Kernel of Truth (2 page)

I bit back the snarky remark about men in trench coats twirling pencil-thin mustaches that was on the tip of my tongue. “Not that I remember. It's been quiet now that the season is over.”

“I know. It was kind of nice.” Dan rubbed his face.

Speaking of quiet, I could no longer hear Jessica shrieking. “Where did Huerta take Jessica?” Glenn Huerta, Dan's deputy, had bundled her off somewhere after Dan and the paramedics arrived.

“Huerta took her over to the urgent care.” Dan jotted down something in his notebook.

“Seriously?” That was so Jessica. She had found a way to make Coco's death all about her. Making herself into the victim was like her superpower.

He shrugged. “She couldn't seem to stop screaming.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Bec,” he said, his tone a warning. “She found her aunt dead on the floor. Look at the reaction you had and you're not even related to Coco.” He gestured at my blanket and coffee.

Being related to a person didn't necessarily make you close. I was more connected to Coco than Jessica would ever be in every way that counted except blood, and I wasn't screaming my head off. Instead I shook hard enough that I couldn't lift a coffee cup to my mouth. It was totally more dignified.

I didn't feel
like opening POPS for the breakfast crowd like I usually did. I had no idea how much business I was losing. I had quite a few regulars who usually came in for coffee and one of my popcorn breakfast bars. Plus I could have probably made some bank on the Lookie Lous crowding around the yellow-tape lines protecting Coco's Cocoas—ghoulish rubbernecking could work up an appetite—but it didn't feel right. In fact, it felt downright gross.

I didn't particularly want to go home, either. Staring at the walls and trying to get the mental picture of Coco slumped over, hands limp in her lap, legs splayed, blood in her smooth gray chignon, eyes lifeless out of my head was even less appealing than serving blueberry-almond popcorn bars to a bunch of bloodthirsty bystanders.

Besides, I loved my shop. It was a haven for me. I wasn't afraid to brag about it. The house had already been converted into a shop front before I came onboard, but that was about all you could say for it. It didn't have any personality.
It didn't have any style. It didn't have any pizzazz. What did it have? A fan-freaking-tastic location between the chocolate shop and the florist on the main tourist drag.

I knew people had talked when I started remodeling it to suit my purposes. I wasn't an idiot. I knew what it meant when people stopped talking when you walked into a room. They thought I should see if the business would take off first before I started pouring money into it. They thought I was bringing my snooty California design ideas to Main Street U.S.A., where they would not be appreciated. They thought I'd screw it up like I'd screwed up everything else before I left here almost before the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” died at my high school graduation.

I didn't give a rat's ass.

Okay. Maybe I gave part of a rat's ass. Like part of one rat buttock. It's not easy to come back to a town that you left with a reputation somewhere on the continuum between sketchy and shady. I couldn't expect everyone to respect my choices. I was going to have to prove to everyone that I'd grown up okay. Well, to everyone except Coco and Dan and Haley. It didn't mean I liked it though. I'd had eleven years of no one taking me seriously because I was Antoine's wife. That had been hard enough to take. Now they weren't taking me seriously because they thought I was still high school me.

At any rate, there'd been a lot of “who does she think she is” and “what does she think she's doing” conversations buzzing around as I'd expanded the kitchen space, had the walls painted a smeary textured blue and started putting in glass shelving. There had been a lot of people making up excuses to come in and out of the shop to watch its progress and report back to the folks at Bob's Diner and Winnie's Tavern. From what I'd heard, a verified account of what type of light fixtures I'd had installed was good for a piece of pie
or a draft beer. If you knew how much they'd cost, you could get the pie a la mode.

Luckily, my contractor was Carson Jenkins, who was enjoying confounding the local population even more than I was. Carson and I used to smoke cigarettes out behind the high school during passing period. Neither of us smoked anymore, but friends you made while hiding from the vice principal apparently were friends for life.

“I placed an order for two hot tubs,” he told me one morning over coffee as we discussed plans. Before I could protest, he held up his hand. “Don't worry. I'll cancel 'em, but let's see how long it takes to get around town that you're putting one hot tub in your shop and another in your sister's garage.”

The answer was approximately eighteen hours. Dan had come home the next evening and asked where on his property did I think I was going to be naked hot-tubbing.

I was impressed at the addition of nudity to the rumor. Someone was augmenting the gossip with some special flourishes. “Gossip much?” I'd asked.

“It's kind of my job these days. The more I know about what's going on around town, the more I can keep everyone safe and everyone on an even keel.” He'd started using sailing metaphors. He was hanging out with Mayor Thompson way too much.

“And how will my naked hot-tubbing endanger anyone or knock anyone off course?” I enquired, trying to keep my tone as sweet as Coco's Signature Fudge.

“Teenaged boys could fall out of the trees they've climbed to get a glimpse of you in all your glory in the backyard and then break their necks. It would be bad for the town and for my insurance premiums. Double whammy,” Dan declared. I was flattered enough that he thought anyone would climb even a step stool to see me naked that I let it go even though
I'd had to give Carson five dollars the next day because it had taken less than twenty-four hours before law enforcement was involved. “Never bet against the house, Rebecca,” he'd said as he'd pocketed my money. “It's a lesson well worth a fin.”

The lesson was worth a fin and Carson was worth every penny I paid him for the Versailles patterned tile floors, the sky blue walls and the glass cases with their sunny yellow trim. He had been more interested in constructing bongs than conjugating French verbs in eleventh grade, but the construction skills were serving him well these days.

I dumped out my caramel Kahlúa sauce and started over. This time my phone beeped a text message alert when the sauce was at almost three hundred and fifty degrees. Did the universe send out some kind of message to interrupt me right then? I ignored it. A text message wasn't a scream. It was ignore-able. I wasn't throwing out a second batch of caramel sauce for anything that wasn't at least scream-worthy.

I pulled the sauce off the stove as I saw the first wisp of smoke and stirred in the Kahlúa and the baking soda. Then I poured the whole thing over the popcorn and mixed it in. Once I finished making that into balls and set them aside to cool, I washed out my saucepan and started on the chocolate sauce with Irish Cream. I decided on a ganache-like base as my sauce, and for a little while I was focused on making sure it was light but still glossy and spoonable enough to coat the popcorn. Everything else disappeared for a while. It was me and the chocolate and the butter and the heat and the wooden spoon in the heaven-blue kitchen I'd created to be my refuge at POPS.

It was what I'd always loved about cooking. So many of my senses were engaged—sight, smell, taste, feel, even sound as I listened for boiling points and the like—that I could make everything else go away for a bit. Every bit of
gossip, every regret, every sorrow disappeared into fragrant steam and spice. Then I started drizzling the raspberry stripes across the chocolate popcorn and the vision of Coco's blood smeared down the credenza behind her popped back into my head, and I had to sit down before I fell.

Coco was gone. She'd been a fixture in my life for so long that it didn't really seem possible. A deep sob clutched in my lungs, burning as it traveled up to the air. I thought about what a mess I'd been as a teenager after my parents died and how Coco had been one of the people to pull me back from the brink. I thought about how thrilled she'd been for me as I left for the Culinary Institute of America in Napa and how she'd given me a candy thermometer for good luck as I left Grand Lake. I thought about how she'd held out the lifeline of helping me start POPS as my marriage had disintegrated and I hadn't known where to go, what to do, how to live.

I thought about our plans. Coco was an amazing chocolatier. She had a touch and a talent far beyond what you'd find in most small-town chocolate shops. She was the equal of anyone I'd met in California and more. She was also a fairly shrewd businesswoman. I don't mean she was the type who started with nothing and ended up dominating the world, buying and selling her way past the competition. But that wasn't her goal. In fact, that was one of the most important things she taught me as I made the plans to open POPS. Identify your goal. Make a plan to reach it. Implement. Sounds easy, but it's not.

Coco might have been seventy-two, but she still had plans. Plans that she and I were going to make happen together. I could have sworn that those plans had put a bit of a spring in her step and roses in her cheeks over the past few weeks. She'd been fretting about how to break the plans to Jessica, but now it looked like that wasn't going to be a problem. Those plans died with Coco.

A knock on the back door startled me out of my reverie. I looked up to see Annie's face peering in. I stood up and unlocked the door and she rushed through and threw her arms around me.

In unison, we said, “God, you smell awesome.”

“You smell like chocolate and vanilla and sugar,” she said into my hair.

She smelled like roses and lilies and green things growing in clean, fresh dirt. It was exactly what her shop, Blooms, always smelled like, too. Like you'd stumbled into a fairy garden. Annie was in her early forties and had pretty much reverted to some flower-child version of herself that probably had never existed. She had long graying hair that she wore loose, and was rarely seen in anything except peasant skirts with tunic-type tops that generally had some kind of embroidery on them. Sometimes there were little bells sewn onto the hems. Those were my favorites.

She pushed me away to arm's length and looked me up and down. “Are you okay? You found her?”

There was no need to ask what she was talking about. No one was talking about anyone but Coco today. “Not really. Jessica found her. I heard Jessica screaming and went to see what was wrong.”

Annie twisted her long graying hair back and tied it in a knot at the base of her neck. From watching her do this before, I knew it would be down again in about two minutes. She said playing with her hair kept her from smoking. It was something to do with her hands. I thought that given that she'd quit smoking twenty-two years ago, she maybe should be over it by now. “But you saw her?” Annie asked.

I nodded. I so wished I hadn't seen her, though. I so wished I hadn't walked around the desk. I wanted the picture of Coco alive and laughing, or tasting a new batch of chocolate
truffles, or sipping a glass of red wine in front of her fire on a winter evening back in my head. Not the picture of her on the floor of her office, glassy-eyed and limp.

“I'm so sorry, honey.” Annie sat down at the rectangular table that dominated the center of my kitchen, tucking her peasant skirt under her.

I pointed to the coffee carafe and she nodded, so I poured her a cup in a thick white china mug and then one for myself.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing to my morning's work cooling on racks over on the counter.

“Adult popcorn balls.”

She arched a brow, cocked her head and looked at them from another angle.

“Alcoholic popcorn balls,” I explained further. I was going to have to figure out something to call them that didn't make people think of triple-X movies. Although maybe there was a market for that. I'd have to think about it.

“Sounds like just the ticket,” she said, standing and grabbing a chocolate one before returning to the table.

There were worse people to try them out on, so I put one of the caramel Kahlúa ones on a plate in front of her as well and sat down across from her, hooking my feet into the rungs of the ladder-back chair. “Did you hear or see anything last night?”

Annie bit into the chocolate popcorn ball, closed her eyes and moaned a little. “Not a thing,” she said after she finished chewing. “I was closed and out of here by a little after six, though.”

“Me, too.” I turned my coffee mug round and round on the scarred wooden tabletop. “I wonder why Coco wasn't.”

Annie shrugged. “You know Coco. Who knows what she was cooking up?”

Knew. I knew Coco, I thought, but didn't have the heart
to say. I also knew how hard it was to start referring to people you loved in the past tense. Then something Annie had said niggled at the back of my brain. “She wasn't cooking, though. She was in the office, not the kitchen.”

“There's cooking and then there's cooking, grasshopper. She was up to something, otherwise she would never have closed early,” Annie said. Annie and Coco have both been coaching me on the business side of opening a business. I knew how to cook. Figuring out how to sell what I cooked was a whole 'nother ball of popcorn.

“She closed early?” That didn't sound right, either. She hadn't mentioned closing early to me. The only thing she'd mentioned was that she'd been having computer problems. She couldn't get something to print. I'd been supposed to go over this weekend to help. Oh, why hadn't I gone over last night to fix her stupid printer? It probably just needed to be turned off and back on again. She never remembered to try that first.

Annie nodded and ate some more. “Must have. Aaron Woodingham came to Blooms to buy flowers for Delia because Coco was already closed. He wanted to bring her chocolate. He was kind of disappointed. Didn't do much for my ego, I can tell you.” She sighed. “I hate being second choice.”

Aaron and Delia Woodingham had pretty much the stormiest relationship in Grand Lake. Nothing in their life was executed without high drama. Aaron was a regular customer at all our shops, looking for make-up gifts. I suspected they had fantastic make-up sex and all the drama was an excuse to hit the sack in a state of emotional intensity akin to Vesuvius about to explode. “What did he do now?”

“Something about being late for dinner at her mother's.” Annie shrugged and made a face.

I leaned my head on my hands. “I didn't even notice Coco
had closed early. I waltzed out of here without a thought about her. I would have waited and walked home with her if she was still working on something.” Maybe if I'd gone in and asked if she wanted me to wait, none of this would have happened. Coco would still be alive and her blood wouldn't be smeared down the credenza she'd inherited from her mother.

Annie dropped her head as well. “I could have, too. I stopped by before I left to drop off those sachets she wanted. I dropped them by the back door without a second thought.” She sat up again. “We absolutely cannot blame ourselves for this. Some stupid crackhead broke into her shop and she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Neither of us could have known that anything was going on.” Annie held up what was left of the caramel Kahlúa popcorn ball. “These are amazing, by the way.”