Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  “I don’t know about that,” Claudia said, as Betty put down the first hoof and moved to the other side. “I kind of suspect he’s only being nice to trick me into incriminating myself. But I figure, if he’s going to be doing that anyway, at least I should get to enjoy it, right?”

  This hoof was cleaner than the last one, and Betty put it down and looked up at Claudia.

  “No. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works at all.”

  “Best idea I’ve had so far,” Claudia countered, then admitted. “Which isn’t saying much. I really don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t reopen the marketplace soon. This is supposed to be our high season—everyone’s counting on the sales from this month to take them through to the holidays.”

  “Especially with the heat wave coming up,” Betty added.

  “Heat wave?” With all that was going on, Claudia hadn’t been keeping up with the weather reports. Betty was quick to fill her in.

  “They say it’s going to be a big one,” she said. “Starting on Thursday and straight through the weekend. Over eighty at the coast, in the hundreds inland. We’ve already had about a dozen people call, trying to reserve rooms.”

  Summer in northern California was a funny thing. For most of the traditional duration, temperatures remained resolutely in the sixties near the coast, with dense fog in the mornings and evenings keeping things consistently cool and preventing the development of any sort of outdoor dining culture. However, two or three times a year a high-pressure system would invade and shock the locals with temperatures that the rest of the country would consider “warmish.”

  When this happened, it was the tradition for everybody to go insane. The heat was the universal conversation topic, and any restaurant that had so much as a couple of tables on the sidewalk advertised their patio seating.

  And once the work week was over, everyone who had the time and the tolerance for the traffic headed to the coast.

  If what Betty was saying was right, Claudia was about to have the weekend of all weekends dropped in her lap, and she was stuck with a closed marketplace and a deeply unsympathetic police chief, with nothing she could do about either. She knew it was irrational, but she couldn’t prevent a burst of anger at Lori for having this be the week she got herself murdered. Just a few more days would have made all the difference.

  Obviously, that wasn’t what she said.

  “I wish I had been paying attention. If I’d known about this sooner, maybe I could have set something up for the vendors. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if they’re going to want to come back even after we get to reopen. Are people really going to want to shop for their organic produce in a building where someone was murdered?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that too much. This sounds terrible, but it might even become a selling point,” Betty said, setting down the last hoof. “Folks love anything a bit edgy and mysterious, as long as it’s not too upsetting. Maybe if the murder is never solved you could spin it as some sort of haunting, or a curse?”

  “Right. The fish sauce for the kimchi is made with fermented Cthulhu and every cheese contains a damned soul.” Claudia shook her head. “I don’t even want to think about where Iryna would take that. No, I’m still holding out hope that the killer turns up soon and it’s something clear and simple that has nothing to do with the marketplace, so we can get back to normal and forget any of this ever happened.”

  Claudia realized she sounded insensitive, and it was also untrue. She wasn’t going to be able to forget everything, no matter how much she wanted to.

  She was trying to find a way to express this when Roy, Betty’s husband, came into the barn. He was carrying his tool box, and after nodding hello he settled in to repair a stall door that was hanging crooked. To Claudia it seemed perfectly normal, but apparently Betty knew better.

  “I thought you were working on the drip irrigation in the garden today,” she said. “Is it done?”

  “Not quite,” Roy muttered. “Had to fix this.”

  “The door is fine. What’s going on back at the house?”

  Roy paused, looking down at the hammer in his hand for long enough that he almost seemed to be holding a separate conversation with it.

  “Well,” he said at last. “The boys are down for their nap, and Olive is practicing driving her robot. The guests went to the beach, and the lady in room seven asked if they could have something local for dinner. Not sure what that meant.”

  He paused to take a breath, and Claudia was frankly stunned. In all the time she had known Betty, she had never heard Roy say more than about four words in a row, generally about farm animals or equipment.

  And he wasn’t done. While his wife looked at him expectantly, he ran his hand over his thinning hair, looked at the door to the barn and back to the stall he was working on, then spoke with exaggerated casualness.

  “Also, the fellow who made his reservation on the website yesterday just checked in. He says he’s the ex-husband of that lady who died, and he’s asking a lot of questions.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  a

  “I’m not saying I won’t let you do it, I’m just saying I don’t think you should.”

  “But why? If he’s looking for people to talk to about Lori’s death, he’s bound to come find me eventually. Don’t you think it’s smarter if I talk to him now, with you guys around?”

  “Makes sense,” Roy said. Having delivered his news, he had relaxed noticeably, and seemed to think he had joined the proceedings.

  Betty threw up her hands.

  “Okay, fine. But I still think you should be staying away from him, not using him as a source. And please, remember he’s a guest here. The last thing we need is reviews saying we interrogate our customers.”

  “Right, so no cattle prod,” Claudia said. “Seriously, I promise, I’m not going to ask him hardly any questions at all. I just want to know why he’s here, and find out some more about who Lori was. She’s the key to everything that’s happened, and we barely know anything about her.”

  Claudia also wanted to figure out how, with all of the information she had been able to gather on Lori’s previous life, she had managed to miss a little detail like a marriage. Frankly, she thought she was better than that.

  Betty put the horse in one of the stalls and they headed back to the main house. Roy suddenly remembered the urgency of finishing his work on the vegetable garden irrigation and left them before they got inside. Betty watched him go with a look of exasperated affection.

  “That man is the biggest busybody I’ve ever known. He’ll act all silent and manly, but give him a bit of gossip and he’s like a dog with a bone.”

  “Maybe he was just being helpful,” Claudia said.

  “Maybe that’s not the sort of help you need,” Betty replied.

  “No, but thanks anyway.” Claudia smiled sweetly at her friend, who started to say something, and then just sighed.

  “Let me do the talking, at least,” Betty said. “It is my business, after all.”

  In fact, the question of who would take the lead was answered as soon as they got back to the main house. A man was wandering around the living room that served as the reception area, picking things up, putting them back down, and looking generally annoyed. The moment the women entered, he abandoned his examination of a ceramic shepherdess and pounced.

  “Hi, do you work here? There was a man who checked me in, but I can’t find him now.”

  He looked like he was in his early forties, with a full head of blond hair and a tall, thin frame that was starting to get a little paunchy around the middle. There was something of the faded college athlete about him; he had probably been a good-looking guy when he was younger, and from the way he held himself, Claudia suspected he believed he still was. For his trip to the country he had chosen an outfit of khaki pants and a polo shirt that still had the creases in the corners from where it had come out of the package, paired with canvas boat shoes.

  �
��That was my husband,” Betty said. “He’s gone to do some work in the garden, but I can help you with whatever you need. I’m Betty Taylor, and this is my friend Claudia.”

  He looked at them like he had been stung.

  “Are you Claudia Simcoe? The owner of the marketplace?”

  Claudia admitted that she was one and the same.

  “What are you doing here? I thought this was a hotel. Do you own this too?”

  “No, Betty and Roy are the owners, I just dropped by for a visit.” Claudia wasn’t sure what she was expecting from a recent ex-widower (widower-ex? husband twice removed?), but it hadn’t been him interrogating her.

  “Claudia is a friend of mine,” Betty repeated, before he could ask anything more. “We were about to have a late lunch. Would you like to join us? We usually have a buffet for the guests, but everyone else took boxed lunches today, so I’m afraid it’s a bit of a potluck.”

  The man muttered that yes, that would be okay, and he hadn’t eaten all day, with something about airplanes that Claudia didn’t catch. He kept looking at her with a kind of confused wariness as Betty led them into the dining room and left them there to go assemble the food. Every few seconds he would look like he was about to say something, then change his mind and stop. Finally, Claudia decided it was up to her to get the ball rolling.

  “I’m very sorry about Lori’s death. Roy said you knew her?” she said. As the words came out, she realized they sounded bizarrely abrupt, but she wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to say. Playing dumb made no sense, since he had to have assumed that Roy would have passed on his introduction, and what little she knew about social niceties definitely included telling people you were sorry when someone they knew died.

  “We were married for about a year and a half, so yeah, I guess you could say we had met.” Whatever his motivations were, the guest seemed to realize he was overdoing it on the attitude, and made an effort to dial it back.

  “The name’s Neil Hahn, by the way. I guess this has been kind of a shock.”

  “Of course,” Claudia said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be cruel.”

  Neil managed a small laugh. “That’s okay. It’s what Lori would have wanted.”

  He didn’t get a chance to explain that rather peculiar statement, because at that moment Betty came back into the dining room carrying a platter of sandwiches and a jug of ice water, with a bottle of wine tucked under her arm. As always, Claudia was in awe of her friend’s hospitality skills. If there was ever a market for a book on how to properly host the previously-unknown ex-husband of a recently murdered acquaintance, Betty would be the one to write it.

  “I just threw these together from some odds and ends,” she said, setting out the sandwiches and distributing plates and glasses from the stacks on the sideboard. “I hope you’re okay with ham? I can do a vegetarian one if you prefer.”

  A rare slip, Claudia thought. Betty must be more shaken by the situation than she was letting on.

  “Ham is great,” Neil assured her. “Thank you. I feel like I haven’t eaten in a month.”

  He did perk up a bit as he ate it, as well he should. Claudia recognized the thinly sliced meat as some of Robbie’s dry-cured country ham, which wasn’t surprising; she knew Betty put her name on the wait list every time he made a batch. It was excellent—rich, well-marbled meat from his pampered pigs, aged to just the right level of salty savoriness, with just a touch of smoke on the finish, and made even better in Betty’s simple sandwich of fresh brown bread, with homemade mustard and just enough lettuce to make you feel like you weren’t a complete barbarian for wanting two.

  “So what brought you out here?” Claudia asked, before realizing that she was setting a land-speed record for getting her foot into her mouth. “I mean, obviously . . . but you aren’t, I just . . .”

  She looked to Betty for help, but it was clear her friend was going to let her live with her choices this time. Fortunately, Neil didn’t seem to mind.

  “It’s kind of weird, I know,” he admitted. “The thing is, Lori and I, we didn’t make a very good married couple, but we stayed friends. Neither of us had much in the way of family, so I kept in touch with her aunt. She told me about what happened, and asked me to come out and see what I could do. She’s pretty sick, so she couldn’t come herself, and Lori’s the only family she has. Had. I can’t believe she’s really gone.”

  It was the first time anyone had expressed anything like sorrow for Lori’s death, and it made Claudia more aware of her insensitivity.

  “Is there anything we can help you with?” Betty asked.

  “I don’t know, I guess I’m still getting my bearings.” He was halfway through the sandwich, and giving the wine bottle interested looks, so their hostess took the hint and passed it around. It was an unlabeled red, “just something from a neighbor,” and it reminded Claudia of a story Betty had told her about the owner of a local boutique winery, whose daughter was dying for horseback riding lessons.

  Sometimes, she thought as she sipped the frankly fantastic pinot noir, it was both what you knew and who you knew.

  The wine seemed to have a beneficial effect on Neil, because he went on in a much more relaxed tone. “I found out where Lori lived, but I haven’t been there yet. Not sure what the procedure for that is going to be. Do you think the police are going to let me in?”

  “That’s probably up to her landlord,” Betty pointed out. “Do you know if she left a will, or who the executer of her estate would be?”

  “I have no idea,” Neil admitted. “She didn’t have one when we were married, I know that. We never really got around to a lot of that responsible stuff.”

  “You should probably get in touch with the aunt, then, and have her contact people for you. They can get in a lot of trouble if they let someone start disbursing the effects without going through the proper channels,” Betty said, speaking from experience.

  “I get that, but I’m really only here as a favor, and I can’t hang around forever. I was hoping I could look through her stuff, let Rhea—that’s her aunt—let her know what there is, in case there were some family heirlooms or something. You don’t think they’ll even let me do that much?”

  Despite Betty’s experiences, neither of them were that knowledgeable about inheritance law, and they said so. Claudia was about to ask about the funeral plans when Neil surprised her by changing the course of the conversation.

  “So, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Lori, and I was just wondering, was there anyone she was hanging around with here? Maybe someone she had a fight with?”

  As he asked the question, Neil’s whole attitude changed. For most of their conversation he had been leaning forward on the table, hovering over his sandwich and ready to take all comers. But now he leaned back in his chair, effecting the attitude of a man who just happened to be wondering if his murdered ex-wife had any enemies.

  Claudia didn’t know where this was going, but she suspected it was bad for her.

  The first question, at least, she could answer with complete honesty. “I really didn’t know her that well,” she said. “She showed up a few months ago and said she was looking for somewhere to sell her products. I had an empty spot in the marketplace, and I rented it to her. She was generally pleasant, but we didn’t talk much. You might ask around with some of the other vendors, but I didn’t get the impression she was very friendly with any of them either.”

  She thought about not telling him that the closest thing Lori had had to a fight recently had been with her, but if this was the sort of question he was going to be asking, he would find out soon enough.

  So she added, “Actually, the last time I saw her, I had to tell her I was canceling her lease. The whole point of the marketplace is that we carry only local, artisan goods, and it turned out all of her stock was mass-produced. I was pretty shocked, I have to say. Had she done anything like that before?”

  Betty had wandered away to let them talk while she pretended
to be very interested in the current state of the flower vases on the sideboard. She was behind Neil when Claudia started her story, and out of the corner of her eye, Claudia could see her friend desperately signaling for her to stop. But it was too late now, and anyway, she was interested in the answer to her question.

  It clearly wasn’t one Neil had been expecting.

  “You mean she just bought them and said she made them? Why would she do that? Lori was never any sort of craftsperson.”

  “That’s what I gathered. I have no idea why she did it; I was hoping you might.”

  “No, that’s just bizarre. And you said you fired her for it?”

  “I didn’t fire her, I canceled her lease,” Claudia corrected. “It was in the terms that anything she sold had to be produced locally by the leaseholder, within reasonable limits.”

  “That’s dumb, why do you care? If people want to buy it anyway, why not let her sell it?” Claudia was starting to see what Lori and Neil had seen in each other.

  “Because that’s how I decided to run the marketplace,” she retorted. “It’s my business, I can make bad decisions if I want to.”

  At this point Betty interrupted, clearly thinking that things had gone far enough.

  “You know, I wonder if anyone at the Hobnob might know more about who Lori was hanging out with,” she said, referencing the less menacing of the town’s two dive bars. “It’s so close to her house, she’s bound to have spent some time there.”

  That was enough to distract Neil, and bring him back to the moment. He thanked Betty abruptly and gave Claudia a dark look before finishing his sandwich in a couple of quick bites.

  “Thanks for the lunch,” he said at last. “I guess I’d better get going.”