Five-Alarm Fudge (38 page)

I expected gunshots but nothing came. Nick must have taken off or he simply didn’t see us behind the car.

We squirmed along the ground like inchworms, doing accordion moves to get away from the car now engulfed with branches on fire. I thought about Wes Weaver in the trunk but couldn’t do a thing about him.

The fire’s glow was causing eerie shadows to dance on the nearby foliage and up the smooth trunk of a maple tree. The fire was so far down in the ravine that it would be
impossible for anybody to spot its glow. Even if anybody in their houses nearby peered out a window into the night, the black smoke wouldn’t be seen, either.

Pauline and I lay under ferns catching our breath and listening again. No footsteps. Nobody killing us. Yet.

I scratched my face against a root until the masking tape gave way. I spat out my sweatshirt sleeve.

“Hang in there, Pauline. Let me get at your face.”

My hands were still taped behind my back, but I wiggled to her face, then chewed through the masking tape. Once I got it loose, she spat out the fabric and asked, “What do you use for laundry detergent?”

“You want to talk about laundry now?”

“It smells a lot like all the stuff Fontana makes. And did you smell Nick? He smelled like her, too. Like lavender and all kinds of pickling spices.”

“My guess is he sprayed a bottle of her stuff all over the trees and bushes around the car, and on us. He wants to blame Fontana for the murder and arsons. He probably sprinkled the stuff over Cherry’s dead body to make sure Fontana was a suspect.”

We wriggled about and even flipped over so our hands were on the ground and under our backs and butts, but we couldn’t find purchase on roots.

I flipped back over onto my stomach. “Who wants to do the chewing first? We have to chew this tape off.”

Pauline said, “I just had my teeth whitened.”

“Crap, P.M., you always have an excuse.”

“A.M., I need excuses for sticking by you. This is not fun.”

The fire was worrying me. I couldn’t bear the thought of Weaver’s body going up in smoke. Maybe he was alive in that trunk. I gnawed on the tape on Pauline’s wrists. I felt like little Titus chipping away on acorns, a sound that never failed to wake me up at two in the morning.

In between spitting out tape, a realization banged inside my brain. “Crap, we have to save Fontana from him.”

“What’re you talking about?”

I spat more tape. “Nick must want her dead or gone, too. He’s going after her next.”

“Because she knows too much.”

“That and because she’s pregnant with Tristan Hardy’s baby.”

“When did you find that out?”

“Just now.” I recalled all the signs and enumerated them for Pauline: the drinking of milk; the episode in the house of rushing to the bathroom—not to cough as I thought, but to toss her cookies.

Pauline said, “But is it Cherry’s baby? She was playing the field.”

I conceded that. And chewed harder.

In minutes, we’d freed ourselves. Panting, we stared at the car engulfed with burning branches. We had no phones.

“We have to get the rest of those branches off that car,” I said.

Grappling in the dark, we snapped off a couple of saplings, then used them to shove at the burning branches. They weren’t too effective.

I wrapped a bunch of fern fronds around my hands for protection and finally pulled and pushed at the burning branches that were too big and not moving. With Pauline’s help, we opened up the space over the driver’s door. The windows had been closed, which wasn’t the brightest thing on Nick’s part because it had saved the interior from catching on fire. I opened the front door and hit the button to pop the trunk.

Pauline and I grabbed Weaver—dead or alive we didn’t know—and then dragged him off, stumbling and falling over him twice before we got him far enough away that any explosion wouldn’t harm us.

Weaver was still breathing, but the breaths were shallow. In the dark, with only intermittent starlight coming through the cloudy night, I couldn’t detect the location of his wound at first. Then my hand found an oozing on his chest. Pauline and I took off his belt and tied it around his chest hoping to stanch the flow of blood.

By then we were drained, almost collapsing. We were scratched and probably bloodied.

We couldn’t head back to the winery where we’d parked, because that was where Nick probably left his vehicle.

“Come on,” I said, dragging myself up off the ground, “we can’t be far from Jonas’s place.”

“What about that pistol he put in your hands?”

In the dark, I looked about but couldn’t see it. I assumed it was under the burning branches.

We pressed into the deep woods.

After we clawed our way up the rim of the ravine and reached the new fencing between Mike’s property and Jonas’s land, we collapsed for good this time, heaving for air.

Seeing the lights on in Jonas’s house revived us. We could call the sheriff from there.

But that thought evaporated when we got close enough to spy through the living room window. Jonas was sitting in a chair while Nick was stalking around him waving a knife in one hand. We crouched down and crawled away from the window’s light.

I whispered, “He’s going to kill Jonas.”

“Because he believes Jonas saw him at the church last Saturday.”

“Nick also knows that Jonas must have gotten an earful from Fontana about Weaver and that whole department, including Nick. Nick’s afraid she’s told Jonas too much.”

Pauline said, “We can run to the Dahlgrens’ place. Should take us only fifteen minutes to get to a phone.”

“That might be too late.”

The pile of old wood from Jonas’s burned shed was illuminated by the yard light. There were splintered two-by-fours and charred chunks of eight-inch beams.

On my nod Pauline and I ran to the woodpile, then raced back to the house, onto the porch, and then we slung our projectiles through the big front window.

The glass crashed in a deafening explosion.

My wood chunk caught Nick on the back of the head. It was like watching one of my three-point shots from center court swish the basket.

Nick turned as Pauline’s big square of wood clocked him straight in the nose.

We ducked and ran.

Jonas tumbled from the house. He hooked up with us
while punching at his cell phone. We ran for our lives into the maw of darkness.

*   *   *

By ten o’clock that night it was all over. Jordy and his backup team had taken Wes Weaver to the hospital. Jordy found Nick in the living room, dazed with a gash across his broken nose and blood streaming down his chin. Evidently, Pauline’s blow to his nose had knocked him out. Nick had the appearance of a bloody wraith when he came out of the house in handcuffs and met the glare of the squad car headlights.

After Nick was hauled away, Jordy stood with Pauline and me in Jonas’s living room interrogating us. Jonas was sitting in the chair where he’d been minutes ago, while Pauline and I sat opposite him on the couch.

To our surprise, Fontana poked her head into the room from the kitchen. She screamed with relief and ran to hug Jonas.

She was saying over and over, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Fontana’s red hair looked as if she’d been pulling at it. Grime sullied a pretty yellow top she was wearing and her blue jeans. She explained that as soon as she had heard Nick’s voice, she’d hidden in the basement by squeezing behind an unused refrigerator.

I got up to let Fontana sit in my place on the couch. “Fontana, we know what’s going on and why you were so scared.”

Jordy was watching us, taking notes.

I knelt in front of her and took her hands in mine. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

Her lower lip trembled.

An awful thought came to me. I made her scooch closer to Pauline, and then I sat beside her. “Is it Nick’s baby?”

“Oh no. Thank goodness, no. I never had sex with him or anybody since my divorce, except for Cherry. It’s Cherry’s.” She retrieved a tissue from a pocket. “I made the mistake of telling Nick about the baby a few weeks ago. I thought I could get rid of him that way. Instead he became obsessed. He kept appearing everywhere with Wes, always ending up
at my roadside stand, and he was following Cherry, too. He said . . . Oh my gosh, I just remembered what he said to me once. He said that I had a ‘fiery’ attitude to match my fiery hair.”

All of us stared at her red hair.

Jordy stepped closer, towering over us. “Why did he set the fires?”

Fontana choked up. “Nick was mad and scared.” She glanced my way. “I overheard your grandpa talk about the recipe with your mother while I was visiting Ava’s Autumn Harvest one afternoon. I told Wes about it. I’m sorry. I was mad at Wes for how he was treating Cherry in the university, and I told him off and said Cherry would be rich and famous because he was helping the Oosterlings find the holy recipe. Nick must have overheard me, or Wes told him.”

She worried the tissue in her hands. “I tried to make you leave, Ava. I wanted you to shut down your market and get away from here. I didn’t want to tell you everything, Ava. I was embarrassed and I wanted to protect you. You’re like my kid sister. I knew you’d be ashamed of me if you knew I’d gotten myself pregnant.”

I hugged Fontana. “Nonsense.”

“But you and your family thought Wes and Nick were wonderful. I’m so sorry.”

Shame came to me. How had I misread so many things? Dillon’s words came back to me. I was too busy with too many things to listen. I peered down at myself. I was full of grass stains, scratches, black soot, and blood, and one sweatshirt sleeve had been ripped off. There were untold mosquito bites on my face. I touched my hair—it was full of cockleburs.

I asked, because I just had to know, “Fontana, you weren’t really dating Jonas or Mike, were you? I mean, well, you kissed them. I jumped to conclusions and thought you were . . .”

“If I kissed a friend, it was a friendly kiss and nothing more. I was scared. Scared for Cherry, and then scared for me and the baby. I wanted to be sure I was never alone.” She sucked in a big breath and said to Jonas, “Sorry that I used you. But I needed you. Still friends?”

Jonas nodded. “Friends.”

Fontana said to me, “Thanks for saving me.”

On the other side of her, Pauline piped up, “Hey, I was the one who hit him square in the nose with a full-court shot.”

Jonas said, “You saved my life, Pauline.” He came out of his chair to shake her hand.

“What about me?” I said. “Tossing the wood through the window was my idea.”

Jordy held up a hand. “Ava, call me first in the future, okay? You almost . . . got yourself killed tonight.” He choked on the words, which made us all exchange glances. Then he headed to the door. “Stick to your fudge.”

Pauline said, “That’ll be the day she does that.”

Chapter 33

O
n Sunday morning I felt as if a tractor had run over me.

My skin burned from bug bites and scratches. But I woke to the smell of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and coffee. I had stayed overnight with my parents rather than drive through the wee hours in deathlike shape back to Fishers’ Harbor. Pauline had stayed in my grandparents’ old room.

After breakfast and a shower, Pauline left for Fishers’ Harbor. Maria Vasquez gave her a ride; Maria wanted to get more details about what had happened in the woods.

Despite my scratched face, I went to church in Brussels with Mom and Dad. I hadn’t been to church in a long time, but I’d been telling a lot of lies and Dad needed some healing prayers. Mom needed me to fend off people asking questions about the murder. We stuck to our story that I’d found the body, but neighbors knew about Mom’s penchant for cleaning, so they knew the vacuum cleaner I’d allegedly used was hers. Mom was a hero by association; I knew she’d really solved the case. Jordy would eventually figure out some of those hairs belonged to Nick Stensrud.

After the service and outside the church, Dillon was waiting for me. I barely recognized him in a blue shirt and dark tie. An involuntary smile pushed creases into my itchy cheeks.

Sun blessed everything and us with a glow. The smell of fresh-mown hayfields for that final crop of hay before
winter arrived was one of the best perfumes I’d inhaled in several days.

From the front seat of Dillon’s white construction truck, Lucky Harbor woofed at me out the window.

It gave me déjà vu to see Dillon waiting for me outside a church. The last time he’d waited for me like this, we eloped. That hadn’t ended well, though.

With most of the congregation talking with Mom and Dad and offering them help rebuilding the barn, I was able to take Dillon aside for a private talk.

His hair had grown over the summer. He had it groomed neatly now into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. It gave him rakish appeal and injected my libido with a touch of wanton excitement.

Feeling awkward, I touched my hair. It hung loose and felt good after my ordeal. It had taken Pauline and me an hour last night to get the burs out. I was wearing Mom’s red jersey knit dress with long sleeves to cover my scratches. Black tights covered my legs. No amount of makeup could cover up the bug bites and scratches on my face, though. I supposed I probably didn’t look too kissable, though I would have loved one of Dillon’s dip-and-kiss routines right now.

I asked, “Were you sitting in back during Mass? Did I miss seeing you?”

“No. I checked Mass times on the Internet, then calculated when you’d be coming out.” He took a deep breath.

“You’re dressed up. Is there an occasion?”

“I got to thinking about things.”

“This sounds ominous, Dillon.”

“I was thinking how I selfishly suggested you slow down and ditch a few things to simplify your life. That wasn’t fair of me. In fact, it was pretty darn obnoxious, egotistical, as if I know everything. I don’t. If we’re going to start over, we need to start at the beginning, at Saint Mary of the Snows. Together. I haven’t been inside the Namur church yet.”

“I understand. I had trepidations, too. I had to force myself into the church a week ago.”

“That’s nice to hear, I mean, not nice exactly, but nice that we think alike.”