Authors: Christine DeSmet
We wended over to the school to pick up Pauline. She shared the backseat with the panting water spaniel.
Dillon skidded and fishtailed through the back streets
and alleys until we found Mercy’s quiet street. Houses were set back in lots filled with cedars, pines, and maples, with forest land behind the homes and a rural road not far beyond that. Her house was a modest bi-level, brown with white trim and a white door in the middle with a garage to the right. We parked in her driveway.
I unlocked the front door, and then we hurried up the steps to the main floor.
Pauline called out, “John? Sweetie? It’s Pauline.”
For a moment we stood in place, adjusting our eyes to all the colors. Mercy was apparently in love with folk art. Her walls, furniture, and furnishings sported every mismatched color and pattern imaginable, but it was all rather quaint in a county fair way.
Lucky Harbor set to work sniffing around the house.
Dillon said, “Now we know what she’s been doing since she lost her job as village president last year.”
Every chair in her dining room was painted a different color—lime green, shocking pink, yellow with black polka dots, and one with purple and teal stripes. But there was no John. The living room was the same.
Pauline said, “If John is here, my eyes can’t pick him out.”
Dillon yelled, “John, where are you?”
A muffled noise emanated from a short hallway.
We found John in a bedroom festooned with flower patterns. The bedspread sported splotches of yellow daylilies against a white background.
Pauline rushed to John, easing her hips onto the bed. “Honey, what happened? How are you?”
“Where am I? How’d I get here?”
Pauline collapsed on him, hugging him, her black hair shifting like a river’s currents over his face and chest. Then she kissed his face several times.
Again he said, “Where am I?”
Pauline took one of his hands in hers. “You’re with me, sweetie.”
Dillon and I exchanged a look. He put an arm around me, but the pleasant gesture didn’t cure my wooziness over
my secret: John had told Mercy something about being in a church and a fight. And John was disoriented now.
He appeared okay physically. But then as Pauline went to help him up, the bodice of a nightgown appeared on John’s burly chest. It had little yellow ducks on it.
Pauline screwed up her nose. “What are you doing wearing a nightgown?”
Dillon chuckled. “You look mighty pretty, John, but let me find your clothes.” Dillon started pawing in a clothes hamper nearby.
John sat up against the pillow. Pauline stuffed another pillow behind him. He said, “Not sure how I got into this or why. I remember being naked in a bathtub, though, with somebody washing me off. That wasn’t you, Paulie Pal?”
Pauline gasped, “No, John.” Her shoulders straightened. “You left our bed to come over here with Mercy?”
He said, “Is that where I am? How’d I get here?”
I sat down on the opposite side of the bed. “Mercy said she found you on the bus. With blood on your hands.” I’d told Dillon and Pauline about the blood previously. “John, do you remember how you got on the bus?”
“No.”
Pauline asked, “What did you do last night?”
“I got in my car to go buy something. I don’t know what now. I remember driving, but I don’t know where I went. I remember being outside my car. Maybe checking a tire? I vaguely recall somebody had stopped, or maybe I stopped behind somebody else. Maybe I had stopped to help them. I don’t know.” He lifted a hand to the back of his head. “I got a bit of a knot somehow.”
Dillon said, “I can’t find your clothes. But we need to get you to the hospital. Do you feel up to me helping you down the front stairs?”
John nodded, one of his hands examining the knot on the back of his head. “I’m not feeling dizzy anymore. Maybe I slipped and fell on the road and Mercy found me. I can’t remember if she said anything. You find my car?”
Dillon said, “We only learned you were here minutes ago. I’ll find your car.”
Pauline scurried about the room, opening closet doors and drawers. “You and Mercy are probably about the same size around the waist.” She held up baggy denim jeans. “Will these do?”
John nodded. “But they’re Mercy’s clothes.”
Pauline said, “All that matters is that we get you out of her house.”
Dillon found a Packers-logo sweatshirt, and then he had the audacity to hold up a giant pair of grandma-style panties. “She’s got clean undies, but I think you’ll want to let the boys hang loose for this ride.”
“You got that right,” John said.
We all shared a needed chuckle.
Pauline and I left the room while Dillon helped John take off the nightgown.
In the living room, Pauline said, “That woman has gone over the edge. I bet she murdered Tristan Hardy, ran into John for some reason, or ran him off the road, then brought him here to wash off all the evidence.”
“You’ve been reading suspense novels again.”
“What of it? There are only so many picture books about puppies that I can handle. Why aren’t you suspicious of this? We just came from your mother’s place and the church where the sheriff and medical examiner found the body. We saw the body. There was blood. What if that blood on John was Tristan Hardy’s blood that came off Mercy’s hands after she killed Tristan? What if John had gone down to the Namur church for some reason and stumbled across the murder?”
With Pauline’s imagination, I wasn’t going to need to tell her what Mercy told me about the church and the fight.
She collapsed into a nearby chair covered with a quilt. “We need to find his car. Why can’t he remember things, Ava?”
“I don’t know, Pauline.”
“I’m scared.”
A sharp bang caught our attention.
I said, “The dog. We forgot about Lucky Harbor.”
Pauline and I rushed to the kitchen. A large roaster pan sat upside down on the vinyl floor. Lucky Harbor had
already scarfed up whatever had been in the pan. He was mopping the floor with his tongue. I tossed the pan on the counter, and then we got the heck out of there.
* * *
After Dillon dropped me off at the fudge shop, he and Pauline headed to the hospital with John.
I whipped on an apron with orange pumpkins embroidered on it.
Cody was handling both sides of the shop. Bethany wasn’t there; she was studying for a test, Cody explained.
But efficient Lois Forbes in her red-dyed hair and Dotty Klubertanz, a plump lady with short white hair and dressed in her usual pink sweats with sequins, were ringing up sales of fudge and aprons on my side of our little outpost on the harbor. Both ladies were in their sixties and part of the church ladies brigade that always seemed to frustrate me as much as it helped me. If I didn’t keep a firm hold on my shop as manager, Dotty and Lois could turn the place into a church bazaar fund-raiser within the time it took to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
Dotty rushed over to help me tie the back of my apron. “Honey, we sold out of the Rapunzel Raspberry Rapture Fudge.”
“How am I doing with the Cinderella Pink Fairy Tale Fudge?”
“Getting low on that, too. And Kjersta called. She can hang in there another couple of hours, she said, but several cars have stopped for lunch and the cheese selection is getting low. She said the mild cheddar paired with the Cinderella Pink cherry-vanilla fudge is a combo that’s selling fast.”
“I’ll call my mom. Thanks, Dotty, for coming to the rescue today. Again.”
“No worries. That nasty business in Namur isn’t getting you down, is it? Kjersta said you discovered the body.”
“It’s unfortunate. I think Cherry and his colleagues were coming close to finding out why Kjersta’s orchard and the Prevost vineyards weren’t performing the way they should.”
Dotty leaned in close, motioning me to her. She was shorter than me, so I lowered an ear toward her. She said, “It has to be about the divinity fudge recipe.”
“How so? Can we talk while I gather ingredients in the kitchen?” I wanted to get out of earshot of the customers.
In the galley kitchen, I began collecting Belgian chocolate kilo bars, a twenty-pound bag of sugar, butter, and cream. Making fudge was helping me build big muscles in my arms. In spring when I first started, I’d made and sold fifty or so pounds of fudge a week. After my first fudge festival in July, I’d begun seeing my sales go up. Then with the introduction of Ava’s Autumn Harvest this fall, I now made and sold over three hundred pounds of fudge a week. It scared me to think of what would happen in winter, because I’d have no roadside market. The tourist trade went way down and my sales would, too.
Dotty was loading her arms with ingredients, too.
I asked her, “Why are you so sure Tristan Hardy’s death is about the recipe?”
“Holy wars.”
“Holy wars?”
“Yes. The other ladies and I were online today discussing it. People are willing to kill for two reasons: love and beliefs. My friends and I doubt that anybody would use the church to hide a love affair, so it has to be about finding the recipe.”
“Because it could be worth a lot of money.”
Dotty stacked one more pound of Oosterlings’ organic sweet cream butter on the load in her arms. “Money is good, but this is about somebody wanting to live in the steps of Sister Adele Brise.”
Dotty said the name with an inflection and flair, as it might be said in the French patois in the Walloon regions of Belgium. Belgium is a country divided into Wallonia with its French-speaking provinces, and Flanders with its Flemish provinces. Namur is the capital of the Wallonia region.
“What are you saying, Dotty? That a woman killed Cherry?”
“I don’t know that. But I’m sure people want to touch all the spots that Adele touched and walk the paths she walked. They want to bask in her love.”
“If this is about love, how could anybody murder Tristan Hardy? For a fudge recipe? What would be the motive?”
“You haven’t been listening. This is about somebody lost in their faith.”
“Well, Dotty, that’s a given. Murder is a mortal sin.”
Dotty’s sweet pink face grew a bit red in obvious frustration with me. She led me out of the kitchen. Both our arms were overloaded. Pausing in the hallway, Dotty said, “This murder is about the glory that somebody needs. Holy wars are about claiming glory. Somebody wanted glory from this murder.”
“What do you mean by glory?” I felt as if I were back in grade school catechism class.
“They want to triumph, Ava. Somebody wants revenge about something. Revenge is why Tristan Hardy was killed. At least that’s how we church ladies voted online about an hour ago. Money came in third.”
“What was the second-place motive?”
“Sex.”
Chapter 9
T
he dark chocolate, sugar, and cream had barely started heating in the copper kettle when questions arose about Tristan Hardy and the divinity fudge recipe. About twenty customers had gathered near my kettle at the front of the shop after lunchtime on Sunday. Raindrops splattered the big bay windows overlooking the harbor.
My arms were on autopilot stirring the fragrant, sweet concoction in the kettle. My brain was stirring the motives for the murder voted on by the church ladies: glory, money, and sex.
A woman in the crowd said, “Divinity fudge didn’t become popularized until the early 1900s, after Sister Adele passed away. Why would you think the holy recipe even existed?”
The crowd quieted at this bold question that had apparently caught all of Door County and me—the fudge expert—in a huge mistake. But it was not a mistake.
“Not so about fudge,” I said. “Yes, the meringue-type candy became popular here after the invention of corn syrup, which was introduced in the United States in 1902, but it existed far earlier in various forms.”
Thanks to the cookbook collection in Lloyd Mueller’s house that I had inherited, I knew that divinity fudge was made by 1915 at least, but it was evident it existed earlier, because a form of it was a candy for the Egyptians, which I told the crowd.
“Divinity candy is related to marshmallows.”
A giggling boy of maybe six with curly red hair and freckles said, “Marshmallows? The Egyptians roasted marshmallows outside their pyramids?”
“They could very well have done that,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Josh.”
“In only a few minutes, you can help me with the fudge if you like.”
“Sure!” His mop of red hair flopped as he nodded.
Stirring, I said, “In two thousand BC, the Egyptians boiled the root of the marsh plant called the mallow, or marsh mallow, then combined it with sugar and honey. The candy was made expressly for royalty.”
Josh said, “Like your prince? If the prince likes your fudge, will he marry you?”
Everybody laughed, including me.
“I’m not sure fudge would make him marry me, but he’s very interested in divinity fudge. That’s one reason why he’s coming to Door County.”
The woman with the earlier questions, who appeared to be Josh’s mother, asked, “So, what’s the connection between the old marsh mallow plants and today’s divinity?”
“Modern marshmallows were made in France in the 1800s using corn syrup, water, and the mallow sap, and egg whites to bind them. The introduction of egg whites into the recipe—which is what is used now in divinity fudge—tells me that Sister Adele could very well have made divinity fudge in the late 1800s.”
Josh said, “How’d she get eggs? Did she steal them from wild turkeys?”
I brought my ladle up into the air to test the state of the chocolate-coated crystals. A ribbon of chocolate whipped about, to the crowd’s delight.
“Chickens,” I explained, “including Belgian breeds like Brakels, were probably brought over on the early ships with immigrants to Door County. The term ‘fudge’ appeared in newspaper articles at the same time in the late 1800s when the Vassar College women made the candy for fund-raisers
using a cooking method over a Bunsen burner, not unlike what I’m doing right now.”
Another woman raised her hand. “My grandmother made divinity with coconut.”
“Oh yes, divinity fudge loves to have a few things added. Peppermint flavoring is a favorite at Christmastime, and in the South confectioners make divinity with pecans. What should I put in my recipe to create something that Sister Adele might have found back in the 1860s and 1870s here in Door County?”