Five-Alarm Fudge (8 page)

Pauline hugged her purse, whispering, “I’m not going down there. I’m only here to drive your truck back home after you get arrested.”

I whispered, “We’re doing this to protect my mother. You like my mother, don’t you?”

“Do
you
like your mother?”

“Very funny. Of course I do. Come on.”

With me in the lead, we trooped down the ancient, short staircase to the basement.

Muffled voices came from the far room. We passed under the hanging cobwebs, then around the old plumbing pipes.

I walked first into the last room where we’d gotten sooty yesterday.

The sheriff swung toward us with a hand out. “Stop. Don’t touch a thing. Where’d you go? I thought you’d be waiting for me here.”

A body lay prostrate on the hard floor, feet to this end and the head—bloodied—near the wall. A woman was putting small bags around the hands of the dead person.

“I . . .”

Pauline said from behind me, “We were at church. I mean, I was at church. She came to pick me up.”

Jordy looked at his watch. I cringed. I knew he was tucking away facts about my comings and goings. “So when did you discover the body?”

My head was muddled. The man was facedown, with dark, coagulated blood on the back of the head. He lay near where the old furnace might have sat, not far from the covered vent hole. The man wore dress shoes, tan pants, and a dark suit coat that looked navy in the harsh light somebody had set up next to the body. The man’s arms were outstretched somewhat toward the wall over his head.

I didn’t know our medical examiner, a woman who’d recently taken over following the retirement of a doctor who’d been in the position for a couple of decades. The woman was maybe forty, shorter than me by four inches, with blond hair worn in dreadlocks down to her shoulders. A camera was slung around her neck.

She was taking off rubber gloves. “I’m done. You can remove the body.” She flashed a suspicious look my way, then addressed Jordy. “I’ll have a report in a couple of days. But it looks like death from blunt trauma to the head.”

I was dying to hear the details, but with the way she was peering at me I realized she harbored uncertainty about my status.

“I only found the body,” I blurted, pleading to her. “I didn’t do it. Who is it?”

She removed the camera from around her neck, then packed up her small case of tools, snapping it shut. She ignored me, saying to Jordy, “Let’s talk tomorrow, say at nine? I’ll be in the morgue.”

Jordy nodded.

“I’ll get my assistants,” she said.

The woman left, stepping gingerly around us, careful not to touch us or the walls or doorway.

After she left, I asked Jordy, “Who is it?”

“Tristan Hardy.”

“Cherry?” My stomach flip-flopped. I took a step forward toward the body, but Jordy pushed me back in place next to Pauline near the doorway. I said, “It can’t be Cherry.”

Jordy squinted at me. “You found the body. Why are you so surprised?”

Heat flamed up my face. I couldn’t let my gaze meet his, so I stared at the back of Cherry’s head, so still on the floor with blood in his short brown hair. His bandaged right forearm drew my eyes next. The bandage looked loose, partially ripped from his wound, as if he’d been fighting. I wanted to see his knuckles but couldn’t because of the bags.

“How long do you think he’s been down here?” I asked, ignoring Jordy’s previous question.

“You didn’t find the body, did you?” Jordy said, his trim but muscular body stepping into my line of sight with Cherry’s body. “What’s the real story?”

I swallowed hard, glancing at Pauline next to me, pleading silently for help. “The real story?”

If my mother were brought into this, the Oosterlings’ lives would fall apart. My mother wasn’t capable of handling stress. She wouldn’t be able to work in her dairy store and creamery. She’d take to cleaning things incessantly.

I said, “The real story is that I love making fudge and I want to keep my life just the way it is.”

Jordy withdrew a pad of paper and pen from his front pocket.

“What are you writing down?” I asked.

“What you just said. Sometimes suspects talk in riddles. What were you doing here this morning?”

“Looking for a recipe.”

“What recipe?”

“The divine one for divinity fudge. Made by a nun who saw the Mother of God.”

Jordy clicked his pen a couple of times as his eyes bored into me. “This isn’t one more of your far-fetched stories, is it?”

Pauline said, “She’s telling the truth. Her family believes the recipe may have been written down by Sister Adele Brise in the 1860s or later. Some people call her Adele Brice, with a C. This church was founded in 1860. It’s been rebuilt and rededicated several times over the years. There could be one of those time capsules hidden away containing holy artifacts touched by Sister Adele, including the divinity fudge recipe. We’ve been looking for it because Prince Arnaud Van Damme told the Oosterlings that he wanted to taste the saintly divinity fudge of Door County.”

Pauline began smacking the gum in her mouth.

Jordy appeared confused by too much information, which was perfect.

The ambulance attendants and the medical examiner trundled down the stairs and into the room. They bagged Cherry’s body and hauled him away.

When Pauline and I turned to leave the basement, the sheriff asked, “Did you kill Tristan Hardy?”

“No way, Jordy.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No.”

“And do you know who might have set that fire upstairs?”

I almost blurted out “Fontana Dahlgren” but held back and said instead, “A lot of people were upset over Cherry’s research.”

I filled him in on the chemical allegations that had fomented into ugly feelings among the local neighbors. “In addition, he had concerns about the dry weather, and pests getting into the weakened orchards and grapes. Kjersta Dahlgren told me he’d been collecting bags of things on
their property as well as next door at Michael Prevost’s vineyard. He and his lab assistants also tromped around Jonas Coppens’s farmland.”

Jordy made me list everybody who’d been at my roadside market yesterday during Cherry’s presentation. Then he asked, “Anybody else in here yesterday or in that loft?”

“Tourists with John Schultz’s tour.”

Pauline elbowed me hard in the arm.

“I’ll talk to John,” Jordy said. “Isn’t that the same guy who found that cup that might belong to your grandma’s family? The guy who almost got himself killed by the murderer of Lloyd Mueller last summer?”

“The same guy.”

Writing, Jordy said, “The same guy who was staying at the Blue Heron Inn in May when that actress keeled over from your fudge?”

“She didn’t die from my fudge. She was choked to death using my fudge, at the hands of a wily woman who was after her money and jewels.”

“Nevertheless, John Schultz seems to have the same talent you do for getting involved with illegal activities.”

Pauline groaned.

Jordy snapped his notepad shut. “The church is off-limits for now. You’ll need to explain to folks that they’ll have to move the kermis, or cancel it.”

“Not this again. You can’t cancel anything and we don’t want to move it. The church is special. Can’t you hurry up the investigation?”

He gave me a sharp look that sent chills down my back. We walked ahead of him out of the church.

When we were outside he confiscated my church key and locked up. After he drove away, Pauline hit me in the butt with her big bag.

“Ouch. What’d you do that for?”

She tossed her hair off her shoulder. There were tears in her eyes, so unlike Pauline. “You’ve ruined John’s fall tours. People are going to be really mad at him if he doesn’t let them inside this church where they think Sister Adele hid the divinity fudge recipe.”

She was loping toward my truck ahead of me.

“Pauline, John wasn’t supposed to be telling people about the recipe anyway. We don’t want people breaking into the church and stealing mementos. We wanted the recipe all hush-hush before the prince arrived. John violated my trust. And it’s not my fault that Cherry got killed in the church.”

“There you go again. You’re always right.” She hadn’t turned around. She charged into the truck cab, closing the door with a bang.

Something was wrong. Pauline was never petulant.

I eased in on the driver’s side. “I’m sorry, but John wasn’t even supposed to be in the church yesterday when he was. Why was he there so early? And with Cherry? Cherry was going to give his presentation about his research at lunch after the tour, not during the tour.”

To my shock, Pauline’s tears turned to a sob. She dug a tissue out of her purse.

“Pauline? What’s wrong?”

“Tristan Hardy bullied his way onto the bus during a tour stop earlier. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that. John didn’t like it. You saw how they were in the church yesterday. Cherry was trying to take over the tour.”

“But what does this have to do with Cherry’s murder?”

The tears flowed faster. “John and I didn’t go on our date last night.”

“But you were together this morning, right? When I called, I thought you sounded sultry . . .”

“Like you’d interrupted a blissful morning after sex? The truth was he was so upset about Cherry that I told him to skip our date because I didn’t want to talk about it over dinner. I was sick of hearing about Cherry.”

“I’m sorry, but I still don’t see . . .”

She wiped at her nose with the tissue. “We were together last night at my house, but John was determined to reroute his tour so that he could somehow avoid Tristan Hardy. So he spent the night on the phone with some guy and got all excited about his TV show idea all over again. We’d gone to bed around ten o’clock when minutes later he got up from the bed and then never came back. I felt bad and got up to go find him, but his car was gone. I think he went to meet up with Cherry.”

Panic punched my stomach. “No, Pauline. I doubt John came to this church last night to meet Cherry.”

She had red eyes. “John loves treasure hunting. He found that precious cup with AVD on it in that big bay. What if they both came here thinking they could sneak in at night to look for the divinity fudge recipe? What if they ended up in a fight? What if John killed Tristan Hardy because of fudge?”

Chapter 6

I
tried to reassure Pauline that a mere fudge recipe couldn’t be the motive for John killing Tristan Hardy.

She started crying harder as I put my yellow pickup in gear.

“Sorry. I said that wrong. John didn’t kill anybody, I’m sure.”

We headed back toward Brussels, passing green cornfields bursting with fat ears for harvest later on. It was a little after nine o’clock. I decided to stop at our farm. It would cheer Pauline up.

We bounced over our long gravel lane. The sun was heating up the day fast and small whirlwinds were stirring the dust enough to nettle my front hood.

Pauline sniffed. “Everybody knows that John has gold rush fever. He’s obsessed with proving himself after that company fired him last spring.”

“He did threaten to sue them for age discrimination, which saved Fishers’ Harbor and my fudge shop this past summer. They were about to buy up all kinds of property if they could swing it. John is our hero. He sent his former employer packing. John is not a killer. You know what I think?”

“What now?”

We were jostling over ruts. “John probably can’t sleep for his nerves. He sent his demo tape to some producer a couple of weeks ago. He’s on pins and needles waiting to hear. That’s why he left your bed last night.”

Pauline’s heavy sigh almost sounded like a tire going flat on the truck. “I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

“No, you always
want
to be right. There’s a difference.”

Pauline and I traveled in silence, then down the remainder of the long, straight gravel lane that parted the pastures and strips of hay, wheat, and corn. Far off to the southeast I could make out Ava’s Autumn Harvest.

We stopped in the gravel circle in front of our redbrick farmhouse and next to Mom’s SUV. The house was to the right or north of the gravel, and the big red barn with its attached creamery and other outbuildings sat to the south side of the gravel area.

Giving Pauline’s forearm a squeeze in friendship, I said, “Let’s see what Mom knows. She might have clues to solve this before the sheriff even has a chance to have his Sunday noonday meal.”

Pauline stared back at me, agape. “Sometimes you say the strangest things. Even I know what your mother must be doing inside your farmhouse.”

*   *   *

Mom was in the hallway between the living room and kitchen vacuuming the beige-carpeted stairs up to the second floor. She was still in her good church clothes—patent leather ballerina flats and a lovely muted forest green A-line, short-sleeved dress. It had a matching jacket, but that was tossed over the corner of a sofa in the living room. Her elbows jabbed the air as she pushed the sucking nozzle over the carpet.

“Mom!” I called above the noise.

I had to take the nozzle from her and turn off the vacuum.

“Mom, Pauline’s here. We went to Saint Mary’s. The body was Tristan Hardy.”

Mom fell into me, wrapping her arms around me. Her shoulder-length, wavy dark-brown hair fluffed about my face. “Oh, honey, no, not Cherry. I didn’t know. I got the heck out of there fast.” She let me go, taking back the hose and vacuum. She was gripping the appliance so hard that her fingers were white. “Please tell me the paramedics got there in time and shocked him or something.”

I grimaced.

Mom stared down at the vacuum. “He’s been here in our home as a guest with his professor friends and those PhD students from the university so many times. We’re all family. He was always working on new ways to manage our crops and pastures. And he liked my cheese curds. He and Professor Weaver always bought several bags to take back to their department.”

Pauline and I led her to the kitchen.

I said, “Let’s make some coffee.”

When we got to the kitchen, Mom set to work washing breakfast dishes by hand. There was no use reminding her she had an automatic dishwasher. I dried dishes while Pauline ground coffee beans and then plugged in the coffeemaker.