Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut Read online

  In reply he shoved a professionally produced flyer at me. Eating on the Edge! was the name of his podcast, it said, and then it listed a half-dozen small New England towns where the first six episodes of the new production would be set.

  I frowned at the flyer just as Ellie came hurrying out of the shop looking vexed, locking the door behind her and testing it, and turning to me with her car keys already in her hand.

  “Jake, I just got a call from Timmy Franco.”

  She headed for her car, which was in one of the angled spaces in front of the shop. I followed, pleased to be leaving Henry Hadlyme sputtering on the sidewalk behind me. Whatever he was up to, I figured I’d have time later to put the kibosh on it.

  But in this, as in so much else, I was incorrect.

  * * *

  Eastport, Maine (pop. 1,200) is located on Moose Island, three hours from Bangor and light-years from everywhere else, or so it often seems. Reachable from the mainland by a long, curving causeway, the town and its bustling waterfront are also accessible to boats ranging from tiny skiffs and tubby fishing vessels rigged for lobster hauling to the vast, ocean-going freight carriers that visit our deep water cargo port regularly.

  “Ellie,” I gasped, hustling after her down the steep metal ramp leading to the floating wooden piers in the waterfront’s boat basin.

  Fortunately, the ramp’s surface was serrated, so I didn’t just slide down it like a human bobsled. “Ellie, what are we doing?”

  Behind us onshore rose the old red-brick storefront buildings of Eastport’s downtown, where distant music and laughter indicated that the pirate celebration was still in full swing.

  Down here among the fishing boats tied up to the finger piers, though, the creak of rigging and clank of anchor chains mingled with the cries of seagulls overhead, drowning out the festival’s din.

  Ellie scampered ahead of me; I rushed to keep up with her while trying hard not to fall into the waves slopping the dock pilings. On either side of me, forty-foot fishing vessels floated, neatly slotted into their assigned spaces and secured to nearby pilings by lines as thick as my wrists.

  “Ellie?” She was already aboard her own little vessel, a twenty-three-foot fiberglass Bayliner with a black canvas bimini awning, a small cuddy cabin, and a walkaround deck.

  From the Bayliner’s stern hung a 225-horsepower Mercury outboard engine I’d nicknamed The Beast. “Ellie, d’you by any chance feel like telling me what we’re doing here?”

  I put one uncertain hand on the bimini’s aluminum-tube frame and one foot on the Bayliner’s narrow fiberglass rail. Then I pushed with my other foot: up, over, and suddenly I was aboard, and as always I felt absurdly proud of myself that I’d accomplished this.

  “Very nice,” said Ellie approvingly. “You’ll be taking her out on your own before you know it.”

  It was among her fondest fantasies that she would turn me into a skilled mariner who could get the Bayliner not only out of the boat basin alone but back into it again, too.

  Without sinking, I mean. “But never mind that now,” she added. She opened the battery hatch next to the engine, reached down into it to snap on the battery switch, slapped the hatch shut, and latched it.

  “Tim needs our help,” she said, and I noticed that she was still moving along rather briskly.

  “Why?” I asked, and in reply she waved at the vacant spot ahead of us in the water, next to the finger pier.

  The spot that usually had a familiar boat parked in it.... Then I got it. “Wait a minute, wasn’t he out of town? You mean he’s . . . ?”

  Tim and his little motorboat were a familiar sight in the boat basin, where Tim spent his days doing chores and running errands for the fishing crews.

  “Uh-huh,” Ellie agreed. “I haven’t seen him around for a few days. And before he left, I noticed he was wearing new jeans and a new pair of sneakers.”

  “So he must’ve gotten work.” Tim’s clothes were usually thrift shop specials, ragged but serviceable.

  “Right. That’s what I thought at the time, but he hasn’t been around to ask,” said Ellie. She switched on the radio, then smacked it sharply with the top of her hand until static blared from it.

  “I ordered the new wires for this thing two weeks ago,” she complained as she dialed the volume down. “One of these days, it’s not going to turn on at all.”

  But she had better luck with the navigation electronics. On the helm near the steering wheel and the engine gauges, a screen jumped to glowing life at her touch, its display showing among other things that at the moment we were in twenty-three feet of water.

  “Anyway, I guess he’s back, because right now he’s stuck out in Head Harbor Passage and he needs a tow,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s inconvenient. What’s he going to do?”

  She pushed a small lever on the throttle, lowering the engine’s propeller, then squeezed a rubber bulb on the fuel line a few times to put a dose of gas into the carburetor.

  She’d taught me all this just in case I ever fulfilled her hopes by deciding to . . . And then it hit me, what she was saying.

  “Wait a minute. Oh no. Don’t tell me you mean we’re going out there to—”

  Not that Ellie didn’t have plenty of boating experience, and she’d taken so many Coast Guard navigation and boat-handling courses that she probably could’ve taught one herself. But . . .

  She turned the ignition key, starting the engine: vroom-vroom, etcetera. “Take the wheel,” she said.

  “Wait a minute,” I repeated, but she didn’t. Instead she hopped out onto the dock, untied the lines, tossed them aboard, and hopped back onto the boat again.

  So the engine was running, and we were untied, and . . . “Okay, now pull the shift lever backward,” she said. “Turn the wheel. Back us out. Come on, Jake, it’s just like a car,” she advised me kindly.

  Sure, but a car wasn’t swerving and swaying each time a puff of breeze got caught up in that bimini awning. The canvas was intended to provide us with shade, but at the moment it was acting more like a sail.

  “Ellie,” I grated out, gripping the boat’s wheel nervously as the dock slid rapidly by. We were in reverse, approaching the granite boulders lining the boat basin to our rear.

  Or “just off our stern,” as these insufferably boaty types like to say. At least I hadn’t hit any of the boats around us. Yet.

  “You’re fine,” said Ellie. “Straighten the wheel, put it in forward gear, and give it a little gas.”

  So I did all that stuff, the alternative being to jump directly overboard, and have I mentioned yet that the water here is very cold?

  Even in summer it’s only about sixty degrees, which sounds fine but if you’re swimming it feels as if ice cubes are floating around with you. And if you’re in it for very long, even with your head above water, you’ll soon be a floating ice cube, too.

  “Get the life jackets out, please,” I managed as I cautiously eased the Bayliner out between a crumbling wharf and a barge with a construction crane perched on it, parked just far enough offshore to create a channel.

  A narrow channel... “More throttle.” Ellie draped a life jacket over my shoulders. “Remember, if you’re not moving, you can’t steer.”

  Against my better judgment I eased the throttle forward, and the boat’s handling did improve; Ellie looked satisfied. I snaked one arm and then the other through the life jacket’s armholes, meanwhile keeping an eye on our port and starboard sides, our bow, and on the depth gauge displayed on the glowing GPS screen in front of me.

  “Now start your turn,” said Ellie as we emerged from between the barge and the wharf’s dilapidated corner, thankfully without hitting either of them; I attributed this mostly to beginner’s luck.

  Dead ahead, though, lay the fish pier, where the boats unloaded their catches: scallops, those lobsters I mentioned, and sea urchins, mostly. The fish pier wasn’t as big as the concrete breakwater that loomed up to enclose two sides of
the boat basin; still, it was solid enough to be daunting.

  “Okay,” I said, turning the wheel decisively so the boat nosed to port. There, I thought, course change accomplished; now all I had to do was get out past the—

  “Yikes,” I blurted, suddenly catching from the corner of my eye the massive fishing vessel Anne Marie—all forty feet and who knew how many tons of her—coming up on my left.

  I couldn’t have seen her until I got out past the barge. But now I sure could. Her huge prow aimed straight at our midsection, and she was way too big to stop for us at this distance. I froze: Go? Or . . .

  Or what, throw the engine into reverse? Sound the horn? Get out of the way was the obvious requirement, but how? And then . . .

  Then some deep, primitive part of my brain took over, jamming my hand onto the throttle and shoving it forward.

  “Hang on!” I had time to warn Ellie before The Beast took over, the big outboard engine emitting a throaty roar while rocketing us forward as if we’d been shot out of a cannon.

  My bag flew off the console and hit the deck behind me, scattering its contents, but I paid no attention; instants later we cleared the Anne Marie’s looming bow with mere feet to spare, our wake spraying it liberally, and as we zoomed by I heard the faint congratulatory cheers of the men aboard.

  “Whew,” I exhaled. Once we got by the fishing boat, I backed off the throttle a little, easing out past the end of the breakwater to the wide blue expanse of the bay itself. And then . . .

  “Hey! I did it,” I said wonderingly to Ellie.

  The sky, vast and cloudless, mirrored the water. A breeze out of the south smelled of salt. A gull cried, sailing on ahead of us like a guide, and the outboard growled pleasantly.

  “You surely did,” said Ellie, her voice coming not from directly behind me, where I’d believed she’d been standing throughout my little emergency, but from way back in the stern somewhere. “But now,” she added, “I need you to do something else.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at her; we were approaching an area of the bay that was thick with lobster buoys, their brightly painted, wooden lozenge shapes bobbing cheerily on the waves.

  My next task was to thread my way through them. She had her back to me, messing about with some ropes—quite a lot of them, it seemed to me.

  Gritting my teeth in mingled fright and determination, I steered cautiously toward them. “Ellie! Why’re you over there? What if I—”

  “You didn’t. Also, I knew you wouldn’t. Don’t bounce us around too much, okay?” She hauled one of the neatly coiled ropes—lines, she’d told me to call them—past me and up onto the foredeck.

  Hmph, I thought. Like I was in control of bouncing. But I was too busy to be annoyed for very long, as suddenly those buoys were all around us. Each marked the spot where a lobster trap lay on the bottom, baited and ready for a tasty crustacean to crawl into.

  “Eep,” I said, weaving among them as best I could; it wasn’t the buoys themselves that worried me, since our moving prow would simply push them aside without damage to them or us.

  It was the line tying each buoy to its trap that would foul our propeller, Ellie had warned me on other voyages—maybe ruining it—and we couldn’t assist a disabled vessel if we were dead in the water ourselves.

  Ellie stepped nimbly past the boat’s windshield and hopped back down onto the deck just as her cell phone jingled.

  “Yes,” she pronounced into it, pressing the speaker button so I could hear. A tinny voice sounded.

  “I seem to be taking on quite a bit o’ water,” it reported.

  “We’re coming,” Ellie replied. “We’ll be there very soon. You’re still in Head Harbor Passage?”

  With the tide, the currents, the wind, and no engine to steer with . . . well, he could drift, was what he could do, and in these waters full of hidden rocks and ledges, that might be disastrous.

  Unless he sank first, which was what that taking-on-water thing could lead to. Also disastrous. I gripped the wheel a little tighter.

  “Ayuh,” Tim replied. If he was feeling even slightly anxious, his voice didn’t betray it. But for a downeast Maine mariner, a second phone call was equivalent to sending up a distress flare.

  “Anchor’s holdin’ a bit better, now the keel’s a little lower,” he added. “That’s the good news.”

  Not really; it was lower because the boat was heavier, a pint being a pound and all that. What he’d just said about taking on water suddenly felt even more urgent.

  Putting the phone away, Ellie took the wheel from me. Her face wore a look I’d last seen when her eleven-year-old daughter, Lee, got stuck in a treetop; like her mother, the kid just couldn’t resist a dare.

  “Oh-kay,” Ellie pronounced now, which was what she’d said then, too, before dusting her hands together, scrambling up that tree, and bringing the girl down.

  Seating herself in the pilot’s chair, she gripped the throttle and aimed us east: vroom. Across the blue water halfway to the horizon lay Head Harbor Passage, and that little white dot on it, far in the distance, was Tim Franco’s boat: disabled and sinking.

  “Hang on,” she said, shoving the throttle forward yet again.

  Shoving it hard.

  * * *

  I hung on all right, feeling very vulnerable indeed to the briny deep we were racing across, but after a little while it seemed less like we were speeding to a watery doom and more like we were merely speeding. Ellie was good at this, she knew she was good, and her confidence was contagious; also, she’d brought doughnuts.

  They were the chocolate frosted ones that we’d made ourselves the night before; I bit in, letting the sweetness flood my taste buds and accepting the thermos of coffee she’d also been smart enough to bring along.

  “That twit,” she remarked after a little while, skimming us over the foam-topped waves.

  “Who, Tim?” But no, she meant my adversary of earlier that day, Henry Hadlyme.

  “Who does he think he is, anyway?” She finished her doughnut. “Although after the way you stood up to him, I doubt he’ll—”

  I hadn’t felt like I’d been standing up to him, more like not letting him push me over. But now wasn’t the time to discuss it.

  “Um, Ellie?” I rose from where I’d crouched to retrieve my bag’s contents—wallet and coins and other small items scattered across the deck. A big screwdriver had rolled off the boat’s console, too, and this Ellie bent to snatch up, dropping it into her satchel.

  The white dot on the waves was a lot closer, and there was a guy standing on it, yelling and waving his arms. “Tim seems to be in some kind of . . .”

  Trouble. Oh, definitely. He was anchored securely, we discovered when we pulled alongside him with our engine down to a near idle; too securely, in fact. He’d accidentally hooked his anchor onto something down there under the water, a rocky ledge or whatever it was.

  And now the tide was rising fast and he couldn’t get the trapped anchor dislodged so he could pull it back up; instead the anchor was pulling his boat down toward it.

  “Here,” called Ellie, tossing him a big utility knife from our boat’s tool locker.

  Swiftly, Tim cut the anchor off its line. Instantly his vessel leveled. “Yeah!” he yelled, relief radiating from his face.

  He was a deeply tanned, wiry young man, with a shock of rust-red hair flopping over his forehead, wearing red swim trunks, ratty sneakers, and a fraying gray sweatshirt with U MAINE lettered on it.

  “Boy, am I ever glad to see you!” he said as Ellie went about the task of lashing his boat to our side; that, I realized, was what all those lines she’d been assembling were meant for.

  “Got a buyer for the boat, took ’er out for a last ride before I hand ’er over,” he said. “But now I think the fuel pump’s history.”

  That wasn’t the only pump he needed. As he spoke, he was bailing like crazy with a blue plastic pail, scooping up water off the deck and dumping it over the side; his bilge pumps
had failed, too, apparently.

  “Selling? But I thought you loved this boat. You even sleep in it sometimes,” Ellie said as she finished tying the final line, then yanked on it to tighten it down.

  It was true; we almost always saw him around the dock or under the tarp he’d rigged for shelter when he stayed overnight. His absence this past week was the rare exception.

  At Ellie’s words, Tim’s grin faded. “Yeah, well, there’s a little thing called money, you know? And not much work around here, in case you haven’t noticed,” he said.

  I understood. My grown son, Sam, had the same problem; guys were lined up for the few open spots on the fishing boats, and in a remote area like this one, other jobs were few and far between.

  Meanwhile, even among the working fishermen the idea of a living wage was laughable some years. So I doubted Tim got paid much for the errands and chores he did. Still, he got along somehow; too bad about selling the boat, though, I thought.

  “Okay!” yelled Ellie, finishing with the last line, and then we were off, back the way we’d come. But this part of our journey ended up being more challenging than the one we’d just completed, since now we were running against the incoming tide instead of with it.

  Cold spray slapped my face as we labored through waves shoved by the wind and the powerful currents, slamming us with explosions of white salty foam and then falling away. The boat charged up the wave crests and smacked down again, over and over, one bone-rattling thud after another.

  Oh yeah, this was different, all right. “Go put your hand on the lower unit!” Ellie yelled over the engine and the wind.

  I must’ve looked confused.

  “The lower part of the engine just above the water!” she yelled. “Lay your hand on it, make sure it’s not hot.”

  “Oh,” I said, comprehending finally. Because the engine was big, all right, but now it was hauling two boats. And as Tim’s experience was proving, you can never be too careful on the water.

  “Barely warm!” I reported when I’d managed to lean out over the stern and flatten my palm to the engine’s casing without falling in—and have I mentioned the great big waves all around us?