Free Five-Alarm Fudge by Christine DeSmet

doorway.
    After she left, I asked Jordy, “Who is it?”
    “Tristan Hardy.”
    “Cherry?” My stomach flip-flopped. I took a step forward toward the body, but Jordy pushed me back in place next to Pauline near the doorway. I said, “It can’t be Cherry.”
    Jordy squinted at me. “You found the body. Why are you so surprised?”
    Heat flamed up my face. I couldn’t let my gaze meet his, so I stared at the back of Cherry’s head, so still on the floor with blood in his short brown hair. His bandaged right forearm drew my eyes next. The bandage looked loose, partially ripped from his wound, as if he’d been fighting. I wanted to see his knuckles but couldn’t because of the bags.
    “How long do you think he’s been down here?” I asked, ignoring Jordy’s previous question.
    “You didn’t find the body, did you?” Jordy said, his trim but muscular body stepping into my line of sight with Cherry’s body. “What’s the real story?”
    I swallowed hard, glancing at Pauline next to me, pleading silently for help. “The real story?”
    If my mother were brought into this, the Oosterlings’ lives would fall apart. My mother wasn’t capable of handling stress. She wouldn’t be able to work in her dairy store and creamery. She’d take to cleaning things incessantly.
    I said, “The real story is that I love making fudge and I want to keep my life just the way it is.”
    Jordy withdrew a pad of paper and pen from his front pocket.
    “What are you writing down?” I asked.
    “What you just said. Sometimes suspects talk in riddles. What were you doing here this morning?”
    “Looking for a recipe.”
    “What recipe?”
    “The divine one for divinity fudge. Made by a nun who saw the Mother of God.”
    Jordy clicked his pen a couple of times as his eyes bored into me. “This isn’t one more of your far-fetched stories, is it?”
    Pauline said, “She’s telling the truth. Her family believes the recipe may have been written down by Sister Adele Brise in the 1860s or later. Some people call her Adele Brice, with a C. This church was founded in 1860. It’s been rebuilt and rededicated several times over the years. There could be one of those time capsules hidden away containing holy artifacts touched by Sister Adele, including the divinity fudge recipe. We’ve been looking for it because Prince Arnaud Van Damme told the Oosterlings that he wanted to taste the saintly divinity fudge of Door County.”
    Pauline began smacking the gum in her mouth.
    Jordy appeared confused by too much information, which was perfect.
    The ambulance attendants and the medical examiner trundled down the stairs and into the room. They bagged Cherry’s body and hauled him away.
    When Pauline and I turned to leave the basement, the sheriff asked, “Did you kill Tristan Hardy?”
    “No way, Jordy.”
    “Do you know who did?”
    “No.”
    “And do you know who might have set that fire upstairs?”
    I almost blurted out “Fontana Dahlgren” but held back and said instead, “A lot of people were upset over Cherry’s research.”
    I filled him in on the chemical allegations that had fomented into ugly feelings among the local neighbors. “In addition, he had concerns about the dry weather, and pests getting into the weakened orchards and grapes. Kjersta Dahlgren told me he’d been collecting bags of things ontheir property as well as next door at Michael Prevost’s vineyard. He and his lab assistants also tromped around Jonas Coppens’s farmland.”
    Jordy made me list everybody who’d been at my roadside market yesterday during Cherry’s presentation. Then he asked, “Anybody else in here yesterday or in that loft?”
    “Tourists with John Schultz’s tour.”
    Pauline elbowed me hard in the arm.
    “I’ll talk to John,” Jordy said. “Isn’t that the same guy who found that cup that might belong to your grandma’s family? The guy who almost got himself killed by the murderer of Lloyd Mueller last summer?”
    “The