Drop Dead Chocolate: A Donut Shop Mystery

by Jessica Beck

  It was close to eight when Grace finally stood. Had we really been talking for over an hour? “I’ve kept you up long enough, Suzanne,” she said. “You need your sleep.”

  “I’m okay, honest,” I said as I stood. Unfortunately, a yawn slipped out just then, though I tried my best to kill it.

  She smiled at me. “Suzanne Hart, you’re the best friend I could ever ask for, but you’re a terrible liar. It’s time I leave you to your sleep. I’m feeling a lot better now.”

  “Is that really true?” I asked, looking deeply into her eyes.

  She considered it for a moment before she answered. “Well, maybe not yet, but I will be. I’m going to go home, eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and then I’m going to watch sad movies until I fall asleep. Maybe I’ll have myself a Nicholas Sparks marathon and cry out all of my tears. You can count on him for one thing for sure; somebody’s not going to make it until the end.”

  We’d laughed in the past that someone always seemed to die in one of the movies based on his books, but we were proud that he was from North Carolina, too, and we never missed reading his latest novel together in a kind of small, two-woman book club, nothing like the ladies I hosted at my donut shop. While that group thrived on serious discussion, Grace and I weren’t above mocking anything we found scorn-worthy in any book we read. “That sounds great,” I said. “I’d be more than happy to join you.”

  “You’d fall asleep before the opening credits of the first movie, and we both know it.” Grace hugged me, and then said, “Get some sleep, Suzanne.”

  I couldn’t deny that I was beat. “If you’re sure,” I said.

  “Go on. You’ve been wonderful. It’s great having you as my best friend.”

  “I think so, too,” I said, and then realized how it might have sounded. “Reverse that. What I should have said was right back at you. You know what I meant.”

  Grace smiled again, briefly, but it was there. Maybe I really had helped.

  “Remember, call me if you need to talk,” I said as I walked her out onto the cottage’s front porch. “I don’t care what time it is.”

  “I promise,” she said, and then Grace walked up the road toward her house.

  * * *

  If I had it to do over again, I would have gone with her, and neither one of us would have gotten into the mess we ultimately did, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, so I watched her until she was gone, and then I went upstairs to bed. Jake was tied up on a case, so I knew he probably wouldn’t have a chance to call. As much as I would have loved hearing his voice as a reassurance of what we shared after hearing of Peter’s betrayals, I didn’t need it. I trusted him with my heart, and with my life.

  It was the only way I knew how to love, and I fully understood that Grace felt the same way, no matter what the consequences were. We both went all in when we were in a relationship, and while that meant we got hurt sometimes like she had been tonight, finding real love was always worth the risk. This time, she’d gambled and lost, but I knew that she’d find it in herself to try again someday.

  * * *

  Grace must have found a way to make it through the night, because I didn’t hear from her after she left my place. When I woke up the next morning, too early as usual, I quickly got dressed and headed to Donut Hearts to start working on that day’s donuts with a little lighter touch to my step. After all, it was a big day for me. Emma’s replacement, Nan Winters, was starting her first day of work. Sure, she’d trained with us for a few days before Emma left, but then she’d had to go visit an old friend while she had the chance before she started helping me make donuts six days out of every seven. With just one day off a week, she knew she wouldn’t be getting any more time off for a while, so she’d taken advantage of it. I just hoped Nan remembered what Emma and I had taught her, but I had my doubts. Then again, maybe a fresh start would be better for all of us. I had resisted the impulse to pick up the phone and call Emma a hundred times since she’d been gone. In a way, I felt as though my own daughter was going off to school, and not just an employee. Honestly, she was much more to me than that, and everyone knew it. But I’d promised to give her a month of finding her way at her new school before I started pestering her so she could get settled in and used to her new life, and I was going to respect that. Emma had signed up for spring classes with the college’s unusual schedule, and while I hated losing her too early, she had every right to go out into the world and find her own way.

  I drove to Donut Hearts in the darkness, and as I went past the front of my shop, my headlights picked up something odd about the front of the building. My business was housed in an old railroad depot, and once upon a time the tracks had been right beside it. One of the reasons I’d bought the business was for the old weathered bricks up front. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but I could swear the bricks looked different somehow in the light from my high beams. I stopped and backed my Jeep up onto the grass of the nearby park, not really worrying about getting in anyone’s way on Springs Drive, since most folks with any sense at all were home in bed instead of out on the road in the middle of the night.

  When my headlights hit Donut Hearts again, I saw that it hadn’t been my imagination.

  Someone had splattered bright yellow paint on the front of my building, obscuring not just the brick, but the new front window I’d just had repainted with our logo. My heart sank as I saw the mess. I was pretty sure the paint would come right off the window without too much of a fuss, but the bricks might be another thing entirely. I moved my Jeep into one of the parking spaces on Springs Drive, grabbed my flashlight, and then walked back toward Donut Hearts to see if things were as bad as I feared.

  When I saw the paint-spattered bucket lying empty beside the front door, I figured it might be time to call the police. If the vandals could be identified by their fingerprints, I wanted to make sure they were caught and got what they deserved. If they were arrested and convicted, and the judge felt like giving them community service, I wanted to see if I could get the perpetrator assigned to me. By the time I got done with them, they’d think twice about vandalizing another business.

  To my surprise, I got one of my friends on the line as I dialed the police night desk. I figured there was no reason to tie up 911, since this was clearly not an emergency. Whoever had defaced my building was long gone.

  When Officer Stephen Grant answered the phone, I idly put a finger on the brick, testing to see if it might still be damp.

  No such luck. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to come off without a great deal of work.

  “Officer Grant, I’ve got a problem,” I said when he picked up and identified himself.

  “Suzanne, is that you?” he asked. He should know my voice by now. The man had been in my donut shop, on official business as well as on his free time, plenty of times over the years. Even though he was a slim young man, he had a surprising appetite for donuts, and we were slowly building a friendship on his frequent visits to my shop. “You didn’t lock yourself out of the donut shop, did you?” he asked hopefully. “Please tell me that I’ve got an excuse to leave the duty desk and come out there.”

  “As a matter of fact, you do, but it’s nothing as trivial as that.” That’s when I realized that he shouldn’t be working the night shift at all. There was only one explanation for that. “What did you do to get on the Chief’s bad side?”

  After a brief hesitation, he said, “I made a crack about his disappearing waistline he didn’t care for,” Officer Grant admitted. Ever since Chief Martin had been dating my mother, he’d been on a constant diet, and so far, he’d lost two pants sizes, with no end in sight.

  “And he punished you for that? I figured he’d be pleased that you noticed.”

  “Not so much. At least not the way he overheard me talking to another cop. Don’t sweat it. It’ll all blow over soon enough, but until it does, I’m riding a desk. Now, you didn’t call here to listen to my problems. What can I do for you, if it�
��s worse than a set of lost keys?”

  “Somebody decided to redecorate Donut Hearts for me without even asking.” Just talking to him on the telephone made me feel better somehow. I would have called Jake first if he’d been in town, but he was in Spruce Pine, and I knew that the cell phone reception in the mountain town was spotty at best with his particular carrier.

  “They didn’t break your front window again, did they?”

  “No,” I said as I looked at the intact glass. At least there was that. “They did chuck a half-full bucket of paint on it though, and the brick exterior, too.”

  That got his attention. “Is the bucket still there? We might be able to get some fingerprints off of it.”

  I looked toward the bucket again, and that’s when I noticed something else. “I can do better than that,” I said. “There’s a set of footprints in the paint where whoever did it ran off. I just found them.”

  “Don’t do anything crazy, Suzanne. I’ll be right there.”

  “Can I at least go inside the shop and wait for you there?” I asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “Why don’t you go sit in your Jeep until I get there so I can have a look around?”

  I laughed. “We both know those flimsy windows I’ve got wouldn’t stop a determined chipmunk, let alone a killer. I’ll be all right where I am until you get here.”

  “Just stay out of sight, okay? It would be crazy to take any chances. I’m on my way.”

  “I’ve got nowhere else I need to be right now except inside making donuts,” I said, and then realized that I had dead air on the other end of the line.

  The police station was just down the road, so I figured that it wouldn’t take Officer Grant long to get there. I decided to compromise somewhat, and moved away from the shop a few yards. Okay, I admit that my path of retreat led me beside the footprints I’d first seen in the spilled paint, and my flashlight tended to follow them with eerie precision, but I was careful not to step in the paint, so did he really have anything to complain about if he found me doing a little snooping on my own? It was a cool early morning, with winter just done. Folks still ate donuts in the spring, but certainly not as many as they did when the weather turned chilly. Besides, I liked a nip in the air, which was one of the many reasons I’d refused to move to LA with my ex-husband, Max, the Great Impersonator, when we’d been together. Give me the changing of the seasons, and I was a happy gal.

  As I searched to see where the footsteps led, the impromptu path got harder and harder to see, and unfortunately, soon enough the paint trail ended half a dozen steps toward the park. By the time Officer Grant showed up, I’d lost them completely.

  He had his squad car lights all blazing, but at least he hadn’t used his siren on his way there. I’d had more than enough of that kind of attention in the past, and I didn’t need any more of it ever again.

  I met him at the patrol car, shielding my eyes from the bright light. It was quite a change from my flashlight, with its dying beam barely able to light my way back to my vehicle. I’d have to remember to get new batteries for it. With only a few seconds of feeble light left, I shut it off and threw it onto the passenger seat of the Jeep.

  “Where did you just go?” Officer Grant asked as he scanned the donut shop and the land around it with the monstrous flashlight-weapon combination in his hand. Honest to goodness, it was big enough to bring down a bear. He might have to do just that someday, since there had been a few bear sightings around the area over the past few months. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone, as far as I was concerned. It just made sense to me. After all, we were developing more and more of the woodlands creatures’ natural habitat, so why was everyone so shocked when they started invading our turf?

  “I followed the yellow brick road,” I admitted as I pointed to the tracks. “Well, it’s not a road exactly, it’s more like a path, but it’s yellow; there’s no denying it.”

  Officer Grant fought back a grin, but I could still see it. This was serious police business; at least that was the way that he was treating it. I kept my other quips to myself as I asked, “May I go start on the donuts now while you search out here? I’m kind of tight on time because of the delay.” I’d cut the shop’s hours, working on donuts from three to six in the kitchen, selling them from six until eleven, and then cleaning up after everyone else went home. It made the day more reasonable, and I almost felt as though I could actually have a life of my own outside the donut shop, as much as I loved being there.

  He considered it for a moment or two, and then nodded. “I can’t see what it would hurt. Go on in. Lock up when you get inside, and I’ll knock when I’m finished here.”

  I smiled my thanks and moved inside after unlocking the front door and carefully avoiding the spilled paint as I walked, though I knew it was dry. I noticed that the door handle had a splatter of yellow paint on it as well, and I was glad that the vandal hadn’t had any red paint at his disposal. I wasn’t sure I’d be as flip as I was being now if it had looked as though the front of my shop had been covered in blood.

  Once I was inside, I flipped on the coffee pot and turned on the fryer, checked the messages on the machine, and then got started on the batter for the cake donuts. Nan wasn’t due to report for another half hour, so I still had some time to myself.

  I was so focused on making donuts that I barely heard Officer Grant as he pounded on the front door fifteen minutes later.

  I opened the door and let him in, noting that he too had stepped over the dried paint. “Find anybody out there?” I asked as I locked the door back behind him.

  “No, and the tracks died before I could trace them any farther into the park. They stopped before I even got to Trish’s Boxcar Grill, so unless we find a pair of yellow-stained shoes somewhere, we’re out of luck.”

  “What about fingerprints on the bucket?” I asked. “Do you think you’ll be able to find any there?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve already bagged it, but I wouldn’t count on us having much luck. Unless the vandal is in our system, it will be impossible to track him down.”

  “Do you think it was a man, too?” I asked.

  “Absolutely.” He smiled at me as he asked, “Why do you think so?”

  “Well, the shoe size, for one thing,” I admitted. “Unless it was a really big woman I don’t want to mess with, it had to be a guy.”

  He grinned at me. “Dead on, Suzanne. Keep that up, and you’ll earn your Junior Detective badge yet.” His smile faded quickly as he pointed outside. “I’m afraid it’s a real mess out there. I don’t have a clue how you’re going to be able to clean it all up.”

  “Hey, as long as no one got hurt, I’m counting my blessings,” I said. “Would you like some coffee before you go?”

  He stifled a yawn, and then nodded. “I probably should say no, but honestly, that would be great.”

  I fixed him up with a cup to go, and then let him out the front door.

  I’d be able to better assess things once it was daylight, but in the meantime, I had donuts to make. There was nothing I could do about what had happened, but I could do my job, and people around here depended on me. Letting them down wasn’t going to happen.

  ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS TITLES BY JESSICA BECK

  Glazed Murder

  Fatally Frosted

  Sinister Sprinkles

  Evil Éclairs

  Tragic Toppings

  Killer Crullers

  Drop Dead Chocolate

  Critical Acclaim for Jessica Beck’s Donut Shop Mysteries

  “A delight. Suzanne Hart is a lovable amateur sleuth who has a hilariously protective mother and great donut recipes! Readers will have a blast with this book.”

  —Diane Mott Davidson, New York Times bestselling author of Fatally Flaky

  “A tribute to comfort food and to the comfort of small-town life. With great donut recipes!”

  —Joanna Carl, author of The Chocolate Cupid Killings

  “If
you like donuts—and who doesn’t?—you’ll love this mystery. It’s like a trip to your favorite coffee shop, but without the calories!”

  —Leslie Meier, author of the Lucy Stone mysteries New Year’s Eve Murder and Wedding Day Murder

  “The perfect comfort read: a delicious murder, a likeable heroine, quirky Southern characters—and donut recipes!”

  —Rhys Bowen, Agatha and Anthony award–winning author of the Molly Murphy and Royal Spyness mysteries

  “A yummy new treat in the culinary mystery genre. Skillfully weaving donut recipes throughout a well-plotted story, the author proves that life after divorce can be sweet; all you need are good friends, your own business, and comfort food. Delicious!”

  —Tamar Myers, author of Death of a Rug Lord and The Cane Mutiny

  “A clever plotted cozy mystery with a wonderful small Southern town … Fatally Frosted is a great follow-up to Glazed Murder. Suzanne is a great heroine. Ms. Beck has a sure-fire winner!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DROP DEAD CHOCOLATE

  Copyright © 2012 by Jessica Beck.

  Excerpt from Powdered Peril copyright © 2012 by Jessica Beck.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  eISBN: 9781429952996

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / May 2012

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.