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My phone rang. Melly again.
I’d stalled with the investigation and had planned to go through a case Monsters, PI had just taken on, one involving a local selkie clan and the theft of the king’s and queen’s skins when they came to shore for dinner. We were sure it was a prank. Kids sometimes didn’t think before doing things like that. But we were also determined to track down their skins and return them.
“Hello?” I said with a smile. “Let me guess,” I joked. “You were scrolling through porn, and youhadto reach out to me.”
“Elrik!”
At Melly’s frantic cry, I bolted to my feet, peering around as if a threat to her loomed inside my office. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s trolling my business.” Her voice choked off with a sob. “I’ve got a troll. A very mean troll.”
Troll?
Despite being a monster myself, I had only met one troll in my life, a hulking, ten-foot-tall dude with mottled green skin and wiry black hair sticking out in all directions. From what I’d read online, his physical appearance was the norm for his species. I’d met him during one of my jobs when he’d volunteered to help us find a lost three-year-old girl, who thankfully was found and returned to her family.
The troll’s bulbous nose sat above a wide mouth filled with jagged teeth, but the little girl had run right to him when we appeared. He’d scooped her up and cradled her in his enormous green arms, telling her over and over again that she was safe.
Unfortunately, I’d lost touch with him not long after that.
“I’ll be right over,” I told Melly. Creature Cones was only a few doors down, and I strode inside within moments.
She locked the door behind me and turned the sign on the door to Closed before taking my hand and tugging me around the counter and into the back room. She sat at a table and wrung her hands on her lap while I leaned against the counter of the small kitchen area. A door on my left was labeled Freezer, and through the open doorway on the right, I spied a hallway and a set of stairs leading up. Grannie had rented an apartment up there at one time. No one was living there at the moment.
“Someone’s trying to ruin my business.” Melly scrolled into her phone and handed it to me. “Look at this. Thousands of bad reviews for Creature Cones. Noneof them make sense. They’re saying I’m poisoning people.”
“What?” I flipped through the comments, most coming from Anonymous, something the site must allow for confidentiality.
“I don’t understand.” Melly’s eyes shimmered with tears. “But this has to be related to the social club poisoning.”
“I can’t imagine how.”
“They left a warning on your truck. Now this. I think someone will do almost anything to make us stop investigating. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Anonymous is the one who dumped Xylitol into Grannie’s punch.”
Frowning, I handed her phone back to her, and she laid it on the table. “This could be a bunch of random trolls. You know how mean people can be, how some like to gather together with a few friends and gang up on a business. Have you received odd emails from anyone?”
“Why would someone like that email me?”
“It’s not unheard of for people like that to one-star a business and then ask for money to remove the bad reviews.”
“Extortion?”
“Sadly, yes.”
She quickly scrolled into her email before shaking her head. “No new email other than one from someone eager to sell me something to increase my penis size.”
Under any other circumstances, I’d make a joke about that, but this was serious business.
“No email demanding money,” she added, laying herphone back on the small table next to her chair. She heaved a sigh. Settling in the chair, she tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do about this. I’ll reach out to the group who runs the website to see if they’re willing to delete the ratings. Other than a few mentioning poisonings, none left real reviews. Surely, they won’t allow random ratings like that to remain. This could ruin me.”
Carla opened the back door and stepped inside, her gaze flicking to me before landing Melly. “Hey, did you know the front door is locked? I couldn’t get in.”
Melly handed her phone to Carla. “We’ve got a problem.”
Carla’s eyes widened as she read. “What is this? How dare they?”
“I’m worried the two things are connected,” Melly said.
“You think someone found out what happened at the social function and decided our ice cream must be poisoned as well?” Carla bit down hard on her lower lip, her brow scrunching. “It makes no sense. Everyone knows your grandmother would never do anything like that. Not unless she was getting forgetful and added too much Xylitol by mistake.”
