Death by Chocolate Pumpkin Muffin

Book 8: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Culinary Cozy Mysteries; Mystery

Synopsis

One of the sweetest places to visit in Eastport, Maine, is Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree and Ellie White’s bakery, the Chocolate Moose, where people treat themselves to the most decadent desserts. But the island town also seems to cater to those with bitter dispositions . . .

Decorations of cobwebs and creatures are just being taken down across Eastport’s picturesque houses as the community says farewell to Halloween and ushers in winter with the unique confectionaries found only at the Chocolate Moose. Revelers have gathered on the waterfront for a party at local celebrity Hank Rafferty’s ramshackle mansion, known as Stone House. The home repair TV show star and his guests await a devilish dessert delivery from Jake and Ellie—who arrive just after Hank falls to his death from the house’s turret’s balcony.

Despite his show’s popularity, Hank was not exactly beloved in Eastport, prompting the police to conduct a homicide investigation. Their number one suspect is the temperamental boyfriend of police chief Lizzie Snow, whom Hank openly hit on during the party. Although he may be hotheaded, Lizzie doesn’t believe her boyfriend is capable of killing anyone.

And neither do Jake and Ellie. Plenty of people had motive to want Hank dead—a disillusioned admirer, a school bully, and a discontent wife among them. Did any of them take the murderous plunge, or is there another ghost in Hank’s shady past yet to be revealed?
 

Release date: April 29, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

“What d’you mean, the house is haunted?” I paused on my way out of the Chocolate Moose, the small, chocolate-themed bakery that my friend Ellie White and I owned and ran on Water Street, overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay.

“You mean haunted by ghosts?” I pressed nervously, pulling the door shut behind me and locking it.

It was a week past Halloween, and all over the island town of Eastport, Maine, pumpkins on porches were softening and sagging into even scarier faces than their carved ones had been.

“Actual,” I went on to Ellie, who had backed her car out of its parking spot and now waited impatiently for me, “ghosts?”

A big orange moon hung low over the bay, shedding yellow light onto the fishing vessels in the boat basin. Wisps of mist drifted in the dark spaces under the dock pilings, and the air smelled like salt.

“Will you please hurry up?” Ellie urged. “We’re late.”

Outside the Coast Guard building on the dock, a couple of state police cruisers idled; there’d been an actual drug bust on the water earlier, a rarity for Eastport.

With one hand I stuffed my keys into my pocket while with the other I balanced a tray of half a dozen chocolate pumpkin muffins, all elaborately frosted and decorated.

“I mean what exactly are we talking about here, and why did you wait until we were leaving to tell me?” I asked once I was in the car.

The brightly lit windows of shops and galleries on both sides of Water Street displayed dried cornstalk bundles, red maple leaves, spilled apple baskets, and a motley assortment of leftover pumpkins, witches, and black cats.

“Our new client is Hank Rafferty,” Ellie said, ignoring my question as she turned uphill onto Washington Street. “He just bought Stone House.”

The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it. Stone House, though, was a different story. Why anyone would buy a home that was said to have at least one long-dead tenant still stubbornly in residence was beyond me, but now it seemed someone had.

And they wanted muffins. “Great,” I said, not meaning it. “And you didn’t mention which house it was to me because . . . ?”

“I knew you’d freak out,” she replied, and in this she was absolutely correct.

Ghosts never used to be high on my “things that are real” list, but then my ex-husband, Victor, who’d eventually died in the guest room of my house here in Eastport—he was awful, but by then he was alone and he was still my son’s father—appeared to me as I was coming out of the bathroom late one night.

To be clear, this was weeks after he’d died, and suddenly my feeling about ghosts went from take-’em-or-leave-’em to one single certainty: nope. I’d seen him, I knew it for sure, and as soon as I did know, I understood something else, too:

He looked harmless, but he was dead. I had no clue what he could or would do and I didn’t want to find out. But if the ghost supposedly infesting Stone House turned out to be real, I might find out anyway, I now realized with a sinking feeling.

On our way out of town we passed the IGA and the Bay City Mobil station, lit up like beacons in the night, then swung around the long, dark curve past Sunrise Campgrounds, its tree-sheltered campsites and lawns for RV parking shadowy and still.

“Jake, we need this job,” said Ellie, her eyes scanning the dark road ahead. “And I know it’s short notice, but catering a post-Halloween party is perfect for us.”

Sure, a job only two days from now wasn’t impossible; that is, if it didn’t come with a side of fright. Still, she was right: winter was imminent, and Chocolate Moose business always dwindled to a farthing once the weather got cold.

Not only that, but our cooler’s compressor needed replacing pronto, or when it rattled and wheezed for the last time we’d be flat out of refrigeration space, and thus out of business until however long it took to get some.

“Fine,” I gave in, and put ghosts firmly out of my mind; later, of course, this turned out to be a colossal mistake. “But tell me again why we need it enough to go out there and audition for it?”

The tantalizing aroma of warm, fresh muffins wafted from the tray. We’d never supplied samples before, but now here we were, baking free muffins and delivering them, too.

“I mean, why is this particular job so important?”

Ellie had gone all out on the muffins, even getting her talented teenaged daughter, Lee, to decorate them with bats, tombstones, and grinning jack-o’-lanterns.

Now Ellie made a face. “Lee’s friend, Arlene Cunningham, has a huge crush on Hank Rafferty,” she admitted reluctantly.

“Ohhh,” I breathed, catching on. I already knew that Hank Rafferty starred on a TV home-repair reality show whose internet presence had somehow caught fire, attracting armies of adoring fans. There were online clubs and contests, chat rooms, fan fiction and art . . .

“And Arlene thinks we might finagle a way for her to meet him, is that it?”

“Yup,” said Ellie, squinting ahead to look for the driveway that ought to be right . . . there. “Not that there’s any chance of that.”

At last she spied the turnoff, a short, sharp right over a culvert and then, it seemed, straight uphill.

“In fact, I shut down the whole idea and told both girls they’d better keep quiet about Rafferty being here, or else,” she went on, gunning the engine of her little old Toyota sedan.

Avoiding publicity about Rafferty’s presence would’ve been impossible elsewhere. But this was Eastport, where people can still keep their traps shut, and they do.

We slowed for the turn. “But I still thought I might try getting an autograph or something for Arlene,” Ellie said. “Poor kid’s kind of a lost soul, you know?”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again as bright lights appeared suddenly from behind us, blazing straight at us; we were still in the travel lane, right in their path. Massive white headlights lit up the passenger compartment and a horn blared, its sound splitting the night.

Ellie swung the steering wheel hard and hit the gas just as forcefully. Our tires howled and I smelled burning rubber as the Toyota bump-bumped across the culvert just in time.

A diesel engine’s roar, a vast, invisible shove from the big truck’s backwash, a smear of running lights . . . as it went by, we hit the steep-hill portion of the driveway and started up.

Straight up, it felt like; the Toyota’s front end rose abruptly. I fought to keep the muffins steady while the rest of me fell back into the position I imagine astronauts must assume right before liftoff.

“Ellie?” The car kept climbing, but very slowly; I really didn’t see how it managed to do it at all.

Ellie muttered words I’d never heard out of her before, meanwhile dropping the car’s transmission into low gear. Then she let the clutch out slowly, keeping one hand on the emergency brake and her other foot on the gas pedal.

The little car hesitated, chugged and nearly stalled, then crept doggedly uphill once more, and have I mentioned that Ellie has nerves of steel?

Slowly . . . I gripped the tray and gritted my teeth, silently willing the car not to roll back down into the path of another eighteen-wheeler. Finally we reached the incline’s top, rolled up over it, and stopped on level ground, both of us staring.

Ahead, the orange moon still hung huge in the night sky. In sharply cut silhouette against it stood a house, very large and starkly black. No lights or sound broke the nighttime hush.

“Welcome to Stone House,” Ellie murmured faintly.

I kept staring. “I’m not sure I feel welcomed.”

Tall, narrow windows, turreted corner towers, and a carved wooden front door that, caught in our headlights, might’ve come from a medieval castle . . . The place looked so haunted, I half expected a flock of ghosts to come flapping out the windows like bats exiting a cave.

“Yeeks,” I said quietly as we drove on into a paved circle with a white stone fountain at its center. “Maybe they should just get Entenmann’s or something.”

Ellie didn’t dignify this with a reply. The fountain was dry. No one appeared to greet us, and no other cars were in the driveway.

“He said he’d be here,” said Ellie into the silence.

A small wooden shed stood in the moonlight at the far end of the driveway circle, backed by massive old white pines that someone had planted here long ago. We parked the car and crossed the driveway to the shed.

“Hello?” I aimed the penlight I always carried through the shed’s open door, saw no immediate dangers, and stepped in.

Old wooden shelves full of dusty tools and clutter lined the walls. A workbench boasted decades’ worth of nicks, dents, and gashes; sawdust filled the chinks between floorboards.

A rough platform bed in one corner was messily heaped with blankets and a disreputable-looking pillow. The woodstove felt cold but the shed’s dim interior smelled sweetly and recently of cherry tobacco. I went back outside.

“No ghosts,” I reported. Ellie rolled her eyes. “But no one else, either.”

We walked back to the car. The hundred-plus-year-old stone part of the dwelling had been added to later, I saw from this angle. Nicely, too; a wood-and-glass, one-story addition jutted from the rear of the flagstone terrace on the water-facing side. It looked sunny, breezy if you opened the windows, and overall like a delightful spot.

“Probably that’s where all the living people hang out,” I joked weakly, still battling the lingering fear that something scary was about to jump out at me.

In the fountain’s dry pool lay a pipe wrench, a pry bar, and some other tools, as if someone had tried fixing the fountain’s workings. I looked around: no plumber.

No people at all, in fact. The house could’ve been vacant, abandoned for years, for all the life it showed at the moment. But at least I wasn’t getting a creepy feeling. The house was a mishmash of architectural styles—balconies, cupolas, arches, columns—but it wasn’t menacing-looking, and nothing had jumped out at me.

“I’ll just take the muffins in,” Ellie said, retrieving the tray from the car. I stood by the fountain and watched her stalking across the flagstones of a wide veranda with umbrellaed glass tables spaced widely on it.

But she came back minutes later looking annoyed. “Jerk,” she uttered once we were back in the car.

We drove around the rest of the driveway circle at a speed that expressed very clearly and thoroughly her deep irritation, then slowed for the steep downhill driveway.

“He left,” she said, shoving a scrap of paper across the passenger compartment at me, “this note.”

“ ‘Sorry,’ ” I read in the dashboard light’s glow. “ ‘Door open. Kitchen straight back and to the right—Hank.’ ”

“Pitch dark, nobody home,” she fumed, touching the brakes as we started down. “I left the muffins on the porch.”

We slowed again, not as much as I would have liked. “And here we were doing him a favor, too,” she gritted out.

Personally, I’ve found that favors can have a way of blowing up in people’s faces, which of course I didn’t say, and I also didn’t remind her that I hadn’t made the arrangements with Hank Rafferty, she had. After all, she was currently driving us down a hill so steep, it was like descending the side of a building.

Or falling off one. “Last time I help anyone out,” she grumbled, glancing up into the rearview mirror and frowning in surprise at whatever she saw there.

I would’ve asked about it, but suddenly the burning rubber smell wafted up again, stronger, like we were driving through a smoldering dump.

Then we began rolling faster. A lot faster, and the brakes didn’t help because they were already failing due to, I had to assume, being on fire.

At the foot of the hill another big truck roared by like a warning of our impending doom. Grimly Ellie threw the car into neutral and pulled the emergency brake.

Not hard. Just a touch. “Ellie? Are you sure this will—?”

“Nope.” Gripping the brake lever, she kept her thumb on the release button. If we rolled too fast, she applied the brake; when we slowed, she released it. Gradually we ceased careening; the smell of burning brakes became a stink, then a stench.

Until finally we were down, idling at the highway’s edge. Ellie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled hugely.

I let my head loll back. “You’re my hero.”

“Ha.” She managed a laugh. “Never a dull moment, huh?”

My heart was still thumping lickety-split. “Where’d you learn that brake thing?”

She pulled out onto the highway. “You know those reality shows where giant tow trucks go out in blizzards to haul other trucks out of ravines and so on?”

Oh great; she’d just saved us from pulverization by trying a trick she’d seen demonstrated a single time on TV.

On the other hand, the trick worked. “Anyway, I’m going to have a word with our client,” she said as we sped back toward Eastport. “Two words, actually: we quit.”

Reminding her that we didn’t even have the job yet seemed pointless—wasn’t that what the samples had been about?—so I kept quiet as we passed the fire station, the ambulance bay, and the youth center, then turned left onto Key Street.

Two blocks later, she stopped outside my house, a two-hundred-year-old white-clapboard Federal with three chimneys, twenty-four old double-hung windows, forty-eight old park-bench-green shutters, and an ell whose large open loft my husband, Wade Sorenson, used for repairing antique guns.

“You should’ve seen your face coming down that hill.”

The street lamp she’d parked under glinted in her reddish-blond hair and lit her freckles with tiny gold gleams.

“Yeah, I always look that way when my life passes before my eyes,” I retorted. “But listen, we’re not really firing Hank Rafferty before he’s even hired us, are we?”

Because not counting the driveway, the scariest thing I’d seen at Stone House was that fountain-fixing project.

“I guess not,” she conceded. “I was just frustrated, is all, and that hill . . . Anyway, don’t forget that we’re seeing him later to finalize everything,” she added.

“Right,” I agreed with my hand on the car’s door handle, and got out into the chilly evening.

Maple branches shook fretfully over the street; thin clouds streaked the moon. From inside my house came the usual sounds of barely controlled chaos: a dog barking, a baby crying, a video game bloop-blooping, and someone stubbornly trying and failing to play the Baby Shark song on, God help us, a kazoo.

Then as I started for the porch steps, I realized that what with all the thrilling events we’d experienced this evening, I’d forgotten to ask Ellie one very important question.

I knew Stone House was supposed to be haunted. Everybody in Eastport did. What I didn’t know was the rest of the story.

That is, who or what was supposed to haunt it?

The kitchen in my old house was last remodeled some eighty years ago, and that’s fine with me. Scuffed hardwood floors, beadboard cabinets and wainscoting, and a tin ceiling stamped in the fruit-and-grape-leaves pattern all give it a 1930s look that some people call dated or inconvenient, and I call home.

My elderly housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, was at the old soapstone sink washing dishes when I went in. Wearing a sleeve-raveled sweater over a green cotton housedress, rolled-down support hose, and battered moccasins, she sprayed a rack full of cooking utensils with enough steaming hot rinse water to sterilize an operating room.

“Work went late?” she asked. She was skinny and raw-boned, with long, ropy arms and grape-green eyes; her frizzy, henna-red hair stuck straight out from her head, so she stuffed it into a hairnet, mostly, and she was wearing one now.

A pink one. We all loved her extravagantly. “Yes,” I said, opening the refrigerator where I found a cold beer. I popped the top just as from somewhere nearby came the crash of that kazoo being hurled against a wall. My grandson, Ephraim, was trying to learn to play it but not having much luck.

This most recent attempt had happened in the annex: the in-law suite I’d had built onto the house, where Bella and my dad now lived. And that was problematic; I hadn’t meant it for a playroom but it had become one, and sooner or later I would have to do something about it.

But not right now. “Ellie and I visited Stone House today,” I said after another swallow of cold beer.

Bella turned, dishcloth in hand. “You drove up there? You went in?” she demanded in that rusty-screen-door voice of hers.

“Why wouldn’t we?” I plucked a string bean from the pot of them that she’d just set to boil and crunched into it.

“Don’t tell me you think it’s haunted, too,” I said. She was the last one I’d thought would ever get spooked.

Bella gave the dishcloth a good wringing-out and draped it over the faucet, looking troubled.

“Sometimes it’s good to know when to leave well enough alone,” she replied darkly, but when I pressed her about this she was too busy fixing dinner to talk, or so she claimed.

Twenty minutes later, she called, “Come and get it!” and from all parts of the house came the sounds of a stampede. Soon all nine of us were at the heavy old oaken table in the dining room, ready and eager; Bella was a magician in the kitchen.

Candles shone on the table and from the mantelpiece and a low fire flickered in the hearth, casting a glow over the hot beef sandwiches, mashed potatoes and gravy, and steamed string beans that were being dished out.

For a while the clinking of serving utensils was the only sound. I wanted to ask Bella what she’d meant by leaving Stone House alone, but with small children present—Nadine was three and Ephraim five and depending on what Bella said there could be nightmares for weeks—it seemed unwise.

But then she brought it up herself. “Stone House,” she pronounced out of the blue, “should be torn down. A person could get hurt in there, everything all collapsed and rotten.”

The house hadn’t appeared derelict to me, just vacant, and I said so; she shot me a dark look. “Just wait,” she said.

My son, Sam, looked up from the end of the table where he and my daughter-in-law, the black-haired beauty, Mika, were trying to get their offspring to eat more than a few mouthfuls while also managing to get a bite in here and there themselves.

Mika was only picking at her food, and she looked pale, as if she didn’t feel well. I was about to ask her about it when Sam spoke up.

“You talking about that big old place stuck way up on a hill, all towers and turrets and so on?” He had his father’s curly dark hair, his long, lantern jaw and hazel eyes; luckily, though, he did not share many other traits with Victor.

“We just did some work out there,” Sam said while spooning strained carrots into his infant son’s open mouth. “That driveway’s a killer,” he added as the baby’s pursed pink lips spewed the carrots back out again.

Sam had grown part-time snow shoveling and lawn mowing into a full-service landscaping and property maintenance company with vehicles and employees.

“Yeah, could your guys please fix it in two days?” I was only partly joking. “A little digging, a little grading . . .”

The baby grabbed a handful of strained carrots and flung it. Orange glop spattered my dad’s cheek; calmly, he scraped it away with his finger and ate it while the baby laughed.

Then for a few minutes we were treated to the sight of an elderly man with a stringy gray ponytail, a face like a carved walnut, and a ruby stud glinting in his left earlobe, shakily spooning pureed beef and gravy into a baby who ate it eagerly.

Mika watched in amazement, as if my dad had just floated down from heaven and was doing miracles right here at the table. My husband, Wade, looked on surprised as well, a bemused smile on his craggy, weatherbeaten face.

It must be hard for him, I thought not for the first time as he passed a big hand over his blond-going-silver brush-cut hair. With so many of us living here, it felt even to me like all the doors and windows might blow out, sometimes, from all the commotion.

But as Wade’s eyes met mine across the table, I could tell that right now, anyway, he thought it was worth it.

That is until pixie-faced little Nadine, jealous of the attention her baby brother was getting, let out a howl fit to break glass. In the silence that followed she looked around at us smugly, then deliberately upended her milk cup all over the uneaten meat and potatoes on her plate.

Well, mostly worth it.

“So tell me some more about this guy Rafferty,” I said an hour later as Ellie and I drove down Key Street.

“Oh, come on.” She turned left past the redbrick Peavey Library and then the Tides Institute, at last right into the fish pier’s parking lot. “Don’t you watch TV at all?”

“Yes, of course, but . . .”

But I’d gotten enough home repair for a lifetime since I’d moved into my old house, and teen girls’ fantasy love interests weren’t my thing, either, for the most part.

She parked under the statue of the fisherman in the yellow slicker and sou’wester, cradling a fish in his big hands like it was a small bomb he was thinking of hurling. The risen moon had gone dime-sized, the clouds streaking it as thin as spiderwebs.

“Hank Rafferty is only the most popular reality-show star in the country,” said Ellie as we got out and walked toward the Horn Run Brewery, across Water Street from the Chocolate Moose.

The breeze off the bay was damply penetrating; inside, we sighed happily as the warm air hit us.

“Zillions of fans,” she said, looking around. This late on a weeknight in autumn, the large, rustic-looki. . .