Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery (29 page)

That got her to smile, finally. Then she shook her head. “This graveyard is so embarrassing. Your grandfather should never have invited them.”

“But the prince and princess are related to the people laid to rest here. They’ll want to pay their respects. They’re interested in the early settlers from Belgium and the generations carrying on here now.”

Many of the other names in front of us were familiar because the families still lived in the area. I recognized Coppens; a high school classmate of mine, Jonas Coppens, owned a small farm up the road from my new market. He was spreading mulch around right now several yards across the lawn at a historic schoolhouse. I growled because I recognized a woman with him, Fontana Dahlgren.

“Fontana is supposed to be helping us dust and polish the inside of the church.”

“That floozy? Don’t count on it.” Grandma shuddered next to me, my body absorbing her tiny earthquake. “I suppose she’ll be flirting up a storm with the prince. Maybe that’s good; at least we won’t have to entertain him and his mother.”

“Grandma? What’s wrong? You haven’t liked this idea of them coming since the moment Grandpa broke the news. But Grandpa and my father—your own son—and my mother would love to marry me off to the prince. Not you?”

The fine wrinkles around her mouth quirked with a grimace. “The prince and princess are barely related to us. They’re all about fuss and appearances. There’s a reason some of us sawed ourselves off from the branches of the family tree and departed for America. This visit is going to end up in a disaster.”

She began limping away from me, toward the historic schoolhouse. She’d meet up with her church-lady friends who were on cleaning detail, too.

My heart held a dull ache, and my stomach felt as if it were a dryer with a bunch of old bolts tumbling in it. I vowed to figure out what was upsetting Grandma about this visit and fix it for her. Certainly a little fuss wasn’t the issue, because Grandma loved our kermises and making her famous pies. Could it be
me
she was embarrassed about? Or our entire family? We were plain people, just farmers, fishermen, and fudge makers. I thought that was good enough. But Grandma was confounding me, something I confessed to Pauline and Laura when I got back inside the church a minute later.

* * *

My girlfriends and I were standing near the bottom of old wooden stairs leading into the dim, dusty cement church basement. This room was about ten by twelve feet. It was empty, save for a row of plumbing pipes lined up in the middle of the floor. A meager bulb lit the area, turning shadows into muddy brown in the corners of the floor and the joists overhead. Cobwebs hung down; they stirred from our sudden appearance.

Pauline stood directly behind me on the wooden stairs. “I tell my kids all the time not to go into strange places.” She was a kindergarten teacher in Fishers’ Harbor. “This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever gotten me into. No recipe is hidden down here. I think your grandmother’s upset because your grandfather has gone lulu.”

“It feels like more than that, Pauline. She mentioned something about the royals being about fuss and appearances. Do you think I embarrass her?”

“Heck, I’m embarrassed by you all the time. Including now. You bought into your grandfather’s fudge story, hook, line, and sinker. He’s a fisherman, and he knows how to reel you in with a tall fish tale. Or fudge tale.”

Laura, bringing up the rear of our human train on the stairs, said, “Can’t we just say we looked and not do it?” She sneezed.

I told them, “I can’t lie to my grandfather about looking for the recipe. I owe him a lot.”

Last spring, Grandpa Gil had resuscitated my life. I’d spent eight years in Los Angeles in a grunt job for a TV show. Then Grandma Sophie broke her leg in April. Grandpa asked me to return while my show was on spring hiatus. He had the idea of moving his minnow tank over in his bait shop to let me turn half of his building into a fudge operation. He’d also moved the singular apostrophe in his sign to make it the plural Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge & Beer. That kind of love couldn’t be ignored. I quit my show and stayed.

With Grandpa’s kindness resonating in my soul, I stepped onto the cement basement floor. As I walked over to the pipes to inspect them, I held on to my ponytail while moving to the right to keep away from a cobweb trailing from the joists.

Laura wasn’t so lucky. “Ick. They’re all over in my hair.”

She’d somehow missed copying my stealthy move. Her blond bob looked like it was snared in a hairnet. As a baker, she was used to wearing hairnets, so maybe she’d cope with this better than Pauline. She was six feet tall—taller than me by two inches—and too dressed up for cleaning a church and poking around for recipe scripture. She wore her favorite designer sleeveless tangerine top and shorts. Laura and I had on denim shorts. I was in a faded pink T-shirt, while Laura wore a threadbare blue-and-white-striped short-sleeved blouse.

Pauline shook her black braid to rid it of a cobweb that had broken loose from its mother ship overhead. “I’ve seen enough.”

“There’s a doorway over there,” I said, pointing toward a passageway, intentionally ignoring Pauline’s whimpering.

I was enjoying the exploring. Although I’d grown up nearby, I’d never been in the basement or the attic of the church because their doors were located in the kitchen. The kitchen used to be the sacristy, where priests and altar boys would get ready for Mass.

I also hadn’t been inside this church since I’d jilted my fiancé here the night of our wedding rehearsal eight years ago. That was the same night I’d eloped with another man—Dillon Rivers, whom I divorced a month after that, then didn’t see for eight years, and now was dating again. Memories—bad, embarrassing ones—had been hitting me like darts from the moment I’d promised to look for the recipe in this church. At first, I couldn’t force myself to come back here. My stomach had rolled for days, as if it wanted to purge my mistakes. That would take a long time. But I knew if I were going to fully embrace living in Door County again, I had to do a mea culpa and face what I’d done. Pauline and Laura were gems to volunteer for the kermis cleaning committee with me. Entering the church this morning had caused my breathing to stop for a moment, but the search for the fudge recipe had helped take my mind off past romantic disasters.

The next room in the basement was empty. Another small space, it smelled of chalky dust and time standing still. It spooked me. A brick chimney stood in the far corner. A rusty lid covered a hole in the brick where a furnace pipe used to fit.

I said, “Check the sills at the tops of the walls and the joists. I’ll check the chimney. I can almost sense that Sister Adele was here.”

Laura said, “Do you honestly think Sister Adele came down here? With a recipe?”

“Sure,” I said. “She may have had to toss wood in the furnace now and then. Maybe she spent a whole bunch of time down here. This space would’ve been cozy with the furnace blazing. She probably had a rocking chair in a corner at one time. She could have built a secret cubby behind a brick for her valuables.”

Pauline scoffed. “What valuables? She was a nun. Don’t they vow a life of poverty?”

Laura answered for me. “She had a rosary. I’m sure she thought that was valuable.”

“And she had the recipe,” I reminded them.

Pauline said, “Have you ever thought your grandfather made up this story to keep you busy looking, and thus keep you from spending too much time with Dillon?”

“I’ve thought of that, but both Grandpa and Grandma are sincere about this fudge story.”

“I still don’t get why nobody found it before now.”

“Pauline, it took a gazillion years for people to find and authenticate the Shroud of Turin.”

“So now you’re comparing this divinity fudge recipe to the Shroud?”

“Yes. If the Blessed Virgin Mary ate this divinity fudge, then the recipe is just as priceless.”

My fingers scrabbled across the rough, dust-laden edges of the brick and cracked mortar, checking for a hiding place. A pebble of mortar popped onto the concrete floor.

Pauline backed away a step. “Watch it. I can’t get these clothes dirty.”

My BFF had worn her favorite outfit today because she’d be meeting up with her boyfriend, John, a tour guide, at the potluck picnic lunch for the church cleanup committee. John was on a bus somewhere in the county with thirty leaf-peeper vacationers from Chicago. The lunch would be held at my new market.

I popped off the metal covering over the chimney hole. Rust and soot flakes spewed out. They fell to the floor near my feet, sullying my running shoes. There was no recipe. I reached down for a handful of rust, wiped it on my pink T-shirt, then bombed the front of Pauline’s shorts.

Pauline gasped, brushing at her shorts and legs. “What are you doing?”

“Proving to Grandpa that we were trusty fudge archaeologists doing our best to unearth ancient, sweet divinity hieroglyphics.”

“When Lent comes around next spring, I’m giving you up instead of booze this time. And forget your Christmas present this year.”

With a smile, I pushed the thin metal covering back in place. “Must I remind you that it was Grandpa who rescued John last summer when John got left behind on his diving expedition by that creep? And John was the one who found the ceramic cup that Grandpa thinks belongs to Grandma’s ancestors at the bottom of Lake Michigan. That’s why Grandpa called up the royals in the first place. The initials on the cup are ‘AVD,’ which might be the other Amandine Van Damme way back in Grandma’s lineage. John finding the cup led to the idea of bringing the current Princess Amandine here for the kermis, and that sparked Grandpa’s memory about the story of Sister Adele and this church and the divinity fudge. So you’re the cause of this search for a recipe, not me. I’m actually the one getting filthy in order to help you and John.”

Laura was giggling.

Pauline pulled madly on her long braid to vent her frustration. “You always manage to turn things upside down and around so that you’re never at fault.”

“And you love me for it. What’re you getting me for Christmas?” I peered up at her in a wide-eyed dare.

Pauline took a deep breath, looking down her nose at me in a double dare.

A dead black-and-red box-elder bug was stuck in her hair above one ear, which I didn’t mention. Instead, I reached up with my thumb and smudged the tip of her nose.

She smudged me back.

Laura said, “Hey, what about me?”

We burst out laughing. Pauline and I wiped our hands on Laura’s blue-and-white-striped blouse and gave her cheeks a sooty pat.

“Perfect,” I said. “Grandpa will believe we did our best, and we can put his silly story to rest.”

Laura took a selfie photo of us with her cell phone. “It’s almost noon. I have to get back to start the bread and relieve my babysitter.”

Laura was the mother of twins born in July. Little Clara Ava had my first name as her middle name, and Spencer Paul got his middle name from a shortened “Pauline.”

I said, “Nobody’s leaving yet. We still have the choir loft to inspect.”

“Your grandpa will never know if we skip that,” Laura said.

Pauline huffed, “But Ava won’t lie to him. Cripes, let’s go get it done.”

“Thanks, Pauline,” I said. “Just ten more minutes, Laura, and then you’ll be free to go home to Clara Ava and Spencer Paul.”

We headed up the stairs to the kitchen, then went into the nave. We marched up the center aisle through shafts of colors striping the pews from the stained glass windows.

Laura said, “Wasn’t a Fontana Dahlgren on the list for helping us clean the church? We could leave the loft for her to clean. By the way, who is she?”

Pauline and I shared a mutual snort. Laura was our new friend, whom we’d met last spring when she opened her bakery, so she didn’t know Fontana.

“Fontana’s outside bothering Jonas Coppens. My grandmother calls her a floozy,” I said. “Fontana is mad at me, and that’s why she’s not in here helping.”

Fontana, divorced from Daniel Dahlgren, ran Fontana’s Fresh Fare, another roadside market a few miles south of mine on Highway 57. She sold her own homemade soaps, perfumes, lotions, and makeup, along with a few pumpkins to lure the tourists. My market, which focused on pairing fudge flavors with local wines, and fresh organic vegetables, fruits, and dairy, sat on land owned by Daniel and his new wife, Kjersta. Fontana had already stopped by my market to suggest that it was unfair competition for me to be located so close to hers, despite our goods being so different. I suspected the real reason Fontana was upset was that I’d made friends with the new wife of her ex.

Pauline added, “I heard she didn’t qualify for the choir that will sing for the prince at the kermis. Maybe she’s pouting and refuses to step inside the church now.”

“It’s more likely she took a look at our names on the cleaning crew and discovered no men to flirt with, so she said the heck with it.”

“Jonas is a hottie,” Pauline said, spritzing lemon oil on a long pew that stretched across the back wall.

Laura set to work dusting the front railing of the loft while I tackled the antique pipe organ.

I filled Laura in on Jonas. We’d grown up with him. He’d lost his parents in a car accident when he was in his twenties. He now ran the family farm northeast of our farm and across Highway C, which intersected with the village of Brussels. He’d never married, but I’d heard plenty of times from my parents that he’d be quite the catch.

Pauline said, “Fontana is merely practicing on Jonas. The prince is her target. I’m surprised she’s not at one of the spas getting a pedicure so her feet look good in glass slippers.”

Poking about for hidden doors and drawers in the organ, I moaned that we hadn’t even found odd scraps of old newspapers I could take to Grandpa. He and I loved treasure hunting in old books and anything with the printed word.

Laura, who was wiping at the organ’s pipes halfheartedly, said, “At least we didn’t find a body in the church.”

“Yet,” Pauline said, coming to stand next to me at the organ.

I gave her a punch in the upper arm, then raised my right hand. “I swear that no bodies will be found in this church now or during the prince’s visit. Grandpa won’t have to add ‘and Bodies’ at the end of our shop sign, though the alliteration should be appreciated by you, Pauline.” She loved word games for her students. “Besides, I’ve changed.”