Chocolate Dipped Death (7 page)

“Karen, I didn’t—”

She slammed out the door before I could even figure out what I wanted to say. I heard her footsteps thundering up the stairs, and a second later, the door to my apartment banged shut hard enough to rattle the windows. I figured she’d gather up her things and take off before I could argue with her, and that was fine with me. I
knew
it was a bad idea for her to stay with me. Was I ever right.

I paced around the kitchen for a little while, rehearsing what I’d say when Karen came downstairs again. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. After twenty, I got tired of waiting and decided to beard the lion in her own den . . . or at least in mine.

I pounded up the stairs, threw open the door, and launched into my speech so Karen couldn’t cut me off. “Look, I know you’re hurt, and I don’t blame you. But you couldn’t be more wrong about how I feel, and I resent the fact that you just
jumped
to conclusions—”

It took me a few seconds to realize that the only one listening was Max, but at least he had the good manners to stop chewing the toilet brush and pay attention. As for Karen, she lay sprawled facedown on the sofa bed, snoring loud enough to wake the dead.

For the rest of the morning I did my best to
forget Evie, Savannah, Karen, and the contest. I finished a large bouquet of cinnamon disk roses, scheduled for delivery that afternoon, filled a handful of smaller orders, and packaged three to go out in the mail. We do a pretty good mail-order business, mostly shipping candy to people who used to live in Paradise. I didn’t have any as loyal as the legendary Cole Porter who, back in the jazz age, had nine pounds of fudge shipped to him every month from his hometown confectionary, but I was hoping to get there someday.

With the mail ready, I loaded a batch of apple pie taffy onto the puller and rang up several more sales before I finally gave up waiting for Karen to show up and called in backup. It was Saturday, so I started with my A-list. That proved to be a waste of time. My twin nieces, Dana and Danielle, already had plans, my sister-in-law Elizabeth was in bed with a cold, and my mother would never make it up the mountain from Denver before closing.

The longer Karen stayed away, the more angry I became. She was being childish and petty, and she’d chosen to deliberately misunderstand what I’d said. Even if she walked through the door
that minute
and begged me to forgive her, I wasn’t sure I would.

I made about twenty calls before I managed to convince my cousin Bea to help out for a few hours. She had a few things to say about the late notice, and she demanded an exorbitant hourly wage, but beggars can’t be choosers. Bea is the oldest daughter of my father’s oldest brother, a force to be reckoned with under any circumstances. She’s organized and punctual. She’s also tall, slim, a natural blonde, and . . . well, bossy.

She showed up a few minutes before eleven and promptly took over. “So what’s going on with Karen?” she demanded as she slipped a gold-edged Divinity apron over her clothes. “Where is she?”

I’d managed to evade the question over the telephone, but it was a whole lot harder with Bea standing less than two feet away. “She’s tied up this morning,” I lied. “Something came up with one of the kids.”

Bea stared me down. “Really? I just saw the kids. They all looked fine, but Karen wasn’t with them.”

“Oh?” I tossed off a casual shrug and turned away. “Well, maybe I misunderstood then.”

“Sergio says she never came home last night.”

“He did?”

“Apparently, she accused him of cheating on her and took off in a huff.
And
she’d been drinking.”

Like I said, news travels fast in Paradise. I was too curious to resist. “What else did he say?”

“Only that she was staying here with you until she pulled her head out. So where is she?”

“Upstairs, sleeping it off. I was hoping Sergio wouldn’t have to find out.”

Bea laughed and set to work straightening the display of old-fashioned favorites we order from a supplier on the East Coast. Necco Wafers, Big Cherry, Zotz, Lemon Heads, Chick-O-Stick, Dots, and Crows, a dozen old-fashioned candy bars all crowded together on a glass table with retro lunch boxes from the fifties and sixties. It was a fun display, and one that garnered a lot of attention from our customers.

“Listen,” Bea said as she pushed, pulled, prodded, and dusted, “Karen gets emotional. Sergio knows that. This isn’t the first time she’s come unglued, and it won’t be the last.”

“So Sergio’s not worried?”

Bea shook her head. “She’ll stay away for a day or two, then she’ll wander on home and act as if nothing ever happened. It’s what she does to assert her independence.”

I had a hard time believing that, but I was hardly an expert on my family and their habits. “Does she always accuse Sergio of cheating on her?”

The little half smile on Bea’s face slipped. “No. That’s new.” She finished with the retro table and moved to the next display without missing a beat. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, though. I keep saying she should just tell Sergio she needs time away when the kids and the house start to feel like too much, but I don’t think she even realizes what’s happening until it’s too late.”

“We’re talking about the same Karen?” The woman Bea described wasn’t the cousin
I
knew, but then, neither was the Karen who’d calmly threatened to commit murder.

“They have their system,” Bea said, “and I guess it works for them. Who’s to say?”

Not me, that’s for sure.
“What does Sergio do when she comes back?”

Bea picked pieces of taffy from the wrong baskets and put them where they belonged. “I don’t know. Probably nothing.” She stepped back to survey her handiwork, then shot a look at me. “What’s wrong?”

Too late, I realized I’d been scowling. It didn’t take a genius to see that Bea was familiar with the routine at Divinity, and I wondered if
she
was harboring bad feelings toward me. But I had deliveries to make, a room to set up, and contestants scheduled to arrive in less than five hours, so I shelved my questions with my other family issues and smiled as I turned away. “Nothing. It’s just been a long day.”

Bea watched me for a few seconds, then shrugged and went back to work. I got busy putting together the baskets of taffy I planned to put out for that night’s guests.

Aunt Grace’s Divine Saltwater Taffy has been a staple at Divinity since the day the store opened its doors. In the beginning, she sold only a handful of flavors. Now, we offer more than a hundred and fifty—everything from amaretto to wintergreen.

Despite its name, there’s really not much salt or even a lot of water in taffy. Legend has it that back in 1883, a man named David Bradley owned a candy shop on the boardwalk of Atlantic City. One night a huge wave hit and soaked his entire inventory in seawater. He’d jokingly called the candy “saltwater” taffy after that, and I guess the name stuck.

When I was a kid, I spent hours watching the old-fashioned rotating hooks stretch the thick, glistening candy ribbons in the shop’s front window. I’d loved helping Aunt Grace cut the candy into bite-sized pieces after enough air had been worked in to make the color and texture just right, and I’d felt so important, wrapping each piece quickly so they would keep their shape.

Without a doubt, though, my best memories were wrapped up in the December evenings when Aunt Grace let the cousins make taffy by hand. We’d waited breathlessly while the corn syrup, sugar, water, and cornstarch boiled, and bickered good-naturedly among ourselves over how we wanted to pair up when it was our turn to work. We’d watched, wide-eyed and eager, while Aunt Grace turned the taffy out onto the greased counter and we’d slathered butter on our hands while Grace cut the huge mound of candy into sections just large enough for two kids to handle.

When the candy was finally cool enough, she’d added flavor and coloring, then turned us loose on the thick, shimmering mounds. It must have been pandemonium, with all of us vying for our favorite flavors and whining when our arms got tired, but I believe that Aunt Grace loved those evenings as much as we did.

I pulled a variety of flavors onto the long workbench overlooking the sales floor—chocolate, strawberry, banana, grape, cherry, cinnamon, orange, peppermint, wild huckleberry, and berry blast. Each flavor had a memory attached, and I could have lost myself in them without any effort at all, but remembering how great Aunt Grace had been only made me realize how far short I fell.

Like Aunt Grace, I had no children of my own, but I did have nieces and nephews. Unlike Aunt Grace, I’d spent most of my life on the fringes of their world, too busy with my life as a corporate attorney and Roger’s wife to make myself a regular part of their world. I’d been more like Savannah Vance—
Horne
—than Grace Shaw, and I didn’t like knowing that.

Well, that was then and this is now,
I told myself firmly. Dana and Danielle might be teenagers, but that didn’t mean it was too late to improve my relationship with them. And Wyatt’s boys were even younger. Brody was eleven. Caleb, eight. I still had time. I just had to be smart enough to use it.

It was midmorning before I found time to take a break. Leaving Bea in charge, I hurried upstairs, made sure Karen was still breathing, then hooked Max to his leash and led him outside. Last night’s storm had blanketed the city in eight inches of soft, white powder. Today’s cloudless sky left brilliant sunlight winking off the snowdrifts all along Prospector Street. The air was crisp and almost cold enough to make my lungs hurt as Max and I hurried along the sidewalk. This was the kind of weather that drew tourists out in droves, and the city had on its best face to welcome them.

Max stopped in front of the store to investigate something buried under the snow, and I stole a glance at the store’s front window. I’d been doing my best to keep up with Aunt Grace’s traditional seasonal display windows made entirely of candy and other edible substances. Just last week, I’d replaced December’s miniature Christmas village with a sledding snowman molded from tempered white chocolate riding down a cotton candy hill on a bright red chocolate sleigh.

My snowman’s chocolate arms waved in gleeful abandon as the sled careened down its imaginary slope. Tiny threads of monofilament ran from ceiling to strategic points on his stocking cap, a carefully constructed mosaic made from broken pieces of red and green hard candy, and the flying ends of his candy-cane scarf.

Without a doubt, Aunt Grace’s windows had been both more artistic and more intricate than mine, but my efforts weren’t half bad. Give me another twenty or thirty years, and I might even restore Divinity to its former glory.

I was just turning around again when Miles Horne’s black BMW roared up the street and screeched to a halt, blocking traffic. The driver of the Suburban behind it had to slam on his brakes and narrowly avoided rear-ending the BMW, but Miles didn’t seem to notice as he shot out of the car, leaving his door wide open. Oblivious to the angry shouts of the drivers all around him, Miles headed straight for me.

I wasn’t in the mood for more questions, and I made up my mind to tell him so, but he surprised me by asking something else entirely. “Have you seen her?”

“Who?”

“Savannah. Has she been here?”

“No. Why?”

He turned away before I finished speaking and covered his mouth with one hand.

“Miles? Is something wrong?”

“I can’t find her,” he said, his voice low. “I’ve looked everywhere.”

I tried to calm him down. “Have you tried calling again?”

“Only about twenty times. There’s no answer. She left the hotel at five thirty this morning. I haven’t seen her since.”

I had a bad feeling, but I didn’t want to make Miles worry even more, so I did my best to look and sound reassuring. “Try not to panic,” I said evenly. “There are probably a hundred places she could be.”

“And I’ve checked in every one of them.” Someone honked, and another driver rolled down his window and shouted for Miles to move his car. Miles waved them both off, took a couple of jerky steps, and dragged his hand across his face again. “Delta hasn’t seen her,” he said. “Nobody on the hotel staff has seen her, and she hasn’t been to that coffee shop she likes so much. What if something’s happened to her?”

“I’m sure she’s just fine. Have you driven along the route she takes when she runs? Maybe she twisted an ankle or pulled a muscle and can’t get back to the hotel.”

He turned a set of agony-filled eyes in my direction. “I’ve looked everywhere I can, but I don’t know my way around that well, and she doesn’t take the same route every day. She likes variety.”

“Well, I’m sure she’s perfectly all right. Why don’t you move your car so people can get through? Pull in next to my Jetta there,” I suggested, pointing out the lot between Divinity and Picture Perfect. “I’ll meet you back there as soon as Max is finished, and we’ll figure out where she is.”