Asking for Truffle: A Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery

by Dorothy St. James

  “Not in so many words.” His absence from my life had spoken volumes. And what he didn’t say, my grandmother had no trouble voicing. Nothing I did was ever good enough. I was never good enough.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Mabel insisted. “Nothing at all.”

  I knew that wasn’t true, though it was nice to hear it, even if it was said by someone who didn’t know me very well at all. And since I wasn’t visiting Camellia Beach to discuss my troubles, I quickly brought the subject back to chocolate, which seemed to make Mabel giddy with approval. She discussed at length various flavor combinations before finally offering me the white chocolate truffle that had been sitting in the middle of the plate.

  “It’s supposed to taste like the tropics, but I’ve never traveled there. Do you think I pulled it off?” she asked.

  I bit down on the truffle. The layers of coconut and vanilla flavors that exploded in my mouth made me think I was standing on a sugar-sand beach in the Caribbean. I could almost hear the steel-drum band playing in the distance and smell the sweet tang of body oil.

  “Oh, it worked all right,” I exclaimed, looking around for another piece.

  Mabel clapped her hands and gave a toothy grin.

  Bertie cleared her throat and cast a meaningful glance at the clock above the door.

  “Yes, yes. It’s time to get started.” Mabel straightened her hunched shoulders.

  Her hands may have been slightly swollen and bent from years of laboring in the kitchen, but they moved sure and true as she worked. She opened the doors of an oversized pantry. On the bottom of the pantry sat a burlap bag tied closed with twine. It had to weigh at least a hundred pounds. So when Mabel moved to lift it, I rushed over and took over the task.

  “I just need it moved out of the pantry,” she said. “I can do it, but if you insist on having your hands on every part of the lesson, I suppose it’s a good idea for you to get a feel for the hard parts too.”

  The bag was superheavy, but I managed to slide the bag out of the pantry and onto the kitchen’s pristine floor. Mabel then unwound the twine holding it closed and reached inside, where she retrieved a metal scoop.

  “Fetch me that bowl over there.” She pointed to a shelf crowded with metal bowls. I grabbed one. “No, not that one. The big one.”

  I carried the largest bowl I could find over to her. She then measured out three heaping scoops of blackish-brown beans into the bowl.

  “Set that on the counter while I put the beans away,” she instructed.

  I quickly deposited the bowl and rushed back over to Mabel in time to manhandle the large bag back onto the pantry floor for her.

  “What are we making?” I frowned as I peered at the unappetizing contents of the metal bowl. “Bean soup?”

  “Bean soup!” She laughed so hard she started gasping for air and ended up having to sit down. “Bean soup! You are too funny, sugar pie.”

  I looked at her and then at the beans. “No, really. What are we making today?”

  “Chocolate,” she said as if offended that I needed to ask. “Could you be a dear and get that cask off the shelf for me?”

  The large wooden box Mabel had indicated looked as if it was hundreds of years old. I ran my hand over its deep-red wood, worn smooth from years of use. It took two hands to carry the heavy cask to the counter in the middle of the room.

  Mabel’s face lit up at the sight of it. “The chocolate inside this box comes from the Cabruca village.”

  She lovingly stroked the top of the cask. “My father gave me this box. He used it to store the bounty from each year’s special harvest. His father had used it before him. It had been given to my grandfather by a member of the Cabruca village who had carved it by hand. My family has served as caretakers of the Amar chocolate and the kind people who grow and harvest their special crop since before the turn of the last century.”

  She went on to explain in detail how there were three main types of chocolate beans. While there were offshoots of all the varieties, the Amar seemed to be in a class of its own.

  “The trees that grow this special cacao bean are rare and sparse within the forest. The bean, you see, will only grow on one narrow slope deep within the rainforest. My father believed it was a combination of the harsh soils and the unique variety of cacao beans that produced a chocolate with the perfect mix of flavors. The villagers say their Amar chocolate beans originated from a mystical fruit gifted to them from the Aztec gods. And they have cultivated and protected it since the beginning of the ancient village’s existence.”

  I leaned forward with anticipation as she pried open the wooden cask to reveal several thick bars of dark chocolate. A deep, rich scent that smelled almost like an expensive cappuccino filled the room.

  “The Chocolate Box holds exclusive rights to the harvest of what is possibly the rarest chocolate in the world. In exchange, we provide the villagers with a fair living wage and full educational opportunities for their children.”

  She pulled out a bar and turned to me. Her blue eyes pierced me with a stinging glare. “For the candies we sell in the store, I add a quarter of the Amar chocolate to the more common Forastero chocolate the villagers grow on their plantations. I have to mix it. Otherwise, we’d sell out of the Amar chocolate in less than a week. And have lines out the door.”

  It was sweet that she’d think that, but I couldn’t imagine her shop ever being the least bit crowded.

  “But for special occasions,” she continued, “I’ll use the chocolate straight from this box to make my recipes. You’ll soon taste the difference and understand why.”

  “I still don’t know what we’re making,” I said, looking over at the bowl of beans again.

  “We’re making magic,” Mabel breathed. For a moment, the old woman looked decades younger. “In this box is—”

  “It’s just chocolate, right?” My skin prickled at the thought of magic. There was no such thing as magic. I didn’t want anything to do with magic.

  “Yes, yes. It is chocolate. The young have no patience. I was trying to set a mood.” As she heaved a deep sigh, her years returned to etch their marks on her narrow face. “As I already told you, the villagers call their chocolate Amar, or love. And scientists have proven that eating chocolate ignites the same pleasure centers that light up when falling in love. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. The Amar chocolate is very special. In it you’ll find the building blocks of dreams. Whispered wishes carried on the wind end up mixed within the depths of these flavors. It is a magical sweet handed down directly from a god.”

  This woman is nuts, I thought to myself, and not for the first time. I’d long given up on believing in silly things like wishes and dreams. It wasn’t as if Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny had ever convinced my father to take an interest in my life or had softened my grandmother’s hatred despite years and years of wishing for just that. “So we’re making a ‘magical’ truffle?” If it was half as tasty as the tropical truffle, she could call it whatever she wanted. Even so, the thought of magic made my stomach clench. Charlatans professed the use of magic only to leave you abandoned and heartbroken.

  “Once you taste it, you’ll see,” Mabel said after a bit. But she didn’t let me taste the chocolate bar she’d lifted from the cask. Instead, she put it back inside and closed the lid. “We need to sort the beans.”

  “The beans?” I asked.

  “They’re chocolate beans. Weren’t you listening? I already told you that we’re making chocolate.”

  “Oh, we’re making chocolate. From beans. Isn’t that difficult?”

  She patted my hand. “I’ll show you what to do.”

  Together we sorted through the beans much like I used to do with fresh peas in Grandmother Cristobel’s kitchen. There were a few stones and leaves and pieces of wood that needed to be removed. Once they were clean, Mabel used a scale to measure out ten pounds of beans.

  “This is a small-scale operation, so we do things a little di
fferently than a large company would,” she explained as I went to fetch several baking sheets. We laid the beans on the sheets, making sure they were spread out in one layer. They were then placed in the twin ovens. We roasted them until the room smelled like brownies and the beans started making popping sounds.

  I kept looking over at the cask of chocolate bars, wishing I could have a sample. But Mabel was adamant that we complete our task before I got to taste the finished product. While we waited for the beans to roast, we cleaned everything in sight. Apparently cleanliness was an important part of the chocolate-making process.

  After the beans came out of the ovens, we ran them through what looked like a large food mill to remove the husks from the beans. My arm felt like it was about to fall off after cranking ten pounds of beans in small batches.

  Mabel then had me carry the bowl of cracked beans mixed with the hulls over to a large metal machine tucked in the far corner of the kitchen. Mabel poured the contents of the bowl into a chute and turned on the machine. In no time, the loose hulls were separated from the beans.

  She handed me the bowl of the finished product. “These are chocolate nibs.”

  “This is chocolate?” I asked, dying to taste it.

  “Not quite.” She let me taste the nibs anyhow. The flavor was strong and dark and not at all sweet.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Are you sure these are going to turn out? It tastes sour.”

  “Good, that’s what we expect at this point.”

  Next we poured the beans into a grinder that Mabel called a melangeur. It had two granite wheels that spun around and around. She also had me add a carefully measured amount of sugar to the melangeur.

  “How long do we have to wait for it to grind?” I asked.

  “Oh, about three days.”

  “Three days?”

  She laughed at my distress. “I’ll not make you wait that long, sugar pie. I simply wanted you to get a feel for how the chocolate in the shop is created. The farmers send us the bags of beans, and we craft our own chocolates using a process that has been refined for centuries. There’s a world of history in what we’ve just done.”

  She gave me one of her grandmotherly hugs and then removed two tiny squares of her special chocolates from the cask and placed them on the same white bone-china plate she’d used earlier.

  After all that work, I was disappointed. There weren’t even any nuts in it or any decoration on top. The plain squares of chocolate were kind of a letdown, knowing Mabel considered this my last lesson. I definitely needed to change her mind about that.

  “I’m sure it tastes better than it looks.” I grabbed one of the tiny chocolate squares and started to pop it into my mouth.

  “Wait.” She grabbed my arm with surprising strength. “You will want to savor each bite.”

  The muscles in my back tightened. Okay, here it comes. I figured she was going to have me taste the “magic” chocolate and then try to convince me to hand over wads of money to invest in expanding the village’s production of their special bean.

  Of course she would. She’d been carefully setting up the con for days now. First luring me in with stories of how the world is quickly losing the diversity of chocolate plants. Then by showing me the photo of the schoolhouse they’d built. She’d even admonished Cal for telling me information about the village before she’d felt I was ready to hear it. And during the classes, she had constantly tried to get me to talk about my family . . . my rich family.

  Even so, I had a piece of chocolate in my hand. I wasn’t going to walk away without eating it first.

  I took a slow breath to steady my suddenly racing heart and then bit into the chocolate square that was so dark and bitter that it nearly bit me back. Flavors exploded in my mouth, a swirling symphony of sweet and bitter, smooth and creamy. “Hmmm . . .” I closed my eyes and groaned with a pleasure bordering on the obscene.

  Mabel grabbed my hands and held them to her chest. “This flavor is my legacy and responsibility. And now it’s yours.”

  If only that were true.

  I swallowed the last of the chocolate. The memory of its smooth texture and swirling flavors left me feeling more than a little unsteady. It pricked at an ache that had long lived in my heart. An ache I never believed could be healed.

  I wish . . . I wish . . .

  What did I wish? What would heal that gaping hole in my heart?

  A home?

  A family who loved me?

  More chocolate?

  Yes, all that, but also something more.

  I wish I had a place where I belonged, a place where, like Mabel, I can spend my days dreaming up new and exciting flavor combinations to tease the senses—a place where I have a purpose, where I’m more than someone’s stepping stone or bank account.

  I swallowed the last of the delicious chocolate and opened my eyes.

  I then waited for Mabel to pitch her case. I waited for her to try to pry out of me a large portion of my family’s fortune.

  Without a word, the older woman released my hands and took a bite of the second piece of chocolate on the plate. Sparks seemed to dance on the air as she bit into it. Once she’d finished the decadently rich treat, a sad smile spread across her lips.

  “My greatest regret, my dear, is that we didn’t have more time together,” she said before she hurried out of the room.

  “Wait,” I called after her. “It doesn’t have to be over. I want to take more classes. I want to see what the chocolate mixture looks and tastes like in three days.”

  But it was too late. She was gone.

  Chapter 6

  That night, I woke up in the middle of a dream where chocolate beans were being hand harvested by hardworking villagers in the depths of the Amazon rainforest and then delivered to me so I could craft them into something beautiful for others to enjoy. I tasted the truffle I’d just made from the handmade chocolate and smiled. I’d finally found what I was meant to do. I was finally happy.

  Stella’s high-pitched bark jolted me out of that decadently sweet fantasy.

  “Hush now,” I said with a sleepy groan.

  She kept barking.

  “You’re going to wake the neighbors.”

  She kept barking.

  The room was dark. I fumbled for my phone so I could look at the time.

  “It’s three in the morning. There’s nothing out there. Settle down.”

  This was the second time since we’d arrived in Camellia Beach that she’d started barking like a mad dog in the middle of the night. I yawned, then rolled out from under the motel’s scratchy sheets to get down on the carpet, where she was running around in circles yapping.

  “Stella, it’s okay. It’s just someone returning to their room. Remember? It’s just like before. They’re not trying to get into here. No one is trying to get into here.”

  She kept barking as if she expected an army of ninjas to break through the door at any minute. If I didn’t get her to quiet down soon, someone would be pounding on the door. I certainly didn’t want that to happen, since it would only prove to her excitable little mind that she had good reason to be on high alert in the middle of the night.

  Tired of stumbling around in the dark, I flipped on the nearest light switch. That’s when I noticed the door.

  It was open.

  * * *

  Police Chief Byrd stood inside the small motel room. Instead of taking notes, he folded his arms over his pudgy chest and leaned against the doorjamb. His eyelids kept sinking over his eyes while I talked.

  “Someone tried to break into my room,” I reiterated when I’d finished walking him through the steps of what had happened. I shivered at the thought that someone had nearly succeeded in getting into my room.

  “You said the door wasn’t open much more than a crack?” he asked with a long sigh.

  “Yes, but—”

  “And that the swinging latch arm had been locked? So really, the door couldn’t have opened much wider than that without
force?” He woke up long enough to demonstrate how wide a crack the door had been opened.

  “I guess, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Ms. Penn, listen.” He swung the door fully open, letting in a blast of icy winter wind that carried with it the salty scent of the Atlantic. With his beefy finger, he pointed to the lock. It was the old-fashioned mechanical kind of motel lock, the kind that used an actual key. Because the room faced the ocean, the lock and the metal strike plate around it were puckered with rust. “This is an old building. The locks can be tricky. Sometimes they don’t turn all the way.”

  “I locked the door. I know I did.” I hugged Stella close to my chest. If not for her and her maniacal barking, who knows what might have happened. Was it an attempted burglary? Or something more sinister? Had I been lured to this godforsaken beach town so the residents could hold me hostage until my father paid a fortune for my release? Was that how they planned to pay for the town’s redevelopment? Or had the intruder broken into my room in order to kill me the same way Skinny had been killed?

  I hugged my little dog even closer. Stella, who loathed cuddles, growled and wiggled and tried to nip my fingers. She desperately wanted me to set her down. I ended up closing her in the bathroom, where she barked and scratched to get out. Better have her do that than let her loose and risk having her attack an officer of the law.

  “Ma’am, I understand you’re upset.” He had to raise his voice in order to be heard over Stella’s barks. “But look at the door. If someone had picked the lock, you’d see signs of it. The rust would be flaked off. There’s no sign anything happened here that couldn’t be explained by regular use. Perhaps you thought you had locked the door, but with the rust and the wind, the door opened a bit while you were sleeping. It happens around here. Especially when a nor’easter is blowing.”

  “No,” I insisted, “someone was out there.”

  “Because your little dog was barking? The same dog that’s barking right now?”

  “Yes, and because of the letter—”

  “Let’s not start with that again. So you won a contest that included a trip to our town.”