The Merchant of Menace

surprising. Yes, he is. Or somebody with the same name.“ Shelley gave her the street address, which didn’t work, and the telephone number, which didn’t work either.
    “Bring a pad of paper and a pencil upstairs while I make coffee,“ Jane said. “Let’s write a list of things to try.”
    They ended up with a long string of words: reporter, television, Wilhite, research, dossiers, jerk (“No, we think of him that way, he probably didn’t,“ Shelley said), and a couple dozen others. Coffee’d up, they went back down and tried them all out. None worked. “Okay,“ Jane said, closing her eyes as if to summon up a vision. “We have to pretend that we are Lance King—“
    “Yuck.“
    “He’d use a word he likes,“ Jane said. She opened her eyes and tapped in the word “scandal.”
    It didn’t work. Shelley said, “No, we have to really think like he did. He didn’t see his work as scandalmongering. He saw himself as the guardian of the public.”
    Jane typed in “guardian.”
    The computer said: PASSWORD ACCEPTED. PROCEED.
    They shrieked.
    Jane studied the list of files. They were numbered. She picked 001. It opened up and they groaned.
    The text was in code. Not a computer code, just an ordinary code.
    File 001 said: Kamoieppi Pixvup—xet e tvoqqis op dummihi. Qsutvovoap vuu? Djidl vuxp sidusft gus vjuti ziest.
    “ What now, Sherlock?“ Shelley asked.
    “I dunno. Do you suppose it’s a simple letter substitution?“
    “Maybe. If we dump them all together, alphabetize, and count each letter, we should be able to figure out which one represents E. It’s the most common.“
    “Big help. We’d know one letter,“ Jane said. “Maybe it’s a foreign language. It does look like a language, doesn’t it. I could ask Mel if Lance was fluent in something or other.“
    “And you don’t think he’d wonder just a bit why you’re asking? I presume you didn’t mention having copied this disk.“
    “You’ve got a point. My dad! My dad knows languages!“
    “Can you E-mail him?“
    “Yes, I’ll do that. Let me print this one out. They’re in the Netherlands. Heaven knows what time of day or night it is there now.“
    “Probably about two in the morning,“ Shelley said.
    “I’ll do that right after we print all the files out. You know, I do those letter substitution things in the puzzle magazines sometimes. If that’s what this is, it shouldn’t be that hard to do.”
    Shelley was doubtful. “But Jane, those give you clues. Like all the words in the list have to do with carnivals or something. And when they’re sentences, they’re real sentences with lots of ‘the’s and ‘for’s and such. This is just the man’s personal notes. They’re probably just phrases.“
    “It can’t hurt to try anyway.”
    Jane made duplicate copies of each of the small files on paper, one set for her, one for Shelley, and sent an E-mail to her father before they abandoned the cold and rather damp-smelling basement.
    “My family will think I’ve run away from home,“ Shelley said. “I can’t remember if I even mentioned I was coming over here, I was in such a rush. I’ll work on this at home and give you a call if I figure anything out.”
    Jane dinked around with the printouts for nearly an hour and got nowhere. It was no wonder, considering what a long day it had been, that she felt brain-dead. It was still Sunday, the day that had started out with church. But that morning seemed like it was days and days ago. She’d put the coded messages away somewhere safe and let her subconscious work on them while she was busy with other things. She got another sheet of paper and started making yet another list of reminders to herself.
    The day after tomorrow was Christmas Eve day. Her shopping was done, but a lot of wrapping remained. Note: Get more tape and ribbon.
    Christmas Eve day was also the normal trash pickup day. Would they send the monster trucks around on what was normally a half holiday? She hoped so. The parties she’d given had generated so much trash that if she didn’t get it out this week, it would become a whole Dumpster load by the next week. Note: Put out trash and recycle.
    That made her think about Sam Dwyer and his fanatic recycling. She had a lot of plastic-coated paper plates. She’d just put them in a big bag. But if she were to recycle them, would they go in the plastics bin or the paper bin?
    Her mind was going. No question about it. She remembered the “fortune“