Chocolate Chocolate Moons Read online

  “Try again.”

  “Nooooo, not Colorful Copies!”

  “Yup. Her biometrics and time stamp at Congress Drugs match. Remember, after her interview with Sandy Andreas and her tour of their laboratories and San Andreas Farms, she was on Nova Scotia’s program.”

  “Yes, I remember because Cortland wanted to watch Earth’s news from Quito, Ecuador, but I insisted because I wanted to see Colorful Copies. We went to college together.”

  “Were you friends?”

  “Definitely not!”

  “So,” Lamont says backing off, “do you remember she held her arm to the camera to show off her charm bracelet? She thought she had eight charms, but when she counted, she only had seven, meaning she lost one somewhere.”

  “I also remember that she mentioned talking to a fat scientist at Congress Drugs, who was most likely Decibel Point, as no other scientist is overweight. He told her that he wasn’t happy with the way Congress Drugs tested new products. But this doesn’t mean she took the anti-flavonoids to poison something. After all she is a reporter. Maybe she wanted to—”

  “Reporter or not, it’s a theft. I learned that you and Jersey will be spending time at San Andreas Farms this week. Keep your eyes peeled for a clue that might pin her to the case.”

  Becky’s new boyfriend is a tall, thin young man with a dark handlebar mustache. He brings me a gift from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s thrift shop on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede that says in big red letters, “Made in Ganymede, home of the solar system’s best Chinese reproductions.” It’s a windup music box with a miniature von Trapp family inside yodeling the Mars national anthem. Cortland examines it and winds it so tightly that he can’t stop it from playing. So he stashes it in the freezer, where it plays until it freezes.

  We sit at the table. Cortland and I are at the ends. Jersey and Trenton face Becky and FDR. Cortland pours a mid-priced pinot noir that took him an hour to select while wondering if FDR was a future son-in-law. FDR yodels a toast that makes Cortland cringe. When I see everyone enjoying their food and we have discussed possible reasons why CC would take the anti-flavonoids, I say, “Okay, we now know that CC’s biometrics match those of the third person who took anti-flavonoids from Congress Drugs, but we still don’t know who the fourth person might be.”

  Jersey guesses. “Rumor has it that Mars Yard might pick up Craig Cashew.”

  Trenton scoops a large third helping of butternut squash that I tossed with curry powder maple syrup and roasted apples. “As far as we know, Craig hasn’t been to Congress Drugs in years.”

  “It’s true that Craig is driven and difficult, but I think he’s a creative genius, like when the seven-layer cakes had eight layers and he called it the Seven Plus. Or, when the cakes had six layers and he told the press it was because the Culinary baked cookies for sick children with the flour saved from the missing seventh layer. I can’t see any motive. Lamont must want him for something else,” I say.

  As I speak, a fleeting thought of owning a restaurant and consulting with Craig Cashew surfaces, but I dismiss it as a fun fantasy.

  “I would love more turkey,” Trenton says. “It’s delicious. What’s this meal called?”

  “Twenty-first-century traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. The diet police outlawed it in the twenty-second century as too fattening but now with all the Freedom Plan foods and supplements, it’s been pardoned.”

  “Good thing,” Jersey says reaching for another roll.

  My caramelized-apple-pecan cake and pumpkin pie finish the meal. We all make a Thanksgiving groan and leave the table.

  “What a meal, Mrs. Summers,” FDR says. “Makes me feel like yodeling.”

  “Not necessary,” Cortland pipes, wondering what Becky sees in him and restraining from saying the old adage: those who can sing, sing; those who can’t, yodel.

  I give Jersey a doggie bag with leftovers that would last Cortland and me a half hour but will probably last six months with them. “Before you both go, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” Jersey says, putting a handful of my favorite after-dinner mints into her pocket.

  “How come you have almost no real food in your house and when we eat lunch at the Culinary you order almost nothing, yet you both cleaned your plate and asked for more?”

  Jersey glances sideways at Trenton, who gives her a poke. She looks like the cat that swallowed something and it wasn’t a canary. “Well,” she stammers. “Who can resist free food?”

  “Besides,” Trenton adds “if I can reduce a meal like that to supplements it might make us rich.”

  40

  JERSEY AND I sit on a tram that Sandy Andreas sends to the Culinary to bring the extra security guards to his farms. When we pull into the parking lot, Jersey closes her book Catch the Guy Who Drank the Rye, by J. D. Scavenger. I remove earphones and click off the twins singing “Lucy in the Sky Lounge with Lucky.”

  We’re greeted by the farm’s manager in a red checkered shirt and jeans. He gives us maps and carts that look like ancient golf carts to get around the farms. He also gives us blue caps with peaks whose white letters say “Stolen from San Andreas Farms.” He tells us they used to be called baseball caps.

  “Talk about cheap,” Jersey, an expert on saving money, whispers.

  A security guard and amateur sports historian can’t resist telling us that baseball was a game where one man wearing a baseball cap in one color throws a little ball to a man wearing a different-colored baseball cap. He holds a big club over his shoulder, and when he sees the ball come toward him, he tries to hit it through a basket. If it goes through the basket, he jumps into his golf cart and flees from the other players, who jump into their carts and try to catch him. If he can make it around a beautifully mowed diamond-shaped park without going into the areas that say “Keep Off the Grass,” it’s called a touchdown. If he only makes it halfway, it’s called a field goal.

  “Any questions?” he asks.

  No one asks.

  Jersey and I climb into our carts. I decide to head north because I want to see the cacao trees whose pods make chocolate. Jersey heads south because she wants to see if Romanian lettuce looks Romanian.

  I program the cart’s directional panel to “cacao forest,” sit back, and enjoy passing through rolling acres of rich growing produce with so many fresh healthy smells that I think I’m breathing a salad.

  After a fifteen-minute ride, I arrive.

  A friendly worker dressed in the same checked shirt and genes greets me.

  “Why are there so many different colored pods and flowers on the trees?” I ask.

  “These trees experience different stages of chocolate production simultaneously. They have early flowers and at the same time mature chocolate fruit, so harvesting is done year-round.” I see rows of seeds lying on the ground, surrounded by a sugary mucilaginous substance. “All that is fermented off before the seeds are roasted and processed.”

  “I never realized this was such an elaborate process. Where’s the chocolate ground?”

  He points to a large brown building.

  I walk over and enter. The place is entirely automated. The refiners are large horizontal drums whose blades crush the cocoa beans. I follow a path used mostly by tourists and slowly start circling the room. I am fascinated by the process and seduced by the aroma. Inhaling the beloved chocolate smell so many times puts me in such a dream-like state that I almost don’t see what looks like a small colored feather lodged in a crack. Is it what I think it is—a rainbow-colored eyebrow? I put on a pair of protective gloves that Lamont told me to bring, remove the object from the crack, eye-cam it to Lamont, slide it into a bag in my pocket and continue circling.

  CC arrives at San Andreas Farms to do her follow-up story and observe the production of the new blue watermelons. Sandy Andreas sends a young attendant to greet her and give her a tour.

  After the tour CC says, “This is such a beautiful place. Mind if I stay and continue looking ar
ound? The farms and gardens are more interesting than I remembered.”

  “No problem. Mr. Andreas told me to give you anything you wanted.”

  “Just give me one of those cute little carts and point me in the direction of the cacao forest. I can’t resist seeing those wonderful chocolate-producing plants again.”

  CC remembers the building that housed the chocolate refinery. She’s sure her charm fell somewhere inside. She pulls her cart into a slot and gets out. A worker checking on the fermentation process looks up and says, “You’re the second person to come today to see the chocolate refinery.”

  “Second?”

  “Yes, a heavy woman from the Culinary’s security team is here inspecting the place until we hire more permanent staff. She went inside about ten minutes ago.”

  “Really?” CC says springing to full alert. “You’re sure she was heavy and from the Culinary?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She wore a Culinary Institute uniform. To tell you the truth, I have never seen a person so heavy up close before, so I’m not likely to forget what she looked like.”

  At first I don’t see CC enter through a side door because I’m circling in the opposite direction. She watches me from a distance; my eyes are cast downward as I move closer and closer to the refineries. Then my toe hits a small object. I pick it up. It looks like a gold charm of an ancient computer, from a charm bracelet. I blink my eye cam and send the image to Lamont.

  Then I see a shadow of a person to the side closing in. I jerk my head around and jump.

  CC holds out her hand. “I’ll take that,” she hisses.

  “No, CC, I don’t think so,” I glare, spinning and clutching it tightly.

  CC pulls my arm. I yank it away and run. “Now, Molly, or else!” she screams.

  I run to the nearest exit and close the door. It locks. CC bangs on the door. I go out the other side and run to my cart and get in. CC sees me through a window and runs to a side door and exits. “Wait, Molly, you don’t understand!” she shouts.

  I start the motor so quickly that instead of turning over and starting, it stalls. I try again. It starts, but by now, CC has caught up with me. “You don’t understand,” she says again. “Stop!”

  “I understand enough, CC. You’re not getting away with this.” I gun the accelerator and start to move.

  CC jumps on the back of the cart. I gun the accelerator again then push the brake, hoping to jerk to a violent stop and she will fall off. But she hangs on. The motor makes more coughing, sputtering noises then quits. CC reaches for my back, but I pull away from her. I jump out and run. Just as I put a little distance between us, my foot gets tangled in high grasses. Plop! Down I go.

  My heart beats wildly, and for a moment I don’t breathe. I pick myself up and start to run again, but I’m winded. CC charges with her arms outstretched. She lunges toward me.

  41

  “YEAH, YEAH, WHAT Breezy said is true.” Craig says to Lamont spitting out the words. “I withheld a device that I found in the chocolate room that I suspected belonged to her or Pluto. It was the day the schoolboys keeled over from eating the poisoned Chocolate Moons. It was late. Everyone had left the building. I picked it up, slid it into my pocket, and then locked it in a cabinet. I suspected it might be some kind of remote control but wasn’t sure.”

  “You should have called us. It was evidence,” Lamont says.

  “I didn’t know what it was until Decibel Point called me and told me he had a plan to help his daughter, Breezy, and her boyfriend, Pluto. Then I realized I could use it to get their help confronting Rocket about something he was blackmailing me with long ago.”

  “Breezy’s some looker,” Sid says showing off his observation skills. “What knockers!”

  Lamont rolls his eyes and continues. “But regardless of whether you knew what the device was, you withheld it from the police. And withholding evidence is a crime. You’ll have to be arraigned.”

  Craig Cashew, in his best blue suit, white shirt, and most conservative tie and suspenders, stands and freezes while the judge sentences him to three years of community service at Sang Sang prison, the worst and ugliest detention center in the solar system: a gruesome, repulsive, loathsome place, a true interplanetary eyesore.

  News reports say he won’t enter the building for health reasons. He pays to have it scrubbed with the strongest possible disinfectant, Lie Sol, and gets an independent committee to give it a lie-detector test. Then he paints the whole place white, endearing him to those individuals inside whose protests about conditions went unheard for decades and who Craig spent most of his life avoiding.

  Thin, round-shouldered Izzy Torquemada has been the warden of Sang Sang for twenty years. He is overworked and underpaid. He views Craig’s community-service assignment as an obtrusive political appointment. He rejects all suggestions Craig makes because he thinks they are better suited to a spa than a prison.

  Finally he lets Craig take ten of the least violent inmates and teach them how to bake. Craig calls Sandy Andreas, who reluctantly takes his call, and convinces him that donating free prewashed produce would be a good tax write-off. He does the same with Solaria, now acting head of the Culinary, who sends Jersey and me to Sang Sang with old pots, pans, decorative molds, used baking ovens and refrigerators.

  One month later, Craig invites Izzy Torquemada to tea in a small room that had been a storage closet. The warden comes with an assistant. He barks that he has only five minutes. But before he enters, the smell of old stones and melted wax infused with the perfume of fresh garden herbs reaches his nostrils. He takes a deep breath. His pace slows. He looks up at the golden shafts of light drifting in from two small skylights.

  “Welcome to the Monks’ Inn,” Craig says. He leads them to a colorful round table painted by one of the inmates in a design that weaves the prison’s name into an elaborate Celtic pattern that the rich might buy in an expensive shop.

  A tall, thin inmate, handsome from one angle and sharp-featured from another, dressed as a monk in a tailored brown bed sheet greets them. He bows. His prison identification number is embroidered in brown buttons that run diagonally across his chest to keep his robe in place. He pours two cups of a liquid that has hints of orange rind, raisins, smoke and wood citrus. He waits as its aroma wafts toward Izzy’s nostrils and moves into every sensory site in his brain. The inmate makes a deep bow and retreats. Another places a plate of éclairs filled with delicate vanilla cream next to each of them. Izzy takes a bite and lets the dark chocolate melt on his tongue. Soft cream slides down his throat. He smiles. His mood lifts.

  The following month Craig Cashew invites the press and every politician running in and out of office, along with Sandy and Solaria, to a grand opening of the prison’s new café. Craig contacts Cortland and asks if the Lunar Tunes would perform. Cortland updates Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” for the event. The twins wear black and white striped dresses with the red words “Mars Mafia” on the back.

  When we arrive we see that Craig has strung blinking lights around the prison’s barbed-wire fences, making the barbs look like stars. Everyone drinks tea, eats pastries shaped like little revolvers and knives, munches chocolate handcuffs, and shakes hands with the warden, to whom Craig wisely gives all the credit.

  Society columnists report that the Monks’ Inn is the charity of the year. They describe sitting on the candy electric chairs as a sweet buzzing experience. Crime rises briefly, since people want to learn gourmet cooking and know that if they go to Sang Sang, they will get a good free education because the state pays for everything. Judges are offered bribes to find ways to extend sentences. Solaria announces that the prison will no longer be called things like the Big House or Sang Sang but will officially be known as the Monks’ Inn.

  When Craig’s community service is over he is hired to run the restaurant permanently. In time, the Monks’ Inn overtakes the Culinary Institute as the preeminent cooking school and restaurant complex in the solar system.

&n
bsp; 42

  CC LUNGES TOWARD me, but I step to the side. She whizzes past then turns and glares. I hold out the charm for her to see, dangle it in front of my face, then put it in my mouth.

  “You wouldn’t,” she cries. “No! NO!”

  Gulp! Gone in a swallow.

  “I can’t believe you did that! Only you would do that!” she screams. “What kind of person are you?” Then she glowers. “No wonder Drew left you!”

  I turn and run as fast as I can. I have barely enough energy to move. CC must also be tired because at first I am able to put some distance between us. I make good time, but then the ground becomes hilly and difficult. CC picks up her pace. The gap narrows. I make a sharp right and head for my rover hoping the motor had cooled off. But when I reach the cart and press start, I hear the same sputtering sounds.

  Panting and sweating CC grabs the back of my head. She gives my hair a sharp yank and drags me from the cart. She twists my arm so hard that it feels like it’s coming out of its socket. We struggle. She shoves me to the ground, gets on top of me, and shoves her fingers down my throat hoping I will gag, hoping the charm will emerge.

  I bite down on her hand. She screams and jerks it away. She removes a red shoe, raises it high over her head and zings the heel toward my head. Thud! Jagged stars. Another thud. Then nothing.

  When I open my eyes, I see Jersey standing over me. “Feel better?” she says looking at my dilated pupils. “You got quite a wallop.”

  I touch the back of my head. It’s damp, sticky, and has a huge lump. When I take my hand away there’s blood on it. My voice is barely audible. “What happened? Hey! Were you following me?” Jersey helps me sit. “Not so fast,” I caution. “I’m nauseous.”

  “You probably have a concussion,” she says.

  I make groaning noises and pull myself to a sitting position. My arms feel like they are in one place, legs in another, and my head split down the middle.