The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase

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  For all the readers of The Candymakers who told me what they wanted to see in this book, I hope you’re pleased.

  May your lives always be sweet. (See what I did there? )

  P.S. Read with candy!

  “You will travel in a land of marvels.”

  —Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

  FROM THE DESK OF MR. J.

  You! With the dirty knees and the leaf in your hair. You with the sticky fingers and the smudge of chocolate on your chin. And you with the flashlight under your covers after Mom said lights out. And, yes, YOU with this book in your hand, trying to decide whether you’re going to read it. You don’t know me very well—not yet, anyway. But a lot of people went out of their way for me, so I figured I’d pay it forward and look out for you. I’m not gonna lie—this is a long book, and there are things you should know if you’re going to spend your precious time turning the pages. After all, what is more valuable than your time? As a man much wiser than I once said, “Time is the coin of your life. Don’t let anyone else spend it for you.”

  If you do read this book, here’s what’s in store for you: Hidden treasures. Secret worlds. A decades—old mystery. The open road. A River of Light. A Map of Awe. A sky of many colors. Gadgets and gizmos. New friends and old relatives. Love. Fear. Bravery. Hope. One very small cat who thinks she’s a dog.

  And candy. Lots and lots of mouthwatering candy. Soft and chewy, hard and crunchy, sour and sweet. Some of it plays music. There’s also the small matter of a comet hurtling toward Earth at a hundred thousand miles an hour, but try not to worry about that. It happens a lot.

  If any of this stuff doesn’t interest you, feel free to close the book now. No hard feelings. I won’t take it personally. I should mention, though, that if you don’t stick around, you’ll miss seeing how one of the world’s best magicians utterly blurs the edges of reality, and that’s not something you soon forget. Trust me, I’ve seen it.

  I’d better go now. I need to sleep. Got a big day tomorrow. So do Logan, Miles, Philip, and Daisy. Only to them it’s just an ordinary Tuesday. Life is like that, ya know? It’s never the things you worry about that get you.

  PART ONE

  LOGAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday

  After spending exactly twelve years and five months living inside a candy factory, Logan Sweet knew all the best places to hide. That’s not to say he hid often. In fact, all the folks responsible for creating, packaging, selling, and shipping the dozen different types of candy produced at the Life Is Sweet candy factory considered Logan to be a visible, helpful (some would add indispensable), and always cheerful presence on the factory floor. But from time to time, he found the need to be alone. Usually these times coincided with the final due date of a homework assignment. Since all his teachers worked at the factory (and in the case of his parents, lived in the same apartment), he had to be creative if he wanted to ditch them.

  Logan found his first hiding spot at age seven and a half, while trying to avoid finishing an assignment on the Amazon rain forest. In between Max’s duties as head candy scientist, he was teaching Logan about the effects of water saturation and drought on various types of cocoa beans.

  Logan didn’t mind having to make a diorama. All he had to do was visit the factory’s Tropical Room, which was as close to a real rain forest as one could get without visiting the equator. He took an old shoe box, shoveled some dirt into it from around his favorite sapodilla tree, taped some fallen leaves to two Pepsicle sticks, strung a green shoelace from stick to stick to make a vine, dangled a brown plastic monkey from the vine, and called it a day.

  But he really, really didn’t want to do the second half of the assignment—going to the factory’s library to find books and write down facts. Particularly in his younger years, Logan was more of a hands-on, in-the-moment type of person, the kind of boy who looked closely at things and tried to figure them out on his own. When he couldn’t, he enjoyed the not-knowing just as much as finding a solution. He would rather wonder how an ecosystem such as the rain forest gave life to so many different types of flora and fauna than find out an answer that might not be as exciting as he’d hoped.

  So he decided he simply wasn’t going to do it. Having no interest in actually telling Max that news, he figured his only option was to hide. But he couldn’t just wander into the factory and pick some random storage room. Preparations had to be made. He carefully gathered his supplies and then parked himself in one of the oversized chairs in the library and pretended to do his reading. He waited as patiently as possible (which is to say, not patiently at all) while, one by one, the workers shut down the factory’s candy machines for the night. This process was a lot more complicated than merely turning off some switches. The oil that made the machines run smoothly had to be drained and disposed of properly. All the pipes, tubes, trays, bins, compressors, oscillators, tumblers, conveyor belts, ovens, stovetops, kettles, vats, pots, pans, funnels, and barrels had to be scrubbed and stored until the machines would start back up again twelve hours later. Logan nearly fell asleep in the chair!

  When the coast was finally clear, he grabbed his stash from behind the chair and slung the duffel bags over both shoulders. He hurried down the quiet hall toward the room with the perfect Logan-sized hiding spot. With one last glance to make sure he hadn’t been followed, he ducked inside the Icy Mint Blob Room and wedged a pile of pillows behind the stack of old peppermint-oil barrels. He stocked his new space with comic books, drawing pads, and snacks of both the candy and the healthy variety. He made it back up to the apartment just in time for his mom’s famous Veggie Loaf Surprise dinner. (It should be noted that his mom’s substitution of chocolate chips for peas hadn’t been a surprise for many years.)

  Even though he ultimately had to finish the report, Logan wound up spending many lazy midday hours tucked away in that hiding spot, lulled into an almost dreamlike state by the thumping of the nearby panning machine. The panner—which looked to him like a space-age washing machine—spun the Icy Mint Blobs and coated them with blueberry syrup until they sparkled with a sugary glaze. It also muffled the sound of Logan crunching/slurping/chomping the latest candies that had been deemed NQP (not quite perfect) by Randall, the head of the quality-control team. As much as Logan loved all the candy Life Is Sweet produced, he particularly loved the pieces that came out too oddly shaped to fit in the packaging, or that were stuck together, or that came off the conveyor belt too sticky or too hard or the wrong shade of brown/red/orange/yellow/neon green. He possessed an uncanny ability to show up exactly when a new NQP batch appeared on the counter of the employee lounge.

  By the time Logan was nine, his legs had grown so long that his feet stuck out from behind the peppermint barrels. Rather than risk being discovered, he found a new hiding spot in the barn’s hayloft. This one worked out even better because the open windows let in a lot of fresh air (which also helped offset the smell of the cows below) and allowed him to play Name That Cloud without lying outside in the open. In one direction, he could gaze at the whe
at fields and cornfields, the fruit trees and sugarcane grove, and the great lawn with the pond and boats and painted picnic tables. A glance in the other direction revealed the gleaming windows, the tall chimneys, and the deep red brick of the back of the factory.

  When not drawing dinosaurs in his sketchpad (many of which looked a lot like his favorite gummy dinosaur, Gummzilla), he would play one of his grandfather’s old hand-carved wooden puzzle games. He wasn’t very good at solving them, but he enjoyed the challenge. He could hum as he worked, and the noises of the busy barn drowned out the sound. The farmers below him milked the cows for fresh milk and collected eggs from the chickens, and if they knew he was there, they never let on.

  As he got older, Logan enjoyed learning more and more and started hiding less and less. Eventually, he forgot about hiding at all. But tomorrow was the big Kickoff. Candy history would be made when the very first Harmonicandy glided down the conveyor belt. A new product was always a big deal, but the introduction of the winning candy in the Confectionary Association’s annual New Candy Contest was a massive deal. All eyes were on Logan.

  So, obviously, he needed to hide. And he needed to hide fast.

  Unfortunately, the options were slim. A frenzied energy buzzed through the air. Visitors from all parts of the candy community filled the factory halls, the candymaking rooms, the library, the cafeteria, the Tropical Room, the Bee Room, the great lawn, and even his family’s apartment upstairs. This made it very hard to hide in shadowy corners or to slip into back rooms unnoticed. The factory hadn’t had this many people in it in seven years, and Logan was finding it hard to adjust. He rested his hand on the pocket where he’d stuck his poem of the day. Ever since the contest, his mom had let him select his own. Today he’d chosen this one:

  I am the boy

  That can enjoy

  Invisibility

  It was written by an author named James Joyce. He’d found it by looking up hiding in the index of one of the poetry books his mother had given him. So far it hadn’t helped him hide, nor turn invisible, but it gave him a slight sense of hopefulness, and he was glad he had it.

  He wished his friends from the candymaking contest were there. They were the only people who knew him well enough to understand how he felt. Miles O’Leary, Daisy Carpenter, and Philip Ransford the Third were so different—not only from each other but also from anyone else he’d ever met. Each of them made his small world bigger, and every night when he recited what he was grateful for, they were at the top of his list. Even Philip. Not that Logan would ever tell him that.

  At least Miles would be there after lunch. Even though it was summer vacation, he had a new hobby that kept him away each morning. Miles wasn’t the best at hiding anyway. He’d most likely sneeze or forget they were supposed to be hiding and then start to tell a story and blow their cover. Poor hiding skills aside, Miles was the best friend Logan had ever had. It helped that neither of them had had a best friend before. They were learning together how to be one.

  If anyone could figure out a way to help him now, it would be Daisy. Hiding was basically her full-time job! But she was away on a spy mission, and even though she had given him one of her secret communication devices that would allow him to reach her wherever she was, she’d made it clear that the gadget was for emergencies only. He hadn’t even turned it on. No one knew when her mission would be over, but she’d promised to be back for the factory’s annual picnic, at the end of the summer. As momentous as the next day’s event was expected to be, the factory’s first picnic in seven years would be an even bigger deal, but one that he was looking forward to. He wasn’t exactly dreading tomorrow, but the tight feeling in his stomach felt something close to it, and the instinct to hide was strong.

  Since Miles and Daisy were out, that left only Philip, who really wasn’t the world’s best listener. Not by a long shot. Still, he was much better than he used to be. After winning the contest, Philip had started hanging around the factory at least a few times a week. The Ransfords’ personal assistant, Reggie, would drop him off after school in a fancy limo and pick him up before dinner.

  For a kid who hadn’t eaten candy for seven years, Philip was making up for it big-time by sampling everything he could get his hands on. He’d follow all the workers around, learning how they did their jobs and always volunteering to help. It was obvious he was trying to compensate for having been so obnoxious during the contest. Logan would say he was successful at achieving that goal about 70 percent of the time; Miles put it at 50. Logan had called Philip yesterday to invite him to come that morning, but Philip had a dentist appointment scheduled. That boy should probably cut down on all the candy eating, just to be on the safe side.

  Logan pressed himself against the wall outside the Oozing Crunchorama Room to plot his next move. Maybe he could claim that his skin felt clammy and hide out in the nurse’s office. It was always empty, so he’d have lots of privacy. The worst thing the nurse usually saw during the course of the day was a bee sting. The Candymaker made safety his number one priority, which made it even worse that the only serious workplace accident had been when his own five-year-old son tried to reach into a vat of boiling-hot fudge and sustained third-degree burns on his arms and face and neck.

  Logan quickly dismissed the idea of the nurse’s office. He’d spent more than enough time as a patient, with doctors treating his burns after the accident. Plus he would feel terrible lying to anyone.

  He glanced behind him. Last month the Oozing Crunchorama had fallen to third on the candy best-sellers list, after being at the top for nearly a decade. Max and the other candy scientists responded to this disappointing turn of events by tweaking the recipe a little. All they did was chop the hazelnuts into smaller pieces and add a touch more cream to up the “ooze factor,” and the candy community went wild. A week later the Crunchorama was back on top. Now the room bustled with activity as they tried to keep up with the demand. Logan sized up the corner behind the hazelnut-warming table. It would provide good cover from the workers pouring the hazelnut-praline mixture into the huge vats of dark chocolate. First he’d have to figure out a way to distract them, though.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you stand so still,” a familiar voice said with a chuckle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Logan jumped. Then he turned to face Henry, the man who had single-handedly run the Marshmallow Room since the factory opened fifty years earlier. Henry had always been like a grandfather to him, even when Logan’s own grandfather—the original Candymaker and founder of Life Is Sweet—was still alive. Since the candymaking contest a few months back, Logan had been so busy that his usual morning visits with Henry had become less frequent. But with his mess of white hair and easy smile, Henry was the only grown-up Logan didn’t mind seeing right now.

  “Can we go back to the Marshmallow Room?” Logan asked, tugging on Henry’s sleeve. He knew they’d have privacy there. Henry guarded the marshmallows the way a mama bird guarded her eggs, and he was extremely choosy about who he let get too close. Plus the walls of the Marshmallow Room were made of a special tinted glass that allowed Henry to see out but kept people from seeing in. Henry insisted the walls were tinted to keep the room cool, but Logan suspected that was just an excuse.

  Without waiting for an answer, Logan took off at a run. He darted through crowds of smiling guests, their arms laden with bags of free treats. He did his best not to meet anyone’s eyes and pretended he didn’t hear their whispered comments. Not being friendly was uncharacteristic of him, but he couldn’t handle even one more person gripping him on the shoulder and offering words that were supposed to make him feel better but had the opposite effect. Comments like “You’re always a winner to us!” or “This must be tough, but hang in there. Your time will come!” Or, if it was a particularly nosy or thoughtless journalist, “Your grandfather won. Then your dad won. What’s it like watching your father’s company produce the contest-winning candy when you’re the first member of your family in t
hree generations to lose?”

  He told them the truth, but no one seemed to believe it.

  By the time Henry showed up in the Marshmallow Room, Logan already had the large Bunsen burner up and running and two marshmallows speared onto the tips of their favorite toasting sticks.

  “Let’s hear it,” Henry said, sitting down on the wooden stool next to Logan’s. The stool groaned under Henry’s considerable weight.

  “No one believes me when I say I’m okay,” Logan complained as their marshmallows toasted over the low flame. He didn’t like the way his voice sounded, but until recent events, he’d never had reason to complain about anything. Now he couldn’t help it.

  “They pat me on the arm,” he explained to Henry, “and tilt their heads at me with their eyes as gooey as a fresh batch of chocolate.” It wasn’t until the contest that he’d begun to realize that people had always looked at him with sympathy—or at least ever since he’d gotten the scars. Other than the need to massage aloe into them, and the occasional itch or throbbing, and the fact that the ones on his hands sometimes made it hard for him to grip small objects, he never gave his scars much thought. It hadn’t occurred to him that others would think about them. He was embarrassed that he hadn’t been smart enough, or aware enough, to realize that of course others noticed. And now with all the strangers at the factory, he was aware of the second glances thrown his way.

  “You can’t really blame folks for thinking you might be disappointed,” Henry replied. “You have to watch the Harmonicandy get all the glory. Under your own roof, no less! And after you’d worked so hard on your Bubbletastic ChocoRocket.”

  “I might not have worked that hard,” Logan admitted.