Free The Chocolate Mouse Trap by JoAnna Carl Page B

called Lindy to make sure Jason had caught her. She had her laptop with her. Its files were fine, she said.
    “I took the day off, because I’ve got to work tonight,” she said. “Mike has city council meeting, of course, and he wants me to be at Herrera’s to close tonight.” Herrera’s is Mike’s upscale restaurant. He keeps it and the Sidewalk Café open most of the winter. In addition to her catering job, Lindy fills in whenever he needs her at one of the restaurants.
    Lindy promised to back up her files, and I hung up, relieved to find that not everyone in the Seventh Major Food Group seemed to have been hit by either a burglary or a computer virus.
    By then the computer had finished copying the files I was most concerned about, and I took the disk out, marked it with “backup” and the date, then put it in my desk drawer. I resolved to think about something else. I hung my jacket on the coat tree in the corner, traded my snow boots for a pair of loafers, and wandered back into the shop, taking deep, soothing breaths laden with chocolate aroma. Aunt Nettie wasn’t in sight, but the place was bustling, just the way a chocolate business should be four weeks before Valentine’s Day.
    I stopped beside Dolly Jolly, one of our newer employees. Dolly had popped up in our lives the previous summer, when she rented a remote cottage near Warner Pier to use as a retreat while she wrote a cookbook. When fall came, she decided she wanted to stay in Warner Pier. She rented the apartment over TenHuis Chocolade, and she asked for a chance to learn the chocolate business.
    Dolly is unforgettable. She’s taller than I am, built like a University of Michigan linebacker, and has brilliant red hair and a matching freckled face. And she can only speak at one decibel level—the top of her voice.
    “Hi, Lee!” she shouted. At the same time she flipped a five-inch mold over and gently tapped until what looked like a bowl of dark chocolate—actually a puffed, hollow heart—fell gently onto a metal tray, where it lay beside identical hearts.
    “Hi, Dolly. How’s the stock holding out?”
    “Fine! But you might want to ask Nettie! She said something about needing raspberries!” Frozen raspberries are used to make the filling for a popular TenHuis bonbon.
    I nodded. “We don’t want to run out of raspberry creams.” Because of their lovely pink insides and their yummy flavor, raspberry creams (“Red raspberry puree blended into a white chocolate cream interior, covered in dark chocolate”) are highly popular at Valentine’s. “Where’s Aunt Nettie?”
    Dolly pulled over a second tray, loaded with small solid chocolate hearts, cupids, and arrows. She began to fill the bigger hearts with an assortment of the small items. “She’s in the break room working on something! Did you see the messages I left for you?”
    “I guess not.”
    Dolly shrugged. “There were only a couple of calls! They said they’d call back! But this one guy came by!”
    “Did he leave a name?”
    “I left it on the desk! Martin? Martin something!”
    I thought a moment. “Martin Schrader?”
    “Older guy? Kinda short?”
    Of course, to Dolly anybody who isn’t playing in the NBA is “kinda short.” But at not quite six feet, I’d looked down slightly when I talked to Martin Schrader face to face.
    “Beautiful head of white hair?” I said.
    Dolly nodded. I stood by and watched as she took a second five-inch dark chocolate heart, spread melted dark chocolate around its edge, then “glued” the two hollow hearts together. The most obvious result was a puffed, dark chocolate heart filled with special little Valentine symbols in dark, milk, and white chocolate. The second result would be a profit for TenHuis Chocolade; these were popular with our customers. Dolly used a spatula expertly, trimming away any chocolate that oozed out from the seam.
    “Beautiful job,” I said. “Aunt Nettie’s sure happy that you wanted to come to work