Death by Chocolate Marshmallow Pie

Book 6: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Culinary Cozy Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

The island village of Eastport, Maine, is full of delights—including the delicious treats sold at The Chocolate Moose, the waterfront bakery run by Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree and Ellie White. But a new bakery in town is proving that you can have too much of a good thing... Summer in Eastport means lobsters and blueberries, though tourists and locals alike always leave a little room for baked goods from The Chocolate Moose. This year’s arts festival, featuring food, games, and rollicking local musicians, means even more sweet-toothed customers. But it’s also bringing competition from a new rival, Choco’s, that’s trying to slice into the action. Choco’s owner, Brad Fairway, is pulling sneaky stunts to divert Moose patrons to his own shop, and Ellie finally confronts him about his tactics. But when Brad is found dead next day—and the weapon is a gun that belongs to Ellie—it’s only a matter of time before she is charged with the crime. Sifting through the victim’s connections, Jake and Ellie sense they’re getting close to the real culprit—a little too close. Can they serve up the solution before the killer dishes up another helping of murder?

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“Oh, this is awful. One of us will just have to go over there and talk to him,” said my friend Ellie White.

Frowning, she turned from the front bay window of our small chocolate-themed bakery, the Chocolate Moose, located on Water Street in the quaint island fishing village of Eastport, Maine.

“So who’s it going to be?” she demanded.

“I’d rather stick pins in myself,” I said as I put the final chocolate cookie onto a tray of them, then slid them into the cooler.

I hadn’t met Brad Fairway, the new owner of the shop across the street from ours, and if his recent behavior was any clue, I didn’t want to. Still, it was clear that something would have to be done.

“The nerve of that man,” Ellie fumed, joining me behind the counter. Besides the cookies, I’d just finished stocking our glass-fronted display case with chocolate éclairs, fudge brownies, a chocolate-swirl cheesecake in a chocolate cookie–crumb crust, and . . .

You get the idea. Steps from the harbor, the Moose offered every kind of chocolate baked treat you could imagine, plus some you might not: chocolate-dipped bacon, for instance, and chocolate pretzels, both so edible that people had been known to make whole meals of them.

Not me, of course. Or hardly ever. Anyway . . .

Ellie slid a tray of her famously delicious chocolate macaroons into the cooler. I reached past her to filch one, popped it into my mouth, and bit down.

“Oh, good heavens.” I managed around it as coconut, chocolate and the tart cherry jam in the middle all mingled gloriously. “Do I hear angels singing?”

The jam had been Ellie’s idea. “Yes, well, our friend across the street had better hope that’s who he hears when I get done with him,” she said.

She closed the display case, carefully not slamming it, then grabbed the dustpan and broom and began sweeping angrily, never mind that I’d already done it not ten minutes ago. “Why, I’ve got half a mind to march over there right now and—”

“And what? Beat him up?” I went around behind her and put our eight black cast-iron chairs back in place around our four small cast-iron café tables. “You know you won’t do any such thing,” I added, setting out four small glass vases, each with a purple hyacinth bulb blooming in it.

“Not that you wouldn’t, or couldn’t,” I conceded. The beating she delivered would only be verbal, but that might not matter. When Ellie got mad, she could deliver a truly top-notch scolding. “For one thing, we’ve still got to finish packing everything up for our table at the art fair later,” I said.

Eastport’s art fair, held each year in June, was a gloriously colorful and varied outdoor show of paintings, photographs, weaving, pottery, and other creations that local artists had been making in their studios all winter and spring. Ellie and I had promised we’d sell pastries and soft drinks in the parking lot by the fish pier where the fair was being held.

Now Ellie looked through the front window again, her eye catching something outside. “Darn, there’s Harald Gleason,” she sighed.

I followed her gaze, and sure enough, a tall, thin teenager in black jeans and a worn black concert T-shirt was out there loitering around the cars that were angle parked on the street.

“Kid’s going to get himself in trouble someday,” she said.

At fifteen, the gawky boy was all brains—he’d just graduated from high school, nearly two years early—but no common sense. Also, from what I’d heard, Harald’s home life left plenty to be desired, but that wasn’t the point right now.

“What’s he doing, anyway?” I wondered aloud. Beyond the window, Harald sidled casually along, squinting from side to side and then glancing around to see if he’d been observed.

“Heaven knows,” Ellie replied. “Statistical study of the ages and models of Eastport cars maybe? Or he’s planning how to steal one?”

Harald was the type who could add columns of numbers in his head, fast. The last time he’d done a “statistical study,” as he called them, he’d been twelve; it had been of the number of seagull landings on the Eastport dock hour by hour for a whole day.

So Ellie’s first idea—some kind of research—wasn’t out of the question, and I hoped it was something like that. But the way Harald kept eyeing the storefront doors he passed worried me, because Harald had also become fascinated with locks lately—picking them, mostly.

“You know Harald has never stolen anything,” I said. “He just likes . . . Oh, I don’t know. The challenge, I guess.”

Harald himself had spent an hour explaining this to me recently, meanwhile surrounding several raspberry-chocolate scones and enough Pepsi to float a barge. He was a good kid, just confused by the amount of brainpower he’d been burdened with and unsure what to do with it.

I looked out once more. No Harald. “Anyway, he’s gone.”

“Mmm,” Ellie said skeptically, but then she looked around at our shop and her face softened. With exposed redbrick walls, a vintage pressed-tin ceiling, and a century-old paddle-bladed fan stirring the sweet-smelling air, the Chocolate Moose was a lot of work, but it was also a labor of love.

“And right now it’s showtime.” She unlocked the shop’s front door and turned the CLOSED sign to OPEN. “But when I see that Brad Fairway guy, he’d better—” Watch out, her tone finished for her.

She’d have said it herself, but just then the silver bell over the shop door tinkled brightly and our first customer of the day bustled in.

“Oh, cheesecake!” Emily Prager said delightedly, approaching the display case. She was a tall, angular woman with steel-gray hair and ruddy cheeks, and today she was carrying a big straw bag over her freckled arm.

And Emily liked to talk, so this was my chance. Take the bull by the horns and so on. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

Outside, welcome warmth poured from the sky; after the winter we’d had, seventy degrees felt tropical. Around me, shopkeepers were planting more red and white geraniums in tubs and window boxes.

A police car slowed in front of me. The driver leaned over toward his open passenger-side window. “You ready for all this?” asked Bob Arnold. He was a big, bearish man, round faced and pink cheeked, with pale blue eyes, rosebud lips, and a deeply dimpled chin.

“All set.” I waved toward the fish pier parking lot across the street from the hardware store. Tents, tables, and display racks were getting set up by volunteers; past them I could just glimpse the pink fringed awning over our own sales table fluttering in the breeze.

Meanwhile, the emptied vans and pickup trucks that had hauled all the artwork into the display area now began pulling out. Or trying. There were so many that a traffic jam had developed.

“That’s my cue,” Bob said, seeing the confusion, and when he’d gone, I finished crossing the street.

CHOCO’S! read the crisp black lettering on the brand-new front window. I stomped up the shop’s granite steps and went inside, where the main room’s vintage tin ceiling had been torn down, and finely milled woodwork, no-longer-trimmed windows and doors, and the venerable old horsehair-plaster walls had had foil wallpaper slapped onto them.

Slowly I turned, getting madder: brushed-steel countertops, hard molded plastic chairs, the once-gorgeous hardwood floor now covered by tiles made of imitation wood product.

“Hello?” I called out.

No answer. A mirror behind the counter showed my reflection—long, narrow face; dark eyes; short, dark hair—lit unflatteringly from above.

“Anyone here?”

Choco’s display case held an assortment of cakes, cookies, brownies, muffins, doughnuts, pastries, pies . . . all items that the Moose sold, too, only Choco’s prices were lower.

A lot lower.

“Hey! Anybody?” I drummed my fingertips impatiently on the steel countertop. The air in here was cool and still, redolent of pine-scented cleaning products but not of baking.

Nuts to this, I thought, turning to go.

But halfway to the door, I jumped as a loud burst of static erupted from behind the counter, followed by a man’s voice. “Jake Tiptree?”

That’s me, Jacobia Tiptree, Jake to my friends. “Who are you?” I demanded. “And where are you?”

“Brad Fairway. I’m in my office. You’re on my security monitor,” he said. “Talk to the mirror. That’s where the camera is.”

Yeah, talk to this, I thought and headed for the exit. “Do you know what slander is?” I called back over my shoulder.

It was what Ellie had been so mad about. “Because my lawyer does. I’ll have her explain it to you if you want.”

For unknown reasons, Brad Fairway had been harassing us since he’d first opened Choco’s a couple of weeks earlier. At first, it was small stuff: coming into the Moose for some small chocolate item, then conspicuously dropping it into a sidewalk trash bin after one bite, or shaking his head warningly at people who approached our door.

But now he’d gone too far, and if he thought he was going to get away with—

“Wait.” This time the voice didn’t come from a speaker. As I turned, a large man in a faded Hawaiian shirt and ragged cargo shorts stepped out from somewhere behind the counter. “Don’t go away mad.” His mouth smiled; his eyes didn’t.

And I knew which part of his face I believed; owing to certain unfortunate events in my past, I’d met his type before. The more I looked, in fact, the more I thought . . . But no, it was too unlikely.

“You told Nan Porter that our flour has bugs in it,” I accused as I stomped toward him. Nan was a longtime Chocolate Moose customer, and she’d reported this indignantly.

I kept closing in on Fairway, not dropping my gaze. The trick is to make them believe you’ll walk right into them, and it worked like a charm. At the last minute he stepped back hastily.

“Come on, why would I say a thing like that?” Getting dusted back was a new experience for him, I could tell by the way his piggy little eyes didn’t get friendlier.

And he still looked familiar. I hadn’t seen him up close before; somehow it had always been Ellie who’d dealt with him at the Moose.

“I don’t know,” I snapped, trying to ignore the alarms going off in my head. “Maybe the same reason you were bragging last night at the Crab that you’re getting ready to put us out of business,” I added.

The Crab was our local watering hole. The night before, Ellie’s husband had been in there and had heard Fairway’s half-in-the-bag blather. If that was all it was.

I pointed at the display-case items, with their unrealistically low prices prominently displayed. “That’s why you’re taking a loss on everything. Later you’ll jack prices up. ’Cause you’re a bully. A lying bully.”

Rude, I know. But if you really want to find out what a person is made of, get right up in their face and make ’em mad.

Fairway’s bullish shoulders moved up and down in a shrug under his bright shirt. “So?”

“So stop spreading rumors,” I said, “that our dishwasher doesn’t sterilize, our walnuts are rancid, our water’s contaminated.” And on and on. “Just cut it out,” I repeated.

His turn to move forward. “Why? Because you say so?”

He got close enough so that I had to peer up at him. His small, slit-like eyes looked amused, and as if something unpleasant hunkered behind them.

And that was when I knew for sure who he was and where I’d seen him before.

“Correct,” I managed finally, keeping my voice steady with an effort. “Because I say so. It’s slander, and I can prove damages.”

The local animal shelter’s benefit dinner would be having its desserts catered by Choco’s instead of the Moose this year, due to a story going around about our tainted ingredients. The shelter manager’s apologetic call this morning was what had gotten Ellie’s temper flaring just now.

“Damages,” Fairway repeated sarcastically.

I wondered if I poked him in the chest with my index finger, would he grab it and bend it back? But at least he didn’t recognize me.

“Why would I want to hurt you?” he asked, waving carelessly toward the Chocolate Moose. “That sad little dump,” he said dismissively, then looked back at me. “People want new and shiny nowadays. You two’re going to go broke no matter what, so if I wanted you gone, why wouldn’t I just wait?”

My finger forgot about his chest and aimed toward his eye. It might even be worth getting the whole hand broken, I thought grimly as my elbow cocked back and the finger stiffened.

“Jake! What are you doing?” Ellie appeared suddenly outside the shop window, banged her knuckles insistently on it.

Fairway stood scowling at both of us as Ellie hurried in, wincing in distaste at Choco’s new decorating scheme.

“Jake,” she said sweetly, “we need you over in the shop.” Taking my arm in a casual gesture, she squeezed it hard.

Like What the hell are you doing? hard.

“Sorry about this,” she told Fairway while guiding me toward the door.

“Yeah, not a problem,” he replied grudgingly, following us across the fake-wood floor, not chasing us, exactly.

Not quite. Ellie hustled me down the front steps, and when I looked back, Fairway’s unfriendly gaze met mine. There was, thankfully, still no recognition in his eyes.

“Not a problem at all,” he repeated before closing the door behind us. The OPEN sign in the window flipped over to CLOSED.

Yeah, you too, buddy, I thought.

“Where does he get his nerve?” Ellie demanded, still gripping my arm. “I want to go there and get some.”

“You’ve got plenty of nerve,” I said, stepping back fast, out of the way of a pickup truck with six wooden weaving looms rattling in its bed.

“Jake!” Ellie yanked me onto the sidewalk just as another car screeched by, narrowly missing me. From down the street, Bob Arnold glanced over and saw me nearly getting smushed. His shiny pink scalp reflected the morning sunshine as he shot me a look: Watch it.

“Anyway, you antagonized Fairway,” Ellie said as we reached the opposite sidewalk. “You went over there and . . .”

When we went inside the Moose, my daughter-in-law, Mika, was getting ready to do bakery duty while we were at the art show. With her glossy black hair blunt cut just at chin level and a fresh white apron tied on over black slacks and a white shirt, she looked like a fashion model moonlighting as a shop clerk, only prettier.

“I didn’t antagonize him half as much I wanted to,” I said. Once upon a time I’d have thrown myself bodily at him, broken fingers be damned.

Ellie blew a breath out. “Jake, if I’d wanted to make things worse, I could’ve gone over there myself and—”

“Anything you’d like me to do while you’re gone?” Mika cut in. Besides being my son’s wonderful wife and the mom of my two gorgeous, terrifyingly smart grandchildren, she was a natural peacemaker.

“No thank you, dear,” Ellie replied, turning down Mika’s offer, her last word coming out dee-yah, the Maine way of saying it. “You just wait on customers and take phone orders and—”

“And if that guy from across the street comes in,” I interrupted darkly, “feed him a poisoned cookie.”

Ellie shot me a warning look, but of course I wasn’t serious. For one thing, I was pretty sure we didn’t have any poison in the shop.

But later I wished I hadn’t said it.

Ellie settled into her lawn chair under the pink fringed awning shading our art fair table. Around us, the vivid hues of watercolors, oil paintings, etchings, and pastels popped brilliantly, interspersed with displays of pottery, stitchery, and stained glass.

I pulled my chair up beside Ellie’s. Out on the water, beyond the end of the fish pier, small whitecaps raced briskly, but here onshore the breeze felt sun kissed.

“I’m glad we have Mika to depend on,” I said. “Someone we know well and can trust.”

Mika and my son, Sam, and their children had shared my big old house with the rest of the family—my dad and stepmother; my husband, Wade Sorenson; and me—for nearly three years before finding their own place.

“Right,” agreed Ellie. Then she added, “Uh-oh, here they come,” as the first art fair visitors began circulating among the tents and booths around us.

Ellie sold two chocolate-cream cannolis to a couple dressed all in L.L.Bean. Tourists, definitely. I handed change to a fellow who’d already bitten into his mocha cupcake.

“And you?” Ellie’s strawberry-blond curls glinted red in the sun as she put two chocolate cream puffs into a white paper bakery bag and added two napkins.

Her thick-lashed eyes, the deep, dark blue of woodland violets, regarded me mildly. “How are you doing?”

“Me? What about me?” I asked innocently as a gaggle of ladies arrived at our table to try out our German chocolate cake.

“Well?” Ellie demanded again when they’d bought thick slices and moved on. “Something’s been eating you since you were in Choco’s.”

I sighed deeply. “Okay. Remember how I’ve always said I hope no one from my deep, dark past ever moves to Eastport?”

Ellie put three chocolate dream bars into a bag for a skinny young fellow in a faded T-shirt and dungarees that had seen better days.

You wouldn’t think from seeing him that his intricate beadwork was in museums around the world, but it was. With a pleasant grin and a mumbled thanks, he returned to his booth, where said beadwork was selling like crazy.

Unlike our baked goods. The few sales we’d made still left us with a tableful of sweets.

Ellie dumped a few small bills into our cashbox. “Yes, I’ve heard you say people from your past need to stay there, many times. But what’s it got to do with . . . oh.” She stopped as the explanation hit her. “You mean you . . . ?”

“Yup.” I leaned back in my chair. “Brad Fairway. He’s aged, and he’s put on forty pounds or so. But back in the old days . . .”

Back then, I’m sorry to say, I’d been a money manager for guys whose large, illegal incomes arrived in manila envelopes. They were normal on the outside, these guys—that is, when they weren’t killing people—but on the inside, they were . . . well, not nice.

Not even a little bit. And they’d needed somebody who was careful and trustworthy to handle all their money: to move it around, invest it and make it grow, and mostly to hide it so no IRS investigator or organized-crime cop could get a sniff of it. Someone like me, young and at the time without noticeable scruples, who could make a cash flow, a calculator, and a set of phony account books sing and dance like a talent-show contestant.

“I never knew his name. He came around where I worked,” I said.

My office back then was a small, cluttered room at the rear of a shoe store in Queens. There I unsealed the cash, counted it, recorded it, and routed it through phony invoices and faked payments until all that dirty money was clean as a whistle again.

“Ohh,” Ellie breathed. “So is he here on account of you?”

She knew enough about my past life to understand that parts of it could still come back to bite me, even after all this time.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I’d been rattled earlier, but now I was calming down. “I doubt he ever noticed me back then, and I’m sure he didn’t know me just now.” Or if he had, his poker face was better than I recalled. “Only from now on you’d better deal with him,” I said. “I’d rather not give his memory another chance to get jogged.”

Ellie nodded agreement. “I’ll go over there again later, soft-soap him a little. See if I can find out why he’s being so . . .” Her final word rhymed with hissy.

“Bring over our old laptop, ask him if it’s worth fixing,” I suggested.

As I recalled, he’d had a string of electronics stores back in the city; maybe appealing to his knowledge might soften him up now.

Or not. I drank some coffee out of the go-cup I’d brought, and watched Harald Gleason slip easily among the crowds of fairgoers. I gathered he’d given up lurking on the sidewalk in favor of running errands for artists who were stuck at their sales tables and he was getting tipped for his trouble.

Like I said, he was smart, just not really well socialized. I hoped the boy found his way in life somehow, and then I forgot about him again.

“Just don’t rile Fairway up any more than I already did,” I added to Ellie. “I don’t know what all other activities he might’ve gotten into since back then, but they probably weren’t good.”

Leg breaking, for instance, had been a specialty with some of those guys. And . . . other things.

“Don’t worry,” Ellie said. “I want to end his hostility, not encourage it.” Unlike your performance with him earlier, she didn’t add, but I knew she was thinking it.

“Fine. But if he gets mad again, leave before things escalate.”

Birds of a feather, after all, and the last time I’d seen him, Brad Fairway had been flocking with the equivalent of velociraptors.

Still, on a day like today it was hard to worry about him for long. Down in the boat basin, lobster boats motored around, unloading their haul and heading out again.

“Pretty afternoon,” Ellie remarked dreamily, turning her face up to the sun.

On the water, a flock of small sailboats tacked upwind, white sails billowing tautly, while beyond them the Campobello ferry chugged toward Canadian waters.

“And the artists seem happy,” I said. The half dozen looms I’d seen earlier were set up nearby. The students seated at them bent to their work, while their instructor, a slim, fortyish blond woman named Babs Littrell, a visiting instructor at the Eastport Arts Center, moved cheerfully among them.

An hour later, when the students took a break, Babs Littrell stood talking with a slender young man in linen trousers and a loose white shirt, with leather huaraches on his feet. Silver medallions formed the band of his black felt hat.

He and Babs bent their heads together over his phone’s screen, where colors moved in an animation of some kind. She looked pleased to be shown whatever it was, he not so much to be showing it, and when I looked over again, he was gone.

Then around twelve-thirty some local musicians with fiddles and banjos and a penny whistle began tuning up on the fish pier, and by the time Ellie had fetched us a pair of hot pork sandwiches from the lunch cart nearby, people were dancing.

Peppery-hot oil in small paper cups came with the sandwiches; the tender, spicy pork practically melted on contact with my teeth. As I devoured mine, the weaving students set their shuttles aside again and got up, then headed for the lunch cart, along with Babs Littrell.

Ellie frowned thoughtfully at our still unsold treats. Finally, she rose and went back to the lunch cart and spoke with the weaving instructor while pointing at our table.

“Sodas and desserts,” she said, answering my unspoken question when she returned. “They can’t buy them if they don’t know they’re here.”

She was right. This time it wasn’t Brad Fairway’s dirty tricks obstructing us, but a large tent, full of brilliantly hand-painted silk jackets, trousers, and scarves, blocking people’s view of us.

Now Ellie had advertised our presence, though, and ten minutes later, our tub of sodas and crushed ice held only slush, while not a crumb was left on our table.

“And that,” said Ellie, dusting her hands together, “is that.”

She folded our chairs while I emptied the cashbox, gathered stray napkins and bakery bags, and picked up litter. Then we started back toward the Chocolate Moose, and it was while we were passing the weaving area that I got my first look at what Babs Littrell had on her own loom.

“Oh,” I heard myself saying. The fabric was nubbly in some places, smooth in others, colored in shades of blue, lime green, and purple flecked here and there with glimmers of gold. “I guess now I see how she’s won all those prizes,” I murmured.

Babs Littrell’s summer residency at the arts center had been covered extensively in our local newspaper, the Quoddy Tides. Now I understood why. The cloth shimmered richly, looking almost alive. Standing there coveting it, I imagined how it might feel when draped over my shou. . .