The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase

by Wendy Mass

  As the workers from other departments streamed out the door, they stopped to give Miles their congratulations and many slaps on the back. (He learned to plant his feet firmly, shoulder-distance apart, in order to stay upright.)

  Sabrina scribbled the final choices on a slip of paper and handed it to Miles. “You get the honor of sharing these with Mr. Sweet. He also has a special announcement, but he’s waiting for your arrival before sharing it.”

  So he had heard his name before. Miles gave her a grateful hug and headed out to the Harmonicandy Room. He hadn’t planned on a pit stop, but the Marshmallow Room was only a few doors down, and Miles couldn’t wait to share his excitement with someone.

  “Henry?” he called as he pushed open the door. But the room was empty. Well, empty of people, but certainly not empty of marshmallows. There were stacks of those cooling on the counters. He popped a still-warm one into his mouth on the way to check the small office in the back. Maybe Henry was having a late lunch at his desk. Miles ducked his head in. No Henry, just one very overcrowded desk with a bulky old computer off to the side. Even though four pairs of eyeglasses with really thick lenses were getting second lives as paperweights, stacks of papers and folders threatened to slide to the floor at the slightest breeze. Miles thought it must be hard to have to do boring things like paperwork when all you really wanted to do was make marshmallows.

  He scribbled a note to Henry letting him know he’d stopped by, and then Miles set forth again. The Harmonicandy Room was all the way at the other end of the building, so he had to face many temptations along the way. The candy scientists in the lab had their door propped open, which wouldn’t help him get to his destination any faster. He would almost definitely get sucked in by the smell of whatever they were testing; it happened every time. Maybe today they’d be developing cabbage candy or asparagus icing or candied beets, and he could easily hurry past. Ah, no such luck. As soon as he passed the Cotton Candy Room, where the smell of grapefruit-flavored spun sugar (smells and tastes better than it sounds!) filled his nose, the unmistakable smell of peanut butter from the lab hit him full force. One whiff and he was powerless against its pull.

  He stood by the open door, breathing deeply with his eyes closed. A few of the candies at Life Is Sweet included nuts (hazelnuts in the Oozing Crunchorama, peanuts in the Snorting Wingbats, peanut-flavored taffy, and you always had the option of sprinkling sugared pecans on the chocolate pizza), but none of the recipes used straight-up peanut butter. Miles’s curiosity kicked in, and he would have gone into the lab if his attention hadn’t been pulled away by the sound of someone whistling. Miles turned around to see one of the assistant candymakers heading toward him, a huge bag of Leapin’ Lolly sticks slung over his broad shoulder. One of the bags had a hole in the bottom, leaving a trail of sticks that went as far back down the hall as Miles could see. The scene reminded him of Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs through the forest so they could find their way home.

  The man nodded at Miles as he passed, whistling away, clearly unaware of the leak. “Hey, your sticks are leaking,” Miles called out, pointing to the trail. The assistant candymaker stopped.

  “So they are! Thanks.” He lifted the bag off his shoulder to inspect the hole. Miles bent down to grab the nearest sticks and felt something flutter onto his shoulder. He turned his head to see what it was. The guy laughed and said, “I’ve heard the expression money doesn’t grow on trees, but I’ve never heard it said about growing on boys!”

  “What do you mean?” Miles asked, then craned his neck a little farther. Resting on his shoulder was a fifty-dollar bill! He snatched it up and held it out. “Is this yours?”

  The guy shook his head. “Nope. Finders keepers. And that bill clearly found you!” He picked up the bag again, careful to pinch the hole closed with his fingers, and whistled on his way.

  Miles stood still, staring at the bill in his hand. He’d never held fifty dollars before! Where had it come from? His mind spun with all the possibilities of what to do with it.

  No doubt about it, this was shaping up to be one of the best days ever!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Such was his overwhelming happiness that Miles had to keep himself from skipping out of the Harmonicandy Room to the library and then skipping out to the great lawn. Even though the box he carried weighed him down a little, he felt as if he were floating. In the last hour he’d had one of his slogans selected to go on every Harmonicandy wrapper, found fifty dollars, seen the Harmonicandy Room, and been told he was going on a road trip with his friends to visit famous candy stores (a road trip! A dream come true!), and now he was about to sit at a picnic table and open a box of old journals and maps that hadn’t been seen in decades. It made all the earlier drama with his dad seem very far away.

  As usual, the lawn was bustling with activity. Even though the factory had closed to visitors in order to prepare for the Kickoff the next day, many of the guests had lingered to enjoy the outdoors. Balls flew between parents and kids, music played, and factory workers carried bales of hay to the barn and boxes of strawberries from the field. Thankfully, the smell from the peppermint leaves helped cover the odor of the manure spread around the flower beds. And Miles had never seen the pond so full. The only boat not on the water was the Candymaker’s private canoe, painted bright yellow in honor of his award-winning Neon Yellow Lightning Chew.

  He walked past the spot where Max had set up their picnic lunch the very first day of the contest. Miles had to shake his head at the memory of telling the others he was allergic to rowboats and the color pink. What they must have thought of him! He was so glad he could tell them anything now. Or almost anything, anyway.

  After making his way around a spirited game of lawn chess played with giant pieces that took both hands to lift, Miles rested the box on the only picnic table that didn’t have families crowded around it.

  The breeze was picking up, so he gathered some stones and sticks to use as paperweights before getting down to the task of sorting the contents of the box into piles. He loved the feel of the old notebook paper beneath his hands. He expected it to be rough and crackly, but instead the pages were soft, almost buttery. Even the musty smell of the newspapers reminded him more of the storeroom of the library than an attic. He breathed the smell in deep, wishing he could absorb all the information just by doing that. Sure would save time.

  A small crowd began to gather around him. Perhaps they thought he was setting up more freebies. Most drifted away when they discovered he was pulling out notebooks and papers, not candy, but two boys—around ages eight and ten—stayed. Miles had thought doing this outside would be more private than spreading the material out on the factory library floor, but he was beginning to doubt his judgment. The younger boy actually reached into the box and began pulling things out! The other started tossing around the rocks and sticks Miles had piled up.

  “Um, can you guys not do that?” Miles asked, pulling the box away. “This stuff is really valuable.”

  “C’mon, Cole,” the older boy said, tossing a few of the sticks from the table into the box. “I told you there’s no candy here.”

  Cole dropped the spiral brown notebook he’d been holding, then peered into the box one last time before following the other boy. Miles was tempted to catch up to them and give them a lesson on manners, but as an only child, he had no experience scolding other children. He straightened the piles and then pulled the sticks out from the box and tossed them to the ground. It wasn’t that windy anyway. He was looking forward to the factory’s return to normal after tomorrow, when people would once again respect other people’s property.

  Finally the visitors slowly began heading around the side of the factory toward the parking lot. Miles rubbed his hands together in anticipation and dove into the pile. He started with the newspaper clippings because they were the most fragile and looked like they’d be the easiest to read. Miles could see from his quick glance at one of the notebooks that Samuel didn’t have
the neatest handwriting. They would take longer to get through.

  First, Miles sorted the papers chronologically. The dates only spanned a ten-year range, from fifty-five to sixty-five years ago. Most were from Sam’s hometown paper, the Brookdale Gazette. The earliest article told the story of how ten-year-old Samuel Sweet started a lemonade stand during a heat wave and raised four dollars and fifteen cents, which he donated to buy fans for the community center.

  Most of the newspaper clippings weren’t about Sam. Some reported on the accomplishments of local businessmen; many were recipes for homemade cakes and cookies; a few told of advances in technology or machinery, which Miles only skimmed. Many, in fact, were about new inventions or discoveries, including one article titled “Local Student Invents Sneezing Powder!” Miles set that one aside to show Logan. Maybe that’s where Sam’s interest in practical jokes came from.

  By far the longest article was the one announcing Sam’s win at the first New Candy Contest, sponsored by the newly formed Confectionary Association of America. It included a very grainy photo and an interview with Sam, along with comments from his parents, his teachers, and the contest judges. Miles set that aside, too. He bet Logan would love to hear that it took his grandfather two solid years before he figured out how to combine the ingredients so that the Pepsicle would taste just right, and then another six months learning how to keep it frozen without it losing flavor. Clearly the man’s ambition and determination had been there since his youngest years. It gave Miles a chill of excitement. From a tiny lemonade stand to the enormous Life Is Sweet factory. What a journey!

  Eager to learn more, he turned to the journals next. Most of the notebooks were plain, with thick brown covers and metal spirals on the top. He liked the weight of them in his hand. In comparison, his own notebook, with its flimsy cover and plastic spirals, seemed very unimpressive. Sam’s notebooks were the kind one would fill with truly deep thoughts, thoughts that would one day change the world. Miles had no doubt that’s what he’d find when he opened the first one.

  So imagine his surprise when he found nothing of the sort.

  Instead, drawings and sketches of trees, houses, treasure chests, and all kinds of animals filled the unlined pages. Miles flipped through the other notebooks. He found more of the same, along with recipes crossed out and rewritten, mazes that went on for pages, lists of rules for made-up games, diagrams of three-dimensional puzzles, and short, direct, to-the-point reviews of everything from the newest superhero comic at the comic-book shop (“splendid art and gripping story line”) to the new socks his aunt had given him for his birthday (“scratchy and unpleasant to look at”).

  Miles had to laugh. He didn’t have an aunt, but if he did, he bet she’d give him ugly socks, too. The last few pages of one of the notebooks were filled with drawings of the Pepsicle from all angles.

  The final notebook contained more of what he’d expected. The handwriting looked more grown up, with fewer flourishes at the ends of the letters, and the words tended to go straight across the page instead of slanting down to the right. Here Samuel finally spoke about how the prize money helped his family buy a modern refrigerator with a separate freezer on top and enabled his mother to buy herself some new dresses for a change, instead of getting hand-me-downs from the ladies in town. He wrote a list of goals for himself—college, then maybe a candy store of his own, a family. Sam had reached his early goals and gotten a lot more than he’d dreamt of.

  Miles closed the last notebook. It seemed odd to him that Samuel would have stopped writing when still young, before he even began his career. Although he’d written about a lot of that business stuff in the pamphlets now available inside in the library, those were more formal, and meant for others. And the library pamphlets didn’t have doodles of gum balls and lollypops down the edges. Maybe whoever gathered this material and sent it to Logan just didn’t have the batch in between.

  He stood up to stretch. It had to be close to dinnertime, and he’d need to pack. He knew he should call home for a ride, but he couldn’t do it before turning to the last, most highly anticipated items on the table—the maps.

  He reached for the rolled-up map first and was a bit disappointed to see that it was a map of Samuel’s hometown of Brookdale. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but the town—with its downtown, bus station, movie house, and school—just wasn’t very exciting. Nicely drawn, though.

  He turned to the next map. This one had been folded instead of rolled, and he opened it very carefully, figuring the creases might rip otherwise. But the thick paper had held up well. The paint had faded, but the colors were still vibrant and beautiful. With a thin brush, the mapmaker had written three words across the face of the map:

  MAP OF AWE

  Miles gasped. Now, that was more like it! What could be cooler than a map of awe? He read the words over again, out loud. He’d always liked the word awe. It made the bottom of his throat vibrate in an interesting way when he said it out loud.

  The map showed a hazy landscape with rolling hills; a deep, sandy valley with a stream running through it; a few clumps of trees; and a cloud with the words FOG to the North running through it. The words River of Light drifted along with the stream. The art style and the lettering didn’t match anything he’d seen of Sam’s so far. Maybe he’d gotten the map as a gift and it had become mixed in with his old papers. Miles looked in the lower right corner for the signature of the mapmaker but found only a drawing of a large gray boulder with some smaller rocks scattered around it.

  He knew that sometimes mapmakers wrote their names or initials inside features of the map or in the borders. This map didn’t have borders, though. He peered more closely at the leaves in the trees, then checked for any patterns in the sparse grass, but spotted nothing. He turned his attention to the boulder.

  Faint lines crisscrossed the face of it, like cracks in the stone… but not all of them were perfectly straight. He tilted the map up to the sun and pulled his glasses a few inches away from his face to magnify the image. The numbers 43127 appeared, ever so faintly. From what he’d learned recently about GPS coordinates, there weren’t enough digits to represent longitude or latitude. Maybe it was the mapmaker’s birthday, or his lucky numbers.

  Miles carefully, and reluctantly, refolded the map and set it aside. He leaned over the box to double-check that he’d gotten everything out and spotted one thin brown pocket-sized notepad that blended in with the bottom of the box. A gray rubber band that must once have been pink held it together. When he went to pull it off, the rubber band crumbled in his hand.

  At first glance he thought the lined pages were blank. Closer inspection revealed that the faintest of pencil writing actually filled not only the lines, but the blank space around the edges of every single page. Time had faded the words so much that they were impossible to read. Holding it up to the sun didn’t help. Whatever notes Sam had written in there were lost to history.

  When he got to the end, he discovered a folded sheet of yellowed paper stuck between the last page and the back cover. The outer edges of the paper were almost completely burned off, as if it had been held over a fire and yanked back.

  Holding his breath, Miles put down the notebook and ever so carefully unfolded the note. Unlike all of Sam’s other writings, this one had been typed on a typewriter; he’d only used ink to sign his name below the single paragraph of text. Beneath Sam’s name Miles could see tiny bits of ink, but they were covered in black soot. He was afraid to even breathe on the paper in case the whole bottom half crumbled right off.

  His eyes drifted up to the text. The words swear never to reveal the location of the special beans jumped out at him from the first line. He stared at them.

  Special… beans?

  Heart pumping hard, he began reading from the beginning.

  We, the four signers of this contract, do hereby solemnly swear never to reveal the location of the special beans, nor how Samuel Sweet came to be in possession of them. If questio
ned, we agree to say we don’t remember any details about our time spent there. We promise to uphold our vow to help keep the valley hidden, whatever that might take in the future. This contract binds us together for life, both in friendship and in secrecy. We have been given a great gift, and we hereby agree to repay that debt whenever possible, anonymously, asking nothing in return. Once this binding contract is signed and sealed, it shall be destroyed.

  Miles’s eyes darted back down to the bottom of the contract. Only Sam’s signature had survived the flames. And he’d only signed his first name. Sam. Somewhat of an expert on the man’s handwriting by now, Miles could tell he was perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old at the time he signed it. So who were the other three mentioned above?

  Miles read the document twice. What did it even mean? Did Samuel Sweet steal something? Did he steal beans? Like, chocolate-making beans? Miles was pretty sure they weren’t the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk kind of beans, although he found himself glancing up at the sky to see if a giant beanstalk had suddenly sprouted from the ground.

  Why had Sam kept the paper instead of fully destroying it, like the contract said? Had the factory been built on a lie? Miles knew he needed to ask someone better at solving mysteries than he was. Good thing he knew someone like that.

  He looked around to make sure he was still alone, then pulled out his vid com and propped it up on a rock. He knelt down and called Daisy. He expected her to answer right away, like she had that morning, but he had to leave a message this time. He had just held the letter up to the screen when he heard Logan’s voice behind him ask, “Hey, find anything cool?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Logan showed up looking like Santa, with his dancing-gumdrops pillowcase filled with candy slung over one shoulder, Miles’s first thought was that he needed to protect Logan from any speculation about Samuel Sweet’s wrongdoings. He couldn’t show him the contract, not before he found out what it meant.