Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery (24 page)

“I confess I eat it for breakfast all the time. My new batch doesn’t have a name yet.”

“It has to be Rapunzel Raspberry Rapture Fudge. Verona would love that.”

“Verona loves a lot of things too much.” I was keeping my eyes on her in the aisles with the dolls and purses. Lucky Harbor was with her, his nose sniffing everything she touched. He kept licking her hands, which seemed to prevent any shoplifting.

I led Pauline over to the new raspberry fudge covered on the white marble slab. “Time to taste-test before Saturday’s contest. I’ll make another batch, once I get feedback from your Butterflies. How are the wagon floats coming?”

“They’re darling puffs of crepe paper streamers and glitter, all designed to look like Cinderella Pink Fudge.”

“Great. The last I looked at the sign-up list, we had thirty-five locals bringing fudge to the contest and dance on Saturday. This could be big. John’s camera will be busy.”

I gave Pauline a tiny bite of the Rapunzel Raspberry Rapture Fudge. With the piece in her mouth, her body turned to jelly before my eyes. She shimmied in place. She settled into a nirvana grin. Her eyes went dreamy. Afraid she might faint, I pulled up the stool from next to the window so she could sit down. Orgasmic gasps came from her mouth after she’d finished swallowing.

“You like it?” I asked.

“A.M., it’s fantabulous.”

“That’s not a word.”

“I teach kindergarten. We make up words all the time. It’s epicurean excellence, extremely edible, with enjoyable excitement, exuding the essence of exuberant effervescence.”

“This is E week?”

“Exactly. We’re now on vowels.”

By now Lucky Harbor’s nose was sniffing the edge of the table, along with the fingertips of six little girls named for cities. I gave each of the girls a piece of the fudge and tossed Goldfish crackers into Lucky Harbor’s mouth.

They scooted outdoors to get in the van Cody had borrowed to take the girls on their field trip to Washington Island.

Pauline and I cut up the rest of the new fudge, moving it from the window to the kitchen. We wrapped it fast and put it inside boxes that I taped shut. I had to keep this flavor a secret from Piers and Kelsey.

In the kitchen, I shared in one big breath with Pauline the news about Dillon and me and what we’d found out at Libby’s last night.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You and Dillon . . . ?”

Her eyes weren’t sparkling like I needed them to do. “It feels right. For now.” I cringed after adding the last words.

“For now. See? Already you’re not sure this is a good thing. Dillon ruined your life. You’re barely recovered. Your shop is in danger of disappearing in this mess with Lloyd’s murder. . . .”

I deserved this scolding after how I’d reacted to her dating John Schultz. I forced the conversation back to the fact that John could possibly help us solve the murder case.

Pauline said, “I doubt the sheriff will find actual videotape. That’s not done much anymore. John would know where it is, though, online or in a chip or flash drive.”

“Let’s call him.”

“Right now he’s following Alex Faust around to some book signings.”

“Oh, that’s right. Libby mentioned something about that happening. She’s helping with those, too. Thank goodness she has something to keep her mind off the murder investigation.”

“They make a nice couple. Like me and John.”

“Yes,” I said, reassuring her, “like you and John.”

“Then after the book signings, John mentioned he was diving again at some shipwreck site, with the professor along with them.”

“So John hasn’t shared his passwords with you, P.M.?” I meant it the way it sounded—John didn’t completely trust Pauline as lovers should do if an engagement was imminent.

“No, A.M.”

Her scowl almost made me feel guilty. But not quite. I handed her some wax paper to wrap more fudge. “Pauline, have you ever thought about how the future might be with him? You have a steady job and he’ll always be following his bliss-of-the-moment, not sharing it with you.”

“But that’s what I like about him. I can live vicariously through him. Like you do through Dillon.”

“You’re insinuating that I’m the dull one and I like him just because he’s adventurous?”

“It’s the other way around now. He’s got the steady construction job, and you’re chasing murderers around.”

I stopped wrapping. “Really? Our roles have switched?”

“Yes, Ava. You’ve become impulsive, as if you’re trying to prove something to everybody.”

“But I am.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket above my breast in the pinafore apron. I jumped.

It was Sheriff Tollefson. “The DNR doesn’t have any cameras in the park.”

“But Kelsey said she saw them there.”

“She could have lied. Not the first time I’ve been lied to in my career.”

I told him about John videotaping the party and maybe leaving cameras out at the park after videotaping out there earlier. Jordy said he’d look into that angle, but he insisted he’d looked everywhere. But this would take a while because he’d also need a warrant to go looking in somebody’s personal online files or cameras.

After I got off the phone, I punched in Kelsey’s number.

She sounded groggy, but I persisted. “Wake up, Kelsey. It’s after ten in the morning. You lied about the cameras.”

“No, I didn’t. I swear. I can show you where they are.”

“Fine. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

“I can’t do that. I agreed to work and sing at Legs and Toes at lunch and again at dinner.”

“Fine. After dinner. What time are you off?”

“After nine it slows down.”

“It’ll be dark!”

“What’s the big whoop? I know where the cameras are. Bring a flashlight.”

I didn’t have time to get upset with slippery Kelsey because of a commotion out front in the shop. Pauline and I raced out. Grandpa was there, shooing fishermen out of his shop!

“Just git! Git out!” He was flapping his hands at several men crowding through the front door. The cowbell was clanging several times as the door got jostled.

“Gilpa,” I said after the customers had cleared out, “what’s going on?” I smothered a smile.

A certain pungent odor was in the air. He’d rushed here straight from the barn, as I suspected he would. He was wearing bib overalls that had a few specks of cow manure on the legs. A long-sleeved, blue chambray shirt underneath that he’d rolled up to the elbows wasn’t much cleaner. My face ached from holding back my triumphant smile.

He turned to me with fire in his eyes. “Those darn men weren’t showing your grandmother proper respect. I caught one of them winking at her when I walked in.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could tell that Grandma was not amused and was about ready to walk out. She was bustling about, pretending to be busy, but her every action was performed with stiff precision.

“Oh, Gilpa, it’s the apron. Doesn’t Grandma look cute in that pink apron?”

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose? You know so.”

I dragged him over to Grandma. “Why don’t you two talk this out?” I turned to go.

“You come back here, little A.M.,” Grandpa said. He pierced me with his steady, dark eyes. A hand combed through his silver hair. “I’m here about you. What’s this I hear about you and Dillon getting back together? That is not going to happen, you hear? Your father was ready to fall over with a heart attack this morning. Me, too. You cut that man out of your life—”

“Gilpa, it’s just that with you changing your life so suddenly, I felt I could change, too.”

“I didn’t change. The rest of you changed. And not for the better.”

“That’s because we need you in order to be better.” The only way to deal with Gilpa was to outtalk him. “You wanted to apologize to Grandma about hiding the box, didn’t you?”

“What?”

Grandma said, “You do, Gil?”

Gilpa rubbed a hand around his whiskered face. “This is about that dastardly Dillon. Ava honey, let’s you and me have a talk out on the docks in private.”

I grabbed Pauline’s hand and began running for the back hallway. “Can’t do that, Grandpa. The sheriff called and Pauline and I have to go do something for him right now.”

We were out the door with the fudge from the kitchen and racing across my lawn before I said, “I think my plan just worked.”

I was ahead of Pauline, rounding the corner of my porch.

She said, “But you’re dating Dillon. You still have to face your grandparents and parents with this big change. Your grandpa sounded mighty mad.”

“All the better for now.” I raced through my front door. “Let them discuss together how to save me. It’ll get them back together. They’ll have to talk about dating and love and pretty soon they’ll be in each other’s arms.”

“You’re a genius, A.M.”

“Thank you, P.M.”

I set my armful of fudge on my counter first. “I win.”

We were puffing from our race. Pauline said, “Can’t run in these shoes.” She had on ballerina flats.

Tossing my apron aside, I said, “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Lloyd’s. I told Grandpa I had to do something for the sheriff, and I never lie to Gilpa.”

Pauline had a good laugh about that, but as we got in the new yellow Chevy truck that Dillon had found for me, she said, “Dillon’s not going to quit on you this time, you know. You’re in trouble with this fudge contest and prom dance of yours. It’s going to be like an engagement party for you two. The whole town’s going to show up for that E word.”

Anxiety scratched through me like a jagged fingernail. “I’m not going with Dillon. I’ve already asked somebody.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell, Pauline. I’m sorry. I really can’t tell in case this new guy turns me down at the last minute. He’s kind of a big shot.”

Pauline was never happy when I kept secrets from her, but she quickly shifted with me to the task at hand: cracking Lloyd’s safe.

Minutes later we parked on the road on the other side of the wooded lot, then walked through the woods to Lloyd’s home. We were inside his house, in the sunroom and library, dialing the safe’s second number we’d found in the historic cookbook, when the unmistakable creak of the front door echoed through the house.

Footfalls slapped our way before we had a chance to hide.

M
ercy Fogg barreled into the sunroom, then screamed when she saw Pauline and me standing next to the table. She was carrying a crowbar.

Pauline took off one of her ballerina flats and flung it hard at Mercy’s head.

Mercy ducked. “Stop! Miss Mertens, are you crazy?”

Picking up a lamp from the table to use as a weapon, I said, “Why are you here, Mercy?”

“Probably the same reason you are. I saw your zippy yellow banana parked over on the road and suspected you were over here. So I came to help.” She hefted the crowbar.

“Help? With what?”

“With breaking into the safe. I’ve been hoping you’d get into that thing, but it’s been taking forever.”

I put the lamp down, though I kept my eyes on her crowbar. “You’ve been watching us? Waiting for us to break in?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to break into it myself. Libby’s my friend. She wouldn’t like that.”

Pauline asked, “How close of a friend?”

Mercy tossed Pauline’s shoe back to her. “It’s not what you think, Missy Mertens.”

“Maybe,” I ventured, “you and Lloyd had something going on.”

She laughed. “Lloyd wasn’t mean enough for me.”

Mercy let those words hang in the air while she switched the crowbar from hand to hand in a menacing way. She wore a sleeveless blouse that showed off the bulging muscles developed by her truck driving and manual labor around our village and county. Pauline let a whine slip from her throat, while I licked my dry lips.

“Mercy, you may be mean, but Libby is your friend. You must be just as bothered by Lloyd’s murder as we are.”

“He’s just one more rich guy out of the way, if you ask me.”

“That’s a little cold,” I said, though I recalled my grandmother had wished him dead herself.

Mercy leaned the crowbar against a bookshelf, then hustled around me to look out at the rose garden as if she’d seen ghosts. “Lloyd had his secrets. Like this garden. I’ve wondered how many women saw this view.”

“Lloyd? Women? You’re talking about Kelsey and him?”

Mercy scoffed. “A man doesn’t live for ten years after his divorce like a monk. They hit it off the minute you introduced them last Monday. Isn’t that when the chefs came to town?”

I gulped. I’d been hoping my suspicions about Lloyd and Kelsey weren’t true.

“Sunday, actually. They came to the shop on Monday.”

Mercy stalked the view of the rainbow-hued rose garden. “He was always behind on his taxes. It was no surprise to me that your fudge shop ended up in the hands of the village.”

“We don’t know that for sure yet. That’s why we’re here, hoping to find the trust papers. We don’t know who he named in his trust. Even his attorney, Parker Balusek, doesn’t know.”

“Parker. Young, cute, and saves churches. Your type?”

“Pauline’s type.”

“Not my type.” Pauline had her shoe back on. She dropped her butt into the chair where she’d sat on Friday.

Mercy said, “Alex mentioned that Parker had become interested in Namur’s little historic Catholic church, the one the Belgian Club has saved.”

“Yeah,” I said, getting nervous. “St. Mary of the Snows Church. My grandparents have been active in saving the historic buildings around Namur and Brussels.”

“Isn’t that where you were supposed to have a wedding eight years ago?”

“What’s your point, Mercy?”

“Lloyd tried to buy that property after you left town. Alex Faust knew all about it because he was doing some research on the church for a book, but when you eloped with Dillon the publicity surrounding the property interrupted the sale. Alex backed off and turned to writing his cookbooks instead. His faculty had frowned on the sleazy nature of Alex’s writing about you jilting a guy at the altar and heading for Vegas with Mr. Hunk.”

“When did you learn this about Professor Faust?”

“Friday at Libby’s impromptu party.”

“So Lloyd was overextended eight years ago, even before my grandfather seemed to get behind on his taxes.” This matched what Cathy Rivers had said about the state of the economy a decade ago.

“The debts are why Lloyd and Libby divorced. Lloyd was constantly in need of money to pay bills, and Libby was constantly worried.”

“Sorry, Mercy, but Lloyd told me you and Libby gambled every cent he didn’t nail down.”

“We gambled, yes, but Lloyd liked to golf more than worry about investments. Have you priced a set of golf clubs lately? Memberships to country clubs?”

If Lloyd had his problems with money, what did that mean? He was still rich until his death. He owned Duck Marsh Street, several buildings on Main Street, and the fudge shop. Mercy wasn’t panicking; she wanted to see what was in the safe as much as I did. But I didn’t trust her.

At a stalemate, we agreed to leave instead of risking the wrath of the sheriff. Each of us knew we’d tattle on the other if one of us dared break into the safe.

As Pauline and I drove back to my place, she asked, “So, what do we do now?”

“We hope the cameras show us what we need to know. That’s all we’ve got. When will John be back from his diving expedition this afternoon?”

“Late, I’m sure. He has to wait for Alex to finish his book signings before they go out on the lake.”

“So we’ll pick up Kelsey, find those cameras, then meet up with John to see what he captured at Friday night’s dinner. And we watch for Mercy tailing us.”

“Ava, you think Mercy’s the killer? Not Kelsey?”

“Mercy seems plenty mad at Lloyd for all his missteps in life, right up until the end with Kelsey, but there’s no proof Mercy’s connected. I don’t think she did it. She’d love it if I got her arrested and made a fool of myself. She’d sue me for defamation of character.”

Pauline laughed. “But who’s left as our suspects, Poirot?”

“Who wants to get rich the easy way, Hastings?”

She stopped laughing.

* * *

The mosquitoes in the park were thick, as if somebody had dumped pepper in the air. We’d worn long sleeves and pants and sprayed ourselves, though, so pushing through the underbrush was tolerable. Except for the limbs we didn’t always see that hit our face or the downed wood underfoot.

It was after nine o’clock. Pale light seeped through the trees from the lighthouse beam directed into Lake Michigan. We were coming out of the woods and approaching the lilac bushes that flanked the lighthouse grounds.

Kelsey led the way, complaining the whole time. “I’m too hot.”

“Show us the darn cameras and we’ll get out of here,” I growled at her. “I thought you knew where they were.”

Pauline said, “Come on, Kelsey, think. I’m tired of lugging this computer around.” Pauline had my laptop in her big purse. Once we found the trail camera, I wanted to plug in the flash drive from it to see the pictures that would prove who the murderers were.

I poked at Kelsey. “Move it. Pauline needs to get back to her boyfriend.”

Pauline said, “Actually, John called and said they were going to be in after dark. He and Alex were staying out until the very last minute at the shipwreck site.”

The three of us hadn’t quite taken another step when a light blinked on in the lighthouse in the historic living quarters on the second floor.

Kelsey said, “Libby. She likes to come over to tidy up when nobody’s here.”

We stayed behind the lilac bushes near the old outhouse. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before we saw Libby come outside with what looked like a dustpan to shake it into the grass.

“Did she come over here the night Lloyd died? Before or after the party?”

“I remember hearing the door open and close at her house, but I was mostly asleep. I’d had too much to drink.”

“But first you’d made Lloyd sick and maybe he took a walk to try and get some fresh air.”

“That’s not true.” She swatted at a mosquito. “I’m getting out of here.”

She started to push past the lilacs, but I caught her by the elbow. “You’re not going anywhere. You poisoned Lloyd with the mushrooms or some plant from this park, didn’t you? You know we’ll see you doing it when we look at John’s video.”

“I didn’t do anything except drink too much. And feel sorry for Libby.”

“Who helped you? Piers? Mercy Fogg?”

Pauline intervened with a hand barely visible between us. “Wait a minute. Didn’t Kelsey just say that she was drunk? A drunk can’t tug a body up the stairs of a lighthouse.”

Kelsey said, “Exactly.”

“Sorry,” I said to Kelsey. “I just had to be sure. I don’t want to believe who I think did it.”

Kelsey asked, “Who?”

“Who was left at the party late that night? Libby.”

Kelsey went wide-eyed in the dark. “I think you’re right.”

Then she ran through a gap in the lilac bushes and leaped onto the rock wall behind the lighthouse. I thought she was running away, but then she stopped and reached up to a tree branch. She hurried back with the camera.

“Here,” she said. “This is the second camera. Sorry I can’t remember where we put the other one.”

Pauline scrambled to get my laptop out of her purse. Junk overflowed onto the grass. “You really think Libby murdered Lloyd?”

“There are motives that I haven’t wanted to admit to—money and avenging ten years of her living in her simple little house and him keeping her valuable ring from her. However, I don’t think she acted alone.”

We put in the flash drive. All it showed on Friday night was Libby outside the lighthouse in the dark, cleaning. The time on the frames said it was three in the morning, though.

Pauline, Kelsey, and I looked at one another with a sad realization. Libby had likely indeed killed Lloyd. Nobody would come out here then just to clean.

Appearing sickly in the meager light of the laptop, Pauline said, “Maybe Libby didn’t know he was lying dead behind the tower?”

“No,” I said. “She was here tidying up to destroy evidence of her being here with Lloyd—and his killer. Which she’s doing right now. She knows we’re onto her. Come on.”

I marched fast, with my laptop in my arms, to the lighthouse, with Pauline in tow. I expected Kelsey to run away, but that didn’t matter to me now. Kelsey wasn’t the accomplice. Was it Erik? I was still waffling slightly on him and two others.

Pauline kept repeating, “Don’t go in there, Ava.”

I flung open the door with gusto to surprise Libby. To my shock, she stood in the gift shop with the missing chest in her arms. “How did you get that, Libby? Wait. Let me answer that. You drove me off the road.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Kelsey used my car all the time.”

I said, “You’d like us to blame Kelsey. You used me, Libby. I invited those chefs for my fudge contest, and you saw that you had a few patsies for your crime, didn’t you?”

Kelsey came up behind me. “My rental broke down. I drove her car sometimes.”

Libby said, “She borrowed my car all the time. She’s nuts. She killed my husband.”

I wanted to believe Libby, but there she stood, hugging the chest in her arms. I was trembling as I asked, “Who really helped you kill your ex-husband?”

She shifted her arms around the chest. Her left hand appeared. The huge emerald ring sparkled in the light.

That confirmed for me what had been going on. It confirmed for me who her accomplice was. It wasn’t Erik. “That’s your engagement ring, Libby. Why are you wearing that now? Ready to start a new life?”

“I wanted to put it on. To remember Lloyd.”

“Liar.”

“I feel alone.”

“How alone? Who helped you murder Lloyd? Say it! Say his name!”

Kelsey, Pauline, and I stood blocking her passage to the door to the outside.

Libby’s gaze held on Pauline a bit too long.

I turned and screamed at Pauline, “Call John!”

“John? Why?”

I couldn’t even speak at first because of my shock.

Pauline found her phone and called. “There’s no answer. What’s wrong? Why am I calling John?”

“Because . . . because he’s out in a boat after dark with a murderer! Alex Faust is behind all of this!”