In Cold Chocolate

by Dorothy St. James

  “What is that?” I demanded.

  “It’s one of them spinner doodads,” Bubba said as he bent to pick up the small plastic device. It had a round disc in the center with three rounded spokes that rotated around the center. He held the disc with his beefy thumb and forefinger and started to spin the rounded spokes. “They’re mighty popular right now. Gives people something to do with their restless fingers other than tapping on relentlessly on their phones.”

  Fletcher snatched it out of Bubba’s hand. “It’s nothing. J-j-just a w-w-way to”—he took a deep breath and spun the plastic wheel before jamming it into his pocket—“calm myself.” He turned back to me. “I’m going to have to leave for a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked as he skirted around Althea and me to get to the door. “Now isn’t a good time for you to leave. Our afternoon rush will be starting soon. I need you here.”

  He shook his head. “I h-have to go.”

  “Wait. I have something I need to talk with you about. It’s urgent,” I said.

  He opened the door and paused. He turned and looked me over from head-to-toe before saying, “Sorry. I have s-s-something I n-need to do.”

  With no other explanation, he was gone.

  “Jumpy little fellow,” Bubba said as we all watched the younger man leave.

  “No wonder he can’t hold a job.” Bertie clucked her tongue. “The boy has no work ethic.”

  “Murderers rarely do,” Althea whispered in my ear. “You need to fire him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “He’s too good a worker to be a killer,” I muttered. After the job he’d done that morning, I didn’t want to lose him. It didn’t matter if he did have one of those red anxiety spinners I kept finding whenever I felt like someone was following me. It didn’t matter if he felt the need to take breaks in the middle of the day. If he continued to do good work when he was at the Chocolate Box, none of the other stuff mattered. He wasn’t a killer.

  “Don’t forget what Muumuu Woman told us.” Althea tapped her nose. “She saw him arguing with Cassidy. What more do you need to know?”

  I shook my head. While Luella Marie had all but pointed her finger at Fletcher and dramatically pronounced his guilt, something bothered me about her version of events. But I couldn’t say exactly what it was about her story that bothered me. It was a queasy feeling in my stomach, the same feeling I’d get after I ate too much fried food.

  Althea grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the others and over to the relative privacy next to the cash register. “What’s wrong?” she whispered in my ear. “I should be the one looking green after humiliating myself in front of Bailey.”

  “You didn’t humiliate yourself. He’s a good looking guy, and I think he finds you charming even though you left him to eat lunch all by himself. Who knows? Maybe he found that charming too.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t try to make this about me. What did you see that has made you react like you’ve finally seen a ghost? Have you seen a ghost?” She glanced over to the wall where the chocolate boxes were displayed and shivered. “I’ve always felt this place was haunted.”

  “Oh, stop being ridiculous. There are no such things as ghosts.”

  She was used to that knee-jerk reaction from me whenever she mentioned the paranormal. She smiled that sly smile she’d get when she thought she knew more than I did. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “If not a ghost, what did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything.” That anxiety spinner Fletcher had dropped didn’t mean anything. I’d seen loads of people with them. I should have been surprised I hadn’t found more of them on the ground.

  “I won’t feel comfortable until you fire him,” she said. “Mama can’t fight off attackers like you can, and you can’t stop people from shooting at you. It’s not a safe work environment. I worry about Mama and about you.”

  “I worry, too,” I was forced to admit. “But there’s something about Muumuu Woman’s story that is bugging me.”

  “What?”

  I held a finger to my lips. “In a minute.”

  The line at the counter had gotten long again. I needed to get back to work. Althea jumped into the fray, working the blender even though she really needed to get back to her crystal shop.

  One-by-one the customers finished their milkshakes and polished off their chocolates. The crowd in the shop thinned. Actually, after Fletcher had left, the shop seemed to clear out faster than usual. I suspected many of my customers were running out to tell their friends about the string of dramas they’d just witnessed. I overheard Ethel telling the woman sitting next to her how the show at the Chocolate Box had become more exciting than any of her daytime soaps.

  Bubba was one of the first ones to leave. He went home to start working on his pork rub for the supper he planned to serve Bertie. About a half hour later, Bertie had grabbed her purse and left to buy vegetables and ingredients for a cake, since she was sure all he planned to bring was the meat. And she wasn’t going to pretend someone could make a full meal out of nothing but grilled pork.

  Over the next hour and a half, a few customers, mainly tourists, came into the shop buying milkshakes and chocolates. Soon, there were only a few customers left sipping on their milkshakes.

  “Let’s take a break,” Althea suggested as she plucked a salted sea turtle from the case. “We need to figure out what’s bothering you about Cassidy’s murder.”

  When I hesitated, Althea tapped her foot on the hardwood floor. “What?” she demanded.

  “Maybe I’m afraid I won’t like what a review of the facts will show me.” Many of the suspects for Cassidy’s murder were friends. Did I really want to know that someone I liked, someone I was trying to learn to trust had killed a man? Talk about putting a monkey wrench into my efforts to improve myself. How could I possibly become the confident, loving person I needed to be to calm Stella’s nerves and to pursue a relationship with Harley if whenever I trusted someone they turned out to be a murderer? Don’t get me wrong. I knew we needed to do it. I simply needed time to work up my nerve.

  But I didn’t have time for nerves. “You’re right. I’m being silly. Let’s sit over there and talk.”

  We were heading over to the sofa when the bell on the door rang. Harley entered dressed in his second best court day suit. It was an off-the-rack gray wool suit that was a touch too long in the arms and not wide enough in the shoulders. Still, my heart stuttered at the sight of him. My tongue wet my lips as if expecting they might get some action in any moment.

  Althea must have noticed. Her eyes widened. “Oh my goodness,” she breathed as her gaze bounced from me to Harley and back to me again. “You two hooked up.”

  “Not really,” I murmured out the side of my mouth. “But we did kiss.”

  Althea slapped her hands together. “I knew it!”

  “Hey, Thea. Penn just told you the news, I see,” he said while his expressive green eyes were locked onto mine. Oh, that man was going to give me a heart attack. “I am sorry I wasn’t here for you earlier, Penn. Miss Bunny told me what happened.” He brushed a kiss on my cheek, the same cheek Florence had slapped. “Are you okay?”

  “She’s never been anything but ugly to me, so today’s performance didn’t surprise me. Not really. However she refused to tell me why she was seen visiting Cassidy at his house or if she saw anything suspicious the night of Cassidy’s murder,” I said. For some reason Luella Marie’s story didn’t feel right. But why? Was she covering for someone?

  “Did you really think she’d help you?” Harley asked.

  “Of course Penn didn’t think that,” Althea said. She continued to grin at the two of us as if we were the sweetest treats in the shop.

  Harley nodded. “Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with any of them for much longer. We’ll move forward with the DNA test right away. Once it’s done, none of Mabel’s kids will be able to say you don�
��t deserve the Chocolate Box. You’re Mabel’s kin, and you’re the one she wanted to take over after she’d passed.”

  “You’re doing another DNA test?” Althea asked. The grin dropped clean off her face. She clutched her stomach. “Do you have to take the DNA test? Can’t you refuse?”

  “Why would she refuse? Mabel’s children have requested that we take a new test using one of them for their DNA,” Harley said. “It’s what we’ve been asking them to do all along.”

  “I can’t wait to do it,” I said. Finally, I was going to get my wish and find out exactly which of Mabel’s daughters was my biological mother. “It has to be Florence,” I hated to admit. “I don’t know why she thinks she can get away with denying it.”

  Althea bit her knuckle and gave a strangled cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Harley asked.

  “Are you sick?” I asked.

  “Not sick,” Althea managed to squeak. “But in a minute I’m afraid you’re going to be.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Althea looked ashen as she started pacing the length of the Chocolate Box. “I can’t talk about it here,” she said. “Where can we go? It has to be private.”

  “What is it?” I demanded. She was starting to scare me.

  “You look like you need some fresh air,” Harley said. I agreed.

  “Could you watch out for customers for me?” I asked Johnny Pane who had nearly finished painting the ceiling. “We’re going to walk down to the park. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “No problem, Miss Penn. I’ll give a holler on my mobile if someone stops by,” Johnny called down from his perch on his ladder.

  “Just don’t let anyone walk off with our chocolate turtles again.” I checked the display case. It was locked.

  We headed down the block to one of the island’s public parks. This one was located on the marsh. A long fishing pier jutted out over the marsh and kept going over the grassy salt flats until it reached the Camellia River. A man stood on the railing as he tossed a plate-shaped cast net out into the water. A moment later he pulled up the net now filled with shrimp and small wiggling fish.

  At the base of the pier, under the canopy of oaks and palmetto trees, three porch swings hung under a tin roofed pergola. Althea dropped down on one of the swings and cradled her face in her hands. “You’re going to hate me.”

  “I’d never hate you.” It was Harley who’d said that.

  I, on the other hand, had been down this path before. It was the Cheese King all over again. Whenever I trusted someone—anyone—I ended up hurt.

  “Just spit it out,” I said more than prepared to hate her and already hating myself for feeling that way.

  “We faked it,” she said to the ground. “Mabel and I. It wasn’t very clever of us. But did you really think your friend had taken a sample of your DNA before he came down here? Mabel had gathered it all up. I don’t know how she got your friend to go along with the ruse. Maybe she was communicating with Skinny without anyone knowing about it. Or maybe she tricked him into stealing the samples from her. I was shocked when he was the one who had the report. I swear I thought Mabel was going to send those samples to the lab. But she always had plans I knew nothing about.”

  “You faked it?” My tone had taken on a razor-sharp edge.

  Althea nodded. “The DNA test, we faked it.” Her confession felt like a slap in the face. I’d trusted her. I’d loved her like a sister. And she’d done nothing but lie to me since the day we’d met?

  “It’s not real?” Harley demanded. “I’ve built Penn’s case almost entirely around a DNA test that isn’t real?”

  “It’s a real DNA report,” Althea offered. “It just doesn’t use Penn’s DNA. We got a spit sample from Edward’s daughter. Mabel had told her that she was sending her spit to one of those ancestry places as a present.”

  Harley’s face turned a molted shade of red. “And you didn’t tell us about this sooner because why?”

  “I hoped it would never come up. And then when it looked like it might become an issue, Florence confessed out of the blue that she was your biological mother, so I thought maybe Mabel had been right all along. Maybe you are a Maybank.”

  “I’m not related.” My legs collapsed under me and my bottom hit the seat of one of the porch swings with a thud. “I should have known. It’s all been a grand con, one that I’d bought into wholeheartedly. I really should have known better than to believe any of this could be real.”

  “You might be related,” Althea said. “Mabel had hoped you were Carolina’s daughter. But she had no way of getting her hands on your DNA. She’d said the fake DNA test would convince you to stay.” Althea looked up at me. Tears were swimming in her eyes. “Don’t you see? She needed you to stay long enough to fall in love with the chocolate and with Camellia Beach. And it worked. The DNA report did convince you to stay.”

  “You should have told me.” Harley dragged his fingers through his hair. “This changes … everything. It changes how I should have been arguing Penn’s case all along. If she’s not related, she still can inherit. But that’s not how we’ve framed the case. And because of that, we’ve just given the Maybank family a big advantage with contesting the will.”

  “I’m sorry,” Althea wailed. “I thought I was doing the right thing. You have to believe me, Penn. Mabel saw that article of you in the magazine and something clicked in her mind. She felt a strong connection to you. She truly believed you were her granddaughter. And then when she finally met you in person, she saw in you the future of the Chocolate Box and her Amar chocolate.”

  I pinched my eyes tightly closed and wished I could put my fingers in my ears and block out Althea’s voice. But adults couldn’t go around covering their ears and singing “la-la-la,” not without having their sanity questioned. So instead I sat there and listened to her while wishing with all my heart and soul that I could go back to yesterday, that I could go back to when someone was shooting at me at the Chocolate Box.

  Ducking bullets had been much less frightening than listening to a friend confess her betrayal. I suspected Althea would simply go on and on digging deeper the pit of lies she and my grandmother—scratch that—the pit of lies she and the lady who had owned the Chocolate Box had created. And I really couldn’t stand to hear anymore lies.

  I forced myself to open my eyes. I forced myself to stand on the pair of noodles that had once been my legs. I forced myself to look at Althea while punching down my anger.

  “Enough,” I whispered.

  She kept talking.

  “Althea,” Harley warned.

  She kept talking.

  “Enough!” I held up both of my hands and shouted the word so loud the fisherman at the end of the pier nearly fell off the railing and into the water. “Enough,” I repeated in a calmer voice. “I have one day to catch a murderer. I don’t have time to deal with this. Not. Today.”

  I kept my hands up as a warning that she really needed to stop talking. We were supposed to be spending the afternoon talking about Cassidy’s murder and trying to figure out why Luella Marie’s story had hit all of the wrong notes with me. We weren’t supposed to be ruining my life.

  My hands stayed up like twin stop signs as I backed away from her and Harley. I needed to be alone. I needed time to think.

  The beach was usually the best place to think. There was something about the feeling of wet sand squishing between the toes that sharpened my thoughts. But I’d left the Chocolate Box unattended. It’d be irresponsible to not return.

  Although my father and Grandmother Cristobel believed me to be the most irresponsible creature on the planet, they were wrong. Besides I truly loved and respected Bertie and could never walk away from the shop without making arrangements with her first.

  Did she know about the fake DNA test?

  No, I couldn’t think about that right now. I couldn’t think about any of that.

  I stole into the Chocolate Box like a thief through the back door a
nd went straight to the kitchen. After everything that had already happened today I was glad to get into the kitchen. The tension in my shoulders eased as I started to gather ingredients for the recipe. My mind quieted, and I was finally able to start to focus on sorting what I knew about the events surrounding Cassidy’s murder.

  Luella Marie had been at Cassidy’s house that night, as I’d suspected. She claimed she didn’t see Jody pull the trigger. She does, however, claim to have heard Fletcher arguing with Cassidy.

  Had Fletcher, in a fit of anger, killed Cassidy? I didn’t want to believe the wiz on the blender could be a killer. I’d rather think I’d hired a great new employee. But why should that matter anymore if I was going to lose the shop to Mabel’s greedy children?

  I pulled out the double boiler I liked to use to melt chocolate. But I was getting ahead of myself. I needed to make the filling for the kiwi bonbons before I melted the chocolate. Bertie had told me more than once that I needed to execute the recipe in the proper sequence. Otherwise I’d end up with …

  The proper sequence. That was it!

  I pushed aside the baking tins and bowls and pulled out my notebook. That was what was bothering me about Luella Marie’s performance. She’d sounded so very convincing, but she was a professional actress. Of course she’d sounded convincing. But the sequence of events she’d described didn’t match what Althea and I had seen that night.

  I started to write it all down. In one column I wrote what I saw. In the other column I wrote what Luella Marie had claimed she’d seen. It was so obvious. I should have done this right away.

  When we’d passed Cassidy’s house his sliding doors had been open to the beach. Jazz music had been playing loud enough for us to hear.

  But Luella Marie had described a different scene. She said Cassidy had been arguing with Fletcher. She didn’t mention anything about hearing the music. She didn’t mention anything about Cassidy being there with another woman.