Asking for Truffle: A Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery

by Dorothy St. James

  Was that what Skinny had been hinting at when he’d left that cryptic message on my phone the night he’d died? Was that the secret that had gotten him killed?

  So many questions needed to be answered. And suddenly, I felt less and less sure I wanted to learn what those answers might be. Would I be strong enough to hear the truth?

  For Skinny’s sake, I needed to follow this investigation through to the end, even if I didn’t like where it would take me. I couldn’t run, even though that’s what I did best in life. I needed to find out what Mabel and Bertie knew and how they were involved.

  Mabel leaned forward as she listened intently to what the man sitting next to her was saying. With a nod, he reached into a leather satchel and produced a photograph that made Mabel squeal with delight.

  Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, I cleared my throat.

  “Oh, Penn! There you are, sugar pie. I didn’t hear you come in. I was beginning to wonder if you’d make it for your next lesson. Come over here, girl, and join us.” A warm feeling tingled in my chest as Mabel turned her bright smile in my direction. Her movements were slow as she rose from the chair. I rushed across the room to help her, but the man took her arm before I could reach her.

  “You should use your cane,” he said gently.

  “I don’t need a cane or your hands all over me, Cal. I might be old, but I’m not infirm. Now let go already.” She batted at the hand cupping her elbow. But the action appeared to be more to preserve her own dignity than to really push him away.

  All of a sudden, she crumbled in on herself as a coughing fit overcame her. The man deftly helped her settle back into her chair.

  He then rushed over to the shop’s counter to find a small pill bottle in her purse. He pushed a pill into her hand, which she willingly slipped under her tongue.

  “Can I do something?” I asked as she still struggled with her coughing.

  “Nothing that won’t make her madder than a wet hen,” he drawled in a low whisper. “Miss Mabel hates to admit weakness. Has for as long as I’ve been alive and I suspect for much longer than that, though I couldn’t vouch for it. I’m—”

  “Penn, dear, that whispering snake standing next to you is—” A series of dry coughs interrupted her introduction. “He’s—he’s a Dalton. Calhoun is his name. The Dalton boy who doesn’t live here anymore. Both boys used to work in the shop,” she said between gulping breaths. “And he’s brought me some good news.” With her finger, bent from years of work, she tapped the photograph that had made her so happy.

  I moved toward the table to look at the photo, expecting to see a picture of a new baby or some other domestic milestone people about my age generally experience. What I saw instead was a photograph of a long concrete block building freshly painted white with rainbow stripes encircling it about a third of the way up the wall. A matching rainbow-striped door was opened a crack, and a small brown-skinned child peered out at the photographer.

  “Is this from around here?” I asked. The type of construction wasn’t that different from the concrete beachfront motel I’d been calling home for the past couple of days.

  “No,” Mabel said. Her energy and her ability to breathe smoothly seemed to return as she talked about the building in the picture. “It’s the new school. The Chocolate Box funded its construction.”

  “This is a school in town?” I asked.

  “No. No. No.” She coughed again. “It’s located in the village of Cabruca in Brazil. The old school’s roof leaked so badly, it ruined all the computers we’d sent. Cal happened to be in the area for work and took an extra day to travel up the mountain to the village to take some pictures of the completed school. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “You built a school in Brazil?” If the Chocolate Box had that kind of money, why in the world was Mabel trying to scam me? And why had she used her money to build a school in South America when she should have used it to shore up this building? After all, it looked like it was about to fall over. “Why would you do that?”

  “We built the school in Cabruca because that’s where our chocolate comes from. Oh, dear, I haven’t told you about that yet, have I?”

  “About what?” I asked. “Doesn’t the chocolate you use come from a wholesale supplier?”

  “Not Miss Mabel’s chocolate,” Calhoun said proudly. “Best beans in the world. Rare as the most precious diamonds. They come from Brazil. Hand harvested. And—”

  “Hush now, Cal.” She slapped the back of his hand. “You’ll ruin my presentation. I’ll tell Penn all about the chocolate during our class.”

  “So you’re the student she’s been talking about?” Calhoun’s brows rose up into his hairline as he looked me over from head to toe with his piercing green eyes.

  “I hope she didn’t tell you how I nearly ruined a batch of truffles yesterday by adding a cup instead of a teaspoon of salt.”

  “Don’t go on so; it wasn’t that bad. We made it work.”

  Calhoun chuckled. His deep laugh sounded as smooth as a jazz singer’s voice.

  “I’m Penn,” I said and stuck out my hand.

  He looked down at my proffered hand and chuckled again before offering me a sturdy handshake. “Penn? Penn? Oh! You’re the one I’ve been hearing about all around town. You’ve been asking questions about that strange fellow who got himself murdered.”

  My cheeks flamed at both his offhand comment about my friend and the way Mabel sucked in a sharp breath. What he’d said was true. I had talked with several residents about Skinny, including the police chief. But I hadn’t yet asked Mabel about Skinny simply because . . . because . . . well, because she seemed like such a sweet old lady. And I didn’t have the heart to remind her of how my friend had died in her store.

  There’s a good chance she’s guilty as sin, my inner voice reminded me. I shushed it.

  Since he’d mentioned the murder, I saw no good reason not to talk about it. “Skinny was my friend. I asked him to come here to do some research about an odd letter I’d received from someone in this town. And before he could tell me what he’d learned, he was killed. That’s why I’m here.”

  Mabel grabbed my hand and squeezed it so tightly my bones creaked. “That poor boy was a friend of yours?” Her voice trembled. “Lord, I’m so sorry. So, so sorry,” she whispered. “I wish I hadn’t—”

  “Miss Mabel, it wasn’t your fault. A drug dealer broke into the shop, dragged the man inside, and killed him. You couldn’t have stopped that from happening,” Calhoun said firmly. He clearly loved her and felt protective of her, which was sweet.

  All the same, I wished he had let her finish what she’d been about to say. Had she been on the verge of confessing that she’d sent me the phony prize letter? Had she been about to confess to murdering my friend in cold blood?

  “Skinny didn’t use drugs,” I said through gritted teeth. “And why would some random drug dealer know where to find a huge vat of chocolate? What in the world was the shop doing with a vat of chocolate large enough to drown a man in the first place? It’s not like I’ve seen you use it for your business.”

  “The police have it. Not that I’d use it again. Gracious, no. Not after . . .” Tears filled Mabel’s eyes. Tears of regret? Guilt? “I’d purchased the cauldron for a charity event that had been scheduled for the next day.”

  “Everyone in town knew about the event,” Cal added.

  “It was going to start early in the morning, so I’d filled the vat with chocolate before leaving that night. Not melted, mind you. Waiting to be melted. The local schoolchildren were going to try to break the world record for making the most chocolate-dipped candies in a day. We were then going to sell the chocolates to their parents to raise money for new gym equipment. The equipment they have now is in worse shape than what the children in Cabruca are using. I wanted to help.”

  “I’ve been telling you all along, Miss Mabel, your heart is too big for that little body of yours.” Calhoun kissed her on the forehead. He t
hen turned to me. His deep-green eyes looked troubled. “I’m sorry about your friend. I hope you’ll find some answers soon.”

  After promising to join her for dinner, he swept his hat up from the table and sauntered toward the door. He paused when he heard me say, “We could skip today’s lesson.”

  “Heavens, no!” Mabel protested. “Bertie will be back in no time. I’m sure she won’t mind demonstrating the recipe’s steps while I explain the hows and whys. Please, Penn. Please, you must stay.”

  “I can help as well.” Cal returned and dropped his hat back on the table. “One cannot disappoint someone as special as Miss Mabel, you hear?”

  So I stayed. And I got so swept up in the act of creating amazing chocolate candies and laughing and talking with a charming man with a honey-sweet voice and two of the kindest women I’d ever met, I forgot to question their motives. Again.

  Cal showed up again the following day. Together with Mabel, we cooked and laughed. The only rocky part of the day happened when Mabel started questioning me about my family. She’d wanted me to talk about my mother and father. I never shared stories from my rocky childhood or about what little I knew of my mother with anyone. I didn’t even talk about it with Granny Mae, who’d been there and had witnessed what I’d gone through.

  Thankfully, Cal had noticed my discomfort and helped steer the conversation back to chocolate.

  Despite that one awkward moment, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so alive or happy. During those hours of perfect chocolate bliss, I would have sworn those two sweet women had nothing to do with sending me that phony prize letter or causing my friend’s death.

  Deep in my heart, however, I feared I knew better.

  Chapter 5

  “You’re late,” Bertie scolded when I arrived on the fourth morning. Her small, round body moved with surprising speed as she pulled the door shut before the wet winter wind could sweep through the shop.

  “I didn’t realize there was a schedule,” I replied and took a moment to enjoy the warm chocolate scents that had started to smell and feel like that mythical home I’d created in my imagination ages ago.

  “Tut, tut, of course there isn’t a schedule,” Mabel said as she used tongs to fill a gold-foil box with an assortment of the shop’s signature chocolate candies. “Bertie is teasing you. Aren’t you, Bertie?”

  Bertie harrumphed. The way she watched me with her narrowed gaze and her disapproving pursed lips made my insides wobble the same way they would whenever I had to deal with my grandmother. “Mabel has been pacing all morning. She’s eager to show you one last recipe.”

  “Last recipe? This is the last class?” I asked, feeling a spurt of panic. This couldn’t be the last class. I hadn’t discovered anything important yet.

  We’d only just begun taking a semisweet journey around the globe, learning about the individual chocolates grown in the tropics from South America to Madagascar and beyond. Mabel had told me how each bean variety had its own unique flavor. Some varieties were even on the verge of extinction. I had to learn more.

  And I also still needed to find out how these two sweet but cunningly sharp old women were involved with scamming me and with my friend’s murder.

  “Won’t Mabel agree to more classes? I’m sure she would for me.”

  Bertie raised her brows and shrugged.

  So this was it, then? After this class, they planned to spring their costly trap?

  While Bertie continued to keep an uncharacteristically chilly distance that morning, Mabel was all about the hugs. She couldn’t seem to get enough of them. And when she wasn’t hugging, she was asking all sorts of probing questions about my life.

  Without Cal there to help deflect her questions, I felt exposed and vulnerable.

  “Isn’t Cal coming today?” I asked, looking around in the corners of the shop as if I’d find him hiding there.

  “I told him you’d cancelled. I wanted to keep you to myself,” Mabel said and pulled me into another tight hug.

  Perhaps she was lonely or was simply displaying the warm Southern hospitality I’d heard about. At least that’s what I told myself. Because, whatever it was, I shouldn’t like it. But I did. Expressions of affection had always felt . . . strange. Especially from overly friendly strangers. I liked boundaries. They kept me safe. But whenever I tried to put up those boundaries with Mabel, she’d bless my heart and walk right past them to hug me again.

  And the odd part about her hugs was that I’d let her give them to me. Oh, these two ladies were experts at playing the con game.

  Even though I’d come to their shop with my defenses on high alert, I suspected all Mabel needed to do was hug me like she really loved me one more time and I’d be handing over a blank check for her to spend.

  “I worry about Mabel,” Bertie came up beside me and whispered, her soft voice quick and cutting. “She’s not well. She doesn’t have the strength to get so worked up over her classes with you. I told her that at ninety-one, she needs to settle down. I told her that she’s only making herself sicker, but she won’t listen to me or her doctors or her family. She won’t settle down.”

  “I’m here now,” I said, patting Bertie’s arm, “and I’ve been enjoying the lessons. Really, I have.”

  “What are the two of you whispering about?” Mabel demanded.

  “We were whispering about how your fretting has been driving me wild all morning,” Bertie shot back.

  Mabel chuckled. “Bertie, you are such a tease,” she said as she shuffled out from behind the display counter and grabbed my shoulders. After studying my expression for a moment, she wrapped her arms around me. This hug, like all her others, felt surprisingly warm for such a frail, skinny woman.

  “You’re too thin, dear,” Mabel said, not for the first time. Her voice was muffled because she hadn’t let go of me.

  Bertie cleared her throat. “Go on, get started with the lesson.”

  Mabel squeezed me closer for a moment before stepping back. “Right, we do need to get busy. Are the ingredients ready?”

  “All but the chocolate,” Bertie replied.

  The backroom at the Chocolates Box was large enough to accommodate a dozen students, but Cal and I were the only ones who ever showed up to take a class. With the miserable weather beating against the windows that looked out over a small patio and the marsh at the back of the island, I wondered why no one else came to the classes. Was the town’s tourist industry really that dead?

  Perhaps it was. The few people I’d met who were staying at the Pink Pelican Inn were elderly long-term residents who were using the motel as a retirement home. But surely the local residents would be interested in taking these chocolate-covered lessons.

  Mabel was a master at her craft. Her passion for teasing the senses came through in everything she did.

  A white truffle dusted with dark-chocolate cocoa waited for me on a bone-china plate in the middle of the counter. Mabel lifted the plate. My mouth was already watering. This is how most of the lessons began, with a taste of the finished product. When my greedy fingers reached for the small, round piece of heaven, Mabel pulled the plate back.

  “This isn’t what we are making today. Today is special,” she said, holding the white chocolate truffle hostage. “We’ll be making something rare and wonderful. In the Cabruca village in Brazil that I told you about, they call it the Amar bean. Amar is Portuguese for love. This is a special chocolate you cannot buy anywhere else in the world. The responsibility for it has been passed down in my family for generations.” Her gaze went to a line of photographs on the wall. “My children . . .” her voice trailed off. She swallowed hard and shook her head.

  “Don’t fret over them,” Bertie said as she entered the kitchen. Her gaze, too, lingered on the photographs. “They have their own lives and their own troubles. What child would want their future career decided for them before their birth?”

  “The chocolate shop and these chocolates, especially the Amar, are part of their DNA,�
�� Mabel said as she slammed her slender fist on the counter’s marble slab.

  Their DNA? It made me wonder about my own half-missing DNA and the paper fragment found on Skinny’s body. Yesterday, I’d contacted Hodgkin DNA, a testing laboratory that mainly catered to running paternity tests. But without an intake number, no one at the company would tell me anything.

  I studied Mabel’s face, memorizing each line and contour, wondering if her narrow nose resembled mine. Or was it my nose that resembled hers? Were we related? Or was I merely trying to see things, hoping against hope to discover I was somehow, even distantly, connected to these two talented women and their sweetly scented shop?

  “But they are too stubborn to understand that,” Mabel said.

  I shook myself out of my overactive imagination. My mom was a con woman who couldn’t be bothered with a baby, and that was really all I needed to know about her. Some people won the lottery when it came to parents. And others got stuck with what they got.

  That was how life worked.

  “I’m sorry. I seemed to have drifted off for a moment. What were you saying?” I asked.

  “My children,” Mabel said with a sigh. “They have no interest in the chocolate shop, and it breaks my heart into teeny-tiny bits. I might have been able to forgive them for that slight, but they’ve gone and poisoned their children against the shop as well. That I can never forgive.”

  I wandered over to the photographs. A yellowy print of five grinning towheaded children caught my attention. Three girls and two boys wearing matching blue cotton jumpers sat on a wide Victorian porch. The photograph was from a different time. Judging by the style of the clothes, I guessed it was taken around the time when my father was about the same age as Mabel’s kids.

  “Sometimes parents expect too much from their children,” I said as I continued to gaze at the portrait of the happy family. Such portraits often hid the truth—and the pain. “We’re hardly perfect.”

  “Did your father tell you that?” Mabel demanded, her voice suddenly sharp.