Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  “Sure,” Claudia said, grateful for the prompt. “And honestly, finding out wouldn’t be hard. People stop by all the time asking for me—other vendors, tour organizers, whatever—and whoever is around will just point them to it.”

  “Well, that’s convenient,” Lennox said, his voice heavy with implication. Claudia chose to misunderstand him.

  “It’s certainly helpful,” she agreed with a straight face. “But I’m afraid it isn’t going to shed much light on who killed Lori.”

  “Let me be the judge of that, Miss Simcoe.” It occurred to Claudia that Lennox may have spent too much of his life thinking he was destined for greater things, when he really wasn’t.

  He went on.

  “So how did you feel when you saw the evidence that she was cheating you? If it was in the afternoon, why did you wait until the end of the day to confront her?”

  “Because I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I knew I’d have to cancel her lease, but it didn’t make much difference if she had her store open for a few more hours. As far as how I felt, I was mostly annoyed, at her and at myself for not having done a better job of vetting her.”

  “Just annoyed, huh? At the woman who was threatening to ruin your business? I find that difficult to believe.”

  There were probably a lot of things Lennox found difficult, but Claudia wasn’t going to get into that right now.

  “She wasn’t going to destroy the business,” she said, emphasizing how calm she was. “Who was going to care if one stall out of six in a small-town marketplace was selling things that weren’t what they were supposed to be? I had to tell her to leave once I knew about it, and I guess it’s a lesson to me to do better diligence next time, but there can’t be more than half a dozen people on the planet who would even give it a second thought.”

  “Well, what about the stink bombs? I guess you’re going to tell me that didn’t bother you either?”

  “Since I didn’t know about them until just now, no, they weren’t the first thing on my mind. But even if she had used them, those things last for what, a couple of hours? It’d be inconvenient, but nobody’s going to kill someone over a prank like that.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Yes, well, it’s mine.”

  That came out snappier than Claudia had intended and she cringed, cursing her temper and its way of making bad situations worse. She didn’t believe that this man she had never met was driven by some sort of personal animosity against her, so she had to assume he was aware on some level that he was in well over his head, and had fastened on the first person he saw as a handy suspect. And now he was trying to bully her into confessing, because hey, why not? Get this done early enough and they could probably get his picture in tomorrow’s papers.

  Claudia knew she was making a lot of assumptions, and maybe they weren’t all fair, but she had been having a rough day.

  “Was there anything else?” she said.

  At the very least, the chief didn’t have the evidence he needed to arrest her, but he wasn’t about to leave without letting Claudia know who was in charge here.

  “No, I think that’s all,” he said, standing up and giving her tiny home a final, smug, once-over. “By the way, since it’s an active crime scene, I’m afraid I’m going to have to close the marketplace indefinitely. Police procedure.”

  Claudia was pretty sure it wasn’t, but that argument was going to have to wait for another venue.

  “How long is indefinitely?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I could say. Might be as long as it takes to catch this killer. Can’t be too careful, after all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So that’s where I am. Dead vendor, business shut down, probably not going to be able to sleep for a week. Other than that everything’s fine. How about you?”

  “Claudia, I’m so sorry.” Her friend Betty sat across from her at the big wooden table, radiating concern. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

  Betty was one of the first people Claudia had met after she had made the decision to move to San Elmo permanently. She and her husband ran a guest ranch a few miles from the town, on the property where his family had raised cattle for eighty years, until economics necessitated a new business plan. Between the animals, the guests, and their three children—twin four-year-old boys and a nine-year-old girl—she must have had more than enough to do, but somehow she always seemed to be able to make time for a chat and a glass of wine.

  She was pouring one now, which Claudia accepted with gratitude.

  “I didn’t want to drag you into it. The last thing you need is for your guests to find out you’re associating with a suspected murderer.” In fact, Claudia hadn’t called at all. It was Betty, ringing her phone off the hook (the poor cell phone reception in San Elmo had driven Claudia to get an actual wall phone, the first of her adult life) as soon as the gossip mill had reached her with the news about the murder. Claudia had been instructed to show up as soon as the guests had been fed and the younger children put to bed, no excuses accepted.

  Which was why Claudia was currently settled in the ranch’s huge kitchen, a room decorated by Betty to look as simple and rustic as it was definitely not. The apron-front stone sink drew the eye away from the professional-sized dishwasher, and the pattern of the backsplash had been specifically chosen so that, from a distance, it was hard to see how many electrical outlets were in it. The centerpiece of the room was the double oven and six-burner stove, on which Betty produced all of the meals for the ranch’s guests. Her cooking had gone a long way to building their reputation as a legitimate destination on the North Coast, despite the distance along narrow backroads from the better-known tourist locations of Napa and Sonoma.

  Based on the number of cars in the parking lot, they only seemed to have a handful of guests at the moment, but Claudia’s concern about upsetting them was genuine. Betty, on the other hand, just rolled her eyes.

  “Please. If they ever looked up from their phones for long enough to notice, we’d just call it authentic local color. They’d eat it up.”

  She finished serving up the dish of pasta, blistered cherry tomatoes, and basil, topped with a scoop of fresh ricotta and set it in front of Claudia, who thanked her friend and wondered, not for the first time, why she didn’t hate her. Betty was a city girl by birth, a self-described “culinary school dropout” who had taken to country life like a duck to a pond full of other ducks that all immediately fell in love with her.

  It probably helped that she was beautiful. Not just the ordinary prettiness of a small-market weather girl, but strikingly gorgeous, with a face and figure that made people ask if she was a model, even when they weren’t hitting on her. (If pressed, she would admit she had done some catalogue work in college.) Time and children had softened her curves, but she could still stop traffic if she wasn’t careful.

  Her husband Roy was the quintessential Westerner, tall and taciturn, dressed in a uniform of tight-fitting jeans and worn cowboy boots. He couldn’t have been more different from his wife; where Betty was mile-a-minute chatty, Roy spoke so rarely and so slowly that Claudia speculated it must have taken him a week to get through proposing. But they seemed happy, and she hoped they stayed that way. She needed more happy people in her life.

  “You should talk to a lawyer.” Betty poured a glass of wine for herself and sat down across from Claudia.

  “Right. Know any that take payment in week-old pierogis? They’ve been in the freezer.”

  “I’m serious, Claudia. You could be in real trouble.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I just don’t know what I can do, besides hope that Lennox finds someone better to suspect, and soon.” She stared down into her bowl, trying not to think about the improbability of that.

  “This is delicious pasta, by the way,” Claudia said, trying to change the subject.

  Betty dismissed her creation with a wave of her hand.

  “It’s all about the ingredients, re
ally. The ricotta is Julie’s, of course. Speaking of which, what’s going to happen to your vendors? I don’t know what I’m going to do without them. We’re starting to get people requesting the pickle and charcuterie platter when they book.”

  It was nice of Betty to say, and Claudia hoped at least partly honest. The ranch had been one of the first commercial customers for most of the businesses in the marketplace, and their reliance on local producers had even made it into the write-up they had just gotten in a San Francisco paper.

  “I don’t know,” Claudia said. “I hope the closure isn’t going to go on too long, and they’ll be able to find some other places to sell in the meantime. I was planning to call around to the local farmer’s markets once I get my head together, see if they take some of our vendors on for now.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.” Betty ran her finger around the rim of her glass and stared into it, distracted by another thought.

  “You know, I talked with her at one point about getting some napkins from her for the dining room, but to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with her work. Which I guess wasn’t really her work at all. Anyway, now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “You have a better eye than I do. God, I wish I had just turned her away. Maybe none of this would have ever happened.”

  “You can’t think that way,” Betty said. “Nobody could have predicted this. To have killed her like that, somebody must have really not liked her.”

  “Ya think?”

  “No, I’m serious. Strangling someone, that’s not something you do if you just want to rob them, right? It must have been personal.”

  She paused and took an awkward sip of her wine.

  “What did you say she was killed with, some sort of string? Do you think he brought it with him?”

  There was a strain in Betty’s voice that Claudia had trouble placing. Not that it should be surprising that anybody would be upset by the violent death of someone they knew, however slightly, but for some reason Betty seemed to be trying to make her completely reasonable question sound unreasonably casual.

  On the other hand, perhaps recent events were getting to Claudia, and she should stop overthinking everything and just answer the question.

  “I didn’t look closely, but I thought it looked more like wire, with wooden dowels on the ends. I thought it looked familiar but I couldn’t—oh.”

  “What?”

  “I just realized what it was. It’s one of the cheese wires from Dancing Cow.” Claudia sighed. “So I guess it can’t be used as a clue to lead back to the killer. They must have just grabbed it off the counter.”

  “I’m sure there will be plenty more clues,” Betty assured her. “Aren’t most criminals supposed to be pretty stupid? They probably left all sorts of evidence lying around.”

  “I hope so. Or at least a witness or two. Somebody must have seen who was at the marketplace last night, right? Maybe our friend Mr. Rodgers can make himself useful for once.”

  Until very recently, one of the biggest problems Claudia had was a surly neighbor by the name of Nathan Rodgers. He lived in the house on the hill directly above the marketplace, a situation that bothered him to no end. He seemed to be gone a lot, but whenever he was in the area he found something to complain about, whether it was the cars that occasionally parked on the road, the picnickers who braved the wind and blackberry brambles to sit on the hillside below his property, animals who were attracted to the garbage, or the security lights Claudia had had installed as part of the effort to keep animals out of the garbage. The complaints came in the form of letters—to her, the paper, or the city council—and he seemed completely uninterested in engaging in any sort of dialogue. More than that, in all the time she had been living as his closest neighbor, she had never met the man, or even seen his face. In the early days she had concocted elaborate theories for his invisibility, but eventually Claudia decided that he was simply the kind of jerk who preferred to harass from a distance, so as not to inconvenience himself with listening to other people. She could only imagine what she would be hearing from him once he learned that her business had brought a murder into his neighborhood.

  Claudia finished her meal and carried the bowl over to the sink. “Thanks again for letting me come over and eat your food and tell you my woes. I don’t think I realized how much I needed a break. This has all been kind of overwhelming for me.”

  “Of course, you know you can call me up any time. But you aren’t going back to that cottage tonight?”

  “That was the plan. I’m afraid I’m a little short on alternate homes at the moment.”

  “You can stay here. There’s no way I’m letting you go back to that place less than twenty-four hours after someone got killed right there,” Betty said.

  “Okay, but how long are you supposed to wait for murderers to clear out? Is it like a bug bomb? I appreciate the offer, but I can’t inconvenience you like that. You’ve done enough for me already.”

  “Claudia, we literally run a guest ranch. It’s right there in the name.” Just then her husband entered, carrying a green bucket. “Roy, Claudia should stay here tonight, right? Someone just got killed in the marketplace.”

  “Sure,” Roy said, as he emptied a bowl of kitchen scraps into the bucket. “Plenty of room.”

  For Roy, that practically counted as a soliloquy. Appropriately impressed, Claudia began to bend.

  “But I didn’t bring anything. I don’t even have a toothbrush.”

  Betty opened a cupboard next to the door, revealing neat stacks of brand-new toiletries.

  “Here at Tyler Ranch, all needs are provided for. And I can loan you a T-shirt and sweats to sleep in, as long as you don’t mind that they have some stuff written on the butt. I went through sort of a phase back in the day,” she said, as she assembled a collection of the necessities.

  “Besides,” she went on. “You can help Olive with her project. Her school put together a robotics team for the summer and they’re having a competition at the end of the month. I think she’s been having some trouble with it, and neither Roy nor I can make heads or tails of that thing.”

  Olive was Betty’s oldest, a third-grader with a serious demeanor who, the first time she met Claudia, had asked if she thought faster-than-light travel would ever be possible. Claudia had never been very comfortable around children, but Olive she liked.

  Claudia doubted there was actually any problem with the robot, but she recognized the kindness of Betty making it seem like she would do them a favor by staying. At that point, there was nothing she could say but yes.

  “I’ll be happy to help if I can. It’s been a long time since I did any hardware work, though,” she said. “So Olive is liking the new science program at her school?”

  “She loves it,” Betty said. “I don’t understand half of the things she comes home talking about, but at least it’s keeping her from taking apart the toaster again.”

  “Okay,” Claudia said. “I’ll see what I can do. And thanks. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You’d eat a lot more frozen pizzas, for one thing.”

  As Claudia expected, the robot was fine, but Olive was gracious about letting her help, and they spent a pleasant evening refining the control mechanism for the flipping arm.

  “Were you on a robot team in your school?” Olive asked, as she worked her fingers through a tiny gap to get at a screw.

  “I wish. We didn’t have anything this cool when I was a kid. The closest I ever came was one science fair where my project was a marble maze that ended with the marble turning on a light switch.”

  “What was the science part of that?”

  “I’m not sure. Gravity? Light switches? Anyway, this is better.”

  They were sitting on the floor of the family living room, one of the parts of the house that was off-limits to the guests. The building was, appropriately, ranch-style, arranged in a stunted L-shape around a courtyard. This section had been built in the twenties a
s a modest, two-bedroom dwelling for the farm’s founders and their seven children. The following generations had added to it dramatically, possibly due to some genetic memory of their ancestors’ cramped conditions. Most of the guest accommodations were in the newer parts, but for Claudia’s money, this room, with its brown-and-orange carpet, oak paneling, and well-worn leather furniture was the most comfortable space in the house.

  At the moment, that carpet was littered with pieces of the robot, which Claudia hoped they were going to find all of before someone stepped on one and she never got asked back.

  “Could you have built a robot if you wanted to?” Olive asked, bringing her back to the moment.

  “Probably not,” Claudia said, feeling like the Ancient Mariner. “All that stuff was really expensive and not nearly so good as it is now. That little computer you’ve got,” she pointed to the controller that was resting in an empty mint tin. “That probably has more computing power than anything my school had the whole time I was there.”

  Olive looked like she found that hard to believe.

  “Did you even have the Internet?”

  “Sort of. We had a dial-up modem, which sounded like putting an electric violin down the garbage disposal and you couldn’t use it all the time because it tied up your phone line. Plus, it was so slow, I kept a magazine by the computer so I’d have something to read while it loaded.”

  That got a giggle out of Olive. She was a gangly, somewhat awkward child, who clearly took after her father. Claudia hoped that wasn’t going to be a trial for her later on, growing up in the shadow of her beautiful mother. Not that Betty would even think it, but for all its modern trappings, San Elmo was still a small town.

  For now, at least, Olive was more interested in the past than the future.

  “What did you do when you got online? Could you post pictures and stuff?” she asked.

  “No, mostly I just went to bulletin boards and talked to other people who were interested in computers. There were some games, too, where you would go on once a day and type in your move, and then wait for the clock to turn over so you could move again.”