First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery (9 page)

A
t six a.m. on a Tuesday, Fishers’ Harbor is usually dead. Weekenders have gone home, and the next long weekenders don’t arrive until Thursday. During the summer tourist season, a Tuesday might be flush with visitors, but not in May. Except today. This Tuesday our little bait and fudge shop was packed. With women.

After entering through the back door, I was hit in the noggin’ by the aromas of peanut butter, maple, and butterscotch. The women were melting all kinds of chips to make fudge. That baby-powdery scent that older women always seem to have also laced the air. The women were all shapes and with hair mostly the color of pewter candlesticks, though a dyed redhead dotted the room here and there. They squeezed past one another in my small galley kitchen with bellies and butts rubbing as they made coffee and drizzled warm icing onto cinnamon buns. Others were using the counters to cut into pans of lemon bars and microwaved fudge made last night in kitchens all over Door County.

I was dressed in my serviceable and dull blue jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved white blouse. They looked like a flock of colorful birds in their various sweatshirts and sweaters adorned with wildlife scenes or Green Bay Packers logos. Here and there a gold necklace or a strand of pearls accented their outfits.

The women ignored me, giving orders to one another while sipping coffee in between gossiping about people I didn’t know. I felt foreign, like a gauzy ghost passing through a dream.

When I left the kitchen and made it into the main part of the store, more shock slammed me. They’d turned the bait and fudge shop into a . . . church bazaar!

Where my copper kettles used to sit, the women had set up four six-foot folding tables, likely brought from a church basement. The tables nearest me were mounded with homemade clothing—like beer can hats made from slicing up the logo portions of cans and then knitting them together with yarn to form the shape of fishermen’s hats. There were also piles of crocheted doilies, tablecloths, and pillowcases, including ones with Green Bay Packer green-and-gold logos. Another table held homemade felt flower pins, hair combs with yarn doodads on them, and crocheted crosses used as Bible bookmarks. And, yes, there was fudge, but not nearly as much as the plates of cookies, including chocolate chip, peanut butter, and oatmeal with raisins. I saw pies, too, and smelled them, including fresh-baked rice pie—a local specialty made with thick cream and lots of eggs. The end of one table held seedling tomato plants that one of these ladies had likely started in her house for spring planting.

Women scurried about folding things; then other women slipped in behind the first ones to refold the same things and fuss with the stack so it was just so.

My sales counter had been taken over by three women putting prices on colored paper dots. Three other ladies hurried to place those dots on the goods on the tables.

Rising on tiptoe, I saw my grandfather over at his register on his phone. He was pale, shell-shocked, too, obviously. Tables had also been set up in his portion of the place. I made my way over to him. He put down the phone to scowl at me.

“Gilpa, I’ll get rid of them. Don’t worry. And please don’t blame Grandma. I take full responsibility for this, this”—I looked around—“whatever it is.”

“Call it a starstruck party. They’re here because of that movie star. They were waiting on the dock when I opened at five, all asking questions about what she was like. I wasn’t even at the damn party.”

The curse word jolted me. Gilpa swore only when something got serious. He slapped through the pages of a tattered phone book we rarely used.

I flinched, but then I thought about Grandma Sophie calling on these women as a big favor to help me. “Maybe you’ll sell out of everything today.”

“These women aren’t here to buy bobbers to put in their hair.”

He had a point, but I persisted. “We’ll just have to coax the men in the door somehow.”

Gilpa growled, his oily fingers smudging the yellow pages.

“Who are you looking up?” I asked.

“Attorneys. I’m not sure what kind I’m supposed to get for our situation. Criminal attorneys? Probably criminally expensive. Or maybe we need a business or municipal attorney who can help us fight off Mercy Fogg if she comes sniffing around again wanting to shut us down.”

“Maybe there’s such a thing as a fudge attorney?”

Gilpa looked up with pinched, silver eyebrows, but then he let loose with the biggest grin. “Ah, Ava honey, your fudge needs no defense. It’s pure magic.”

We hugged. He smelled of bacon from breakfast along with a tonic of gasoline and crankcase oil. I asked, “You’ve been working on the boat already this morning?”

“If I don’t get it working by this coming weekend for the outings for Mother’s Day, my heinie’s in a sling for sure.”

I knew he didn’t want to say he couldn’t afford a new boat, so I said, “Maybe it’s time to think about partnering with Moose Lindstrom.”

“That young punk of a Swede? He’s not even of Social Security age yet.”

Moose was Carl Lindstrom, a tall, barrel-chested guy, and he’d just turned sixty, two years shy of qualifying for his first Social Security check. Not that Moose needed money. He’d had a birthday party on his new charter fishing boat last week, the
Super Catch I
, which sat at the far end of the harbor. You can see his boat through our windows, its riggings and captain’s crow’s nest sitting high and pretty. Although Gilpa had refused to set foot on the
Super Catch I
, I had. It’s a thirty-two-foot Grady-White with autopilot, with real-time weather and sea conditions delivered by satellite, air-conditioning, and even an iPod stereo system. It made Gilpa’s old boat,
Sophie’s Journey
, look like a Conestoga wagon out of an old Western movie.

Things were rough enough at the moment with all the women taking over his bait shop, so I steered us back to safe ground. “We’re going to make magic in the shop today, Gilpa. I’m making more Cinderella Pink Fudge today. Grandma said I have to put on a show, and she’s right. We’ll sell tons of fudge and start our season together flush with cash.”

His brown eyes twinkled with hazel green highlights in their irises. “We Oosterlings are fighters.”

He tousled my hair, which I’d forgotten to comb or put up; I promptly whipped it into a twist atop my head. I hauled myself across the store to swipe a hair comb with a yellow felt flower in it to hold my hair in place.

Next, I took charge. I flung a long apron over my head. With the ladies’ help, I made room for a copper kettle and my double boiler near the window north of the door to the docks. Passersby would see the show and thus be enticed in to buy fudge and beer can hats and maybe even bobbers and beer from Gilpa.

By seven thirty, the giant double boiler was cooking with twelve pounds of sugar, more than two whole quarts of cream from my parents’ cows, and all the white chocolate I’d bought yesterday at the farmer’s market and the Luscious Ladle. With vanilla and red cherry juice added, the ingredients soon infused the shop with a savory bouquet. I felt official when I rolled up my sleeves, put the chef’s hat on my head, then stirred with my four-foot walnut wood paddle.

Several of the women clapped.

Sam showed up then, wending his way from the back toward me. He’d obviously come in the back door thinking he’d avoid the crowd. A mistake. He wore a tie, which was already askew and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. He was wiggling a finger for me to join him outside. I knew right away something awful had happened to Cody Fjelstad. A couple of ladies were happy to take over stirring the bubbling fudge potion.

Out front, in a refreshing, misty fog and the hint of a warmer day, I took off my hat as Sam led me several yards down the wood plank pier that jutted out over the water where Gilpa’s crippled charter boat sat.

With dread, I asked Sam, “What did Mercy do now?”

“Mercy?” Sam asked, perplexed.

“I saw her having dinner last night with Cody up in Sister Bay at Al Johnson’s.”

Sam straightened his tie, his mouth agape as he digested the odd news. He wore a white shirt and tan pants. Everything about him was neat except the troubled look in his blue eyes. “Cody never went home last night. His parents called me a half hour ago. When he was late getting up for school, Arlene went in to wake him up and found his bed hadn’t been slept in.”

My mouth went dry. “You have to call Mercy. Maybe he stayed at her house.”

He called her, then pocketed his phone with a sour face. “He’s not there. She said he was very upset with you. What happened?”

“Nothing. But maybe he saw me spying on him at the restaurant.” I felt horrible. I worried my hat with my hands.

Sam whirled on his heels in clear disgust. “I have to make a report about this, you know.”

“Leave my name out of your report.”

“You want me to lie.”

“Yes.”

His eyelids flared and his blue eyes took on the intensity of a mad bull. But I had the oddest reaction; heat galloped across my body. It was a little sexy the way Sam Peterson had just made my heart race. I didn’t want to feel this way toward him.

I pleaded, “You have to speak with Mercy again. I think she was giving Cody a gift last night for all the wrong reasons, and it was an expensive watch. Maybe something with diamonds.”

“What?”

“It sparkled way too much to be an ordinary watch. Mercy had gone up those stairs with Rainetta on Sunday and then Mercy disappeared. She might have stolen things from Rainetta and gone down the back stairs.”

Sam paled, backing up just enough to scare me, but he didn’t fall into the water. The mist feathered around us in gray, gossamer strips. He said, “I have to talk to Mercy.”

He trotted back up the pier, making it bounce under my feet. Sam never panicked, but he was clearly upset now. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t telling me everything he’d seen or done that afternoon with Rainetta when he was upstairs with her. Had Sam and Mercy witnessed something together? For some reason, in my head I’d been imagining each of them alone with Rainetta. But now I wondered about that.

A woman’s voice called to me through the mist, “Your fudge keeps wanting to boil over!”

Oh shoot. I’d forgotten the church-lady invasion. I ran as fast as I could, slapping my chef’s hat back on.

• • •

Church ladies were all about prayer and money. Don’t let them fool you about being humble and charitable. They liked the
ka-ching
of pennies in copper kettles, the smell of folding money, and the zippery sound of a credit card sliding through a card reader. More of them arrived while my fudge ingredients were cooling for a few minutes in the copper kettle. The sea of gray heads and fancy sweatshirts soon had red hats bobbing in it when a busload of the Red Hat Society arrived from Sturgeon Bay for a sojourn in Fishers’ Harbor.

My grandfather slipped out unseen, probably after a drop-and-roll maneuver to avoid all the hats, hair combs, and henna rinses that could rub off on his clothes and stain worse than the crankcase oil already under his fingernails. A couple of fishermen stepped into Oosterlings’ looking thirsty, then pivoted, about to slink out. I rushed over with a six-pack of beer, took their money; then they left. The next man we saw was Jeremy Stone.

When a broad smile curved up under his crooked nose, I wanted to kick him in his derriere, but I’d already tied on a long apron and was whipping my fudge mixture with what amounts to a long-handled metal spatula. It was flexible on the end so that it could scrape every bit of delicious chocolate off the sides of the copper kettle.

Once you started whipping in the copper kettles, you couldn’t stop for fear of ruining the fudge crystals. I was missing my apprentice in a big way. Cody could easily take over the whipping; I couldn’t trust any of these older ladies to do the task. They’d surely stop willy-nilly to sip coffee and gossip, wasting my money and time spent gathering the ingredients for Cinderella Pink Fudge.

Jeremy Stone took photos of the whole hullabaloo, finally focusing on my whipping procedure. Sweat trickled down my back. I was forced to smile for him, which pained me.

“Can I taste it?” he asked.

“No,” I said, purposely short with him.

“Quite a crowd. What’s your estimate?”

“We might be able to hold a couple dozen people usually; this has to be twice that.”

“I counted more than sixty. You’re to be congratulated on the idea.”

His compliment—which I didn’t deserve because this was Grandma Sophie’s idea—almost made me stop stirring, but I couldn’t. My shoulders ached. I glanced at the old clock over the door. I had ten more minutes to go. I pulled the stirring spatula into the air to check the consistency. A long, three-foot column of pure pink chocolate—like a stalagmite meeting a stalactite—whirled in front of me. Again and again, up into the air I lifted the drizzle of pale pink perfection. The air grew so thick with the aroma of the chocolate-cherry confection that you could taste it by breathing. I explained to Jeremy the close relationship between breathing in aromas and the ten thousand taste buds that each of us has. Taste is the weakest of the five senses, but what we smell enhances the taste. I threw in the fact that fish can taste with their fins and tails, which the crowd seemed to enjoy learning.