Bonbon With the Wind Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Recipes Snipped from the Camellia Current, Camellia Beach’s Local Newspaper

  Penn’s Pumpkin Spice Bonbons

  Althea’s Cacao Nib Encrusted Salmon with White Chocolate Sauce

  Penn’s Surprisingly Simple Chocolate Chip Brownies

  Thank you for reading

  Also by Dorothy St. James

  About the Author

  Bonbon with the Wind

  A SOUTHERN

  CHOCOLATE SHOP

  MYSTERY

  Dorothy St. James

  Barking Dog Press

  There’s a legend in the Sea Islands that before a hurricane hits the Gray Lady can be seen walking down the beach warning of doom. Penn doesn’t believe in such silly stories, but she does believe weather forecasters. A powerful hurricane is heading their way. Everyone on the island of Camellia Beach is busy boarding up windows and securing valuables to upper levels of buildings. Joe Davies, a local treasure hunter with an unquenchable sweet tooth, claims to have seen the Gray Lady walking toward him just that morning and is terrified for his life.

  After the storm passes everyone returns to survey the damage. As Penn walks her little dog Stella on the beach, she finds Joe Davies’ body washed up onshore. Not only that, it looks as if an exploding transformer caused Joe’s seaside shack to burn to the ground. Did the Gray Lady claim another victim? Many on the island believe that is exactly what happened.

  Penn is sure there’s another explanation. She follows the clues and hints of lost gold to discover that the truth behind the treasure hunter’s death is as much of a maze as the boating channels winding their way through the local marshes.

  Visit Dorothy St. James at:

  http://www.dorothystjames.com

  http://www.facebook.com/dorothy.stjames

  Published by Barking Dog Press

  “Bonbon With the Wind”

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © February 2019 by Dorothy McFalls

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Ebook Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Publisher’s Note: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or food allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reaction to the recipes contained in this book.

  Cover art designed by Nicole Seitz

  Editor: Nicki Richards

  Dedication:

  For My Readers.

  Like Penn, I don’t always take praise or kindness well. But if not for you and your support over the years, this book would have never been written. Thank you.

  Chapter 1

  Everything looked gray in the dim predawn light. The damp sand. The cresting waves as they reached up in an attempt to touch the endless stretch of sky. The blurred shapes of people walking along the shore. It was all colorless. And silent. The air stirred only a little. It felt as if the entire world was holding its breath.

  Here on Camellia Beach, we were all holding our breath—and worrying. The South Carolina island town, a thirty-minute drive from the historic city of Charleston, had become my adopted home less than a year ago when I’d inherited the local chocolate shop from my maternal grandmother, a grandmother I’d never known existed.

  My best friend’s murder had brought me to this little island town. I’d come chasing after answers. When I’d first saw the beach’s shabby downtown, I’d thought to myself that only a bulldozer could improve it. That was before I’d learned what a true paradise looked like.

  Now, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. On my way to the beach, I had made an effort to etch into my memory each of the humble clapboard, concrete block, and brick shop fronts. I trembled at the thought that my beloved town might be gone in the next twenty-four hours and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Standing on the sandy shore where the land slipped into the ocean, I watched the beach in all that grayness. The tall sea grass rose up from the gently sloping dunes. Further inland silhouettes of the palm trees and scrubby oaks with their twisting branches and trunks waved in the building wind. This quiet, spit of sand at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean had become my personal paradise and my refuge. And yet, already, nothing appeared quite the same.

  Nearly every house and shop on the island had been boarded up tightly. Porch swings fashioned from bed frames, rocking chairs used for lazy days, and family picnic tables were missing from the cottages’ welcoming, wide porches. The twinkling holiday lights (displayed year-round) were gone. Sandbags had been piled up against doorways. The town reminded me of one of the many forgotten and neglected neighborhoods in the Midwest abandoned when all the jobs had moved to other areas. Nearly the entire town’s population had vacated Camellia Beach.

  A few islanders lingered, though. The surfers, who talked excitedly about the challenge of the storm-churned waves, had completely ignored the governor’s mandatory evacuation order demanding residents flee inland. They bobbed like seals in a line just beyond the breakers as they waited to drop in on the next big swell. There were also shop owners, like me, who had agreed to stick around and serve the community until the very last minute and a handful of stubborn residents who believed that by staying they could singlehandedly hold back a hurricane and keep it from ravaging their homes.

  Rough sand grated against the bottom of my bare feet. I continued down the beach with Stella, my five-pound papillon dog, at my side. The black silky fur on her wing-shaped ears—ears that were bigger than her head—shuddered. She gazed out over the water. I stopped and squinted to see what she saw. On the far horizon, dark clouds had lined up like soldiers of an advancing army.

&nbs
p; I tightened my grip around the leash until my fingers cramped.

  This was really going to happen.

  I stood frozen in place when what I really wanted to do was fall to my knees and sob at the unfairness of it all. It’d taken me thirty-eight years to find it, the first place that had ever felt like home. How could I lose it now?

  Stella quickly lost interest in the storm rolling toward us. She tugged at her end of the leash, urging me to get moving again. With her nose half-buried in the sand, she moved her head from side-to-side like a tiny metal detector in search of treasure.

  Treasure to Stella meant ghost crabs. She loved rousting them from their holes and chasing them down the beach. I let my pup lead me just a bit farther past the pier and in the direction of the old, abandoned lighthouse. Although I didn’t want to leave the water’s edge—or turn my back on those portentous storm clouds—I desperately needed to return to the shop. My to-do list had grown as long as my arm overnight. And time was definitely running out.

  “I thought I’d find you here, Penn,” Althea Bays called from one of the wooden walkovers that provided access points from the interior of the island to the beach. I turned to watch as she moved with enviable grace down the steps and toward me.

  Althea, short and slightly waifish, had an otherworldly glow this morning. She’d wrapped a colorful yellow scarf around her hair. Her skin appeared even darker than usual against the backdrop of the bleak landscape and the bright yellow of her scarf. She wore a matching yellow sundress. Its flared skirt flowed like the rising tide around her legs with each step. I don’t know how she did it. Even at the edge of disaster, she looked stunning.

  Stella barked wildly while tugging even harder at the leash. “Let me at her,” her actions were saying. “I’ll protect you. I’ll bite her toes until she cries. Come on. Let me get her.”

  While Stella had never taken a liking to Althea—nothing against Althea since I suspect my dog only barely tolerated me—Althea and I had grown to be the best of friends. When I’d first arrived in Camellia Beach determined to single-handedly solve a murder, Althea had offered advice and help. She owned the local crystal shop and believed in magic and witchcraft and things that go bump in the night. I had just left a career in advertising and needed all the help I could get in figuring why my friend had died in a giant vat of chocolate.

  We’d had a shaky start. At the time, I had been unwilling to trust anyone on this strange island. But Althea had been tenacious. She’d eased her way into my life. Even though I thought she was a weirdo for believing in magic and crazy woo-woo crystals, I’d started to feel comfortable around her. We made a good team. With her help, I managed to solve several other murder mysteries.

  But then, two months ago, a lie had come between us, a lie that had nearly caused me to lose the chocolate shop. As much as I wanted to forgive and forget, I couldn’t seem to manage it. Not that my reluctance to let her back into my life seemed to matter to Althea. She kept coming around and acting like nothing had changed. While I bristled at the sight of her, she offered a wide, guileless smile.

  Stella continued to bark with a crazed frenzy.

  “Quiet,” I commanded. When my little dog paused in her hysterics to take a breath, I tossed her a small bit of bacon from the stash I kept in my pocket. She gobbled it and looked up at me expectantly for another. “Good girl,” I said, then tossed her a second piece. “Sit.”

  The hours and hours and hours I’d spent working with Stella were finally starting to pay off. She sat beside me, her entire body shivering with excitement while she waited for yet another treat. I praised her and told her how wonderful she was before saying to Althea, “Please don’t tell me there’s a new crisis. Don’t tell me the chocolate has been stolen. Don’t tell me someone set off a bomb in the shop. And certainly don’t tell me someone found a dead body. Even if it happened, just-just don’t tell me. I don’t think I can take it.”

  Althea shook her head. “No crisis. No dead bodies.” Her brows furrowed as she thought for a moment. “At least, none that I know of. Just coffee. Mama’s in the Chocolate Box already. She brewed a big urn to offer those who haven’t evacuated yet.”

  When Althea got close enough, she handed me a cup that smelled like caffeinated heaven.

  “Bertie added a shot of the Amar chocolate?” I asked as sweet and bitter scents swirled around me. I took a long sip and sighed.

  “Just to yours. Mama suspected you’d need an extra boost this morning,” Althea said. Her mother and I shared the apartment above my chocolate shop. Although I owned the shop, Bertie Bays was the real talent behind the chocolates we crafted at the Chocolate Box.

  I was, without doubt, the apprentice while Bertie was the master chocolatier. I’d inherited the Chocolate Box after taking a couple of chocolate making classes from my maternal grandmother, Mabel Maybank. Occasionally, Bertie threatened to retire and move to Florida. So far I’d been enough of a disaster in the kitchen to keep her from considering leaving town too seriously.

  “Mama sent me out to deliver that cup of coffee to you. She said you’d need it like a fish needs water.”

  While I sipped, Althea stared out over the ocean. “This isn’t the first time.” Her voice sounded oddly subdued as she gave a nod toward the ominous clouds gathering on the horizon. “I think Mama asked me to find you because she wanted me to make sure you weren’t freaking out.”

  “Me? Freaking out?” I laughed. The rusty cackle sounded rather hysterical. “I’m totally freaking out,” I admitted.

  Althea put her hand on my arm. “No matter what happens, you’re not going to lose anything important.” She sounded sure of herself.

  Too sure of herself.

  “What did you do?” I demanded. The muscles in my back tightened. I jerked away from her to put some distance between us. “You didn’t use some mystical divination to peer into the future, did you?” I asked, not that I believed in that kind of claptrap.

  I was the rational one. The sane one. I knew better. Magic didn’t exist.

  “Don’t go and get all snippy,” Althea said. She softened her words with a good-natured smile. “What I mean is that no matter what happens tomorrow, you won’t lose me or Mama or Harley or anyone else who’s important to you. We’ll all come back. We’ll rebuild if we must. Camellia Beach is our home. Nothing can change that.”

  I hoped she was right.

  But I feared she wasn’t.

  One little lie had already wedged its way between Althea and me, and I wasn’t sure if I could ever allow myself to trust her again. If one lie could do that kind of damage to our relationship, I hated to imagine the kind of strain the destruction of a town would put on the relationships I had with everyone else who mattered in my life.

  “They’re saying Avery is the hurricane of the century,” I reminded her. “They’re calling it a superstorm.”

  The weather forecasters were now on air twenty-four hours a day reporting on Hurricane Avery’s slow churn toward our coast. The storm was supposed to be even more powerful than Hurricane Hugo, which had devastated the South Carolina coast back in 1989.

  “They’re saying there’s going to be nothing left of any of the islands.” I was starting to sound as shrill as the excited weather forecasters. I even flapped my arms a bit. “They’re saying there might not even be enough of an island left to even be able to rebuild.”

  “They always say that.” How could Althea sound so calm? “It’s rarely as bad as any of the forecasters predict. Still, we take precautions.” She gestured toward the plywood covering the doors and windows on the houses facing the beach. “We leave before the storm hits. And when it’s all over, we return to see what needs to be done. It doesn’t do anyone any good to fret so over what might or might not happen.”

  Stella, bored with our conversation, started pawing at a nearby ghost crab hole. The morning breeze was starting to build. The wind smelled moist and salty and portentous.

  Despite Althea’s upbeat w
ait-until-tomorrow attitude, I saw plenty of reason to fret right now. But instead of telling her that, I buried my nose in my rich coffee with its dark chocolate undertones and took several deep breaths.

  “Isn’t that Joe Davies?” Althea asked.

  I followed her gaze. Several hundred yards down the beach I spotted the hazy figure of a hunched man pulling a beach cart toward us from the eastern end of the island.

  “It looks like him,” I said.

  Old Joe Davies, with a crooked back and perpetually sunburned bulbous nose, spent nearly all his time walking up and down the beach or through the marshes, dragging that old beach cart made from stained PVC pipes with him. It was loaded down with shovels, sieves, and all sorts of equipment that he said was essential to his search for pirate treasure. Joe liked to tell anyone willing (or not so willing) all about his theory that there was gold hidden just under our noses on Camellia Beach.

  I’d heard his fantastic story more than once. He would launch into the lecture about how he was destined to find this fortune in treasure every time he came into the Chocolate Box. And he came in nearly every day to purchase a piece of Bertie’s dark chocolate sea salt caramel. According to Joe, the infamous pirate, Blackbeard, had buried his treasure on Camellia Beach shortly before his ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge sank in 1857.

  I was surprised to see Joe out searching for treasure this morning since the island was under a mandatory evacuation order. I was planning on leaving as soon as Bertie and I had finished up all the preparations to the shop. And Joe struck me as a careful guy who followed the rules and liked to make sure everyone else around him was following the rules as well.

  “Who’s he talking to?” I asked as a woman appeared at Joe’s side from out of nowhere. Like everything else in the dim pre-dawn light, her shape was gray and somewhat blurry. Even though I couldn’t get a good look at her, something about her felt familiar.

  I leaned forward, trying to make out her features.

  Was that Florence, my on-again-off-again mother? No, it couldn’t be. What would she be doing out here? On the beach? She never went out to the beach. The sand would ruin the fancy shoes she liked to wear. And why would she be talking to Joe Davies?