Chapter 1

 Here is my confession. Not that kind of confession, you understand. I know the rules and I follow them.

 But in a way, it’s almost as bad, given the story I’m about to tell you.

 I hate sweets. I hate baked breakfast goods, especially those of the genus donut and the phylum glazed. The entire cookie family is equally loathsome to me, although I might be able to gulp half of an oatmeal raisin if my life or the life of my child depends upon it. Pies, I strongly feel, are best employed as weapons. I maintain a deeply comforting fantasy about a confrontation with a serial killer that ends with a banana cream to the face. As for “artisanal gelato,” it is ice cream in a fake mustache. In the version of Dante’s Inferno I would have written, fraudsters who write artisanal gelato on the signs of their ice cream stores would be slowly drowned in rivers of their own boutique churn.

 Chocolate, though. Chocolate was the archnemesis, the demon squatting at the center of the whole sticky sweet horror show, gnawing on the souls of those who were damned to festoon their walls with posters that said things like, “All you need is love and chocolate, and love is optional.”

 My name is Maris MacWhorter, and my answer to the cup-vs.-cone question is “go lick yourself.”

But, as it turned out, I didn’t hate chocolate. I just hated bad chocolate. This was one of the many things I was about to find out, halfway through my life’s journey. I was also about to find out that I had also accidentally inherited a dog, along with my mother-in-law’s chocolate shop on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, plus a mystery book club that sort of became a real mystery-solving club. And—perhaps not coincidentally—that my mother-in-law’s “accident” wasn’t one at all.

But don’t worry—we’re getting to all that.

 ***

“Count the fudge shops,” I told Bea as we crested the hill and Campbell Creek spread out along the lake like an overfiltered Instagram influencer photo. The Bras d’Or Lake, slate-blue under wispy, high clouds, docks studded with boats, and the main street brimming with signs that apparently had all been made by the same typesetter.

 Quaint.

Blech.

Bea looked up reluctantly from her book and squinted through the windshield. “One. Two. Three. Four.”

“There are four fudge shops on this street,” I said, “and one pharmacy.”

“I think the pharmacy also sells fudge.” She pointed at a window sign in MacLaren’s Family Pharmacy. Yes, we have fudge! “And there’s an ice cream shop. Well, shoppe.”

So two ice cream shoppes, four fudge shops plus a pharmacy that was also a fudge shop, and one tiny grocery co-op. The full grimness of my future existence was dawning on me in pastel sprinkles.

And it was all Eileen MacWhorter’s fault.

My ex-mother-in-law apparently believed two things, both of which she wrote in her, uh, idiosyncratic will: that polite is not the same as kind, and that I am kind even if I don’t know it. Yes, that’s what she wrote. In her actual will. She was apparently trying to prove the second by leaving me her chocolate shop and her house in a town that thinks fudge is a food group. How soon would I crack and kill someone with their own fudge? Meanwhile, my ex-husband—her very polite, fully Canadian son son—got a modest trust and, I imagine and hope, heartburn from realizing he’d been effectively disinherited in favor of his ex-wife.

Bea, naturally, was already plotting against me, eyeing my disdain for Campbell Creek warily from the backseat of our elderly maroon Subaru. As for the traitorous Subaru, it had seemed about ready to give up the ghost in California, but crossing the Canadian border had somehow revived its spirits, like a sick kid who suddenly finds out that it’s a snow day. (Not my particular kid, who loved school, because of course she did.) The Subaru’s air conditioning was even working again—sort of. Not that I thought we’d need much of it up here. It was the last day of August, and the temperature had barely broken seventy. Climate change was one of the many things that had not made it all the way up to northeastern Nova Scotia, apparently.  

 Also, don’t even ask me what seventy is in Celsius. I don’t know, and I don’t plan to learn. I also have no idea what a meter is.

“Are you going to be nice?” Bea asked. “Like Grandma said?”

“She didn’t say nice,” I pointed out. “She said kind. They’re different.”

“Well, you could try being both.”

“The only thing I’m going to be trying to do is figure out how quickly I can sell up and get back to civilization and put a nice little deposit down on a condo in the city. Maybe something with two bedrooms. You never know.”

That was the plan. I’d broached the subject experimentally with the lawyer on the Zoom call that served as the reading of Eileen’s will.

“Well,” he’d said, scratching his dark (and admittedly somewhat sexy) five o’clock shadow in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of my ex-husband. They were cousins, apparently. Cape Breton Island is probably one of those places where everybody is a cousin. No wonder Gavin wanted to get out to find a bride.

 “You could certainly try selling. End of the season, though. You might be better off hanging on through the winter and selling up in the spring, to one of the…out-of-towners.” I had a sense he’d been about to use a descriptive noun that might not strictly qualify as Canadian nice, but changed tack at the last minute.

I relented with Bea, though, because I always relent with Bea. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “No guarantees.”

She accepted this and, even though we were almost there, immediately stuck her nose back into The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal. Bea is nine, obsessed with mysteries, obsessed with animals, and, I’m sorry to say, obsessed with sweets. The Lilian Jackson Braun mysteries offered at least two of those things; I tried my best to limit the third to after dinner. Somewhere around New Hampshire, she developed the annoying habit of proclaiming that we were going to love Campbell Creek and running a chocolate shop, as if I’d already agreed to stay.

Which I definitely had not.

My GPS, which stubbornly refused to sync with the car once we crossed the border, told me that The Tempered Muse was at the end of Nanaimo Street. Campbell Creek also had, as far as I could tell, three streets and a faintly fudgy smell, and we were drawing to the end of one of them. The fudgy smell, however, followed us.

“You have arrived,” my phone proclaimed, pompously and optimistically.

Bea and I peered up in unison at the top of a sloping green hill.

“Monstrosity,” I said, at the same time she said, “Home.”

 ***

 The house was one of those Victorian mansions that looked like a wedding cake had had an unfortunate late growth spurt. Tower, gables, a wraparound porch edged in gingerbread trim that would give any self-respecting dentist a panic attack. And as the daughter of a dentist with a great deal of self-respect, I should know.

 The clapboards were painted a minty teal with cream trim and a front door the color of a ripe cranberry. All of it clashed, but all of it somehow worked. Just behind the rather ample bosom of the main structure was the hint of greenhouse. A conservatory, they probably called it up here. Just like they called a mile a meter.

 A surprisingly tasteful oval sign that wasn’t in the town font hung from an iron bracket. The Well-Tempered Muse was printed in gold leaf over a sketch of a whisk and a cocoa pod. The shop took up the ground floor, the lawyer had told me. The rest of the house was “seven bedrooms and one and a half baths,” which sounded like five bedrooms too many and three bathrooms too few for a mother and a daughter who would be a teenage girl in less than four years. Luckily, I found out later that there was a toilet in the middle of one of the bedrooms. Just a toilet. In the middle of the bedroom. Also, the toilet was home to an absolutely enormous spider, the likes of which I thought only lived in fantasy books and Australia. But again, that comes later.

 Above the shop, windows winked under dormers: our new home, allegedly.

 “Allegedly,” I said out loud. I’d acquired an annoying habit of repeating snippets of my internal monologue in the years since I’d become unmarried.

 Bea hugged her book and grinned. “I love it.”

 “Of course you do,” I said, and pulled into a spot with a view of the porch steps and a pot of geraniums so cheerful I wanted to arrest them for loitering. To be fair, our one and a half bedroom apartment back in Berkeley boasted neither dormer windows nor cheeky geraniums, so I could see Bea’s point.

 A little.

 We hauled ourselves out of the Subaru, and up a set of stone stairs set in the sloping lawn. Once we had arrived (maybe the climb made you feel better about stuffing your face with sugar and cocoa butter?) the porch boards creaked like souls in torment. Up close, you could see that some of the paint was peeling around the windows, and someone needed to refinish the porch. But a well-polished brass bell that looked like it might have come right off some oceangoing vessel hung over the door.

 In the window hung a sign. “Temporarily closed, due to a death in the family.”

 For the first time, the reality of it all–Eileen’s unexpected death, the two weeks we’d had to pack up our lives and decide to move to Canada (temporarily and allegedly), the fact that Eileen had been part of this weird little community and its uni-font culture, where she was obviously loved and missed–hit me all at once. I felt tired: no, exhausted. I slumped down on the swinging porch bench (of course there was one of those) and stared at the geraniums.

 Bea slumped down next to me.

 It was only when we’d gathered the energy to find the keys in the lockbox that the semi-hot lawyer’s latest email had pointed out and were ready to insert them into the lock of our new lives that I noticed that someone had written, in very small letters below the closed sign, “Good riddance.”

 I grabbed it before Bea could see.

 ***

 “I wonder how much it costs to heat this place in the–” I started to say, fumbling for the lights next to the door. I found them, and the shop glowed to life.

 I was completely silent. It was Bea who supplied the, “What the…”

 “Do not finish that sentence, young lady,” I said. “We’re in Canada now.”

 “I was going to say, what the fudge,” sniffed Bea.

 “Exactly my point. You know how I feel about that word.”

 All quips aside, the shop was…truly magnificent, and not at all what I’d been expecting. It took up the entire ground floor of a surprisingly high-ceilinged Victorian: and a Victorian on which  someone had lavished money at some point. Every surface gleamed with natural wood in a light, contemporary finish. The displays of chocolate were sparse and attractive, looking more like an expensive San Francisco boutique specializing in bean-to-bar than the Cracker Barrel reject pile of country cozy-ness I’d been dreading since I heard the news. Behind the cash wrap a stained glass window that looked original cast rich yellow, green, and red squares of light onto the countertops.

 Bea had immediately run over to a display case near the cash register, and I followed her. We peered inside. It was like a jeweler’s case, full of perfectly formed and petitely perfect chocolate truffles that had obviously been hand-dyed by someone who knew what she was doing. Small, handwritten cards next to them identified the flavors: Passionfruit habanero. Vanilla sweet corn. Blueberry horseradish. (Okay, that one was weird.)

 “I want to eat them all,” said Bea, pressing her nose against the glass.

 “Just keep in mind you’re eating your college fund if you do,” I said. I checked to be sure the case was locked, just in case, before I headed back to the part of the building that interested me the most: the kitchen.

 It was an open kitchen, visible through a large window that led to the shop. Had Eileen done demonstrations here? Made truffles while the tourists shopped? I didn’t know, but the kitchen’s stainless steel surfaces gleamed immaculately. Although, now that I thought of it, it also looked like more than a show kitchen. It looked well-used. Well set-up. Two mugs sat next to a very clean chocolate tempering machine.

 I started opening up bins: labels in the shop’s sleek branding. Large vat-like containers of real extracts: vanilla, maple, lemon, orange. And…chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.

 But what wasn’t I smelling? I closed my eyes, and tried to breathe with my entire body.

 What I did smell was something citrusy, with a faint aftertaste of coffee. I breathed in deeply.

 That’s what it was: no sickly marshmallowy fudgy sticky sweet.

 This was the real stuff.

 Who was my mother-in-law, anyway? Gavin had always described her–with the faintest snort of derision–as “a very nice lady who makes candy.” But Gavin had lied about a lot of things, as it turned out. Because this wasn’t candy.

 It was art.

 My culinary reverie was interrupted only by a panicked-sounding squeal in Bea’s general direction. I found that I’d been sitting cross-legged in front of a tub of couverture in bags. I got up as quickly as I could and bolted back to the shop showroom, slamming the door to the kitchen open and shouting, “What? What’s going on? Is everything okay?” I try not to be that mom, but the thought of Bea in any sort of trouble has haunted my dreams since the very early morning when I gave birth.

 I found her lying on the floor, on her back, being attacked by…something.

 But the squealing wasn’t pain or suffering. It was delight.

 A large sausage-shaped thing wrapped in a red tartan sweater like a cocktail weenie in puff pastry was squatting on my daughter’s stomach, licking her face with a pink tongue. He was also making the most incredible noise I’d ever heard, which could be heard even over Bea’s squeals.

 “Dog!” Bea was saying over and over again. “Dog! Dog!” My ninety-ninth percentile on the California state reading test daughter had been reduced to toddler-like declarations of fact. Great.

 It was a while before we could get the creature off of Bea long enough to read the name printed on his ID tag, which was shaped like a violin.

 “Angus MacBagpipe,” I muttered, reading the tiny words crammed onto the very edges of the brass tag. “Dear god. Oh, wait, there’s something else on the other tag. Oh, he has asthma. We have inherited an asthmatic dog named Angus MacBagpipe.” I guess that explained the noise. He was breathing.

 “I love him and will die for him,” said Bea, wrapping her arms around his neck. Angus had settled down next to her, sitting at full attention, looking as regimental as a dog that was roughly shaped like a corgi but with the coloring of a sick Dalmatian and the droopiest of droopy beagle ears could look.

 “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

 Angus padded along wheezily but amicably behind us as we explored the rest of the shop. Thank all the gods it wasn’t a shoppe (was about the only coherent thought I could manage after a full seven days of driving). We found a small office next to the kitchen, and I looked around while Angus took a few noisy slurps from an almost full water bowl. A large desk took up most of the rest of the windowless, no-frills office. In comparison to the immaculate kitchen, it was cheerfully untidy. A half-full mug of something beginning to turn sat on the desk. A blotter next to it was open to August, which was about to expire. Poor Eileen, I thought again. I ripped off the top page, feeling somehow and vaguely like it was the right thing to do. Eileen had already started filling out September. Order mango infusion. Pedicure. (Well, huh, I thought. Keeping it tight, Eileen. You know, before I remembered that she was never going to get that pedicure.) And then, for September 2, 6:30pm, “CSMC.”

 Bea was standing next to me, and she pointed at this. “I saw those same initials out there,” she said. “Maybe it’s a clue to her murder.”

 “Bea,” I said, too tired to finish the thought. Somewhere around Montana, Bea had started expounding on her theory that “Grandma Eileen” (whom she hadn’t met since she was in diapers) had actually been murdered.

 “Don’t make me take the Rita Mae Brown away,” I’d said.

 “I’m onto Tana French now, anyway.”

 “Bea! No Tana French! You’re nine! I didn’t sleep for a week after In the Woods!”

 “I’m just saying,” she said. “The death was unexpected, right?”

 “She was 71. Death isn’t unexpected at 71.”

 “But it wasn’t, like, a heart attack or cancer or choking on a chocolate or something.”

 “She had a fall. Old people fall. Not your other grandmother, alas.”

 Bea’s disapproving look nearly shattered the rearview mirror. “Grandmaman isn’t so bad.”

 “Call her granny and see what you think then.”

 Bea had buried her nose back in Broken Harbor then, as if to say, “Discussion over if you’re not going to behave yourself,” but over the next several days in the car, it had come up again in Bea’s matter-of-fact, unsentimental way with murder.

 Now, I said, “So she wrote down a clue to a murder for a day several weeks after her actual murder date.”

 “Ugh. You should start watching BritBox with me. It could be the name of her murderer. Maybe she was going to meet him…or her. Plenty of murderers are women these days.”

 I shook my head. “Bea, I’m serious. We can joke about it in private. But don’t mention this in public. We’re strangers here. You and I are what you might call the direct beneficiaries of her death, even if we were 4000 miles–”

 “--About 6500 kilometers,” interrupted Bea.

 “--whatever that means, away at the time. It’s not…funny, either. I knew Eileen, sort of. And she was very good to leave us this place.”

 Bea took me by the hand. I understood it for what it was: an apology, of sorts.

 “I’ll show you where I saw those letters before,” she said, leading me back out to the shop.

 The house had a bay window, and I saw now that it was more than just the window. It was an entire alcove. There were no displays of chocolate here, just a window seat and a gorgeous round oak table that looked like it might seat six comfortably, or eight at a squeeze. Bookshelves lined the space underneath the windowseat, and a small handwritten card that matched the labels on the truffles in the case sat in the middle.

 “Reserved for the members of the CSMC,” I read out loud. “A club?”

 Bea shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out in two days. Meanwhile, I have to start school tomorrow.”

 “Right!” I said. “And I bet we don’t have anything in the house.”

 We trooped up the stairs. After the cool elegance of the not-a-shoppe and the spotless, vaguely Scandinavian commercial kitchen, I was experiencing something that tasted like…hope.

 “Oh my…” And here I uttered a very un-Canadian word.

 Whatever chaos and faux Victoriana Eileen had driven out of her downstairs life and commercial enterprise had walked up the stairs, flopped down on the leather chesterfield, and made itself at home.

 “Dank,” I said.

 “Cool,” said Bea, and immediately ran off to claim the largest bedroom, Angus wheezing at her heels.