“That was some party.”
“Yeah.”
“You think there’ll be leftover cake?”
“Bound to be. He can’t eat it all. Can he?”
“I don’t know.”
They looked glum as they escorted me down the hill. Behind us the gates shut noiselessly. I almost felt sorry for Waffles.
“Sweetcakes Ratchet,” I said.
Gordon looked guarded. “What about her?” he said.
“She’s pulling some muscle on you guys,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” Ronny said. “Don’t you worry about the Sweetie Pies.”
“Think they can take us on?” Gordon said. “We’re not some kids in kindergarten.”
“Yeah,” Ronny said. “You think we got to where we are by being soft?”
“No,” I said, “I’m sure you’re real tough guys.”
They glared at me. They looked about as hard as fudge.
“What about de Menthe?” I said cautiously.
“Eddie?”
“Him?”
“What about him?”
“Just making conversation,” I said. A streetcar went past us. We were almost at the bottom of the hill and the avenue ahead was shaded with trees.
“He’s all right.”
“He’s not a bad guy, Eddie.”
“We have a treaty, don’t we?” Gordon said.
“He don’t poach into our territory, and we don’t go into his.”
“Plenty of candy for everyone.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Listen, snoops,” Gordon said. He and Ronny faced up to me. “Boss don’t want you going around asking questions. You understand?”
“Peace and quiet all round, get it?”
I looked at them. They stood there like they’d been ordered to go to the principal’s office. Defiant yet worried. But doing what they were told.
“Sure,” I said. I thought of the boy up on the hill, alone at his own birthday party. “Sure.”
I had no intention of stopping the investigation, of course. But there was no reason to tell them that just then. Whether any of this was connected to the case I couldn’t, as yet, say for sure. But a good detective asks questions first, then tries to figure out how the pieces fit together.
Then I thought about how there were two of them, and how they weren’t exactly on the right side of the law, and it made me wonder, if only for a moment.
“Did you break into my office?” I said.
“What would we do that for?” Gordon said, wounded.
“Of course we didn’t,” Ronny said.
I stared at them hard. Could I believe them? Cody did say that the people who broke in were grown-ups. And even though he didn’t really see them…I found it hard to believe they were Ronny and Gordon. For one thing, they were just a little too short.
“So we’re cool?” Gordon said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Good,” Ronny said.
“Well, see you around, Nelle,” Gordon said.
“Or not,” Ronny said. “If you catch our drift.”
I watched them walk back the long way up the hill.
My mind was full of unanswered questions. I had come no closer to solving the case, and I was starting to get worried. A simple missing teddy seemed to lead me directly into a brewing gang war over the illegal candy trade. Things were escalating too quickly.
I didn’t even know if these events were related, but put everything together and it seemed odd. And who had trashed my office? Grown-ups, Cody told me, but he must have been wrong—grown-ups didn’t go around breaking into kids’ sheds and destroying what was inside—did they?
It was only a short walk from where I was up to Farnsworth Drive and, half on a whim, I turned on to it. It had been too long since I’d last been there.
Farnsworth’s Chocolate Factory.
I stared at the name. It rose in wrought iron above the gates. It was so familiar that it had become just a part of the background, like the tall silent chimneys, or the walls that kept out intruders.
It was quiet here on the hill by the abandoned factory, quiet and still.
And I remembered the day the chocolate factory shut down. We all did.
The police officers, grim-faced, approaching the factory. The workers milling about in their blue overalls, some defiant but most, it seemed, resigned.
The machines were stopped.
The cocoa beans were left to rot.
The workers were made to leave.
And the chains were placed over the gates, and locked.
It was the day the smell of chocolate left the city. Like a soul departing.
They said Farnsworth never left the factory that day, that he lived there still, all alone…
A new police department was set up, the Bureau for Prohibition, and soon after the candy gangs were everywhere.
And no one ever saw Farnsworth again.
I began to walk around the walls. They had been topped sometime in the past with barbed wire. It sat there still, sharp and rusting. There were warning signs posted everywhere: “Do Not Enter—Danger of Death!”
“Private Property—Intruders Will Be Prosecuted”
“Property of the Farnsworth Candy Company Inc.—No Unauthorized Access”
There was even a sign that said, “Beware the Dog!”
While the factory could no longer make chocolate it still belonged to Farnsworth, and before he’d disappeared he’d made sure no one could enter his private kingdom. Perhaps he hoped to come back one day and resume production. Until then, no one was allowed in.
The walls were high and solid, with no easy foothold. Even if you could climb over and not cut yourself, you’d only be in the big courtyard in front of the factory itself.
To get to the production floor, you’d still have to get through the main doors, and those were locked and bolted.
I walked around for a long time, looking for an opening, but I found none. The wall stretched across the hill, and weeds now grew around it, and I saw ants had built a prominent nest against one corner.
On the west side of the factory, the road from out of town led up the hill to the service gates. Here the trucks used to come every morning, laden with raw materials, cocoa beans and sugar and nuts, and return in the early evening packed carefully with freshly minted Farnsworth bars.
My mouth watered just thinking about them.
Caramel fudge with chocolate wafers so thin they melted in your mouth, tiny sugared hazelnuts that popped when you bit into them.
You could get still get candy, I knew that as well as anyone. All I had to do was go down to see Bobbie, and he’d have as many chocolate bars as I could eat. A Soufflé Brothers’ Special-Super-Softy-Pop, or Madame Sosotris’ Three-Flava-Guava bar…but they’d be inferior.
No one had ever made chocolate as good as Farnsworth’s.
The road to the factory appeared, at first glance, to be abandoned. Weeds grew here too, and roots broke through the asphalt. And yet when I looked more closely I saw new tire marks on the road and places where the plants had been crushed by the passage of something heavy like a truck.
When I went up to the side gates I saw the locks on the heavy chains had been replaced, and not long ago: they were well-oiled and without the fine layer of old dust that gathered everywhere about the factory.
Could someone have been using this gate, and recently?
But if so, why?
As I rounded the perimeter of the factory, the sea came into view. The sun shone high in the sky and the blue of the water was startling.
I looked out to the horizon and could see ships as tiny as sugar plums, and seagulls like specks of chocolate chips hovered amid the few meringue clouds. I took a deep breath of honey-scented air and, after a moment, continued to walk.
I felt I had been walking around the factory for hours. I followed a dirt trail that had crept up into being around the walls, as though others like me had followed this same route, circling in the hope of gaining access to the mysteries of the chocolate factory.
But I could see no way in. The building kept its secrets tightly and would allow no intruders into its heart.
I reluctantly said goodbye to the chocolate factory, and went back down the hill deep in thought.
When I got home I went up to my room and sat on the bed, trying to make sense of everything in the case so far. Eddie’s teddy had been stolen from the playground—that, at least, seemed clear. The question wasn’t so much who the thief was, as anyone present in the playground at various times could have taken it. It was more a question of who, then, they were working for. Could one of Eddie’s rivals—Waffles or Sweetcakes—be behind it?
So far, so simple—but that didn’t explain the grown-ups who broke into my office. If they really were grown-ups, which I still found hard to believe. One way or the other, something didn’t fit—and I was no closer to finding the missing teddy. There was something bigger at stake, I just knew it, but what?
All that was clear to me so far was that no one involved in the case wanted me to stick my nose in it.
Who knew the chocolate trade was such serious business?
It was then that I thought I heard the front door open, and I knew my mom must have come in. I opened my bedroom door.
“Mom?”
There was no answer, though I heard someone move down below.
“Mom?”
Footsteps, but moving softly, as though trying not to be heard.
And I was suddenly scared.
I tiptoed to the stairs. I looked ’round for something to use, a baseball bat or a frying pan, but all I could find was a potted cactus plant. I held it up. It had thorns.
It was the best I could do.
I stepped on the stairs. The first step creaked and I froze. Down below someone moved and I shouted, “Who’s there!”
There was no reply and, with a burst of panic, I ran down the stairs, my hand raised to throw the cactus. I heard an intake of breath and saw a dark, indistinct shape moving away through the open door, and then I stumbled over the carpet and the pot flew from my hand and hit the door as it closed, showering the floor with dark earth and broken shards. The door slammed shut behind the intruder, and I stared stupidly at the floor and at the cactus which lay there.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it stared back at me with a mournful expression.