First-Degree Fudge: A Fudge Shop Mystery Read online

  When he’d reached the small hallway behind the cash register, I hurried after him, stopping him just outside the kitchen door. “I recall you said that the medical examiner’s findings were ‘preliminary.’ When will he give you the final report on Rainetta Johnson’s cause of death? That will clear my fudge of any wrongdoing.”

  Gilpa and my girlfriends gathered around.

  Jordy squared his shoulders in a last-ditch effort to look threatening. “He said he’d have something official by Friday. And I suppose it’ll take the state crime lab that long to dig around for the poisons in your fudge.”

  The sheriff marched into the kitchen to begin poking around.

  When we returned to the main floor area of the shop, a wide-eyed Mercy toddled out the door, smug with determination on her face. I had a feeling we hadn’t heard the last of her about our so-called code violations. And who knew what the rumor mills would now say about fudge and diamonds?

  Isabelle and Pauline crushed around me in a three-way hug and human sandwich.

  Isabelle said, “You’re off the hook. It’s not like you keep diamonds around here in sugar tins or anything.”

  “The sheriff is all bluster and bluff, a big bully and buffoon,” Pauline said, the alliteration habit signaling that she was relaxing along with the rest of us.

  My grandpa, though, wore a frown, his oil-stained forehead creased, his silver eyebrows knitted together while his mouth was twitching.

  “What’s wrong, Gilpa?”

  Despite his oily duds, he stepped over and hugged me tight. Now I knew something seriously was wrong. “Gilpa?”

  Behind us, the sheriff was rattling through pans and dishes in my kitchen. He couldn’t be finding anything because his people had already stripped me clean in there. The refrigerator door popped open.

  “Ava,” Gilpa said, stepping back but keeping his hands on both my shoulders, “as much as I’d love to think this is all a big mistake, the fact is a woman died. And the sheriff thinks it’s murder. And he thinks there’s a connection to these so-called New York diamonds; that’s plain to see.” Gilpa gave me one of his soul-searching looks that make my heart sputter and my knees knock together from paralyzing fear. “You’ve got only four days of freedom unless we do something.”

  Pauline and Isabelle squelched cries of disbelief. Isabelle said, “Four days? To prove your innocence?”

  “That’s silly. I am innocent,” I said, but the look on Gilpa’s face was funereal.

  Pauline muttered, “I think they could arrest you, Ava, just to be safe.”

  “Safe?” I yelped. “I make fudge. I’m harmless. It’s all circumstantial evidence, nothing more than that.”

  Gilpa said, “I’ll call your father before this hits the Internet.” With a greasy hand, he pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket.

  My heartbeat paused in panic.

  Isabelle said, “This is awful. What can I do?”

  I hadn’t a clue. I stared at them. The customers behind us in the bait shop were clamoring for my grandfather to ring up their purchases. He clicked off his phone before letting it ring through to my parents, a tiny reprieve for my heart. The oil and gasoline smells on Gilpa mixed oddly with the vague hint of vanilla and chocolate still lingering in my empty half of the shop.

  The whiff of aromas revived me. I looked into my Gilpa’s worried eyes and offered as bravely as I could, “You always say that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. We just have to solve the case somehow.”

  “In four days?” Isabelle asked again.

  She was new to my social circle. I’d known her for only the two weeks I’d been back. Her being new challenged me to dig somewhere deep, to show her my stuff. My fear began to melt like chocolate and turn into determination as strong as chili pepper–infused fudge. I said to Isabelle, “We start now. We have to go over the list of people staying at the Blue Heron Inn.”

  “The couple from New York is certainly suspect,” Isabelle said, her pale cheeks turning pink with excitement. “They’ve been agitated the entire time they’ve been at my inn. They’re forever arguing. Maybe they’re professional thieves.”

  Pauline said, “Maybe they were trying to sell the stolen ice to Rainetta, but she didn’t like the idea of swallowing them in order to hide them.”

  Isabelle quipped, “And maybe Rainetta was going to turn in the New York couple, so they killed her.”

  I crowed for my grandpa’s sake, “Woo-hoo! See? The case is solved already.”

  Gilpa shook his head at us as if we were all Pauline’s kindergartners making up stories. “I’ll get us a good lawyer,” he said. “And I’ll call your father and mother.”

  We went silent as Jordy passed us in a hurry. He wasn’t carrying anything that I could see. But I got the feeling he’d gotten an answer to some question just by being in my kitchen.

  • • •

  We girlfriends agreed to meet after Pauline was done with school at two thirty to go over the Blue Heron Inn guest list. Meanwhile, it was almost ten o’clock and Isabelle had to prepare lunch for her guests. I rushed past the kitchen of my shop, flung open the back door, then charged across the quiet back street to my grandparents’ house. But not before my phone rang. It was Mom.

  Mom cried every word. “We’ll”—blubber, blubber—“sell the”—blubber, blubber—“farm. We’ll sell all the”—louder blubbering—“cows. We’ll do”—sniffling snorts—“what it takes.”

  “No,” I said. “You won’t do any of that. Gilpa’s hiring a lawyer and this will all blow over. You’re not losing the farm because of me. I’ll pay Gilpa back for the lawyer.”

  “I should call Father Van den Broeck.”

  “Why?”

  “He can dedicate the next Mass to you. And we can announce it for the prayer chain groups for all the sister churches in Door County.”

  Egads! Now Mom was going to have the whole county praying for my soul. But then I thought, maybe I needed that kind of help. Everybody would be hearing about my mortal sins soon enough anyway. “Mom, thanks. I guess the only time I envisioned having a Mass said for me would be my funeral, so having it said now before I go to jail gives me a warm feeling.”

  She wailed louder.

  • • •

  My grandparents weren’t criers, thank goodness. I barely knocked before going inside their home across the street from mine. The core of Grandma Sophie’s and Gilpa’s cottage was identical to mine and all the rest along this street. In the 1800s, the immigrant Belgians, Finns, and Swedes felled trees fast to build shelters from the brutal winter weather that sets in here come November. My grandparents used to live on our farm down by Brussels, about a forty-five-minute drive from here, but when I was born they moved up to Fishers’ Harbor, I guess to give my family room to grow. Unfortunately, my parents had me and then nobody else. They were hoping when I married eight odd years ago that I’d fill the farmstead house’s four bedrooms with kids, but that was another disappointment involving my ex. My grandparents added two bedrooms to the back of their cottage, turned the old bedroom into a dining room by knocking down those walls, and also enclosed the front porch for a year-round sunroom. It’s a lot of space to clean and keep up when you’re in your seventies and have a broken leg like my Grandma Sophie.

  The house smelled of strong coffee, cinnamon toast, and fried eggs from breakfast.

  Grandma Sophie—her thick mass of white, cascading hair looking fairylike and as if it had been sculpted from the whitecaps of Lake Michigan—was sitting in the living room area by the fireplace watching a cooking show. “Hey, Grandma.”

  “Double hey back, Ava honey.”

  The softened sparkle in her deep brown eyes told me Grandpa had reached her with the news.

  I took her hands in mine, then gave her a cheek-to-cheek hug that grew into one of those where your grandma encircled you with her arms, pulled you in tight, and then refused to let go. Greetings were important to Belgians. We smiled and chuckled a lot just
saying “Hi,” and it’s not uncommon for Gilpa or my dad to shake your hand but forget he was still hanging on to it as he launched into a conversation.

  They say that if you hug a person for at least twenty seconds you both release the calming and friendship-making hormone oxytocin. In other words, a hug means a tiny “I love you.” Grandma says that the home country was overrun a lot in wars because the Belgians were lovers and not fighters. If world leaders hugged my grandma, her soft cheeks would soften their intentions immediately. She didn’t have much for wrinkles, having never smoked, and always washed her face with her homemade soaps. She was also young yet, barely in her seventies. She had gotten pregnant with my father when she was only sixteen. Yeah, a big oops. She said that Gilpa’s love never wavered and his hugs made her cheeks glow, so she knew everything would be all right. And it was for her. I dreamed of being as beautiful—and as wise and useful—as Grandma Sophie when I hit seventy-one.

  She said with a toss of a hand toward the TV, “Ava, they’re making a stew with snakes today. Can you imagine serving snakes here in Door County?”

  “No. I can’t imagine changing over our fish boils for snake boils,” I said, enjoying the relief of laughing after the past hour at the fudge shop. “I’ll make up your bed and do the dishes. What do you want me to cook for lunch?”

  “Oh, Ava honey, I can manage on my crutches to lean against the counter and use the microwave. Now, tell me about this hubbub over your film star. They say you killed her.”

  I nearly fell down. “They?” I sat down gingerly on her couch so as not to bounce the leg with the cast on it. “Where did you hear that?”

  She reached to the table next to her to pat her laptop. “On the Internet.”

  “Jeremy Stone?”

  “His online newspaper headline said, ‘Film Flower Finished by Fudge.’”

  I let go with another laugh, despite the situation. “Not quite Pauline’s guess, but close. She predicted ‘Fatal Fudge Flames Out Forgotten Film Star.’”

  “Too long for a headline.”

  “I guess. At least he was nice enough to call her a ‘flower.’”

  “Rainetta Johnson was a knockout in her day. Gil and I drove all the way to Madison one time for one of her movies.”

  “You did?”

  “We stayed overnight at the Park Motor Inn and walked down State Street to the Orpheum. Rainetta was an ingenue then, and she wore Tiffany jewels in every scene.” Grandma Sophie sighed with a faraway look. “I talked about the jewelry so much after that, that your grandpa bought me a diamond necklace for Christmas that year.”

  “But I never see you wear jewelry much.”

  “I got out of the habit on the farm. Do you want to see the necklace?”

  I did, but I felt an urgency to take care of my big problem so begged off for now. I filled in Grandma Sophie on our plans to solve the case in four days and Grandpa’s quest to find a lawyer.

  She puckered her face. “That’s all you’ve got? A lawyer and a guest list?”

  Worry slammed back into me. I told her about Cody Fjelstad being a suspect, too, and his social worker Sam Peterson disappearing upstairs at the inn just prior to Rainetta being found.

  “Your friend Sam must have his reasons. He really raised his voice?”

  “I don’t want to believe it either,” I said, getting up to go to the kitchen to begin washing their dishes. I didn’t want to talk about the rift between Sam and me that had begun back when I decided to date Dillon Rivers during college. The only two times I’d ever heard Sam raise his voice was with Rainetta and with me all those years ago. Sam was protective of me, and maybe jealous of Dillon, who was just about as nice and charming as any guy could be with my parents or anybody. He’d driven up from school in Madison several times to visit me during summer vacations or other times. Dillon was six years older than I was and had interrupted his schooling a few times to pursue his love of being a comedian, but he was back studying to be an engineer when we met. He was smart, and his family was well-to-do. His parents lived in Milwaukee then, in a big home on the lake. But Sam said Dillon was too charming and spoiled. I felt like Sam was calling me spoiled, too. The sting of that contributed to my need to leave Door County, though I’d never admit that to Sam. Whenever we had met by accident on the street during my holiday visits home, we were always civil, but the edge between us had always remained, like some piece of nut stuck between your teeth and you can’t dislodge it.

  “You have to talk with him right away,” Grandma called from the living room. “Sam always liked you.”

  Maybe too much, I wanted to say. “I suppose.”

  “There’s no ‘suppose.’ He and that Ranger boy can help you figure all this out in a jiffy.”

  I doubted that, what with Ranger avoiding me, too.

  She hobbled up on her crutches, but when she headed my way in too much of a hurry, she teetered too far forward.

  “Grandma!” I rushed to her, grabbing her and the crutches with a sweep of my arms. “Please be careful. Sit down. Watch your cooking show about snakes. I don’t need your help.”

  “But I think you do. We have to make fudge like crazy. A boatload of fudge.”

  “Why?” I helped her to the kitchen with my hands firmly clasped on her birdlike limbs. After leaning her crutches on the back of the chair, I eased her into the seat, then poured her a cup of coffee from a simmering pot. The lingering aromas of cinnamon toast and eggs filled my lungs full force, making me hungry and making me want to hide out right here with Grandma Sophie and not face the world.

  She said, “You have to get back on the horse, as we say, and make your wonderful fudge.”

  I slid into the chair opposite her at her squeaky oak table to tell her about the ingredients being confiscated and my quest later today to find Belgian chocolate to start over with more Cinderella Pink Fudge. It required the sometimes hard-to-find white chocolate chunks. In addition, I wanted to experiment with Belgian couverture chocolate, which had cocoa butter solids well over fifty percent for a creamy texture. Sometimes that type of chocolate needed tempering and the recipes needed last-minute adjustments. Making fudge with Old World ingredients wasn’t for amateurs and it couldn’t be a rushed process.

  “That’s very fine,” Grandma said, “but making even one loaf of fudge is going to be too slow with you taking all that time to stir your heart out in those copper kettles. That’ll make good pictures if Jeremy Stone drops by, but you need to fill those shelves with an onslaught of fudge to show people you can’t be kept down and that you didn’t do in poor Miss Johnson. You could be getting crowds of people coming here overnight. This is a big story, Ava.”

  I hadn’t thought about that aspect. What good are a lot of customers if you have nothing to sell? But there was the fact of how long it took to make real fudge. “I don’t know, Grandma. I can make only what fits in my copper kettles.” I had six, but I could stir only one at a time myself. “As it is, I have to start work at seven in the morning to make a batch that’s ready for the following day, at the earliest. I have to mix, heat, cool, loaf. It’s a long process.”

  “I can make microwave fudge right now within an hour, start to finish.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That’s quickie melting of chips basically. That’s not the kind of fudge I want in my shop, Grandma. Sorry. Nothing personal.”

  “Who will care? People are going to be flocking to your shop to stare at the woman accused of murder, and you need fudge to sell.”

  “But a lot of them are going to believe I put poison in my fudge. That rumor caught fire yesterday already, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, but others will hear about the diamonds soon enough, and they’ll think you hide gems in all your fudge. They put plastic toy babies inside cakes for Mardi Gras. Maybe we can find things to stick inside your fudge. People will flock to the shop. You’re going to be famous. And make a boatload of money.”

  “You think so?” Maybe I’d attain the fame I had missed
out on when working for The Topsy-Turvy Girls. I thought about Jordy threatening to close us down. If the murder had happened at the shop, we would be closed and out of business. I still worried, though. Jordy could order it closed for another search on a whim. I sat down across from Grandma. “But I don’t have time to microwave batches of fudge, and neither do you.” The truth was, I was shivering still at the thought of foisting fake fudge onto the public.

  Grandma Sophie reached over to pat my hand, her warm fingers and palms clasping mine and not letting go. Like infusing my fudge with flavors, she was infusing me with her warmth and wisdom. She made my soul lighter and purer. I supposed all grandmas do that for their grandchildren; these moments gave me fleeting yearnings to have children just so they could know Sophie Oosterling.

  With a smile creasing the faint wrinkles around her brown eyes, she said, “I’ll get on Facebook and e-mail and call the ladies from church. We’ll clear our cupboards of chocolate chips this very afternoon. We’ll fill your shelves. You can still make your fancy stuff, too. Sell our version for cheap but put a premium price on yours.”

  That plan felt acceptable to my honor code. Excitement tickled my innards. “This’ll be just like putting props on our stage sets for the show.”

  She squeezed my hands. “This is what you have to do to save yourself, honey. Just what I said. You have to put on a show to make sure you look innocent.”

  “But I am innocent.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re in charge of your destiny. The producer of your own show!”

  Me? In charge of my own “show”? A fairy-tale wish for it swelled inside me like a time-lapse video of a spring tulip budding and unfurling into full bloom under the sun. And I would make money to repay Gilpa and Grandma for hiring the lawyer. And my parents would be proud of me finally.

  Grandma’s plan seemed foolproof. What could go wrong with church ladies praying for me and making fudge?