All Fudged Up (A Candy-Coated Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

man—stop me from opening on time. Not that I wasn’t sorry for Joe and his family. It’s hard when you lose a loved one. I’d gone through it last month with Papa.
    I paused for a moment on the stairs. Wait, had Joe been trying to prevent me from opening? The thought crossed my mind for a second time. The idea that Joe Jessop, or anyone for that matter, might want to see me fail made me realize I would do whatever it took not to let that happen.
    The lobby, where Benny Rodriquez and his crew of three worked painting fat pink-and-white stripes on the walls, was oddly quiet.
    “The power’s out,” Benny said when he saw me come down the stairs.
    “I know. I’m working on it.” I took the papers over to the fudge shop area and placed them on the long stainless-steel countertop.
    “My guys don’t work as fast without music,” Benny called over.
    “I get it.” I waved my hand at him in a dismissing fashion. “I’m working on it.” I carefully sorted through the papers on the wide-open counter. Water account. Phone account. Cable account. Elevator inspection . . . wait. Was the inspector still coming? I would need to check into that. I made a note on the palm of my hand, then continued through the paperwork to find the hotel inspection report. Fire inspection. Health inspector for the fudge shop. Huh, that would probably have to be redone now that they found a dead body in the building.
    I made a face of disgust at the thought as I flipped through papers. There was the proof the boiler was replaced and the water was at a safe temperature for showers. Papers showing the down payment I had made on the new lobby carpet.
    Let’s face it. The McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shoppe was a money pit. But it’d been in my family for one hundred and twenty years. It was important to me, as the only child of an only child, to keep the business going. If Papa Liam’s father could keep the place open through the Great Depression, then I could keep it open now. I pulled over a stainless-steel stool on rollers and sat down.
    It was too bad my dad didn’t want anything to do with the old place. He’d moved us to Detroit and become an architect. Growing up with Dad designing buildings and Mom teaching English at the local high school meant that the only time I’d seen my grandparents was in the summer. My parents would bring me up to play on the island and help around the shop.
    It was the influence of those long-ago summers and the stories Papa Liam would tell of the people he would meet from around the world that made me decide early on that I would see that the McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shoppe stayed in the family.
    I loved the tradition of a family-owned place and the quaint elegance of the island. I loved the gentle lake breezes, the sounds of summer children laughing, the clomp of the carriage horses drawing their guests, the ring of bicycle bells. I loved the whole Victorian feel of the island, from the colorful painted ladies that passed as cottages to the old fort with its limestone surface.
    Mackinac Island didn’t allow cars. The locals were proud of the back-in-time feel. Tourists came for the day or to stay a while in one of the hotels and enjoy the ambience. They’d come to bike around the island or take the carriage rides. They’d come to visit the fort, but mostly they’d come for the fudge—Mackinac’s number one souvenir.
    On Mackinac, the locals were proud of their fudge, and each shop had its own private recipes. The McMurphy recipe had been created in the tiny cook’s house of the hotel. It was a closely guarded secret that was learned by rote memorization as no one would write it down for fear of it being stolen. Did I mention that the fudge business was highly competitive?
    The fudge shops on island had seasonal recipes as well as their longtime favorites. It was why I went to school to learn candy making. So that I could develop new recipes that could compete on a national, if not world, level. My hope