Death by Chocolate Raspberry Scone

Book 7: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Culinary Cozy Mysteries; Mystery

Synopsis

Summer guests are eager to sink their teeth into tantalizing desserts at The Chocolate Moose, Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree and Ellie White’s bakeshop in the island village of Eastport, Maine. But attracting the wrong kind of attention can be deadly . . .

With the August heat strong enough to melt solid chocolate into syrup, Jake and Ellie crave a break from the bakery ovens, despite tourist season promising a sweet payday. But they never envisioned spending the last weeks of summer drifting around Passamaquoddy Bay searching for pirate’s treasure—and a dead body.

Sally Coates believes her husband was murdered off the coast, and begs Ellie, a trusted childhood friend, to locate his remains. It’s unusual that a skilled fisherman would vanish along with the gold doubloon he inherited from his grandfather. And Sally isn’t the only one coveting the valuable heirloom for her own.

As Jake and Ellie’s island-hop for answers, they find themselves caught between hungry sharks and hungrier suspects. Can the duo tempt fate and dodge danger before there’s blood in the water—or are they destined to fall into the jaws of a killer’s trap?

Release date: April 23, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“Standing in front of a hot oven during a heat wave is not what I signed up for,” I complained, sliding another batch of chocolate chip cookies onto a platter.

“You could stand over there by the hot cash register,” my friend, Ellie White, replied, waving the knife she’d been using to smooth frosting onto a cupcake. “Or the hot display case, or . . .”

Ellie and I owned and ran a small, chocolate-themed bakery, the Chocolate Moose, on Water Street in the island village of Eastport, Maine. Ocean breezes cooled us reliably here, or had until recently. But outside our shop window now, relentless heat shimmered under a mercilessly blue sky.

“Even the walk-in freezer is starting to look good to me,” I said, spray-rinsing soapsuds off the baking sheets I’d just scrubbed. “I mean as a place to sleep.”

It was August, the height of Eastport’s tourist season, with a high-pressure system lodged stubbornly over us, rocketing the thermometer above ninety for five days straight. And we weren’t the only ones; just two miles across Passamaquoddy Bay the Canadian island of Campobello lay sweltering under a sun so cruelly bright, even the seagulls should’ve been wearing sunglasses.

Ellie finished frosting the cupcakes and offered one to me. “Chocolate cherry. Lots on top, just the way you like it.”

But the only kind of cupcake I wanted was frozen and had a gin-and-tonic wrapped around it. “Thanks. Better put them in the cooler before they melt.”

The little silver bell over the shop’s front door jingled and a half dozen tourists came in. In their L.L. Bean summer garb they all looked adorable, but also as if they were sweating to death.

“No air-conditioning?” one of them inquired disappointedly, dragging the back of his sunburned arm across his forehead.

We did have a big AC unit in the kitchen window, but with the oven on it didn’t help much. Our century-old building’s vintage paddle-bladed fans turned overhead, too, and a portable electric fan in the open back door kept the air moving.

But it was still hot air. The newly arrived tourists looked around uncertainly as if they might leave, until Ellie rushed out and cajoled them to a table by the front window; iced coffees and slices of ice-cream-topped chocolate cake followed swiftly.

Past them through the window I caught sight of a blue-and-white power boat motoring into the harbor across the street. Two people stepped up onto the pier, each lugging one end of a long black bag.

The third person off the boat was a woman who even at this distance looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her, and anyway it was the bag that interested me. While the tourists chatted happily over their refreshments, I followed Ellie back out to the kitchen.

“Hey, somebody just brought in a body bag. With, I’m pretty sure, a body in it.”

Not that we hadn’t been expecting this; Paul Coates’s boat, Sally Ann, had been found by the Coast Guard running in circles way out past Cherry Island, two days earlier.

Coates hadn’t been aboard, nor in the water nearby. But now he’d been found floating or washed up on shore, I supposed.

“Sally will be relieved,” Ellie said.

Coates’s widow, she meant. It seemed to me a strange kind of relief, although I guessed it might help to put a stop to the worst of the bereaved woman’s imaginings. Still, the reality was just as bad: cold salt water, fast currents, sharp rocks . . .

“Not the cheeriest thing for a new top cop’s first morning on the job,” I said.

Eastport’s new chief of police was supposed to start work today, and amazingly for Ellie and me, we didn’t even know his name, yet. The Moose had been madly busy this summer and we’d had other things going on, too, that had kept us hopping. So all we did know was that the new chief had a strong recommendation from our previous one, Bob Arnold.

And since Bob had been caring, thoroughly competent, and a good friend, besides, we figured that was enough. Ellie rinsed and dried her mixing bowl and utensils, then turned to the big butcher-block worktable in the center of the kitchen.

“All right, now,” she said determinedly, eyeing the ever-present “To Bake” list taped to the refrigerator, “what’s next on the hit parade?”

But then the bell over the shop door rang energetically again, signaling the start of the midmorning rush. That was when people—even sun-hammered tourists—began feeling that they might just possibly eat a little something: a fudge-frosted brownie topped with a scoop of vanilla, say, or a chocolate cannoli stuffed full of sweetened cream and with cinnamon, cocoa powder, and powdered sugar lightly sprinkled onto the top.

You know, something light. “I’ll go wait on them,” said Ellie. “And how about you run up to the bank, meanwhile, and get us some change?”

I’d have hit the bank earlier, but major construction was under way at my house (see things going on, above) and talking to building contractors always makes me too crazy to be able to count money correctly.

“Fine,” I said, grabbing the cupcake that Ellie had offered me. The mingled flavors of dark chocolate and cherries hit my brain as I stepped out into the shop area; by the time I reached the counter, my face must’ve looked like it belonged on a saint being drawn bodily up into heaven.

“Ellie’ll be out here in just a minute,” I began around a mouthful of frosting, and then I saw who the customer was.

“Hi, Jake,” said the woman at the counter. “How are you?”

“Hi, Lizzie,” I managed. She had short, spiky, black hair, blood-red nails that matched her vivid lipstick, and smoky-dark eye makeup applied skillfully and with a feather-light hand.

“I’m fine, how are you?” I added inanely. She was wearing dark blue tailored Bermuda shorts and a black, short-sleeved T-shirt whose fit flattered her well-toned arms and shoulders. A badge was on her belt, a holster with a .38 auto nestled in it was on her hip, and she was, I suddenly understood, Eastport’s brand-new police chief.

“Congratulations,” I said calmly, just as if her sudden reappearance in Eastport hadn’t knocked me for a loop.

But it had.

My name is Jacobia Tiptree—Jake to my friends—and when I first came to Maine, I thought big crime only happened in big cities. Ones like New York, I mean, where back in the bad old days I’d been money manager for a crew of guys so evil that just knowing them at all was probably a felony.

Then when their criminal fortunes went south and mine were about to, I ran, leaving my husband and his many girlfriends and moving—along with my then twelve-year-old son, Sam, twelve going on twenty (by that time he’d already known so much about drugs, he could’ve started a pharmaceutical company)—into the two-hundred-year-old Eastport house that we still live in, today.

With thirteen rooms, eight fireplaces, three porches, an attic, and a two-story ell, the house was much larger than anything I’d lived in before; for a while Sam and I rattled around in it like marbles, unused to so much space.

But nowadays the place is so fully inhabited that people and animals are practically tumbling out the upstairs windows. Sam and his wife, Mika, and their three kids; my husband, Wade, and I; and my elderly dad and stepmother, Jacob Tiptree and Bella Diamond, all live in it. I’d put a chair outside the bathroom door recently so that the person waiting—in our old house, someone was always waiting—wouldn’t have to stand.

Which brings me back around to the hot August morning when Lizzie Snow showed up at the Chocolate Moose:

“Would you like to sit down?” I invited, indicating one of our black cast-iron café chairs. It was just like the one I had outside the bathroom, part of a crateload we’d bought at a deep discount when we opened the Moose.

Lizzie shook her head. “Just came in to say hello.” She looked around at the exposed redbrick walls, slate tile floor, and the whitewashed barn boards fronting the cash register.

“Nice place,” she said approvingly, sniffing the coffee-and-chocolate-scented air with evident pleasure.

“Thanks, but . . . what’re you doing here?” I asked. From what I knew of her, she could’ve worked anywhere, and Eastport—two hours from Bangor and light-years, or so it often seemed, from anywhere else—wasn’t exactly a step up on the career ladder.

“New chief,” she confirmed without answering my question.

Two summer-garbed customers came in and approached the display case to make their selections; after that, two more couples and a trio arrived, all looking hot, tired, grouchy, hungry, and thirsty.

Ellie hurried to help relieve these difficulties while I wished Lizzie Snow good luck with her new job.

“Let’s hope no more of those anytime soon,” I added with a wave toward the harbor and the boat that brought the body in.

“Jake,” Ellie reminded me, quick-stepping with the coffeepot in one hand and the ice-water pitcher in the other, “if you are going to the bank at all, you might want to . . .”

Hustle it up, her tone implied, and she was right; soon it would be wall-to-wall people in here again and we’d need coins to make change.

Outside, my car sat baking at the curb: a ’74 Fiat Spider with a black canvas top, five speeds forward, and the classic Pininfa-rina body still with most of its original apricot paint.

“Mind if I ride with you?” Lizzie got in without waiting for an answer and settled into the passenger-side bucket seat. I turned the ignition key, exhaling with relief as always when the engine rumbled to life—FIAT, in case you didn’t know, stands for “Fix it again, Tony”—and we pulled out onto Water Street.

“So that was Paul Coates’s body you guys brought in?” I asked, because of course it had been Lizzie I’d seen getting out of the boat.

Lizzie Snow, I marveled silently; who’d have thought we’d see her again around here? Last time, she’d been in town hunting for her dead sister’s daughter. She didn’t know if the child was dead or alive, and she didn’t know what sort of life the child might be leading if she was alive.

She’d said then that she’d never quit until she located her niece, and I’d thought I understood. But that was back when I didn’t have grandchildren at home; now the thought of losing one of them—or any child, really—made my heart lurch painfully.

Driving slowly up Water Street between rows of sun-baked parked cars and throngs of visitors strolling in and out of shops, I wondered what sort of loss Lizzie Snow was living with, and if I dared ask her.

“Yeah, the body was probably Coates,” Lizzie replied after a thoughtful silence. “It was pretty banged up,” she added as we passed the Eastport breakwater.

The massive L-shaped concrete structure extending out over Passamaquoddy Bay had a paved deck so vehicles could drive out onto it; now cars and trucks crammed the parking spaces, while below, the boat basin held docks and wooden finger piers with large and small boats tied up at them.

“The medical examiner’s office will let us know for sure,” Lizzie said, watching the white van I’d seen earlier exit the breakwater and turn onto High Street.

“I just went out with them to start getting my sea legs,” she went on. “Not many boats way up where I was.”

In Maine’s vast northern wilderness territory, she meant: the state’s wild rooftop, where the trees outnumbered people a thousand to one and so did the bears.

“The body was otherwise okay, though?” I asked, by which I meant dead but without, for instance, a bullet in its head or a knife in its chest.

“What?” she asked distractedly. On Washington Street, a kid on a skateboard raced toward us, spinning in circles and jumping the sidewalk’s cracks in high, fracture-inviting leaps.

“Yeah,” she responded, still watching. “Yeah, it was fine. No foul play signs that I noticed.”

Our no-skateboarding ordinance was mostly just meant for downtown, where visitors gazing dreamily at the pristine water, picturesque fishing boats, and quaint, nostalgia-inducing old buildings were as vulnerable as bowling pins.

But the rule was enforceable anywhere in town, depending on how much of a hard-ass a police officer wanted to be. So when Lizzie flashed the kid a thumbs-up sign and a grin, it gave me some hope that her new job might actually work out; in Eastport, picking your battles is a skill worth having.

Something about her still reminded me of a fuse waiting to be lit, though. It was one of the reasons I’d been glad to see her go last time, and so flustered by her reappearance: the sense that when Lizzie Snow was around, so was trouble.

And now she was here.

“I think all the guys on the boat expected me to throw up when I saw the body,” she said.

We crossed High Street between the bank, the sail-making and repair shop where long rolls of canvas were just now being delivered, and the laundromat. “You mean because it was bad?”

Lizzie made a face. “No, ’cause I’m a girrrl,” she drawled exaggeratedly, and laughed.

I did, too. “Yeah, well, I know the guy whose boat you went out on,” I told her.

When Frankie Munjoy wasn’t ferrying cops and dead bodies, he took people out on sightseeing voyages around the bay.

“And I happen to know he gets sick at the sight of a loose egg,” I finished. “You didn’t, though, did you?”

“Get sick? No. But I could’ve. He’d washed up on a stony beach out there, tide rolled him around. Rocks’d bashed him.”

Also he’d been in salt water, which wouldn’t have helped. I pulled into the bank’s driveway and parked.

“Want me to put the car top up?” I asked as I got out.

It was nearing noon and the sun overhead continued to be brutal; my straw sun hat was pretty much essential gear lately, and today I was tempted to tuck some ice cubes around the brim.

But sunglasses were Lizzie’s only concession to the heat and brilliance. “I’ll be fine, take your time.”

I squinted against the glare bouncing off the Fiat’s hood. “Fine,” I said, “but when I come out here again I want some real answers. To why you’re here, for a start.”

And for how long, at whose suggestion . . . but mostly it was the why that I wanted, because Lizzie Snow was no more a small-town police chief by nature than I was the Queen of Sheba.

She was a murder cop. She’d been one in Boston and then in northern Maine; pretty successfully, too, from what I’d heard, so if her hunt for her niece was over, why try something here instead of going back to the city?

There had to be a reason, but ten minutes later when I came out of the bank I was no closer to knowing it. Instead, my attention was captured by a tall, dark-haired man in a yellow polo shirt and white tennis shorts who stood by the Fiat.

After an instant I recognized him as Dylan Hudson, Lizzie’s old . . . what? Buddy, boyfriend, something in between?

I didn’t know that, either, but I remembered him from her last visit, when he was still a Maine state cop; he’d been hanging around her then, too. Now Lizzie leaned back against the Fiat’s headrest, her hands raised in a warding-off gesture.

“Okay, okay,” he was saying as I approached, “I just wanted you to know I’m here, so it doesn’t come as a surprise.”

“Nothing can surprise me anymore where you’re concerned, Dylan,” she said tiredly as I got in and started the car. “You just do your thing and I’ll do mine, that’s all.”

Dylan Hudson had dark, deep-set eyes that gleamed with intelligence, angular features that weren’t handsome but instead something better, and a wolfishly mischievous grin that promised fun plus sharp teeth.

“Fine,” he said, backing away undiscouraged; the smile was the kind you wanted to fall headfirst into, whether you liked him or not. “I’ll see you around, then.”

“Not if I see you first,” she muttered as he stood watching us go, but despite her heavy sigh somehow I didn’t believe her; not quite.

“So, are you and Ellie still snooping?” Lizzie changed the subject as we started back downtown. By now the Chocolate Moose would be packed full of customers; I didn’t really have time to ask what Lizzie was doing here, and hear the reply.

If she gave one. I pressed the gas pedal. “Sometimes. Now and then.”

Because as I’d learned nearly as soon as I’d moved here, I was the nosy type and so, as it turned out, was Ellie. Also I found out that big crimes weren’t confined to big cities; not even major crimes, like murder.

“But it’s been quiet for a while,” I said, as we turned onto Water Street and parked.

We got out of the car and into a swirling wave of people licking ice-cream cones, kids spraying Silly String, and dogs lapping at water bowls placed outside shop doors.

Packed sidewalks, full restaurants, shops crowded with visitors searching for the perfect souvenirs . . . it all looked busy, happy, and prosperous, a real sea change from the days when tourists in Eastport were scarce as shark’s teeth.

Which were visiting, too, I’d heard—the sharks, I mean, not merely their teeth—in our waters recently; there’d been articles about it in the Quoddy Tides, our local newspaper, and sightings by several fishermen around the bay.

Fortunately, though, the sharks weren’t my problem, or so I still thought as I yanked the shop door open and shouldered my way through the small crowd of people inside the Moose.

Behind the counter, Ellie was counting out nickels and pennies with one hand while refilling a coffee cup with the other, meanwhile smilingly telling a fellow who’d just stuck his head in behind me that no, we didn’t have a public restroom but the port authority building did.

“Half a block that way at the breakwater entrance,” Lizzie told the man, whose expression brightened considerably once he’d gotten a good look at her.

Because sure, she was a cop: shiny badge, sensible shoes, and the gun, of course. But with her clipped-short black hair and flashing eyes, those red lips, and the snug, black T-shirt that she wore like a second skin, she was also, as my son, Sam, would’ve said, a complete knockout.

I tossed the bank bag at Ellie, who caught it one-handed while answering the ringing phone again. Then I nudged my way behind the counter and began slinging cake, cookies, and iced coffees, taking money, and handing back change. For a while it was quite the little whirlwind of chocolate-themed commerce, and I forgot all about Lizzie until I looked up and she was gone.

“Who was that on the phone?” I asked when the latest rush was over. Two local ladies sipped tea at a table in the corner, but otherwise the Moose was finally quiet.

Ellie put the heel of her hand tiredly to her forehead, shoving back stray blond curls. “A big catering order was on the phone, that’s what.” She sighed, sinking into a chair.

The tea-sipping ladies got up and paid their check, then went out to the jingle of the bell over the door.

“How big?” I asked cautiously; very cautiously, in fact.

During our first couple of years at the Moose, the money situation had been perilous in the extreme; it’s why we’d added dessert catering to our repertoire. But this summer the shop had boomed, so we were already scrambling hard to keep up.

“Really big,” she replied, “at least for us. Four dozen chocolate-raspberry scones with egg wash and sanding sugar.”

“Oh, is that all?” I managed after a moment, then took a deep breath. We were already alternating sessions of baking late at night so that we’d be stocked and ready for the next day’s clamoring hordes of . . . I mean, for our valued customers.

“When?” I asked weakly. Sanding sugar, by the way, is the glittery, large-grained kind, good for decorating and crunch.

“Saturday. Darn this hair,” she added, grabbing a handful and snapping it back into a rubber band.

“But, Ellie,” I said gently, “we’ve never made chocolate raspberry scones before.”

She nodded resignedly. “I know. It’s for a bunch of shark scientists coming here this weekend for a conference. They’re going out on boats and doing observations and so on, and there’s refreshments afterwards.”

“They’d better hope they don’t turn out to be refreshments, themselves,” I said, hoping to make her smile.

She did. Then: “This is the kind of catering job we want,” she added, heading back toward the kitchen, where I’d spied the ingredients for chocolate dream bars already set out.

“Big job, big paycheck,” she said. Where she’d found the time for dream bars, I had no idea, but I wasn’t shocked. With her strawberry-blond curls, pale freckles like a scattering of gold dust, and wide, long-lashed eyes the exact same color as woodland violets, she might’ve looked like a princess out of a storybook but she was as tough as an old boot.

“Anyway,” she called from the kitchen, “we’d better put our thinking caps on, because I said yes and in four days we’ll need those scones.”

Great, I thought, and of course they’d feature raspberries as crimson as blood drops; just right for shark enthusiasts.

Outside, summer in Eastport continued despite the heat. On the sidewalk across the street, an athletic-looking woman with a small dog in a backpack strode vigorously along. She’d rigged up a small blue umbrella that stuck up out of the backpack to keep the sun off the dog.

Behind her came girls in bright halter tops, sun hats, and shorts, like schools of exotic tropical fish; beyond them where the water glittered, fishing boats puttered in and out of the harbor with lobster traps stacked on their decks.

I turned back to the shop, where the paddle-bladed fans slowly stirred the heat under the pressed-tin ceilings. Scones, I thought again; lots of them, and soon.

On the plus side, however, the rest of the afternoon passed quickly and without incident. Between waiting on customers and producing more baked items to feed them, I didn’t have time to wonder any further about Lizzie Snow, and Ellie didn’t, either.

“Wow,” was all she said when I finally got the chance to tell her Lizzie was our new police chief. As she spoke, she zipped by me carrying a tray loaded with eclairs, a brownie, three iced coffees, and a slab of chocolate cream pie.

It was the final order of the day; it was almost five o’clock, and the cooler and the glass-fronted display case were nearly empty. Once this last table had finished up and departed, we could close.

“You know what I think would be good?” Ellie mused as I wiped down the counter and the coffeemaker.

When Ellie says something would be good, I listen; she’s the one who invented chocolate-covered bacon, after all.

“Fruitcake with chocolate in it,” she answered herself, leaning in to clean the last cookie crumbs out of the cooler. “Good fruitcake, I mean, the homemade kind.”

“Ooh,” I replied; good fruitcake is the food of the gods even without chocolate. “And a thin chocolate drizzle on top,” I suggested.

She looked up. “Dark chocolate,” she agreed, “but not so dark that it isn’t—”

Sweet, she’d have finished, but instead the bell over the shop door jingled yet again.

“I’m afraid we’re closing,” I began as a tall, blond woman came in.

Then I figured out who it was and put down my cleaning cloth as Ellie hurried from behind the counter.

“Sally!” she cried. “Oh, you poor thing, what’re you doing here? I thought you’d be—”

“What, lying down in a dark room, sobbing?” she asked with a grimace. “I’ve got three kids, I don’t have time for that.”

Sally Coates was in her late thirties, but her face today was the lined, haggard visage of someone much older. It was probably her husband, Paul, whose body they’d brought in.

“I’m so sorry,” I said uselessly as Ellie guided the new widow to a chair.

“I had hopes,” Sally said shakily, “but now . . .”

Her blunt-cut, wheat-colored hair, normally smooth, was a rat’s nest; her ragged denim shorts and stained, much-worn T-shirt said that the usually spiffy Sally had reached the end of her . . .