Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake by Sarah Graves EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Sarah Graves
- Language: English
- Genre: Cozy Culinary Mystery
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Flailing his arms wildly, Eastport, Maine’s local bad boy Toby Moran flew
out the front door of the Rubber Ducky Bar & Grille as if shoved hard from
behind.
Or possibly he’d been kicked. Staggering, he snarled something ugly
over his shoulder at the waterfront drinking establishment he’d been ejected
from. Then he stumbled unsteadily through the gathering dusk toward the
paved path overlooking the harbor and the fishing pier beyond.
I watched from my seat at one of the big, round tables by the front
window in the Pickled Herring, on Water Street across from the Duck.
Around me, the savory aromas of roasting, grilling, and sautéing mingled
with whiffs of seawater drifting in through the open front door.
Outside, it was a lovely late-spring evening, the kind that often lured
unwary visitors into buying old houses here. Right now, in fact, a pair of
them strolled unsuspectingly, hand in hand on the other side of the
Herring’s window.
“. . . architecturally unspoiled,” I heard one of them saying in reverent
tones as they went by.
“And so affordable!” the other agreed brightly.
Yeah, and there’s a reason for both those things, I thought, sipping my
Irish coffee and remembering the days when I, too, was as innocent as a
little lamb. Back then I’d bought one of the big old houses here, then spent
years fixing it up.
Not to mention nearly every penny that I’d possessed. But there’d been
little choice, since the house—fourteen rooms, forty-eight old double-hung
windows, eight fireplaces, and an ell, all covered with white clapboard and
topped by a roof so full of holes that it could’ve doubled as a spaghetti
strainer—showed every sign of being ready to fall down on my head.
Which it still might; old houses are sneaky, it turns out. But at the
moment I had a different problem.
“I’m just not ready to throw in the towel yet,” my friend Ellie White said.
She pursed her lips determinedly around the straw in her tall drink.
Not ready to give up and close the little chocolate-themed bakery
business we’d started together a little over a year earlier, she meant. It’s
what we’d been discussing before I got distracted by the action across the
street; now I turned from the Rubber Ducky’s flashing yellow neon sign and
the shadowy path behind the place, under the building’s metal fire escape
stairway where Moran had gone.
“Ellie,” I began. “I know it’s hard. It is for me, too. I really hate the idea
of closing the shop, but I’m not sure we have a choice.”
The problem being that, as usual at the end of a long winter in downeast
Maine, right now ready cash around here was extremely scarce, and that
went double for our own bank account.
“But we could still squeak through with just one big order,” she insisted,
brushing a long curl of strawberry-blond hair back from her face.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB
