Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery (21 page)

* * *

When Sheriff Tollefson and I arrived at the fudge shop close to one o’clock, Cody was running a fudge-making show that was delighting the tourists. Kelsey and Piers were stirring new batches of fudge in the copper kettles—and both of the confectioners had on frilly aprons. Piers’s stout frame was pretty funny in a lacy pink pinafore apron. He wore a matching toque on his head. They looked innocent—by design?

Cody’s girlfriend, Bethany, stood between the dueling chefs in a powder blue apron, helping three of Pauline’s kindergarten Butterfly girls stir fudge ingredients. All three girls had their hands on one four-foot wooden ladle. The girls, too, wore aprons, which had obviously been pinned in the straps to help them fit their tiny statures. They could barely reach over the lip of the kettle. The ladle looked like a giant oar and they were rowing in a chocolate lake. Little Verona Klubertanz was standing in front of her three friends and the copper kettle reciting the fairy tale “Rapunzel.”

The story of “Rapunzel” is a pretty grim Grimm’s fairy tale. An evil enchantress steals a girl child and locks her in a tower, and when she’s a teenager a prince tries to help the captured girl escape. But the evil enchantress blinds him with thorns. I was a little shocked that little Verona knew the gruesome story by heart, but I had to remind myself that kids liked being scared and the story had a happy ending I couldn’t recall. Right now I had other things on my mind, like solving a murder committed by the very woman standing there next to Pauline’s kindergarten students in my shop. As far as I was concerned, Kelsey was the evil enchantress who had done away with a prince—Lloyd Mueller. Instead of using thorns, she’d poisoned him with mushrooms.

Jordy managed to catch Kelsey’s attention.

She flounced outside with us in the yellow apron I’d worn once. It almost matched her long blond hair. We sat a few yards from the shop on the picnic table, with Kelsey facing us and the sun. Boaters coming and going and the hubbub of the harbor continued behind her.

Jordy said, “Have you been in the woods lately, Miss King?”

Kelsey flipped her long tresses back off her shoulders. “You know darn well I’ve been in the woods. Looking for ingredients to cook in my fudge. But I promised not to pick anything illegal.”

I said, “Mushrooms are legal.”

She contorted her face. “Why would I pick mushrooms?”

“Kelsey, cut the crap. You’ve been following me. Pauline and I saw you running in the woods. You ran from Lloyd Mueller’s house this morning, I bet. You shot at me and Sam at the lighthouse last night after dark.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Jordy asked, “Can you prove that?”

She had to think too long. “I didn’t do those things. Honest.”

I said, “You were singing on the lighthouse the other morning. Mercy Fogg saw you. The singing was just a ruse to cover up something. You were at the lighthouse making sure you’d cleaned up any evidence left behind. Did you search the grounds, too, for any box of rifle ammunition you might have left behind? How about a piece of fudge not finished because you suddenly got interrupted for some reason in your plot to murder Lloyd?”

She paled. Was she guilty or just good at looking like a confused fish caught in a net, which I would have to throw back in the water?

She said, “I was singing because I like to sing. It’s fun to sing on top of a tower like that, and inside, too. Libby gave me a key to get in to practice. Honest, I didn’t shoot at you. I hate guns.” She licked her lips, blinking several times.

Either she was a good actress or her distress was real. I sided with actress for now.

She said, “I can prove I wasn’t in the woods doing anything wrong or shooting at you.”

“How?”

“Somebody set up a trail camera in the park around the lighthouse sometime. I saw cameras when I was out looking for dirt to cook with.” She added, looking at Jordy, “I’m not taking dirt anymore. The trail cameras will prove I was only singing.” She described two locations for cameras, both in the woods near the lighthouse.

Jordy let Kelsey go back to making fudge.

He said, “I’ve never heard of cameras there. I’ll call the DNR and lighthouse society to see if those cameras are something new they just put up. They always let us know where those are and when they install them. Probably in my paperwork waiting for me on my desk.”

“We could find our killer this afternoon, Jordy.”

“We?”

I shrugged at him.

Trail cameras use infrared night vision and tell you what time the photos are snapped. A lot of rural residents here used them to see what kind of critters walked by the house at night. It was entertainment.

Jordy and I got up from the picnic table as a seagull swooped in to beg. I tossed one of Lucky Harbor’s crackers into the lake for the bird. It flapped away to get the treat just as Lucky Harbor came from nowhere to launch into the water to gulp at the cracker. The seagull screeched in disgust at his loss. Lucky Harbor hauled himself ashore in the reeds past my grandfather’s dead boat, then came over to shake, spraying my fancy dress and dousing Jordy’s uniform.

Jordy said good-bye and then sauntered back to the squad car.

Lucky Harbor wagged his tail while he panted at me, looking up at me with his doggy smile.

I was about to call Dillon about his dog when Pauline pulled into the parking lot and then came running.

“Why haven’t you been answering your phone? Laura’s in the hospital.”

“She’s having the twins?”

“I don’t know. Maybe worse. She fainted. I found her on the floor of the Luscious Ladle and called an ambulance.”

O
osterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge & Beer was in good hands with Cody and Bethany, so I changed clothes and hopped into the passenger side of Pauline’s small sedan to head to the hospital to see Laura Rousseau. Lucky Harbor wanted to go with us, but cookbooks already took up the backseat.

As we drove through Main Street, Lucky Harbor followed us, catching up with Dillon, who was working with Al. Melancholy struck me. Dillon’s reason for being here would be over soon. Then what for us? The memory of the kiss in the rose garden lingered, as did the fun ride in his mother’s car, his apologies, his changed ways.

Because of the heavy traffic, Pauline took side streets to skirt around town. We were out in the countryside, passing the turnoff to St. Ann’s, when she said, “I bet you thought you were clever, leaving me stranded at the church with Parker Balusek.”

“Didn’t you talk basketball?”

“I’m not going to date Parker. My kindergarteners won’t like it.”

“It’s great alliteration. P and P, Parker and Pauline.”

“They’ll giggle over it being pee and pee.”

“Well, John Schultz is worse. That’s Pauline Mertens Schultz. PMS. The junior high kids will scrawl that on your dusty car windows.”

“I’ll be able to handle that. If he proposes to me.”

“If? Is there trouble in paradise?”

Her arms went stiff against the steering wheel. “He’s obsessed with diving suddenly, especially now that Professor Faust is excited about it, too.”

“The professor wants to write something other than cookbooks so he can please his faculty buddies.”

“It pleases John, evidently, more than I do. Now he’s planning two TV food and travel shows. You saw him at the funeral. He didn’t even sit by me. He was too busy with his camera. Why would he want to videotape a casket rolling through a church?”

Because he murdered the man?
No. But maybe he inadvertently helped the murderer. My heart beat faster. “I’ve got something to tell you about John.”

She flashed me a hopeful look. “Did he buy me a ring? He asked you for my size?”

Oh dear.
Her question made me remember that we had to find that box with the ring in it. I didn’t care what was inside it anymore, though. I had a hunch that whoever had it was the murderer. But I had to lie for now. “I missed him in the church basement, but the church ladies said he had a certain look in his eyes. They were tittering.”

“Tittering?” Her voice went up an octave. “Maybe they teased him about having a reception for our wedding in that church basement.”

Pauline was a lost cause. A sick feeling came over me. I popped a couple of Goldfish crackers to settle my stomach and keep my mouth shut.

* * *

At the hospital, a couple of nurses called me by my first name. I’d obviously been here too many times lately.

We found Laura flat on her back in a bed with her legs elevated. Monitors blipped next to her. She was awake. Her short blond bob had fanned out in angelic fashion on the small pillow.

“How ya doin’?” I asked, rubbing her arm in greeting as I sat down in a chair on the near side of her bed.

“Bored,” she said. “The babies seem to be settling down.”

Pauline took the other side of the bed. “That’s good. I found you on the floor in that room you’re fixing up. Do you remember anything?”

Laura winced, rubbing her mounded belly. “Not much. I went to see how Piers was doing. He was carrying some kind of a box, but I was behind him.”

“A box?” I shot up from the chair. “What’d it look like?”

“I didn’t see it clearly, but I swear he fumbled with the lid to toss a ring in it.”

“A ring! It’s our box. What type of ring?”

“Green? It looked big, like costume jewelry. He said he had to take it back. He left. Then I felt dizzy. That’s the last I remember.”

I sat back down, collapsing into the memory of Lloyd’s words about Piers perhaps bribing Erik. The possible conspiracy involving several people in murder and money swirled in my head. “But you and the twins are okay, thank goodness.”

“I just have to lie perfectly still for a day or two. And I’ve already gone through all the magazines.”

“How about we look through cookbooks?”

Pauline and I retrieved the suitcases from her car. After wheeling them into Laura’s room, we each took a stack. Our goal was to find numbers to the safe or anything else of that ilk. With three of us thumbing through the old volumes, you’d think the process would be fast. But we kept pausing on recipes. Pauline had lots of sticky notes in her big purse, so we marked pages to come back to later. Pauline volunteered to make the raisin butterscotch pie; Laura had dibs on experimenting with strawberry soda-pop cake that she thought would make great muffins; and I marked two recipes for combining possibly into a new fudge recipe for kids—marbled brownies that could be made with cream cheese from my parents’ farm, and another odd recipe for date bars made with candy orange slices. Pauline’s kindergarteners could cut up the orange slices for me with their snub-nosed scissors.

It was lunchtime, so I went down to the hospital’s cafeteria and brought back garden salads to munch on while we turned pages.

Our salads were almost gone when Laura announced, “Handwritten numbers!”

Pauline looked. “But those are for the length of fish.”

Indeed. The cookbook had photos. There was Hans Mueller again, with Bram Oosterling and Clement Van Damme. Somebody—probably Lloyd—had handwritten the fish types right next to each fish and the fish’s length in inches.

But then I recognized our folly. “There’s no way that trout is only thirteen inches long.”

We squealed with success. The numbers had to be the combination to the safe.

Pauline and I told Laura we’d be back when she could be released. We left most of the cookbooks for Laura to go through to pass the time, but Pauline and I took the books with the recipes in them we liked so we could copy those.

When we arrived at my cabin, a shiny yellow Chevy truck was parked out front—just like the one I’d crunched in the accident.

Pauline asked, “Did they fix it that fast?”

“They couldn’t have,” I said. We got out and went over to it. “Here’s a note.” It was under a windshield wiper. “
Found this on sale online. Owner in Green Bay. Your auto body shop bought it as a loaner. Keep it until you find a new vehicle. Dillon.
”

Pauline said, “Way to go, A.M. This is nice of him.”

“No.” I was boiling mad. “He’s doing it to me again.”

“What?”

“He’s being nice. Notice he didn’t actually buy this and give it to me. He knows I would never stand for that. He knows he can’t buy me like he once did.”

“So now you’re mad because he’s changed, and he didn’t buy you a car? All he did, Ava, was look around for you online to find a truck that matched yours. You loved your yellow truck.”

“That’s just it. He’s being really careful to do everything the way I would want it done.”

Pauline squinted her dark eyes down at me. “He wants you. What do you want?”

I wanted the peace found on this little street with its canopy of maple trees. But there was no peace—I also saw my grandparents’ home across the way. My first duty was to get them back together. Their hearts were far more important than mine. A plan hatched in my brain.

Pauline asked, “So, what are you going to do, A.M.?”

“Drive the yellow truck, P.M. Because I think it’ll help get Gilpa and Grandma Sophie back together. That and the aprons.”

“Aprons?”

“Yes. I have a plan to get my grandparents back together. And you can help. Is there some kind of field trip or two you can plan for the Butterflies that would require Cody and Bethany to chaperone and be away from the shop for at least a day, even two days?”

“Of course. There are tons of educational things to do in Door County for kids. I can send them on the ferry to Washington Island to the nature center at the schoolhouse there, and to the ostrich farm, and—”

“Great. Line up all those things, please. Thanks.” I squished Pauline in a hug.

She grunted. “Are you going to tell me what plan you have up your sleeveless blouse?”

“You’ll see.”

She left for home. I went inside to my cabin to drop off the cookbooks on the kitchen counter, where I discovered a note sticking out of the toaster.

An icy gale seemed to whip through the kitchen.

Orange letters were sideways in the toaster. I gingerly picked the note out by one corner, then set it on the counter.

Who will be the next fudge judge to die because of you?

I swallowed hard. The judges were Erik, Libby, the professor, and Dotty. My grandmother was pretty close to two of those people. The realization that Dotty and Libby were in danger felt as if Grandma Sophie had been threatened, too. The shock of it sent tremors through me.

* * *

Jordy told me not to touch a thing. Maria Vasquez was across the county in Baileys Harbor and she’d be there within the half hour.

Too agitated to just stand around, I called Dillon. I didn’t tell him about the note. I thanked him for the truck, but my voice was cracking. I needed him to help me get my grandparents back together. But I was having second thoughts about my plan now.

“Anything wrong, Miss Fudge?” Dillon asked.

I suggested I’d buy him a beer at the Troubled Trout so we could talk. Since it was going on four o’clock already, he offered to meet for dinner at seven instead. I accepted.

A knock at my screen door revealed Grandma Sophie standing there with a pie in her hands. “Hello, Ava honey! I have a pie for you to take to Sam.”

Seeing Sam tonight was decidedly not in my plans. And I didn’t want my grandmother seeing the note that threatened Libby and Dotty.

“How nice, Grandma.” I let her in, the smell of a strawberry pie thawing my nerves a little. “Let’s put the pie over here on one of the boxes.” I led her into the living room area. “Maybe you should save this pie and invite Sam over again to your house, Grandma.”

“He’s got that bad shoulder now. He’d be so appreciative of you bringing it over to him.”

Grandma’s matchmaking was transparent. She wanted me carried over the threshold of the house Sam had bought for us eight years ago, with the key given to me as a shower gift. I’d never stepped across that threshold.

My cabin was redolent now with aroma of fresh strawberry pie. I plastered on a fake smile. “I’m not sure this will make it to Sam’s. I’ve got some ice cream. Want me to bring it over to your house and we’ll eat this? With Grandpa?”

Grandma Sophie tossed her cloud of white hair back. “Honey, I don’t need that old goat. Why don’t you come stay with me?”

“You and Grandpa need to patch things up. I’ve got my mouse to keep me company.”

“Bah. And where’s your pet mouse?” She headed into the kitchen before I could stop her. “Bah and booyah!” she shrieked. “Orange crayon again. Neat, legible writing. We have to warn Libby, honey.”

“Why Libby? And you’re not upset about Dotty maybe being threatened?”

“Dotty’s got guardian angels watching her. Libby seems to be having bad luck lately. She told me that Kelsey asked her to be a fudge judge. I think there’s more to all this than fudge.”

I escorted my grandma to the sofa in front of the fireplace. “More what?”

“Somebody wants to do away with the Muellers so that he or she can take over their estate. Is there some long-lost relative we don’t know about living in our midst?”

I hadn’t thought hard enough about that angle. Was there some illegitimate son or daughter? I went to the screen door to watch for Deputy Vasquez. “Lloyd was pretty sure he had no relatives left here.” I recalled the cookbooks my friends and I had just pawed through this afternoon. “Grandma, one of the cookbooks of Lloyd’s has old photos of Bram Oosterling. Some old cousin, right?”

“An older cousin of your grandpa’s. Bram was an only child like your grandpa. Bram’s branch of the family is back in Belgium.”

“He was with a Clément Van Damme and Hans Mueller.”

“Clément? Let me see that book.” She rose from the couch.

“Pauline has it. It had a recipe for raisin butterscotch pie she wants to try. Who’s Clément?”

We went onto my front porch to sit in the rocking chairs to wait for Maria. A mother duck and her ducklings were nibbling their way through the grass in my lawn on their way to the marsh.

Grandma said, “Clément Van Damme is one of my relatives, related somehow to Henrik, that shirttail relative who runs that brewery near Madison in Flanders. Some kind of fiftieth-cousin-twice-removed thing.”

“And Hans Mueller is Lloyd’s grandfather.”

“That’s right. Hans and Ruth. They would have emigrated from Germany about the same time as the Oosterlings and Van Dammes who came over from Belgium to work as laborers and farmers in the 1850s.” Grandma’s sniffle startled me.

“What’s wrong, Grandma?”

“Your grandpa says he’s staying at the farm to help with the haying. Says the village can have the shop. He’s giving up.”

I swallowed hard. This was my fault. And it was playing right into the hands of the murderer. Her talk of our ancestry gave me a clue to Lloyd’s murder, but I didn’t want to involve Grandma Sophie. I got up from my rocker to give her one of our famous Belgian hugs that never stopped. “Grandma, I won’t give up.” I decided to put my secret matchmaking plan in motion. “I could use your help tomorrow because Cody and Bethany are on a field trip with Pauline’s Butterflies. Will you come over to help sell fudge while I take over Grandpa’s bait shop?”

“Of course, dear. You don’t need to fail just because Gil is being an old poop. I’ll bring a batch of cinnamon rolls hot from the oven for the fishermen.”

“Don’t get too carried away in your kitchen tonight. I want people to buy fudge.”

Maria pulled up in her county squad car. Grandma and I spent the next half hour watching her lift fingerprints off the doorjambs, counters, and toaster. She even lifted prints in my bathroom. She said criminals were like anybody else; they used the john before they left a crime scene just because the toilet was handy. As soon as Maria left, Grandma and I disinfected everything.