First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (4 page)

With a sigh I also noticed that the loaf of pink fudge had disappeared off my marble table. I rushed to my copper kettles; all the dry fudge ingredients there were gone. The wall shelves were empty. On them I featured the standard fudges to just give me a reason to open my business—double chocolate, caramel, peanut butter, butterscotch, maple, and cookies and cream. I had also made a couple of male varieties. The deputy had cleaned me out.

He’d also rubbed some chemical on my marble slab and in the copper pans I used to make my fudge. A whiff of something akin to nose-burning solvents ruined the air and obliterating the smells of chocolate and vanilla. Everything would have to be cleaned and sterilized.

I pushed up my sleeves. I still wore my cherry-stained apron that I’d had on all day. I untied it and balled it up, tossing it aside. I grabbed a fresh apron from a closet behind the cash register.

Pauline said, “What are you doing?”

“Making more fudge. Wanna help?”

“I don’t want to be arrested, so no. Besides, I’m tired.”

She’d missed the party because it took her three hours to hang book titles and character names from the ceilings of her classroom.

“How could teaching reading be more important than the debut of my Cinderella Pink Fudge and Cinderella being under suspicion for murder?”

“Stop it, Ava. There’s no need to take my head off.”

“All right. Sorry, but . . .” Belgians are stubborn. We hate losing. Pauline was Belgian, too, so our squabbles could go on for days just on principle.

I finished tying on the fresh apron. “Sorry, Pauline, but this always happens to me. You know it does. As soon as something good comes to me in my life, I’m guaranteed to have something bad happen.”

“Nothing bad happened to you. The only ‘bad’ thing is the bad heart that woman evidently had.”

“No, my fudge is gone. That’s very bad. I’m making fudge this instant to bring back good karma. Eating fudge is all about having good karma. Besides, I can’t let Gilpa see these empty shelves and copper kettles. He’ll lose all faith in me and plunk fishing lures in the space.”

“Tell him you sold all the fudge.”

“Lies are mortal sins. I don’t have time to go to confession.”

Pauline muttered something that wasn’t fit for kindergarteners, but she followed me to the back room.

My cleaning and cooking supplies had been pawed through. Plus, to my chagrin, whoever had been poking around for poison had taken my bottles of vanilla extract. “Crap. That was the expensive stuff.”

A quick glance in the refrigerator revealed they’d taken my milk, sour cream, and buttermilk—ingredients for my fudge and all fresh from my parents’ farm down near Brussels in the county. I checked my chocolate bins; the imported Belgian bulk dark chocolate was gone, too. That cost a fortune.

“Why would they take that? Do they believe I sent all the way to Belgium for poison?”

“They were likely hungry. Better for their hearts than doughnuts.”

“I can’t make my fudge until I reorder supplies and my Belgian chocolate. The sign outside says ‘Belgian’ fudge, not ‘ordinary’! I’m ruined, done for, cut down in my prime!”

Pauline grabbed me, flipping me around to face her. I expected her to slap me, but she didn’t. She said in a soothing voice, “Hey, let it go for tonight. Let’s go to your place to regroup. I’ll make you hot cocoa. We’ll wait there to hear from your grandfather.”

For a startling moment I realized that in my selfish need to rail at the world I’d forgotten about Gilpa’s plight. I forced myself to breathe. “Wow. Sorry. That’s why I needed to move back here from Los Angeles. I just sounded like the producer I worked for on that crappy TV show.”

My dream of becoming a writer had become one of my infamous spontaneous combustions, like my marriage. The experience of working in TV production was still too raw to talk about, and a wish that I’d done better lingered inside of me; nobody but Pauline knew I was basically licking my wounds. When my grandmother Sophie Oosterling had broken her leg three weeks ago, my dad had called me to say she and Gilpa needed somebody to help them and would I consider coming home?

Of course I leaped at the chance to help my beloved grandparents, but only Pauline knew I was probably going to be fired from the half-hour TV comedy
The Topsy-Turvy Girls
after this season’s low ratings. The show starred two young women like me and Pauline, trying to find love and success. The script that got me on the show was based on my very odd divorce circumstances. By the fifth year working for the show, I was beginning to run out of ideas based on my experiences or lack thereof in the realms of romance and success. The only good thing about the TV experience was that as my writing assignments decreased, the executive producer had put me in charge of buying the treats for the cast table. They thought I got the stuff from fancy chefs. I pocketed the cash and made what made me hunger for home—homemade fudge. At least the fudge was a hit.

Then, last Christmas, when I was home and making fudge from my grandma Sophie’s recipe, she and Gilpa offhandedly said that I should start my own business making candy. When I came home two weeks ago, I was surprised to find out that my grandparents and my parents had been scouring the county and beyond for secondhand equipment for my business—should I ever end up moving back to the Midwest. Between the time I’d said yes to coming back and my arrival in Fishers’ Harbor just days later, my grandfather and dad had remade the bait shop.

Pauline and I went to my rental place in the small enclave of fishers’ cottages behind the bait shop to share my misery over cocoa. Gilpa and Grandma Sophie owned one of the cottages across the narrow street and west from me. My rental sat right behind my fudge shop. The cottages were log cabins that had been built in the 1800s by the Belgians, Finns, and Swedes who came to Wisconsin for a new life based on fishing and lumbering.

“Have you called your parents?” Pauline asked.

“No way. This will blow over like that storm outside.”

My parents, Pete and Florine, were dairy farmers down in Brussels, a town in the southern area of the county. My parents supplied all the dairy products that made my Belgian fudge unique and tasty. Mom and Dad were salt-of-the-earth folks, expert farmers and proud of what they did. They had not liked me running off to Vegas and then to Los Angeles after the divorce. They’d felt I was abandoning them and my heritage. They had expected me to join them to milk cows, raise calves and my own kids. And here I was, back for only two weeks—working alongside Grandpa and helping Grandma, which was all good—then bam, something bad happens and I’m accused of murder. My same old pattern. Good, then bad.

“I doubt a murder will blow over,” Pauline said. “Jeremy Stone will issue his ‘Fatal Fudge Flames out Forgotten Film Star’ front-page headline tomorrow all over the Web.”

“Thanks for making me feel even worse.” I set my cup of cocoa down in disgust on the table by my chair. We were in the living room area with the fireplace roaring.

Pauline said, “You should call or e-mail Stone. Give him your side to the story right away. Tell him how sorry you are she died of a heart attack.”

“We don’t know yet how she died,” I said, tapping my fingers on the chair arms, feeling increasingly on edge.

“Tomorrow’s Monday. The medical examiner will be back in the office then, and he’ll have it all solved. However, Stone will have already run his ‘FFFFF’ story in the morning paper, which will be too late for you if you wait to talk with him. You’ll be drowning in your ‘miasma.’ You always do things spontaneously, so talk to him now.”

That brightened my mood a smidgen. “You’re right. I can remind him to wait for the medical examiner’s report. My family’s name will be saved from the muck.”

“I just said that.”

“You said ‘miasma,’ not ‘muck.’” Stubborn Belgian.

I dragged my laptop onto my lap, punched myself online, found his e-mail address at the newspaper Web site, then shot off an e-mail to Mr. Stone. I could almost visualize him in the Blue Heron Inn, just above us on the bluff, reading my message. I felt better already.

But he shot back a message instantly that said, “Some years ago arsenic was found in well water in an area of Door County. You were here at that time. What area was that?”

I almost threw my laptop into the fire. But instead I snapped it shut, then set it aside.

Pauline asked, “What’s wrong? What’d he say?”

“Damn man thinks I used arsenic in my fudge!”

“So maybe we should go up to the inn and talk to him in person.”

“No, Pauline. Everything I touch right now turns out unlucky. He had a crooked nose that looked as if he’d been a boxer. He’s used to fighting. He’ll punch out my lights.” I got up, though, and said, “The person we need to see is Ranger. I need to go apologize and make sure he’s all right.”

“And maybe find out if he accidentally put something in the fudge?” Pauline shot me a plaintive look.

My heart ached. If Ranger was responsible for Rainetta Johnson’s death, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Ranger, or Cody Fjelstad, had been hanging around the bait shop off and on for a couple of winters, anytime he and his dad came in for bait for ice fishing. I’d met him a couple of times when I’d come home for holidays. Ranger liked the bait shop. And like me, he liked a little sparkle in life and fun. We’d become fast friends almost the instant Sam Peterson fixed him up with the job working for me.

“Come on,” I said to Pauline, grabbing my red jacket. “I’ll need your support.”

• • •

The clouds parted as we wended our way in my recently acquired, used, yellow Chevy pickup truck through the back streets to get to the Fjelstads. I’d loved the cheery, bright color of the truck when I’d bought it; now I was self-conscious about its flashiness. I expected people to line the streets to point fingers.
Look at the fudge murderer!
But it was five o’clock, dinner hour for a lot of people around here, so the streets were nearly empty.

Arlene Fjelstad met us at the door. She had puffy eyelids and shiny wet cheeks. I smelled hamburgers frying on a stove.

“Hi, Arlene,” I managed. “Is Ranger here? I’d like to talk with him.”

“No, he’s not.” She swiped at her tears.

“He’ll be at work tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. My husband had to pick him up at the sheriff’s department and then pick up some new medications for him.”

I felt ill. Evidently Ranger’s time at the jail didn’t go well. Pauline just stood there beside me, looking down at us, no help at all.

I said, “I’m sorry. Ranger makes good fudge. He’s a great wrapper, too. Everything will be okay tomorrow when he gets back to work.” That sounded lame. Nothing would be okay. I had no idea what to do, though, to make things better. “He can take a day off. He doesn’t have to come by in the morning. He can just sleep in and go to school instead. I don’t have any supplies, and it’ll take me a day to go get those or have them delivered.”

“He won’t want to go to school to be laughed at.” Her entire face wrinkled up like cracked glass that would break into a thousand pieces at any second. “He was doing so well.”

My anger with the sheriff rushed back into me with the force of a Lake Michigan storm tide. “Everything will be normal tomorrow. They’ll find out that there’s nothing wrong with the fudge. It was a horrible thing, but sometimes people . . . expire. And the sheriff made a mistake taking Ranger down to Sturgeon Bay. A simple mistake. Ranger will come to understand.”

“Understand what?” Arlene cried out. “That he can’t trust anybody? He trusted you. I trusted you because you’re an Oosterling. That was my mistake.” Arlene closed the door.

Pauline was biting her lower lip, looking as lost as I felt.

I said, “Ranger hates his medications, Pauline. Says he’s not normal when he has to take pills. He was thinking he could get off his meds.”

“But the medications help him.”

“He wants to be normal.” A whimper drifted off my lips. “I have to fix this.”

“Everything will be back to normal tomorrow. You said so. Believe in that.”

But it wasn’t. Ranger didn’t show up in the shop on Monday. Pauline called me during her kindergarten class’s nap break to report that Ranger hadn’t shown up at school, as predicted by his mother.

I snuck into my shop to clean up things, defying the sheriff’s orders to stay out. I started on Gilpa’s side, putting packaged snacks back on their hooks. Gilpa and the four guests had been rescued by the Coast Guard in the wee early-morning hours. They’d drifted over to the protection of the Chambers Island Lighthouse, which was the good part.

A ruddy-faced Gilpa, with his uncombed silver thatch of hair making him look like he had horns, passed through the shop growling about it being closed, growling over getting no sleep, growling at the poor fishing weather. He didn’t even look at me. That sucked something out of my soul. I suspected he was totally embarrassed and his pride hurt from his old boat’s engines giving out on him, but most of all he was disappointed in me.

My parents found out about everything, too, and they ragged at me over the phone as if I were one of Pauline’s kindergarten kids. I hadn’t yet talked with Grandma Sophie but would have to face her judgment later when I went over to tidy up and wash dishes for her.