Beware False Profits by Emilie Richards Page A

chocolate, nobody trips over the cord, and the fountain is perfectly level, it should work just fine.”
    “Wow.”
    “Oh, and the final blow? Hazel refused to let us purchase the chocolate that’s made especially for it. We had donated chocolate available, so she insisted we find a recipe ourselves and use it.”
    The chocolate fountain was beginning to look a shade less yummy.
    Sally must have read my expression, because she put her hand on my shoulder. “It tastes perfectly fabulous. You just add vegetable oil based on the pounds of chocolate you need, but you have to melt the chocolate first and do some adjusting to get it flowing. Then you turn it off and on again every twenty or thirty minutes to reprime the pump. I won’t go on…”
    “I’m wondering why you didn’t get Hazel to do this herself, since it was her idea to change the order.”
    “Hazel and chocolate? Not a chance. Her views on what foods are acceptable for human beings are way out there. Only food in its purest form. She claims she eats nothing but nuts, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Of course…”
    Sally’s eyes were sparkling. I knew that look. Sally was listening to her better side, trying to stem the flow of gossip. But I wasn’t above pulling a brick or two out of that dam.
    “You don’t think she really follows the diet?”
    “You’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?”
    “I don’t expect other people to follow the lettuce-lined path.”
    “Well, the rumor is Hazel doesn’t practice what she preaches. She’s a junk food junkie. I’m told she’s a hopeless chocoholic, and get this…she smokes!”
    I envisioned Hazel, the food Nazi, rolling a tobacco leaf and smoking it “in its purest form.”
    “People have seen her smoking?” I asked.
    “People have smelled it. I’m one of them. She tries to cover it up, but she’s not successful. I get the feeling maybe she smokes half a pack at a time whenever she can get away with it. I think she more or less stores it up until she can go off on a binge by herself again.”
    This was a character flaw that improved Hazel’s resume. She almost sounded human. Imperfections have their place.
    “But of course she would never admit it,” Sally continued. “So she rails against the evils of chocolate and lets the rest of us do all the work. She forgets the rest of us have busy lives, too. In fact, the minute I’m done here, I’m heading out of town.”
    “Somewhere fun?”
    She looked at me as if I needed my consciousness raised. “A conference on urban renewal for small cities.”
    In her own way, Sally is as single-minded as Hazel.
    I told her again how lovely everything looked, then I wandered over to sample the wares.
    Chad Sutterfield was standing by himself at the end of the table, so I went to chat with him after I filled my plate. I planned to save the chocolate fountain for dessert. I wanted to look forward to it.
    “You did a great job on the tour.” I offered him one of the tiny spinach quiches that had just been put out, but I guess it’s true what they say about real men. He shook his head.
    “You’ll have to tell me how those are. We have thirty boxes in the warehouse freezer.”
    “What will you do with them? They don’t seem like the kind of thing families are looking for when they come to get groceries. ‘I’d like dried milk, canned tomatoes, a pound of cheese, and a box of fancy appetizers?’”
    “One day next week we’ll probably include them in our meals for the elderly.” He watched me take a bite and smiled when I nodded my approval.
    “You get all sorts of odd things like this?”
    “We’re always surprised what people think we might use. Once we got a hundred pounds of ground ostrich meat.”
    “What did you do?”
    “They say it’s really healthy, so we couldn’t see disposing of it. Our volunteers made spaghetti. I won’t tell you where we served it. Maybe you ate some.”
    “Nope. I’m a vegetarian, brought on at least partly