Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

Book 1: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Jake and Ellie have been through a lot together, from home repair to homicide investigation. So when they decide to open a chocolate-themed bakery, they figure it'll be a piece of cake. With Ellie's old family recipes luring in customers, they expect to make plenty of dough this Fourth of July weekend. Having family home for the holiday only sweetens the deal for Jake—that is, until the ill wind of an early-season hurricane blows up her family's plans. But as bitter as the storm is, something even more sinister is brewing in the kitchen of The Chocolate Moose—where health inspector Matt Muldoon is found murdered.

Ellie never made a secret of her distaste for Matt, who'd been raining on their parade with bogus talk of health-code violations. But now, with no alibi for the night of the murder, she's in a sticky situation with the police—so it's up to Jake to catch the real killer and keep Ellie living in the land of the free.

Release date: January 30, 2018

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 240

Sample

It was a bright summer morning, the first day of July in the remote island village of Eastport, Maine—three hours from Bangor, light-years from anywhere else—with a salty breeze snapping in the banners over the seawall and the sun glittering on the bay.

Up and down Water Street in front of the old two-story brick or wooden storefront buildings, shopkeepers swept doorways, hung out colorful OPEN flags, and watered lush window boxes brimming with red geraniums while seagulls swooped above.

Not the kind of morning that makes you worry about finding a dead body, in other words.

But as I approached my own small chocolate-themed bake shop, The Chocolate Moose, a petite white-haired woman in jeans and a black T-shirt—the shirt gorgeously embroidered in gleaming jewel tones at the neckline, jeans fitting as if tailored—stepped from the Second Hand Rose, her vintage clothing emporium next door.

“Good morning, Jacobia,” she trilled.

The accent’s on the second syllable of my name, by the way, and it’s Jake to my friends. But the Rose’s owner disdained casual nicknames as scrupulously as she avoided giving discounts.

Firmly I averted my gaze from the shimmery-gray wool shawl hung in her store’s bay window. It was lovely, and would be even more so this coming winter. But it was expensive and I’d put all my disposable money into setting up the Moose six weeks earlier.

Plus some that was not strictly disposable. “Good morning, Miss Halligan. Hard at work already, I see.”

She was lugging a bucketful of sudsy water with a squeegee in it, though her shop’s window was already spotless as usual.

“Mmm,” she replied, squeegeeing energetically. Her perfume, a light citrus fragrance, mixed pleasantly with the sweet smell of the bay. “I hope everything’s all right.”

She’d called me at 5 A.M.; Miss Halligan was an early riser. She’d said my own shop door was standing open and did I want to do something about it myself, or should she just call the cops?

Listening, I’d held back a sigh. The wind often blew that old door open—the lock had been wonky from the start, the door itself creaky and temperamental—and obviously it had done so again. So I’d merely asked Miss Halligan to close it as best she could, then made one more call before going back to sleep.

Now she eyed me, brandishing the dripping squeegee. “I’d have panicked if it had been my shop,” she said.

And would’ve rushed down here at once to check on things, she meant. “But you must have all sorts of responsibilities at home with that big old house of yours and your family,” she added.

“Uh-huh.” I stepped into the doorway of the Chocolate Moose, a tiny storefront with two bay windows, a moose-head silhouette with elaborate wooden antlers hung from chains over the door, and a pair of small cast-iron café tables on the sidewalk out front.

At the moment, that big house of mine was being cleaned by my housekeeper, Bella Diamond, who since she’d married my elderly father had also become my stepmother. Meanwhile my husband Wade Sorenson was on a tugboat bound for the enormous container vessel that he’d be piloting into Eastport’s harbor later that day; my grown son Sam was in Boston visiting friends; and my father was loudly but uselessly agitating to be released from the hospital where he was recovering from a heart attack.

So I couldn’t use family duties to excuse my not being here at the crack of dawn. Nor did I try; for one thing, I was too busy squinting at that door.

“Thanks for calling me,” I replied absently instead. “Looks like Morris got the new lock set installed already.”

Morris Whitcomb was Eastport’s jack-of-all-trades, the man you called if you needed your porch light replaced, your sink drain unclogged, or your fishing boat’s old, sputtery wiring transformed from a rat’s nest of fuses and tattered electrician’s tape into a neatly labeled model of twelve-volt order.

Morris had said he had a lock set he thought would work, and he’d go to Wadsworth’s Hardware Store when it opened and have an extra key made for me, too.

Which he’d done; I’d picked the key up on my way here. And he’d have called me if he’d noticed anything suspicious while he was working, I knew. But I’d never seen these small scratches in the door frame before . . . had I?

The key turned easily and the door opened; the little silver bell hung over it jangled sweetly as I went in. And at first I noticed nothing amiss:

The shop’s interior had exposed redbrick walls, a pressed-tin ceiling featuring two very lovely old wooden-paddled ceiling fans, and a black-and-white tiled floor. The single bakery display case, glass-fronted and white-enameled, was all we had room for, but we only sold what we’d baked ourselves so we didn’t need more.

Three additional café tables crowded the opposite wall. The cash register—now open and empty, the way we always left it—sat on a counter to one side of the display case, and behind that a door led back to the kitchen.

Which was where I hit trouble. My longtime friend and current business partner, Ellie White, had been here baking cookies until late the previous night. The air in the shop was still heavy with the luscious aroma of warm chocolate.

So the lights must’ve worked then. But when I flipped the switch now, the windowless kitchen remained a pitch-black cave.

“Drat.” It was probably nothing more sinister than a single blown fuse; the wiring in many of these old downtown buildings was practically prehistoric. Still, I made my way a little nervously—had I seen those odd scratches in the front door’s frame before?—through the sweet-smelling darkness to the kitchen cooler.

There with the aid of the small flashlight on my key ring I removed the trays of fresh baked goods that Ellie had placed in the cooler the previous night. During the ill-lit transfer I only tripped once over something on the floor that I didn’t bother stopping to identify. Then, after switching on the front-of-the-shop lights—they all worked fine and so did the ceiling fans, strengthening my blown-kitchen-fuse theory—and readying the cash register and the electronic credit card swiper for the start of business, I began setting out our offerings for the day.

These consisted of chocolate pistachio brownies, cranberry-nut chocolate chip cookies, and the pièce de résistance, dark chocolate fudge. Arranged on old blueware plates lined with white paper doilies, the fudge looked so tempting that I nearly grabbed a piece and devoured it myself. But I’d already had a cookie—all right, two—so I went back outside to watch for Ellie instead.

Because the thing was, I didn’t want to visit the dark cellar alone. I’d never been down there before; it wasn’t included in the shop space we were renting. So I didn’t even know for sure where the fuse box was located, and if I ran into anything that I needed quick help with, without her I’d be stuck.

But Ellie’s arrival wouldn’t only clear the way to my fixing that blown fuse. It would also signal the start of our biggest baking day yet. Since our opening a month earlier we’d had fabulous success with a small, varied menu: chocolate ladyfingers and fresh éclairs one day, whoopie pies and chocolate biscotti the next.

And while it was all pretty challenging—the day before, I’d had to battle a dozen cream puffs into submission while injecting them with chocolate filling—so far we’d managed not to overwhelm ourselves. Now, though, a dozen chocolate cherry cheesecakes were due to be delivered in twenty-four hours to the Eastport Coast Guard station. There they would be auctioned off and the proceeds used to pay for Eastport’s Fourth of July fireworks, three days away.

Cheesecakes, I mean, that Ellie and I had promised to bake. And although Ellie was brilliant at following her grandmother’s old chocolate-themed recipes, and we’d bought or borrowed every springform pan in eastern Maine so we could bake the cakes in only a few batches, the task still felt daunting.

Anxiously I peered up and down Water Street. With the holiday imminent, patriotic flags and banners draped the shops’ fronts. The cotton candy and popcorn stands were set up along the fish pier. A corral made of sawhorses and lobster traps stood ready for the pony rides in the post office parking lot, and a gaggle of vendors—postcards and T-shirts, earrings and refrigerator magnets, ball caps and candles and coupons good for 15 percent off the price of a tattoo—gathered on the walkway overlooking the boat basin.

But there was still no sign of Ellie. Meanwhile, I supposed I could be fixing that fuse right now if I just locked the shop again for a few minutes. After all, one cellar is much like another; my working down there alone wasn’t guaranteed to lead to disaster.

Finally I went back inside, where by now the smell of warm chocolate was so paralyzingly delicious, you could’ve used it for crowd control. Also a familiar humming sound was coming from the kitchen: the cooler’s compressor.

It meant the power was back on. Hurrying out there, I snapped the light switch once more and this time was rewarded by a bright fluorescent glow from the kitchen’s overhead fixtures.

But my relief at not having to root around in the cellar got squelched fast. The kitchen was spotless as always: a worktable stood at the room’s center, flanked by a baker’s rack and the oven on one side, baking implements ranged out on Peg-Board hooks on the other. Two stainless-steel sinks, one for dishes and the other one strictly for washing hands as per health department regulations, completed our equipment.

The walls back here weren’t brick, only plaster and Sheetrock, evidence of some long-ago architectural fiddling that had merged two buildings, ours and Miss Halligan’s, into one. Now the walls’ hospital-white paint pushed the room’s cleanliness quotient up off the charts.

Only two things marred the room’s spic-and-span perfection, in fact. The first was a box of salt lying on the floor, its spout open and a few remaining white granules spilled out in a heap.

Which wasn’t so terrible. I could just sweep the salt up, and ordinarily I would have done so at once. But the second odd thing in the kitchen that morning was so utterly incongruous that I had to blink several times just to be sure I was really seeing it:

A man’s body leaned against the worktable with its feet on the floor and most of its middle sprawled across the table’s surface. Its head was plunged down into the large, heavy pot that we used for melting chocolate. The pot stood on a warming pad whose dial, now that the power had come back on, glowed cherry red.

“Eep,” I squeaked, stepping back sharply. And just that small movement, or my voice, or maybe a breeze or something, caused the body to begin sliding.

The body’s shoes had been braced against a cardboard box full of cookbooks. That’s what I’d bumped against earlier, moving it just enough, apparently, so that now the box and shoes slipped backward together on the shiny linoleum. The arms slid, elbows slanting down off the table, hands splayed across the stainless-steel top as if feeling around for something.

Finally the hideously chocolate-coated head rose, dragged upward by the body’s weight, until at last—with the chin hooked stubbornly over its rim—the pot tipped threateningly.

“Oh no, you don’t!” I snapped, shocked suddenly out of my horrified paralysis. Grabbing the man’s shirt collar, I lifted him by it; not much, but it was enough so that his chin came free.

The pot settled. So did the melted chocolate in it. “Good heavens,” said someone from behind me, startling me so I gasped, dropped the dead guy, and whirled to confront whoever it was.

Somehow I’d expected the cops, or maybe Miss Halligan. Or perhaps some kindly space visitor, here to whisk me away to some distant galaxy until any possible need for cheesecake baking was over.

But instead it was Ellie White, a slim strawberry blonde with violet-blue eyes and a dusting of gold freckles across her nose. For her bakery duties today she wore a bibbed white apron over a blue-and-white summer shorts set and white canvas sneakers. A red-white-and-blue ball cap perched jauntily on her head, and her earrings were small, brightly enameled American flags.

“Darn,” she said, sounding vexed, eyeing the dead man. “Now we’re going to have to throw out all that good chocolate.”

My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and when I first came to Maine I had a young teenaged son named Sam, enough money if we lived carefully, and a heart so badly broken that you could have swept the shattered bits up into a dustpan and dumped them.

That was what I’d felt like doing, having at last left my husband to the mercy of his many girlfriends back in Manhattan. Driving up the East Coast with my whole past life little more than a smoldering crater in the rearview mirror, all I could think of was getting to the end of the Earth and flinging myself off.

But then I crossed a long, tide-swept causeway and found Eastport, a tiny town on a Maine island a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. The town’s narrow streets full of venerable old wooden houses overlooked a pristine bay dotted with lobster buoys and fishing boats, and the air smelled like beach roses.

It wasn’t quite the end of the Earth, but it was close; I did not, though, find myself wanting to take a leap. Instead I bought one of the old houses, an 1823 white clapboard Federal with three redbrick chimneys, forty-eight old wooden shutters, and about a million acres of peeling wallpaper all of which needed scraping.

So I began to. Also I began raising Sam, who after a dozen years of hearing his parents threatening to kill one another was nearly as broken as I was, and I can’t say I got very far with him.

Soon, though, he discovered the island’s beaches, wide sandy expanses thickly studded with rotted pilings from vanished two-hundred-year-old wharves. There he found antique bottles, clay pipe stems, and beach glass, pale nuggets of sandblasted translucence which he began collecting in Mason jars.

Next thing I knew, he was helping out on a fishing boat and doing better in school. He had his problems, still, some of them very serious ones that would end up lingering into his adulthood, but all in all he managed to turn himself around.

And then I met Wade Sorenson, a local harbor pilot who guided big ships through the wild tides and ferocious currents for which Eastport’s waters were famous. I wanted a new romance the way I wanted a chronic skin condition, but Wade bided his time, never hurrying or veering off-course. We were married a few years later; I guess he must have been practicing on those big ships.

So that’s how I got here, and now with Sam grown and the old house at last wrangled into some semblance of order (by which I mean it was no longer actively in the process of falling down) I’d found a new passion: The Chocolate Moose.

Ellie had talked me into it, but to my surprise I loved it. Creating delicious chocolate treats and selling them to our customers had turned out to be a blast; too bad that at the moment our shop was the location of a dead—and almost certainly murdered—body.

“I just don’t see how someone dies in a pot of chocolate,” Ellie murmured, still staring.

“I think maybe he had help,” I said gently.

Close up, she resembled a princess out of a fairy tale: hair of gold, long, thick lashes, a smile that could make grown men whip off their jackets and fling them across puddles for her.

“Ohh,” she breathed comprehendingly. Then, tenting her clear-polish-tipped fingers, “I wonder . . .”

So did I. But I was trying hard not to. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d wondered ourselves into a lot of trouble; one way or another, Ellie and I had a fair bit of experience at snooping into Eastport murders.

Which was one reason why I’d already decided that we wanted no part of this one. I was about to say so, too, but instead Miss Halligan stuck her head in and spied the dead guy.

“Let’s all of us step outside, shall we?” I said swiftly, body-checking the elegant-looking little owner of the vintage-clothing emporium back out through the kitchen doorway again.

I might not know much—for example, who was the guy? His thick chocolate coating and could-be-anyone clothes, consisting of a gray sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, and running shoes, obscured his identity. But I knew the cops wouldn’t like it one bit if we contaminated their nice, fresh crime scene.

I mean, any more than we already had. “Come on, Ellie, let’s go,” I said while she stood staring at the body some more.

Today’s cheesecake ingredients were all stowed in her carryalls, fortunately, and she’d left those out front. “We’ll call Bob Arnold and then lock the place until he gets here,” I added.

Bob was Eastport’s police chief. “Probably Miss Halligan’s calling him right now,” said Ellie, hurrying to catch up with me. “You know how she likes to be in charge.”

I did know, and she was excellent at it, too. So I decided to let her do the cop calling: for one thing, we still had all those cheesecakes to bake; and for another, the presence of a dead man—even a chocolate-covered one—was beginning to feel oppressive.

“Ellie?” I said. She was looking back over her shoulder at the guy again, an odd expression on her face. “You okay?”

But of course she was; Ellie might’ve resembled a fairy-tale princess, but she was as tough as an old boot.

“Fine,” she replied. Still, I wondered about the expression in her eyes, a flash of dislike aimed squarely at the dead body. Her look faded so fast, I could almost pretend I hadn’t seen it.

Almost. “The cheesecakes,” I reminded her.

She nodded slowly. “We’ll have to bake them at your house.”

Right, because the Coast Guard auction waited for nobody. One year it rained so hard that the winners wore hip boots and snagged their sodden prizes with boat hooks, but the sale went on.

I only hoped the cops would agree to interviewing us while we baked. If not, we’d be auctioning off store-bought Twinkies, and those wouldn’t even begin to pay for the holiday fireworks.

“Come on,” I said again, and Ellie followed me outside.

She knew who the dead guy was, I could tell. Knew, and didn’t much mind finding him that way, either. We’d been friends for a long time, and I could have just about guaranteed it. But she would tell me when she was ready, I knew that, too.

Besides, sooner or later they’d wash the chocolate off his face and then we’d all find out, wouldn’t we?

The kitchen in my big old house has antique hardwood floors, old pumpkin-pine wainscoting, an old butler’s pantry, and old . . .

Well, you get the idea. The cabinets are varnished beadboard, the countertops vintage linoleum. The tall double-hung windows all face south, so potted geraniums grow there with wild enthusiasm, and across from the woodstove and the old soapstone sink there’s a huge butcher-block table with a knife rack built into it.

Shortly after we found the body in our bake shop, Ellie set her carryalls down on that table and began emptying them while my housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, watched skeptically, her ropy arms crossed over her flat chest.

Bella was gaunt and hawk-faced, with big grape-green eyes and high, angular cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on. A firm believer in the germ-killing properties of hot soap-and-water, she ran my old house with the firm, clear-eyed purpose and whip-crack organizational style of a crusading military general. When we arrived, she’d been down on her knees scrubbing the baseboards with a toothbrush.

“We’ll clean up afterward,” I promised, carrying a pile of round, shiny-metal springform pans in from the pantry and stacking them on the soapstone sink.

“Mmm,” Bella said, unconvinced. Then, swiping back a hank of her henna-dyed hair with a work-roughened hand, she went on:

“You know, that father of yours is just about the stubbornest man alive.”

I did know, actually, and even more so now that he was stuck in a hospital bed.

“This morning he called a taxi and was just climbing into it when the nurses caught him,” Bella went on exasperatedly.

Ellie got the mixing bowls out; luckily, I am a fan of church fairs, and had collected a lot of them from the sale tables, where items like Crock-Pots, popcorn poppers, and George Foreman grills complete with instruction booklets were available for a dollar.

Sadly, there were no instruction booklets for handling my father. “Jacob Tiptree,” Bella pronounced darkly, “is lucky I promised ‘for better or worse.’ ”

That’s my dad’s name, and yes, I’m named after him. Bella grabbed a paper towel and began furiously polishing the doorknobs, to emphasize her point. But she didn’t mean it; the truth was that she adored my father and it was her lingering fear over his recent cardiac event that was making her so testy now.

Well, that and us messing up her nice, clean kitchen. Time to change the subject. “Guess what, Ellie and I found a dead guy this morning.”

Still polishing, Bella rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’ve heard all about that already. Matt Muldoon, it was, stone dead with his face in a pot of chocolate. Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Really,” I said, startled until I realized: Miss Halligan must’ve recognized him just as Ellie had, and the gossip wire in Eastport worked so fast and accurately that if you got a bee sting at one end of the island, minutes later somebody was getting a pair of tweezers and some baking soda out for you at the other.

So of course word was getting around. Ellie said nothing, busy cracking eggs into a bowl; she’d never liked Muldoon, but her dislike had turned to fury when he began complaining loudly about cleanliness issues in our shop.

Which was nonsense. We had no sanitation issues at the Moose. On the contrary, Bella did all our cleaning for us (she insisted) and as a result you could have run your tongue over any surface in the place and it would come up tasting like rainbows.

But that hadn’t stopped Muldoon. First it was insects, then animal hair; for weeks, now, the accusations had kept coming. As soon as we managed to disprove one, he’d presented us with another, threatening to shut us down by reporting it to his friends at the Maine State Health Department.

According to him, he visited them often at their offices in Augusta, yet another of his claims that I didn’t believe. In fact, where the Chocolate Moose was concerned Matt Muldoon was nuttier than a chocolate-dipped pistachio; I didn’t know why.

But as Bella finished with the doorknobs and started on the cabinet latches, I already had a feeling that he was going to be even more trouble to us dead than he’d been alive.

“Anyone home?” called a voice through the screen door, and Bob Arnold came in.

With his round, pink face, thinning blond hair, and rosebud lips always seemingly ready to curve into a smile, Bob didn’t look like the kind of cop who could walk into a bar fight, separate the combatants, and minutes later have the aggressor placed safely in the backseat of his patrol car, thus ending the battle.

But Bob was a master of law enforcement persuasiveness, and if that didn’t work, he had a head-swat maneuver that did. Now he seated himself on a stool at the butcher-block table, frowning.

“So you found him?” Muldoon, he meant, and he already knew that we had.

“Me,” I said, getting the rest of the butter and cream cheese out of one of the canvas carryalls that Ellie had brought with her and arranging them on the table. “I found him.”

Ellie went on cracking eggs one after another, and I figured it would be best to let her keep quiet for as long as possible. After all, her well-known dislike of the deceased wasn’t exactly going to simplify our day, was it?

And it definitely needed simplifying; just for starters, my oven here at home wouldn’t hold very many cheesecakes. Two, maybe; so even if all went well, we’d be baking until the wee hours.

“All going well” also being an idea that was fast fading into the sunset. “Okay, here’s what happened,” I said.

Bob listened with interest as I went through the morning’s events: the call from Miss Hal. . .