Death by Chocolate Raspberry Scone, page 1
Kensington books by Sarah Graves
Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake
Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake
Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut
Death by Chocolate Snickerdoodle
Death by Chocolate Chip Cupcake
Death by Chocolate Marshmallow Pie
Death by Chocolate Raspberry Scone
Death by Chocolate Raspberry Scone
SARAD GRAVES
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Chocolate Raspberry Scones
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
900 Third Ave.
New York, NY 10022
Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Graves
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023951844
KENSINGTON and the KENSINGTON COZIES teapot logo Reg. US Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-4411-1
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: May 2024
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-4413-5 (ebook)
One
“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 r
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.”
