Chocolate With A Side Of Murder Read online

  Chocolate with a Side of Murder

  Meredith Potts

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter One

  “Any sign of her?” I asked.

  I was gasping for breath as I reached my mother’s car. For the last hour, I had been running up and down a rural stretch of Route 32 at a frantic pace, looking for any sign of my nineteen-year-old sister. Jessica had gone out for a jog earlier that morning and had not been heard from since.

  It just didn’t add up. My sister was a woman of routine. She woke up at the same time every day, went out for a run, took the same route, came back thirty-five minutes later, and then prepared a green smoothie for herself when she arrived home.

  Jessica preferred to run alone, but that morning, I wished that she hadn’t. My sister’s reason for running solo was simple—she told me that her morning jogs gave her time to clear her head and think. Normally, that rationale got no argument from me. It was safe to say that running was not my thing.

  By and large, I had been plenty happy to stay at home while Jessica went on her jogs. Of course, back then, I was eighteen years old, and I foolishly believed that my metabolism would keep effortlessly burning off all of the calories that I filled my stomach with.

  Then again, during the school year, I spent so much time walking to and from class on campus that I burned plenty of calories without realizing it. As I got older, my growing waistline ended up giving me a wakeup call, to the point where I had to resign myself to putting in some time on the treadmill on a regular basis. During my teen years, however, it was crazy to think how clueless I was about things like nutrition and exercise.

  My older sister had always been wiser than I was about those matters. She also had a determination that was admirable. For years, she kept to the same jogging routine without any deviation. It wasn’t enough to say that she was a creature of habit. Jessica was so set in her ways that I could set my watch by her.

  That August morning was different. Thirty-five minutes after she had left for her run, she hadn’t returned home. At first, I waited a few extra minutes, wondering if maybe the stop light at the intersection of Route 32 and Oak Street had taken a little longer to change that morning. Some days, it had a nasty habit of staying red for an interminably long time.

  After an additional twenty minutes had gone by without me seeing or hearing from Jessica, I picked up my phone and called her. My suspicion only grew when she didn’t pick up. That really wasn’t like her. Jessica was the kind of woman who answered her phone by the second ring.

  A queasy feeling came to my stomach. Before I began to panic, I called her again. Unfortunately, I had no luck reaching her. There was no keeping the worry from my mind any longer. Deep in my gut, I knew something was wrong.

  When I expressed my concern to my mother and stepfather, we decided to go out looking for Jessica. Together, we drove the length of my sister’s typical jogging route with our eyes peeled. Unfortunately, that yielded no results.

  As our search continued, I decided to try something different. My mother and stepfather remained in the car and drove back and forth along Jessica’s usual route. I, meanwhile, got out of the car and searched for my sister on foot. There were some stretches of the route that I could get better visibility of by being outside of the car. Most importantly, now every angle was covered.

  Yet, despite all of my looking, I wasn’t able to spot my sister. As much as I tried not to descend into a full-blown panic, it was becoming hard to deny that something suspicious had occurred. The problem was, as much as I had scoured her route, I had not discovered a single clue of what had happened to her.

  So when I saw my mother’s car approach, I prayed that she’d had better luck.

  When I asked her for an update, much to my chagrin, my mom, Elizabeth Daley, shook her head. “I have looked everywhere and haven’t seen any sign of her.”

  As those words spilled out of her mouth, there was a look on my mother’s face that I had never seen before. It was one of pure terror.

  My heart sank.

  Mom was usually so good at not showing cracks in her armor. It was in her nature to put on a good face and to offer a soothing voice of reassurance. So for her to be so visibly distraught was unheard of.

  In addition, my stepfather, Luke Norton, a man who was known for having a steady hand, also looked jittery. So much so that he had no words of encouragement to offer.

  Hope was in scarce supply, which only made me even more frantic. I had been trying to keep panic at bay but was now failing miserably. Horrible thoughts bounced around in my head. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to get rid of them. It was so frustrating. After all, I knew that negativity wouldn’t do me any good, but that didn’t mean that I could get my brain to listen to me.

  Instead, my mind skipped right to the worst-case scenario. With that, my world was turned upside down. It took all the energy I had not to scream.

  “How about you?” Elizabeth asked.

  More than anything, I wanted to be able to share any kind of good news. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any to speak of. I shook my head. “I haven’t found a single trace of her. On top of that, she still isn’t answering her phone. I have called her ten times and haven’t gotten an answer.”

  My parents and I looked around, completely distressed. The questions in our heads piled up. Where was Jessica? What had happened to her? Why wasn’t she picking up her phone?

  It was as if she had just disappeared into thin air. Only, that didn’t make any sense. She had to be somewhere. Besides, people didn’t just go missing without a trace in a place like Treasure Cove. I knew the days of sleepy small towns where the residents didn’t even have to lock their front doors at night were long gone. That being said, something heinous like an abduction occurring in my coastal California tourist town was unthinkable to me.

  As a shiver ran down my spine, it was hard to keep my mind from assuming the worst. I had never felt so terrified in my entire life.

  I looked out into the distance. “She has to be out here somewhere.”

  Elizabeth groaned. “We’ve gone over her entire route twice. If she was here, we would have seen her.”

  I knitted my brow. “If she’s not here, then where is she?”

  My mother shrugged. “That’s the problem. I don’t know.”

  I grimaced. “She couldn’t just have disappeared.”

  My stepfather finally spoke up. “You say she can’t, but it looks like she did.”

  I shook my head. “She has to be somewhere.”

  Stress lines came to my mother’s forehead. “Yes
. But where?”

  With a pained face, I called out at the top of my lungs. “Jessica!”

  I let her name hang in the air for a moment. When I did not receive a response, I yelled again. “Where are you?”

  My question echoed across the rolling hills. Unfortunately, it remained unanswered.

  Chapter Two

  Ten years later

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Kelly O’Reilly looked awful. My guess was that a sleepless night was the culprit. The telltale signs of a lack of shuteye were there. Unflattering bags were under her blue eyes. Her wavy blond hair, which she usually wore down, had been pulled back into a ponytail. The contact lenses she usually wore were absent, replaced by a pair of glasses with big thick blue frames.

  If those peculiarities weren’t enough, I looked at her angular face and saw no sign of makeup. Granted, she didn’t usually wear much, just a little foundation on her cheeks, but her skin was completely untouched. In addition, the curvy twenty-eight-year-old looked jittery as she stood behind the counter of my family’s coffee shop.

  I knew all too well that getting proper rest was crucial when working at a fast-paced place like this. So as Kelly stood before me that morning, my heart went out to her. After all, she wasn’t just my employee. She was also one of my good friends.

  “Let’s just say it was a rough night,” Kelly replied.

  The evening must have been even more difficult than she was letting on. I had known her long enough to be able to tell just by looking into her eyes that something was really troubling her. In addition, during all the years we had been friends, I was used to her being very chatty.

  That morning, she abruptly stopped her explanation and pulled a compact out of her purse. She grimaced as she looked at herself in the mirror as if she hadn’t quite realized until right then just how different her appearance was from normal.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious myself. After all, I hadn’t exactly spent a lot of time in front of the mirror that morning as I got ready for work. With a predawn wakeup call, I was barely able to drag myself out of bed, throw my work uniform on, and run a brush through my hair before bolting over here to open the shop. I quickly snuck a peek at my reflection in the mirror of Kelly’s compact to see if anything about my appearance was askew.

  Thankfully, the answer was no. My long brown hair wasn’t out of place. My hazel eyes weren’t bloodshot. There were no noticeable blemishes on my oval face. I was the same trim twenty-eight-year-old woman as ever.

  Now that I was confident that I didn’t look like a train wreck, I turned my focus back to Kelly. I certainly understood what she was going through. During my time slinging coffees for a living, I had been forced to put punctuality before looking my best more than a few times in the past. The phrase “beauty rest” had recently taken on a whole new meaning.

  It was not an exaggeration to say that working at a coffee shop could be a real grind when I didn’t get enough shuteye. On those poor-sleep days, I always kicked myself for not getting enough rest the night before. Unfortunately, my mind had a notoriously difficult time quieting itself in the evening. Sometimes I got to bed plenty early, but instead of falling asleep, I would just toss and turn while various thoughts swirled in my mind. Had that happened to Kelly last night?

  “I’m sorry. Did you forget you were working a morning shift?” I asked.

  Kelly shook her head. “No.”

  I waited for her to continue, but no words came. I had never known Kelly to be shy about sharing her feelings before. Perhaps she had gotten even less sleep than I thought. I glanced at her again, wondering if she would continue, but she did not elaborate.

  How peculiar.

  I didn’t know where her chatty attitude had gone, but it would be nice to get it back. Unfortunately, Kelly didn’t seem to be in any hurry to move the conversation forward. Seeing her this quiet was not only unsettling to me, but it also made me consider switching her to some afternoon work shifts.

  The problem was, who was there to plug into this work slot? This was one of those things that had never occurred to me until I took a management role at the coffee shop. From a scheduling standpoint, the morning shift was a nightmare. No one wanted it—not Kelly, not any of my other employees, not even me.

  Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed my job. Being a part of the family business was a source of great pride for me. But, even though I loved my job as a whole, waking up before the sun did was one of the few sore spots of running this place.

  I pushed my employee-scheduling concerns aside when I saw Kelly fire up a double espresso for herself.

  Uh-oh.

  A single espresso usually did the trick for her. It was funny the details I picked up while I was on the job. It made me realize how habitual most people were, especially when it came to their caffeine intake. Through no intentional act of my own, I found myself memorizing the coffee preferences of both the regular customers and most of the employees that worked for me.

  Daily repetition had a way of grinding details like that in my memory. That was how I knew that Kelly was a single espresso kind of woman. So for her to be making a double was a big deal.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Before she answered me, Kelly downed the double espresso in one gulp.

  Yikes.

  Kelly wasn’t messing around. She needed a caffeine jolt and wasn’t going to speak up until she got it. A moment passed as she waited for the buzz to hit her system. There was a pretty incredible transformation that happened to people after they had finished their first cup of coffee in the morning.

  So often, customers and employees alike would stagger into the shop like zombies. But when that caffeine kicked in, their personalities changed in an instant. Not only would they perk up, but they would become abuzz.

  When that spike in energy level came to Kelly, she finally revealed the source of her troubles. “I was on my way home last night when I saw a light on at the old Watterson estate.”

  That statement sent a shiver down my spine—mostly because it didn’t seem possible. The estate was vacant and had been for decades. Not to mention the property was in complete disrepair. It was home to nothing more than cobwebs and weeds with perhaps a few rats and other four-legged creatures thrown in the mix.

  When I stood at the front gate of the property and looked at the estate from the street, it looked like nature was reclaiming the place. That was why the light being on inside the house was so preposterous. It had probably been decades since the electric company had shut off the power to the property.

  There was a very good reason for all of this. Unfortunately, the estate had a grisly history. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the Watterson estate was the pinnacle of luxury in town. It was a symbol of the Watterson family’s wealth. William Watterson had opened the first department store in town in 1921. On the back of the store’s incredible success, the Watterson estate was constructed four years later.

  Subsequently, the business, as well as the estate, had been passed down through the generations, eliciting envy from most of the town’s residents. All that changed a little more than twenty years ago when Joe Watterson came home early from work one afternoon and walked in on his wife having an affair with their pool boy. In a fit of rage, Joe shot his wife and the pool boy before turning the gun on himself.

  No one had lived at the estate since that tragic day. Even more, it didn’t look like anyone ever would.

  Wanting to wash his hands of the place, the Wattersons’ only child, Xander, put the property up for sale shortly after his parents’ death, but received no offers. Even when he cut the selling price in half, the estate garnered no interest. Finally, Xander gave up on the idea of unloading the property and had just left it to rot.

  After wrestling with the haunted memories of his tragic family history, Xander Watterson had moved away from Treasure Cove a handful of years ago. As far as I knew, he had not returned to
town, much less the estate, since. During that time, the place had been sitting vacant.

  There was no denying that the property was spooky. When I was a child, I got the creeps even walking by the front fence of the estate. Stories made their way around the neighborhood about how the place was cursed. There were whispers that it was haunted by Katie Watterson’s ghost. I wasn’t sure what my opinion was on haunted houses, but if they did exist, the Watterson estate would be the place most likely to be home to ghosts.

  Given the property’s sordid history, to hear Kelly tell me that she saw a light on in the place was inconceivable to me.

  After an extended period of silence, I only managed to muster a one-word reply. “What?”

  I was hoping that she was joking. The stiff expression on her face made it clear that she was dead serious.

  “You heard me,” Kelly replied.

  My eyes widened. “But that place has been abandoned for years. The only things living there are spiders and mosquitos.”

  Kelly stared long and hard at me. “Exactly.”

  I hated not giving her the benefit of the doubt, but her claim just sounded too impossible to be true.

  My breath shortened. “Are you sure about what you saw?”

  She nodded. “Don’t get me wrong. At first, I thought I was just seeing things. After driving by the house, I switched my car into reverse and pulled back to the front gate of the house to make sure it wasn’t just some illusion. Trust me, I sat on the street in front of the house for a good thirty seconds staring at the light, so I’m a hundred percent sure about what I saw.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “You said that you stopped at the front gate of the house. Did you get out of your car and go inside the gate to get a closer look?”

  Kelly arched her eyebrows. “Are you crazy? No way. I wasn’t about to set foot on that property.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “I heard a noise coming from the bushes just inside the gate. The rustling sound scared me so much that I nearly jumped out of my seat. I wasn’t about to stick around to see what had caused that noise.”