Death by Chocolate Snickerdoodle

Book 4: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Craft & Hobby Cozy Mysteries; Culinary Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

As co-owners of Eastport's beloved waterfront bakery, The Chocolate Moose, Jake and Ellie know their customers expect them to cream the competition. But they're really just in it for fun, hoping to get Jake's daughter-in-law baking again. Those plans collapse when fearsome local curmudgeon Alvin Carter is murdered, and every crumb of evidence points to Tiptree family friend—and all-around sweet guy—Billy Breyer. Billy's sisters beg Jake and Ellie to prove his innocence. After all, lots of folks had gone sour on Alvin—the only thing the retired lawyer liked better than bilking widows was swindling orphans, and several victims of his long-ago schemes still lived in Eastport. But just as the ladies begin sifting through the suspects, a series of grass fires blaze across the island, cutting off access to the mainland. Could someone be trying to hide the truth about Alvin's murder? Now, Jake and Ellie will need all their courage—and an extra dash of that down-east Maine stubbornness—to sniff out the real killer before anyone else gets burned...

Release date: February 23, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Cozies

Print pages: 199

Sample

It was a warm golden morning in late September in the remote island village of Eastport, Maine, and the air smelled like sea salt, pine needles, and smoke from the grass fires burning in fields all around the edges of town.

“If only it had snowed more last winter,” said my friend Ellie White as we hurried down Water Street together.

Tourist season had nearly ended, and the shop windows in the two-story brick or wood-framed downtown storefronts held postcards, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and ball caps with lobsters, lighthouses, and eye-patched pirates embroidered on them, all on sale at a big, winter-anticipating 50 percent off !

“Or if summer hadn’t been so dry,” I added.

To our right, past the fish pier, the boat basin, and the massive concrete-and-steel breakwater, which stuck out over the waves, Passamaquoddy Bay spread wide and blue.

On it, small fishing boats motored slowly, their crews hauling up rectangular wire lobster traps and stacking them on deck, later to be brought to shore.

Because it was nearing the end of lobster season, too.

“Or if,” said Ellie, “we could just get a little rain right now.”

But that seemed unlikely; the sky was the same relentless clear blue as it had been for weeks, and we were all beginning to feel a little anxious about it.

“One spark down here is all it would take,” said Ellie, and she was right. The nineteenth-century structures weren’t built to modern fire codes, and while our local volunteer firefighters were well trained and dedicated, they weren’t miracle workers.

Ahead, our store’s sign—a wooden cutout of a moose head, his big, googly eyes and goofy grin suggesting he’d just eaten something tasty—hung out over the sidewalk.

“Well, at least that hasn’t burned down yet,” said Ellie with a wan smile. The night before, several acres of dry grass had been charred black before the fire trucks could get there.

THE CHOCOLATE MOOSE said the ornate stenciled lettering on our front door. Ellie turned the key, and the little silver bell over the door jingled prettily as we went in.

Sunshine slanted in through the shop’s front bay windows, lighting up the half dozen cast-iron café tables and chairs placed against the room’s exposed-brick interior walls.

The air in here smelled like warm chocolate, butter, and sugar. Owned and run by Ellie and me, the Chocolate Moose made and sold cakes, cookies, brownies, éclairs, scones—just about anything you could bake with chocolate.

I glanced back out the window and noticed wisps of smoke drifting across the water; something was burning, again, somewhere nearby, and a trickle of unease about it went through me. The fires hadn’t approached the town yet, but . . .

Fortunately, I had plenty to distract me.

“Once all those fishing boats get in with those traps, their crews are going to be hungry,” said Ellie, straightening the chairs and spiffing up the napkin holders on the tables.

I flipped a bunch of wall switches, then lugged trays of cookies from the cooler as overhead the big old paddle-bladed ceiling fans began turning and the radio began playing WSHD, the local high school’s student-run station.

The Bee Gees burst bouncily from the speakers my son, Sam, had set up for us here, as I began filling our glass-fronted display case with the variety of treats we’d made for today: chocolate pinwheels, ginger-chocolate biscotti, and the ever popular chocolate-chip lace cookies, which are like regular ones, but so delicate, they might float right away from you.

“Good thing we’ve still got the lobster fleet coming in,” I said.

Did the cooler sound a little different this morning? I wondered. Inside its motor, had its sound changed from a gentle mutter to something more resembling a high, unhappy . . . ? I thought it had, but then it settled itself and ran normally again.

“Although not for much longer,” I added, meaning the lobster fleet.

Summer business had been good. Ellie’s treasured old family baking recipes, plus the top-quality ingredients we used, drew tourists in droves. Only her genius-level organizational skills and my dismal but slowly improving ability to just shut up and do whatever she said had kept us sane, even when we were baking practically twenty-four-seven.

Once the summer people had gone home, though, sales had dropped off sharply. We were, after all, a community of only twelve hundred year-round residents, and money was tight around here at the best of times.

Ellie started the coffeemaker, then booted up the cash register and the credit-card reader on the counter. Finally, she opened our laptop computer.

“You’ve got that right,” she said. “From now until next summer,” she went on, scanning the incoming email, “I’ll be glad for any customers we can get. I don’t care who they are. Speaking of which . . .” She read the screen. “Huh. We just got a special order.”

“And?”

The kitchen timer buzzed; somehow when I wasn’t looking, she’d gotten a tray of snickerdoodles—the batter made the night before and left in the cooler—into the oven.

“You won’t like it,” she said as she hurried back to the kitchen to slide snickerdoodles from the tray onto a wire rack.

“Why won’t I?” I asked, following her and watching the just-baked treats. Each one wrinkled delectably as it cooled, a kind of magic I never got tired of. “I mean, it’s for cookies, right?”

Wielding the spatula, she didn’t look up, which right there was a bad sign. “Yes,” she said slowly.

“So?”

Strawberry-blond and blue eyed, with small, finely carved features and a lot of gold-dust freckles sprinkled across her nose, Ellie was ordinarily a wide-open book expression-wise. But she still didn’t answer. So this was going to be a thing, and possibly not a good thing, though I didn’t see how a cookie order could be bad. After taking a warm snickerdoodle, I poured coffee from the fresh pot and sat at one of the café tables.

“Lay it on me,” I invited.

“Twelve dozen,” said Ellie, and I didn’t quite choke on my bite of cookie. “The triple chocolate ones,” she added, moving the final snickerdoodle to the rack. “There is one problem, though . . .”

“Ellie!” I swallowed coffee to wash down the swear words I wanted to say. Triple chocolate cookies were delicious, but they were also complicated and labor intensive. “Ellie, have you forgotten that the annual Eastport Cookie-Baking Contest is this weekend? How can we possibly also make twelve dozen—”

“By Saturday,” Ellie called out from the kitchen, where she was already scrubbing the baking tray. The smell of hot soapsuds mingled pleasantly with the aroma of snickerdoodles.

“For the Elks,” she added as I got up and carried my cup into the kitchen. “Or is it Elk?” She shook her head impatiently, a blond curl bouncing out of the hairnet she wore in the shop. “They’re having a regional meeting.”

“Fine,” I said. “Good for them. But how many cookies can an elk eat, anyway? Besides, don’t they usually just browse in forests? Chomp on leaves and berries and so on?” I held my cup out to her. “I mean, when you stop to think about it, are chocolate cookies even good for . . .”

She gave me a look of long-suffering amusement. “Very funny. But I don’t think whether it’s good for them is exactly the point here.” She took the cup and dunked it into the soapy water. Then her tone changed. “I mean, we talked about this, remember?”

I did. We had. “But—”

“We said if we wanted to get through next winter without all the financial problems we had last winter . . .”

Right. Just one big expense—such as, for instance, if an entire brick wall should happen to collapse without warning off the rear of our building and land in the alley out back, the way it had the previous January . . .

Well, let’s just say that a nice, soft cushion made of cash would’ve softened the blow considerably.

“I know,” I replied unhappily. “Building up the bank account before winter really sets in would be great. But still, the contest . . .”

Eastport’s annual cookie-baking contest was a local tradition. Anyone could enter, and there were no rules; if you turned your boxed mix into something better tasting than my from-scratch creation, you won.

But that didn’t often happen. Eastport people had their own treasured old family recipes and wouldn’t dream of foisting any packaged concoction on the judges. It was what made the contest so exciting—and competitive.

“What if we made the same cookies for both?” she asked as she wiped the cup dry. “For the contest and the special order?”

She slipped out of the bibbed apron she’d tied around her slender middle. Beneath it she had on a white cotton tunic with rolled sleeves, blue denim clamdiggers, and Keds, and despite the perspiration glistening on her brow, as usual, she looked like a million bucks.

“Brilliant,” I said. “Chocolate batter, chocolate chips, chocolate frosting . . . How could they possibly lose?”

“Plus,” she agreed, smiling wisely, “a secret ingredient.”

I nodded. It was a dagger of white chocolate stuck into each cookie’s top that made them so good that they could imperil your very soul. We’d even nicknamed them mortal-sin cookies.

“There is still one problem, though—” she began, but just then the little silver bell over the shop door rang again and I went to see why.

“Hi, Jake!” a pair of lively young voices rang out.

That’s me. It’s short for Jacobia—accent on the second syllable—and I’m Jake to my friends.

“Hi to you, too,” I greeted the ruddy-cheeked young women who’d just entered the Chocolate Moose.

After dropping their backpacks full of schoolbooks by a table, they hurried to the display case and peered in.

“Oh, there’s dream bars!” said Anna. She was the tall, blue-eyed one, her flaxen hair braided into a thick plait that ended halfway down her back.

“And éclairs,” Helen sighed happily. She was a dark-eyed, curly-haired brunette with red lips and a dimpled chin.

“One of each, please,” said Anna, opening her purse.

They both wore overalls, red ribbed-cotton river driver’s shirts with men’s plaid work shirts over them, and faded ball caps: red for Helen, blue for Anna. I took the money, gave back change, and poured two coffees over ice, light and sweet.

“On the house,” I said of the drinks, and after a bit of polite struggle, during which I pointed out that they were already poured and would be wasted if the girls didn’t drink them, the two stubbornly self-sufficient young ladies gave in gratefully at last.

“Studying for a test?” Ellie emerged from the kitchen with a towel in her hands as the girls pulled textbooks from their bags.

“Yes!” groaned Helen, rolling her eyes. “Algebra.”

“Not me,” said Anna, shaking her head indulgently at her sister. “I’m just her study coach.”

“Good for you both,” Ellie said approvingly. After they’d lost both their parents suddenly in a domestic incident two years earlier, Ellie had become a sort of adopted aunt to them.

Domestic incident . . . That was putting it mildly. But I had no time to think about it, as now more customers began coming in. One after the other, they got and paid for their coffee and breakfast pastries—today’s was chocolate prune, and don’t knock it till you’ve tried it—and went out again, keeping me busy for nearly an hour.

But when the mini-rush was over, I looked at the girls again. Surrogate aunthood had not been extended to me as it had been to Ellie—for one thing, Ellie had a daughter nearly the girls’ age—but they liked me well enough.

“You two aren’t dressed for school,” I observed. “And aren’t you hot in those outfits you’ve got on?”

Canvas pants, those red long-sleeved undershirts poking out from flannel cuffs . . . I spied sweaters stuffed into their packs, too, and yellow windbreakers tied around their waists.

“Teachers conferences,” Anna explained. At fifteen, she was a sophomore; Helen was sixteen and a junior.

“We don’t have school today. So we thought we’d go out on the boat and get our traps, and that’s what we dressed for,” Helen added.

Which made sense; a seventy-five-degree morning might make the day feel like midsummer, but on the water it was more like fifty, and if you didn’t get drenched by icy spray at least once out there, you weren’t doing it right.

“But now it turns out Helen’s got this big make-up test,” Anna said, sounding put upon. “We thought she’d gotten out of it, but then the teacher set it up for the school secretary to supervise.”

“Which was a dirty trick,” Helen added indignantly. “But I’ve still got to be ready for it, unfortunately.”

Both girls worked part-time on the lobster boat they were talking about going out on, and they had been allowed to drop a few traps of their own, besides, for extra money.

A plan formed in my head. “When’s the test?” I asked.

“Two o’clock,” said Anna. “But if you don’t want us to be studying in here,” she added hastily, “we can go—”

“Oh, no. You two are always welcome,” I told her. These cheerful, energetic young women were a pleasure to have around. “But if you leave here now,” I said, “can you still make it to the boat on time and get your traps hauled?”

“Yes,” said Helen, looking puzzled. “They’ll be going out soon, and the boat’s due back in right after lunch. But . . .”

“Then why don’t you go down to the dock, come back right afterward, and I’ll help Helen with her algebra,” I said.

Back in the old days, when I lived in the big city, I’d made a good living on my math skills, plus some other, less socially acceptable talents, which we’ll talk about later.

“Great! Thank you!” the girls enthused, and after stowing their books behind our counter, they scrambled out the door.

But... “Do you think that was a good idea?” Ellie asked when they had gone.

Getting involved, she meant. The sisters were adorable, but their home life was complicated. A hands-off policy had always seemed best, meddling-in-their-affairs–wise.

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But math is one of the few things I’m good at.”

And being motherless was a subject I knew plenty about, too.

“At least we’ll get a chance to feed them again,” I said. “Why don’t I run home and get some of those good baked beans you made and the garlic mashed potatoes we have left over?”

Because I happened to know that when you’ve been out fishing, hot baked beans over buttered mashed potatoes, with a salad and a rosemary biscuit on the side, is just what the doctor ordered.

“Good idea.” Ellie got a coffee for herself and sat down to do our shopping list for the special order of cookies.

Which reminded me. “What did you mean, there’s a problem about the contest?” I asked.

She began to reply, then stopped herself. “Never mind. If you don’t notice it when you get home, then maybe I’m wrong and there isn’t one.”

“Okay,” I said slowly and decided to take her at her word. We’d been friends for a long time.

The little bell jingled as I went out.

On Water Street, autumn chrysanthemums had replaced the geraniums in the planters outside the shops. Flags snapped briskly outside the Coast Guard station overlooking the harbor, and the breeze had shifted, so the air was damp from the spray blowing in off the whitecaps on the bay.

I stepped along quickly, not having brought my own sweater with me. Now the wind out of the north had an edge on it, under a sky whose summer azure had suddenly turned dark blue.

Uphill, past the library, the Happy Crab restaurant, and the flower shop, with its bright bouquets beaming in the window, I shivered a little; the fiery reds and oranges beginning to show in the maple branches overhead gave only the illusion of warmth.

Up Key Street, I walked between small, close-set cottages with picket-fenced dooryards, neatly swept front walks, and early Halloween decorations festooning their porches. A few had snow shovels already standing sentinel by their doors. I’d thought this was an affectation until one Thanksgiving, when I’d had to dig my own shovel out from under a foot of the icy white stuff before I could start roasting the turkey.

But now at the top of the hill, my own house appeared: a big old white clapboard dwelling with three redbrick chimneys, forty-eight old double-hung windows with green wooden shutters, two porches, and a granite foundation peeping up beneath it.

I climbed the porch steps and pushed open the back door. “Hello?” I called out.

No answer. I hadn’t expected any. My husband, Wade, was a harbor pilot, which meant he guided ships through the powerful tides, treacherous currents, and underwater granite ledges that our bay had in marvelous abundance. At this time of day, he was at the port authority building, assembling his paperwork and getting ready to take a tugboat out to meet whatever freighter was on its way in, headed for our cargo port.

Probably everyone else was out, too, I thought, the house was so quiet. But then, hanging my bag in the hall, I heard a strange sound, a sort of sniff mixed with a faint whimper.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I said, following the sound to the kitchen.

It was a bright, high-ceilinged room with tall, bare windows, beadboard cabinets and wainscoting, and a big kitchen table with a red-checked cloth spread neatly over it.

In one corner stood an antique potbellied stove; in the other, a soapstone sink. At the Formica-topped counter under the old beadboard cabinets stood my daughter-in-law, Mika, wearing black slacks, flat cloth slippers, a white shirt, and a three-month-old baby cradled in a fabric sling hung around her neck.

My little grandson, Ephraim. clung to her pant leg. He wasn’t fussing exactly, but the look on his small, round face said it wouldn’t take much to get him going.

“Hi,” Mika managed, hastily brushing her blunt-cut black hair back from her face. She’d been crying, and I’d surprised her.

In front of her on the counter were a large mixing bowl, some eggshells, a bottle of cooking oil, and a bag of flour.

“Mika, what’s wrong?” I scooped Ephraim up and away from her. She’d been crying hard, and from his red-cheeked, woebegone little face, I could see that soon he would be, too.

“Oh,” she sighed with a hopeless wave at the mixing bowl. A fat tear slid down her cheek and fell into it. “It’s all just so . . . I can’t seem to . . . Oh, Jake, what am I going to do?”

“Now, now,” I said, hoisting little Ephraim onto my hip while guiding his mother over to the kitchen table.

“Sit,” I commanded, and she did. Mika ordinarily had a stiff upper lip that wouldn’t quit. Since she and Sam and the kids had begun living here, I’d grown to love her a lot.

But now she felt wretched, I could see. Ephraim wriggled to get down; unwisely, I let him, and he reached up to his mom just as the baby began crying.

“Here, let me,” I said, hoisting the infant from the sling to my shoulder, but little Doreen wasn’t having any of me, either. Kicking and waving her tiny pink fists, she jerked her baby head back hard, as if trying to fling herself from my arms.

“Wow. She really owns her feelings, doesn’t she?” I said, which at least got a quavery laugh out of Mika.

Ephraim held the baby’s pacifier up to me in an offering gesture; then, just as I reached for it, he popped it into his own mouth and ran off.

“Oh,” said Mika, “I should go get him before he . . .”

“Never mind,” I told her. My new granddaughter had stopped crying and was asleep. I handed her to her mother. “He won’t hurt anything,” I added. “This house is so baby proofed, there’s no way he could possibly—”

A crash sounded from the dining room. After putting my palm up in a “Stay where you are” gesture, I followed the sound to the dining-room table.

He was under it, with the tablecloth pulled down over him. What had been a stack of library books waiting to be returned lay around him on the floor.

“Oopsie,” he whispered, peeking out, watching me carefully to see what I would do about all this.

But there’d been enough crying around here already. “Ssh!” I whispered, putting a conspiratorial finger to my lips.

“Sssh!” he agreed, and we tiptoed back to the kitchen, where Mika was still at the table and the baby still slept.

“Now,” I said when I’d gotten out a new box of crayons and a coloring book and Ephraim was settled with them. “What’s this all about?” I said as I sat across from Mika.

“Oh, Jake,” Mika sighed heavily. “I feel so foolish about this. Even my doctor says I’m fine, physically, but . . .”

Tears threatened once more as I sat across from her; she gestured at the mixing bowl and ingredients on the countertop.

“This is going to sound crazy, I know, but I’ve made those popovers a million times at least. But now . . . I can’t remember how!” she wailed.

“Oh, dear,” I said, sympathizing automatically with her, not yet quite seeing the problem. “That does sound distressing. But can you not just look them up in the cookbook?”

Her answering gaze was hopeless. “Oh, sure. I can do that. But even then . . . Jake, it’s not only that I’ve lost my memory of it, but it’s also like I’ve never even seen the recipe before.”

Then I got it. “Oh, honey, you’ve got mom brain,” I said, recalling my own life right after Sam was born.

One week I’d been juggling millions of dollars for people, and the next, I could barely add and subtract.

“How long has it been now since you were working?” I asked my daughter-in-law.

A professional pastry chef in Boston before she married my son, Sam, Mika had moved here to Eastport and had had Ephraim, then had developed a freelance gig catering for business events. She’d done that until practically the moment before Doreen was born, and from the mess on the countertop now, I gathered that she was ready to go back to it.

Or she’d thought she was.

“Four months,” she said as the baby stirred warningly and then slept again, to our relief. “But how could that possibly be enough to . . . ?”

“And in all those four months,” I asked, already knowing the answer, “have you done anything at all other than take care of these kids?”

On the floor, Ephraim stopped scrubbing his crayons over the coloring-book pages and began tearing the pages out.

Mika got up to stop him. “Sweetie, let’s not—”

I shook my head at her, indicating that it really didn’t matter how many pieces he tore those pages into, and she sat again.

“Nothing,” she admitted, biting her lip hard. “I’ve done nothing else.”

Oh, man. Hearing this, not only was I not surprised Mika was having trouble with a recipe, but I thought, too, that it was a wonder her brains weren’t actively leaking out her ears.

“Okay,” I said decisively. “We’re changing that. I don’t know exactly how yet, but . . .” I got up. “As for that popover recipe, let’s finish them together, shall we?”

Ellie would know that I had a good reason for delaying my promised return to the Moose. In fact, I got the feeling this was what she’d meant by “problem,” and since she’d mentioned it in connection with the baking contest this coming weekend, I had to wonder whether . . .

But before I could finish my thought, just then my elderly father, Jacob, and Bella Diamond, my beloved housekeeper-slash-stepmother—and yes, I do know our family’s relationships are complicated—came in.

“Oh,” said Bella, sweeping little Ephraim up into her arms and cuddling him fiercely. “Who is this handsome boy here?”

Skinny and ropy-armed, with big grape-green eyes and a jutting jaw full of mismatched teeth, Bella had frizzy red hair and a voice like gravel being shaken in a metal bucket.

“My boy!” she declared, nuzzling Ephraim’s neck while he wiggled and giggled. “And I’m going to eat him up!”

She was wearing a purple sweatshirt, red pants, and black high-tops that Ellie’s tween-aged daughter, Lee, had decorated with silver glitter. Behind her, my dad scrunched his withered-apple old face into terrifying expressions, all of which made Ephraim laugh, then took him from Bella’s embrace. . .