Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery Read online

  Dillon came to my rescue. “Where are the conflicting confectioners, by the way?”

  “Sleeping in, I’m sure. I don’t care. It’s peaceful here.” I turned back to Sam. “What are you up to with this expedition?”

  “Living what I preach. We have to get along with people. And Cody invited me.”

  Cody said, “Dillon and Sam don’t want to fight over you like the chefs do. I asked them both their intentions.”

  Dillon’s dark eyes crackled with humor. Sam kept nodding like some bobblehead doll. This was so unlike Sam to put up with Dillon. But Sam would do anything for Cody and I could see now that Cody was playing matchmaker.

  Dotty and Lois saved me. They came in with their arms loaded down with mounds of shiny, frilly, lacy fabric. The three men and Lucky Harbor drifted over to join John and desperate Pauline.

  Dotty had a pink rosebud tucked in her short white hair behind an ear. “We’re here with your surprise.”

  Lois also had a rose in her red hair. She foisted her armload of fluffy lace and satin fabric into my arms. “These are for you!”

  Lace tickled my nose. I sneezed. “What are these things?”

  “Aprons,” Dotty said.

  She placed her pile on my counter with great reverence. I tossed my pile on top. Dotty held up a gauzy pinafore apron with wide pink satin ruffle ribbons for ties at the waist. The shoulder straps were made from the same satin ruffles, with an added white lace overlay. The same lace and satin trimmed the entire skirt. It looked like something from a 1950s or 1960s television show. The Dick Van Dyke Show came to mind; my grandmother loved watching it in reruns.

  Oohs and aahs went up from the women and girls next to the glass fudge cabinet.

  Dotty said, “Try it on.”

  “Yes,” said Lois, “it’s perfect for you.”

  “I have aprons already,” I said, grabbing the plain cotton chef’s apron on a hook behind me.

  Lois hustled behind the cash register and swiped it out of my hands. “Oh, sweetheart, we’re here to cheer you up.”

  “I don’t need cheering.”

  Pauline stepped up to the register. “Yes, you do. Try the darn thing on. It’s cute.”

  I could tell she was eager to get a little revenge on me for my comments about John.

  “Since when do I have to be cute?” I was about to disparage the pink fluffy bit of cloth when I saw the disheartened looks on the faces of Dotty and Lois. I plastered on a fake smile. “You two made all these, didn’t you?”

  They nodded.

  Lois said, “Along with the other church ladies in our group. We want you and Door County to look good on camera for Mr. Schultz’s TV show. I stayed up until midnight sewing. I almost fell asleep in church this morning. But with your lovely complexion, pink is you. With the summer sun’s highlights, your hair is almost auburn.” Lois held the pink apron up to my body and turned to Dotty. “Don’t you think she looks like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

  Dotty nodded. “My mother and I watched that movie together when I was young. We rent it every Mother’s Day now.” Dotty teared up.

  Lois said to me, “You’re our Holly Golightly. That was the character’s name in the movie, you know.”

  Gulp. These women were in their early sixties—and with quick calculations I realized they’d been maybe ten when they saw that 1961 classic romantic comedy movie. Somehow they were picturing me as Audrey Hepburn through the innocence of their formerly young eyes. Maybe this was good for me. Research on nostalgia has proven it has great powers for health and healing. Amused, I figured my stitched head would heal faster if I played along.

  I put the apron over my plain white blouse and denim shorts. Pauline tied it in back.

  A chorus of oohs and aahs preceded the women’s applause. My face was flaming again. Flustered, I picked up an apron and thrust it at Pauline. It was a frilly pile of white lace with red roses on it, which matched her red sweatshirt and shorts.

  Lois patted her red hair. “I’m partial to that one, too. Ava, it’s made with Belgian lace I got long ago from your grandmother. We’d made aprons for all the servers for some Valentine’s Day family dinner at St. Bernie’s.”

  Pauline twirled in place. Then she shoved me around in a circle to model mine until I was dizzy. Giggles rippled through the shop.

  Bethany emerged from the crowd to tie on a powder blue lace apron, and then a few other women joined us. We were soon modeling them for one another, laughing, and . . .

  The men over in the bait shop—Sam, Dillon, Cody, John, and the other male customers—stood like statues with open mouths.

  Then John licked his lips—lasciviously.

  Sam blinked a lot, a crooked smile making him look drunk.

  Cody kept nodding like a bobble head at Bethany.

  Dillon hiked an eyebrow in a way that was akin to a bull pawing the earth.

  An unwanted sizzle zipped up and down my body.

  Before I could untie the sash of my apron, chatter broke loose. The women and girls and men were all buying things with gusto. There was a lineup of men at the fudge counter, something I’d never seen before.

  The aprons had changed the axis of the earth. I heard stories about aprons of grandmothers with pockets filled with candy, about traditional appliquéd aprons used at Christmas dinners, and more tales about serviceable flour sack aprons used during threshing season; still more aprons were used to shell peas on a porch on a summer evening.

  This evolved into sharing fudge recipes their grandmothers made. I made notes.

  I hauled out Lloyd’s cookbooks to let people take a look. The women saw Ruth Mueller’s name. Some promised to ask at home to see what their relatives remembered about the Muellers. One man thought he recalled his grandfather saying something about the bait shop being used during Prohibition to hide booze. But other men and women argued no way would a Mueller be caught up in that.

  As if on cue, Mercy Fogg showed up. She marched right up to me. “I want to talk with you about Lloyd’s murderer. Who happens to be in your employ.”

  Chapter 11

  Mercy looked evil, dressed in a uniform black jacket over a gray blouse and gray pants.

  “Want to try on an apron, Mercy? How about some coffee?” The last cup had been in the pot so long I hoped she’d taste its bitterness and flee. Mean of me, but I still couldn’t forgive Mercy for reporting Lucky Harbor’s presence in my shop to the state health inspectors.

  Mercy had a small digital camera around her neck. A button on her jacket said BIRD PEOPLE ARE THE REAL TWEETERS.

  “You’re here to buy fudge for your birding group today?”

  Mercy huffed. “No. I was up at seven busing them around Door County, but that crap is over with. Dumped them off for a picnic lunch they’re having at Peninsula State Park. That’s why I’m here, honey bunny.”

  “My name is Ava.”

  “Ava Mathilde Oosterling. Yeah, yeah. I’m Mercy Annabelle Fogg. Now that we’ve got the niceties over with, I want to tell you that Lloyd’s murderer—your stupid girlie guest chef you hired—was on the lighthouse tower this a.m. at daybreak. It was almost like she was a bird singing about her guilt.”

  Ah, it was Kelsey, and not Cody, she was calling a murderer. “Singing? On the lighthouse?”

  “You heard me. What’s-her-face was up there. Let me show you.”

  Mercy turned on her digital camera, then advanced the photos until she found one that showed the pink glow of sunrise on the vertical, squared edge of the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse tower. At the top, behind the railing, stood a slim person with blond hair. I saw no yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter at the bottom and asked Mercy about it.

  “Kelsey King probably took it down herself.”

  I stared at the photo, incredulous. “Maybe that’s not her. It’s har
d to tell one blonde from the next.”

  Mercy’s blue eyes burned into me. “I’ve got blond hair. You’re saying you can’t tell me from Miss Skinny Bones?”

  “Point taken, Mercy.” The photo scared me, to be frank. This was a bold move to do at a crime scene. “Did you talk to her?”

  “No. We were in the woods and we were headed the other way on Tramper’s Delight Trail. I was last on the trail and heard singing behind me. I looked back and there she was.”

  “She was really singing?”

  “Man, you don’t listen, do you? Talking to you is hard work.”

  I pretty much deserved that remark. “Why did you rush to tell me this? Why not the sheriff? Or did you call Jordy already?”

  “No, I didn’t. I . . . I forgot my wallet this morning with my driver’s license.”

  A tickle came to my insides. I’d caught “Miss Perfect” Mercy Fogg in an indiscretion? I should have been jubilant. But darn, I went soft and felt sorry for her. Hadn’t we all forgotten our driver’s license at least once and driven illegally? Besides, maybe if I gave her this one she’d go easy on me the next time she caught me in one of my many mistakes or spotted Dillon’s dog licking the glass case or putting a paw on the edge of the marble table.

  The photo didn’t convince me this was Kelsey King, though. “She was supposed to be working late at a new vegetarian restaurant I hooked her up with called Legumes and ’Toes in Egg Harbor. She’d be sleeping in.” The ’Toes stood for Potatoes.

  “Oh, she was at Legs and Toes. But not cooking. I was there with Libby last night. They had a woman folksinger, but after she started, Kelsey came out of the kitchen, grabbed the guitar right from the woman, and began strumming and singing.”

  “Yikes. That assignment was supposed to keep her out of trouble.”

  “Afraid not. The other singer stalked off.”

  “Was Kelsey any good?”

  “Nobody barfed up their dinner.”

  I squinted at the photo on the camera again. My body went cold. “We have to call the sheriff, in case she’s still out there.” I pulled up the ruffled apron skirt and retrieved my phone out of my shorts pocket. “I need to get out there. To talk to her.”

  “You think she . . . ?” Mercy used a hand to mimic Kelsey diving to her death.

  “Mercy, please don’t kid around. It’s slippery up there. Accidents happen. I’ll never live with myself if something happens to her.”

  I tried Kelsey’s phone number. It flipped me to voice mail. I left a message for her to call me. “She’s obviously not dealing well with me or this fudge contest.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  I called nine-one-one. When I got off the phone, I realized my dilemma. I had no vehicle. I raced to Pauline and asked her to drive me out to the lighthouse.

  “Sorry. John and I walked over here from his motel.”

  Ugh again. She’d stayed with Mr. Hairy Toes at his motel last night. “Can you take over the registers?”

  “What’re you up to?”

  “Kelsey’s in trouble. Doing stupid things. Maybe because of me. She’s out at the lighthouse.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Playing detective maybe.”

  “But you were suspicious of her.”

  “I still am. She’s crazy and unpredictable. Pauline, this is serious. We have to hurry.”

  Mercy said, “I’m going back to the park to pick up the bird-watchers.”

  She was insinuating I could ride with her. Never.

  “No, I can borrow my grandmother’s SUV.” But when I phoned, Grandma was gone and there was no answer. Obviously, she was still in church or somewhere with her phone turned off, maybe over at Libby Mueller’s house.

  I knew that Dotty and Lois weren’t far away after leaving the fudge shop, so I phoned Dotty. They were happy to take over the cash registers. I felt a disaster coming on, but I had to trust them anyway.

  Within the next minute Pauline and I were seated behind Mercy as she drove the yellow school bus a bit too fast out of the harbor’s parking lot. Squirrels dove under nearby cars.

  Mercy turned onto Main Street in Fishers’ Harbor, slowing into the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit and coming to a dead stop in summer tourist traffic.

  “Can’t you push it a little, Mercy?”

  She couldn’t. But it gave me a moment to consider other suspects in Lloyd’s murder—the people who rented his properties on Main Street. They included a collection of artists in a couple of buildings, plus Travis Klubertanz and his wife, who ran the market, and Milton Hendrickson—the elderly gentleman who ran The Wise Owl Bookstore. Pauline knew the artists because they often taught art over at the school; she said they seemed solid and happy with their rent arrangement with Lloyd. I knew Travis; a busy young father working a small farm plus a grocery and with little kids didn’t have time for murder. I also couldn’t imagine elderly Milton tossing anything heavier than a book off the lighthouse tower. Milton was also part of the group of guys that played cards with my grandfather and Lloyd.

  We weaved around Dillon’s construction equipment.

  Pauline asked, “When will the construction ever end?”

  Mercy and I said simultaneously, “We have two seasons in Wisconsin. Winter and construction.” It was a common saying.

  As Mercy navigated the bus northward to the edge of town, I worried about Kelsey King out at the park. Or whoever it was. It didn’t make sense that if she was up late cooking or singing at Legumes and ’Toes, she’d be up this morning early to go to the tower.

  I must have mumbled that out loud because Pauline said, “Unless she was snooping around and making sure they didn’t find her lined paper and crayons.”

  “Maria and Jordy surely would have found those things by now.”

  Mercy said, “Libby told me all about the note.”

  “You two are good friends,” I said, hoping for more information. “Even though there’s a good difference in your ages. She’s much older than you.” I said that to butter up Mercy. Libby was in her early sixties, only slightly older than Mercy. “How’d you and Libby meet?”

  “On a gambling bus heading for the Oneida Casino.”

  “You still go?” I recalled how sad the gambling had made Lloyd.

  “Not so much. We go over to the Troubled Trout now and then. You been there lately?”

  “No.”

  Mercy eased the bus around a car being parallel-parked. “You should go. You’d be surprised what you can put money on these days.”

  Pauline said, “The last time Ava gambled, she ended up with a bigamist, a divorce, and then an annulment and no money.”

  “But I learned to write TV scripts and make fudge,” I countered. “And I can navigate the L.A. freeways.” I turned to Mercy, or more correctly, the back of her blond head. “You’d enjoy the challenge of driving a bus out in L.A., Mercy.”

  “No, thanks.”

  I agreed with her. Five blocks and only a couple of lanes of traffic in our little town was a picnic compared to clogged six-lane freeways.

  We beat the local officers to the park.

  The yellow tape was gone from around the lighthouse, just as Mercy’s photo had showed. The tape was balled up under a bush near the split-rail fence.

  I headed to the solid green front door of the gift shop, where I almost fell on my butt after trying the doorknob. The place was locked. “She must be here yet.” I slapped on the door and yelled, “Kelsey?”

  Pauline asked, “You’re assuming she had a key and just waltzed in?”

  “She got up to the top of that tower somehow. Let’s go around back.”

  Mercy said, “I’m not going. Libby told me all about how Lloyd had looked.”

  The vision of Lloyd splayed on his back with his arm crooked and under him came
back to me. I shook off goose pimples forming. “Pauline, come on.”

  Pauline looked down at me. “Maybe we should wait for Jordy.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Kelsey might still be up on the tower and need talking down.” I ran around back.

  Pauline and Mercy trotted behind me, our footfalls crunching in the gravel.

  There was no one on the ground, to our relief.

  We looked up. We didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean Kelsey wasn’t crouched on the outdoor deck on the other side and trying to avoid us.

  “Kelsey!” I called again.

  There was no response, but then Mercy said, “There!” She pointed toward the nearby woods and Tramper’s Delight Trail.

  A figure was disappearing into the brush. I took up the chase.

  * * *

  A siren wailed in the distance as Pauline and I raced down the park’s woodland trail. Mercy stayed behind.

  After a small bend in the trail, I glimpsed Kelsey or whoever it was duck into the understory.

  Pauline said, puffing beside me, “We’re going to lose her.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  But we did. Thick ferns and brush and prickly downed fir trees pushed back at us. We came to a halt amid mosquitoes and black flies attacking us for their lunch.

  A rustling from afar put me in motion again. “Come on.” As I pushed at an opening in the brush, I called out, “Kelsey? Stop! Kelsey, we can work this out!”

  We scrambled through thorny berry bushes snagging our clothes and loose hair.

  “Let’s go back,” Pauline said. “Let her go.”

  “No, Pauline. We’re closing in.” I could still hear branches slapping in the near distance ahead of us.

  We came to a deer trail where the footing was easier. We were huffing pretty hard by now, but I forced myself to run faster. We had to pause to step over downed limbs and even a small birch tree trunk, rotted just enough to be shedding its white bark in sheets that made footing slippery. Something was grunting and flailing about in the woods not too far from us.

  “Kelsey?”

  In a small clearing we came upon Lucky Harbor playing with an old rope maybe five feet in length. He whipped it about as if it were a snake he was trying to kill. As soon as he saw us, he barreled at me, leaping up on me with his front paws on my blouse, leaving green grass stains. He was wet and covered in cockleburs.