The Manifest

Chapter 27

     Jerome was watching the auction with great care, and there had been quite a few bids over the first twenty hours after posting Jessica's necklace for sale. He was watching and observing when people bid for the item and for how much at any given time. He was looking for that one person to keep coming back for more and never stop bidding no matter how high the price got. He took another sip of his coffee and kept watching but there were no new bids in the last while so he went back to his Hollywood stock exchange account and updated his portfolio to kill some time. He switched back to the auction when he realized that Jessica was walking into the living room. She looked just as beautiful in the morning, even with a mean case of bed head Jerome thought to himself as he watched her walk in.

     "Morning." He said trying to be friendly, but not in a creepy kind of way, "You're up early."

     "Did you sleep at all?" she asked, knowing she had been occupying the only couch since the night of the fire.

     "I think there was a moment earlier when I closed my eyes." Jerome said as he took another sip of brew, "I think I may have dozed off for a few hours. It's probably all the rest I'm going to rest when Edgar got back, but I could do that now if you don't mind watching the auction for me."

     "Sure, I can do that." Jessica replied, "It's not like I have anything else to do. If those people are really after me, I can't go to work or back home right now. Get some rest."

     She walked over to the monitors that were watching the auction and other various websites. She looked at the pictures of her mom's necklace, and while the number was pretty high she had no idea of any of the bidders was her mother.

     "How many bids do we have so far?" she asked eager to see if there was any interest.

     "We've got well over a dozen bids so far. It's been crazy since the item has been posted, but we've got two or three people who are going insane over the item. This is going to be intense. The item has already passed a thousand dollars and everyone still has many hours left to bid. I'm stroked about this because these two have been going to war over this necklace. I think one of them might be the one we're looking for."

     "How do you intend to look into them all if only one person can win?" Jessica asked someone confused.

     "That's the beauty of this site," Jerome started to explain, "Let's say that I'm bidding on a comic book, something I really want to get. I try to place a bid for ten dollars but forget to put in the decimal point, which means I bid a thousand instead of ten dollars. The site allows the buyer to retract the bid as long as it's done before the auction ends, thus giving everyone else a chance to keep bidding. The site even allows someone to retract a bid after the auction but only with permission from the seller first. So what I intend to do is email everyone who aggressively bids on this item, and let them know that the winner retracted their bid and they all won by default. That way we'll be able to look into them all and deliver the box to them personally."

     "I don't mean to poop your plan because it sounds really cool, but how do you intend to deliver the same necklace to more than one person?" she asked rather curious to how he was going to get around that.

     "We're working on it." Moth said from the other side of the room. Since the fire she hadn't applied any makeup and actually looked half human for a change, "Devon knows people who are capable of making a few fakes and they'll pass the test and give use a few cracks to find your mom."

     "This way not only can we serve this item to more than one person at a time, if none of them can be identified as who we're looking for, we can always put up another auction and try again." Jerome smiled to the two women, very proud of himself and his plan.