The Chocolate Cupid Killings

by JoAnna Carl

Handmade truffles begin with fondant filling rolled into a ball between the palms. In a professional shop, it’s important that each ball be uniform. These are covered with chocolate.

  Two methods are used to cover truffles or bonbons with chocolate: They may either be hand-dipped or “enrobed,” which means run through a sort of shower bath of melted chocolate called “couverture.” The final step for both types of chocolates is decoration—either with chocolate in special designs or with nuts or other embellishments.

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  THE CHOCOLATE PIRATE PLOT

  Available now from Obsidian in hardcover.

  A sunset cruise on Lake Michigan in an antique wooden power boat is the perfect way to celebrate the summer solstice, and the weather that particular June 21 was also perfect.

  Joe’s Shepherd Sedan, a 1948 model he’d restored until it looked and ran like new, was anchored in a broad cove, so the boat was surrounded by a semicircle of sandy shore and tall trees. The four of us had finished our picnic dinner and were starting on coffee. With it we passed around bonbons and truffles made by TenHuis Chocolade—an easy contribution from me, since I work here as business manager.

  We had clumped ourselves into a conversational group inside the boat’s cabin—a cabin that was much like the interior of an automobile of the 1940s, except that where the trunk should have been there was a small deck.

  The huge red sun had just sizzled and sunk into the water over toward Wisconsin. The breeze was cool, but not chilly; sweatshirts were nice, but inside the cabin, jackets weren’t needed. The water was a deep silky gray, the sky had exactly the right number of puffy purple clouds edged in gold, and gentle waves rocked the boat, making me feel as relaxed as a bird dozing off in its nest.

  I was taking a bite of an amaretto truffle as the pirate came over the stern.

  His head popped up first. It was wrapped in a bandanna, buccaneer-style, and sported a big, bushy beard and a gold earring.

  I was looking straight at the head as it appeared, but I was so surprised all I did was blink.

  Pirates on Lake Michigan? In the twenty-first century? Who could blame me if I didn’t believe my eyes?

  Then the pirate somersaulted over the side and leaped to his feet on the deck.

  I leaped to my feet, too, banging my head on the sedan’s roof. I probably yelled something witty, like, “Who the heck is that?”

  The pirate wore black knee breeches and a black vest, open to show a hairy, muscular chest. A pirate pistol was jammed into his broad belt, and he was brandishing a cutlass. Add that to the beard, bandanna, and earring—plus a skull and crossbones tattooed on his biceps—and there was no question of what he represented.

  The pirate waved his cutlass. He gave a loud yell, the traditional “Yo-ho-ho!”

  My husband, Joe, and our friends Maggie and Ken McNutt were also on their feet as two more swimmers in pirate garb climbed over the stern.

  The second pirate’s outfit was almost identical to the first one’s, except that over his bandanna, he had put on a funny hat with the brim flipped backward. He produced a whistle and began to play a rollicking sea chanty. Or I guess that was what it was.

  The third pirate—a buccaneer queen whose vest had a plunging neckline to show her cleavage—began to dance, waving her arms in the air and weaving her feet into an intricate jig.

  For the next two or three minutes, the pirates went wild. The musician pranced, and the dancer danced. The first pirate waved his cutlass—by then I could see that it was plastic—in a series of fencing moves. He yelled in a hoarse voice, “Avast, me hearties!” and “Lift up the top sheet and spank her!” He clinched the cutlass in his teeth and did a handstand on the gunwale—the low railing along the side of the boat. Next he clambered onto the top of the cabin—we could hear his footsteps as he crossed over our heads—and dropped onto the bow. There he walked around on his hands, weaving among the horns, radio gear, and other paraphernalia that the Coast Guard requires.

  All this activity made the twenty-two-foot boat bob and buck. Joe, Ken, Maggie, and I grabbed our coffee before it could spill. We held on to any parts of the boat we could reach as the dancing and acrobatics made it bounce around. The show was terrific—after our initial surprise, we all started laughing—but I was afraid that the jumping around was going to knock one of the pirates overboard.

  The buxom pirate queen didn’t seem to share my fear. She linked arms with the piper and they do-si-doed while he managed to continue playing.

  Then the music stopped abruptly, and so did the dancing. The dancer and the musician gestured dramatically toward the front of the boat and the pirate who had boarded first.

  “Yo-ho-ho!” His shout echoed over the water. He pulled the pistol from his belt and aimed it toward our group, right through the windshield.

  I wasn’t frightened. Despite their grotesque makeup and out-of-nowhere appearance, the pirates had done nothing but amaze and entertain us. I was wondering if Ken or Joe had hired them as some sort of joke. Besides, the pistol was patently fake—an imitation firearm, a stage prop. I couldn’t believe it would actually fire.

  So the pointed pistol didn’t make me faint. The pirate king simply couldn’t be threatening us.

  Then he pulled the trigger, and a flag popped out of the end of the gun. Bang! it said.

  We all laughed hysterically. I guess we were hysterical.

  Just as quickly as they had arrived, the pirates left. One by one they dived over the side of the boat, and Ken, Maggie, Joe, and I crowded out of the cabin and stood on the small open deck to look after them. All of us were laughing.

  Joe leaned over the side. “Where did they go?” I realized that none of the swimming pirates had come up again.

  “I never heard of mermaids—or mermen—in Lake Michigan,” Maggie said. “And these pirates didn’t have tails. So they must have a boat.”

  We scanned the horizon. Ken and I exclaimed at the same moment. “There it is!”

  Sure enough, around a hundred feet away, just outside the cove, was an inflatable boat, the kind Navy SEALs use. As we watched, bandannas popped up on the gently rolling surface of the lake. The pirates began to swim on top of the water. Within minutes all of them had reached their boat, and one by one the pirate crew climbed into it. They waved to us. Their outboard motor roared, and they left, throwing up spray behind them. The backwash reached our boat, bouncing us up and down. The pirate boat headed north, parallel to the shore, and was soon out of sight.

  We were the first boat boarded in what came to be known as the Summer of the Warner Pier Pirates.

  Maggie, Ken, Joe, and I all assumed that the pirates were some sort of promotional stunt. Warner Pier—Michigan’s quaintest summer resort—was already full of pirates that year. We weren’t too surprised that a few more had turned up.

  The pirate craze was Marco Spear’s fault. That was the year of his first big hit movie, Young Blackbeard. The film had everything: comedy, romance, a beautiful Caribbean setting, a cast of thousands, gorgeous costumes and sets—plus Action! Action! Action! It also had a handsome and charismatic leading actor who did his own stunts.

  America’s teenagers gathered in gangs outside movie theaters and chanted his name. “Marco! Marco! Marco!”

  My stepsister, Brenda McKinney, was working at TenHuis Chocolade again that summer, and she admitted she’d seen Young Blackbeard twice. And she was nineteen and a little old for the fad. Marcia Herrera, the niece Joe and I had acquired when his mom remarried the previous spring, had just turned thirteen, so she was exactly the right age for the Marco craze. She had half a dozen Marco photos taped up inside her Warner Pier Middle School locker, she told me, and she and her friends had each seen Young Blackbeard at least five times. She brought me a magazine showing pictures of Marco Spear from infancy to age twenty-two. It had ragged edges because of the number of ti
mes it had been read.

  Some of the pictures showed Marco in his Young Blackbeard getup of tight knee breeches and open vest with three days’ stubble on his chin. Other pictures showed him in his pre–movie star life as an Olympic gymnastics champion. At thirty-one, I was too old for the Marco epidemic, but I was young enough to notice that he looked great in either outfit. Of course, the critics claimed he couldn’t act nearly as well as he could swashbuckle, but America’s girls didn’t seem to care.

  Marco Spear was clean-cut enough to please the mothers, athletic enough to impress the guys and sexy enough to attract the girls. That and a major publicity campaign had put him at the pinnacle of celebrity. The guy couldn’t move without falling over a member of the paparazzi. The world received daily updates on Marco’s life, whether or not it wanted them.

  Because of the topic of his first starring movie, Marco had made pirates celebrities, too. The whole country was wearing eye patches and growling, “Arrr.”

  Naturally Warner Pier had gotten on board for the fad. Our chamber of commerce had picked “Warner Pier: A Lake Michigan Treasure” as the slogan for the summer and had selected a logo featuring a buccaneer waving a cutlass and hoisting a treasure chest to his shoulder. Teenagers costumed as pirates roamed our picturesque downtown, handing out golden coins and treasure maps to tourists. A weekly treasure hunt sale offered special bargains for shoppers. The climactic production of our summer repertory theater was to be Pirates of Penzance.

  Even my aunt, Nettie TenHuis Jones, president and chief chocolatier of TenHuis Chocolade, was involved. Our featured items for the summer were pirate treasure chests—four-inch, six-inch, and eight-inch—filled with chocolate coins and jewels covered with shiny gold or silver foil. A giant pirate ship made of chocolate was featured in our show window. The Jolly Roger that flew from its mast was made of dark chocolate, with the skull and crossbones painted on the banner with white chocolate. The sails were white chocolate, and the decks milk chocolate. It was a work of art. But just for looking, not eating. Aunt Nettie would kill anybody who took a bite.

  We all four thought our solstice adventure had been an amusing experience, and we told everybody about the pirates.

  Joe passed the story along to a group he meets for coffee most mornings at the Shell station out on the highway. Ken told the story to the faculty at the math and computer camp where he was teaching that summer. I told everybody at the chocolate shop, and Maggie spread the word around the theater. So by noon news of our experience was all over town, and I got a call from Chuck O’Riley, editor of our local weekly newspaper, the Warner Pier Gazette.

  I assured Chuck that we hadn’t been injured or even inconvenienced, just amused.

  “We all assumed it was some sort of promotional stunt,” I said. “But the pirates didn’t give us any information.”

  “Maybe it’s The Pirates of Penzance,” Chuck said.

  “Could be.”

  By the next weekend the excitement had died down. I yawned and concentrated on running a chocolate company.

  Then the next Monday, the pirates struck again.

  Once more they appeared just at sunset, climbing aboard a small yacht that was taking a group on an evening cruise. Again they gave an exciting demonstration of acrobatics, and the piper did a few sleight-of-hand tricks.

  Again the people on the boat applauded and cheered as the three dived into the water and swam underwater a long way, then climbed into their inflatable dinghy and roared away, leaving the boaters with a darn good story.

  Eight times they struck in July. Always early in the week and occasionally on Sunday evening. Warner Pier’s boaters began to brag about being hit by the pirates. It became a point of pride. People gave “pirate parties” and were disappointed if they weren’t boarded. I lost all curiosity about the pireates early. Running a chocolate business and trying to find some time to spend with Joe took all my energy. I had no interest in fake pirates who could walk on their hands. The evening we were boarded faded into memory. The Gazette still ran stories, but Chuck O’Riley had moved them to an inside page.

  I was glad to see interest in the pirates wane, but I wasn’t ready for a new kind of excitement.

  That began on the last Wednesday in July.

  My office is a glass-walled cubical at one side of the TenHuis Chocolade retail store. There was only one customer in the store, and I was working quietly in my office when the street door flew open with such violence that I expected the window in it to shatter.

  Two of our counter girls ran in—my stepsister, Brenda, and her best pal, Tracy Roderick. They were traveling at hurricane speed and shrieking like hurricane winds.

  I jumped up. “What’s wrong? Why all the yelling?”

  “Marco’s coming! Marco’s coming!”

  “What?”

  “Marco Spear is coming to Warner Pier!”

  This behavior was most unlike Tracy and Brenda. Both were ready for their second year of college. Being cool was a full-time job for them, and movie star crushes were not their idea of cool.

  But Tracy’s next squeal showed me I was wrong. “It’s so great! To think we might get to see him!”

  They jumped up and down and squealed some more. The two girls already at work behind the counter came out and joined in the squealing and jumping.

  I tried to sound stern. “You two don’t usually go nuts over movie stars.”

  “But Marco Spear is coming to Warner Pier!”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “We stopped by the Superette, and Mr. Gossip—I mean, Mr. Glossop—told us that fancy new yacht Oxford Boats is building is for Marco Spear! And Marco’s coming to Warner Pier—himself—in person—to pick it up!”

  They barely restrained themselves from another squealing session.

  “Tracy,” I said, “how reliable do you find information provided by Greg Glossop?” Greg Glossop, who runs the pharmacy at our local supermarket, is well-known as the worst gossip in Warner Pier.

  My question brought giggles from Brenda, and Tracy smiled sheepishly. “Oh, I know—he leaps to conclusions.”

  “He vaults to conclusions the way Marco Spear jumps up and down the masts of pirate ships.”

  “But there really is a gorgeous yacht out there—in the big building at Oxford Boats. Brenda and I saw it when we went out on the river last week.”

  Whatever I thought, the rumor that he was coming spread through town. Marco! Marco! Marco!

  The news was whispered down the aisles at the Superette and spoken out loud at Warner Pier Beach. Everybody was sure he was coming, although there was no official confirmation.

  Warner Pier is the home of Oxford Boats, one of the last companies that build luxury yachts. Their products were not the boats you might see at a boat show or use for a fishing trip. Each yacht produced by Oxford Boats was individually designed by the nation’s top maritime architect. The yachts took a year or more to build. Most of them carried from six to a dozen crew members when they left port. Their sleek hulls and luxurious cabins inspired as much drooling as TenHuis chocolates.

  Every teenager who had access to a sailboat, motorboat, or dinghy was out on the water, peering into the big boat shed at Oxford Boats, trying to get a look at the yacht under construction.

  Marco! Marco! Marco! He must be coming soon.

  Well, I wasn’t worried about movie stars. I had plenty to think about in my own life.

  Joe and I live in a semirural neighborhood on the inland side of Lake Shore Drive, and about eight o’clock in the morning, I put on a pair of denim shorts, a sweatshirt and some sandals and walked down to the road to get the Grand Rapids Press out of our delivery box. It was a bright, crisp morning. The sunlight was filtering through the trees, and the birds were singing like mad. I scared a flock of eight wild turkeys—two hens and six half-grown poults—out of our side yard as I left the house. It was my day off. I didn’t have to rush down to the shop. All was serene.

  I had barely
reached the newspaper delivery box when the screaming started.

  “Help! Help!”

  I nearly dropped my newspaper as I whirled toward the sound. A girl wearing a neon-striped bikini came running up Lake Shore Drive toward me.

  “Help! He didn’t come up!”

  As soon as she was within clutching distance, she grabbed my arm. Her fingers felt like so many vises. I could see that tears were running down her face.

  “He never came up! He just disappeared! I think he drowned!”

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  ALSO BY JOANNA CARL

  The Chocolate Cat Caper

  The Chocolate Bear Burglary

  The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up

  The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle

  The Chocolate Mouse Trap

  The Chocolate Bridal Bash

  The Chocolate Jewel Case

  The Chocolate Snowman Murders

  Crime de Cocoa