Death Is Like a Box of Chocolates (A Chocolate Covered Mystery) (4 page)

Erica’s floor was like a different country from mine. She had about a thousand books scattered all over and interesting art and other novelties from around the world. Her bed belonged in some kind of ad for a five-star hotel on an exotic beach somewhere, with wispy curtains hung between the four posts. It certainly gave away her secret that she was a total romantic.

My apartment was the very definition of functional. I had only a few things on the walls that I had bought at garage sales, a photo of my family when I was twelve, and a huge beanbag chair in the shape of a Hershey’s Kiss in the corner of my dining room. I certainly didn’t have a bed that was appropriate for a romantic comedy set in the Caribbean.

I looked forward to playing with my gold cocoa butter, like a toddler with a new toy, and tried to think of another use for it. Something other than for bachelorette party favors. I bet my exclusive hotel in Georgetown would love me to add a gold sheen to the logo chocolates they placed on customers’ pillows every night.

I closed the door to my apartment, which was the “do not disturb” code Erica and I used, and started tempering the chocolate. Even X-rated chocolate was going to be smooth and delicious if I was making it.

First, I chipped away at a brick of my gorgeous dark Felchlin chocolate and tossed the pieces into a double boiler. I took my time bringing it to the perfect temperature and then removed the pot from the flame, adding more chunks to reduce the heat.

I squeezed gold cocoa butter into the small cup of the electric warmer and turned back to the chocolate.

With my expensive, but indispensable, infrared thermometer, I monitored the chocolate until it dropped to exactly eighty-four degrees, and then I put it back into the double boiler for reheating.

Like any chocolatier worth anything, I instinctively knew when the chocolate was ready—when it hit that rich brown color and that perfect combination of flat and shiny on the surface. But I liked the confirmation of my thermometer.

Leaving the chocolate to heat up, I poured a tiny amount of the now-melted gold cocoa butter into the paint holder and turned on the airbrush machine.

I sprayed a light dusting across the first mold, held it up to the light to make sure it was even, and set it aside to cool down, the risqué outlines still jarring me. I repeated the process with the first three molds, stopping in between to stir the chocolate.

The hints of vanilla, citrus and smoke in the chocolate were released by the heat. As soon as it was ready, I poured the perfect amount in each mold, tapped gently to remove the air bubbles and set them in my refrigerator.

As I was spraying the next mold, my door opened and I jumped, fumbling the airbrush and shooting a spray of gold across my chin before grabbing it out of the air with both hands.

A blast from my past had walked right into my kitchen.

B
enjamin “Bean” Russell. The middle brother of Colleen and Erica. One of my brother Leo’s best friends. And unbeknownst to anyone, including Erica, the star of my high school fantasies. Okay, college as well. And maybe ever since I found out he was visiting. I’d had quite the dry spell lately, romance-wise.

“Hi,” Bean said, looking not much like the hero I remembered. While his hair always had the disheveled look of a distracted writer, it now seemed to be plastered to his head in a weird “I just woke up” smush on one side. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his clothes looked as slept in as his hair.

“Hi, Bean.” I turned off the noisy compressor and tried to hide the molds behind me. “Erica’s apartment is upstairs.” My words sounded too loud in the sudden quiet.

“I know. I followed my nose.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I knocked but you didn’t hear me.” He cleared his throat. “And I go by Ben now.”

Of course. He wasn’t the sixteen-year-old wunderkind of West Riverdale anymore, shattering every academic record—that is, until Erica came along and shattered them all again. Now he was a world-renowned journalist and author coming home for a book launch at his sisters’ store before jetting off to another exotic part of the world to do an exposé that rocked whatever political or business enterprise he investigated. I’d read an advanced copy of his first book and it was intimidatingly brilliant.

“Sure.” I paused. “Bean.” Couldn’t let him get a big head.

His eyebrows came together but he let it go. I wiped at the gold on my chin, even though I was probably making it worse. He hadn’t been home in the two years since I’d become friends with Erica. “I’m Michelle.”

“I know,” he said. “You look different.”

“I’m not thirteen anymore.” It came out more defensively than I intended, probably because I flashed back to a fumbled kiss in a dark closet, the unfortunate result of a spin-the-bottle loss. Or win. I was sure he didn’t remember it at all.

“You weren’t gold-plated back then either.” He stared at my face. “What is that?”

“Gold cocoa butter.” For some reason, that sounded ridiculous. “I spray-paint it across a mold then pour chocolate on top of it so it looks like it has a gold sheen. So it’s like edible gold, but it’s not, you know, real gold.”

A flash of amusement crossed his face, his brown eyes crinkling in the corners. “Okay.” His gaze went to my mouth. “Edible you say.”

Whoo boy. I could feel a flush building and looked away. “Yep. So, Erica?”

Again the amused look. “Yes.”

“Is upstairs.” I pointed a little too emphatically out the door but he leaned back against the counter as if he was planning to stay for a while. I couldn’t figure out how to usher him out without revealing the molds behind me.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were hiding something.”

“Nope,” I said too loudly. “Not hiding anything.”

“I don’t know. I’m a reporter. I have finely tuned instincts for that kind of thing.”

“I’m just making chocolate. I’m sure Erica is waiting for you.”

“No, she’s not,” he said. “I’m surprising her. Nice try.” He feinted right and I leaned my body to make sure he couldn’t see the molds. Then he moved left for the refrigerator. “Got any food in there?”

“No!” I said, but it was too late.

He pulled open the door and stared at my project: gold-painted, anatomically correct chocolates. Tiny, but definitely male.

“Whoa. What are you going to do with those? You can’t,” he grimaced, “
eat
them.”

I felt a giggle rise in my chest. “Okay, you found me out. I’m making chocolates for my cousin’s bachelorette party. I’ve never made X-rated chocolate before. Don’t tell Erica.”

“Oh, I won’t. I’m sure she’d make you move out or something,” he said. “Got any others that aren’t shaped like that? Erica said your chocolates are like tasting heaven. And I haven’t eaten anything except protein bars in about twenty-four hours.”

“Yuck.” I got up and opened the wine cooler I used to store chocolates at home. Two of them held thousands of chocolates in my kitchen at the shop. I pulled out a batch of red-white-and-blue painted chocolates molded into flags.

“Try these.” I arranged a few on a small plate for him.

He tossed one in his mouth. “Mmm,” he said. “Amazing.” He swallowed and ate another, closing his eyes for a moment.

It was hard not to stare.

He smiled, revealing the same David Letterman gap in his teeth that Erica had. Both had ganged up on their parents, refusing to get braces to correct it. “That’s the best thing I’ve tasted in my life. You actually made those?”

“Yep,” I said. “Glad you like them.”

“Got any more?”

“Take the whole batch,” I said. “And make sure Erica feeds you some real food so you don’t go into a diabetic coma. And don’t tell her!”

This time he headed for the door. “I don’t know. You might have to buy my silence with more chocolate.”

• • • • • • • • • 

M
y alarm went off in the middle of a dream in which my poor young staff was forced to toss chocolates out to crowds pushing through the doors while I was in the back, frantically wrapping chocolates from a fast-moving conveyor belt like Lucille Ball in that candy factory episode.

I usually couldn’t wait for Mondays, which I dedicated to inventing and tasting new concoctions. But after tossing and turning much of the night, it took two cups of my strong French press coffee to get me into my running clothes and out the door. If I wanted to eat my own products and not gain weight, running had become nonnegotiable.

The foggy morning didn’t help my energy level. I couldn’t even see past the next hill, and we had plenty of those. Our house was on the outskirts of town, right where the sidewalks ended, so I ran on the side of the road. Houses appeared like ghosts in the gloom before falling behind as I trudged along. It took until the second mile for me to get up to my normal pace, but as I finished my four-mile route, I felt great. Invincible. I was going to kick some major cooking butt.

I showered and put on brown chef’s clothes that stayed cool and, more important, didn’t show chocolate stains. I packed my secret chocolates in a large box with special chilled dividers to keep them cool and layers to cushion them, then loaded my contraband and drove to the store in my minivan emblazoned with my logo.

The houses and businesses got closer together as I drove toward town. Most of Main Street was narrow, packed with buildings from colonial times. Some of them looked like they held each other up, their bricks and mortar seeming to bind together. The town kept up the old cobblestone sidewalks to complete the historic appearance.

Our section of Main Street was somewhat more modern. In 1954, a fire had raged, destroying the whole block. Tales were still told of the bravery of the firefighters who made a stand in tiny White Stone Alley, preventing the fire from decimating the whole street and possibly the entire town.

Back then, people around here weren’t as into preserving historic buildings, so the owner of a few of the stores bought out the rest of the block and built what he called the West Riverdale Town Center Mall, a long wooden building that fit the needs of shops more than colonial families.

As I passed Chocolates and Chapters in the middle of Main Street, I was surprised to see a dim light in the dining area. I definitely didn’t leave that light on.

I parked in the gravel lot behind the store and saw the brown cat sitting by the empty food containers as if waiting for me to refill them. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to feed it. I couldn’t have a cat in a chocolate shop. One stray hair in a truffle and the health department would slap me with some kind of fine. And what would the customers think?

“Good morning,” I said to the cat. What did I know? “Coco?” I tried. Green eyes followed me as I walked over and unlocked the door.

Shoot. It was already unlocked. Everyone knew that Monday mornings were my time. Colleen usually opened up the bookstore while Mark dropped their kids off at daycare, but this was early even for her.

Kona always opened up the front without interrupting my creative flow, and my other assistant Kayla didn’t come in until noon. I got the whole back kitchen to myself to decide what chocolate magic or madness we’d create that week.

“Wait here,” I told the cat, and went inside. As I walked down the short hall toward my kitchen, I smelled Denise’s perfume, Samsara. She loved it, even after Erica told her the Hindu definition of samsara: the eternal cycle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth. Sounded creepy to me, but it did smell glamorous on her.

One reason I was good at creating new recipes and knowing if they’d appeal to customers was my highly developed sense of smell, which translated to my ability to distinguish between subtle flavors. Unfortunately for my parents, it had made me a picky eater as a child, but it turned out to be a great asset for a chocolatier.

I couldn’t believe that Denise was at the store so early. She’d perfected the art of walking in five minutes before her first client and looking like she was ready and waiting to take their photos. And hadn’t she told us she’d cancelled all of her appointments for the day?

I dropped off my purse in the kitchen before making my way to the front of the store to investigate the light. The scent of perfume grew even stronger.

Denise’s break-in popped into my head, filling me with an ominous feeling. Should I call the police? Instead, I went back to the kitchen and picked up my cell phone. And an extra-large, extra-heavy copper ladle. Just in case.

The light came from a small reading lamp we’d placed on a side table. I flicked on the overhead lights, which were the superefficient kind that came on slowly as they warmed up. I paused, ready to pounce, or run away, if anything moved.

The perfume was even stronger in here, mixed with something almond-tinged that I’d never smelled before, medicinal on the surface but dank and dark underneath. When I moved closer, I saw very long legs sticking out from a high-backed chair with oversized wings facing the bookstore. Denise was the only person I knew with legs that long.

“Denise?”

Nothing.

I walked over and saw that she was leaning her head against the right side wing and holding on to her stomach as if she’d fallen asleep in pain. A box of my chocolates sat in front of her on the coffee table and I couldn’t help but notice they were all Denise’s favorites, Amaretto Palle Darks, and that three were missing. “Denise?” I touched her shoulder.

Still nothing. My heart started to pound.

I shook her shoulder this time and her head dropped forward, chocolate froth falling from her mouth.