Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  Appropriately chastised, Claudia followed her friend to the back of the room, where the other committee members were waiting.

  “I’m sorry, I guess I just lost track of the time,” she said.

  “I can’t imagine why,” Julie said, with raised eyebrows and a smile. “Did you find out anything interesting about what happened to Lori?”

  “That wasn’t what we were talking about,” Claudia insisted, suddenly confused about how much Julie might know or have guessed. Had she figured out that Claudia was trying to solve the murder? Had everyone? She suddenly felt very exposed, so she tried to cover by redirecting. “And I wouldn’t expect him to. He’s very professional.”

  “I’m sure.” Julie left it at that and started the round of introductions.

  The informal meeting went well, and Claudia left with promises for appearances from the Firefighter’s Aid Society, the Rotarians, who could bring their own booth, and a corgi rescue organization who didn’t have any corgis yet, except the founder’s not-quite-housebroken pet, but they were hopeful. They all agreed it was short notice, and said they were going to have to talk to their other board members (or, in one case, Mr. Wuffles), but the general attitude was one of optimism and Claudia left feeling slightly more like her event wasn’t going to be a total disaster, at least from the attendance standpoint. That only left her about eighty other things to worry about, or more if you counted natural disasters and zombie invasions.

  Claudia left The Breakers feeling proud of herself for having spent so much time working on the market, instead of the murder, and she decided to reward herself with some time spent looking at Lori’s list.

  She had initially thought it was just an impenetrable collection of names and numbers, and a closer examination did little to alter that impression. If there was a code, it wasn’t an obvious one, and why would Lori be writing coded messages to herself? It seemed more likely she was gathering information about something or someone, and this was all she had managed to get before she died. In which case, it was up to Claudia to take it from there.

  She started with searches on the names, which was largely an exercise in futility. Most were too common, with too little other identifying information, to narrow the choices down from the thousands, and even the best weren’t that great. There were fifteen Kara Youngs in Philadelphia alone, though she thought she could exclude the two-year-old and the 19th-century trombone player—and no Rebecca Cobbs at all in the nearest Palmyra (New Jersey). The only other information she had about them was that Lori had written their names down, so Claudia decided to search for any connections there.

  She hadn’t had a lot of hope for the new approach, but in fact it turned out to be almost immediately fruitful. One of her Kara Youngs had attended college with Lori, and while being a graduating class of twenty thousand meant there was no guarantee they had known each other, she was able to find them both on the professional networking site where Lori’s resume was posted, linked by only three degrees of separation.

  That Kara was a real estate agent now, and the webpage for her office listed an email address and a phone number. She dialed the number before she could talk herself out of it, and a woman picked up on the third ring, which was exactly two rings after Claudia realized she still hadn’t worked out exactly what she was going to say.

  “This is Kara Young, how can I help you?” The voice on the other end of the line was clipped and professional, with just a touch of boredom.

  “Um, hi. This is Claudia Simcoe. I’m a friend of—I knew Lori Roth. I think you might have known her? I was just calling because I thought I should let you know that she died.”

  If she was going for garbled and incomprehensible, Claudia would have given herself full marks, but as an investigative strategy it left something to be desired.

  The woman on the other end of the line clearly felt the same way.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I know that name. Are you sure you don’t have the wrong number?”

  “I don’t know,” Claudia admitted. “Possibly.” Nothing else was working and she had a feeling the call was very close to being over, so she decided to risk it all and go with honesty.

  “I’m sorry, I just have this list here that Lori made, and I’m trying to figure out what it means, and it has your name and ‘5k cousin cancer’ in it. Does that mean anything to—”

  Claudia was suddenly aware that she was talking to a dead line. Whatever that note had meant to Lori, to Kara Young it meant time to hang up.

  Claudia spent a while staring at the phone, but it didn’t have any more to offer her. She had no business being surprised, and she certainly wasn’t mad. She would have hung up on herself a lot sooner. The call had been a shot in the dark, and like most it had probably missed, and now Claudia found herself left with just as many questions and less chance of them getting answered.

  She was about to turn her attention to the major sales event she was planning to hold in less than twenty-four hours, when there was a soft chime from her laptop. Claudia had so many alerts set for so many things that it didn’t immediately register which one this was, but she wandered over to check it anyway.

  There was nothing immediately different on the screen and it took her a moment to figure out what she was looking at. Then she realized: the status bar for the hacking attempt on the password was gone, replaced with a dialog box that said, somewhat anticlimactically, “Progress Complete.”

  Claudia clicked through with shaking hands, hardly believing that this particular idea had worked. And there, in front of her was the prize, the secret password of Lori’s that she had spent all of this time pursuing: Passw0rd123!

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Claudia said.

  She stared at it for a while longer, wondering if she should laugh or scream. Had she honestly just spent all that time and effort for something she could have gotten with five minutes and a list of the world’s laziest passwords? It wasn’t the only time Claudia had outsmarted herself, but it was definitely going to make the top ten.

  Regardless, she had it now, and it was time to test her theory that it would get her into Lori’s other accounts. She went to the webmail portal for Lori’s email and was about to type the password into the box when she stopped herself. It was only because of her own love of security that Claudia had set the requirements for passwords for the marketplace system to require at least twelve characters, including letters, numbers, and at least one symbol. Knowing what she knew now, she thought that the odds that Lori would complicate things that much on her own were slim to none. She wasn’t going to have too many tries at this, so she tried to put herself in Lori’s place. What would a person who didn’t care about their information security at all do?

  Claudia typed:

  password

  Password Incorrect

  password123!

  Password Incorrect

  Most sites had a limited number of fails they would allow, and three was a common choice. One more attempt and the account might lock, and all of her efforts would be wasted. Claudia went back and looked at the password Lori had used for the marketplace site.

  There were two things that stood out to her. First, the requirements Claudia had instituted didn’t include the need for capital letters. And second, if she already had the numbers at the end of the word, there would be no reason to change the o to a zero. So, going by the theory that Lori wasn’t going to make any changes that weren’t absolutely required, Claudia made her final guess.

  Passw0rd

  The screen went blank, and then the interface for the email inbox loaded.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The number of unread messages that filled the screen were enough to tell her that no one had accessed the account since Lori’s death. Most of them were from mailing lists; sale announcements, listserv updates, general advertisements, and requests for money from her alumni association. There were a few information requests about her products that had come
in through the marketplace portal, and one thing that looked like an invoice from her overseas supplier, but it seemed that no one, on finding out that Lori was dead, had emailed to ask if it was true.

  Digging deeper into the inbox wasn’t much more enlightening. There was nothing in the days leading up to Lori’s murder to suggest she was being threatened, or felt worried about anyone around her. Giving up the present day for the time being, Claudia went back to the beginning, to see what Lori’s communications could tell her about the woman.

  Lori seemed to have acquired the email account about ten years ago, and in the early days she had used it mostly for signing up for retail loyalty programs. The personal messages started about six months in, and were generally on the subject of five to seven people trying to decide on where and when to meet for dinner. Neil Hahn and Dana Herschel appeared in several of them, so Claudia branched off from her chronological search to check all of the messages to and from their respective addresses.

  If she still had any doubts that Neil and Lori had been romantically involved, the series of increasingly explicit messages would have dispelled them, and that was before she got to the one with the attached video. (Which Claudia didn’t open, but the thumbnail image was enough to make her open all of the following messages with her eyes slightly out of focus.) Later on, the messages got less intimate, but remained friendly enough to support Neil’s claim that their breakup had been amicable. The most recent email was just a list of website links, with the subject line “here are the links I was talking about.” Claudia hesitated to follow them, given what she had just seen, and compromised by downloading the message to save for later, then moved on to the emails from Lori’s former friend.

  The only reason she had to be particularly interested in Dana Herschel was she had found her picture in the same notebook that had held the mysterious list and, along with the list, it was one of the only things she could imagine Neil had been looking for. There were certainly plenty of messages from her, particularly in the early days of the account; chatty missives heavy with gossip about shared acquaintances. Dana seemed to be in the habit of recommending bright lipsticks and embellished jeans for Lori to buy, and asking for opinions on recipes she found on the Internet. Lori’s responses were briefer, and more negative than not, to the point that Claudia started to wonder why anyone would try to have a conversation with her.

  It went on that way for a while, and then about five years back the emails grew less frequent and the tone changed. Most of the remaining exchanges were initiated by Lori, and the responses were brief and disinterested. Dana also vanished from the group get-together threads, and the prompts from others to try and reach her went largely unanswered. Eventually, the communications dwindled to nothing, except for one lone message, sent by Lori several months after her last attempt went ignored.

  I tried to help you and I’m sorry you’re not listening to me. If you’re going to be an idiot there’s nothing I can do, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. whatever happens to you now is your own fault.

  There was no response.

  Hoping for enlightenment, Claudia searched the rest of the folders for any other emails that included Dana’s name. She only came up with one that post-dated Lori’s ultimatum, in the sent mail file, to someone named Sandra Herschel-Wilson.

  I’m so sorry for what happened. Dana was my best friend, even after what went on between us I will always love her. She didn’t deserve any of this and I would give anything to go back and change it.

  It was the rawest and most heartfelt thing she had ever seen from Lori, and so out of sync with everything else Claudia knew about her that for a moment she wondered if it was some kind of a joke. But that seemed unlikely, and when she cross-checked the dates on the photo-sharing site she found, as she expected, the email lined up fairly closely to the picture of the lily.

  So Dana was dead. And before she died, she had gotten involved with something her best friend was sure would doom her, but she refused to listen to warnings. Claudia would very much like to learn some more about what that had been, but she had exhausted her normal information-gathering routes. This was going to take some more thought.

  The cell phone she had been ignoring while she was doing her research buzzed, knocking her out of her reverie. It was Julie, asking if she had drawn up a plan of the layout in the parking lot for where they were going to set up the booths tomorrow, because she was running into some difficulties arranging her community groups to minimize conflicts. Claudia lied and said it was almost ready, then set about making the lie into the truth. She could think just as well while she got some work done.

  “The booths with hot food are going to have to go along this side, so that puts the charity tables over here, and the performers can set up over there. Except, no, that doesn’t leave enough space from the exit.”

  Claudia was talking out loud to herself, wandering around the parking lot with a tape measure in one hand and a copy of the fire department regulations in the other. Every few minutes she would stop and redraw the map, only to realize some problem with it, stop, cross it out, and start over. Teddy was trailing along behind her, not sure what this new game was about, but enjoying it nonetheless.

  The work hadn’t gotten her much closer to thinking of a new way to find out what had happened to Dana. Asking Neil was the obvious option, but that presented the minor problem of having to explain to him how she knew as much as she did. “I was just hacking into your dead ex-wife’s email, I hope you don’t mind,” didn’t seem like a very promising way to begin a conversation, but so far she hadn’t been able to come up with a useable lie.

  Claudia stopped what she was doing to respond to a text from Emmanuelle, asking for an opinion on what hashtag they should use for photos of the event. Claudia said she would leave it up to her expertise to choose one, and promised to start using it as soon as she did.

  She had drawn out the placement of two more booths when she was interrupted again. This time the text was from Betty, saying that she had to get dinner ready at the guest ranch but she was free to help after that, and should she bring anything to eat? Claudia thought about telling her not to worry, that she had everything under control, but Betty wasn’t going to believe that for a second, and she didn’t have time for a tedious dance of oh-no-you-shouldn’ts. So she wrote back that help and dinner were welcome, and when, three minutes later, Julie and Helen sent near-simultaneous texts offering their own assistance, Claudia gave up, declared it an open house, and sent Betty another message asking how many she was willing to cater.

  It was midafternoon, and in the open parking lot the air was uncomfortably hot and still. Claudia looked longingly at the locked-up marketplace and wished she could go inside, if only for a couple of minutes. For the last two years it had been her second home, and looking at it now, she felt like she could see straight through the redwood-shingled walls and tightly closed blinds, to the polished concrete floors and closed shops.

  It would be dark in there, and cooler. The power was still running to the refrigerators, but Claudia didn’t want to think about what the cleanup was going to be like, particularly at the produce market. If things went on much longer this way, she was going to need a flamethrower just to get past the fruit flies.

  Claudia ended her survey of the building at the door, still decorated with two bands of police tape. One had come loose and drifted in the air like a bit of abandoned spiderweb. Nobody from the police department had been inside since they took Lori’s body away, which strengthened Claudia’s suspicion that the closure had been more out of spite than necessity.

  She spent a few entertaining, if pointless, minutes imagining the devastating put-downs she would have for Lennox once she had solved the murder and he was forced to come to her and apologize, begging her not to make him lose his job. (Somehow, in this fantasy, she had acquired that power.)

  With some difficulty, she pulled herself away from the question of whether she should be vengeful or mag
nanimous, back to the more immediate issue of what she was going to use to block the door from the curious eyes of what she hoped was going to be a throng of customers. She had just worked out that the bookshelf in her living room would fit there, and would be a good place to display pickles, when her phone buzzed again.

  Assuming it was another person inviting themselves over, she was already composing a “the more the merrier” reply in her head, but the number wasn’t in her contacts, and the message wasn’t an offer of help.

  I’ve got a bottle of wine that needs drinking and you need a break. Meet me at Clover Beach at 6? Derek

  Claudia stared at the screen for a lot longer than she had any business doing. She was a busy woman, with way too much on her plate to even consider going on a date, no matter how charming the man or how well-shaped his forearms. Still, she hesitated. She had been single for too long, and dates over these last few years had been infrequent and unsatisfying.

  But that was just a trend that was going to have to continue, Claudia thought as she put the phone back in her pocket. Because she had a mystery to solve and a business to save, and she wasn’t going to do either by sitting on a beach on a beautiful evening, sipping wine with a handsome man who might be trying to get her to make an incriminating statement.

  She was putting the finishing touches on her layout plan when a glint of light caught her eye. It had come from the direction of Mr. Rodgers’ house, and at first she thought it had just been the reflection of the sun off a window. But then she saw it again, and it came from an object on the otherwise-empty porch, a long tube ending in a lens that was pointed right at her.

  Claudia wouldn’t have expected her neighbor had a lot of things left he could do to surprise her, but she hadn’t thought of a telescope.

  She wanted to laugh it off, but the discovery unnerved Claudia more than she liked to admit. Her unseen neighbor had always been more of an annoyance than anything else, just another headache that had come with the marketplace, like health inspectors and the geese. But the thought of an unknown pair of eyes on the other end of that telescope, getting a close look at her when she wasn’t aware, was not comforting, to put it mildly.