Stop and Spell the Roses

by Stacey Alabaster

  Vicky had dropped the open tube of cream and stepped in it during the aborted demonstration, after I’d asked everyone to leave and she had rushed to the door trying to stop them. But I was just glad to have them out of my house. I hadn’t been comfortable with any of it, and in the end, Kaylan was a welcome distraction.

  “I don’t know how many of them are actually going to use the creams, now that we skipped the official demonstration.” Vicky was pouting. She’d managed to give the samples away, but I hadn’t made any actual money.

  I didn’t have time to worry about that right then. I was sure that enough of them would, anyway.

  “I’m sorry I interrupted . . . whatever that was,” Kaylan said, glancing around. He took a sniff of the air. I showed him into the kitchen while Vicky tried to clean up a little. “What is that smell?”

  “Never mind,” I said, wondering how I was ever going to get that moldy scent out of the carpet.

  Vicky came back into the kitchen and took a seat with us at the table.

  I introduced Vicky to Kaylan, and she went all funny, sort of blushing a little, and couldn’t quite make eye contact with him. I took note of it, but it wasn’t at the top of my list of concerns.

  “I can’t stay long,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “I need to practice guitar. Only got half an hour in this morning, so I’m behind my daily quota.”

  “I like to play as well,” Kaylan said.

  “You do?” Vicky said sitting up straight. “What do you play?”

  “Bass, mostly,” he said.

  “Oh, cool. Maybe we could jam sometime.”

  Kaylan nodded and agreed that would indeed be cool.

  I really wanted to get back on topic.

  “What did you discover?” I asked Kaylan, trying to pull focus back onto the topic of the case before they started comparing record collections. I knew that Vicky could go on and on, once you got her onto that topic.

  “The messages were sent from a computer, as I first suspected,” Kaylan said. He’d finally pulled his hoodie off entirely. Maybe it had taken him that long to get comfortable in my house.

  “Of course,” I said, nodding along as Kaylan explained about IP addresses and where the owner of the crypto account might be located. I saw the look on Vicky’s face to the side of me. I was caught. I had been pretending that I was on top of all the tech stuff, and she’d had no idea that I had outsourced it to Kaylan.

  “I managed to trace the physical location of the Wi-Fi router used. It wasn’t very well disguised, though whoever did it tried a little bit.”

  “And?” I leaned forward, and Vicky did too. We both got closer to Kaylan, and she actually touched her hand against his accidentally, then blushed and leaned back again.

  “It is local,” he said, frowning. “Which surprised me a little.”

  “Huh.” It surprised me as well. I supposed I thought—or maybe hoped—that whoever had started the chain was located somewhere far away.

  “These messages didn’t come from overseas, or even a different state,” Kaylan explained. “Someone in Swift Valley is sending them.” He shot me a look. “That’s why I’m here today. I’m as worried as you are about it. Are you gonna do something about this?” he asked me, demanding an answer.

  I told him that of course I was. “And do you have a location?” I asked him. “An address?”

  He clicked his tongue. “Sure do. The address of the router is Onyx Coffeehouse.”

  I saw Vicky’s eyes grow wide, and she let out a little gasp.

  “Well, that is just because they must have been using the Wi-Fi there,” I quickly interjected.

  Kaylan nodded. “Yes. That’s probably right.”

  I was relieved that I was right. It wasn’t necessarily anyone closely connected to the Onyx.

  “But it’s a customer of the coffeehouse,” Vicky said, raising her eyebrows at me. “We know that, at least.”

  “That’s half the people in town,” I pointed out. “That hardly narrows down our suspect list.”

  Vicky grimaced and nodded when she realized that I was right. We still had a lot of people to suspect. Half the people in the town went there for coffee.

  Kaylan shrugged. “If you need help with narrowing it down, then I suppose I can keep digging into it for you, if you want. But my rates are still the same.” He looked a little smug because he knew that I needed him more than he needed me. I was in no position to haggle.

  I sighed and glanced around at all the boxes of unsold hand lotion. Unsellable hand lotion, with my captive audience now thrown out.

  “Fine,” I said. “I can pay. But I need results. I’ll give you forty-eight hours.”

  “You never told me that you hired a hacker,” Vicky said after Kaylan had left.

  “Yeah, and I might live to regret it,” I said. “He’s good at his job, but I’m not sure he is being very fair with his pricing. He’s kind of ripping me off. He came here pretending to need my help, but I think he was really just trying to get more work from me.”

  “I think he’s kinda cool. Dangerous,” she said dreamily while she stared out the window. “Plus, he plays music. I mean, it is bass. Which is the least difficult instrument to play. Everyone knows that. But still. Don’t you think he’s pretty cute?”

  “He’s not really my type,” I said, while trying to swallow down my smile at Vicky being infatuated with this punk.

  There was a loud meowing sound, and I gasped as I ran for the laundry and undid the latch to find a very grumpy cat looking up at me.

  “Hey, I’ve been locked in here for an hour and a half,” Indy said, indignant as she waltzed out and sat down, looking up at me with accusation as though I had been purposefully torturing her.

  “I thought you could walk through walls or teleport,” I said with a shrug. I mean, it was true that I hadn’t wanted her to interact with anyone, and I had technically locked her in there, but I’d never thought that she was actually trapped in there. I was pretty sure that she could get herself out if there was any actual emergency.

  “I am a cat,” she said.

  “Yeah, a witch’s cat.”

  She was sulking with me, though, and so I had to get out her favorite meal of tuna, salmon, and sweetcorn that came in these little cans with flimsy lids that always spilled over when you opened them. The smell of it always made me gag a little. But I was sure that she enjoyed my discomfort in that moment. Payback.

  I made a mental note to never lock her in the laundry again.

  There were enough strange smells in my house that day. I closed my eyes and leaned against the fridge for just a moment, taking a deep breath. It just seemed like it was one thing after another. The wheel was spinning and heaping more and more misfortune on me, and I was helpless to stop it.

  Vicky called out to me from the living room. I was surprised that she was still there. I’d assumed she had left to go home and play guitar, or to chase Kaylan down on his push bike. He couldn’t have gotten too far.

  “What is it?” I asked as I marched into the living room to find her staring down at her phone in horror. Her eyes were transfixed by something she had seen on the screen. I had to call out again to get her to respond to me.

  “Have you gotten any text messages recently?” she asked me, looking up from her phone. Her voice wavered, and the phone was shaking a little in her hands.

  “Only from Bruce,” I said with a little roll of my eyes. “And I have been ignoring them.”

  “Check,” she said quietly.

  I walked over to the coffee table and turned my phone over so that the screen was facing upwards. There were a few notifications, and so I had to open my phone to check them all. An email from Lisa, asking what time I would be at the show the following morning and warning me to wear sunblock. A ding on my meditation app reminding me that it was time to meditate. Well, that was not going to happen.

  I had to scroll down to check my text messages.

  I did ha
ve a new message. From an unknown number. Not Bruce. Not anyone I knew personally.

  But someone who knew me.

  “If you don’t pass this on within the next forty-eight hours, then someone you know is going to die."

  A new chain message had been sent out to people in Swift Valley.

  7

  “Two hundred dollars? Who has that kind of money to give to scammers?” Vicky was packing up her hand creams and trying to fill out a ridiculous form that would allow her to return the unsold creams to Oasis Creams. There were so many rules about which products could and couldn’t be returned that I didn’t think she had any hope of even getting a cent back from them.

  “People who are scared,” I replied in answer to her question as I eyed the products she was packing into a box. I hoped that they didn’t still have the magical ingredient in them, which was apparently an herb called yarrow.

  Vicky glanced over at me. “Yeah. People who are scared for their lives.” She plonked herself down on her bed and stared forlornly at all the unsold creams. She hadn’t passed on her message—as far as I knew.

  “Your life isn’t in danger,” I said, keeping things practical. “You are a witch, remember? If anyone tries anything with you, just freeze them. Or make a house fall from the sky,” I said with a little wink.

  Vicky laughed and said that she wasn’t that sort of witch. But then her face turned grave again. “And what about the people who don’t have magical powers?” she asked me. “Don’t we have a duty to protect them?”

  “That’s why we’re solving the case, Vicks. That’s why we are detectives. We’ll find out who sent those messages and expose them for the scammers they are. But they are harmless,” I added firmly. “They will not actual murder anyone.”

  Vicky still didn’t look like she believed me, but she kept her lips sealed. I knew what her hesitancy was about this time. The second bunch of text messages were way more threatening than the first. The first batch had warned that bad luck would befall anyone who didn’t forward the text and send the money.

  But the second one had said that the life of someone you knew was in danger if you didn’t do what was asked.

  That was a pretty big thing to threaten an entire town with.

  Desperate people had already started to send both the messages and the money, and some people were even throwing their phones away afterwards and getting new numbers, and then refusing to give those numbers out to anyone. See? Total paranoia had spread throughout Swift Valley. That was the real virus.

  I’d been down to the local radio station that morning to put out a message to people that they should not give money to this obvious scammer, and that their lives were not in any actual danger. That I was on the case and would have the culprit soon. I didn’t usually like making myself and my work so public, but I thought that might be the only way to get people to listen. The problem was, barely anyone actually listened to the local radio station, and those who did seemed to have ignored my pleas.

  To be honest, I thought they were all bonkers, giving two hundred dollars to a scammer for no reason. What was this person going to do, kill every single person in Swift Valley because they hadn’t forwarded a text message? Let’s think logically here. That’s what I had tried to tell people.

  But after what had happened with Jolene, most people weren’t prepared to risk it. They probably thought that two hundred dollars was a small price to pay for their lives. Maybe they were right. They genuinely believed that Jolene had been cursed with bad luck—and that was what had killed her. So they were using their own kind of logic, I supposed. If it had happened to Jolene, it would happen to them.

  But I wasn’t willing to give up. If no one was going to listen to the radio, then I was going to have to take my fight to the streets. I climbed out of my car and marched past nervous people, stopping them and handing them my business card. “If you have any information about the text scammer, give me a call,” I said to them. “And if you are having any worries about your safety, call me immediately.” I hoped that might put some of their minds at ease a little. They thanked me but eyed me suspiciously. Maybe they thought I was the one who had sent the messages.

  I was in the coffee shop trying to convince people to put their phones away and live their lives free of fear and paranoia. But I could see them ignoring me and tapping away on their phones anyway.

  One woman with arthritis-riddled hands scowled up at me. “That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “I’m sure that you’ve already sent your message on.”

  “I have not passed my text message on, and I certainly haven’t sent anyone any money,” I said with indignation. I turned to Akiro, who was behind the coffee machine, pulling out parts to rinse it during a slightly quieter spell in the late evening when people had switched to decaffeinated teas. “Can you believe these people?” I asked pointedly, aware that Akiro was one of these people. Even though he had sworn that he didn’t pass on the second message, only the first. In fact, he claimed to have not even received one of the new messages.

  “I don’t get it,” Akiro said, getting a face full of steam as he spoke.

  “What don’t you get?” I said, hoisting myself up onto one of the bar stools and then slumping down. I was just about ready to give up on the general public that day.

  “Well, it seems like an easy enough criminal to catch. Can’t they trace the bank account that these payments are being made into?” Akiro asked as he took a tray out from the bottom of the machine that was filled with copper-colored liquid, sloshing precariously around.

  I shook my head and sighed. “It’s cryptocurrency. Not real money. And not a real bank account. So, it’s untraceable.”

  Akiro scoffed a little as he ran the water through the now pulled-apart machine, to clear all the pipes so that tomorrow’s coffee would taste smooth and creamy. “What is real money anyway these days?” he said with a little shrug. “Isn’t it all smoke and mirrors?”

  “Real money is what these people are losing,” I said, looking over my shoulder. I made a decision right then and there. “And I am going to get it all back for them.”

  I was googling “how to track anonymous cryptocurrency” in my empty office and coming up about as short as you can imagine. I wished I had contacts in the so-called “dark web.” When I had taken the course for my PI license, my trainer had drilled into us the importance of having contacts in various fields, even the sketchy ones. But I hadn’t wanted to delve into any of that stuff. Now I was starting to wonder if I needed to expand my circles of influence.

  The best lead I had, though, was Kaylan—home hacker, hoodie wearer, and cheap burger enthusiast. Even though he wouldn’t necessarily be able to trace the account in the traditional sense, he had connections and ways of finding out who out there might have come up with the idea to run the scam.

  When I asked to meet with him, he texted me back. “Scams like this get run every day. Most fade out, though. Whoever came up with this one got lucky. It hit at just the right time to make people scared for their lives.”

  I wasn’t sure lucky was the right word. We were talking about a woman’s life here. But Kaylan seemed interested in bringing the person to justice as well. It was almost like he was annoyed that such a stupid scam had worked because so many smarter ones had failed.

  I didn’t know much about scamming and hacking, but I had the feeling that it was the dumb ones which were most likely to succeed.

  Kaylan was still laying low since our close brush with the cops, which I was trying to convince him had been solely about me and my possession of Jolene’s phone and not anything to do with them being onto his hacking. I was pretty sure that the small-town cops in Swift Valley didn’t even know what a hacker was. He definitely had nothing to worry about.

  He walked in with his dark hoodie up per usual and looked around furtively at the other people in Han’s Burger Joint.

  “Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “No one is looking at you.”


  He took off his hoodie and looked sullenly down at the menu before ordering a strawberry shake and a cheeseburger with extra pickles. “I’m thinking about getting out of the whole hacking game. The risk isn’t worth it, now that I’m trying to save up for a house and stuff. And if my employers at the painting business knew what I was getting up to in my spare time, I would be let go.” He looked up at me. “I’m twenty-eight now.” He shrugged. “It just feels like it’s time to grow up and leave this stuff behind me. Let those young kids have their turn at it. The ones who have less to risk.”

  I wondered if one of these young kids with less to lose might be behind the chain message. “Well, I think that all sounds good and healthy,” I said with an encouraging smile. “Er, but just for now, do you think that you could give me some hints about who to look out for?” I took out a pen and paper. “Any names that you are willing to disclose? People who might have mentioned pulling this kind of scam in the past?”

  Kaylan answered me slowly. “I can’t give out the names of specific individuals. That’s not what you hired me for, Ruby.” He picked up the fork sitting beside him, even though he never used a fork when he ate at the burger joint. “Do you know what is more dangerous than getting on the bad side of the cops? It’s getting on the bad side of a hacker. Besides, we have a code between us. We don’t go ratting each other out.”

  I sighed and put my pen back down. “I was afraid it was going to be something like that. But you said you wanted to help me catch them.”

  “I can give you some info. But no name of anyone I know.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. This guy charged close to a hundred dollars an hour, and he wasn’t going to give me any real info that I could actually use?

  Our food arrived. Well, Kaylan’s food arrived. I had just ordered a soda water and some apple slices on the side, which I peered at carefully. They were a little brown. I wondered how long they had been sitting in the kitchen. Not the most popular item on the menu, I had to guess.