Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery (11 page)

M
ercy looked evil, dressed in a uniform black jacket over a gray blouse and gray pants.

“Want to try on an apron, Mercy? How about some coffee?” The last cup had been in the pot so long I hoped she’d taste its bitterness and flee. Mean of me, but I still couldn’t forgive Mercy for reporting Lucky Harbor’s presence in my shop to the state health inspectors.

Mercy had a small digital camera around her neck. A button on her jacket said B
IRD
P
EOPLE
A
RE
THE
R
EAL
T
WEETERS
.

“You’re here to buy fudge for your birding group today?”

Mercy huffed. “No. I was up at seven busing them around Door County, but that crap is over with. Dumped them off for a picnic lunch they’re having at Peninsula State Park. That’s why I’m here, honey bunny.”

“My name is Ava.”

“Ava Mathilde Oosterling. Yeah, yeah. I’m Mercy Annabelle Fogg. Now that we’ve got the niceties over with, I want to tell you that Lloyd’s murderer—your stupid girlie guest chef you hired—was on the lighthouse tower this a.m. at daybreak. It was almost like she was a bird singing about her guilt.”

Ah, it was Kelsey, and not Cody, she was calling a murderer. “Singing? On the lighthouse?”

“You heard me. What’s-her-face was up there. Let me show you.”

Mercy turned on her digital camera, then advanced the photos until she found one that showed the pink glow of sunrise on the vertical, squared edge of the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse tower. At the top, behind the railing, stood a slim person with blond hair. I saw no yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter at the bottom and asked Mercy about it.

“Kelsey King probably took it down herself.”

I stared at the photo, incredulous. “Maybe that’s not her. It’s hard to tell one blonde from the next.”

Mercy’s blue eyes burned into me. “I’ve got blond hair. You’re saying you can’t tell me from Miss Skinny Bones?”

“Point taken, Mercy.” The photo scared me, to be frank. This was a bold move to do at a crime scene. “Did you talk to her?”

“No. We were in the woods and we were headed the other way on Tramper’s Delight Trail. I was last on the trail and heard singing behind me. I looked back and there she was.”

“She was really singing?”

“Man, you don’t listen, do you? Talking to you is hard work.”

I pretty much deserved that remark. “Why did you rush to tell me this? Why not the sheriff? Or did you call Jordy already?”

“No, I didn’t. I . . . I forgot my wallet this morning with my driver’s license.”

A tickle came to my insides. I’d caught “Miss Perfect” Mercy Fogg in an indiscretion? I should have been jubilant. But darn, I went soft and felt sorry for her. Hadn’t we all forgotten our driver’s license at least once and driven illegally? Besides, maybe if I gave her this one she’d go easy on me the next time she caught me in one of my many mistakes or spotted Dillon’s dog licking the glass case or putting a paw on the edge of the marble table.

The photo didn’t convince me this was Kelsey King, though. “She was supposed to be working late at a new vegetarian restaurant I hooked her up with called Legumes and ’Toes in Egg Harbor. She’d be sleeping in.” The ’Toes stood for Potatoes.

“Oh, she was at Legs and Toes. But not cooking. I was there with Libby last night. They had a woman folksinger, but after she started, Kelsey came out of the kitchen, grabbed the guitar right from the woman, and began strumming and singing.”

“Yikes. That assignment was supposed to keep her out of trouble.”

“Afraid not. The other singer stalked off.”

“Was Kelsey any good?”

“Nobody barfed up their dinner.”

I squinted at the photo on the camera again. My body went cold. “We have to call the sheriff, in case she’s still out there.” I pulled up the ruffled apron skirt and retrieved my phone out of my shorts pocket. “I need to get out there. To talk to her.”

“You think she . . . ?” Mercy used a hand to mimic Kelsey diving to her death.

“Mercy, please don’t kid around. It’s slippery up there. Accidents happen. I’ll never live with myself if something happens to her.”

I tried Kelsey’s phone number. It flipped me to voice mail. I left a message for her to call me. “She’s obviously not dealing well with me or this fudge contest.”

“What did you do to her?”

I called nine-one-one. When I got off the phone, I realized my dilemma. I had no vehicle. I raced to Pauline and asked her to drive me out to the lighthouse.

“Sorry. John and I walked over here from his motel.”

Ugh again. She’d stayed with Mr. Hairy Toes at his motel last night. “Can you take over the registers?”

“What’re you up to?”

“Kelsey’s in trouble. Doing stupid things. Maybe because of me. She’s out at the lighthouse.”

“Doing what?”

“Playing detective maybe.”

“But you were suspicious of her.”

“I still am. She’s crazy and unpredictable. Pauline, this is serious. We have to hurry.”

Mercy said, “I’m going back to the park to pick up the bird-watchers.”

She was insinuating I could ride with her. Never.

“No, I can borrow my grandmother’s SUV.” But when I phoned, Grandma was gone and there was no answer. Obviously, she was still in church or somewhere with her phone turned off, maybe over at Libby Mueller’s house.

I knew that Dotty and Lois weren’t far away after leaving the fudge shop, so I phoned Dotty. They were happy to take over the cash registers. I felt a disaster coming on, but I had to trust them anyway.

Within the next minute Pauline and I were seated behind Mercy as she drove the yellow school bus a bit too fast out of the harbor’s parking lot. Squirrels dove under nearby cars.

Mercy turned onto Main Street in Fishers’ Harbor, slowing into the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit and coming to a dead stop in summer tourist traffic.

“Can’t you push it a little, Mercy?”

She couldn’t. But it gave me a moment to consider other suspects in Lloyd’s murder—the people who rented his properties on Main Street. They included a collection of artists in a couple of buildings, plus Travis Klubertanz and his wife, who ran the market, and Milton Hendrickson—the elderly gentleman who ran The Wise Owl Bookstore. Pauline knew the artists because they often taught art over at the school; she said they seemed solid and happy with their rent arrangement with Lloyd. I knew Travis; a busy young father working a small farm plus a grocery and with little kids didn’t have time for murder. I also couldn’t imagine elderly Milton tossing anything heavier than a book off the lighthouse tower. Milton was also part of the group of guys that played cards with my grandfather and Lloyd.

We weaved around Dillon’s construction equipment.

Pauline asked, “When will the construction ever end?”

Mercy and I said simultaneously, “We have two seasons in Wisconsin. Winter and construction.” It was a common saying.

As Mercy navigated the bus northward to the edge of town, I worried about Kelsey King out at the park. Or whoever it was. It didn’t make sense that if she was up late cooking or singing at Legumes and ’Toes, she’d be up this morning early to go to the tower.

I must have mumbled that out loud because Pauline said, “Unless she was snooping around and making sure they didn’t find her lined paper and crayons.”

“Maria and Jordy surely would have found those things by now.”

Mercy said, “Libby told me all about the note.”

“You two are good friends,” I said, hoping for more information. “Even though there’s a good difference in your ages. She’s much older than you.” I said that to butter up Mercy. Libby was in her early sixties, only slightly older than Mercy. “How’d you and Libby meet?”

“On a gambling bus heading for the Oneida Casino.”

“You still go?” I recalled how sad the gambling had made Lloyd.

“Not so much. We go over to the Troubled Trout now and then. You been there lately?”

“No.”

Mercy eased the bus around a car being parallel-parked. “You should go. You’d be surprised what you can put money on these days.”

Pauline said, “The last time Ava gambled, she ended up with a bigamist, a divorce, and then an annulment and no money.”

“But I learned to write TV scripts and make fudge,” I countered. “And I can navigate the L.A. freeways.” I turned to Mercy, or more correctly, the back of her blond head. “You’d enjoy the challenge of driving a bus out in L.A., Mercy.”

“No, thanks.”

I agreed with her. Five blocks and only a couple of lanes of traffic in our little town was a picnic compared to clogged six-lane freeways.

We beat the local officers to the park.

The yellow tape was gone from around the lighthouse, just as Mercy’s photo had showed. The tape was balled up under a bush near the split-rail fence.

I headed to the solid green front door of the gift shop, where I almost fell on my butt after trying the doorknob. The place was locked. “She must be here yet.” I slapped on the door and yelled, “Kelsey?”

Pauline asked, “You’re assuming she had a key and just waltzed in?”

“She got up to the top of that tower somehow. Let’s go around back.”

Mercy said, “I’m not going. Libby told me all about how Lloyd had looked.”

The vision of Lloyd splayed on his back with his arm crooked and under him came back to me. I shook off goose pimples forming. “Pauline, come on.”

Pauline looked down at me. “Maybe we should wait for Jordy.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Kelsey might still be up on the tower and need talking down.” I ran around back.

Pauline and Mercy trotted behind me, our footfalls crunching in the gravel.

There was no one on the ground, to our relief.

We looked up. We didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean Kelsey wasn’t crouched on the outdoor deck on the other side and trying to avoid us.

“Kelsey!” I called again.

There was no response, but then Mercy said, “There!” She pointed toward the nearby woods and Tramper’s Delight Trail.

A figure was disappearing into the brush. I took up the chase.

* * *

A siren wailed in the distance as Pauline and I raced down the park’s woodland trail. Mercy stayed behind.

After a small bend in the trail, I glimpsed Kelsey or whoever it was duck into the understory.

Pauline said, puffing beside me, “We’re going to lose her.”

“No, we’re not.”

But we did. Thick ferns and brush and prickly downed fir trees pushed back at us. We came to a halt amid mosquitoes and black flies attacking us for their lunch.

A rustling from afar put me in motion again. “Come on.” As I pushed at an opening in the brush, I called out, “Kelsey? Stop! Kelsey, we can work this out!”

We scrambled through thorny berry bushes snagging our clothes and loose hair.

“Let’s go back,” Pauline said. “Let her go.”

“No, Pauline. We’re closing in.” I could still hear branches slapping in the near distance ahead of us.

We came to a deer trail where the footing was easier. We were huffing pretty hard by now, but I forced myself to run faster. We had to pause to step over downed limbs and even a small birch tree trunk, rotted just enough to be shedding its white bark in sheets that made footing slippery. Something was grunting and flailing about in the woods not too far from us.

“Kelsey?”

In a small clearing we came upon Lucky Harbor playing with an old rope maybe five feet in length. He whipped it about as if it were a snake he was trying to kill. As soon as he saw us, he barreled at me, leaping up on me with his front paws on my blouse, leaving green grass stains. He was wet and covered in cockleburs.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “You’re supposed to be on a boat fishing and finding shipwrecks in Lake Michigan.”

Pauline cried out, “Something’s happened to John. They had to come back because John’s sick, or worse. I need to get back. Crap, I left my purse on the bus.”

“Pauline, get a grip. I’ll call Dillon.”

My phone was always in my pocket. When I called Dillon, I found out that Lucky Harbor had jumped ship right in the harbor as usual to chase frogs. Dillon had been just about to call me to watch for him. The men were okay and the
Super Catch I
was closing in on a shallow shipwreck site in Lake Michigan. John had had his first diving lesson and had done well.

Pauline held a hand over her heart while breathing hard from our exertion. “John isn’t careful, you know. He doesn’t think things through.”

I was picking burrs out of Lucky Harbor’s curly fur and tossing them far into the underbrush. “That’s an understatement. What is it exactly that you see in him? You two are such opposites.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“Is this a serious relationship?” I let the dog go for a romp.

“What are you getting at?”

I couldn’t bear to broach the “marriage” word. “I was going to say something about messy, sloppy John not deserving you, but you’re more a mess right now than he usually is.”

“You, too.”

Our shorts had threads torn from them, our legs and arms were striped with bloody scratches, and her red hoodie had been plastered with some sort of sticky weed seeds.

The dog brought the rope to me. By now it was pretty slobbery. I told him, “No. Drop it.”

He did.

Pauline said, “Dillon’s done a good job with him. You, too. You make a nice threesome.” She had one of her devil looks.

“Stop it, Pauline.”

“If Laura and I can’t get you to pick a date via picking fabric swatches, then maybe we can use this dog. Dogs are good judges of people.”

“If that’s true, I must remind you that the dog keeps running
away
from Dillon, not
to
Dillon. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

“You’re going to have to choose somebody for that prom next Saturday night.”

“If there is one. Kelsey is nuts and maybe she murdered Lloyd Mueller because she was upset about this fudge contest and Lloyd spurning her overtures to hook up.”

“Nobody murders somebody for refusing to have sex with them.”