Asking for Truffle: A Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery

by Dorothy St. James

  Bertie’s energy level matched that of the storm raging outside. She just about blew across the room toward me, her smile now reaching every corner of her face. “I’m Bertie, Bertie Bays.” She extended her hand.

  I took it. “I’m Penn.”

  She nodded. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  And with that, I was 100 percent certain these two were the ladies who had sent the letter. No, make that 110 percent sure.

  Everyone, and I mean everyone, I met for the first time would ask the same question when they heard my name. Even that surfer had asked it.

  “I’m Penn,” I’d say.

  “As in Penny?” is the response—unless the person already knows who I am.

  Both Althea Bays and her mother Bertie had accepted my name without questioning its origin. The reason had to be because they already knew I simply went by my last name and that the mention of my first name made my skin crawl.

  And yet neither of them mentioned the phony prize letter they’d sent or the cooking lessons that were included.

  “I know what you’ve done, Mabel,” Jody said. “You’re not going to get away with it.” She snatched a white bag from the counter.

  “Does that mean your company won’t fix our closet door? It sticks, you know,” Mabel called out to the woman’s retreating back. She grinned mischievously.

  The tall woman huffed angrily but didn’t rise to the bait. “Come on, Gavin.” She grabbed the boy’s arm and rushed out of the store without even glancing in my direction.

  Bertie shook her head as she watched the woman leave. “That one needs to slow down and watch what she’s doing if she knows what’s good for her.”

  Was that a threat? Was the chocolate duo already planning another murder? Had killing my friend empowered these women to commit more?

  “Penn, is it, dear? An unusual name for such a beautiful young lady.” Mabel hurried over to me as soon as Jody had left. She grabbed both my hands and held them tight in hers.

  I held my breath, waiting for her to mention the phony prize vacation. She didn’t. Instead, it looked as if tears were swimming in her eyes as she looked me over from the top of my head all the way down to my soggy boots.

  Could these two women, who looked about as sinister as newborn kittens, actually have committed such a crime?

  Probably.

  “Yes,” I said and wrenched my hands free. “I’d like to take the lessons. How much do they cost? When are they offered?”

  “Cost?” Bertie asked at the same time Mabel gushed, “Now!”

  “Now?” That wasn’t the answer I’d expected. “On a Sunday?”

  “We’re open for business, so why not?” Mabel said. “Follow me. Follow me.” She tugged on my arm. “I have just the recipe you need to try.”

  “I don’t cook.” I’m not sure why I said that. It wasn’t as if it mattered. I wasn’t there to actually learn how to fix fancy chocolate treats. I was there to find out what involvement these women had in Skinny’s death.

  “Did you hear that, Bertie? She doesn’t cook,” Mabel crowed. “Good. Good. I have a clean slate to work with. So many people claim to know their way around a kitchen, but they do everything wrong when it comes to chocolate. They come in here thinking they can temper, and it’s always such a disaster. Such a disaster.”

  As she led the way to the back of the store, she patted my hand. “Don’t worry about the cost, dear. We’ll work that out later. You pay what you think it’s worth.”

  I’d heard that before from people who wanted more than just a simple payment for services. Erik, the Cheese King, had offered all sorts of free perks and acted as if he loved me before springing his idea of my investing and getting my father to invest in his expansion plans. By the looks of the chocolate shop’s building, these women needed a steep influx of money to rebuild or, better yet, relocate to a new town.

  But since I needed to know what connection they had to Skinny’s murder, I took the bait and agreed to put myself in Mabel’s hands for the afternoon.

  Walking with her body slightly hunched, she took me down a narrow hallway and into the large back room with an extra long kitchen island in the center of the room. Burners lined two walls, and several sets of mismatched ovens covered the third wall. She flipped a switch, and the overhead florescent lights flickered on.

  “Now”—she tapped her chin—“what should we make?”

  “Something easy,” I suggested.

  She clicked her tongue. “Honey, it’ll all come easily for you.”

  “Clearly, you haven’t seen me cook,” I muttered as I watched her move through the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors as if searching for something specific.

  “What did you say?” She pulled a bag of powdered sugar from a cabinet and set it on the counter in front of me. Her kind eyes met mine. She stared at me as if the answers to the universe were printed on my face before asking, “You do enjoy eating chocolate?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  With a curt nod, she returned to rummage in the cabinets. “Dark chocolate?”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  She chuckled.

  “We received a shipment of peanuts yesterday,” Bertie said. She was standing at the doorway with her arms crossed over her broad chest. Her brows were furrowed with what looked like concern.

  “We can do better than peanuts,” Mabel said. Her eyes glittered with pleasure as she grabbed a bag of nuts from a pantry. “Here they are.”

  She dropped the bag next to the sugar.

  “Filberts?” I asked as I read the label on the plastic bag.

  “Also known as hazelnuts,” Bertie said.

  “They’re the key to Christmas,” Mabel said at the same time, her voice trembling with excitement. “With them, I’m going to teach you how to conjure the magic of Christmas no matter the time of year.”

  Conjure? Magic? Oh, dear, she sounded as nutty as Bertie’s daughter. I held up my hands. “I’m simply looking to take a cooking lesson.”

  “Don’t scare the girl,” Bertie warned from the doorway.

  Mabel smiled sweetly. “It’s an old family recipe that I’m going to teach you. A dark-chocolate hazelnut truffle.”

  “I like truffles,” I said, feeling my body relax.

  “The flavors of this truffle remind me of Christmas. I hope they’ll taste like Christmas for you too.”

  Only if they tasted like broken promises and time spent with the hired help.

  She must have mistaken the pained look on my face for disbelief. “I know it sounds crazy, sugar pie, but you’ll see. When the flavors come together, something amazing happens. The truffles truly taste like Christmas.”

  While Mabel finished gathering the rest of the ingredients, she had me mix together cocoa powder, sugar, and salt in a large metal bowl. We then moved over to the gas stove to melt bars of dark chocolate in a double boiler. I stirred while Mabel controlled the amount of heat. The air filled with an amazing chocolate aroma.

  Once the chocolate had melted into a silky liquid, we poured the dry ingredients into the pot.

  Mabel had been right. This wasn’t a difficult recipe. I smiled as I picked up the wooden spoon and started to stir.

  “Butter my biscuits!” Mabel grabbed my wrist to stop me from stirring. “What in tarnation did you do? The recipe called for a cup of powdered sugar, not granulated sugar.” She frowned as she peered into the pot.

  “I used powdered sugar.” I frowned as I looked into the pot too.

  She dipped her finger into the half-mixed ingredients and tasted it. “Salt,” she said with a grimace. “How much salt did you put in?”

  “A cup like it said in the recipe.”

  “Sugar pie, the recipe calls for a teaspoon of salt.”

  “A teaspoon? Oh, no! I’ve ruined it,” I cried. All that delicious dark chocolate ruined. “I knew I couldn’t do this.”

  Mabel grabbed both my hands in hers. “Listen to me,” she scolded. �
��It’s just chocolate.”

  “That I ruined.”

  She took the spoon and started scooping out dry ingredients that hadn’t yet been mixed into the melted chocolate. “Go get the powdered sugar, the cocoa powder, and a measuring cup.”

  When I didn’t move, she gave me a little nudge. “Go!”

  With her guidance, I poured correct amounts of sugar and cocoa powder into the melted chocolate. Using quick strokes, she stirred everything together.

  Once it was smooth and silky again, she dipped a spoon into the pot to taste it. “It needs more sugar,” she said.

  “It needs less salt,” I corrected. “Or no salt.”

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong. The salt is necessary. It enhances the sweet. In cooking, just like in life, you need the salt in order to notice the sweet.”

  She added more sugar, tasted the chocolate, and then added even more sugar. Finally, she nodded. She dipped a spoon into the mixture and held it out for me to taste.

  It was sweet—perhaps a little overly sweet—but surprisingly, I didn’t taste the salt.

  For the rest of the lesson, Mabel hovered, keeping a close watch on what I was doing, saving me from any further disasters. The way she worked with me, with an endless supply of patience, reminded me of cooking sessions with Granny Mae, but with one main difference: Mabel actually knew what she was doing in the kitchen.

  When we were finished, we had filled a tray with perfectly rounded balls of chocolate with a nutty center. The truffles were coated in cocoa powder that was so dark in color, they looked as black as the night sky.

  Smiling widely, Mabel used tongs to place two truffles on a fine china plate. She then held the plate out for me to take one. She took the other. Starving, I popped the truffle into my mouth. The delicate chocolate melted like butter in my mouth. The nuts had a satisfying crunch. I closed my eyes as the simple mixture of flavors hit me. Then I jolted in surprise as my mind conjured the soft chords of a Christmas carol, complete with organ music and a choir singing. The piney scent of Christmas trees tickled my nose.

  I quickly swallowed and opened my eyes. My gaze scanned the kitchen, searching for a diffuser that could send the scent of the holidays into the air.

  But there was nothing. And as soon as I’d opened my eyes, the music in my mind had stopped. The air no longer smelled of pine. What I found instead was Mabel watching me with her hands clasped over her chest.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I think you’re good.” I wasn’t sure how she’d done it. Perhaps it’d simply been the power of suggestion. Or perhaps Bertie and Mabel had worked together to time the scent of pine to fill the air the moment I’d closed my eyes.

  Heck, it really didn’t matter how they’d managed to fool me into thinking about Christmas when I ate the truffle. Christmas scams aside, the chocolate was delicious. At Mabel’s urging, I happily agreed to come back the next day to learn how to perfectly temper chocolate.

  As soon as I left the shop, I realized I’d gotten so wrapped up with the cooking that I hadn’t learned anything useful about Mabel and Bertie and their plans for my money. I’d even forgotten to ask them what they knew about Skinny’s death.

  I promised myself to not let the lure of chocolate, no matter how delicious, distract me from investigating my friend’s murder again.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, a chilly Monday, I started the day with a series of phone calls. First I returned a call to my half sister, Tina, to reassure her I was safe. She’d left five worried messages the day before. “No, you don’t need to jump on the next plane to rescue me,” I told her. “Really, you don’t.” After I regaled her with tales of the quirky townspeople and bored her with a detailed description of my first chocolate cooking lesson, she finally relented. As long as I promised to keep in contact with her, she would stay in Chicago. I couldn’t have been more relieved. Grandmother Cristobel would kill me if she thought I put her precious oldest grandchild in any kind of danger. (I might be Cristobel’s oldest grandchild, but if you asked her, she’d readily tell you there’s nothing precious about me.)

  Next I called Granny Mae. “Holy cow, you’re a lucky duck, Penn,” she exclaimed when I told her about Mabel’s chocolate shop and the delicious truffles she’d helped me craft. “If I didn’t have these classes to teach, I’d be rushing to the airport to take those cooking lessons with you.” She paused a moment. “That reminds me.” I could hear her tapping on her iPad. “I just saw an article.” She tapped some more. “Ah, here it is. It’s about chocolate production. Did you know some plantations routinely use child labor and sometimes even slave labor? It happens mainly in Africa, but it sounded as if the practice and abuses were pretty widespread. Disturbing, disturbing. I’ll send you a copy of the article.”

  I promised to read it when I got a chance. We then talked a bit more about what I’d learned yesterday, which wasn’t much. “If I were you, I’d try to find out what questions Skinny had been asking before he died. What exactly was he doing? Who had he contacted? And what had he done to make at least two of the people you’d questioned yesterday visibly uncomfortable when you’d mentioned his name?”

  It was sound advice. After I hung up with her and had taken care of Stella’s needs, I paid a visit to the town’s police chief, Hank Byrd.

  “Drugs,” he declared as he leaned back in his ratty desk chair. “Not from this town, mind you, but from the city of Charleston or perhaps North Charleston. The drug dealer must have followed your friend into town because we don’t have a drug problem here. Never had. Never will.” He leaned back even farther in his swivel chair and scratched his bristly chin.

  I tried to tell him Skinny wouldn’t use drugs, but the town’s top cop stubbornly refused to listen. “Look here.” He dug out a paper from beneath a towering pile on his desk and tapped on the printed list. “Marijuana.”

  I leaned forward and squinted at the page. The line his chubby finger had pointed to did say “marijuana” and had an amount written next to it.

  I looked up at him. “What is this?”

  “It’s an inventory of what we found on your friend’s body. And you can’t argue with facts. We found marijuana in his pocket.”

  I glanced down the list, scanning the catalog of Skinny’s clothing and wallet and their contents. I looked up at Byrd in confusion.

  “He didn’t have his phone on him?”

  Byrd shrugged. “Likely stolen. Didn’t find any money on him either.”

  “The fake prize letter I’d given Skinny isn’t on the list either. What happened to it?”

  Byrd shrugged again. “Don’t rightly know.”

  “And this . . .” I tapped on the paper. “What in the world does ‘fragment of Hodgkin DNA’ mean?”

  He yanked the paper away. “It’s nothing. Just a torn piece of paper the coroner found in a pocket. Trash most likely. They have to list everything. Even pocket lint.”

  “Trash? Trash that had ‘Hodgkin DNA’ written on it? That’s unlikely.”

  What was “Hodgkin DNA”? Was Hodgkin a person? A company? Had the police found a fragment of a DNA report? Why would Skinny have a DNA report on him?

  My heart started to beat wildly.

  A DNA report? Could that be what he’d wanted to tell me when he’d called the night he’d died?

  With a spurt of nervous excitement, I told Byrd again all about why Skinny had come to Camellia Beach, and I reminded him again about the phony prize letter I’d been sent. Wouldn’t sending fake prizes be considered a crime in his precious town?

  I also reported the black sedan that had tried to run me off the road yesterday. Wasn’t that a crime?

  “Drugs.” He beat his fist on his desk so hard, the desk jumped. “It was the drugs that caused your friend’s death, not some convoluted plot involving mystery DNA reports or con artists or crazy drivers.”

  Nothing I could say, apparently, would change his mind.

  I ended up
stomping away in anger and frustration, vowing to bring enough evidence that even the closed-minded Byrd couldn’t ignore it.

  A few minutes later, I arrived at the Chocolate Box for my next lesson.

  No one noticed my entrance to the shop even though the copper bell above the door had tinkled its sweet song. Standing a few steps inside the door, I breathed deeply to savor the dizzying aroma of rich chocolate that filled my senses.

  Mabel was sitting at one of the café tables in deep conversation with a man with short dark hair. His wide shoulders filled out a well-used leather bomber jacket. Underneath he wore a hand-tailored white oxford shirt along with cargo pants and leather hiking boots. He looked like an action hero with his square jaw. There was even a weathered Indiana Jones–style fedora sitting on the café table next to his arm. Action hero or model. He looked . . . good . . . like a model on set for one of my half sister’s fashion shoots.

  I didn’t see Bertie anywhere.

  I took a moment to reflect on what I’d learned at the police department. The possibility that Skinny had died with a DNA report in his pocket had my mind reeling.

  Was it possible? Did Skinny somehow find my mother? She was a drifter, a fortune-teller scam artist. No one knew her true identity. Had Skinny learned her name? If he had, I wasn’t sure how it made me feel. Excited? Angry?

  Did I even want to meet her?

  My gaze traveled across the room, and I wondered if I’d somehow already met the woman. Was that the reason Mabel and Bertie had lured me here—to this dinky beach town—to reunite me with the con artist who’d given birth to me and then promptly abandoned me on another’s doorstep?