The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase

  Logan scratched it gently with his fingernail and shook his head. “You can tell the color goes all the way through. I’ve seen a lot of different cocoa beans, but never one this round, or this blue, or this strong smelling. Where did you get it, Miles?”

  Miles hesitated before answering. He felt bad pointing another finger at Henry, but it was the truth, after all. “I found it in the Marshmallow Room.”

  Logan frowned. “That’s strange. Henry never has chocolate in the Marshmallow Room.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly in the room,” Miles said. “More like I found it on his desk.”

  “It must not have been in there yesterday,” Philip said. “I was helping him catch up on paperwork. I definitely would have seen it on his desk.”

  “Well, it wasn’t so much on his desk,” Miles admitted, “as it was inside an envelope with an old picture.” He reached into his backpack and placed his copy of the Opening Day photograph on the table.

  Even though Logan’s stomach was still in knots, he couldn’t help smiling when he saw the picture of his grandfather as a young man. He walked by a large print of this photo every day. It hung in the hallway of his apartment. “Why do you have this?”

  “It was in the library display on the history of Life Is Sweet,” Miles said. “After seeing all that stuff in Sam’s box from when he was younger, it just sort of caught my eye, so I borrowed it and made a copy. Then I saw another copy in Henry’s office with the bean, so I’m pretty sure it must mean something. You told me once you don’t recognize anyone other than your grandparents, right?”

  Logan nodded, tracing his finger over his grandfather’s face. The original Candymaker couldn’t have been more than ten years older than Logan was right now when the picture had been taken. Very strange to think about. Where would he be standing in ten years? Who would be standing beside him? Hopefully the same people who were sitting beside him right then.

  “I asked Arthur to see if he can track down their identities,” Miles continued, hoping Logan wouldn’t think this was an invasion of privacy. He seemed to be in a trance, though, staring at the picture and not blinking.

  Daisy looked up from her virtual keyboard. “So am I correct that we’re all assuming there’s some connection between this bean and the contract and the chocolate used to make the first Harmonicandy?”

  “But the original Harmonicandy wasn’t blue,” Miles pointed out.

  “True,” Logan said, prying his eyes away from the photo and back to the bean. “But remember, the Harmonicandy was a mixture of dark and milk chocolate. If Henry had mixed it already, the blue would have been absorbed by the darker color, and we wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “Can’t you use that dog skill you have?” Philip asked. “If you taste the bean and it tastes like the original Harmonicandy, won’t we have our answer? I mean, at least we’ll know more than we do right now.”

  Logan picked up the bean (an act that took both hands), sniffed it, then with only a second’s hesitation about where the bean may have been before, he licked it. His smile told the others all they needed to know.

  His hands shook as he placed the bean back down on the table, where it kept trying to roll off. “This bean—well, one from the same harvest of cocoa beans—was used to make the original Harmonicandy. No question.”

  “And you’re sure you’ve never tasted it before?” Daisy asked, tapping on the table. Her brain had been busy putting all the pieces together, and she was almost ready to lay out her plan.

  “I’ve definitely never tasted it,” Logan said. “I might have smelled it before, but I’m not sure exactly.”

  Daisy picked up the bean and watched as the sunlight through the window made it gleam. Most beans were dull and had no shine at all. She made one last notation, then stood up and began pacing in front of the table. It was strange to be able to walk normally in a vehicle going seventy miles per hour on the highway, but she wasn’t complaining.

  “All right. Let’s go through what we know and what we don’t know. We don’t know why this bean was stuck in an envelope with that photograph, or whether the people in the picture are the same people who signed the contract. We don’t know if this blue bean is one of the ‘special beans’ they talked about, either. But we do know that beans of the same type were used in making the Harmonicandy, and we know that they were used at least one other time, because Henry claims to have tasted it before, and Logan may have smelled it before.”

  “Is there something we can do to find out where else it was used?” Miles asked. “Other than tasting every chocolate candy out there? Not that I’d mind, I mean, if it came to that.”

  “I’m not sure good ’ol Harvey here can tell us that,” Daisy said, “but we can get a lot of other information. We can use the lab to analyze the bean’s chemical composition and to find out what part of the world it came from. The computer can find the identities of the people in the photograph, although that will take some time, and maybe Arthur will find them sooner.”

  “Wow,” Miles said, shaking his head in amazement. “Harvey can do all that?”

  “I’m telling you, R and D spared no expense with this baby.”

  “I’ll try to remember where I smelled it,” Logan said. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the chocolate smell still hanging in the air. Maybe he could narrow it down to a question of timing—had he smelled it recently, or years ago, or somewhere in between? He tried to clear his mind of everything else—a pretty impossible task at the moment—so he could focus purely on his sense of smell. He began to get an image of himself standing somewhere as he smelled it, but all he got was a sense of yellow. The sun? Had he smelled it outside?

  Something about the bean was nagging at Miles, too. But it wasn’t the smell; it was the color. When Daisy had held it up to the light a few minutes earlier, it glowed such an unusual, shiny bright blue. Not sky blue or baby blue, but almost midnight blue. He’d seen that exact shade before, except it had a shimmery look to it. He looked down at his hand. That’s where he’d seen it—in his hand! But what had he been holding?

  Miles stared into his empty palm, willing his brain to remember. Then suddenly he knew! He jumped up from his seat, nearly banging his head on the row of cabinets above it. But before he could say anything, Philip jumped up, actually did bang his head on a cabinet, and yelled, “We have to go back!”

  “What?” Daisy said. “Why?”

  Rubbing his head furiously, he said, “I left my violin in the Harmonicandy Room!”

  “Can’t you borrow one when you get there?” Daisy asked.

  “Or we can rent one on the way,” Logan added, slightly annoyed at having his concentration broken when he was on the brink of remembering.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Philip insisted. “I need my own.”

  Miles shouted, “He’s right! We need to go back!”

  Philip gave him a surprised look. He wasn’t used to Miles being on his side for things. “Er, thanks. See? Miles gets it.”

  Miles shook his head. “No, I mean, sure, you totally need your violin, but there’s another item we need to pick up.”

  “If this is about Whaley,” Philip said, “you’ve gotta let it go. It’s embarrassing.”

  “It’s not Whaley,” Miles promised.

  Logan grabbed Miles’s arm. “You figured something out, didn’t you?”

  “I think I know when Henry tasted that chocolate before,” Miles said, trying to keep his voice steady. What he was going to say sounded crazy, even to him. “But to prove it,” he continued, “we’ll have to go back and get a sample.”

  “A sample?” Logan asked, confused. “But there isn’t any left, remember?”

  Miles shook his head. “There is. And it’s locked in the factory’s safe. We’re going to have to steal it.”

  Logan’s eyes opened wide. What could be so precious it would be locked in the safe? He heard Henry’s voice saying he’d only tasted it once, a very, very long time ago. He st
ood up, banging his knee on the underside of the table but not caring. “The Magic Bar! You want to steal the last remaining Magic Bar!”

  Miles nodded.

  Daisy leaned back and smiled. “And the adventure begins.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Absolutely not,” AJ said. “We can’t possibly turn around now.” He’d pulled off at a rest stop and was now doing a hamstring stretch on the climbing wall, which apparently also functioned as an actual climbing wall.

  They tried to argue with him, but AJ only said, “We’re due at The Candy Basket in the morning. If we miss our first stop, the Candymaker will pull the rest of the tour for sure.”

  That quieted them. “What if we got in and out really fast, and then you drove through the night?” Logan asked. “We could still get there on time, couldn’t we?”

  AJ shook his head. “No can do, not safe. Why do you need this particular candy bar so badly? Can’t you just buy another one?”

  Logan and Miles groaned in exasperation. “This is the only one,” Miles explained. “The Magic Bar hasn’t been made for fifty years.”

  “Fifty years?” Daisy repeated. “You never said that. How could the same chocolate have lasted long enough for you guys to use it in the contest?”

  “It couldn’t,” Logan said. “Even if it were frozen. That’s part of the mystery we need to solve.”

  AJ switched to the other leg. “So why try to use the same chocolate now? If they stopped making the Magic Bar, that means it must have tasted pretty bad if no one bought it, right?”

  Logan and Miles only stared at him, incredulous. Philip sighed. “Even I know the history of the Magic Bar. It was the first chocolate bar Life Is Sweet ever produced. It sold more units in one week than any other chocolate bar in the country. Then they pulled it from the market, and no one knows why.”

  “Balderdash!” Daisy said. “Someone knows why. Just not us.”

  “Balderdash?” Miles repeated, momentarily distracted from the current situation. He rolled the word around in his head, loving the way it sounded both harsh and soft at the same time.

  “Nonsense,” Daisy clarified. “Baloney. Hogwash. Hooey! All those things. Obviously there’s a lot more going on here than we know, and I say we do whatever’s necessary to figure it out. Otherwise everything we worked so hard for in the contest is out the window.”

  AJ grabbed a bottle of water and began to walk back to the driver’s seat.

  “So you see, AJ,” Miles said, following him, “we have to get that Magic Bar.”

  “Plus I really need my violin,” Philip added. “It’s not like it can fly out of the factory and drop in through Harvey’s sunroof and land in my lap!”

  AJ stopped and turned around. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked Daisy.

  “The drone!” they exclaimed at the same time. Daisy laughed. “We haven’t used that thing since the mission to—”

  AJ held up his hand. “You’ve got to stop talking so freely.”

  “Sorry!” Daisy said. “But you’ve gotta admit it was cool! Coming down from the sky in the middle of—”

  “Daisy!” AJ said again, exasperated.

  “Oops, sorry! But we could totally use it now, right?” Her brain began working overtime. “Okay, we could get Courtney to break into the safe and get the Magic Bar, then scoop up the violin, then pack them into the drone and program it to track our signal!”

  AJ nodded. “Don’t see why not.”

  Miles and Logan stared at them, open-mouthed. “Are you… serious?” Miles asked AJ, hardly daring to believe his good fortune. “A drone might land on Harvey? While we’re driving down the road?”

  “Well, it could arrive when we’re parked for the night, but theoretically, yes, it could arrive while we’re driving. It will track our current GPS coordinates, alter its speed and direction accordingly, and find us wherever we are.”

  Since Logan and Miles were too busy whooping and jumping up and down, Philip figured he had to be the voice of reason. “Am I going to have to point out that my violin is very, very fragile? And if that Magic Bar is the last one in existence or whatever, do we really want to trust its safety to a hunk of thrown-together electronic parts that has to fly hundreds of miles to reach us?”

  “Yes!” Logan and Miles shouted.

  “But what if people notice it and yank it down?” he asked. “Then we’ve lost both!”

  “Don’t worry, Philip,” Daisy said. “It’s big enough to keep everything sealed against the elements, and small enough to look like a hawk. The drone is a very safe way to transport important items.”

  “And you know this because you’ve used it how many times?”

  Daisy paused. “Well, only once, but you can trust me.”

  He looked at her skeptically. They both knew that statement wasn’t always true.

  “Well, you can trust me this time,” she corrected herself.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “Now what?”

  “Now we get back on the road,” AJ said, returning to his seat. “You guys need to figure out how to get the violin and the Magic Bar to the drone in the first place. Don’t bug me about it until it’s time to call the drone into service.”

  “Yes, sir,” Miles said, not even sarcastically.

  Daisy pointed all the way to the back of the RV. “Let’s spread out in the bedroom and make the plan.”

  Miles and Logan led the way, eager to explore that part of Harvey. By the time Philip and Daisy got into the bedroom, Miles and Logan were nowhere to be found. “I know this place is big,” Daisy said, “but it’s not that big. Unless they already jumped into the fake getaway toilet!”

  Philip pointed at the closet. “Pretty sure they went in there.”

  “Huh?” Daisy stepped past the shelves and ducked her head between the firefighter uniform and the tuxedo hanging from a wooden rod above her head. She knew the closet was deeper than it appeared, but when she stepped all the way in and extended her arms and still didn’t hit the wall, she realized how much she’d underestimated it. “Miles?” she called out, her voice muffled by the clothes. “Logan?”

  “Turn left at the cheerleader outfit!” Miles called back, then giggled. “You have to see what Logan’s wearing.”

  “Hope it’s not the cheerleader outfit,” she muttered. “What the—?” A narrow tunnel ran what looked like the whole length of the RV! She could see a faint light up ahead and quickly deduced it was the lamp on a miner’s hat, which was currently on top of Logan’s head. She pushed past the scuba suit, the camouflage bathrobe, the doctor’s scrubs, and a frilly purple bridesmaid dress that must have been selected by a very mean bride. She caught up with the boys just past the fake mailbox large enough to hide in, and stuck her hands on her hips.

  She was about to remind them about the seriousness of their current assignment, but they both had fake mustaches stuck above their lips, and she couldn’t scold them with a straight face.

  “At least now we know we won’t go hungry,” Miles said, tapping giant cardboard boxes of canned peaches, tuna, and tomato sauce with the tip of a cane he’d found. “Yum!”

  AJ’s voice burst into Daisy’s ear as the transceiver she’d forgotten she’d stuck in there switched on. “Do you have the plan yet? Courtney is about to leave the compound.” Daisy lowered the volume. After a month without wearing it, she’d forgotten how it felt to hear something no one else could.

  “I thought she finished her gig for the day,” Daisy said, motioning for Logan to take off the hula skirt. “Where is she going?”

  AJ paused. “She has a date.”

  “A date?” Daisy shrieked.

  “Ouch!” AJ said. “Volume!”

  “Sorry,” Daisy whispered. “How do you know she has a date? Isn’t that against policy?”

  The boys stopped clowning around to listen to this one-sided conversation.

  “Officially, yes,” AJ said. “But your grandmother looks the other way as long as it doesn’t
get serious.”

  Daisy didn’t know what to say to that. She wasn’t sure what that really meant, and she decided she didn’t care all that much, either. “Okay, I’ll let you know in a few minutes.”

  Daisy turned off the transceiver. “C’mon, guys. Let’s get back to work.”

  Logan held out the bright purple bridesmaid dress with frills and lace all around the edges and said, “I bet this would look great on you.”

  “What’s going on?” Philip asked, appearing at the scene a minute later. He looked from Miles to Logan to Daisy, where he stopped, closed his eyes, and them reopened them. Nope, he hadn’t been seeing things. “Did you lose a bet?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  With a few keystrokes Daisy linked her vid com up to the security system at the candy factory, a feat that both impressed and scared the others. The four of them were lying across the bed, watching the screen intently.

  “There she is!” Miles cried out. They could now see Courtney approaching the delivery tunnel on the side of the building. Logan thought that would be the best way to get inside without being seen. Daisy and Philip agreed, although neither mentioned they’d snuck in that way before.

  Courtney kept to the shadows of the trees, darting between them so fast they could barely see her go. She wore dark clothes and a cap pulled down over her face. When she reached the entrance to the tunnel, she pressed herself against the wall and disappeared from the screen.

  “Switching to the camera in my baseball cap,” she whispered. They heard a soft click. The view narrowed and became brighter once the video stream wasn’t coming secondhand through the security camera anymore.

  “Thanks again for doing this,” Daisy said to her.

  “It’s okay,” Courtney replied. “I’ll just add it to the growing list of favors you owe me.”

  “Fair enough,” Daisy said. “Okay, let’s get to it. You shouldn’t encounter any activity in the tunnel. Most people are gone for the day. The door at the end will lead to Hallway B. At that point you’ll be about halfway between your two destinations.”