All Fudged Up (A Candy-Coated Mystery) (18 page)

“I grabbed his thumb when he tried to make me drop the hammer. I must have hit his thigh somehow because he cursed and let go of me. But he didn’t double over or anything.”

“You said he ran up the stairs?”

“Yes, but first he grabbed the two unbroken bottles of wine from the box.” I made a face. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“Really weird,” she said. “What’s the big deal about some wine?”

“I have no idea. Let’s research it.” I hobbled over to my desk and started up my computer. Mal jumped up, licked my face, and curled up in my lap. “Yes,” I cooed. “You’re my big guard doggie. It’s my fault you were stuck in your crate.”

The search engine came up and I entered the name from the wine bottle. “Oooh,” I said and pursed my lips.

“What?” Jenn looked over my shoulder.

“It’s a very rare wine. It looks like most of the great vintage was lost in a massive storm that sunk the cargo freighter it was shipped on. The ship went down during Prohibition and the vintage was being smuggled from France through Canada. The vintage was lost except for a few rare bottles.” I read on in silence. “Check this out. The last bottle sold at auction went for a whopping five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit!” Jenn cursed. “That means your attacker potentially stole a million dollars from your basement.”

“No wonder he ran off with it.” I sat back. “Pete Thompson told me that Papa had a source of income other than the McMurphy. Do you think he was referring to this wine? Where did Papa get it? Who else knew about it?”

“You’d better call Officer Manning,” Jenn said. “I think we cracked his case wide open.”

Butter an 8” × 8” × 2” pan. Line with wax paper or plastic wrap. Squeeze juice from lime, save juice, and grate the peel. Set aside. Using a double boiler fill
of the bottom pan with water and heat on medium high until the water is boiling. Then you can turn the heat down to low and in the top section, place sweetened condensed milk, white chocolate chips, and cream cheese. Stir constantly until chips and cream cheese are melted. Remove from heat. Add vanilla, lime juice and rind bits and stir until combined. Pour into pan or crust. Cool completely. Cut and serve in colorful cupcake papers. Store in covered container.

If you want, you can prepare a graham-cracker crust:

Mix until well blended. Pat into pan. Bake at 375°F for 7 minutes—cool completely.

“A half a million dollars a bottle?” Rex whistled. “That’s a whole lot of motive.”

“Do you think Joe was killed over the wine?” I asked. It was after midnight and Rex stood in my living room looking at my computer screen. He was every inch the police officer in his full uniform with a gun on his hip. There was something predatory about him that made a girl feel protected and nervous at the same time.

Jenn lounged in Papa’s easy chair. We had both changed out of our flapper gowns. Jenn wore leopard-spotted leggings and a black tunic. I wore jeans and a purple T-shirt. My hair was still in the braid that Jenn had woven for the cocktail party.

“If he was, it still doesn’t disprove you as a suspect.” He glanced at me.

“Why not?” I drew my brows together.

“The wine was in the basement of the McMurphy and everyone is aware of your dwindling resources as you remodel.” He was dead serious.

“I have enough money for the season,” I argued.

“I imagine that a million dollars would give you more than one season. People have killed for less.”

“I know of someone who was killed for a carton of cigarettes,” I reasoned. “If you think of it that way, then everyone on island has motive to be a killer.”

“Not everyone had a million dollars stolen from their basement.”

I stood. I have to admit that my nerves were more than a little raw. “I didn’t kill anyone. Someone tried to kill me.”

“And Mr. Finley,” he added. “George told me that Mr. Finley didn’t have any water in his lungs.”

“So it wasn’t an accidental drowning in the pool tonight?” Jenn sat up.

“It doesn’t look like it.” Rex’s jaw clenched.

“But he could have had a heart attack and fell in the pool, right?” I asked.

“That’s for the coroner to determine.” Rex had the best poker face ever.

“We have two dead men—both of the same age—and a box of expensive wine, all but two bottles broken. The two that remain were stolen when a man attacked me. I don’t understand how you could think I might even remotely be a person of interest.”

“This isn’t about what I think. This is about the facts. The facts are that no one saw this person who attacked you. Two bottles of wine worth a cool million disappeared and you were the only one in the room. Two men are dead. One in your utility closet and the other in a pool house during a party you hosted.”

“You are only saying that because you don’t have a clue who’s really doing this or why.” Yes, I was defensive. I liked this guy. Why did he continue to blame these terrible things on me?

“For all I know your Papa smuggled that wine into the McMurphy. He told you where he kept his treasure and Joe Jessop found out about it. He confronted you and you killed him.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not talking to you.”

“You shouldn’t,” Jenn said. “You should go through your lawyer.”

“We don’t need to get all hasty,” Rex said, his eyes twinkling for the first time as his cop persona slipped. “I do have another theory.”

“Are you going to let us in on it?” Jenn asked.

“Now, that wouldn’t be very professional of me,” he said. “For now, I’m going to keep a security patrol on the McMurphy. We’ll come through every four hours.”

“Is that because you think we’re in danger or because we’re under lock and key?”

“You may leave anytime you want. In fact, I’d prefer you stayed elsewhere—”

“I will not!”

“And that is why we’ll be doing security checks until we have someone in custody or at the very least an answer to who attacked you.”

“Fine.” I refused to budge from where I stood, which was basically toe-to-toe with the man. I didn’t want to admit that my heart raced and my skin flushed. He was infuriating and he thought I was some kind of serial killer.

All I wanted was to be a successful fudge shop/hotel owner. I wanted to fit into the community and maybe someday see as many green ribbons as purple.

“Good. Thank you for your cooperation.” He nodded at us. “If you find more of those wine bottles, I expect you to let me know. Whoever is killing may be killing for them and I don’t want you harboring anything that might get you killed—even if it’s worth two million dollars. It’s not worth your life.”

“If we find it in the McMurphy, it belongs to the McMurphy, right?” Jenn asked.

“Unless someone can prove otherwise, yes. I’m not calling you thieves. I’m trying to look out for your safety.”

I let him out the apartment door.

“Lock it behind me,” Rex said. “Dead bolt.”

“No problem.” I slammed the door closed and threw the dead bolt. I turned to see Jenn grinning at me from the couch. Mal chewed on a toy and glanced at me, wagging her tail.

“That guy is hot for you,” Jenn said.

“He thinks I’m a murderer,” I pointed out.

“Which makes you off-limits and even hotter.” Jenn waggled her eyebrows. “He’s a local, right?”

“And twice divorced.”

“Even better, he doesn’t strike me as a man who makes the same mistake twice.”

“Wait . . .”

“You said that he married two different women and divorced them for two different reasons . . .”

“True.”

“Then he knows for sure what he wants now. It looks to me like he plans to go after it as soon as he solves this case.”

I rolled my eyes and picked up my puppy. “He wants someone who will remain on island. I’m not certain I can make it beyond the first season.”

The next day I left Frances and Jenn to cross-reference the guest list with the packages of fudge while I searched the office files. If Papa Liam knew anything about the expensive wine, he didn’t tell me. The best part was he never threw anything away.

It was family tradition.

We kept anything and everything about the McMurphy we thought might even remotely become interesting in the next couple of hundred years. This meant that the office had rows of file cabinets with files dating back to the grand opening of the McMurphy fudge shop in 1865. It’s how we were able to prove to the historical committee that fat pink stripes were authentic to the time period.

“All right. If there is any logic to these files, then the earliest files would be on the lower left and the newest files on the upper right,” I told Mal as she sat on her haunches and studied me with blinky, black button eyes. “Let’s test that theory.” I went to the top right-most cabinet and opened it. Sure enough, it was dated from last year. “Thank you Papa Liam for making sense.”

Now all I had to do was figure out where the 1930s were and go through the files one by one until I hit present day. If those bottles of wine had been smuggled in, there was some record of it—no matter how slight. If there was a record, perhaps it would help me discover who else might know about the wine.

“Let’s start with the year the wine was labeled.” I found the appropriate file cabinet and pulled out the folders in that drawer, took them back to Papa’s big oak desk, and plopped them down. Mal waited for me to sit before she jumped up and curled up in my lap.

I was about two hours into the files when the phone rang, startling me out of my thoughts. “Hello?”

“Allie?” It was a decidedly male voice and the rumble had the full attention of my nerves.

“Yes.”

“Trent Jessop. I’ve been going through Joe’s things and I think we need to talk.”

“Will I need my lawyer?” Why was I always such a jerk to this guy? “I’m sorry, I don’t know where that comment came from. I’ve been buried in McMurphy files looking for clues.”

“Right. Should we meet in a neutral place?”

“Like where?”

“Let’s meet at JL Beanery. Do you know it?”

“The little coffee shop across from the Island House Hotel?”

“Yes. Say in an hour?”

I glanced at the clock on Papa’s shelf. It was already one in the afternoon. “Sure.”

“Great.”

He hung up and I ran my hand along Mal’s back. She sighed and tried to curl up tighter on my lap. “I wonder what that was all about?” I picked her up, kissed her on the nose, and set her back in the chair as I replaced the files I had with the next decade full.

Thumbing through the file folders, I noticed a note scrawled in feminine handwriting across a receipt. “Liam and his friends discovered a box. Paper label is wet, but appears to be French. Must look up translation.”

Was this what I was looking for? I sat down on the overstuffed green leather couch and put the rest of the decade’s files on the floor at my feet. The receipt the note was written on was for laundry. In the 1950s the laundry for the McMurphy was sent out to a service. Most hotels of the time sent their washing out. Even to this day the laundry was done by a service. Papa looked into creating a laundry room, but the basement was too old to be converted. There were plans to add on to the pool house and create a laundry building, but the Thompsons refused to sell Papa the real estate that the laundry would sit on.

Papa had decided that it was no longer in our best interest to co-own things. Instead, he broke off the partnership. The Thompsons built a laundry room for their bed-and-breakfast and the McMurphys sent their laundry out to the Yangs to be washed in professional washers and hung out on long clotheslines to dry in the sun.

“Sunshine is the best antiseptic,” Papa would say and point out scientific studies that backed up his theory.

“Besides, sheets simply smell better dried in the sunshine,” Grammy would add to the conversation and then wink at me. “All our guests ask where we get our fabric softener. Nothing like fresh air and sunlight to make a bed feel like home.”

It was easy for us, of course. The McMurphy had only ten beds. Last count the Thompson’s B and B had twice as many beds. Besides, clotheslines weren’t allowed in the downtown area.

I dug through the receipts and papers in the folder with the note. It was 1952. There were grocery receipts. The cost of sugar was forty-three cents for five pounds. Candy-grade bulk sugar was a nickel per pound. I was surprised to see another note in the same feminine handwriting concerned about sugar doubling later on that year.

I know that my grandparents kept the cost of fudge low. They considered it more of a draw than a business. The McMurphy was the real business. Fudge was a luxury more than a necessity. Perhaps Papa’s mother had been contemplating getting out of the fudge shop business.

It made one wonder if they had a price point where they would decide to get out. If so, did that hit it? And what made them continue? ?

I continued looking through the paperwork for clues. There was no further mention of the box or French translation. All I could do was hope that whatever Trent had found in Joe’s papers was more significant than a cryptic note.

I stopped by the general store on my way to the coffee shop. I needed to make a photocopy of the handwritten note I’d found. “Always have a backup,” Papa used to say.

“I heard you donated your party plates to the St. Ignace soup kitchen.” Susan Goodfoot stepped out from behind the store counter. “That was thoughtful.”

“I couldn’t throw them away,” I said.

“Others would have.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “They are calling it a feast day at the kitchen.”

“Really?” I winced. “But it’s leftovers.”

“Most people never get a chance to taste chicken marsala or grilled veggie and steak skewers, let alone the cheesecakes. Trust me, they don’t care if the food is a day old.”

“Then I’m glad.” I made my photocopy.

Susan sat behind the counter reading a gossip rag when I turned to leave.

“I didn’t know you worked here.”

“I substitute for Mary sometimes,” she said.

I drew my brows together. “Is Mary sick?”

“She’s in mourning.”

“Really? Why?”

“Finley was her lover,” Susan said. “They’d been seeing each other for years.”

“Seriously?”

“Everyone on island knows.” Her brown eyes sparkled at me. I swear she was silently calling me a fudgie. This time I took it all in stride.

“Was she there when he died?” I had to ask.

“Word is they didn’t realize the party was setting up in the pool house. When the catering company showed up, she and Finley slipped into the dressing rooms. She heard Mr. Finley arguing with someone in the men’s room. Scared, she gathered up her stuff and snuck out.”

“She didn’t see anything at all?” I clutched my purse.

“She waited in the dark for Finley to come out of the pool house, but he never did.”

“That poor girl, what must she think?”

“She thinks if she had stayed in the pool house she might have saved her lover’s life.”

“Or lost hers as well,” I pointed out.

“There was one thing,” Susan said and leaned in close.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“She said Colin Ferber was hanging around outside the pool house just before she and Finley met up for their rendezvous.”