Murder Goes to Market Read online

  MURDER GOES TO MARKET

  Published 2020 by Seventh Street Books®

  Murder Goes to Market. Copyright © 2020 by Daisy Bateman. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover images © Shutterstock

  Cover design by Jennifer Do

  Cover design © Start Science Fiction

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  ISBN: 978-1-64506-012-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-64506-027-7 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  MURDER GOES TO MARKET

  DAISY BATEMAN

  For Cameron

  CHAPTER ONE

  It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that a person in possession of a business must at some point want to yell at someone. Claudia Simcoe took a breath and looked down at the stack of paper in her hand. There was nothing for it; it had to be done.

  “Lori, do you have a minute?”

  Lori Roth, the eponymous proprietor of Lori’s Handmade Creations, didn’t look up from the pile of tie-dyed placemats she was sorting. “I’m busy right now. Can it wait?”

  “Not really.” Claudia laid down one of the sheets where the other woman could see it. “This is kind of important.”

  The page was a printout from the website of a large wholesale importer. The printer that had produced it was not top quality, and almost out of yellow ink, but the images were clear enough to identify the products, next to their wholesale prices and volume discounts, and match them up exactly to the “handmade creations” Lori was selling, at what Claudia now knew was up to a five-hundred percent markup.

  “Where did you get that?” Lori asked.

  It wasn’t the response Claudia had been hoping for. Rather than embarrassed or ashamed, Lori seemed suspicious. Irritated, Claudia pressed on.

  “I don’t think that’s the most important thing right now,” she said. “Are these your products?”

  “Would you believe me if I said no?”

  “No.” It was occurring to Claudia that she didn’t know much about the other woman. Lori was the newest vendor in the marketplace Claudia ran, a home for independent businesses that were only supposed to sell things that fell into the local and/or artisanal categories. And while Claudia supposed you could make the argument that the machine operators in the overseas factories were artisans in their own way, it wasn’t what the customers expected.

  Lori herself certainly fit the brief, with her long hair, loose skirts, and coarsely-knitted cardigans, all in an undifferentiated mass of earth tones. Claudia had been surprised to learn, from the driver’s license she provided with her application, that Lori was younger than she looked, only a few years older than Claudia’s own thirty-four.

  Right now she was looking like a sulky child, caught with her fingers in the definitely-not-handmade cookie jar.

  “Well? What do you want me to do about it?”

  Claudia tried not to let the strain show in her face. This was the part she had been preparing herself for. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate your lease. If you look at the contract, you’ll see the criteria for vendors are very clear, and you’re well outside of them. You can have a couple of days to clear out your stuff, but I can’t allow you to make any more sales from this space.”

  Mentally, Claudia was crossing her fingers and hoping that the real estate lawyer she had found on Yelp had done a good enough job on the contract, because she suspected Lori wasn’t going to take this lying down.

  She suspected right.

  “Oh, come on!” Lori said, her petulance exploding into anger. “The idiots who come browsing through here just want something they can take home and show off to the other hicks, because it came from California, and believe me, they would never pay what it would actually cost to make this crap. Nobody actually cares who made it.”

  “Well, I do. And this is my business, so you can go ahead and pack up the crap, as you call it, and take it elsewhere.”

  Lori was fully enraged now. She came out of the glorified booth that until recently had been her shop and pointed accusingly at the produce market at the other end of the hall.

  “Oh, so now you’re all high and mighty with your purity? Where was all this when Orlan wanted to bring in the artichokes?”

  “Castroville is a lot closer than Bangladesh,” Claudia said through clenched teeth. “And Orlan never lied to me, or tried to cheat anyone. Look, I’m sorry, but it’s my house and they’re my rules. You knew what they were when you signed the lease, so you can be as mad at me as you want, but you and your store have to go.”

  Claudia braced herself for another outburst, but none came. Instead, Lori started wandering around the empty market, like she was looking for inspiration in the jars of pickles or wheels of cheese. It was an hour after closing, and though people usually hung around for a while, Claudia was glad that everyone else had left. At least, she thought they had, but a flicker of motion in her peripheral vision had her worried. The last thing she needed right now was for the gossip mill to fire up before Lori was even out of the building.

  Inside she was kicking herself. When she had opened the market hall she had had a clear vision of only hosting local food vendors, to offer residents and visitors a literal taste of the work of the people and land around them. But one of the booths didn’t have power for a refrigerator, and when Lori had turned up with her samples and her rent check, Claudia had ignored her misgivings and welcomed her with open arms and a needy bank account. Even then it had felt like a bad idea, and now she knew why.

  Lori passed in front of the cheese shop for the second time, then seemed to come to a decision.

  “Please,” she said, the anger slipping off her face like a mask. “Please, just a couple more weeks. I just need the space for a little while longer—I’ll take all the ‘handmade’ signs down, lower my prices. It’s really important. You’ve got to let me stay.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claudia repeated. “But this is my business, and I’ve got to enforce some standards. The whole point of people coming here is so they can get something local and authentic. If we don’t have that, we have nothing.”

  “But I only need a little more time.” Lori was pleading now, almost whining. “You have to.”

  Claudia shook her head. “Three days. And no sales.”

  Claudia escorted Lori to the door and locked it behind her. Not that it would make much of a difference; all of the vendors had keys, and most of them made copies. The best she could do was to watch until Lori’s car was out of the parking lot and hope her erstwhile tenant wasn’t about to try anything more stupid than she already had. Claudia made a mental note to call a locksmith in the morning.

  She was about to leave when she remembered the impression she had had of someone else being in the building. She wasn’t terribly worried about break-ins—aside from the fact that they were in the snooziest coastal town that ever lost its fishing fleet, there was noth
ing to steal besides various food items and some inauthentic textiles—but a raccoon had snuck inside a few months back and raised havoc among the salamis. So she thought she had better go back and check.

  The market didn’t have a lot of enclosed spaces; it was just a large rectangular building with a corridor down the middle and nooks for the shops around the sides, separated by low partitions to let as much light as possible in from the windows, so it didn’t take long for Claudia to confirm that there was no one, human or otherwise, hanging out behind the cheese fridge or in the compost bin. (She did find evidence that a large percentage of the customers didn’t know water bottles weren’t compostable, but she knew that already.) Satisfied, Claudia locked up again and headed for home.

  She didn’t have far to go. When people asked her what she liked best about her new life, her joking response was “the commute,” and it wasn’t entirely untrue. The market building had come with the neighboring piece of land and two vacation cottages included in the sale, and together they made up her entire living and working space.

  As empires went, it wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  The market was set on the side of a hill, overlooking the bay and the ocean beyond. A narrow road ran up from the town, passing the market, then vanishing over a low shoulder in the hill to where the cottages were, before winding its way up to dead-end at the hilltop, where a large house sat in lonely splendor, the only other building on the road.

  On one side of the marketplace were a couple of picnic tables and a small, roughly paved, parking lot with space for about thirty cars, if they weren’t too big and people parked carefully. (At least that was what Claudia estimated; so far the lot had never been that full.) On the other side there was an awkwardly shaped wedge of land that ran over the shoulder in the hillside to the cottages. One of the tiny buildings had been gutted by the previous owner, but the other was pretty much livable, so Claudia lived there.

  The cottage wasn’t exactly luxurious, but most of the lights worked and the roof probably had at least a couple more years on it. Someday, maybe, Claudia would have enough money to finish the renovations, or at least buy a dishwasher she didn’t have to roll across the kitchen and attach to the sink, but those sorts of extravagances were beyond her for the moment.

  Claudia crunched her way across the hillside, through the dry grass of a California summer, reminding herself for the umpteenth time that she really needed to do something about having it cut.

  August on the Sonoma coast meant alternating periods of wind and fog, with infrequent shocks of heat. This night was shaping up to be a windy one, with gusts so strong they made her stumble, and Claudia pulled her fleece jacket more tightly around her shoulders as she crossed the field to her home. In the distance, she could hear the waves crashing on the rocks mingled with the sounds of the ongoing arguments of the local sea lion colony.

  It was just past sunset but there was still some light in the sky, so navigating the path back to the cottage wasn’t a problem. Claudia had taken to using a somewhat indirect route, because the lot was also home to a pair of large and highly territorial geese, who lived in what looked like a converted doghouse that sat between the cottage and the market. Nobody seemed to know who they belonged to or how they got there, but offers to help move them were equally scarce, and the geese clearly had no intention of going anywhere on their own.

  She was almost home when she caught a movement in her peripheral vision. Chiding herself for being so nervy, she was about to put it down to the wind when she noticed the silhouette of a pair of triangular ears in the gloom. A dog, part German shepherd but mostly not, was sitting in the middle of the field, looking at her. There was nothing threatening about it, but it wasn’t a small dog, and Claudia made her way past it as quickly as she thought was reasonable, hoping she didn’t smell like fear, or sausages.

  Finally home, Claudia tossed her jacket on the chair by the door that had been demoted to that purpose and collapsed onto the couch (which, due to the size constraints of a 600-square-foot house, was actually a loveseat).

  Considering that almost none of her furniture would have fit, moving in had been easy. The front half of the cottage was her living room, kitchen, dining room, office, and overflow storage, and aside from the loveseat all it had room for was a makeshift desk, a couple of chairs, a barstool she had found by the side of the road, and a small table. Past the kitchen there was a hallway that was too short to really deserve the name, with the bedroom on one side and the bathroom on the other, and just enough space left to fit a miniature bookcase against the back wall. Claudia had meant to finally get around to organizing it that night, but even as she thought about it, she became aware that she barely had the energy to stand up, much less decide on an alphabetical versus theme-based ordering scheme. If it wasn’t for gravity, she wasn’t sure she would even have had the strength to stay on the couch.

  Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much the conversation with Lori had drained her. She had known coming in that running the business wasn’t going to be all biodynamic wine and locally grown roses, but this was the first major personnel problem she had run into. She turned around to put her feet up, deliberately avoiding looking in the mirror next to the door. Intended to make the room look bigger, it mostly just served to remind Claudia that she needed a haircut and possibly an entirely different wardrobe.

  Even in her previous, marginally more professional life, Claudia had never been much of a fashion plate—she had always felt that one of the best things about a tech career was that no one had a problem if you dressed for comfort over style—but even by her standards, the jeans she was wearing were on their last legs, literally and figuratively, and there was probably a limit to the number of consecutive days a person could wear humorous T-shirts and still expect to be taken seriously as a business owner.

  In that area, Claudia probably needed all the help she could get. With her short stature, heart-shaped face, and large eyes, she had always looked young for her age, and she still occasionally got carded, and not just by people who thought they were being cute.

  Some of that she couldn’t help, but Claudia had to admit there was probably more she could do. Like getting her hair cut so that it was something other than random waves taking routes of their choosing from her scalp to her shoulders, or deciding on a color for it other than “mostly brown, except for the parts that used to be highlights.”

  She held up a lock of it in front of her eyes, seeking the line where the highlights ended. That would have been about two years ago, when she was still doing that sort of thing, until the round of bad luck that had gotten her here in the first place. She had been living in San Francisco, a software engineer at an idealistic startup out to change the world via app development. But the money ran out, and in the end the only way they changed the world was by making it into one where their former CEO owned a boat. Around that time, her boyfriend declared they were breaking up, because he was “tired of dealing with her.” What he wasn’t tired of, though, was living in the city apartment which, through a miracle of a poorly worded listing and months of ramen dinners, she had managed to buy several years earlier. It was while he was explaining how San Francisco’s renter-friendly laws were going to keep him there indefinitely that she had made the decision.

  “I’m selling it,” she had said, barely thinking the words before they were out of her mouth. “The open house is on Sunday. We need to clean the bathroom.”

  And, thanks to a motivated realtor and a local real estate market that was hovering somewhere between superheated and ludicrous, that was it. Bidding started on Tuesday, and by Friday Claudia was explaining to Oliver that she was sorry, but he was going to have to take up the issue of his continued tenancy with the new owners. It was the most impulsive thing she had ever done, right up until the next one.

  She had not set out with the idea she was going to own a marketplace. All she had in mind when she arrived in San Elmo Bay was a month’s vacati
on in the seaside town she had visited with her family as a child. It had been perfect, so completely removed from everything that had seemed vitally important back in the city that she could barely remember why she had cared about all that stuff in the first place.

  Pure chance had led her to rent the cottage where she was currently living, and after a week of walking by the empty market building with its “For Sale” sign she had gotten around to asking the rental agent what it was. That was when she had learned about the grand designs of the former owner, to turn the old warehouse into a market hall, with local farmers and craftspeople renting out spaces inside to sell their wares to the visitors who would come from across the world and put San Elmo back on the road to prosperity, and the divorce that had cut off the money that was funding those dreams. She also learned that the sale price was almost exactly what she had cleared from the sale of her apartment, if by “almost exactly” you meant “with the addition of a substantial bank loan.” Claudia had decided it must be a sign.

  Everyone she knew thought she was crazy, and they were probably right. But for once in her life she was doing something she loved, something that was all hers, and no idiot with a bunch of counterfeit handcrafts was going to ruin it for her.

  Which, she reminded herself, was why she had gotten that lease agreement written up in the first place. Lori might be upset that her scheme had been discovered, but there shouldn’t be anything she was able to do about it.

  And there was nothing anyone was going to do about anything tonight, so Claudia probably should stop worrying and have dinner.

  A particularly strong gust of wind rattled the windows as Claudia hauled herself off the couch and wandered over to the refrigerator. It was only slightly larger than the one she had had in her college dorm, and about as usefully stocked. People might think the owner of a marketplace like hers would have a larder packed with the finest in local and artisanal foods, from which she would effortlessly whip up a meal that was at the same time simple and sophisticated, but those people had not seen Claudia stare blankly at a kohlrabi for upward of twenty minutes.