Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake Read online

  From the various reformatories, jails, and prisons that Moran had been sent to during his lifetime, she meant. Burglary, car theft, drug offenses, assault . . . if there’d been a poster child for bad behavior in Eastport, Moran would’ve been it.

  His worst crimes, though, were . . . well, it was this way: Moran was the kind of guy who, despite his history, could still convince a woman that he’d turned over a new leaf for her. Then when she saw the error of her ways—either before he’d twisted her arm and/or blackened her eye, or afterward—he’d show up at her door late at night with a song in his heart and a loaded pistol in his hand, wanting her back.

  Demanding her back. Sometimes he’d fire off the weapon a few times, other nights he’d just sit there staring balefully, but always he would return night after night, slipping off into the darkness just before the cops got there.

  He’d done it to at least three Eastport women that we knew of, and probably more. “Can’t argue with you about that,” I conceded.

  The less trouble now that he was dead part, that is. “I mean, for a guy who was only thirty years old . . .”

  Cops from three towns had needed calling to his birthday bash at the Rubber Ducky not quite a year earlier, which was how I knew.

  “He’d sure racked up a lot of bad deeds,” I finished as Ellie began beating marshmallow fluff into the sugar-and-shortening mixture.

  The kitchen timer buzzed; together with the luscious aroma of Toll House cookies floating from the smaller of our two ovens, it told me that the early-morning’s last batch of baking was complete.

  The trick to these cookies, by the way, is to use a little less flour than the recipe calls for. Also, some recipes include cinnamon and salt, but shouldn’t; the butter’s salted already and the cinnamon, you should excuse my saying so, is an abomination.

  I slid the cookie sheet out of the oven, set it on a rack at my end of the worktable, then with a thin spatula began transferring the cookies onto white paper doilies on a display case tray.

  And then I hesitated. They looked lovely: golden brown, darker but not too dark around the edges, with plenty of chocolate morsels in them. But I couldn’t be sure, unless . . .

  Ellie glanced over suspiciously. “What are you doing?”

  “Testing one,” I mumbled, “to be sure it’s okay.” Oh, it was. It definitely was.

  “We wouldn’t want to be selling anything that wasn’t, would we?” I added through a mouthful of chocolatey heaven.

  “Surely not,” said Ellie, unable to repress a smile. Going into business is a learning experience, they say, and one thing we learned right off the bat was that I had a sweet tooth the size of a Buick.

  “I am,” I said after licking the remaining melted chocolate off my fingertips, “our taste tester, after all.”

  Hey, it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. Also, I saw it as payback for me having to deal with all those bills.

  “Oh, indeed,” Ellie retorted wryly, squinting at her measuring cup. “Fine, then. Just don’t give yourself a stomachache.”

  Saying this, she walloped the remaining marshmallow fluff into the sugared shortening mixture. But then her voice went somber.

  “I almost wish we hadn’t used those antler-shaped sprinkles.”

  We’d been delighted to find them in a specialty baking supply catalog, but now they were how the fatal milkshake had been identified as one from The Chocolate Moose, along, of course, with the instantly recognizable paper cup with our antlered mascot on it.

  Apparently Moran had drunk most of the milkshake before he died, which I thought posed its own problems. But I would wonder about that later, I decided as Ellie frowned down at the bowlful of sweet stuff she’d been working on.

  Marshmallow fluff was not a regular item on our ingredients list; personally, I’d rather eat lard than a fluffernutter, and Ellie thought the stuff was right up there with Spam straight out of the can.

  But in this case it was required. “Now this frosting needs to get chilled,” said Ellie.

  I took the bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and set it in the cooler alongside a half-dozen already-baked trays of Chocolate Cruller Muffins, Heavenly Devil’s Food Cookies, and Criminally Good Fudge Drops. In fifteen minutes when the shop opened at 10 a.m., I’d have them all out in the display case with the cookies and we would be ready.

  “There,” I said, dusting my hands together. But my satisfaction was mingled with worry; as I slid open the glass door of the display case I couldn’t help wondering how many more times I’d get to do it before we really were forced to quit.

  A year earlier when we began, we’d hoped Ellie’s grandmother’s wonderful old baking recipes, Ellie’s own skill at following them, and my ability to pinch a penny until Abe Lincoln screamed would carry us through any little deficiencies in our actual storekeeping experience.

  But so far, all we’d been able to do was keep our heads above water—barely—especially in winter, when there just weren’t enough customers around to pay the light bill, much less make any profit.

  Still, we’d been friends for a long while and I felt sure that much at least would continue; small comfort in the business world, maybe, but to me it was everything. Now while I swept a final time under the tables and straightened up the napkin dispensers, she began her next task of the day: putting together the bottom layer of a whoopie-pie wedding cake for what promised to be—in our remote little corner of the world, anyway—the wedding of the century.

  Also, at least if Ellie was right, that cake was going to bring us the payday that would save our business, and the wedding was just five days away. So maybe things were looking up, I thought hopefully.

  But just moments after I’d gotten the front door unlocked and the last of the Fudge Drops onto the tray in the display case, the little bell mounted over the shop door jingled and the bride-to-be walked in.

  And she was crying, which could not be a good sign. “Oh, have you heard?” she managed. “Toby Moran’s been murdered!”

  “Yes, we have, you poor thing,” I replied, hurrying to her.

  I pressed a napkin into the hands of the wretchedly sobbing young Eastport kindergarten teacher, Sharon Sweetwater, and guided her to one of the small tables, then brought her a box of tissues and a glass of iced Perrier water with a lime slice in it.

  “Here, drink some of this.” I sat across from the distraught young woman while she obeyed me as best she could, given how hard she was still crying.

  “Oh,” Sharon breathed. Her eyes were still streaming and her shoulders hitched with lingering sobs.

  With her dark curls clipped closely to her small, neat head, her wide green eyes framed by lashes black as ravens’ wings, and cheeks that really did look as if the roses of spring were blooming in them, Sharon was just about the prettiest girl we’d ever seen.

  The happiest, too, usually. But not now, of course. “The police came to my house a little while ago,” she said. “They asked if they could come in, and they asked me a lot of questions.”

  She took another hitching breath. “A lot of very worrying questions, and I’m very upset, and I couldn’t think of anyone else but you two that I wanted to talk to about it,” she finished, the words coming out in a rush.

  She sucked in a shaky breath. “Because I thought it was all over with,” the words tumbled from her, “but now it’ll all be brought up and hashed over again, and at the worst possible time, when the last thing I want is to remind anyone at all that I . . .”

  That she’d been one of Moran’s victims, she’d have added if she hadn’t begun crying so hard again. Before meeting her current fiancé, she’d been one of Moran’s girlfriends—everyone in Eastport knew it—and their inevitable breakup had, of course, come with his own special brand of terrifying harassment.

  “Just like the others. He’d sit outside my house at night,” she said. “Staring and glaring, and scaring me half to death.”

  “Ugh. In that awful car of his? And di
d he have the gun?” Ellie wanted to know.

  Because naturally Toby’d had a gun; guys like him always did, and he’d made a show of it whenever he could. The car he drove was characteristic of him, too: a black Dodge Charger with dark-tinted windows, a hideously realistic skull-and-crossbones hood ornament, and a custom chrome grille like a mouthful of shiny metal teeth.

  “Yes, that car. And the gun. It was a .22, he’d showed it to me before,” Sharon said bleakly.

  Of course he had. “So what the cops really wanted to know was if maybe you ended Moran’s harassment by ending him?” I asked.

  Which didn’t quite make sense, partly because she’d already broken up with him long before and partly for another reason.

  “Yes.” Sharon nodded energetically again. “They didn’t say so, exactly, but why else? They asked me a lot about whether was I still angry with him, that’s for sure.” Another shuddery breath. “And I said I was.”

  She’d made no secret of the fact that she despised him; probably every woman he’d ever met still did, some murderously so, maybe.

  “And what made it worse was that I’ve got no alibi,” she said. “I was home finishing up the crocheting on my wedding veil, all alone. So it’s not like I couldn’t have done it.”

  Only that she wouldn’t have, since angry or not, here’s the thing about Sharon: if you were a housefly—a large, thoroughly repulsive housefly, buzzing around annoyingly and making a complete nuisance of yourself—she wouldn’t swat you. She’d trap you in a jelly jar, then fling you out into the fresh air and watch you fly.

  “They were skeptical of me,” Sharon added, meaning the police.

  Which was most likely an understatement. She’d had a restraining order against Moran—it’s what sent them to her so fast, probably, her name in some database or another—so while she might not yet be a no-kidding murder suspect, she was surely a person of interest.

  Once more the little bell over the door tinkled; this time Jenna Waldrop waltzed in, all auburn ringlets and copper bracelets, wearing a pair of black slacks and a white cardigan with ruffles around the neckline.

  Jenna was a kindergarten teacher, too, and in her twenties, but that was where any resemblance between her and Sharon Sweetwater ended. Meanwhile the kindergarteners’ school year, always abbreviated for the littlest children, had ended even earlier this year due to a roof leak, which was why neither young woman was at work.

  “Sharon, are you okay?” Seeing her colleague looking distressed at the café table, Jenna plastered a look of concern onto her face.

  But if her sympathy had been any more fake, her nose would’ve begun growing; Jenna was well-known around town for her strong sense of entitlement, as well as for the few scruples she had to go with it.

  And according to local rumor, what Jenna felt recently that she deserved but hadn’t gotten was Sharon’s fiancé.

  “Oh, I’m just ducky, Jenna, thanks for asking,” replied Sharon. Then, with a daggerish glance, “Give my best to your mother.”

  Oof. Jenna’s mother, Henrietta, was a well-known domestic terror of the daughter-dominating variety, and reminding Jenna of this was as cutting as any insult. Never mind Sharon’s fiancé, Andy Devine; Jenna would’ve married a department-store mannequin if it got her away from Mrs. Waldrop.

  “Yes. Well,” Jenna said, digesting Sharon’s remark while picking out a half-dozen chocolate macaroons from the display case. “I’m sorry about your friend.” Biting the words off, she took the white paper bagful of macaroons Ellie handed to her and accepted her change.

  “Friends, actually,” she amended, turning to Sharon again. “Your dead friend, Toby Moran, and Andy Devine, too. Who the cops already think probably killed Toby,” she added meanly.

  She paused at the door. “I overheard them saying so just now in the diner where they were getting coffee, and d’you know what?” Her dark eyes narrowed in satisfaction. “Say what you want about the golden boy,” she delivered her final thrust, “but I’ll just bet they’re right.”

  The golden boy . . . She flounced out. I turned to Sharon, now pressing a fresh tissue to her lips in a vain attempt to stifle her own sobs.

  “I don’t get it,” said Ellie, looking puzzledly from me to Sharon and back. Jenna had a viperish tongue, and not getting Andy for herself had made her bitter. But still . . .

  “What’d she mean by that last part?”

  I stood there silently thinking about what it would take to get poison into a chocolate macaroon. Not the deadly substance that had killed Toby Moran, of course; insecticide, they could smell it ten feet away, police chief Bob Arnold had told us.

  Just something that was thoroughly inconvenient. Outside, Jenna strode past the window and down the street.

  “I mean, the very idea of Andy Devine being a suspect,” Ellie went on, “how could they possibly . . . ?”

  Andy Devine, the most dashing young Coast Guard officer any of us had ever seen, resembled Great Britain’s Prince Harry without the beard. Smart, funny, and a sure bet to be promoted in the not-too-distant future, the Maine Maritime Academy graduate-with-honors was an Eastport success story.

  And now, at least if you believed Jenna, he was a murder suspect—a situation that promised to sink not only the upcoming wedding celebration, but also The Chocolate Moose.

  * * *

  “It’s too bad Jenna can’t come right out and complain about her mom,” Ellie said. “She’d find a lot of sympathy if she did, I’ll bet.”

  I nodded agreement. We’d sent Sharon up to my house to be cosseted and cared for by Bella Diamond; Sharon had no relatives here in town and her friends were mostly other teachers, all of whom were busy teaching the older students who were still in school right now.

  “Jenna grew up with meanness, now she’s mean, too,” I said. “And doesn’t know how to stop, maybe, she’s been that way for so long.”

  Just then my daughter-in-law, Mika, arrived to tend the shop for the day. A talented violinist, my son Sam’s beloved wife, and the mother of my fabulously wonderful grandson, Ephraim Tchang-Tiptree, Mika had also turned out to be a competent pastry chef, fortunately for me and Ellie.

  “Hello, hello,” Mika greeted us smilingly, pulling back her shiny black hair and stuffing it into a hairnet like Ellie’s.

  “How’s he doing?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  The very idea of having a grandchild had once stuck in my craw; for one thing it meant I was no longer a teenager myself, as if I’d needed any more proof. Now, though, just the thought of him melted my insides into something much like the marshmallow fluff Ellie had been using.

  “Oh, he’s great.” Mika pulled a white bibbed apron on over her blouse and capri pants. “Sam’s taking him to the park this morning and then over to the health center for his six-month checkup.”

  She began polishing the display case with one hand and neatening the toothpicks in the ceramic jar on the cash register counter with the other.

  “You two can go if you want,” she added. “I’ll be fine here.”

  Not that we needed toothpicks, usually. We just liked the way they looked in the jar. Thinking this, I peered again at the counter; it seemed different, somehow.

  But before I could figure out why, Ellie came out of the kitchen with a sweater over her shoulders and her bag over her arm.

  “Maybe you can figure out something with that frosting,” she told Mika, meaning the stuff still sitting in the cooler. “I’m starting to think I’ll never get it the right consistency.”

  Because even a small whoopie pie slides sideways if the frosting is goopy, and for it to happen to a wedding cake would be disastrous. Assuming, I mean, that there was still going to be a wedding....

  On Water Street the breeze off the harbor was refreshing, the salt air tinctured with an invigorating mixture of seaweed and wood smoke. As we went by, Ellie brushed off the tops of the cast-iron café tables we’d set up on the sidewalk.

  “Hello again, ladies,”
called a familiar voice. It was Eastport police chief Bob Arnold, slowing his squad car alongside us.

  Bob had plump cheeks, thinning blond hair over a high, wide forehead, and pink rosebud lips that didn’t look as if they belonged on a law enforcement professional. But what he lacked in appearances he more than made up for in the ability to wrangle evildoers.

  And talk their secrets out of them, too, sometimes. “State boys been by to see you yet?” he wanted to know.

  In Maine, only Portland and Bangor had their own murder squads; the rest got handled by the Maine State Police department’s homicide investigation unit.

  “Not yet,” Ellie replied. “But I’ll bet they will be. Wanting to know if we sold Toby Moran that milkshake, I imagine.”

  How he’d gotten it, complete with a Chocolate Moose cup and even the antler-shaped sprinkles, was still a mystery.

  “But, Bob,” Ellie went on, “is it true about Andy Devine, that the state police think he might’ve killed Toby?”

  Static fritzed out of the squad car’s radio. Something about a break-in somewhere made him grimace. When it was done, he answered. “Yeah, the two of ’em had a beef last night in the Duck, nearly came to fists before Moran got tossed out on his ear.”

  More static, then: “Bad blood between ’em anyway,” Bob went on, “ ’cause of Sharon. And,” he added unhappily, “people saw Andy follow Toby onto the path behind the Duck, after Toby got eighty-sixed and Andy left on his own.”

  “Rats,” I said, not mentioning that I’d seen him, too; as Wade would’ve said, Andy didn’t need more weight on his anchor chain.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I added. “I wish we could help about the milkshake, at least, though. Maybe someone who really hated Moran came in and bought one?”

  Ellie nodded disconsolately. “That’s possible. But Mika was in the shop all day yesterday,” she said.

  I’d have been there myself, but my dad had had an eye doctor appointment, so I’d played chauffeur. He’d been saying for months that his recovery from a heart attack was complete enough for him to start driving again, and an eye exam was the first step.