I glanced away from the nest’s shifting sands to look over at Gibbons. “What do you mean? I assumed Fletcher walked in on Bailey as he was stealing the chocolate sea turtles, and Bailey had no choice but to kidnap him. And then Bailey tried to kill him.”
“According to Fletcher, that’s not what happened,” Gibbons said. “Not at all.”
A turtle’s tiny flipper popped out of the sand. I held my breath. A second flipper appeared. And then a head. My heart beat a little faster. The first sea turtle was emerging.
As I watched, Gibbons kept talking. “Fletcher had suspected Bailey had something to do with Cassidy’s murder, but he wasn’t sure what or why. The night of the murder, he’d spotted Bailey’s car parked on the road several blocks from Cassidy’s house, which seemed odd since Bailey lived next door and should have parked in his own garage.”
“Why was Fletcher there that night?” I asked.
“The boy had gotten himself drunk and had gone to Cassidy’s house to punch him. When he got to the open sliding glass doors—the one’s you’d noticed—he shouted for Cassidy to come out and face him like a man. Well, Cassidy did come out. He had a lady on his arm. She looked so unhappy, Fletcher said he lost his nerve and ran away.”
“Muumuu Woman?” I asked.
“The description matches. When Fletcher ran away, he passed a man standing in front of Bailey’s brightly lit house. He also ran past Jody. He remembered seeing her flinging her gun around as she came up to Bailey’s house.”
A second tiny sea turtle had worked its way to the surface, followed closely by a third.
“Why didn’t Fletcher come forward and report any of this?” I asked.
“I asked him the same thing. He claims he didn’t think what he saw was important.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” I said. “Bailey told me that Fletcher had been following him around town. Perhaps Fletcher pictures himself an amateur sleuth. That would explain why he ran out of the shop to ‘run an errand’ so abruptly after Bailey had visited the shop. Perhaps he left to see where Bailey was going.”
“You think there’s another pretend sleuth on the island? Heaven help me, I don’t think I could survive it.”
The first baby sea turtle had reached the water. A wave crashed over its tiny back and pushed it back onto the shore. The mighty ocean didn’t deter the tiny creature. It kept moving forward, swimming when it could, fighting to get past the waves. For some reason, tears sprang to my eyes as I watched it try and accomplish the impossible. I quickly blinked them away.
“I’m not a pretend sleuth. I’m simply a concerned citizen doing her civic duty. Besides, you shouldn’t groan at me. I get results,” I argued.
“You get yourself in dangerous situations,” Gibbons argued back. “So does Fletcher, apparently. He told me he was putting away the chocolate benne wafers when he noticed the chocolate sea turtles he’d just put in the cooler were gone. He suspected that Bailey had been stealing them. And he went in pursuit. The problem with that was that when he caught up to Bailey, he didn’t have a plan. He’s lucky you and Harley found him when you did. Otherwise, Fletcher would be dead right now.’
“Bailey had been telling the truth about that. Fletcher had been following him.”
“He apparently followed Bailey all over the place. He saw that Bailey kept coming to your shop. He saw Bailey leave a threatening note on the Chocolate Box’s door. He saw Bailey hanging out near your apartment. He saw Bailey follow you to the hardware store to buy the security camera.”
“He saw all of that? My goodness, that explains why I kept finding those anxiety spinners all over the place. He was the one dropping them, not Bailey.” And then a thought struck me. “Bailey was the one who posted the threatening note on the door? Fletcher was sure about that?” The yellow note on the door hadn’t been that threatening. It seemed tame when compared to the second one. “I’d assumed Bailey was the one that had tossed the stuffed dog at me with the note that said that if I didn’t stop asking questions I die a horrible death.”
“I’m having forensics work on matching the handwriting, but it looks like Fletcher is telling the truth about seeing Bailey post the threatening note,” Gibbons said.
I tapped my chin as I wondered about the second note. It’d clearly been written by a different person, which meant someone else in town had been prepared to kill me, and not just kill me but make sure I died horribly. Luella Marie Banks was the first name that came to mind. She definitely had a flare for dramatics, and she did have a strong motive for guarding her secret.
As more baby sea turtles struggled to get past the waves and into the deeper part of the ocean, I glanced around at the crowd that had gathered on the beach. Standing apart from everyone else was a lady wearing a large floppy hat, oversized sunglasses, and a flowered muumuu. This one was a pale shade of pink.
I thanked Gibbons for telling me what he knew and then slowly approached the woman.
“Thank you,” she whispered when I got close. She touched a finger to her nose, which was still slightly swollen from her plastic surgery. “You guarded my identity despite pressure to tell others on the island that I was in town. You could have blabbed how I’d let that nasty Cassidy Jones fellow coerce me into his bed.” She coughed delicately. “Not many would do that for a stranger.”
“Perhaps that’s true for the world you live in,” I said, “but here in Camellia Beach, nearly anyone would have done the same.”
She sniffed. “I’ve been gone from this town for too long. I’ve forgotten how people here are different. Kinder. I hate to leave it.”
“It is a special place,” I agreed. “When do you have to go back to California?”
“In a few days. I’ve already lingered here too long, I’m afraid.” Her accent, I suddenly noticed, had remained flat and unremarkable. Forgettable, even. She sounded completely different from the dramatic actress I’d met only a few days earlier. “Harriett told me how your friend Lidia wants to use the cottage as an animal rescue center. I think it’s a lovely idea, so I’m going to let her have the cottage along with a generous donation to help her get her rescue operations started.”
“That’s awfully kind of you.” And surprising. It’d been easy to suspect her of being the kind of woman who’d toss a death threat at me. It was harder to imagine that she might be the kind of woman who thought to do nice things for others. “Lidia will be grateful.”
Luella Marie waved her hand in a dismissive manner. “It’ll be good PR for me. People love sob stories about homeless animals. And if anyone thinks they can cash in with the gossip rags about having seen me in Camellia Beach, I can explain to the press that I was here to check out Lidia’s dog shelter before writing her a check. It’s the perfect cover story. I’ve even scheduled a photographer to take pictures with me holding cute puppies.”
A cheer rose up from the crowd around the nest. I was anxious to get back to watch the turtles, but there was one more thing I needed to ask her. “A few days ago someone tied a note to a stuffed dog. Someone stood hidden in the woods across from the Chocolate Box and threw it at me. The note was a warning that I needed to stop asking about Cassidy’s secrets. Was that you?”
She bit her lower lip and shook her head. When she spoke, her voice took on the lovely singsong accent of the island. “Honey, if I wanted to threaten you, I wouldn’t stoop to skulking around in prickly bushes. I’ve spent a fortune to make my face look young again. I’m certainly not going to risk marring my surgeon’s work by walking around in some thorny bushes. And the snakes. There’s poisonous snakes hiding out in the underbrush just looking to kill someone. That’s not somewhere you’d find me.”
“It must have been someone else.” Someone with a secret worth killing over?
Luella Marie leaned toward me and whispered, “If I were in your shoes I’d take that threat to heart. Tread with care, my dear Penn. Camellia Beach might look like a paradise, but there are secrets aplenty buried deep on thes
e shores, secrets no one wants uncovered.”
When I asked her what she meant by that, she told me again to “tread with care” before walking away from me and the crowd on the beach.
Feeling just a bit shaken by her warning, I returned to watch the baby turtles. Dozens had broken out of the nest and were pulling themselves on their tiny flippers toward the ocean. They were the future. The ones who survived into adulthood would return to this beach to make nests of their own. I hoped I would still be living here to witness it. I hoped I would still be running the Chocolate Box.
Like those tiny sea turtles having to battle through the waves in order to make it to calmer waters, every time I thought I’d resolved the shop’s disputed ownership, something else happened to push me back. And now everything rested on the results of the court-ordered DNA test. Part of me wanted to give up. But if those tiny sea turtles could keep pushing and swimming after being knocked back to the shore over and over, I could do this. I could be just as determined as a sea turtle … I hoped.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Three weeks. Three long weeks. The day I’d dreaded had finally arrived. Harley and I had an afternoon appointment to meet with the judge handling Mabel’s contested will in his chambers. Mabel’s children would be there as well.
I hadn’t slept at all the night before. And if judging by the looks of my bloodshot, baggy eyes, you’d have thought I hadn’t slept for over a month. No amount of makeup was going to fix that.
I put on a blue batik sundress that reminded me of the ocean and ate all of the chocolate I could find in the apartment before meeting up with Harley. He drove my car to the county courthouse in Charleston’s historic downtown.
The judge’s chamber smelled musty. It wasn’t a large room. The clerk had to drag in extra chairs to accommodate everyone. She then had to push the chairs together until the seats were touching each other. The three Maybank children arrived as a unified group. They were dressed in what Bertie would have called their Sunday best. Both Florence and Peach were wearing gleaming white gloves and pearls. Peach’s silky pink suit served as a lovely contrast to Florence’s vintage teal with white polkadots A-line dress. Edward wore a dark gray suit with such a perfect cut and fit it screamed money. None of them greeted either Harley or me. They barely looked in my direction before taking their seats.
The judge entered from a door behind his desk. He was an older man with thinning hair. His robes were open. Underneath all the formality of his position he wore a causal polo shirt and Bermuda shorts. He was carrying a manila envelope. When I saw it, I sat a little straighter in my chair.
He greeted Edward warmly and asked about his golf game. They chatted amicably just long enough for me to lose any hope that I’d get a fair hearing. Finally, the judge settled down in his oversized leather chair and tapped the envelope on the desk. “I feel like a game show host,” he said and laughed. No one joined in.
He cleared his throat and opened the envelope with a letter opener that looked like a tiny dagger. All the air seemed to leave the office as the judge took his time as he silently reviewed the report the lab had sent. My lungs struggled to get a smooth breath as I watched him, his expression grim and unchanging. A chair to the right of me creaked. Conversations of people passing by in the hallway sounded unnaturally loud and intrusive. Even the tick-tick-tick of the gunmetal gray institutional clock hanging on the wall hurt my ears.
Harley reached across the distance between our chairs and offered his hand. I grabbed onto it, probably squeezing the life out of his fingers. He didn’t complain.
Finally the judge, who had to be the slowest reader in recorded history, lowered the report. He removed his reading glasses. He looked at me only briefly before turning toward Edward.
“You’re the one who provided a sample to the lab?” the judge asked him.
“That’s correct, John,” Edward replied. I don’t know if it was my imagination or not, but I thought he sounded smug.
“I see,” the judge said before turning back to me.
“You’ve held us all in suspense long enough, your honor,” Harley said. “What does the report say?”
“She’s a Maybank.” The judge dropped the words into the room so abruptly, I was certain I hadn’t heard them correctly.
“Excuse me?” I asked, but no one was paying attention to me.
Edward had flown out of his chair. “You swore to me you had lied to her about being her mother!” he shouted at Florence.
Florence remained with her back straight and her head held high. But she’d bitten her bottom lip and had crinkled her brows in puzzlement. Carolina couldn’t be my mother, since she’d died years before my birth. And Peach couldn’t be my mother, since she was too young to have gotten involved with my father. So that left Florence. She had to be my mother. But something about that conclusion felt wrong. Florence looked about as dumbfounded as I felt.
Peach had turned toward me and was smiling as Edward continued to yell, cursing Florence to high heaven for putting them in such an embarrassing position. My thoughts stumbled as I considered what seemed like an impossible scenario. Peach must have been fourteen or fifteen when I was born. Had my father seduced a minor? No. That couldn’t be true. But just in case it was, I leaned toward her and started ask her about it when the judge rapped on his desk with his ham-sized fist.
“I’m not interested in getting involved with family squabbles,” he said. “We’ve held this estate in probate long enough. Your mother chose to give her home and business to one of her grandchildren. I don’t see how anyone could object to that. Unless you insist—though I don’t see why you would—I’m not going to schedule a hearing date. Instead I’m going to dismiss your lawsuit and release the full inheritance to Ms. Charity Penn. Now get out of here. All of you. I have work to do.”
Florence and Edward argued with each other as we filed out of the judge’s chambers. They didn’t even look in my direction, not even once. I stood in the middle of the courthouse hallway and watched as Florence left without even giving me a second thought. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that or about her or about any member of the Maybank family. Did I even care that she’d left? Peach pulled me aside and gave me a quick hug before running after her older siblings.
And that’s how it ended. Or perhaps that’s how it all began.
By the time Harley and I returned to the Chocolate Box my thoughts had returned to chocolate. I was wondering aloud how a chocolate bonbon with a spicy pumpkin filling would taste. It would be coated in dark chocolate … with a swirl of white chocolate threading through the dark. And it’d have to be pumpkin shaped, of course.
Harley laughed and kissed me and told me, “I’m going to end up weighing a gazillion pounds. In all my born days, Penn, that sounds delicious.”
Recipes Snipped from the Camellia Current, Camellia Beach's Local Newspaper
Penn's Moon Benne Wafer Cookies
Penn? Yes, you read that right. Our local firecracker Penn, who can be a disaster in the kitchen, came up with this mouth-watering recipe. To be fair, Bertie Bays contributed the benne wafer recipe. The recipe makes a crispy thin wafer with a powerful sesame flavor that is sandwiched between white chocolate on the top and dark chocolate on the bottom. Is it a candy or a cookie? Perhaps it’s both!
This recipe for these simple black and white chocolates is perfect for cookie swaps or a way to add a touch of elegance to your parties. Your friends will be begging you for your recipe while asking for more.
Ingredients
½ cup of sesame seeds (important for the wafer’s distinctive taste)
½ cup of all-purpose flour (gluten free flours also work with the recipe)
½ tsp of baking powder
Pinch of salt
6 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup brown sugar
1 egg
¼ tsp pure vanilla extract
1 bag of white chocolate chips
1 bag of fair trade dark chocola
te chips
Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure the oven rack is in the center position for an even cooking.
Toast the sesame seeds by heating them in a dry pan over medium-low heat. You want the seeds to turn a light golden color, so they’ll release their flavors. Keep a close eye on them, you don’t want them to burn.
In a bowl, combine the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, and salt.
In an electric mixer, beat the butter and brown sugar together until smooth and creamy. Add the egg and vanilla extract. Mix at a lower speed until combined. Add the flour mixture continue to mix at the lower speed until the batter is smooth. Add the toasted sesame seeds and fold in with a spoon.
Line the baking sheets with parchment paper or a baking liner. Using a teaspoon, drop the dough onto the baking sheet. You can use the back of the spoon to help form a round shape in order to make sure your cookies come out moon shaped. Leave about 2 inches between the dough. The cookies will spread. Yes, you want them to spread!
Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until the edges of the cookies turn a dark brown. (This is important, otherwise your wafers won’t have that delightful snap.) Let cook on the baking sheet for 2 minutes. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.
Melt the white chocolate chips using either a double boiler or following the microwave directions on the bag. Using a tablespoon, coat the top of the cookies with the melted white chocolate. Place cookies in refrigerator for 30 minutes to 1 hour to cool.
Melt the dark chocolate chips using either a double boiler or following the microwave directions on the bag. Using a tablespoon, coat the bottom of the cookies with the melted dark chocolate. Place cookies in refrigerator for 30 minutes to 1 hour to cool.
Store in the refrigerator. Makes approximately 2 dozen.
Bubba's Spicy Cocoa Pork Tenderloin
Bubba says chocolate and romance is too cliché. What everyone loves is a good pork dinner. We’re lucky he agreed to share with us his go-to meal when he’s looking to impress that special someone in his life.
In Cold Chocolate Page 28
