Murder Actually (23 page)

 

Wait until strawberries are in season.

Buy Strawberry Cream Cupcakes from Sweet Annie B's Bakery.

Destroy bakery box prior to serving (preferably by fire, Blue always pulls things from the trash).

Serve.

Bask in glow of unearned praise.

Go to confession; take cupcakes for Father Foy.

 

Stephanie McCarthy obtained a BA in English from Southern Illinois University and a J.D. from Southern University School of Law. She is the author of Haunted Peoria, based on the folklore of her hometown, and her debut cozy/chick-lit mystery, Murder Actually. She is currently an attorney living in Peoria, Illinois with her husband and three lively children. In her free time she enjoys reading mysteries, writing mysteries and plotting the elaborate deaths of her enemies (take that, Comcast guy). She blogs about mysteries at Love is Murder ( http://stephaniemccarthyauthor.wordpress.com/ ) and guestblogs for Smitten by Britain and Criminal Elements.

I'd like to thank my agents, Sarah Jane Freymann of the Sarah Jane Freymann Agency, and Jessica Sinsheimer for their hardwork, enthusiasm and patience with a newbie; and my editors Anselm and Eloise at Attica Books, for all of the professional advice and expertise. On a personal note, I'd like to thank my husband, Tim, for all the time he lets me spend on my books while he watches our adorable monster children, David, Madeline and Nathan. I'd also like to thank my mother, Liz Zentz, and mother-in-law, Lynn McCarthy, for all of their assistance and support.

Read on for a preview of Theft by Chocolate, another whimsical and laugh-out-loud mystery from Attica Books...

 

by

 

Luba Lesychyn

 

Chocolate addict Kalena Boyko wasn't prepared for this. Heading to work at Canada's largest museum as an administrator, she hoped for quiet and uninterrupted access to her secret chocolate stash. Instead she's assigned to manage the high-profile Treasures of the Maya exhibition with her loathed former boss Richard Pritchard.

 

With no warning, her life is turned inside out and propelled into warp speed as she stumbles across an insider plot that could jeopardize the exhibit and the reputation of the museum.

 

After hearing about a recent botched theft at the museum and an unsolved jewel heist in the past from security guard and amateur sleuth Marco Zeffirelli, Kalena becomes suspicious of Richard and is convinced he's planning to sabotage the Treasures of the Maya exhibition. Her suspicions, and the appearance of the mysterious but charming Geoffrey Ogden from the London office, don't help her concentration. The Treasures of the Maya seem cursed as problem after problem arises, including the disappearance of a key artefact - the world's oldest piece of chocolate...

 

 

 

I scrambled beneath the humbling granite archway that framed the Canadian National Museum's staff entrance, water dripping from me as if I had just slipped out of the shower. The quivers that waved through my body triggered an uncomfortable realization, not that I was cold from my drenched state, but that I'd transitioned into the first stage of chocolate detox. I hadn't had a crumble of the substance for at least eighteen hours.

The tinted glass of the door before me mirrored a startling reflection – “harrowing” would have been a kind descriptor. The morning had started as a good-hair day, but the flash-flood rains that had caught me sans umbrella put a different spin on the do. So not fair. Why was it that Audrey Hepburn looked positively radiant after being soaked in a torrential downpour in Breakfast at Tiffany's? I looked like Breakfast at Wal-Mart. Mind you, I didn't resemble Audrey Hepburn at the best of times except perhaps for the dark, doe-like eyes I shared with the Hollywood icon.

I tilted closer towards the glass, raised my index fingers to the corners of my eyes and elongated the fragile skin upwards planing out the subtle crow's feet. Maybe I did have a bit of Hepburn going on. The image grimaced back at me. Who was I kidding? The Hepburn I was channeling was Katharine when she was fished out of the Ulanga River in African Queen.

“Are you going inside or are you planning on staring at yourself all day?”

Embarrassed that my self-deprecation had been interpreted as vanity, I rotated towards the person with the after-hours-club voice. The young woman I faced sliced away any traces of my self-esteem in a nanosecond, bulldozed past me and vanished behind the second set of doors.

I mustered a handful of dignity only to lose it after slipping and lurching on the stone floor opposite the security control room. Through the triple-glazed, bullet-proof glass, there was a beehive of activity. Security command central was crammed full of people, and I discerned guards who didn't usually work the morning swing. The news must have broken over the weekend. But I had eyeballed all the dailies before stepping onto the subway – The Globe, The Post, The Star and even skimmed the free Metro paper, but none referred to the disappearance of the porcelain Tang horse from the Chinese gallery the previous Friday.

One more set of doors steered me to the main security checkpoint where a boyish newbie guard was planted behind the counter of black polished laminate. I instantly dove into his eyes. Emerald green pools like that are a rarity. The combination of those eyes with his dirty blonde faux bed-head was an irresistible combination. His neck was a tad thick, but I suspected there was a body-builder's frame hidden beneath the uniform.

“Good morning.” I hoped my voice would drown out the sound of my heart palpitating.

“Good morning, ma'am. Looks like you forgot your umbrella today.”

Ma'am? Seriously? Clearly my cougarishly-tight skirt wasn't fooling anyone. “You can call me Kalena. And I suggest you drop the word ‘ma'am' from your vocabulary, at least around here.” I was doing him a favour. He could lose his head if he used that term on one of our resident feminazis.

“Uh…noted. My name's Marco…Marco Zeffirelli.”

“Like the director?” Franco Zeffirelli's screen version of Romeo and Juliet was my all-time favourite version of the story of the star-crossed lovers.

“I thought the Director's name was Carson James.”

“Never mind.” Eyes you could lose yourself in – yes. Knowledge of Italian film directors – no. I plunked my purse down and rummaged for my ID badge. No point asking a keener if he'd swipe me through. “What's going on in the control room?” I scrounged deeper into my bag with the fervour of a manic dog trying to surface a buried bone.

“They caught the guy that stole that horse.”

“Are you kidding?” So far I'd found a bottle of dark plum nail polish and some rogue shavings of chocolate in my bag. I licked my fingers.

“Oh, I wouldn't kid about a thing like that. It's only my third day on the job.”

“Sooooo, who was it?”

“One of the contract construction workers. Have you found that ID yet, ma'am, I mean, Kalena?”

“How did they catch the guy?”

“Seems he was a suspect in the theft of that small Group of Seven painting from the Art Gallery a couple of months ago? They've been keeping an eye on him. The perp's a total amateur.”

“Why do you say that?”

“International art thieves go for big ticket items. Like that opal collection that went missing from here.”

“That was almost thirty years ago.” My eyebrows arched into an unnatural point. Was this kid even born when the gems went missing from the Canadian National Museum? “You seem to know a lot for someone who's been on the job for only three days.”

“Personal interest of mine, art theft, that is. The crime's second only to drug trafficking. About $6 billion worth of art is stolen every year.”

“Who knew?” I spied the woman who'd almost bowled me over moments earlier as she whizzed through the corridor bordering the rear of the security desk.

“By the way, do you know the woman that came through here just before me?”

“The one who's a lead singer for a death metal band?”

I tried to suppress a chortle, but failed. “I think you profiled that one pretty accurately.”

“It's not a profile. I saw her front a band a couple of months ago. She's the new IT Help Desk person – still has her temp badge. Doesn't really have customer service written all over her, if you ask me.”

Finally my fingers landed on a familiar plastic shape. I whipped my hand out of the bowels of my purse as though withdrawing it from an alien's guts. Out fell my BlackBerry as well as heaps of gold foil wrappers that feathered the security log book.

“Ferrero Rochers for breakfast again?”

I budged my head towards the nauseatingly familiar voice and was walloped by a blast of Gucci cologne. “Good morning to you too, Richard.” I scooped up the week-old chocolate wrappers and with a deft sleight of hand they disappeared back into the depths of my bag.

“That's a great suit, sir. Is it Cavalli?” said Marco.

“Who are you?” said Richard.

“My name's…”

“It was a rhetorical question.” Foam was forming in the corner of Richard's mouth. “I didn't really expect an answer.”

Marco's face soured. Poor kid. Nothing like being verbally bitch-slapped first thing on a Monday morning.

Richard Pritchard was my former boss and current Director of Exhibits and Programs. When he was recruited to head the division in which I'd worked for almost fifteen years, it was as if a gnarly chunk of metal had been thrown into a finely tuned piece of machinery. I fled the toxic environment as quickly as possible and joined a newly created department called Museum Consulting Services.

Richard slid back the finely-woven sleeve of his jacket and eyed his Movado. “Running right on time as usual, I see.”

I elevated onto my tiptoes and transfixed my gaze to Richard's forehead. “If I were you, Richard, I'd request a refund for the Rogaine. I really don't think it's doing the job.”

Richard whipped up his hand, skimmed over the peach fuzz at the front of his skull and immediately dropped his arm as if all life force had been drained from the limb. Blood slowly rose up his neck and began flushing his face from the chin up, like red-tinted mercury rising up a thermometer. I dipped my chin and turned my face sufficiently to give Marco a discreet you-owe-me-one wink. He responded with a Cheshire grin.

“You might be interested to know I'm meeting your boss and Brenda in twelve minutes and fifty-six seconds,” Richard said, “and we're expecting you to take notes.”

“I'm aware of that,” I said, sporting a saccharine smile.

“You must be telepathic then seeing as Stewart and I arranged this meeting minutes ago.”

“Please don't spit on me.” With the palm of my hand, I swiped my cheek. “Stewart sent me a text.” I grabbed my BlackBerry from the counter, slid my thumb over the dead battery indicator light, and waved it past Richard's face as though swatting a fly.

“You'd better hurry–”

“Yes, I'd better.” I swiped my ID card through the electronic reader releasing the lock and cycloned my way through the doors to the curatorial centre where the Museum's offices and collections are housed. Richard bellowed something after me, but it was lost in the wake I left behind.

With determined grace I circumnavigated the first corner, ensuring I was out of Richard's sightline, then idled at Information Technology's door. Through the window I spotted the overly-made-up death metal vocalist. But there was no time to waste. If memory served me well, there was a chocolate bar stashed in my desk. There was still time to inhale it before the meeting with Richard.

I sprinted through a maze of hallways like a thoroughbred bolting for the win, past Carpentry and Taxidermy, and galloped past the Museum's own weapon of mass destruction, the daunting fumigation chamber used to exterminate insect stowaways catching rides on incoming artifacts and animal specimens. My high heels tap-tapped against the worn tile floor, mimicking the sound of machinegun fire. I rounded the next bend with an indelicate skid almost colliding into a technician from the Egyptian Department. Planted in the middle of the narrow corridor, she was talking to the Museum's chief librarian, Walter Pembroke. They hovered over a cart of small mummified creatures – probably cats or baby crocs.

“Doh! Sorry about that,” I said and swerved around the pair and barreled onwards.

“Kalena, have you returned
The Art Paper
?” Walter hollered.

I decelerated to a trot.
The Art Paper
was the museum and art world's answer to an entertainment rag reporting on who bought what for how much, exposing galleries that had inadvertently purchased forgeries and headlining the most recent museum thefts. “Soon, I swear.”

Parting my way through a last set of doors, I emerged into a public gallery lined with boulder-sized rocks, minerals and gems to whose beauty I had long become desensitized. I came to a slow halt, panting as though I had just climbed the stairs of the CN Tower. A sign with the words ‘Museum Consulting Services' finely etched into a brass plaque hung on the stone wall at eye level. Home at last.

The department was the brainchild of my boss, Stewart Anderson, who had modelled it after a local private firm that provided consulting services to museums internationally. Stewart persuaded the Museum's new Director and board of governors that a consulting branch within the institution could offer expertise on everything from designing a new gallery to building a museum from scratch and turn a much needed profit for a Museum whose funding sources were increasingly shrinking. He was given carte blanche on the condition the new department earned enough to cover all salaries and operating costs and made revenue to spare.

Stewart knew I had been integral in developing another Museum department from scratch, and he wanted someone who could produce administrative protocols and maneuver with ease through the Museum's tangled bureaucracy. He was relying heavily on me and our senior consultant, Brenda Lockhart, to achieve the department's mandate. And all of us bore Atlas's burden daily.

I twisted the doorknob to the office with the tremble of a heroin junkie plummeting from a high. “Hey, Brenda.”

“Morning,” she said, without releasing her stare from her computer monitor.

I whipped off my soggy plaid trench and set my purse down beside the picture of my cat. Sweet old thing had died shortly after my second husband moved out. She had been as brokenhearted as I was. I flung open my desk drawer. Where was that chocolate bar? Crap. I had forgotten I had consumed it as an afternoon snack on Friday. Chocolate withdrawal was obviously affecting my memory. What the hell was I going to do? I couldn't go to a meeting with Richard in this fragile state and risk coming undone in front of him.

“Were you at the gym this morning?” Brenda tilted her head upwards at a newsroom-like row of clocks labeled London, Lisbon, Hong Kong and Toronto. The time for Toronto read 9:25.

“No. I woke up too late for my body combat class this morning. My alarm clock's messing with me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honestly, there's something screwy going on with the volume on my radio alarm, and I didn't hear it go off. Anyways, have you talked to Stewart yet?”

“The usual crack-of-dawn briefing.” Brenda typed so furiously I thought her keyboard was going to split in half. “Don't worry. Stewart loaded up at Heathrow with Thornton's including your favourite chocolate-smothered toffee.”

“Awww, really?”

“You know he always does. You can pick it up when you see him. He called down a few minutes ago and said he needs you in his office prr-onto.”

“I know, I know. I ran into Richard on the way in, and he told me we're meeting. Said I was supposed to take, uh…notes, like suddenly I'm uh…a… secretary or something.”

Brenda swiveled around in her Herman Miller and peered at me suspiciously over the rim of her round metal-framed specs. With her banged bob of red hair and her penchant for wearing flats and skirts whose hems fell below the knee, she reminded me of a 1920s flapper. “Richard's neurons are misfiring again. Stewart didn't say anything about me joining the hot air fest. But you better do something with that hair of yours. Freakishly scary.”

I whipped a mirror out of my purse. “Oh, give me a friggin break.” Between the rain and the mad dash from the staff entrance I had a veritable vermin's lair on my head. “I can't believe people I work with have...uh…seen me like this.”

Brenda hopped to her feet as though she'd been auto-ejected from her chair. “You're exhibiting symptoms of fuzzy brain. You haven't had any chocolate yet today, have you?”