Asking for Truffle: A Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery

by Dorothy St. James

  “You need to talk with Althea.”

  “I do,” I agreed. Despite the fact that her belief in crystals and woo-woo magic made my skin crawl, I needed to find out more about what she knew. I hadn’t forgotten how she had hated Skinny and had clearly lied when I’d asked her why she didn’t like him.

  “I think we’ve made some good progress here, dear. And my fingers are starting to turn blue, so let’s wrap up by summarizing what we do know. You received a letter, which you now know was a ruse to lure you to Camellia Beach so she could teach you about the shop. Skinny was killed because he was asking about Mabel and her family.”

  “He was asking mostly about Carolina, the missing sister,” I added.

  “Interesting. I think that’s an important clue.”

  “I do too,” I said somewhat shakily. “What if—”

  Granny Mae didn’t let me continue that thought. “The letter Mabel sent you is now missing as well as Skinny’s phone, but they found on him a fragment of a letter from a DNA testing company.”

  “You don’t think I could be—?” Was Carolina Maybank my mother?

  “Let’s stick to facts right now. We can speculate later. So after Skinny is killed, you take the lessons and a few days later inherit the shop.”

  “According to Harley, I would have inherited whether or not I came to town.”

  “That’s interesting as well,” Granny Mae said. “I’ll have to think about that for a while. What else do we know?”

  “Jody,” I said. “Don’t forget that she’s desperate to buy the building so she can redevelop this part of town into high-rise condos and shops. She told me the other day that she’d already paid someone a large down payment for the land.”

  “Who did she pay?” Granny Mae asked.

  “I don’t know. I meant to ask her last night, but then we got all wrapped up in accusing her ex, Harley Dalton, of murdering Skinny. And everything else just kind of, well, got forgotten.”

  “Understandable, dear. But it sounds as if you don’t think he could have done it?”

  “He didn’t use his car to run me off the road on my first full day in Camellia Beach.”

  “He has an alibi?” she asked.

  “He does. He was with his son at the time, which means someone else must have been driving his noisy sedan. And if someone else had been driving his car to run me off the road, couldn’t that same person have also used Harley’s car to follow Skinny while he was making that last phone call to me?”

  “But didn’t Harley have a motive to kill your friend?” Granny Mae asked.

  “He did. Half the town heard him threaten to kill Skinny. He won’t tell me what the argument had been about. But it clearly has something to do with Skinny’s relationship with Jody. Harley has no interest in the chocolate shop, at least none that I can find. So he wouldn’t have a reason to be trying to hurt me.”

  “So you think. I wouldn’t cross him off your suspect list yet.”

  “I’ll leave him on but move his name to the bottom,” I said. “I can’t shake the feeling that everything that’s happened is connected to Mabel’s shop and her chocolate.”

  “And your DNA?”

  “Yes. And my DNA.”

  Chapter 19

  The DNA discussion got quickly tabled. Beyond the fragment of a letter found on Skinny’s body, there was no evidence that I was at all related to the Maybank family. Granny Mae made me promise to read the articles she’d sent and to call again that evening before we disconnected.

  I then called my half sister, Tina, who had threatened to hop on the first available plane south if I missed even one of my daily check-ins with her.

  I lied beautifully, telling her how I was up to my elbows in chocolate while busily ensuring the upcoming Sweets on the Beach turned into a smashing success. She fell silent for a while, perhaps picking up on the panic I couldn’t quite chase away from my voice. After I told her several more times how much work I needed to get done, she reluctantly wished me well and ended the call.

  With that accomplished, I went in search for a piece of paper to jot down everything I’d discussed with Granny Mae before I forgot anything. On a shelf underneath the shop’s front counter, I found a legal-sized yellow pad and a pen.

  I started to make a new list of suspects, along with my thoughts and action plans. I’d barely written more than a few words when I noticed the impression of someone’s notes from the previous sheet of paper above it. The writing was bold and had formed deep creases that had transferred to several pages below even the top sheet.

  I turned the legal pad this way and that trying to make out what the list said. It looked like a to-do list.

  What if Mabel had created a to-do list for the festival? That was definitely something I could use. Time was running out for us. It was already Sunday, and the festival started on Thursday night. Finding a copy of Mabel’s festival notes would save us loads of time.

  So instead of jotting down notes from my conversation with Granny Mae, I dug around for the eyeliner pencil I kept in my purse. Using the superspy skill every child learns by age six, I lightly rubbed the side of the pencil along the paper to bring the words pressed into the page into view.

  At the top of the page, someone had written the date: the day before Mabel’s passing. Below it in all caps read, “To Do.”

  As I’d suspected, the list detailed things to be completed in advance of the festival, such as who needed to be contacted, display tables that needed to come out of storage, and a list of chocolate truffles Mabel planned to make.

  She’d also started a shopping list, but it contained only a handful of items, such as caster sugar and pecans.

  Below the incomplete shopping list, someone with a light hand and tight-looped, sloping letters had written, “Mabel, you are out of your nitro pills. Refill ASAP.”

  I placed both my hands on the sales counter as I reread the note on the bottom of the page. Nitro? Nitroglycerin pills? For her heart? I chewed my bottom lip and tried to remember if I’d seen a bottle of nitroglycerin pills in Mabel’s bathroom.

  Bertie had cleared out Mabel’s clothes and belongings from the bedroom, but she’d left the attached bathroom untouched. In the cabinet below the sink, I’d found stacks of towels and assorted cleansing creams. In the medicine cabinet above the sink, I’d found prescription bottles lined up like loyal soldiers. I thought I remembered seeing a glass bottle of nitroglycerin pills. A nearly full bottle.

  Had Mabel gotten her new prescription filled before she’d died? I didn’t remember seeing a date on the label. And I wasn’t sure why it mattered, but the back of my neck tingled.

  When Harley had told me that Mabel had died, the first thing I did was to ask him how she’d been murdered. But that had been the wrong question to ask, since she’d died of natural causes. Unless . . .

  If Skinny had been killed for what he’d found out about the Chocolate Box, wouldn’t it also make sense that Mabel might also be killed for what she knew?

  My heart started beating a little faster. Could this be about that fragment of a DNA results letter the investigators had found in Skinny’s pocket? DNA results that possibly linked me to Mabel’s family?

  If a relationship between me and Mabel was proven, killing me by Wednesday would have no effect on the will. Her children wouldn’t get the shop. My heirs would. I’d call that a motive for a murder, or perhaps two murders.

  After locking up the shop, I jogged back upstairs to the apartment to take a closer look at Mabel’s medicine cabinet. The prescription bottles were all still crammed in there. The glass bottle of nitroglycerin, as I’d remembered, was nearly full of pills.

  I squinted at the date the prescription had been filled. The bottle was several months old.

  And she wasn’t out of pills. Not by a long shot. So what did the note scrawled on the bottom of Mabel’s to-do list mean?

  “Have you managed to pull your thoughts together about what’s going on?” Bertie stuck he
r head in the bathroom to ask. She’d pulled a black cable-knit cardigan sweater on over her purple T-shirt.

  “I thought I had,” I said. “But then I found this.”

  I handed her the to-do list I’d uncovered using my eyeliner pencil.

  Bertie reached into her cardigan’s pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses with purple polka-dot frames. She frowned as she read the page. “Yes?”

  “Did you write the note at the bottom of the page?” I asked.

  Her frown deepened. “Yes? Why?”

  “Because of this.” I handed Bertie the glass bottle.

  She read the label and nodded. “That’s Mabel’s nitro. She must have gotten it refilled. Sometimes she needs to be reminded, but she’s generally good at refilling her prescriptions.”

  “Look at the date.”

  Bertie squinted at the bottle again. “That’s impossible. Two days ago this bottle was empty. She took the last one on the second day of your cooking class. She told me she’d suffered a slight ‘episode.’ She’d never admitted to having heart trouble. She’d only say she had episodes.” She gave the bottle an angry shake, causing the pills inside to rattle. “This isn’t empty.”

  “No. It’s not. Do you think she reused her old bottles?” For Bertie’s sake, I hoped the thought tugging at me was wrong. Dead wrong.

  “Why would she reuse it? The pharmacy always gave her new ones.”

  “Because if you noticed she was out of pills and now there are pills in the bottle, that means someone must have refilled it. Did she always keep the bottle here in the medicine cabinet?”

  “No. She carried it with her everywhere she went in her purse. She only put it away at night. I don’t understand what this could mean.”

  “I think someone might have tampered with her pill bottle,” I said.

  Her hand started to shake. “I gave her a pill from this bottle the night she died. It-it didn’t alleviate her pain. It didn’t help her at all. Despite her objections, I called an ambulance.” She shook her head. “It didn’t arrive in time. She told me if the pill didn’t work, it must mean it was her time. She told me that she was ready to go. But-but what if . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What if the pills in this bottle weren’t nitroglycerin? What if someone put placebos in her bottle to make sure they wouldn’t stop a heart attack?” I finished for her.

  Bertie squeezed the bottle so tightly I thought it might shatter. Her voice trembled with red-hot rage. “We-we-we-we need to get these tested. We need to find out what’s in this bottle.”

  I nodded. “And we need to call the police . . . again.”

  * * *

  “I’m sure it’s not what you think it is. I’m sure it’s not murder.” Detective Frank Gibbons, from the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, wore a crisply pressed suit with a black wool overcoat. His black shoes had been polished until their sheen reflected like a mirror’s. He stood nearly a foot taller than the potbellied Police Chief Byrd, who nodded vigorously at the detective’s declaration that Mabel hadn’t been murdered.

  Both men carried extra weight around the middle. Detective Frank Gibbons actually had more girth. The difference between the two men was that Gibbons knew what to do with the extra weight—like how to buy properly fitting clothes, how to stand up straight instead of slumping down into a puddle of flesh, and how not to use his expansive waistline like an additional appendage to punctuate a point.

  “I told them not to bother you.” Chief Byrd turned to glare at me. We were all crammed into Mabel’s small bathroom. He stood so close, his nose nearly touched mine. “Ms. Penn has been nothing but a bee in my bonnet since the day she’s arrived in my quiet town. If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a million times that the case concerning her friend’s murder was all but closed. Drugs. Nothing but an unfortunate illegal drug deal gone wrong.”

  “Skinny didn’t use drugs,” I said for the millionth time even as Detective Gibbons calmly stated, “The case is nowhere near close to being closed. There are far too many questions here that still need to be answered.” His Southern accent produced a deceptively lazy manner of speech, drawing out his vowels as if each held a separate but important meaning. “It’ll be a while before I’m satisfied with the current results of our investigation.”

  “Harley didn’t do it,” I mumbled.

  “What did you say, Ms. Penn?” The detective leaned in closer to me. I pressed myself into the corner next to the shower to get some breathing room. “Who didn’t do what?”

  “Harley Dalton didn’t kill anyone.” I’m not sure why I suddenly felt so certain. I mean, just because he had an alibi for the time someone had run me off the road didn’t necessarily mean he should be cleared of all wrongdoing. And yet despite the logical evidence to the contrary, in my heart, I believed what I was saying was true.

  Maybe I’d changed my mind about him because I was now convinced Mabel had been murdered. And Harley didn’t have a motive for wanting her dead. At least none that I could figure out.

  “So now you’re a detective, Ms. Penn?” Detective Gibbons asked. “And you’re conducting your own investigation?”

  “No, of course not. I’m simply saying that last night when I called you, I didn’t know Harley let others borrow his car. He leaves the keys in it so anyone can take it. Apparently, half the town knows about this and makes use of his generosity.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling her all along.” Byrd exerted the effort to pull himself to stand a little taller.

  “Let the professionals do the detective work, okay, Ms. Penn?” the detective said to me.

  “That’s also what I’ve been telling her,” Byrd said.

  Detective Gibbons held up his large hand to silence his local colleague. “Ms. Penn, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your willingness to report both the message on your cell phone and this troubling pill bottle. If you hear or learn of anything else, I do expect I will be the first person you contact. I assure you, your concerns will be taken seriously.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Detective, you will let us know right away what you find out about those pills, won’t you?” Bertie asked.

  “I will, ma’am.” The detective carefully placed the medicine bottle into a paper bag. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have quite a bit of work to do.” He started to leave but paused long enough to turn back toward me. “Please, Ms. Penn, do heed my advice. Stay safe. Let the professionals do their work.”

  Chapter 20

  Since Hodgkin DNA wouldn’t give me any information, I decided I needed to perform my own DNA test. But how? That was the question.

  After Detective Gibbons had left, Bertie had disappeared into her room and I’d sat myself down on Mabel’s bed, feeling stunned.

  Someone had killed Mabel? Because of me? Because of my DNA?

  If Skinny had been killed because the information reported in the Hodgkin DNA test proved I was related to Mabel through her missing daughter, Carolina, then that would mean one (or more) of Mabel’s children was involved in Skinny’s murder. It would also, chillingly, mean her children were involved with their mother’s murder.

  Asking one of her kids to give a DNA sample might put my life at an even greater risk. But at the same time, the more I thought about it, the more I needed to know. Was Carolina Maybank my mother?

  “Are you ready?” Bertie called to me from the living room. Stella barked and zoomed around my legs like a blurry black-and-white cloud. I grabbed her leash, figuring I might as well take her with us. She only halfheartedly nipped my finger when I snapped the leash to her collar.

  “I’m ready,” I said as I emerged from Mabel’s bedroom.

  Bertie’s eyes looked red and teary. This new information about how Mabel might have died had hit her hard, but she nodded in my direction with determination. I linked my arm with hers and gave her a quick hug. We had decided earlier that we needed to head back down to the chocolate shop. If we were goin
g to have any hope of making the first-ever Sweets on the Beach festival a success, we were going to have to get creative—supercreative, considering we didn’t have any chocolate.

  “I heard what happened,” Cal said breathlessly as he jogged up the steps to Mabel’s apartment while I fought with getting the key to turn in the apartment door’s rusty lock.

  He took one look at Bertie, her ashen skin tone and pained expression, and pulled her into a tight hug. “I can’t believe it’s true. I can’t. The police are going to find out what happened. I know it.”

  I shook my head. “News sure travels lightning fast in this town. Detective Gibbons left no more than a couple of minutes ago.”

  Cal lifted his head from Bertie’s shoulder to tilt his head in my direction. “Detective Gibbons was here? Just now? Why?”

  “Because of Mabel’s nitro pills, why else?” I answered as I finally managed to wiggle the key from the apartment’s lock.

  Cal’s gaze narrowed. He unwound his arms from around Bertie’s middle and took a step toward me. Stella gave a warning growl before starting to bark again. “Nitro pills?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard above Stella’s racket. “What are you talking about? I’m talking about the break-in.”

  “Oh, yes, the break-in,” I said and tossed Stella a piece of bacon from my pocket to get her mind off barking. “Or I suppose I should call it a robbery, since the police chief couldn’t find any evidence of anyone actually breaking in.”

  “Nitro pills?” Cal asked again. “What-what are you talking about?”

  “Mabel’s nitroglycerin pills had been tampered with,” Bertie said in a voice so sharp it could cut glass. “That county detective is investigating to determine if she was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Cal shook his head. “Mabel? No, not Mabel. That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

  “Doesn’t it?” I asked. “If Skinny knew something about Mabel’s will, something that the killer didn’t want anyone else to know, wouldn’t it make sense that Mabel, who wrote the will, knew this tidbit of information as well? Perhaps that information, whatever it could be, convinced the killer that he needed to silence Mabel too.”