder up in a shrug, which told me he hadn’t found a connection yet. I continued on with the analysis of my fudge ingredients.

I had also ordered glucose in big jugs, which is like corn syrup. I pointed out to Jordy, “It’s harder to hide small diamonds in liquid glucose. It’s a super-refined sugar.” Glucose was commonly used in fancy candies. I was ready to experiment with using a Belgian candy chocolate glaze on top of my fudge, which was paintable.

Jordy was impressed with all the gadgets like my Felchlin chocolate warmer, my induction burners, which slid out on a tray from under a cabinet and didn’t use any flame, and my industrial microwave that could handle stainless-steel pans inside of it. He took a look at the framed pieces of paper on the wall that showed I was certified in safe food handling. That made me nervous.

“Mercy must have been sad to see those,” Jordy mused. “Foiled her attempt to shut you down but good.”

Jordy didn’t realize I didn’t yet have a license to operate. I had just up and started making fudge two weeks ago when I arrived and moved in. Somehow Mercy had missed that lack of an operator’s license, too, in her ardor to find my place unclean and unsafe.

“Do you know why she hates me so much?”

“She doesn’t hate anybody. She’s probably jealous of you and wishes you could be friends.”

I scoffed. “Jealous?”

We headed to the front as Jordy said, “She’s lonely, Ava. She got voted out of office, and now she has no purpose. You have a purpose with your shop. Mercy’s always been a common laborer, worked in factories and been a truck driver most of her life before she got elected.”

“I didn’t know that.” He was certainly making my head spin in a new direction about Mercy, but I still didn’t trust her. “Her nastiness seems to be a symptom of something deeper going on, Jordy.”

“She lacks a lot of self-confidence maybe. She never went to college, like some people around here who’ve scratched out a living just fine without it.”

The blood drained from my body to pool in my feet, making me feel hollow. I remembered spouting my snarky “college sorority girl” remark at Mercy right in front of the reporters, and Mercy getting madder after that. I’d been cruel, though unintentionally, of course. But still, I felt bad about my treatment of Mercy.

I said to Jordy, “I’ve found out recently from Cody that she’s really on our side in all this murder investigation. She’s been sniffing around on her own. She thinks the Reeds are your culprits.”

“What else has she found out?”

“You’ll have to ask her. And Cody, man to man this time, not sheriff to perpetrator. To Mercy’s credit, she probably respected Cody more than the rest of us and made Cody her deputy of sorts, and that’s why he got suckered into doing things that are wrong. I’m not sure those things were even Mercy’s fault. Cody’s impulsive by nature and just does things his way. The only thing that kid wants more than anything is to wear a badge.”

“That puts a new spin on things for me. Thanks, Ava.”

Jordy put down all the supplies on my cash register counter. With the apron covering up his badge and his boyish brown hair, Jordy was far less intimidating, though his pistol holster still stuck out from his side. He helped me pour ingredients into the boiler next to the copper kettles.

He said, “Not much for customers today.”

“Well, besides you telling all the newspeople we wouldn’t be talking for a couple of days until the ME’s report comes out, there’s the issue of ‘pink.’”

“Pink?”

As I handed him the four-foot wooden stir ladle, I nodded toward the pink paper on the cash register counter, pink ribbons for tying up fudge gifts, and over on the shelving units, pink accessories for girls and women, including pink coin purses and teacups for both moms and daughters. “It seems in my quest to draw women down to the docks, I’ve also kept the men away.”

“Then come up with manly fudge.”

“The church ladies have tried that. They made a few flavors with nuts. Still didn’t do much.”

Jordy chuckled. “Men like grease and dirt under their nails. Think of a flavor for that.”

“The flavor of dirt? Grease?”

He shrugged as he stirred. “You’re the fudge expert. I’m only the expert on figuring out who murdered Rainetta Johnson and Conrad Webb.”

“And neither one of us is doing all that well, are we?”