Death by Chocolate Chip Cupcake

Book 5: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Jake and Ellie are taking a break from perfecting their chocolate-pizza recipe to cater a housewarming party hosted by movie-icon Ingrid Merryfield. Miss Merryfield is famous for her old-Hollywood glamour. Her new home, Cliff House, has a reputation too—for being haunted. But she isn’t concerned, and some of her guests even try to summon a spirit during the party, using a Ouija board. What arrives instead is a freak autumn storm that downs an ancient tree, traps everyone on the property, and leads them to stumble upon a hidden room—where they find film critic Audrey Dalton, apparently frightened to death. Though Jake and Ellie don’t intend to get stirred into the mix, there’s no avoiding it—especially when they discover a locket in the victim’s hand, with a picture of Ellie and the word “next” on it. Is someone trying to write her out of the script too? Jake and Ellie begin sifting through suspects and motives, a search that takes them from a long-lost family graveyard to an antique smokehouse and finally to Cliff House’s overgrown gardens. Is there some ghostly presence involved—or a flesh-and-blood villain? And either way, can they ensure that Ellie avoids meeting her very own, very permanent Hollywood ending?

Release date: March 29, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

If I’d known right up front that so many dead bodies would be involved, I’d have vetoed the chocolate pizza. Besides, I was already busy reinventing the chocolate chip cupcake.

And then there was the earthquake. “Did you feel it?” my friend Ellie White wanted to know when we arrived that morning to our small, chocolate-themed bakery, The Chocolate Moose.

The brief, gentle shaking had happened at four a.m., just in time for me to not be able to get back to sleep.

“Yes,” I said, “but I doubt it really was one.” Everyone knew Maine didn’t have earthquakes.

“The U.S. Geological Survey thinks it was,” Ellie countered. “It was on the radio. A two-point-four, they said.”

Okay, so I’d been wrong. As it turned out there was a well-known fault line not far from us at all, along the shore on the mainland near the St. Croix River.

Well known to geologists, anyway. It seemed that a Maine island town could get as shook up as anywhere else, just not as often.

“That’s all news to me,” I told Ellie when she’d filled me in on the details.

Still, the event was over and likely wouldn’t happen again. So we dropped the subject, and it wasn’t until later that afternoon that she mentioned another thing she’d been mulling.

“I want,” she began, “a . . .”

You guessed it. “. . . a chocolate pizza,” she finished.

“Do you, now?” I answered cautiously as I glanced out the shop’s front bay window. On that damp, late-September afternoon, shadows had already begun gathering between the two-story brick or wood-framed storefront buildings on Water Street, across from the harbor in the remote island village of Eastport, Maine.

“To sell by the slice, you mean . . . ?” I let my voice trail off into deliberate uncertainty.

We’d closed early, due to not having even one customer all day. I was scrubbing out the drinks cooler and thinking about how the cupcakes I was inventing had to have real whipped cream filling, not the spray-can kind.

“Both,” she called from back in the kitchen, where she was baking chocolate pinwheel cookies. “Slices, or whole pizzas.”

Drizzle streaked the window looking onto the gray, empty street. On a day like today it was good to be warm and indoors. Too bad everyone else thought so, too; see not even one customer, above.

“Also, it has to be great chocolate pizza,” said Ellie.

Due in part to the treasured old baked-goods recipes that Ellie’s grandmother had passed down to her—the other part was plain hard work—the Moose had an excellent reputation and we didn’t want to risk damaging it.

“Not too sweet, though, not cloying,” Ellie said, tapping a wooden spoon into the palm of her hand. “With hazelnuts, maybe?”

For our work that day she wore a white cotton turtleneck, red quilted vest, and denim jeans, with a blue chambray smock top pulled on over all of them, plus white Keds. In that outfit I’d have looked like somebody getting ready to clean out a bunch of stables; she looked like a million bucks.

“Hazelnuts sound good,” I said, a little less skeptical. After all, we already sold cakes, cookies, pies, pastries . . .

So why not a dessert pizza? Except . . .

“But, Ellie,” I said, “we’ve already got cupcake invention in progress.”

The cream-filled ones, I meant. Chocolate chip batter with chopped cherries would make fine surroundings for the cream.

But I hadn’t even run a test batch yet. “Maybe with winter coming we should wait on another new recipe? At least until we’ve got more money?”

Ingredients were expensive, after all, and the empty street outside wasn’t due only to the drizzly weather. It was also because we were nearing the end of tourist season now, and the people who’d flocked here all summer had mostly gone home.

That left only a thousand or so year-round Eastporters to buy our high-quality but also more expensive bakery items. Not only that, but they had to come downtown just for them instead of getting cheaper packaged things at the IGA.

I sprayed my towel with our own homemade cleaning solution, wrinkling my nose at the pungent ammonia smell, and began wiping down the front of our glass-fronted display case.

“We could wait,” Ellie agreed. “But I’ve been thinking it over, Jake, and I feel we need something new right now.”

She’d stuffed her strawberry blond hair into a hairnet but soft tendrils curled from it, framing her heart-shaped face. Blowing strands away impatiently, she flattened the cookie dough with quick, deft strokes of her rolling pin.

“We need it because of winter,” she said. “For the variety, see? So people will keep coming to the Moose.”

She had a point. Winter in Eastport is a cheery, life-affirming combination of sleet, snow, wind, ice, and the kind of dense, energy-sapping gloom that closes in on you at three in the afternoon and doesn’t let go again for sixteen hours.

Also, Eastport really is remote—three hours from Bangor, light-years from anywhere else—and when the fog freezes, it puts another ice layer on the roads, iron hard but slipperier.

That’s why in winter some Eastporters get so desperate for entertainment that when it snows they take their lawn chairs and cocktails outside and sit watching the snowplows go by.

Not me, of course. Well, hardly ever. Anyway:

“But the truth is that mostly the idea came out of the blue and now I can’t stop thinking about it,” Ellie said.

“Ohhh,” I breathed, my interest suddenly piqued; that made a difference. When Ellie got an idea for a new chocolate treat, it bounced around in her brain for a while until finally it went away. That is, unless it became an obsession, in which case she nurtured it stubbornly through test batches, taste surveys, and careful ingredients-tinkering, followed of course by new batches, tastes, etcetera.

Her venison jerky in bitter chocolate went through twenty-two revisions, as I recall. But then came the result: tender but chewy, mind-bogglingly delicious, and delivering a really quite noticeable jolt of energy.

Customers had loved it. Now: “I suppose it could work,” I said, meaning the pizza.

In our display case right now were batches of peanut-butter-and-chocolate cookies, mocha fudge brownies with a broiled pistachio crumble topping, and a chocolate-cherry cheesecake with our special, super-secret ingredient (hint: it’s a dollop of Hershey’s Syrup) in its chocolate-wafer crust.

Fortunately, all these items were special ordered, paid for, and waiting to be picked up; no way would we be able to sell it all at this time of year, otherwise. But these and many more of our most popular offerings were the result of Ellie’s creative streak, and I had no reason to think chocolate pizza would be different.

“It’s not like we’re new at this,” I added.

We’d been in business for five years already, so we weren’t poorly equipped. We would have to buy ingredients and a couple of kitchen tools—we did not, for instance, have a pizza stone and we’d be needing one of those—but now that I thought more about it, what better thing to bet on than Ellie’s great track record?

“All right,” I said finally, pulling chairs back one after another from our quartet of black cast-iron café tables.

“You may be on to something,” I said, “so let’s go ahead and try this. How can I help?”

Saying this, I looked around for my next cleaning task. When we’d first rented it, the shop space had been filthy and in need of repairs, but now we owned the narrow, two-story wooden building, and after our improvements The Chocolate Moose boasted a slate tiled floor, handsome exposed-brick walls, and a large, late-nineteenth-century wooden-paddled ceiling fan, which slowly stirred the sweet-smelling air under the vintage pressed-tin ceiling.

“You can think about toppings,” Ellie replied as I got the broom and dustpan from the utility closet. “Jalapeño, maybe?”

Or maybe not. Ellie is brilliant, daring, inspired, but she goes a little far in the surprise combinations department.

So I didn’t answer, just began sweeping silently, watching the fishing boats motoring into the blue-shadowed harbor with their running lights glowing. As they glided up to the finger piers, their captains shut their engines down just as the last light drained from the sky and the night took over.

Ellie’s boat was there, too; I spotted the black canvas Bimini awning that shaded the helm and the small porthole in the boat’s little cabin, lit by the dock lamps on the breakwater nearby.

Soon she’d be wanting me to go out for a last, chilly ride with her before winter, and although I was a landlubber through and through, I would agree; it was important to her.

Happily for me, though, it was the last thing on her mind right now. “I’d like the crust to have a plain, saltine flavor,” she mused aloud.

On the breakwater, the dock lights shed glowing yellow cones hazy from the drizzle falling through them. “With the salt sprinkled on top, you know?” she went on. “Like the cracker.”

Chocolate where you don’t expect it, such as on a saltine, can be either a triumph or a complete flop. But I’d begun thinking already that we might have a winner; well, minus the jalapeños.

At last I set aside my broom. The clock over the counter said half past four, and now the boats bobbing at the dock were black cutouts under a nearly full moon.

While I watched them, a long, dark limousine glided up to the curb outside our shop.

“Um, Ellie?” The street was painted for angle parking. The limo parked unapologetically parallel to the sidewalk. Its windshield wipers beat back and forth over the tinted windshield to sweep away the thickening mist.

“So if you can come up with more toppings, I’ll get to work on the crust,” Ellie went on, pleased that I’d agreed.

I glanced back into the kitchen, where she’d spread the flattened cookie dough thickly with a layer of melted chocolate, rolled it up again, and sliced the roll into neat, thin rounds.

Then I stared out at the dark limousine some more. Maybe it was a Fig Newton of my imagination, as my son, Sam, would say.

“Ellie?” I repeated, turning to her again. With her fine, regular features, gold-dust freckles, and a mouth almost always curved into a smile, Ellie was as delicately pretty as a fairy-tale princess.

But she was as tough as an old boot when she had to be, which I hoped wasn’t right now. We didn’t get many long, dark limousines around here, and so far I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about this one.

“What’s in a saltine, anyway?” Ellie wondered aloud, still unaware we were being visited by the Longest Car in the World.

She slid the cookies into the cooler; tomorrow she’d bake them and—voila!—warm cookies for morning customers.

If we had any. Outside, the newly arrived vehicle just sat there, radiating vague menace. “Ellie, come look at this.”

The limousine’s headlights lit the street all the way to the big granite post office building on the corner of Washington Street. The tint on the windows kept me from seeing inside.

The wipers kept flapping. I was about to call Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, and ask him to just casually stroll down here from his office half a block away, and find out what cooked in the unfamiliar vehicle department.

But just then the driver’s-side door opened and a man in a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater, chauffeur’s cap, and brown leather jacket got out and peered carefully around.

“Ellie,” I repeated more sharply than before. “You really should come and . . .”

She emerged from the kitchen, still not listening to me at all. Rain tapped the window glass, slid down in shining trails.

The limousine driver unfurled a black umbrella as he stepped briskly around to the curb side of the car, then opened its rear passenger door. The car’s overhead light went on and something big moved inside. Big and . . . hairy?

I squinted, but whatever it was had moved out of sight.

“The obvious choice is still hazelnuts. Or maybe walnuts,” Ellie said. “Pizza crust is already fairly chewy, so no pecans. We could use hickory nuts, but . . .”

We’d driven all over downeast Maine looking for a hickory grove but had no luck.

“Look,” I said, turning her by her shoulders.

The limo driver was extending a hand to whoever was in the rear passenger compartment.

“Who . . . ?” Ellie began, her eyes widening as the vehicle’s occupant emerged from the backseat.

Which was when I saw who it was, and so did Ellie.

“Oh my goodness,” she said as the world-famous swirls of pale blond hair appeared, followed by a face that had launched a string of Hollywood hits, back in the day.

“That’s Ingrid Merryfield,” said Ellie wonderingly.

“Yep,” I said. “It certainly is.”

In her final film, Call Me, a scam artist and a woman who’s gathering evidence against him fall in love. She’d been gorgeous then, twenty years ago, maybe, and now in a tailored white pants suit and jacket she still looked fabulous, darling.

Leaning back, heedless of the rain, she peered up at the sign over our door. It was a big, wooden cut-out moose head with branching antlers, googly eyes, and a toothy grin.

Ingrid Merryfield grinned back up at it just as a kid on a bike pedaled past on the pavement behind her: sandy hair, flat brown cap, tweed jacket. Then she actually entered our shop, the door’s little silver bell jingling over her blond head as she swept in.

“Hi,” I murmured, suddenly not knowing what to do with my hands; at last I stuck them clumsily into my apron pockets.

“Can I help you?” I asked, only stuttering slightly.

At close range, the film star had soft little jowls under her jaw, and her hair looked more gluey than glam now that it was wet. But she still had that zillion-watt smile, the one that made you think the sun had suddenly come out just for you.

And it worked even better in person than it had on the silver screen. “Hello,” she said pleasantly, looking around, and gosh, wasn’t I glad I’d just finished cleaning the place up?

“I’m Ingrid Merryfield,” she said, offering her hand.

“Yes, you are!” I blurted, taking it. Then, “Oh gosh,” I added, a flush of embarrassment warming my neck.

I hadn’t thought I’d be star struck. But she just laughed, the same peal of friendly amusement that I recognized from her films, and suddenly it was all fine again and I was fine, too.

“Welcome to Eastport and The Chocolate Moose,” Ellie said.

“Why, thank you.” The blond head tipped slightly. “What a sweet little bakery,” she said including me in her glance.

“Thanks,” I replied. What are you doing here? I wanted to add, but I didn’t because with her next words she explained.

Sort of. “I’m from here, actually. Eastport, I mean. Why, when I was a little girl, this was the drugstore.”

She glanced around nostalgically. “The soda fountain with red leather stools where we sat and drank Cokes and read movie magazines was right over there.”

Ellie and I glanced at one another. Ingrid Merryfield had it right about our building’s history, but . . .

The aging film star looked up at me, her large, beautifully made-up blue eyes softened with memories. “At the back of the store was the phone booth, and on the counter were those little jukeboxes, remember?”

I didn’t. All that was before my time here, back when the city was busy with its two main industries, ships and sardines.

“It sounds wonderful,” I told Ingrid Merryfield as Ellie emerged from the kitchen with the tea she’d gone back there to make. “I didn’t know you were from here,” I added.

The star’s merry laugh rang out again as she accepted the mug and Ellie’s invitation to sit by the window.

“No one does. I’ve kept my own name—no stage name for me, thanks! But other than that, I’ve kept my personal life to myself, and somehow no one’s managed to track me back to here.”

She inhaled the tea’s fragrant steam. “Thanks, this is good of you.”

Reflected in the darkened window glass behind her, she reminded me of a rose just past its prime, no longer perfect but still lovely and fragrant.

And hiding sharp thorns, the thought popped unbidden into my head, and where had that idea come from, I wondered?

Then her driver came in, raking the shop with an assessing glance and even peeking into the kitchen, then approaching Ingrid Merryfield. Before he could speak, though:

“Bryan,” she said, “have one more look around outside, will you? Make sure there are no predators.”

I must’ve looked puzzled. “It’s what I call the paparazzi,” she said, hissing the final word unpleasantly as the driver went back out. “That’s Bryan Dwyer, by the way. My driver and right-hand man.”

Ellie caught my eye. What the heck? her look said, and I agreed; we were on an island seven miles from the mainland, and any paparazzi we got way out here were probably lost.

Then Bryan returned, and now I noticed that although his waistline was trim, his shoulders bulked his jacket out in a way that pretty much yelled, “regular workouts.”

One of those shoulders also yelled “don’t mess with me”; it was the one with the bulge that even his well-cut leather jacket didn’t quite conceal.

He saw me looking, shot me a tight smile; I shrugged back because, hey, what did I care? Whatever made him think he needed a gun was none of my affair.

Or so I thought at the time. Ellie spoke up. “Anyway, it’s lovely to see you. But what can we do for you, Miss Merryfield?”

Bryan had found no paparazzi on Water Street, I gathered. Now he eyed the display case’s content hungrily, and I realized that the two of them had probably just gotten into town.

“Listen,” I said quietly, sidling over to him. “If you’re staying here in Eastport and you want to get dinner . . .”

I glanced up at the clock. Somehow it had gotten to be a little past five. “You will want to visit the IGA,” I finished.

Three of the four restaurants in Eastport were already closed for the season, and the fourth, the Busted Flush, was mostly a drinking establishment.

“The IGA closes at seven,” I added. “Or you could drive back over the causeway and north on Route 1,” I said. “There’ll be something open somewhere up there, I imagine.”

Bryan was about sixty years old, I estimated, with short salt-and-pepper hair, a ruddy complexion, and bushy eyebrows on a prizefighter’s crumpled-looking face.

“Okay,” he exhaled resignedly, possibly contemplating the unhappy prospect of a grocery store delicatessen dinner heated up in a motel room microwave.

“Ma’am,” he said, turning to his boss. “This nice lady here says if we want something to eat tonight, we’ll need to—”

“Wait, though,” I cut in as a new thought hit me. After all, here were a real, no-kidding movie star and her driver, just in off the road to Eastport.

And here we were, able to help them. Meanwhile, I had a stepmother at home who was right now getting a delicious dinner on the table, and who would skin me alive if she didn’t get to meet them.

And there were always plenty of leftovers. “Come on up to the house,” I said. “You can freshen up and have dinner there. And maybe a drink?”

Ingrid Merryfield’s bright-blue eyes brightened even more at the mention of refreshments. Still:

“Oh, no, we couldn’t possibly impose on you to—”

“Ma’am, we don’t even know if there’s pots and pans at the house,” Bryan interrupted. “And has the power been turned on?”

Ingrid got up, looking vexed. “Well, I don’t know, Bryan, I’m not the one who’s handling—”

I got the strong sense that Ingrid Merryfield rarely handled the troublesome details. She had people for that.

Bryan, here, for instance. “But you’re right,” she added to him, “we should go there first and check things out, at least.”

Ellie stepped quickly between Ingrid and Bryan. “You should go with Jake,” she told the movie star kindly but firmly.

Meaning me: Jacobia Tiptree, Jake to my friends.

“Even if you buy food for dinner,” Ellie went on, “it seems like you’re not even sure that you’re going to be able to cook it.”

Bryan nodded at this but Ingrid Merryfield still looked stubborn, and now, to tell the truth, I was getting a bit tired of these perfectly pleasant people who nevertheless couldn’t figure out what they wanted, or how to say it if they did figure it out.

Or maybe I was just getting hungry, myself. Silently I eased them toward the door; Ingrid didn’t seem to mind and Bryan couldn’t do much about it because she was his boss.

Outside, he glanced up and down the dark street again as he moved toward the car. No one had told him, I supposed, that in Eastport you could walk stark naked down Water Street with the Hope Diamond in your hand and nobody would bother you.

“Call if we can help with anything,” I told the film star as we stood together on the sidewalk. The rain had stopped for the moment, leaving the pavement gleaming.

Then Bryan helped her back into the car, and did I catch another glimpse of someone—or something—in there with her?

Maybe, but before I could look again the long, dark vehicle was pulling away from the curb, then driving off into the night.

“They’re not headed toward the IGA,” Ellie pointed out; she’d overheard me mentioning it to Bryan, earlier. And on an island only four miles wide and seven miles long, it’s hard to get lost.

“They’ll find it sooner or later,” I said. Then we went back inside and for the next hour worked steadily, knocking off our remaining baking and cleaning chores.

Grating ginger and shaving long curls off a block of dark chocolate, for instance, or mopping off the metal top of the drinks cooler, which I’d discovered, to my horror, that persons standing more than six feet tall could actually see.

Finally Ellie gave the whole place a last looking-over while I snapped the fan and the lights decisively off and pulled my key from my bag.

“Why do I feel like we haven’t heard the last of them?” she said as I turned the key from outside.

Across the dark bay lay the Canadian island of Campobello; lights were on over there in the little windows and I could see the bluish glow of TV screens through their open curtains.

A car went by, its tires hissing through the puddles. “Of Ingrid Merryfield and Bryan? Oh, I’m fairly sure we haven’t.”

As I crossed the sidewalk to Ellie’s car something else occurred to me. “Are you hauling your boat soon?”

Each autumn the vessel got pulled from the water and stored at the boatyard for the winter, and the sooner it happened the sooner I could quit stressing about boat rides.

But: “No.” She dug around in her bag for the keys to her old Honda. “I’m going to keep it at the dock until Thanksgiving, try to go out a few more times.”

“Cool,” I told her, lying through my teeth as I got into the car, then fastened my seat belt and rolled down the window.

In the distance a foghorn honked. Down in the boat basin, the bolts and chains on the floating dock sections creaked.

“Anyway, why not?” asked Ellie, backing out. “Why don’t you think we’ve seen the last of them?”

“Well, for one thing,” I said, “can you imagine either one of them cooking anything like a decent dinner in the kitchen of some empty, unheated house they’d just walked into?”

“No,” she said with a smile from behind the steering wheel. “Neither of them looked very domestic.”

She didn’t ask the other reason I thought they’d be back. But from the way he’d glanced around and the weapon he carried, I was pretty sure I’d identified Bryan’s real profession.

So just before he left the bakery with Ingrid, I’d quietly mentioned one more thing to him, since in a world full of convenience store coffee and vending machine sandwiches I knew that what a bodyguard always wanted—

“We’re having stewed chicken with garlic mashed potatoes,” I’d told him, and heard his stomach growling in reply.

—was a home-cooked dinner.

“Jake, what’re you up to?” Ellie asked. I’d just told her about tempting Bryan with dinner deliciousness.

“First of all, Bella will kill me if I let Ingrid Merryfield get away without giving Bella an autograph.”

Bella was my stepmother as well as my housekeeper. She’d worked for me at first, then married my father, and now we all lived together in my big old house on Key Street, along with my husband, my son and his young family, and va. . .