The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase Read online

  CHAPTER THREE

  Miles found his parents having lunch outside on the back porch. A place was set for him with a bowl of noodle soup and a grilled cheese sandwich under one of those tent things that keep flies off your food. His mother jumped up to hug him.

  “Um, Mom? I was gone for less than two hours.”

  “I know,” his mother said, smoothing down his hair. “I’m still not used to you being out on your own. It’s a mother’s job to worry.”

  “I’m fine,” Miles insisted, pulling away a little. It wasn’t that he minded the hug, but he was afraid if she hugged him any harder, the bottle of disappearing ink would get squished. It would be fun to try it out on his parents, but his mom had zero sense of humor when it came to messes.

  “Did you have fun at the park?” his father asked, gently prying them apart.

  Miles scarfed down his sandwich (geocaching made him hungry!) while he filled them in on his adventure. When he got to the part about Fluffernutter beating him to the cache by a nose, his father shook his head and said, “Wouldn’t have happened if she was a cat.”

  “I know, totally!” Miles said. “Something else kind of weird happened.”

  “What?” His mother stopped eating her soup midslurp. He almost didn’t want to mention it now, but he knew she’d keep asking.

  “You know that guy with the metal detector I told you about?”

  They nodded.

  “We saw him again today. He thought Arthur’s daughter, Jade, was my sister.”

  His mother laid down her spoon. “Well, I suppose we can understand why he would think that.”

  “I told Arthur he wasn’t tall enough to be my dad.”

  Mr. O’Leary puffed out his chest. “I am blessed in the height department.”

  “Your dad was a lot taller than you, though, right?” Miles asked. “I mean, it looks like that in the picture from your high school graduation.”

  Dad looked momentarily unsure how to answer. He took a few sips of lemonade, then said, “Yes, your grandfather was similarly blessed. Over six feet two inches in his prime. He played college basketball.”

  “Wow,” Miles said, sliding the noodles onto his spoon. “What else did he do?”

  Once Miles’s dad started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop. Over the rest of lunch Miles heard more stories about his grandparents than over all the lunches that had come before, combined. His grandparents didn’t only grow vegetables and fruit for themselves; they donated most of it to the town’s food bank so people in need would have fresh food along with the canned goods. His grandfather was the town pediatrician, and his grandmother was his nurse. Miles hung on every word while his mom looked on with misty eyes.

  “I wish I’d gotten to meet them,” Miles said.

  “They would have been really proud of you,” his mother said.

  His father tried to say something, but then his lip quivered and he reached for his lemonade instead. Miles looked back and forth between his parents. He’d gotten really good at reading their signals. For all the times they’d told him he needed to get out of the house last year, there were ten more times when they’d wanted to tell him to move on, to stop blaming himself. They wanted him to accept that he’d never know what really happened (turned out they were wrong about that part!), but most times they just busied themselves with some minor task rather than risk upsetting him. When his mother started quickly piling up the lunch plates, he knew for sure that’s what was happening. The conversation had ended.

  And then it was just the two of them. Miles smiled at his dad, trying to send out telepathic vibes that he wanted to know more. Clearly his mind-to-mind powers weren’t very strong, because the only thing his dad said was “Don’t forget you have a meeting at the factory soon.”

  On his way upstairs to get his notebook, Miles swung by the kitchen and grabbed two Blast-o-Bits from the treats drawer by the fridge. “Really, Miles?” his mom said. “You’re on your way to the factory and you still have to eat more candy?”

  Miles looked down at the grape candies with their bright purple wrappers. “But, Mom, the factory only makes these every three days, and today is an off-day. Mondays are High-Jumping Jelly Beans, Tuesdays are Leapin’ Lollies, and then they convert the machines back to Blast-o-Bits on Wednesdays. Do you expect me to wait until then?”

  She sighed. “Why am I not surprised that you know the candy production schedule?”

  Miles grinned. “If you’d prefer, I can go back to talking about the afterlife.”

  She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. “No thank you. Now go on. I’d like to see what you came up with for the slogan.”

  “Be right back.” Miles took off before she changed her mind. He stopped at his bedroom door and cringed before entering. He’d always kept his room relatively neat (at least compared to Logan’s room, where he sometimes couldn’t see the floor), but now sheets of paper covered not only his floor but the desk and even his bed. He’d been so focused on coming up with a creative slogan that researching it had taken over both his brain and his room.

  Miles had let go of most of the habits he’d picked up after the girl-who-drowned incident (although he still sat out on the roof to think, and when he got superexcited, he still spoke backward, so maybe not most of the habits). But some had proven harder to break. He still tended to get very focused on one single thing to the point where he tuned out everything else. His father told him that wasn’t always a bad quality and that every new invention or discovery came from someone who was willing to put the time and effort into focusing on the solution. Most recently that one thing was the Harmonicandy slogan.

  He wished he had a slogan he really loved, but none had made him jump up and shout, “This is it! This is The One!” He grabbed his notebook and added the new one he’d thought of (with Arthur’s help) when he left the park.

  He found his parents still in the kitchen. They stopped talking as soon as he appeared, a fairly common occurrence in the O’Leary household. Usually he’d assume they were talking about boring, grown-up stuff like mortgages (whatever they were) or taxes or retirement plans or who to vote for in the school board elections. But now he was beginning to suspect otherwise.

  “So what have you got for us?” Dad asked.

  Miles flipped open his notebook. He took a deep breath and belted out, “In no special order: Tap your feet to the beat of this delicious treat!”

  “Hey, that’s pretty good!” his dad said. “I like the rhyme. Are there more?”

  Miles scanned the list in front of him. He flipped over the page and scanned again. He looked up and announced, “Thirty-one.”

  “You have thirty-one different slogans?” his mother said, glancing at his father with that oh-so-familiar look of concern. “Didn’t they want you to bring two or three?”

  Miles looked sheepish. “I couldn’t decide.”

  His dad checked his watch. “We’d better get going. I need to drop you on the way to a meeting at the university.”

  “Don’t you want to hear more?” Miles asked, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  “You can tell me on the way,” his dad said, reaching for his briefcase.

  Miles hadn’t expected to leave so soon. He still had one more thing he needed to do in his room. “Can I have ten more minutes?”

  “Five,” his dad replied.

  Miles turned toward the stairs.

  “Can I read them over while you’re up there?” his mom asked.

  Her offer made him feel a little better. “Sure, let me know your top three.” He handed her the notebook and bounded up the stairs, two at a time. He couldn’t believe he’d almost forgotten to check his books!

  He had to scramble on the floor to find them under all the papers, but eventually he had five library books opened up to random pages. He closed his eyes and let his finger drop. Then he scribbled down a sentence from each on the last page of his school notebook.

  Turtles can inhale