“I’m not trying to get any money out of you,” he said, sounding offended at the prospect, and putting an odd emphasis on the last word. “I just want to know what happened. Someone I cared about is dead, and I think I deserve to know what happened.”
It was a strange phrasing, and Claudia wondered at the psychology of someone who thought that the great injustice of a murder was that no one had properly explained it to him.
“I’m sorry, but you’re not going to find that out here,” she said. “I don’t have any more idea what happened than you do, and I’ve told you what I know.”
“You didn’t mention the police have excellent reasons to believe that you killed Lori.”
“I didn’t mention it because they don’t, and I didn’t.”
“The police chief seems to think otherwise.”
“Chief Lennox couldn’t find his own backside with a map and a flashlight. He’d like to think I murdered Lori out of some kind of insane rage over her selling mass-produced totes, because that’s the answer that requires him to do the least amount of work, even though it makes no sense at all. You can take his word for it if you want, but in that case I don’t know what you’re doing here talking to me.”
To his credit, Neil didn’t come back with a retort. He just sat there, holding the mug of coffee he clearly didn’t want to drink, looking across Claudia’s kitchen table at her like he wasn’t sure if she was right or crazy or both. Finally, he seemed to settle in favor of not getting thrown out of her house, and even took another sip of the coffee as a kind of conciliatory gesture. (He immediately regretted it.)
“Okay, so let’s say for the sake of argument that you didn’t kill her.”
“Thank you so much for that,” Claudia said, but he ignored her and kept talking.
“Then who did? And why?”
Those were exactly the questions that Claudia had been trying to answer, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. It was kind of a shock, honestly, to hear her own internal monologue made real, and placed in another person’s mouth, and it was impossible not to recognize that they were very strange questions for either of them to be asking.
Claudia didn’t share any of these thoughts. Instead, she took on the role of her own doubts, a position with which she was intimately familiar.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But I don’t see how you can possibly expect to find out. What can you do that the police wouldn’t be able to?”
“Do you think the police are going to solve it?” he asked.
“They might,” she said, but her lack of conviction was hard to ignore. She thought about Lori stealing the number from Emmanuelle’s phone, and trying to line up press coverage for something, and it was on the tip of her tongue to ask him if anything he knew about her could shed some light on that, but something stopped her. She didn’t know this man, and she had no reason to trust anything he was saying. For all she knew, this entire visit was a ploy to find out what she knew. And even if it wasn’t, it was clear that Neil was already suspicious of her, and revealing that she had been doing some snooping of her own wasn’t likely to win him over.
“Anyway,” she went on. “As incompetent as they are, the police are the ones with all the information and resources. How would you even know how to start investigating a murder? Besides coming here and yelling at me, that is.”
“I wasn’t yelling, I just wanted some information. And I’m still not sure I got it.”
The time for reconciliation was apparently over. Claudia got the impression that Neil wasn’t a man who cared for being told he couldn’t do things.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “Believe me, I want Lori’s murder solved too. She died in my marketplace and I found her body, and it’s not something I’m ever going to forget. Her death was terrible and cruel, and whoever did it is obviously very dangerous and probably still in the area, so I have personal reasons to want them found as soon as possible. But I don’t know what you think you’re going to be able to accomplish going around and asking people questions.”
By the time she was finished, Claudia wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself or Neil. Fortunately, he didn’t catch the ambiguity.
“You think so, do you? The thing is, I’ve got some more resources than you might know about. And you should be grateful, because if I’m right, I could get you out of all of this trouble.”
That caught Claudia off guard. Again, she was tempted to press, and bring up her own information, but caution still held her back.
“Then I wish you the best of luck,” she said. “But if you really didn’t suspect me, then what are you doing here?”
“I need to know some things. Like who Lori was in contact with while she was at the marketplace, and where she might have been keeping some things. Do you have any access to her goods in the shop?”
Claudia didn’t, and she told him so.
“She did have some stuff she was storing here, in the other house. The police have it now. It was mostly things to do with her store, so I let them take it.”
“You did what?”
She hadn’t been expecting to be thanked, but the outburst took Claudia by surprise.
“I didn’t know if anyone was going to show up to claim it, and they’re investigating a murder, after all.”
“Well that’s just great. So now I have to go to the police? Why didn’t you just toss it all into the ocean and be done with it?”
“I’m sorry, I really didn’t think there was anything there that was that important. And it wasn’t mine to hold on to, anyway,” Claudia said. She refrained from asking what he thought he was going to do with some boxes of counterfeit handicrafts.
Or maybe the boxes had nothing to do with it. There was still the question of that list she had found, along with the picture of Dana. Could that be what Neil was after? But why? She wished he would leave, so she could take another look at it.
As if on cue, Neil stood up, leaving his nearly full coffee cup on the table.
“I guess I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said. “I’m sure you’re busy.”
It might have been sarcasm, but it was true, and as Claudia went to open the door for him she was already thinking about what she was going to do next. He was almost all the way out when she pulled her attention back from thoughts of marketplace prep and search terms and realized she had another question for him.
“One more thing, if you don’t mind,” she asked from her doorstep, Teddy crouching suspiciously behind her legs. “When was the last time you talked to Lori?”
Neil stopped and thought for a moment.
“I think it was last year. She was moving, and she had found some stuff she thought was mine and asked if I wanted it. It was just a bunch of junk, so I told her to throw it out. She did say something about ‘not being in touch for a while, but then I was going to be hearing a lot about her.’ I still don’t know what she meant by that.”
Claudia agreed that it wasn’t much to go on.
“I hope she didn’t do anything stupid, trying to get famous,” she said, thinking of Lori’s attempt to reach Emmanuelle’s media contact.
“Me too,” Neil said. “But she must have done something, right? She’s dead.”
After he had gone, Claudia went back into the house and cleaned up the mugs, with a bad taste in her mouth that had nothing to do with the coffee.
Neil claimed to be trying to find his ex-wife’s killer out of sentiment for her, but his readiness to blame her for her own murder and the fact that he had trouble remembering the last time he had talked to her didn’t fit with that. Unless, of course, he remembered everything just fine, and had only been hesitating for as long as it took him to remember what lie he was telling.
In fact, there had been something off about the whole conversation, from his initial aggression about accusing Claudia to suddenly indicating he had some reason to believe she was innocent, and from probing for information to implying he knew more than he was
willing to say. That he had come to talk to her was the least surprising part, Claudia supposed. If he really was trying to solve the murder, the person who found the body was an obvious person to talk to, even if she hadn’t told him anything of substance. She thought back over his questions, but there was nothing there that made it clear what line he was pursuing, except that he thought there was something Lori had been storing among her possessions, and he either hadn’t found it yet or wanted to know if Claudia had. She didn’t think she had given away what little she knew, but it was hard to tell when she wasn’t sure what exactly that was.
One undeniable outcome of his visit was that Claudia was suddenly much more interested in that list of names Lori had collected. It hadn’t seemed like much when she found it, but it was the only thing among her possessions that Neil could conceivably have been searching for, and that meant it was time to give it a closer look.
She had just poured herself another cup of coffee and was examining the pictures she had taken of the list when she got a call from Julie.
“I had an idea,” she said, once greetings had been exchanged. “What if we got some of the local community organizations to set up booths at the marketplace? It would be a good way to bring in a few more bodies, and they’ve all got mailing lists. I have a meeting with some members of the Beach Society at The Breakers tomorrow morning, and I thought you could come along and make your pitch. We’re all a bunch of busy-bodies, and I don’t think anyone is on less than three nonprofit boards, so it would be a good way to take care of a bunch of them at once. The only problem I can see is if some of the people who aren’t there end up feeling left out, but you can let me deal with them.”
“That sounds great,” Claudia said, meaning the suggestion in general, but also the idea of Julie dealing with the hurt feelings of left-out nonprofits. The complex politics of small-town living were still a bit beyond her. “What time should I be there?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was getting late in the day, but Claudia thought there might still be time to try again to reach a few more of her media contacts, none of whom had returned her calls so far. It was frustrating, but Claudia kept trying, stationed at her kitchen table with her phone and laptop, working her way through every name she could find while the wind rattled the windows.
After two hours of work with nothing to show for it but the possibility of a mention on the local traffic-and-weather radio station, Claudia was ready to give up and leave it to luck and the local grapevine. Her one hope at this point was Emmanuelle’s social media presence, whatever that was worth. Which, it occurred to her, was something she could determine, or at least estimate. She knew that Emmanuelle was most active on a particular photo sharing site, where Claudia had created an account years ago that she had left to languish, but it was no trouble to log in and find her tenant.
Emmanuelle certainly did have a good number of followers, and based on the amount of comments her photos got, her engagement wasn’t bad either. Starting to feel optimistic, Claudia clicked through to look at the list of profiles of the people who were interested in well-lit pictures of strawberries and pancetta, hoping to see some prominent names. She found a few, but almost immediately lost interest in them, because in the long string of thumbnail images her eye had picked out a familiar one. The picture wasn’t recent, but there was no question it was of Lori. Dreams of viral fame forgotten, she followed the link.
Sure enough, the face in most of the photos was Lori’s, smiling up at a camera held an arm’s length from her face. At first glance, the contents of the page were the furthest thing from shocking; the biggest surprise (and, frankly, embarrassment) for Claudia was that her investigating hadn’t turned it up before now.
In her defense, the page hadn’t been active for a while; the most recent post was from close to five years ago. That one wasn’t much, a close-up of a calla lily with a series of crying emojis and hearts as the caption. The post had merited two likes, with one person posting a crying emoji in response.
Further back, the account took on a cheerier tone. Lori hadn’t been a steady user of the site; her pattern was occasional bursts of activity followed by long silences, but when she did post, the photos tended to be in the genre of average restaurant meals photographed in low light, and Lori standing in front of things. Most of the things she was in front of were deeply uninteresting—why anyone would think the fact that one was in line for chicken fingers at the ballpark merited documentation was not clear to Claudia, but to each their own.
What she was more interested in was the other people in the photos. Neil appeared in a few, which supported but didn’t exactly confirm the case for him actually having been her husband. But the most frequent appearances were from another familiar face, smiling next to Lori at restaurant patio tables, in front of vacation-spot vistas, making faces while wearing hats. In all of them, Dana Herschel—the girl from the journal photo—clung tightly to her friend, giving the same full-teeth, squinty-eyed smile.
Claudia looked over them carefully, trying to guess what had made Neil so sure that this friendship was over. Dana did appear in fewer of the later pictures, and when she did, Claudia thought her smile seemed thinner and more forced. About six months before the final post she vanished entirely, and in most of the remaining photos Lori was alone.
A quick reverse image search on some of the better pictures of Dana didn’t turn up anything, so Claudia copied them and emailed them to herself, along with the page address, for further investigation later. Dana remained a question mark for her, particularly since the time she had learned her full name, but Claudia hadn’t had much time to devote to research. She made an attempt now, but even with the pictures, it wasn’t possible to pick out the relevant people from the endless search results. With enough time, Claudia was sure she would be able to learn something, but before she could get deeper into it the phone rang.
“Hi, I’m calling for Claudia Simcoe?”
“This is she.”
“Good evening, Ms. Simcoe, this is Todd Thompson from the West County Gazette. I got your message about an event you’re holding this weekend?”
The voice on the other end of the line was a little raspy, like he had just finished a coughing fit, but it was the loveliest sound Claudia had heard all day. The Gazette was a large local newspaper, taken by most of the households in the county that still took a paper. A write-up there wouldn’t guarantee her event would be a success, but at least it would prevent it from sinking into history completely unnoticed.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, we are,” she said. “Is there any chance you’ll be able to write something about it? I realize it’s very short notice.”
“It’s a little unusual, but we might be able to manage something,” he said, this angel of the newsroom. “Why the last-minute planning?”
“Because of the hot weather,” Claudia answered, semitruthfully. Unusually for her, she had actually thought this part out.
“It’s like Mavericks,” she explained, referring to the big-wave surfing competition held near San Francisco. “When they have the waves it happens, when they don’t, it doesn’t. Same deal.”
“Right, well, as I understand it, you’ve had some other newsworthy events there? Someone was killed? This is the same marketplace, right?”
Claudia went cold all over. She had done her best to avoid the news vans and unfamiliar cars that had been showing up for the last couple of days, but she was aware of the sensation that the murder had caused among the local media.
“Yes,” she said, cautiously. “We had a terrible tragedy at the marketplace the other day. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with making that part of a story about the outdoor event, though. If that’s the only thing you’re interested in writing about . . .”
“Oh no, I think we can work something out to do separate stories. But I was interested in hearing your account of the death. You’re the owner of the marketplace, correct?”
The reporter’s game wa
s clear now. If she wanted her event promoted, she was going to have to give him a story. Which she supposed was fair, in a way. Everybody wants something.
While they talked, Claudia had been running a quick search on his name. Todd Thompson had plenty of articles on the Gazette’s website, all of them having to do with local food and drink events. If he had ever had a byline on a crime story, she couldn’t find it. None of his pieces seemed to have made it in the vicinity of the front page, let alone investigative reporting.
She had a theory, and if she was right then maybe they could both get what they wanted, plus a bit more.
“So, I take it that you were hoping for a personal account of the death? Some details about the victim or the investigation? And if I can offer those to you, you might also write up our event?”
“Something like that, yes.” If he was put off by her directness, Todd didn’t show it. Claudia decided to press her luck.
“Well, the issue with that is that I don’t really want to be giving statements. But what if I told you something you could use for a whole new angle?”
This was the bait; she hoped it looked tasty enough. Claudia’s guess was that Todd was an aspiring investigative reporter putting his time in on the fluffier beats, who had heard her name in his voicemail and decided to seize the moment. What she needed now was to offer him an even better opportunity, one that wouldn’t just get him a shared byline on a follow-up story, but an exclusive of his own. And at the same time, he might be able to get some information that Claudia hadn’t. The idea had its risks, but she was willing to take them.
“I’m listening,” the reporter said, possibly unaware that his voice had gone up in pitch. “What kind of information?”
“There’s actually a couple of things, though I should warn you that I have no idea if either is going to pan out. And I’m only telling you this on the condition that my name is nowhere in the story. I’m just a source close to the investigation, okay?”
Murder Goes to Market Page 14