The Candymakers Read online

  Logan knew what to do. He’d seen Max do it a hundred times. “Okay, everyone,” he announced, stepping away from the table. He waited before continuing until they were all facing him. “This is the plan. We lay out all the ingredients Philip used. We try each one separately, we try them together. We add new ones, we take some away. We write down how it tastes, how it feels on our tongues, how long it takes to chew. We rebuild it until it plays like a real harmonica.” Turning to Philip, he asked, “You’ll be in charge of that last part. Do you know anything about music?”

  Philip hesitated. “I know enough.”

  “That’ll have to do. Miles, you’ll work on the molds.” He pointed to a shelf lined with candymaking books. “Those will help you. Daisy, you’ll make up batches of chocolate. Sound good?”

  “Ready, boss!” Miles said with a wide grin.

  Logan felt his cheeks grow warm. “I’m not the boss, I just—”

  “You’re the Candymaker’s son,” Philip said. “If anyone can make this work, you can.”

  Logan looked down, both surprised at the compliment and afraid to admit it might not be true. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “I’ll try my best.”

  “You can do it,” Philip said confidently. “This is what you were born to do.”

  At those words, Logan felt a new determination rise up inside him. So what if he hadn’t always been the best at following through with things? So what if he sometimes got distracted and his attention wandered? Now was what mattered, and now he would give it all he had.

  “Well, well, Philip Ransford the Third,” Daisy said, nodding appreciatively. “You really are full of surprises.”

  Philip winked. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Before anyone could ask what he meant by that, the door to the lab swung open, and they froze.

  “You all look like you’ve seen a ghost!” the Candymaker boomed.

  Logan glanced at the others. They wore identical expressions of shock and fear. He was sure he did, too.

  The Candymaker held up a plastic bag with something square inside. “I thought you might need a snack.”

  No one spoke. The others were still frozen in place. Logan snapped out of it first, his heart rate slowly lowering. “How did you, uh, know we were here?”

  The Candymaker laughed. “I went to the Tropical Room to see if you needed anything. You weren’t there, so I knew I’d find you here. This is exactly where I was the night before the contest thirty years ago!”

  Logan could sense the others relaxing a bit, but still no one moved.

  “I didn’t expect to find all four of you, but hey, the more the merrier. I’ll go rustle up some extra blankets.” To Philip and Daisy he asked, “You’re planning on staying the night, I presume?”

  When they didn’t answer, Logan said, “Yes, is that okay?”

  His dad handed him the big plastic bag and said, “Of course it’s okay. Just remember the contest rules. All contestants deserve privacy while they’re working on their entries.”

  Logan nodded, not daring to even glance at the others.

  The Candymaker turned to Philip and Daisy, who still hadn’t moved. “Hey, either of you want to share how you got in without showing up on the video monitor?”

  Philip began to stutter some sort of answer, then gave up. Daisy tugged on her ponytail so hard she let out a little yelp.

  The Candymaker laughed. “I figured as much. I’ll leave the blankets in the Tropical Room.” He turned to go, then glanced back at Philip, his head tilted as though trying to remember something. Then he shook it off and was gone.

  “Wow,” Miles said. “That was… unexpected.”

  Logan turned to Daisy. “You’re the expert at sneaking around. Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell my parents what’s going on?”

  She shook her head. “We can’t tell anyone else at the factory, because the only way to stop Philip’s dad is for the harmonica to win fair and square. That way no one can claim someone here influenced the judges.”

  “But they’d never do that,” Logan said.

  “Sometimes in business people are ruthless. They could make things up. We can’t take any chances.”

  Logan nodded. He knew she was right. But he didn’t have much practice lying to his parents. The one time he’d lied—about doing his homework when he hadn’t—his mom threatened to send him to a real school, with standardized tests! Logan didn’t know what standardized tests were, but he didn’t like the sound of them. He couldn’t even bring himself to think about how awful it would be to tell them he wasn’t submitting the Bubbletastic ChocoRocket after all.

  “Are you going to get in trouble for bringing us here?” Philip asked.

  Logan shook his head and lifted up the bag. “If I was in trouble, he wouldn’t have brought us chocolate pizza!”

  Miles lunged for it, but Logan held the bag over his head. Miles jumped for it but still couldn’t reach. “Sorry,” Logan said, “but we can’t eat it yet.”

  “Why not?” Miles cried.

  Logan stepped away from Miles and slid the bag under the lab table. “Because we can’t clutter up our taste buds.”

  “M’i gnilliw ot ekat eht ksir,” Miles grumbled.

  “I’m going to ignore that,” Logan said, using his foot to push the pizza even farther under the table.

  “C’mon, let’s get to work,” Philip said, heading toward the cabinets. “I’ll show you what I used.”

  The next hour flew by in a flurry of activity. Logan tasted different portions of the harmonica, focusing on the delicate balance of ingredients. He suggested adding a little dash of vanilla to the chocolate for a kick of sweetness, spreading a thin layer of caramel on top of the cookie for bulk and stability, and laying down the honeycomb in a crisscross pattern. This would strengthen the inside of the harmonica in case the person playing it gripped it too hard. He also thought they shouldn’t use the marshmallow chunks to block off sound in the ends of the tubes, because history (in the form of Life Is Sweet’s great Chick-in-the-Egg debacle) had taught them that packaging two different confections together was inevitably disastrous. One always melted or cracked before the other, or they got separated in shipping and the customer wound up with only half of what he’d been promised.

  Meanwhile, Daisy tempered the chocolate by hand, her considerable strength speeding the process along. She tapped her foot impatiently whenever the chocolate entered the cooling phase and she was left with nothing to stir.

  Philip spent a good ten minutes trying to explain that the different chambers of the harmonica had these things called reeds and that the air blowing through them was what made the different notes. Then there were reed plates and combs, which supported the whole structure. Logan wondered where Philip had learned so much about music. Even though he couldn’t follow half of what Philip was saying—stuff about how the reeds had to be open at one end and closed at the other, and some holes were for drawing in and others for exhaling, and the seventh hole was sometimes reversed—he was still impressed by Philip’s understanding of the instrument.

  Eventually Philip, growing weary of the others’ attention clearly drifting off, went to the back of the lab to prepare the honeycomb as Logan had shown him.

  Inside his cubicle, Miles pored over a book from Max’s shelf on how to make a mold. Logan had just finished adding a cup of flour to the cookie recipe when Miles reappeared, the book clutched in his hand. “I’m afraid what Max told Philip is right,” he announced. “There’s no way to make the molds in time. We’re going to have to do each one by hand.”

  Daisy lifted the glass thermometer out of her pot of chocolate, checked it, and slid it back in. “Not necessarily,” she said. “We could make the mold out of wax.”

  Miles shook his head. “Metal is the best, or plastic. Wax would melt when we poured the chocolate in.”

  Daisy grinned. “Not my wax.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pssst, Miles,” Logan whispered. “Are yo