Asking for Truffle

by Dorothy St. James

  “I don’t know where Erik got her. And she bites. No shelter will rehome a dog that bites.” It’d be a death sentence. Though I might not like the little Papillon, I knew only too well how it felt to be put out of a home that didn’t love you. I didn’t have the heart to do that to her.

  So I kept the little monster.

  But I’d dumped the King.

  I didn’t want a dog. And apparently Stella didn’t want a person. When she wasn’t barking, she was nipping fingers, toes, and pretty much any piece of exposed skin she could find.

  The little black, tan, and white monster was yipping and running circles around my chair. I told her to hush. Surprisingly she stopped and looked up at me. Her huge dark-brown ears tilted left and right. Her black eyes sparkled with mischief.

  For a moment I thought she might obey. Silly me.

  After a quick series of shrill barks, Stella jumped up and nipped my big toe. “Son of a—”

  I jumped off the stool and chased after her. Even though Stella’s legs were much shorter than mine, it didn’t slow her down. Not one bit. We ran around the kitchen until I felt like a complete nut.

  I finally opened the back door. With a happy yip-yip, the tiny Papillon hurried outside. Sometime during the night, a sparkly white blanket of Wisconsin snow had covered the tidy backyard. Stella wouldn’t stay out long. It was too cold out there for a dog that could literally fit in my pocket. But she seemed to enjoy bouncing around the freshly snow-covered bushes.

  I watched her for a moment before pushing the door closed.

  “Oh, dear,” Granny Mae said. While I’d chased Stella, Granny Mae had picked up her iPad. “Oh, dear; oh, dear,” she said again and handed me the tablet.

  On the screen was a newspaper headline:

  Man Murdered in Vat of Chocolate

  “What in the world is this?” I asked.

  A consummate researcher, Granny Mae searching out articles about chocolate and chocolate shops didn’t surprise me. Digging through information had been her way of helping out after I’d received that phony prize to an obscure chocolate shop on the beach.

  I scrunched my brows and read the headline again. Murder by chocolate? The articles that usually caught her fancy were scientific discoveries, political opinion pieces, and human rights violations. Not sensational murders.

  “What is this? I don’t have time to read an article about some bizarre murder,” I said and then checked my phone for the call that still hadn’t come.

  Granny Mae had three PhDs—one in biochemistry, one in astrophysics, and the third in journalism. Strange or sensational news simply wasn’t her thing.

  “It’s Skinny,” she whispered.

  “What?” I dropped like a heavy weight into the nearest kitchen chair. A frigid cold that had nothing to do with the outside air settled deep into my bones. I read the entire article. Skinny?

  “No. It can’t be. It can’t be him,” I said.

  Granny Mae bent down and enveloped me in her warm embrace. Together we cried loud, sloppy, hiccupy sobs, the kind I loathed. But with her holding onto me, making me feel safe and loved, I couldn’t seem to hold back my messy emotions.

  After I’d wrung myself dry, she handed me a tissue for my nose and then blew hers as well. “After we met with your friend, I subscribed to the digital edition of Camellia Beach’s local newspaper, The Camellia Current. I was hoping the newspaper might help us learn more about the town and the chocolate shop that sent the prize letter,” she explained. “It’s a small-town paper. Most issues are filled with things like arguments about new land developments at the monthly town council meeting, surf contest results, and this scone recipe. But this morning’s headline . . .” She tapped the iPad with the heavy scone she still had in her hand.

  “I can’t believe it,” I whispered. It couldn’t be true. But each time I read the article, the facts refused to change. Last night, Skinny McGee, my Skinny McGee, who’d promised to call this morning to tell me his exciting news, had been dipped headfirst into a huge vat of semisweet chocolate in the back room of Camellia Beach’s local chocolate shop, the Chocolate Box.

  The Chocolate Box: the same chocolate shop where I’d won cooking lessons—cooking lessons Skinny had suggested I take.

  I need to think.

  I need to think.

  But my mind, along with the rest of my body, had frozen up.

  “Could you let Stella in? She must be a pupsicle by now,” I murmured.

  Granny Mae sniffed back tears. She grumbled about the little dog as she padded toward the back door and swung it open, letting in a blast of frigid air.

  I looked at the article again.

  “Start packing your bags,” Skinny had told me. “You really need to come down here and see this for yourself.”

  Why? I silently asked him. What did you find?

  A photo accompanying the article showed a pair of silver-haired ladies standing arm in arm in front of the now infamous chocolate shop.

  Why would someone send me that gold-embossed letter informing me I’d won a trip and cooking lessons at their shop? I squinted at the screen to get a better look. The caption beneath the photo stated it had been taken last year at the shop’s one-hundred-year anniversary celebration. Both women were wearing crisp, white aprons and grinning at the camera like a pair of giddy teens. The woman on the right, clearly the older of the two, had deep wrinkles around her eyes and etched in her forehead. The lines weren’t unattractive. Rather, they suggested a long, well-lived life of experiences, of joys and sorrows. Though her shoulders were hunched with age, she had a tall, slender frame that made her blue gingham dress hang loosely as if it were still on a hanger. Her partner, an African American woman who wasn’t nearly as tall, had much better proportions. Her body filled out her black-and-white suit dress and apron in a way that would make my fashion-designer half sister smile. Her dark skin nearly glowed as she leaned toward her friend. A broad smile creased the corners of her wide mouth. Her arm was wrapped protectively around the older, taller woman’s, clearly providing support.

  They looked so nice, so friendly—like the kind of women who could be trusted to the ends of the earth, like people I would desperately want in my life. Luckily, I’d learned a long time ago not to trust nice people. They could turn on you faster than a nest of hornets.

  Could those two women overpower my friend and shove him into a vat of chocolate? He wasn’t very tall. If they took him by surprise, they might have been able to—

  Stella, soaked from her romp in the snow, shook her wet little self, splashing icy water on the legs of my flannel pj’s. With a shiver, I jumped up from the chair and grabbed a towel I’d hung from a hook beside the door for just this purpose. She took one look at the towel and growled. I tossed her a doggie treat that was about the size of her head. While she happily chomped, I dried her off.

  She was reasonably dry by the time she scampered off into the living room.

  “Skinny had said I should go to Camellia Beach. Do you think I should go?”

  “I don’t know, Penn.” Granny Mae refilled my mug with fresh coffee. The steam from this new pot perked up my senses with its sweet aroma. I inhaled deeply, savoring the rich scent from the shot of chocolate she’d added to the brew. She only did that when she was truly worried. The bittersweet flavor tasted like home and family. Well, not my home and my family, but the fantasy home and fantasy family I dreamed of one day finding.

  I took another sip of the rich, chocolaty coffee and remembered how Skinny had died. Suddenly, the chocolate tasted more bitter than sweet. I gazed again at the photo of the two older women grinning at the camera.

  My hand shook just a bit before I set the mug on the counter. It might seem crazy to think of those two shop owners as murderers. But what if my friend’s life had been cut short because one of them had lusted after my money? Or rather, my father’s money?

  The old-lady angle—that was a new one.

  I needed to be on guard. Heck,
I needed to do more than that. I needed to stand up for myself and shout, Enough!

  Yes, that felt right. It was time to act. I’d let the cheese kings and chocolate mavens and everyone else take advantage of me and my unfortunate birth for far too long. But not anymore.

  I needed to do this for myself. More importantly, I needed to do this for Skinny. I owed it to him to find out who killed him and why.

  I picked up my cell phone and dialed the number for the Camellia Beach police department.

  Chapter 2

  Was someone out there? Watching me?

  Come on, Penn. Get a grip. I rubbed my hand over the nape of my neck to chase away the uneasy feeling creeping up my spine.

  Skinny had told me I needed to be here, so despite my trepidation, here I stood, in the same town where he’d been murdered.

  The gray, stormy stretch of Camellia Beach lurked outside the door of my tiny motel room. I padded a few steps into the powdery gray sand so I could get a better view up and down the shore. Before I had a chance to stop her, Stella bounded out of the room and scampered several yards past me to sniff where the tide had receded, leaving the sand damp.

  She seemed to love the sand just as much as the Wisconsin snow.

  “Hello? Are you even listening to me?” Tina, my half sister, shouted through the speaker of my cell phone. She sounded even more worried than usual. Perhaps she should be worried this time. I hadn’t told her what I’d planned to do until this morning . . . after I’d arrived in Camellia Beach. For one thing, she had the power to talk me out of coming. “I don’t know why you’re not letting Daddy take care of this.”

  “You know he’s on his yearly rainforest sojourn. Which means no phones. No contact for the next month.” Our father was the driving force behind Penn Industries, a multinational conglomerate that bought companies, restructured them, and sold shares of the rejuvenated businesses at large profits. He’d learned the business at the knee of his father, who’d built the business from the ground up. After his father had died more than a decade ago, he’d taken over and had expanded the company with holdings in twenty new countries. It was an exhausting job. When he took time off, he took time off from work, family, everything.

  “Then the police. Good gracious, they should be investigating,” she said and then huffed with frustration.

  “I called them. The Camellia Beach officer listened politely and told me the women who run the chocolate shop are as gentle as a pair of lambs. He actually chuckled at the thought of one of them wanting to do me or Skinny harm. Then he told me that they found illegal drugs in Skinny’s pockets and that his murder must have been a drug deal gone wrong.”

  “Was it?” she demanded.

  “No. No! The police are wrong. Skinny didn’t do drugs. Wouldn’t do drugs. He said it messed with his ability to surf competitively.”

  “At least tell me you are going to ask Granny Mae to go with you. Perhaps she can keep you from doing something stupid and dangerous. Running after a murderer—that has to be the height of stupidity.”

  I didn’t answer right away. Early this morning Granny Mae, who was still in Madison, had sent a batch of articles for me to read about the chocolate industry and Camellia Beach.

  “Penn? Penn? Are you still there?” Tina shouted into the phone.

  “Sorry, Tina. I’m still here. Granny Mae couldn’t come. She has her classes to teach at the university.”

  “And you don’t have a job that needs your attention?” was her quick reply.

  “Actually, I don’t. I quit.”

  “You quit?” she shouted. “What? Why?”

  “It’s a long, boring story.”

  “Penn? You don’t have a job? Does that mean you’re actually going to dip into your trust fund to pay for the trip? What about your foolish vow to never use it?”

  “I never said I wouldn’t use my trust fund. It’s the confrontation with Grandmother Cristobel over my spending habits that I vowed to never have.”

  Tina was quiet for a moment. “She does seem to have an ugly chip on her shoulder when it comes to you.”

  That was an understatement. Grandmother Cristobel managed to find fault in everything I did.

  “You don’t have to worry about me. I have a savings account. Stella, don’t go too far,” I called to my little dog. She’d started to run toward a man dressed like a harbor seal with a surfboard tucked under his arm. Then I saw what Stella had spotted: the man’s naked toes. Toes, unfortunately, proved irresistible for biting.

  “Don’t tell me you’re already in Camellia Beach.” Tina’s voice grew shrill with alarm.

  “Okay, I won’t tell you. Stella!” That poor guy’s toes were about to get attacked. I started to run toward him.

  “You are already in that beach town. I can hear the waves. I can’t believe you. You called me after you went and put yourself in danger?”

  “I’m not in—hold on.”

  I shoved the phone into my jeans’ back pocket and ran as fast as my spindly legs could carry me. It was one of the few times in my life I was glad my legs had grown so long.

  “Look out!” I called in warning. Too late. Stella had already reached the poor surfer.

  Stella growled. Then chomped.

  “Ouch!” the man cried.

  I scooped up my naughty dog. Frustrated that I’d taken her away from her new chew toy, she clamped down on my finger.

  “Owww! Stella, behave.”

  Behaving was the last thing the silky little dog had on her mind. She wiggled and yipped and tried to take another chunk out of my finger.

  “Do you need a hand with your dog?” the man asked.

  “She’s not my dog,” I replied while still wrestling with the little monster. “Well, she is my dog. But I didn’t—” I finally managed to get her tucked safely under my arm. “It’s a long story. Is your toe okay?”

  He shook his foot. “She didn’t break the skin. But you really need to train that thing. It could hurt someone.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. She’s—” I stopped myself from saying what had been on the tip of my tongue—that she’d been an unwanted gift. Yes, I knew she was just a dog, but I grew up in a household where family members talked about me as if I were an unwanted gift. The memories cut too deeply. “She’s still adjusting to her new home. And then I brought her here. So she’s pretty confused.”

  The corner of his mouth curved up a bit. “Picked one hell of a time to go on vacation. A nor’easter is blowin’ in. It’s supposed to rain like the devil all week. I hope you got a discounted price on the room.” He nodded to the run-down motel behind us.

  “I’m not on vacation. Not exactly.”

  “Business? Here? Not much happens on this spit of sand, at least not in February.” He stuck the nose of his long surfboard in the sand and leaned against it. “I’m Harley.”

  Water droplets from the drizzly rain hung like tiny stars in his hair, which was dark with a few naturally sun-bleached highlights. His slightly-too-long hair curled at the ends. As I looked at him, my breath got caught in my throat. He had the sharply sculpted features that master artists have strived for centuries to capture in their artwork.

  “Uh . . . hiya. I’m Penn.” My voice squeaked. Embarrassed, I cleared my throat.

  “Penn? As in Penny?” His smile grew. He was tall. Not many men matched my height, but with this guy, I had to tilt my head up just a bit to see that wry smile of his and to gaze directly into his stormy green eyes.

  I scowled. Not at his good looks, but at my silly reaction to them. Heck, I was a smidge older than thirty-five. My stomach shouldn’t jump around like it was filled with baby frogs. And my head definitely shouldn’t fizzle with silly romantic bubbles. But I couldn’t stop it from happening. Irritated with myself, I suddenly felt as prickly as a woolen winter sweater.

  Not only that, but I’d always shied away from talking about my name. So instead of saying something witty or even nice, I said sharply, “No, my name’s not Pe
nny. Penn. Just Penn.” Not the most intelligent way to start an investigation, I know, but I plowed on anyhow. “Did you happen to know the man who’d been murdered, Skinny McGee?”

  He’d been relaxed, leaning against his board as if he had all the time in the world to stand in the cold drizzle and flirt with a stranger, until I’d mentioned my friend’s name. His muscles suddenly tightened. He stood a little straighter. “Why are you asking about him?”

  “Because he was murdered and—”

  “Why are you asking me about him?”

  “Because you’re the . . .” I was about to tell him the truth—that I was asking because he just happened to be standing there, that he was the first person, other than the ancient, half-deaf clerk manning the motel’s front desk, I’d met in Camellia Beach. But the way he’d clammed up when I’d mentioned Skinny set off several alarms in my head. He knew something.

  So I leaned toward him and whispered, “Because you’re the one who can tell me the most about him.”

  He recoiled as if I’d slugged him. “You can tell whoever told you that to tie an anchor around his neck an’ go take a jump into the pluff mud. I’m not talking to anybody about that no-good loser other than to say he got what he deserved.” He plucked his surfboard from the sand and dashed toward the angry waves. He plunged into the crest of a wave, emerging again several yards from the shore.

  Well, that struck a nerve.

  As I watched him paddling his board with an expert’s skill through the rough surf, I stood there wondering about this Adonis of the waves—with his Southern accent and strained connection to my friend—until the rain started to fall in earnest.

  Stella wiggled and nipped my hand, a gentle reminder (gentle for her) that I hadn’t yet fed her breakfast.

  Huddled against the wintry rain, I plodded back through the wet sand to my motel room. I glanced over my shoulder to watch the mysterious lone surfer.

  What did he know about Skinny’s death?

  And how would I get him to tell me?