The Merchant of Menace

holidays.

She checked the computer for return E-mail from her father, but there was nothing but a spam ad from somebody called 'HotChick' saying if the recipient of the note would send $29.95 to a post office box address, a complete guide to curing impotence would be forthcoming.

Jane hit the delete button. She used to send irate responses to junk like this, but it was fruitless.

She wrapped the last of the presents, prepared a new grocery list, and hit the mall. By the time she got home, she was nearly asleep on her feet. She checked E-mail again, found none, and decided she really needed a good nap. Not a few minutes of sleep on the sofa, but a real turnoff-the-phone, get-in-bed nap. She set sandwich makings on the kitchen counter and told the kids she wasn't to be disturbed for any reason for at least two hours.

This unusual request must have alarmed the kids, she realized three hours later. While she slept, they had cleaned the house, even their own rooms. Katie had consulted some cookbooks and was preparing chicken soup. Mike had shoveled the entire driveway and put out the trash and recycle bins for tomorrow morning's pickup. Todd had washed, dried, and brushed Willard, who was now so staticky that he looked like a big yellow tumbleweed.

“Good heavens!' she exclaimed. 'All this because I took a nap?'

“We thought you were sick and wanted everything nice for you,' Katie said.

“That's very sweet of you all,' Jane said. 'But I was just tired. Now I feel great.”

And she did. Amazing what a little sleep could do.

“You don't want chicken soup?' Katie asked.

“Why don't we all have it with dinner?”

This settled and the kids reassured that she wasn't ill, Jane checked her E-mail again. This time there was a note from her father saying the Jeffry family's Christmas packages had arrived in good order and that her peculiar note wasn't a foreign language. Change each consonant to the one that comes before it, his note said. Same with the vowels. Who is Julianne Newton and why does anybody care if she was a stripper in college and might have been a prostitute? You aren't involved in another murder, are you? Your mother worries. Love, Dad.

Twenty-three

E ven the knowledge of the code didn't help · much. Jane phoned Mel with her father's information, then went over to Shelley's.

“My dad broke the code. Where are the printouts?' she said.

Shelley shoved a pair of cake pans, half full of a pink batter, into the oven and ran to get her paperwork. They ended up having to write the alphabet down to keep the letters straight, but quickly had the files deciphered.

Jane looked over the results. 'For all the trouble this has been, there's not much of a payoff, is there?'

“I certainly expected something juicier,' Shelley agreed.

Most of the notes were extremely sketchy. About a stockbroker down the street, Lance only gave the name of the man's firm and a remark about possible inside trading. Jane's said, Jeffry pharmacies? Work there? Ask customers about mistakes. Shelley's said, Paul Nowack. Polish, but Greek food. Check with random health inspectors.

“This looks like nothing at all,' Jane said.

“I'm going to call Julie and ask if she was a stripper,' Shelley said. 'Hers is one of the more specific and I'm curious to know if there's any truth whatsoever to it.'

“You're sure you want to do that? If she was, she's ashamed of it. Her husband works for a bank. They're pretty stuffy, you know.'

“Maybe twenty years ago something like that would have mattered. But nobody takes stuff like that seriously, unless it's a politician or public figure.”

Julie didn't seem to be offended. 'I wasn't a stripper, I was a go-go dancer. Not many clothes, but some. Why on earth are you asking?”

Shelley didn't have an answer ready and just said, 'I'll tell you later.' She repeated what Julie had said to Jane. 'If she was upset about being asked, she sure didn't show it,' Shelley added.

They went back to the list. Bruce Pargetersame as Pargeter in KY. Asked around for home repair recommendations. No complaints.

“Poor old Lance, striking out everywhere,' Jane said.

Sam Dwyer's file only said, Florida. Child.

There wasn't a file for Sharon Wilhite. Presumably anything he knew about her was in his head and didn't require notes.

The rest were all people who didn't appear to have any involvement with his murder. Some had left the neighborhood long ago. Several were people who had been absolutely proven to be out of town at the time of the murder.

“I'm really disappointed,' Jane said. 'He didn't really know much of anything about anybody. It was all bluff and speculation.”

Shelley shook her head. 'Maybe. But then he could have just kept some of these notes as reminders of what he did know. And there might be other disks someplace with more detail.”

Jane stood up. 'I'm going home. I'm sick of this and starting to feel like I just don't care who killed the jerk and why. I'm going to quit thinking about it and enjoy the holidays.'

“Lucky for us that we can just put it aside,' Shelley said. 'Poor Mel can't.'

“I know. But we can't solve every case for him.”

Shelley laughed. 'I'm going to tell him you said that!'

“Don't you dare!”

Jane was so firmly resolved to stop thinking about the murder that she almost succeeded. She fixed a nice family dinner to go with Katie's chicken soup. She read a couple chapters of a mystery that she thought was too easy to solve, but discovered that her solution had been wrong all along. She tried out a new rinse on her hair that turned out fairly well, but did some serious damage to one of her favorite towels. She found some Static Guard to spray on Willard as the kids had discovered that petting him in the dark generated sparks. She called and had a conversation with Uncle Jim about Christmas dinner, then girded herself to call her sister. Marty, fortunately, was just getting ready to go out to a party and Jane felt blessed indeed that they didn't have to talk very long. Still, Marty man? aged to make three irritating comments and two downright stupid remarks.

As she went upstairs to bed, she reminded Todd that he had to get up fairly early the next morning.

“Why?”

“Have you forgotten? Pet got those tickets to some Christmas movie that's opening at ten.”

Todd was torn. He wanted to see the movie, but didn't want to have to drag Pet along. Jane pointed out that the tickets were scarce and he hadn't managed to bag his own — Pet had, and it was she dragging him along.

Jane went to bed early, slept like a rock, and was wide awake by seven — with nothing to do. She could hardly remember a time when she didn't have at least the tail end of a 'to do' list pending. She let the pets outside, let them back in and fed them. This always had to be done early on Tuesdays because the trash trucks came later in the morning, terrifying the cats and moving Willard to bark his fool head off. Jane went back to bed with a new mystery book that was already overdue at the library. But she couldn't quite get into it.

She was as twitchy today as Julie Newton always was. Maybe that was Julie's problem — she got too much sleep. She tried picturing Julie as a go-go dancer. It wasn't hard. Go-go dancing, as Jane recalled, was all twitching.

Had Julie told Shelley the truth? Even if Julie really had been a stripper and Lance had proof, could it be a reason to kill him? As deep, dark secrets went, it wasn't a very good one.

The only person on the files who appeared to really have something to fear from Lance was Bruce Pargeter. And he freely admitted that he despised the man. And he really didn't have a good alibi for the night Lance was killed. He and his mother were both at home, but she was upstairs and he was in the basement. Even if she had