Death Is Like a Box of Chocolates (A Chocolate Covered Mystery) (6 page)

“What?” I hadn’t even thought of that.

“Erica?” Bean’s voice came from the doorway. He stood there in navy plaid pajama pants and a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt, looking all just-woken-up sexy. He pushed his hand through his hair, his shirt lifting to show a tantalizing flash of muscular stomach. “Good morning,” he said sleepily.

“Um, not really,” I said.

“Bean!” Leo walked by me to give him a man-type hug, with lots of backslapping.

Bean must have picked up on the tension in the room because he stopped the reunion to ask, “What’s going on?”

I
t took forever for Erica to tell the whole story to Bean and for me to kick everyone out so I could make my phone calls. Erica went upstairs to consult with our lawyer on the press release and letters to our customers, while I brought up my sales information on my laptop and took a deep breath.

It was early enough that some of the businesses who bought my chocolates weren’t open yet, and I was able to leave a few messages before talking to live people. But my voice choked up when I called the diner and got Iris, my favorite waitress in the world, who gave advice worthy of a mafia don in a southern accent while serving scrambled eggs and grits. “What y’all gotta do,” she told me, “is find the critter who dun ’nat and twist his little neck like a chicken.”

I laughed through a few tears. “Thanks, Iris. I’ll consider that.”

“And you tell that Chief Noonan that if he don’t get off his fat butt and find that a-hole, I’m gonna do summin’ awful to his griddle cakes.”

I asked her to return any chocolate to me and to let any customers know of the recall as well.

The hardest call was to the food buyer at my biggest customer, the hotel. She had visited my shop right after it opened and took a chance on me. It didn’t matter that in two years I’d never let her down; her responsibility was to her customers. She listened to me for a minute and then asked, “Any other victims?”

“No,” I said.

I heard the hard, fast tapping of her pen through the phone. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll stop distributing your chocolates in our hotel until we learn the findings of the health department. We will make a determination at that time whether to return our recent purchase.”

I breathed out a sigh of short-lived relief.

She continued. “If the findings are that your shop is responsible, then I will have to find another supplier.” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry.”

We said our good-byes and I hung up, a heavy weight on my chest, and moved on to my next issue.

No way could I send this box to my cousin. I’d have to make another batch of adult chocolates completely from scratch, with new ingredients, and get it to the maid of honor by Saturday. Although once I explained the delay, they may want to just buy Internet crap.

I’d already decided to ask Tonya Ashton for help. She’d been the only other female on my adult coed softball team, playing on and off when she could. She’d gone through the Frederick community college’s nursing program, studying long hours in my shop while I poured her tons of free coffee refills and gave her discounts on the Green Apple Indulgences she loved. She’d mentioned on Facebook that she was now working at the West Riverdale Urgent Care, which was on the other side of town. I hoped she’d be willing to help me.

I texted Tonya before I left to make sure she was working. She’d texted back a bunch of questions about Denise, but I told her I’d tell her when I saw her. I felt crazy nervous driving through West Riverdale, although I avoided Main Street. I even thought someone was following me for a while, until the car pulled into the gas station right by the clinic.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket as I pulled around the back of the building. It was a text from Jolene Roxbury.
How ya holding up honey?
Her southern charm came through the phone.
I’ll call you in between classes.

No need
, I texted back.

Want Steve and me to stop by after school?

No, that’s okay
, I typed at the same time my phone buzzed again.

No I can’t. Drama club . . . We should hold an emergency meeting asap.

No kidding
, I started to text and then decided to answer a simple
Yes
. Then I added,
There was a stray cat hanging around the store. Can you let me know if it’s still around?

Tonya came running out as soon as I let her know I was there and gave me a dramatic overly squeezy hug. “Oh you poor thing!”

Tonya had become famous on YouTube a few years before for documenting her travels with her boyfriend to follow the Baltimore Orioles to every home and away game, and using her college fund to pay for it all. Everyone loved her energetic enthusiasm for the team, and her expressive face when they won or lost was priceless. Her parents had not been pleased.

I guess she’d sowed all her wild oats because now she was happily married to her travel partner and had a kid just a few months old. Their birth announcements had featured a squirrely looking baby, of course wearing an Orioles onesie.

“It was terrible,” I admitted. “They think Denise was . . .” I unexpectedly teared up and had to clear my throat. “Poisoned.”

She gasped and clasped my arm. “No!”

“I imagine that they’ll throw all of my chocolate in the shop away.” My heart clenched. “But I made these at home for my cousin and now I can’t send them to her.” I told her about my special project. “They’re probably fine. But I can’t risk it. I can’t throw them away—what if a kid found them, or a little squirrel or something got into them and they were poisoned?”

“Of
course
,” she said, her mouth in a perfect little frown like a computer icon for “sad.” “That would be terrible.”

“But I just can’t let anyone know I made them. It’d be too embarrassing.” I ripped up the tape on the box and pulled up the divider, showing her the chocolates. They looked so harmless.

She met my eyes and started laughing. “They’re so tiny!”

“I know,” I said. “They’re ridiculous. I wanted to see if you could just throw them in your medical waste bin or something. I don’t know how it works—”

Suddenly, Reese Everhard, owner and executive editor of the
West Riverdale Examiner
, jumped from behind the corner of the building. “Stop her!” she said. “She’s trying to get rid of evidence!”

I looked around as if she meant someone else and Tonya skipped back as if I’d handed her a live rattlesnake. Reese ran over and grabbed the box, tearing at it with her wickedly long nails. I instinctively tried to take it back from her and then the tape broke free and the box of gold, X-rated chocolates glowed in the morning sunlight, before spewing across the ground.

• • • • • • • • • 

F
or the second time in my life, and the second time in one day, I was surrounded by police officers. While Tonya and a group of urgent care workers looked on laughing their fool heads off, Reese, who had called Chief Noonan when she saw me meeting with Tonya, insisted on having the police “collect the evidence.”

With all of the cell phone videos in action, the whole world was going to have plenty of “evidence” that I made bachelorette party chocolates. Maybe that’d be my new career.

After Tonya had stopped laughing, she’d yelled at Reese to leave me alone and find a real scandal to investigate. Someone besides me was finally losing patience with the loony reporter.

Everyone knew that Reese had bought the newspaper as some kind of compensation. It was horrible: she and her husband had been trying to have children for two years and found out she couldn’t. So the jerk left her. He’d been forced to leave town after the reason for the split became known and everyone had frozen him out. Reese had earned a heck of a lot of sympathy. But that was fast depleting with her outrageous attempts to increase circulation.

Even in crazy Reese world, how could she be proud of her journalistic accomplishments? Like the time she broke the heartbreaking story of the missing Girl Scout cookies. Or the article about the horribly underserved population of vegetarians at high school football games. And, the one that got her the most Google hits for its hysterically overblown prose, the rampant corruption of the town council who received, wait for it, free coffee at their meetings, supplied by the West Riverdale Diner.

She needed to get a life.

Reese and I went way back. We’d been on opposing recreational basketball and softball teams throughout elementary and middle school, trading championships along the way. Most people assumed we were sports buddies, but Reese was monstrously competitive even when we were on the same high school team. When she was injured halfway through the basketball season, I replaced her as point guard and took the team to the state championships while she sat on the bench in her cast. She’d never forgiven me.

I checked her out from head to toe—she’d already been suspected of using recording devices without letting her targets know. Was that pen in her pocket actually a tiny camera?

“Those chocolates could be poisoned too,” Reese said, sticking her neck out and looking remarkably like a stork. “It was murder, wasn’t it?” She leaned her chest toward Lieutenant Bobby. Definitely a camera.

“No comment,” Bobby said, making notes.

• • • • • • • • • 

I
t wasn’t even noon by the time I made it home and I was already exhausted. Bean leaned back on the porch with Leo, trying hard not to laugh. He had his shirt off, enjoying the sunny day. Erica had told me that his back was scarred from a horrific police interrogation in Afghanistan early in his career, but all I could see were abs too well-defined for someone who spent so much time in front of a computer.

“Worst day of your life?” Leo asked, which had become our way of checking in with each other ever since our parents died—the true worst day of our lives.

“Not yet”—I trudged up the wooden steps—“but the day’s still young.”

“I know what’ll cheer you up,” Leo said. “You’re trending on Twitter.”

“I am not,” I insisted, appalled.

“I’m kidding,” he said, “but look at this.” He showed me his phone with a video of me grabbing at the box and the X-rated chocolates flying in slow motion. You could almost hear me yelling, “Nooo!” It was definitely taped by the camera in Reese’s pocket and she’d uploaded it to her blog as soon as she could. The bitch.

“I’m never going outside again,” I said, and stomped to my room.

• • • • • • • • • 

I
burrowed under my mother’s quilt and went to sleep until I could face the world again, something I did when life got to be too much. This was the perfect time for such an escape.

By the time I woke up, the sun was no longer coming through the front of the house. I looked at my phone and listened to a bunch of messages checking in to find out if I was okay. A few of them worriedly asked if Memorial Day weekend was still on. Beatrice Duncan’s message held the strongest plea. “I’m so sad about Denise, but please tell me we’re still carrying out all of the plans for Memorial Day. We’re all counting on you and Erica.”

I walked out to my kitchen, and Bean looked up from his laptop. “Feeling better?” he said. He’d obviously showered and changed.

“Are you babysitting me?” I asked, suddenly worried what I looked like. I went to the sink and rubbed a wet paper towel over my face. I knew my hair was unfixable.

“Not really,” he said. “Leo just wanted someone here when you woke up.”

“As fine as I can be now that my friend is dead and my X-rated chocolate business is public knowledge.”

“So, good, right?” he said, smiling.

I smiled back, not feeling so bad with him so cheery.

Then Lieutenant Bobby drove up in his cruiser with a state police car right behind him.

I groaned.

“I’ll get rid of them,” Bean said, his smile disappearing into a scowl. I remembered that Bobby had broken Erica’s heart at the end of high school. Some big-brother animosity was probably at work.

“No.” I went to the door. “Time to get it over with.”

Lieutenant Bobby apologized for bothering me and paused at the doorway when he saw Bean. He nodded stiffly. “Benjamin.”

“He goes by Bean,” I said, which made Bean shake his head in exasperation.

Bobby gestured to the man standing behind him in a state police uniform. “This is Detective Roger Lockett. He’s in charge of Denise’s investigation.”

“Really?” I asked him. “Like lock-it-up-and-throw-away-the-key?”

“No,” Bobby said with a straight face. “Like L-O-C-K-E-T-T.”

Detective Lockett smirked. “I’ve heard ’em all before,” he warned in a strong western Pennsylvania accent.

“Challenge accepted,” I said. “Are you from Pittsburgh?”

The detective was actually pretty cute in a rough-and-tumble kind of way. Short dark hair and a crooked nose that had definitely been broken. Where Bobby was tall and lean, Lockett was wide and muscular, his shoulders pushing at the seams of his uniform. “Haaja know?” He emphasized the accent.

“Yinz guys want coffee?” I said, using one of the Pittsburgh-ese words I’d heard a lot. “I used to work with someone from the North Side. Her accent was so contagious.”

“South Side for me.” Lockett’s smile didn’t reach his eyes as he and Bobby joined Bean at the table.

“I used to go to Kennywood with my folks,” I said. “Best roller coasters
ev-er
.”

“You bet.” This time Lockett’s eyes smiled too.

“You staying?” I asked Bean.

He leaned back in his chair as an answer. “Does she need a lawyer?” he asked them both with a challenging glare as they sat at the table.

I rolled my eyes as I poured coffee for everyone and set up the creamer and sugar.