The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase Read online

  He hurried from his room so he could say goodbye. Halfway down the stairs he stopped short. Maybe the mystery of the photo wouldn’t have to wait! There was someone in this very house at this very instant who would probably love the challenge of tracking them down. He ran back up to get the photo for his favorite reference librarian.

  “Of course!” Arthur said when Miles explained it to him. “You know I love a good challenge!”

  “I hoped you’d say that!” Miles said. He ran into his dad’s office to make copies, and they each kept one. Arthur promised to let him know as soon as he discovered anything. Miles’s dad was so used to his quest for knowledge about unusual topics that he didn’t even ask what Miles was up to.

  An hour later the pamphlets and photo were back on the display table in the library. Miles’s note was still there, apparently unseen. He tossed it in the trash and ran to the Harmonicandy Room to join his parents and the others who’d been invited to the special event.

  Seeing that first tray move along the conveyor belt was a moment he’d never forget. He kept watching tray after tray move toward the cooling station, even once everyone else had broken off and started chatting. He couldn’t help overhearing a heated discussion between Philip and Reggie about the percentage of money Philip would get on the sale of each one and what Mr. Ransford would say about it. Sometimes Miles forgot that the candymaking business was actually a business. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised that Philip was talking about money before the first Harmonicandy had even cooled down.

  Wheeling the trays out to the crowd was awesome! He could tell Logan was thrilled, too, and Philip caught his eye and smiled really big in the middle of all the craziness. The smile felt real and sincere and special. Miles gladly returned it. He had to admit he’d been a little scared that the Harmonicandy wouldn’t actually play any notes, but it totally did! And it tasted great!

  And then everything fell apart.

  Miles knew Logan would never have tried to ruin the Kickoff on purpose, but the event went from awesome to awful in just a few minutes when he said there was something wrong with the Harmonicandy. When they went into the Marshmallow Room to look for Henry, Miles ducked into Henry’s office. The Marshmallow Room never smelled like chocolate. But back here he definitely smelled a faint odor. Maybe Henry was planning on branching out from marshmallows.

  The tiny office looked much as it had the day before, although the stacks of bills and paperwork were lower and organized into neat piles. A small rectangular bin marked OLD RECEIPTS sat on the desk chair. Miles turned to go when something in the center of the desk caught his eye. He stepped closer. It was the picture he had just returned to the library! Not the same exact one, but a copy. Judging by the small size and the water stains, this might even be an original photo. His eyes darted across the desktop to see if he spotted anything else unusual.

  That’s when he saw it—and smelled it at the same time. Underneath the photo was a faded yellow envelope that it must have been stored in. The middle bulged out slightly. Miles picked up the envelope and turned it over. A bright blue ball fell out onto his palm. For a second he thought it must have been a gum ball, but since the chocolate smell multiplied by about a thousand when it hit the air, he revised his opinion. This could only be a cocoa bean. He’d seen a lot of cocoa beans over his months at the factory, but never one this round and certainly never this blue color.

  Logan called out that they should keep looking. Miles left the picture and the envelope on the desk and stuck the bean deep in his pocket.

  When they finally found Henry by the marsh, Miles stood quietly, hoping no one would notice the smell from the hidden bean. Maybe Philip had been right to call him out for stealing back in the library. His heart pounded. Why had he taken it? Was he just a common thief now?

  As Henry tried to explain about the chocolate, Miles’s heart sank. That contract wasn’t just a joke; he knew that now for sure. Somehow the bean, the Harmonicandy, that old photograph, and Sam’s secret were linked. Miles needed to find out as much as he could about these mysteries, and he needed time. They had to go on that road trip! He couldn’t explain everything to them, though, not there and then. Not in front of Henry, who definitely knew more than he was admitting to. He had to let Logan know the importance of the trip, so he blurted it out the only way he felt sure Henry wouldn’t understand it—backward.

  Logan got it right away, even though it obviously annoyed Philip and left Henry confused. But then Logan pointed out that there wasn’t anyone to drive them. “Henry can drive us,” Miles suggested, fixing his eyes on him. “Will you do it, Henry?” Henry was their best chance of solving this mystery. Who better to accompany them? But Henry broke eye contact even before Philip annoyingly jumped in with his reasons why Henry couldn’t do it. Miles snapped at Philip and then felt ashamed at his tone and almost missed it when Henry said someone else could drive them.

  Miles felt uneasy as they followed Henry around to the front of the factory. What if the driver was someone he or his parents wouldn’t feel comfortable with? Philip walked close to Henry, and Miles felt another flash of annoyance. Why did Philip have to remind Henry about the Marsh-Wiggle?

  The sounds of the Kickoff gradually fell away behind them. Parked outside the front door was a blue minivan, with pretty much the last person Miles expected to see leaning against it.

  “Who’s up for a road trip?” their new driver asked.

  As Miles stared in surprise, slowly but surely he felt the tension in his chest fall away.

  PART THREE

  DAISY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sunday night

  Daisy watched as her camp counselor tugged on the piece of rope that hung from the rafters. The lone lightbulb clicked off, plunging the cabin into darkness. Only the faint moonlight outside allowed the girls to see the outline of the bunk beds and cubbies that filled the cabin. Daisy could see perfectly well in the dark. That’s what a lifetime of training will do for a girl.

  “Sleep tight…,” the counselor sang.

  All twelve campers replied with a chorus of “Don’t let the ladybugs bite.”

  And then all the girls giggled. Honestly, Daisy didn’t see what was so funny about living in a cabin infested with ladybugs. Plus everyone knew ladybugs didn’t really bite. But she giggled along with the rest of them and even joined in when the girl on the bunk bed below her started a game of Toss the Stuffed Animal.

  After a full day of swimming, arts and crafts, kickball, campfire songs, and scratching mosquito bites, everyone except Daisy quickly drifted off to sleep. She’d been there two weeks already, pretending to be Ava Simon, the shy, bookish girl from up north who didn’t gossip and kept her cubby neat and organized. She didn’t usually play this type, but at Camp Tumbleweed for Girls, it was best if she didn’t stand out very much. That way she wouldn’t be missed when she slipped away from the group.

  And she slipped away a lot. Who could blame her? She was stuck at sleepaway camp! Her! The best and brightest thirteen-year-old spy in the country, deep undercover in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but trees and lakes and grass and more trees!

  She had to constantly remind herself that she’d asked for this job. After the mission at the candy factory, she had insisted on taking a break from her crazy, busy life and the responsibilities that came with it. She didn’t know if she could continue being a spy. At least, not without getting to make more of her own choices.

  She had spent most of her first day off riding Magpie through the fields around the mansion, listening to pop music on her headphones and enjoying the breeze through her hair.

  On day two, she’d walked the gentle curves of the labyrinth in her grandmother’s Zen garden, trying to force herself into a state of calm and clarity, but all she got was dizzy from the twists and turns.

  On day three, Grammy had presented her with a backpack, a bag lunch, and fake school documents created by her most skilled forger. Off Daisy went to the loca
l public middle school. And not on an undercover assignment, either—as a real student! The situation turned out to be completely unbearable. Daisy lost her mind having to sit quietly at a tiny desk all day long and pretend she didn’t know more about the world than the teachers did.

  Plus she didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch.

  After that brief glimpse of life as an ordinary school kid, she’d been ready to jump back into the spy game with both feet. It took many hours of begging and groveling (of which she wasn’t proud) before her grandmother finally agreed. Daisy still wouldn’t be allowed to choose her own cases, but she had figured out how she could do her job without worrying about whether she’d been hired by the good guys or the bad guys. It was a brilliant solution, really. Basically, she simply wouldn’t dwell on the situation, which was exactly how she’d handled it before she’d started thinking about it! She would lock the question of right and wrong so far back in her mind that she’d forget where the key was. It would languish there along with other unanswered questions, like her real last name and did she really have a brother, questions her parents had skillfully dodged during their brief visit to the mansion the previous month.

  The only downside to being back in the spy business was that her grandmother had made her promise to keep her distance from the candy factory and the friends she’d made during her short assignment there. Once you leave a job behind, you shed the person you’d been pretending to be. The fees for the gig got paid, the documents shredded, the files encrypted. The End.

  But at the factory gig—for the second half of the job, at least—she hadn’t been pretending to be anyone other than herself. She and Logan and Miles and even Philip had grown so close and been through so much that she couldn’t simply turn her back on them. For now, though, she’d have to limit herself to short visits and letters from the road. Her grandmother wasn’t trying to be cruel, but she had the whole organization to protect. Daisy knew it was the right thing to do, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.

  Her grandmother had insisted on starting Daisy off easy, with a straight-up surveillance gig at a museum where a young man was suspected of plotting to steal an extremely valuable statue. There had been a string of art thefts in the area in recent months, so the museums were on high alert for any suspicious behavior. They couldn’t even trust their security guards.

  Her assignment had been to watch from across the room as the man, dressed as a ponytailed artist, drew sketch after sketch of a marble statue of a bald eagle in flight. Sometimes he would sit there for eight straight hours, moving his stool in tiny increments around the roped-off statue. Close observation of his behavior led Daisy to believe he really was the art student he appeared to be, but the museum needed her to stay in place until he was gone, just in case. She knew this boring job was partly a punishment for what had gone down at the candy factory, but she was determined to take it seriously.

  As the days wore on, she’d gained an appreciation for art and an admiration for those who loved it enough to stare at the same piece all day long. She missed seeing her new friends, though, and she missed riding Magpie. The only time she got outside was when the man took a short break to eat his salami sandwich on the museum steps and she followed at a safe distance.

  After two weeks, he closed his sketchpad with a finality that indicated he had done whatever he came to do. He tucked his pencil behind his ear, stood up, and stretched. Then his eyes darted around the room. Usually he seemed oblivious to the world around him, so this last bit had Daisy on full alert.

  His eyes passed over her, not even slowing down. Her disguise as a Girl Scout with a badge-covered vest made her seem particularly nonthreatening and also not very memorable. It’s an old spy trick that if you wear a uniform, people will notice your clothes and not your face. They will assume you’re part of a group and won’t suspect you’re there for them. The trick had clearly worked this time.

  Brown and green wasn’t the most flattering combination, but Daisy did enjoy wearing the vest. Even though she hadn’t earned the badges the traditional way, she had earned every single one during her years of training and service. Now she finally had the chance to show them off with pride.

  Apparently confident that no one was watching him, the young man stepped closer to the ropes. Daisy used the remote in her pocket to snap pictures with the tiny microcamera hidden behind her archery badge. Could she have been wrong? Was the man planning to try to steal the statue after all? She glanced quickly over at the security guard stationed at the entrance of the room. He was busy giving an older couple directions to the restrooms.

  The art student (thief?) now stood against the rope, only inches from the giant bird. Was he going to grab it right there, in the middle of the day, surrounded by a dozen museumgoers? He couldn’t hope to get very far, even if he could lift the weight of the statue, which she doubted. He didn’t look as if he spent much time exercising. Only a few feet behind him, Daisy balanced on the balls of her feet, ready to spring into action.

  The man leaned the top part of his body over the rope. With one last glance left and right, his head darted forward and he kissed the marble eagle right on its pointy beak. Then he backed away, tucked his stool under one arm and his sketchbook under the other, and hurried out the door.

  In Daisy’s official report to her grandmother, she’d concluded that loving art shouldn’t mean loving art, and that grown men shouldn’t wear ponytails.

  Two more assignments followed before her current position at the camp. She’d enjoyed being a golf caddy at a fancy country club, where she recorded the private conversations of the wealthy businesspeople whose clubs she carried. Their discussions were boring, but the green rolling hills were beautiful, and she liked the triple-decker sandwiches in the clubhouse.

  After that assignment ended, she and Courtney—who was still her closest spy friend in the mansion, even though she was nearly AJ’s age—were hired by the local soccer association to join two rival all-girls soccer teams. They needed to find out whether the coaches were conspiring with each other to throw the games (they were). She always enjoyed the rare occasions when she and Courtney got to work together, and soccer was one of Daisy’s best sports. She’d even scored a game-winning goal (made only slightly less gratifying because she knew that the opposing goalie had been ordered to let the ball through).

  She’d taken those assignments in stride; she’d had dozens like them before. But deep-cover jobs like the one at Camp Tumbleweed were definitely the toughest. Being a sleeper agent meant that she had to fully immerse herself in being a camper, without getting to do any spy work until AJ activated her. She was Ava Simon all the time. She couldn’t show even a little of her true self.

  In the past this wouldn’t have bothered her. But she couldn’t deny that her experiences at Life Is Sweet had changed something inside her. The friends she’d made there had liked her for who she was, even when she wasn’t pretending to be sweet and happy all the time. But now when the girl on the bunk below her got homesick, she had to pretend she knew what it felt like to miss a home with parents and a pet and a white picket fence around it all. (Her mansion did have a white picket fence around it, but it was electrified and had sensors that read the fingerprints of each resident before allowing the person to go inside. So, not really the same.) And the missing-her-parents part—well, she was so used to not seeing them for long stretches that being away from them felt more normal than being with them.

  Maybe the most difficult thing was having to pretend she was only half as skilled at the camp activities as she actually was. She could climb/swim/run circles around the other campers without even breaking a sweat, but that would make her stand out. People would ask questions. If her cover got blown, like at the candy factory, it would mean she’d have to go back to middle school, and she’d already crossed the middle school experience off her list of things to try.

  Daisy reached over to the top of her cubby to grab her journal so she could complain in
print, then remembered that her pen had run out of invisible ink the night before. Apparently, invisible doesn’t mean endless. She couldn’t write her innermost thoughts with a real pen and risk someone’s seeing it. And even if she wanted to write an online diary instead and encrypt it in secret code, the camp was an electronics-free zone, so she didn’t have her computer. Tomorrow she would “borrow” a lemon and an onion from the camp’s kitchen and make her own (smelly) invisible ink.

  Daisy flopped back onto the bed and thought for the hundredth time how lucky AJ was right now. He got to hang out in his totally awesome tricked-out RV a mile down the road from the camp, watching TV till all hours of the night, while she was stuck in this drafty cabin, where a trickle of brown water passed for a shower and the smell of artificially scented coconut sunscreen always hung heavily in the air. When she got older, she’d get the cushy jobs.

  Ah, who was she kidding. She’d be bored and a little creeped out living alone in the woods for weeks. But at least AJ had real running water in his RV, and both eggs and milk that weren’t from powder. And he didn’t have to pretend he loved to make birdhouses out of Popsicle sticks.

  Daisy checked her watch. It was still too early to sneak out and meet him. She had to wait until even the counselors were asleep, and she’d discovered they did their own share of sneaking out of the cabins after lights out. She didn’t blame them; having to pretend to be cheery and full of camp spirit all day couldn’t be easy. Although as someone who pretended for a living, she knew most of them really were cheery and full of camp spirit, which, frankly, she found annoying.

  While she waited for a safe time to go, Daisy allowed herself to drift into a sort of half sleep. She had trained herself to literally sleep with one eye open (it involved light meditation and wearing an eye patch), and whenever she was on a mission, that was how she slept.