Stop and Spell the Roses Read online

  Okay, okay, I may have tried to find Kaylan Moore by searching for “hacker” and Swift Valley. Somehow, I doubted that was a very hacker move on my part. Nothing useful resulted from that search, so I did the next best thing. I asked around. I put out word that I would pay for the services of a good hacker. And that got results.

  Eventually, I received a strange email directing me to his website and asking to meet at a local burger joint. He’d heard I needed his services. That’s all the email said.

  But his website seemed legit, even if it was white text on a black background and thus, hard to read. That was what hacker websites looked like, right?

  I spotted him across the street, leaning against a pole and trying to remain low-key, and he spotted me as well. We each nodded as a sign of silent acknowledgment, and I took a deep breath. This was it, then. My first stop on the path to figuring out who had killed Jolene McGill.

  I entered the burger joint a minute before him so that it wouldn’t look suspicious, and went to the side of the restaurant opposite to the one where the young family was coloring. Kaylan had his hands shoved in his pockets when he hurried in, a little while after I did. He knew who I was, and so he made a beeline for the table.

  Kaylan was wearing a hoodie, even though he was now indoors and outside it was a warm day. He only took it down when he was seated across from me in the booth. He was strangely older than I had been expecting. I’d thought he would be a kid or maybe in his early twenties. Only just out of school, if not still studying. But he actually looked a couple of years older than me, maybe verging on thirty. Youthful still, but lines around his eyes and a tired look.

  “You got the stuff?” was all he said. Not even a hello or an acknowledgment of all the time we had spent chatting online in the lead-up to our meeting. I’d already told him all about the messages, but I hadn’t actually sent them to him. And the reason was—I felt like that was “forwarding” the message and giving the sender, and possibly the killer, exactly what they wanted.

  So, I was going to show Kaylan physical copies of the text messages.

  Kaylan looked over the messages that I had printed out and frowned a little. Didn’t say a word. If anything, he looked a little bored by them, like he had been expecting something more exciting than just a few sentences and a vague threat.

  “So, can you find out who sent these to Jolene?” I asked.

  He leaned back a little. “My guess is that they were sent from a computer, because it is harder to trace and easy to generate a bunch of false phone numbers. They probably use an automated system. And that’s not a bank account it would be linked to—it will be a cryptocurrency exchange. Hard to trace.”

  I just nodded and went along with the theory, even though I didn’t really understand what he was saying.

  “That’s your area of expertise, right?” I asked him. “Computers?”

  Kaylan nodded and told me that he would be able to trace the address within a couple of days, but that he would need to have a look at Jolene’s phone. I hesitated for a moment but handed it over to him, and he swiftly took the SIM out and placed it inside a burner phone he had in his pocket, telling me that he was copying the data.

  While he was doing that, he told me how much he charged per hour for his work.

  “Oh, that is almost . . . my full wage,” I told him, hoping that he would lower the price. It was nearly what I usually made on a case!

  He shrugged. “So? How does that affect me?” He took a sip of the shake that he had ordered. I’d been too nervous to order anything except a glass of water, but now his insolence was weirdly making me feel hungry for a hamburger, even though I usually stuck to vegetarian food.

  “Well, I would essentially be working just to pay you.”

  He still didn’t care, and I realized I should have worked “expenses” into the price that I had quoted Jolene. But then I stopped, and this sort of ice-cold feeling ran through my body—there was no Jolene any more, was there?

  With growing frustration, I recalled how I wasn’t getting paid at all. But I still wanted to do this. I’d started something here, I had a lead, and I didn’t want to let that go.

  Kaylan was still waiting for my answer.

  “I can pay you,” I said. “I just need your help. Can you do it?”

  Kaylan finished off his shake, stood up, and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt back over his head. “Give me one day.”

  For my next meeting, the burger joint had been replaced by the Onyx, the coffeehouse where my friend Akiro worked.

  I was starving by the time I got there, and so I ordered a serving of sweet potato fries to go with my iced latte. Akiro warned me that the fries might be on the small and soggy side considering all the farmers were keeping their best produce for the show. I said I understood and ordered them anyway.

  “Boy, it’s a hot one out there,” Vicky said as she waltzed in and called out hello to Akiro before she spotted me. I’d left her the cushioned side to sit on. I took the hard chair.

  She ordered a strawberry shake, which was the same thing Kaylan had ordered at the burger place.

  I hadn’t told Vicky about my meeting with Kaylan the hacker. Mostly because I was letting on as if I knew all about the tech side of stuff and had that totally under control.

  There was something else I hadn’t told her, either. Maybe because I hadn’t even admitted it to myself. Or at least, not admitted that it was any sort of big deal.

  Vicky had brought me a copy of the local paper and opened it to the page after the article about Jolene’s death. It was a report on the festivities leading up the show. She told me that the garden show was still going ahead at the end of the week. It had been officially announced in the paper.

  Hmm. Part of me had wondered if the whole thing would be cancelled, but I’d also known that it wouldn’t be. And this news gave us a bunch of new leads.

  “Simple, really,” I said, pulling out a pen and paper, ready to take names as my sweet potato fries arrived at the table. They didn’t look too small. “We just need a list of people who wanted Jolene out of the judge’s chair.”

  Vicky nodded and sipped on her shake. “This could be personal for a lot of people in this town.”

  This case had suddenly become very important to me, though. If I’d wanted to solve it before for personal reasons, now it had become really personal. That was the problem. After Kaylan had left the burger joint and I had checked my phone for messages, I had gotten the buzz of a new message.

  And a text from an unknown number had flashed on my cell phone screen when I’d looked down at it.

  I was trying to ignore the uneasy feeling it produced in me, but as we looked over the list of names that we were compiling, I was feeling a little anxious. Vicky had asked a couple of times if I was all right, and I’d reassured her that I was. But when I was unable to finish off even a quarter of my fries, she was no longer buying it.

  “What is it?” Vicky asked. “Come clean.”

  I bit my lip, still unsure whether I should tell her or not. But it was weighing heavily on my mind. “Okay, okay. I got one of the messages.”

  “One of what messages?”

  “Vicky, what have we been talking about for the past two days? I received one of the chain letter messages . . .” I caught my breath. Lowered my voice so that Akiro wouldn’t overhear anything while he was delivering coffees to tables. “Telling me that unless I passed the message on to twenty people immediately, I was going to experience bad luck.” Not to mention the fact that I was supposed to send fifty dollars to some random account that may be a bank account or a crypto account, and I had no idea what the difference was.

  I had no idea what it even meant by “immediately.” It had already been at least two hours since the text had come through. And just over an hour since I had opened it.

  Vicky gasped and placed both hands on her cheeks. There was a slapping sound. “No, no, no! I cannot deal with my best friend, dying, okay?”
>
  Her eyes actually started to water.

  I rolled my eyes just a little bit at her reaction that I might actually die if I didn’t send the message on. Yes, I was a little shaken, but that thought had not even crossed my mind.

  Well, not entirely.

  “Vicky, I am not going to die. The so-called bad luck curse does not exist. That is not what happened to Jolene. And I am going to prove it.”

  “Where is Jolene’s phone?” Vicky asked, because she wanted to compare the messages we had both received. I wasn’t sure that she’d realized the fact that the messages had been a little different.

  I patted my pockets, but I could only feel one phone there. “Er, I must have left it in the office along with the evidence,” I said. I’d stopped by the office in between my meeting with Kaylan and the one with her.

  She sighed and then asked for my phone. I supposed that was part of our evidence now as well, so I handed it over to her.

  She seemed to be opening all sorts of apps and programs, tapping violently at the screen. “Hey, don’t go through my photos,” I said. “There are a few embarrassing selfies there.” Like all the winner’s poses I had taken, using a stick and a jar of honey as fill-ins for the trophy I was still sure I was going to win.

  Vicky promised that wasn’t what she was doing. But she was definitely doing more than just reading through the one text that I’d found. She was tapping all over the place. Well, I figured, maybe she was just as tech un-savvy as I was.

  I was more focused on our list of suspects, anyway, so I went back to looking over that and tried not to think about bad luck and curses and what would happen due to the fact that I had not forwarded the message immediately.

  The name Lisa Spears stood out at me from the list. She was known for her gigantic strawberries that were extra red and more than just sweet. They had a sort of sourness to them as well, and they were extra juicy. An unusual flavor, but it had won her the first-place prize a few years running. Not this year, of course. My plums were going to win this year.

  Who knows? Maybe Lisa knew she had some major competition and so wanted to get a new judge on her side. I was wildly speculating, of course, but something was telling me that Lisa was the one to talk to first.

  Vicky still had my phone, so I got out my laptop and found Lisa’s email. I arranged a time to visit her at her house, under the guise that I just wanted to get a friendly look at the competition for this year’s show.

  Anyone who was entering any sort of produce was a suspect, though. First prize wasn’t just a photo on the front page of a paper. It was two thousand dollars and an article in Garden and Grass, with a photo shoot and the opportunity to publish a favorite recipe using the produce that took first place. For me, it would be plum pie. Everyone wanted those prizes. If someone thought that killing Jolene would give them an advantage, they would take it.

  Vicky was still busy. I used my computer to find previous entrants and a list of people who had won or come close to winning in the previous five shows. That narrowed my list down to twenty suspects. I was going to go through them one by one.

  “Should we get started?” Vicky asked, finally passing back my phone. She had spotted the new list I had made and nodded toward it. “On interviewing them, I mean.” It was a good idea.

  But I was on a strict schedule with the plums. They needed to be watered every night and morning, all the dead leaves removed, and any rotten plums disposed of. Vicky offered to come and help me, but I warned her that I would still not be able to give her any plums, even if she was helping me out. “What about the ones that have dropped on the ground?” she asked me.

  “Those you can have,” I conceded.

  But when we finally got up the hill and reached my precious plum tree, there were only plums on the ground.

  None of them left on the tree at all.

  And the ones that were on the ground? None of them were whole. They were hollowed out, gutted, pecked at, and left bleeding all over the grass beneath.

  “Oh, no!” Vicky cried out as she ran over to the tree.

  My heart leapt into my throat, and I felt my legs trembling beneath me as all the air left my lungs. “I . . . I don’t understand,” I was finally able to squeak out as I reached the trunk of the desecrated tree.

  Vicky craned her neck and pointed up to the sky where there were beady-eyed objects circling above. “Crows,” she said, taking a step back. “They did this, Ruby.”

  “What are you talking about? The birds and I are best friends. They would never do this.” There was a sort of understanding between me and the birds, you see. They didn’t swoop at me in spring, they didn’t eat my fruit, and they didn’t poop on my head. In fact, they helped me out when I needed it. They certainly never attacked my plum tree or broke my heart like this.

  But this was like something from the end of days. The tree had been completely destroyed. Stripped bare of all leaves and fruit, anything living. It looked like a withered skeleton. Had the birds been starving?

  “Why?” I asked, calling up to the birds, wishing they would give me some answers. “Why have you turned on me like this, guys?”

  “Oh, no,” Vicky said, staring up at the ravaged branches. “I must have forwarded the message too late.”

  “You must have what?” I asked, slowly turning toward her.

  She went white, and she looked guilty but defiant. “I was only trying to protect you. Help you,” she said, backing away from me a little bit. “But it was all for nothing anyway.” And then she turned it all around on me. “Ruby, you should have passed on the message as soon as you got them! Just like the instructions said. Bad luck takes hold very quickly.” She backed away from me more swiftly and shook her head, looking me up and down with fear, as though I was contagious.

  I was livid. “Vicky, you should not have passed on that message at all.” I demanded that she give my phone back to me. I snatched it out of her hands and then stomped away, over all the rotten plums lying on the ground.

  3

  I was reading my horoscope but quickly turned it over as Akiro approached my table. But not before I caught the words “. . . expect a sudden change in fortunes” underneath the heading for Scorpios that day. Did that mean that everyone who was a Scorpio was going to face bad luck that day?

  Hmm. I considered the implications. But I supposed the wheel of fortune could spin both ways. Those that had been having good luck would go bad, but there would be a balance as well. The bad would turn to good.

  Akiro hadn’t quite caught me looking, thank goodness. He was so far from superstitious. He didn’t like to talk about anything involving crystals or horoscopes or anything that didn’t have a logical basis in what he referred to as the “real world.” He was a Capricorn, so that actually made a lot of sense. They are the most sensible and down-to-earth of all the zodiac signs.

  Do you know that Scorpios and Capricorns are actually really compatible? Romantically. That always gave me something to think about. I found it highly interesting.

  Akiro had time to take a short break, and so, he decided to spend it with me. He had made me a second coffee, a latte, and for himself, a black coffee.

  He sat across from me and passed me the sugar.

  “Sorry about your plums.” He did look really sympathetic. “If there was anything I could do, you know I would. But I suppose nothing can be done, can it?”

  Well. I knew one thing that I could do. I was sure there were any number of spells I could do to reverse my fortune. I could do a “turn back time” spell to stop the crows from ever attacking that day, or a “fast growing” spell to quickly replace what I had lost. But I wouldn’t feel right entering any plums into the competition that I had grown with the help of witchcraft.

  “There’s always next year,” I said and asked Akiro if he was entering anything. The show was only five days away.

  He grinned at me and said that he would be entering some limes from a tree in his backyard. “They are alw
ays small and never take any place. But it’s a town tradition just to get involved, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. I was going to be the odd lady out if I entered nothing at all. Maybe I could pick some of the spinach I grew in a small pot on the kitchen sill. It was pretty wilted and dried at the edges. But at least I’d have something.

  Akiro frowned as he looked down at his phone.

  “Did you get one of these?” he asked me. A message had popped onto his screen.

  “I am staying off technology for a while,” I replied and took a sip of coffee. And then I wondered if he was talking about a chain letter message. But he didn’t look worried, just a little confused

  “It’s an invitation to a party at Vicky’s house,” Akiro said, still frowning. “Only it sounds like kind of a strange party, if you ask me.”

  For a second, I was offended that I hadn’t gotten an invite. My best friend was having a party, and I didn’t even know about it? She hadn’t mentioned a single thing to me about throwing a party. But then Akiro showed me his phone, and I realized what was really going on.

  “I thought a party was supposed to involve music and dancing. And, you know, fun? This seems like a demonstration for hand cream.” He turned the screen and showed me an invite that was encouraging all the ladies of Swift Valley to come to Vicky’s house to try the latest and greatest hand creams. Guaranteed to cure dry skin.

  I laughed a little bit. “Yeah, she probably just added your name to the list by accident.”

  “Hey, I like hand cream.”

  “Enough to go to a whole party centered around it?” I asked him. “Enough to spend sixty dollars on one tube of it?”

  The name of the company was Oasis Creams, and Vicky was apparently a new distributor of the product they sold. She needed to sell the stock she had bought to other people. Maybe even encourage them to sign up as sellers themselves.

  I could see what Vicky had gotten dragged into, and I was pretty sure it was a scheme, a game that she was going to lose. And I also knew the reason she hadn’t told me about this “party” she was throwing.