Could the murderer be someone who lusted after Mabel’s special chocolates? Did he—or she—kill Skinny in an attempt to keep me from finding out . . . what? What was Skinny going to tell me about Mabel?
I sighed.
If I eliminated Harley as a suspect, the shop was really the only motive I had left.
Chapter 17
The velvety-rich and nearly otherworldly scent still surprised me when I walked into the Chocolate Box. The scent pulled at something deep inside me. I supposed some people experienced something similar when walking into a church or returning home after a long absence.
And yet no matter how much I loved Mabel’s chocolate, the experience I felt walking into the store was bitingly bittersweet. Skinny had died within these walls, killed in the very same chocolate I had come to love. Mabel had died upstairs only a few days after I’d met her.
Death and chocolate. Grief and anticipation. A mishmash of emotions swirled in my heart like ingredients in one of Mabel’s stainless-steel mixing bowls. I wondered what Mabel would have said if I could tell her about the conflicting thoughts I had toward her shop.
It’s the salt that brings out the sweet in life, she’d told me during one of our cooking lessons. The memory came to me almost as if she were whispering it from beyond the veil. I swiped at the salty tears I hadn’t even realized had fallen and smiled.
She hadn’t left me the shop with no one to help me run it. Bertie, Althea, Cal, and even Derek had all promised to help me get ready for the festival. And despite the heaps of salt that had brought me to this shabby little beach community, I did find the challenge of running the chocolate shop, even for one week, pretty dang sweet.
It took some effort to put aside the questions that still surrounded Skinny’s death as I walked through the shop, flipping on lights. If I was going to make this weekend’s chocolate festival the success Mabel had dreamed it would be, I needed to focus.
Among other things, I had ad copy to write, newspapers to contact, ingredients to buy, and mouthwatering chocolates to make.
But first things first: I needed to get the shop ready for its nine o’clock opening and then check on the chocolate beans that had been grinding away in the kitchen. I opened the cooler to fetch the trays of beautiful truffles and stood there . . . dumbfounded.
The shelves were empty.
Okay. Don’t panic. Perhaps I’d misremembered that Bertie put the trays of truffles in the cooler. I hurried to the front of the store and peered into the glass display case.
Those shelves were also empty.
“What are you doing standing around gaping at the chocolates like that?” Bertie asked. She’d showered and dressed in a worn pair of blue jeans with an elastic waist. A long-sleeve purple T-shirt printed with the Chocolate Box’s scrolling logo and the word “Chocolate” was neatly tucked into her jeans. “Go ahead and eat one,” she said as she dropped her apron on over her head.
“The chocolates,” I whispered. “They’re not here.”
“That’s because you haven’t gotten them out of the cooler yet.” While she tied her apron, she turned back around and headed down the hallway toward the storage rooms.
I followed her. “They aren’t there, either.”
“You must have looked in the wrong place. I put them away myself last night.” She swung open the cooler’s door and looked inside. “Where’s our stock? Where’d you put it?”
“The cooler was empty when I got here,” I told her.
She shook her head and hurried back out to the display case. “Where are they?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” I said.
“What’s going on?” Derek asked from across the room. He’d settled into a café chair, sitting with his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. Like yesterday, he was dressed from head to toe in utterly forgettable beige.
I jumped at the sight of him. “How in the world did you get in here?”
“The back door.” He pointed in that direction. “It was unlocked.”
“I left it unlocked?” I didn’t remember doing that, but then again, my mind had been on other things.
“The door was unlocked when I came in too, but never mind that.” Bertie tossed her hands in the air. “We’ve been robbed!” She pulled out a key and opened the register. She gasped at what she saw there. “They took all the money too.”
“How much are we talking about?” Derek asked as he lurched up from his chair.
“I’d guess nearly a thousand dollars from yesterday’s sales,” Bertie said as she rushed down the narrow hall to the kitchen. She frantically dug through the pantries. I chased after her. “This is bad. This is bad,” she was saying as she tossed opened one cabinet door after another.
“What? What is bad?” I asked.
“Our supplies are gone.”
I peeked over her shoulder into the pantry door she’d pulled open and spotted a few bags of old Halloween candy and nothing else.
“We’ll have to reorder everything,” she said.
“Which will cost money,” I said.
“And we’ll have to put a rush on the order.”
“Which will cost even more money,” I said.
She turned toward me. “It has to be done. We need to start rebuilding our stock for this weekend’s festival.”
“And the money in the cash register has been stolen. Please tell me Mabel kept a fat bank account for the business.”
“It’s not exactly fat,” she said.
“All accounts will be held up in probate,” Derek said as he followed us into the kitchen. “You won’t have access to any of it until, well, I’m not sure how long it’s going to take to get access to anything, since Edward plans to contest the will.”
My heart dropped. I’d failed even before I’d begun.
That’s when I noticed the silence. The melangeur should have been grinding away, changing the Amar chocolate beans into something as dark and mysterious as the shadows in the Amazon jungle.
Not only was the grinder silent. Like everything else, it was gone.
“What are we going to do? How can we salvage this?” I asked. Both Bertie and Derek shook their heads.
“We’ll have to report the theft to Byrd,” Bertie said. She sounded about as excited to talk with the police chief as I did.
“I suppose so,” I agreed. “Would you mind calling him? I’m not sure he’d come if I did.”
She nodded and left the room to make the call using the business phone next to the cash register.
“I can’t understand how this could have happened.” I paced the hallway that connected the kitchen to the front of the shop. Derek, far too calm for the situation, followed along like a happy puppy dog. “I replaced that back lock last night precisely so something like this wouldn’t happen.”
“I wonder who has a key,” Derek said as he tapped his cleanly shaven chin.
“No one,” I snapped. “I changed the lock.”
“And you gave a copy of the key to no one?” Derek leaned toward me as he asked the question. He reminded me of an old-fashioned sleuth with his slow speech and the way he watched me as if searching for answers in my expression.
“Bertie has the only other copy,” I said.
“And she wouldn’t want the festival to fail . . . or would she?” Derek tapped his chin again.
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.” I returned to the kitchen and tossed open the pantry doors again, hoping against hope that this was all a mistake and if I’d only take a second look, I’d find the supplies right where they were supposed to be.
“Think about it. Bertie wants you to keep the shop open . . . forever, right?”
“She wants—”
“Seems a little convenient to me,” he said, not giving me the chance to defend her. “I know.” He snapped his fingers. “The two of you work night and day to make up for lost time and barely manage to pull off the festival. But by this time, you’re compl
etely committed. How can you walk away from the shop after putting in so much work, after using so much of your own money to make the shop and the Sweets on the Beach festival a success?”
“Bertie?” I emphatically shook my head. “You think Bertie would do something like that?”
“Her, or perhaps that sneaky daughter of hers.”
That was when I remembered something important, something that blew a huge hole in Derek’s theory and ruined any chance of us salvaging the Sweets on the Beach festival. If the robbers had taken everything, that would also mean they’d taken Mabel’s special chocolate. No amount of money could get that back.
I raced across the room and found the ancient cask where she stored the rich and wonderful chocolate bars. I lifted the lid.
“It’s just as I feared.” It felt as if my stomach had crashed onto the floor. “Mabel’s chocolate. It’s gone too.”
Chapter 18
Police Chief Byrd pressed his lips firmly together as he jotted down notes in his casebook. He leaned against the empty display case as if the act of standing on his own caused him too much work.
Even though I let Bertie do all the talking, his angry gaze kept traveling over to me. After he’d listened to her account of the theft, he examined both the front and back locks. He then violently snapped his casebook closed.
“There’s no sign of a break-in. Whoever did this must have had a key,” he said, echoing Derek’s thoughts.
“That’s impossible. I changed the locks yesterday afternoon. The only two people who have keys are Bertie and me.”
“Did you lock the door?” he asked.
“Yes! I tested it myself.”
“I was there. The door was locked when we left for the night,” Bertie agreed.
“Then it must have been someone with a key,” he repeated.
“We didn’t rob the shop.” Hysteria was beginning to fizz in my head like champagne bubbles. “We didn’t rob our own shop.”
He nodded. “I know Bertie wouldn’t do anything foolish like that. Yet neither the front lock nor the back lock was jimmied.” The look he gave me, like I was something nasty that had gotten stuck to the bottom of his shoe, made me want to squirm. “We didn’t have trouble here in Camellia Beach. This was a peaceful town before you and your troublemaking friend came into town, Miss Penn.”
“This isn’t my fault.” I hugged my arms to my chest in an effort to keep my body still and my emotions in check. The fizzing in my head got louder. “I’m not even keeping the shop.”
He hooked his thumbs on his belt loops and hitched up his pants as he stepped toward me. His voice deepened. “I don’t know what your game is or why you decided to play it here in my town. During these past two weeks, starting with your friend’s murder, every bit of trouble in this town has involved you in some way. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”
“I don’t like it either. I didn’t ask for any of this,” I protested.
He unlatched a thumb from his belt loop so he could wag his thick finger beneath my nose. “So you say. So you say. Well, missy, let me make this clear so you’ll understand it: you don’t have to stay in our fair town. In fact, the sooner you leave Camellia Beach, the better.”
* * *
It wasn’t until Chief Byrd had said it himself that the idea hit me like a frying pan to the head. Everything bad that had happened since I’d arrived in Camellia Beach (and even before I’d arrived) revolved around me and the chocolate shop. Sure, the police chief had been insinuating that I had somehow brought the trouble with me. I knew that wasn’t true. But until that moment, I hadn’t thought about Skinny’s murder, or the rogue car coming at me, or the attempted break-in, or even Mabel’s will as pieces of a larger picture that I couldn’t quite get far enough away from to see in its entirety.
Instead, I’d kept trying to cram the pieces into small, simple theories. Mabel’s children want the shop? I tried to shove the pieces into there, even though killing Skinny didn’t cause Mabel to change her will. Harley had threatened Skinny’s life? Then he must have killed him. I tried to shove the pieces of the puzzle there too. But why would he steal Mabel’s letter from himself? And why try to run me down with his car? Those were questions that desperately needed to be answered.
Since we didn’t have any inventory to sell, I pushed Bertie and Derek out of the shop’s front door and locked it behind me. I even turned off the lights so no one would bother me.
I needed to find the larger picture. To help me, I called Granny Mae on her cell phone because, quite simply, she possessed the most logical mind of anyone I’d ever known. It was a little after ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. If she followed her regular Sunday morning schedule, she would be leaving church and walking home with her girlfriends.
I was right. After I briefly explained why I needed her help, she begged off coffee with her friends and then, despite the freezing cold January Wisconsin weather, sat down on a park bench so she could concentrate.
“You’re telling me there’s now been a robbery, dear? And you don’t have any idea who might have stolen both the money and the chocolates or why?” she asked after I told her about what I’d found that morning.
“I have a feeling all this is connected to everything else that has happened, but I can’t pull it together.”
“Penn, what you need to do is sit down and concentrate on one thing at a time.” How she knew I was standing up and pacing I couldn’t even guess.
I settled in one of the café chairs and stared at the small, round metal table in front of me. “My mind is spinning. I honestly don’t know where to start.”
“Have you read the articles I’ve been sending you?”
“Um . . .” I hadn’t. “I keep meaning to.”
“Make a point to read the articles. I think they’ll help you. I even sent one on how to train unruly dogs.”
“Do you mean now? I should hang up and read them now?” I started to panic. I didn’t want to read articles about the chocolate industry or dog training or whatever else she’d sent my way. What I wanted to do was sort out the thoughts I already had in my head, not add to them.
“You should read them, and read them carefully, but I can hear in your voice that you’re too nervous to concentrate on that right now. So let’s look at what we know and expand our knowledge later.”
“Yes. Yes. Let’s do that.” Unfortunately, I still didn’t know how to start.
Luckily, Granny Mae did. “That lawyer fellow who the police had arrested, didn’t you tell me he’d warned you about how inheritance laws work in South Carolina? Didn’t he tell you something about that if something happened to you within five days of the will reading, Mabel’s family inherits the shop?”
“You’re talking about Harley. He did tell me that. Since I’m not a blood relative, the state law has this weird provision that says if I die by this coming Wednesday, anything I’ve inherited from Mabel will be split evenly among her legal heirs.”
“Wednesday,” Granny Mae said thoughtfully. “That doesn’t give us much time.”
“But why would anyone want to stop me from inheriting now? I’ve told anyone and everyone that I’m going to sign the shop over to Mabel’s family.”
Granny Mae seemed to chew on that thought for a moment. “Last night Bertie had the only other key to the shop. And she wants you to carry out Mabel’s wishes. Could she have stolen everything in a desperate move to force you to invest in the Chocolate Box? Is she trying to get you to become both financially and emotionally attached to the shop so you’ll stay?”
“That’s what Derek suggested.” I started to tap nervously on the tabletop.
“Derek is Mabel’s youngest son?”
“He is.” Granny Mae had an impressive memory.
“He’s not a reliable source, then. Who else could have broken into the shop?”
“Althea, Bertie’s daughter, could have stolen her mother’s key and robbed the shop,” I said. “Derek suggested
her as a suspect when I told him Bertie would never steal from me.”
“And again, he’s not a reliable source,” she said.
“I don’t know. He’s been a big help. He even came in this morning to lend a hand in getting ready for the festival.”
“Why? Why would he do that?”
“He told me he wanted to help with the festival because it was important to his mother.”
“Ah-ha!” Granny Mae clapped her hands. “You’ve caught him in a lie.”
“I have?”
“Yes, you have, dear. Don’t you see? If he cared that much about what was important to his mother, he would have made her a happy woman and agreed to take over the shop.”
“But he said he didn’t know how to—”
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know how to make chocolates either. But you’re trying to fulfill her wishes at least with the festival. So the question is, why is he really hanging around the shop?”
I thought about that for a moment. “I have no idea.”
“Could he have broken into the shop last night?”
“He didn’t have a key, and there’s no sign of a break-in.”
Granny Mae fell silent again. She finally asked, “What do we know about Derek other than the fact that he’s Mabel’s son?”
“Cal told me last night that Derek likes to party.”
“Hmm . . . could mean nothing or it could mean everything. What does he do for a living?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out.”
I nodded.
“You’re nodding, aren’t you, dear?”
“I sometimes think you can see through phone lines,” I said.
“Maybe I can, Penn.” She chuckled but quickly grew serious again. “And you’re sure neither Bertie nor her daughter would have a reason to rob the shop, not even in a twisted attempt to convince you to stay?”
“The thief took Mabel’s special chocolates. It’s not something that can be purchased. Without it, and with me making the chocolates, oohhh . . .” I groaned. “What a disaster. Bertie wouldn’t do that. Althea wouldn’t either, at least I don’t think she would.”
Asking for Truffle: A Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery Page 17
