Shop and Let Die

SHOP AND LET DIE

Copyright © <2014>
Kelly McClymer

All rights
reserved.

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for
your personal enjoyment only. No part of this may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Dedication

To all the secret shoppers out there keeping
an eye on efficiency, courtesy, and cleanliness.

And sending a special happy birthday to
Nancy Sakris, a mystery lover and reader extraordinaire, who is
much loved by her daughter Kirsten.

Other Books by Kelly
McClymer

Secret Shopper Mom Mystery
series

Shop and Let
Die

License to Shop

Once Upon a Wedding
series

The Fairy Tale
Bride

The Star-Crossed
Bride

The Unintended
Bride

The Infamous
Bride

The Next Best
Bride

The Impetuous
Bride

The Twelfth Night
Bride

FOR TEENS…and the young at
heart…

Blood Angel

Getting to Third
Date

The Salem Witch
Tryouts

Competition’s a
Witch

She’s a Witch
Girl

Must Love Black

Must Love
Halloween

CHAPTER ONE

Life in the
Express Checkout Lane

The clerk wasn’t going to give me my receipt.
Damn. She was just a kid, too. She had that glowing, wrinkle-free
skin of the very young.

IRENE, the orange name
tag—at regulation height, just above the baby blue smock
pocket—read. An old fashioned name for someone who probably wasn’t
yet legal to drink. I smiled, fiddled a moment with my bag of
groceries, gave her every opportunity to remember the oversight. No
go.

She’d done everything else
on my checklist perfectly—greeted me in a friendly manner, asked if
I’d found the items I was looking for, carefully scanned and packed
my groceries, checked the eggs in the carton were not cracked or
broken and the bread wouldn’t be crushed.

To crash and burn at the
last minute was heartbreaking. For me. Irene wouldn’t find out the
bad news until after her shift was over.

Okay, so I shouldn’t get
so wrapped up in what other people do right or—in this case—wrong.
But she was so close.

In one last ditch effort,
I looked back at the mints and gum, as if thinking about adding
some at the last minute. As I did, my eye caught the MISSING MOM
flyer hanging just above Irene’s head, right next to the reminder
that any customer who was not offered a receipt could get $5 off
their next visit. The woman on the flyer looked a little like me —
hair not perfectly brushed, eyes a little desperate. But her smile
was genuine.

I broke script. Just a
little bit. After all, it seemed like any normal customer would say
something about that flyer. “I hope she just ran off with the pool
boy.”

Irene glanced at the
flyer. “She has a nice smile, doesn’t she?”

The woman behind me in
line chimed in, “Anything would be better than being the Shopping
Mall Killer’s next victim.”

Irene smiled at her and
then glanced back at me. “Would you like help with your bags,
ma’am?”

“
No thank you.” I was
forbidden to ask for the receipt. So now poor Irene went from a
perfect score of 10, down to 7.

Receipts are worth 3
points. And anything less than a perfect 10 means the $25 gift
certificate in my pocketbook stays in my pocketbook.

Sometimes I hate mystery
shopping.

Irene the baby cashier
flashed me a real smile. “Have a great day.” Yep, not one fine line
around her eyes.

I gave my scripted
customer-to-clerk reply. “Thanks. You too.” Feeling like a feckless
double agent, I skulked away to snitch to the manager of the store,
bag of groceries clutched to my chest, acutely aware I had no
receipt to prove they were mine should anyone challenge
me.

Unlike some of the kids
who waited on me, Irene had meant her salutation.
Have a good day
. Poor
thing.

I had meant mine, too. I
never wished a bad day on anyone who risked carpal tunnel on a
daily basis by running other people’s twelve-packs of soda through
the beeper scan thingie.

Unfortunately, after I
talked to Irene’s manager and showed him his “Instant Store Score,”
she was not going to have a very good day.

I consoled myself with the
thought that it wasn’t personal. I just had a job to do.

Molly the dime store
secret agent strikes again.

Whenever a mystery shop goes wrong, I wonder why
I do it. But I know the deep dark truth. When I was twelve, after a
long summer day reading
Harriet the
Spy
, I switched my career ambition from
being a top fashion model to being a spy. The art of the mysterious
has called to me ever since.

So why was I in our local
SuperiorMart playing dime store secret agent instead of traveling
around the world on the CIA’s dime? Simple. A husband and kids are
not the best accessories for the trenchcoat lifestyle.

I stood outside the
manager’s closed office door for a moment before I knocked.
Channeling my Secret Shopper mojo, I took a moment to study the
framed picture of the employee of the month. He had a jarring smile
considering his picture was positioned just above another flyer
asking for any information about the missing local mom. I knocked
firmly.

The manager—she, not
he—was an overworked, freckle-faced red head who looked up from
what appeared to be a logistics schedule for a massive military
invasion but was probably just the next week’s work
schedule.

Her nametag was blue and
gave her whole name, DONNA SOMMERS, Manager. Do the people at
Corporate have name tags with all three of their names? Is that how
to break the nametag code? More responsibility equals more
names?

I introduced myself, using
the script I had been given. One blink was all it took before Donna
realized I was not a customer registering a complaint.

Her eyes narrowed and her
shoulders squared. I was from Corporate (in an indirect
way—corporate hired the company that hired the person who hired
me…but still…). And she was going to deal with me professionally
and efficiently, just like she’d been trained.

I politely nodded and made
sympathetic noises as she assured me she had trained all her
employees to follow procedure properly, stressing this was just an
oversight. I couldn’t bear to meet the efficient and sincere gaze.
Definitely some wrinkles there. They probably deepened when she
smiled, like mine did. Maybe. She didn’t smile for me.

I broke script a
little—how could I not?—I emphasized, studying the pictures of
Donna’s three happy freckled kids taped above her desk, how close
Irene had come, if only she’d given me a receipt. And I glossed
over the fact—I was required to tell her, or I wouldn’t have been
able to bring myself to do it—that she herself would have been
rewarded with a gift certificate if Irene had scored a perfect
10.

By the time I got to the
third part of the instant store score—cleanliness—Donna Sommers had
checked her watch four times. I started talking faster, but that
only made her prop her arm so she could pretend to look at the
score sheet while she was really watching the time.

“
Am I keeping you?” I
wasn’t supposed to keep management from their appointed rounds. I’d
scheduled my shop during the slow time, just like I’d been told.
But slow times aren’t always slow.

She blushed bright red, to
match her hair, and her freckles got darker instead of blending in.
Interesting. Her sincere, steady, efficient tone of voice lowered
to a whisper. “I have to pick my kids up from school.”

I stood up. “Of
course.”

She stammered, still in a
whisper, “It’s my break you understand, I don’t use company
time.”

She didn’t have to explain
to me, but the Corporate cachet attached to my presence forced it
out of her.

I raised my hand. “Just
let me cover these last two points quickly.” I delivered my spiel
so fast there’s no way she understood what I said. But it wasn’t
rocket science. She knew the most important part. Her instant store
score wasn’t perfect.

There wasn’t a lot of
sympathy in Donna’s blue eyes as we shook hands—she’d have liked a
gift certificate, too.

Who knows what she might
have brought home for those smiling children if she’d gotten a gift
certificate. Maybe a box of cookies. Or cinnamon buns. They made
good cinnamon buns at Superior Mart—which was why I needed to lose
30 pounds.

Out in the parking lot I dismissed the warning
that my cell phone battery was low, found the evaluation form app
with the gray trench coat icon, checked to make sure there was no
one nearby to see what I was doing (spies—and secret shoppers—are
not supposed to get caught) and quickly filled in my
notes.

The clerk wore a blue
button down shirt under her neatly pressed apron. Her nametag was
placed just above the store’s logo, as it should be. She had short
blond hair and a small tongue stud.
And
eyes clear of any worry that she’d forgotten something important
because she hasn’t had children yet (no I didn’t really put in that
last part—but I noticed it).

Ever since I started
mystery shopping, I’ve been noticing how many mothers are out there
in the working world. It’s eerie how easy it is to tell who they
are. They’re the ones who have a haunted,
I’m sure I’ve forgotten something
,
look in their eyes.

Like Donna Sommers as she
waited politely at her desk for me to leave first, fingering her
keys like worry beads.

Like the woman on the
MISSING flyer, come to think of it.

I know that look. I see it
in the mirror every time I brush my teeth and my hair. I try not
to. But I do. We pretend we have it together, we mothers. But
there’s always that periodic lurching mindsweep:
What am I forgetting?

In fact, I had one of
those moments as I finished the mystery shop and looked at the form
and the twenty questions I had to answer in detail in order to get
paid. For a minute, my mind went blank. Utterly and completely
blank like a memory black hole.

This happened to me often
when I started a report. Falling off a cliff would have felt
better…at least until I hit ground. Secret shoppers live and die by
the details we can remember and record in our reports. Don’t want
to report a yellow name tag if it was blue. Or accidentally rename
a clerk Sam when his name is clearly Stan.

Fear of failure, my fellow
shoppers diagnosed, with great sympathy, when I told them. Only one
other shopper confessed to suffering from the black hole effect,
though.

So far, at least with
mystery shopping, all the necessary details have flooded in and
I’ve gotten excellent scores on my mystery shopping reports. Oh
yeah, we spies who rate others get rated too. Life’s fair that way
sometimes.

With the contents of my
memory safely recorded on my smart phone, I got behind the wheel
and started the car. I didn’t pull out right away because I didn’t
want to attract the notice of Donna Sommers, who had just come out
of the employee door, moving at the speed of a supermom, and
climbed into her beat up SUV.

She didn’t close the door
immediately. Instead, she lit a cigarette, leaned over, closed her
eyes, and took three deep drags. Without exhaling, she then tossed
the smoking remains to the asphalt, closed her door, and backed out
of her parking space at warp speed.