Ice Cream, Beads & ?

TOTALLY off topic here, but my daughter was telling me about two different ice cream trucks near where she lives, and wondering if they have "ice cream truck wars" because they never seem to cross certain boundaries. (This was her intro explaining that the one she hears ALL the time plays a tune that drives her nuts.)

This got us thinking that this could be a good plot for a lighthearted mystery involving kooky ice cream truck drivers, their territories, and . . . well, the rest has to be filled in.

​Tying this plot in with beads is another challenge.  Typing "beaded ice cream" into Pinterest does not produce a lot of beaded ice cream images, though there are some other interesting images out there.

So who's up for contributing to the Ice Cream War Mystery?  ​Write your contributions and ideas in the comments section and we'll see what happens.  Let's get started.

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Tom Ballou had been driving his ice cream truck in this neighborhood for nearly 20 years, and by golly if he was going to sit around and watch some other wanna-be ice cream truck move into his territory.

​Sure, they were having extreme heat this summer, but that didn't mean people were out eating more ice cream. In fact, they mostly stayed inside where it was air conditioned. He'd had to crank up the volume of his music to get noticed, much less overwhelmed with customers.

Still, he'd never wished anything bad happen to the new guy, Jimmy somebody, and just because they'd had a showdown the other evening where Tom might have said some unfortunate things about how he'd like Jimmy to no longer exist, all he really meant was that he just wanted Jimmy to go away. But this, this, he never imagined anything like this.  What could possibly have caused Jimmy's truck to totally melt?  And where was Jimmy? Oh man, Tom did not have a good feeling about this.