Five-Alarm Fudge (33 page)

I retreated. I’d lost control of my own fudge shop again.

I suspected Marc and John had shot video of this party. I cringed. This was not how I wanted my shop depicted on TV. Drunken women dealing saints? Eek.

When I stumbled back inside, exhaustion overwhelmed me. I decided to follow Grandpa’s lead on this and walk on through and out the back door. “You’ll lock up for me, Dotty? You can put the fudge on the marble table by the window to cool and cure.”

“Oh, sure. But you better take the money in the till and get that to the night deposit at the bank. I’ll go outside right now and collect your cut.”

The cash register drawer was hanging open because it was so overstuffed with cash. There were no credit card slips. Nothing to trace back to illegal activity. Dotty knew what she was doing.

Dotty came back in from outside with fists filled with greenbacks. “Here’s your take on this round.” She helped me stuff the cash in the bank envelope. The zipper barely closed.

I said, “I don’t feel right about this. This is a fudge shop, not a gambling hall.”

“Honey, I was only trying to help. You weren’t here, after all.” Dotty pursed her bright pink lips in a hurt expression. “I like working here. I found those old saint prayer cards in an attic we cleaned out a couple of days ago for a family after the woman had passed on, and you know how I am with a glue gun. Pretty soon Lois was helping me and we had them all decorated. We made up rules like Go Fish for the game and here we are.”

I felt bad for hurting her feelings, so I asked her, “How does the game work?”

“This game uses the September saints. Each month we meet will have that month’s set of saints. You have to get five saints from five days in a row. A Monday saint from September’s first week, for example, can’t be next to a Tuesday saint from a second week of September, but if you have saints from Monday and Tuesday of the same week, you get bonus points and a free piece of fudge. Losers in the round are called sinners and they have to put more money in the pot in the middle of the table to pay off the saint who wins the next time.”

“What about the stars on the toy fishing poles?”

“We call them wands. Those are awarded to the woman at the table who’s won the last hand. But the wand has to keep moving around the table. When I whistle at any moment in time, sort of like in musical chairs, whoever has the star gets to take extra cards off the pile.”

She was so earnest, and looked so cute in her little red hat, that I relented. “It’s wonderful what you did for me tonight. Your heart was in the right place, and you’re right—I should’ve been here. If it weren’t for you and your friends making fudge right now, I’d have nothing to sell in my shop in the morning. Thank you, Dotty. Did you pay yourself?”

I handed her a few bills.

She handed them back. “Honey, I’ve been friends of your family a long time. I enjoy thinking up goofy stuff. Letting me do this once in a while is payment enough. Besides, if this game catches on, it’ll change the card nights at St. Ann’s in a big way. We can donate a lot more to local causes. Treat this as research. Is that okay?”

I wasn’t a fan of research lately, but Dotty was sly as a fox. But what harm could come from a bit of craziness now and then? And for good causes? I nodded. “But I’m the boss of my fudge store, right?”

“Of course you are, dear. Whatever you say.” She laughed on her way back to her copper kettle to finish the fudge.

“What’re you making?” I wandered after her to peek in the kettle. Her fudge was red.

“Red velvet cake fudge. We thought it would have to be
that because we all wear red hats. And with royalty coming, we were thinking about royal red carpets and capes.”

“Does it have a fairy-tale name yet?”

“Why, no. We do want to leave you something to do when we barge in like this and take over your shop.” She winked at me.

I laughed. “Capes, hats, and keeping the wolf from my door?”

Dotty said, “Little Red Riding Hood Fairy Tale Fudge.”

The ladies at the kettles gave it a thumbs-up. Dotty said, “We can sew red capes for the dolls and red aprons for moms. And of course you’ll want mini picnic baskets made from local willow twigs and grapevines.”

The grapevines reminded me of today’s events. “Do you know Michael Prevost?”

“The girls and I have been to his winery many times for wine-and-cheese pairings.”

“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”

She left the copper kettle to steer me over behind the minnow tank across the way. “He’s a nice enough man, but he doesn’t have friends.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because one of the gals in the group told me. She stops by Chris and Jack’s bar often enough with friends and Michael is there evenings. Alone.”

I made a mental note of that. The bar was next to the Namur church. “What’s wrong with going alone?”

Dotty nodded. “That’s unusual in Door County where everybody’s so friendly.”

“Maybe he’s pining. He told me he loves Fontana Dahlgren.”

“Pffft. That trollop? Before you returned to Door County, she was dating one of Cherry Hardy’s colleagues.”

That surprised me. “Who was that?”

“Wesley Weaver.”

My insides clenched in surprise. “I spoke with him yesterday. He didn’t say anything about her.”

“Why would he? Anything he’d say would implicate him in the murder. Remember when I told you this was about
revenge? Cherry may have had something over on Professor Weaver that would destroy him.”

*   *   *

After I took the gobs of cash to the bank, I was glad to get home to my quiet cabin. But it was too quiet. As I lay on the couch, I could hear Titus tiptoeing across my kitchen floor.

I thought about the issue of being alone. What if I were alone for life? I thought about Mike, in love with Fontana, but it was evidently unrequited love. He hung out at the local bar for companionship. What would I do? Pauline was lonely, too, wanting more from John. And Grandma was lonely with her secret. My mother had her secret of discovering the body. My grandpa had the secret of the prince being here and he hadn’t told Grandma. And what about Cherry Hardy, dead now but a loner in his university department where they didn’t much like him evidently because he put my fudge in test tubes? Research has shown we can die of loneliness. Humans need friends; we need to be touched and cared about.

It struck me as odd that the only people not lonely at all were people like Mercy Fogg and Dotty and Lois and women in red feather boas playing a made-up, silly card game and eating all my fudge. They lived for fun.

What if that was all Cherry had been doing? Living for fun? I recalled that his colleagues didn’t appreciate him having fun or testing fudge. Would the very serious Professor Weaver kill the silly, fun-loving Cherry? Nothing made sense to me.

I called Kjersta Dahlgren, but the call went to voice mail. I left her a message, telling her about the gang coming to her place on Saturday to clean up the garden for her and Daniel. I also informed her that the sheriff had been looking through everything again, even her compost pile. I didn’t know what he was looking for, though. What was left to find? They had the shovel as the possible murder weapon.

The sheriff also had my father’s Buck knife, which had ended up in the organ bench, obviously stolen somehow from our farm. The knife wasn’t used to commit the murder, though I wondered if it had been used to scare Cherry. Did Cherry know about the knife? Cherry was so not himself
during that tour, I wondered now if he’d come on the tour as a means to retrieve the knife.

The crimes were all a muddle in my head, but I felt close to putting the jigsaw puzzle together.

A soft knock came at my door. Regrettably, I had to move off my couch.

I flicked on the outside light. When I opened the door, Lucky Harbor dashed in.

On the porch, Dillon was holding a huge picnic basket and wearing a grin. The basket had the distinct, delicious aroma of the fried cheese curds and cheeseburgers from the Troubled Trout. My mouth watered.

A tickle settled into the empty spot in my stomach. “How did you know I forgot to eat today?”

“Because I love you and you’re in my heart all day even if you’re not beside me.”

I was ravenous. For food. For company. For everything Dillon had to offer.

Chapter 28

O
n Friday morning the sheriff returned my father’s Buck knife. The only blood and fingerprints on it were Cherry’s. John’s blood was on the music sheets, but not the knife.

I called my father. “Did he borrow your knife? Then forget to leave it when he left the farm?”

“Could be. He could have used it to cut some plants to take in for testing and hadn’t taken the time yet to return it. I leave it sitting around in the haymow to cut twine off the bales. He’d split open bales and take samples from the middle of the bale.”

“Like Nick yesterday. But that still doesn’t explain why it was at the church with Cherry’s blood on it the morning before his death.”

My father sighed. “Ava, be careful with all this. Stick to your fudge. It’s safe.”

I recalled the line from “Ave Maria” with the blood smeared beneath it.
Safe may we sleep beneath thy care.
“I’ll stay safe, Dad, don’t worry.” He grunted at me but I went on. “Was Professor Weaver out there recently?”

“Yeah. He was here with a few colleagues maybe a week ago to look at our third-crop hay.”

That gave me the chills. “Was your knife missing since that day?”

“I never thought about it because I didn’t need it. We only started the baling a few days ago and that’s when I missed my knife.”

“Who were the colleagues with Professor Weaver?”

“Oh gosh, I don’t remember all of them. The usual guys from the lab, like Nick Stensrud and Will Lucchesi. You know the bunch.”

“Yeah. Working on their doctorates.” By examining my fudge. “Was Mike Prevost at the farm recently?”

“Ava, he comes here all the time to pick up cheese. You know that.”

I was only making my father more worried about me, so I said good-bye and hung up.

I needed a normal Friday in order to sort through my twisted thoughts. The weather cooperated with low humidity, so I tested a different divinity fudge recipe, this time with no marshmallows. I let it sit in the kitchen to set up while I came back out to the front to cut up all the fudge Dotty and her five friends had left on the white marble slab at the front window.

Edible gold glitter still festooned spots on counters and floors. I was vacuuming when Grandpa charged in from the front door at around seven o’clock that morning. He went straight for his pot of aromatic chocolate-laced coffee behind his register counter.

“What’s up, Gilpa?” I wondered if Grandma had confessed her secret.

He slurped his coffee. “My hands are a problem. I can’t take this.”

Confused, but patient, I kept cutting the red velvet fudge Dotty had made. Its cakelike, sweet chocolate aroma tickled my nostrils. I carved a slice and walked it over for Grandpa to try.

He said, “You didn’t make that fudge.”

“How can you tell?”

“Your fudge is always extra creamy.”

“Because I stir it fast and long. See my muscles?” I showed off my arms, then went back to cutting fudge. “Don’t worry about the fudge. I’m going to reheat this and give it a workout with my arm muscles, and if it doesn’t meet my standards, then Laura or Piers can use it to moisten some cupcakes or muffins. So, what’s your point about your hands?”

“They’re clean.”

“Yeah, they are. Do you want to help me cut fudge?”

He kept flipping his hands palm up and down. “These are no good.”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you remember my hands from the first day you started calling me Gilpa?”

“Dirty with grease and soil from the farm fields or fixing machinery. You always had black crankcase oil under the fingernails and in the cracks of your knuckles. I remember you called them your knuckle rivers. You would tell me your knuckle creases were named after the rivers of the world. The Nile, the Euphrates, the Danube, the Mississippi.”

A smile spread so wide on his face I thought it’d reach his earlobes. “That’s my point, Ava Mathilde Oosterling. Ever since I got rid of
Sophie’s Journey
and took on piloting Moose’s brand-new boat, I have nothing to fix. A man has to have stuff to fix.”

“You could fix my truck. Mercy put a big smudge on it with her limo. That needs to be rubbed off.”

“I’d be happy to. But I need something more substantial to fix.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dillon could use help in the Blue Heron Inn.”

He growled. Before he disappeared through the back hallway with his coffee cup, I said, “Are you and Grandma okay? About you know who?”

“I didn’t tell her about the prince being here. She was in a good mood last night. She liked making those truffles with you girls. You and Pauline should come over more often. Bring that Laura friend, too, and her babies. Your grandma gets lonely. She wouldn’t mind if you blessed us with a little one.”

“Don’t push it, Gilpa. Speaking of blessed, why do you believe there’s a divinity fudge recipe in that particular church? After all, Sister Adele could have kept it in her church in Champion.”

“No way. That church was rebuilt twice. No hiding places left. Saint Mary of the Snows is special. Have you ever sat in the middle pews of that church and watched how the light from the windows crisscrosses the nave?”

“No. We used to always sit up front when I was little.”

“Watch the light in there. It’s as if angels fly back and forth before your very eyes, sort of like barn swallows swooping. The sun has to be just right, though. Sister Adele had to have noticed the same phenomenon. She would have hidden things where angels roam.”

After he left, I wondered if the church warranted another close inspection.

I finished cutting up the fudge and replenishing my shelves.

A scratch signaled me from the front door. Lucky Harbor wore the floatable key holder on his collar. The note from Dillon read
Arnie stayed at the farm last night. Come up for breakfast. Piers not here.