Murder By The Pint (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  And then there's the smell. Like I said, I love it. Alcohol meets oatmeal meets lemon drops. It's a pervasive smell that gets into your pores. It's like working in a pizza parlor.

  My cousin Gerry was still the master brewer here. I was thankful for that. I hadn't seen Gerry in years. He was my partner in crime when we were kids. He'd put on a stack of pounds since I last saw him. He obviously served as official taster in more than one capacity here. He gave me a huge bear hug that almost squeezed out my spleen. I was truly happy to see him. I felt home.

  Brunhilde nudged me on, showing me the equipment and the daily order of operations. She knew her stuff, I'll give her that.

  Gone, however, were the various uncles and aunts and cousins who used to mill about the place. Quite literally – milling grain is one such task these honorary employees would routinely perform. My mother still worked here, but she was in semi-retirement. She still oversaw the books from home though.

  Throughout it all, Hildy ushered me through the place as if her job depended on it, which I guess it did, for all intents and purposes. She had a consistent professional air that I kind of liked, but it just wasn't what I expected in a microbrewery. That kind of corporate gait is fine for an investment firm. Here, it stuck out like...well, like a business suit in a microbrewery. There's no other way to put it.

  When the tour ended, I was exhausted. There wasn't much to see, but I'd travelled all the way from Syracuse, what should have been a six-hour drive but wound up being closer to eight with rest stops and traffic once we got onto the island close to the city. Long Island is the fish and Manhattan is the hook in its mouth, is how I explain it to those who've never been. No matter what time of the day or night, what day of the week, what time of the year, everything comes to a halt once you cross that hook and enter onto the body of the fish. And it stays that way for about an hour or so. Then suddenly you're moving again, only you feel like you've been drained of all your life energy by a psychic vampire in the form of a toll collector. And then it's three hours before you hit Carl's Cove on the other end of the island, the southern tail of the fish, or the South Fork, as it's known by those who live on it.

  And speaking of live, the house was a cute little cottage close to Main Street. Just big enough for two people, as long as they took turns breathing. The place had been built in the late 1700s, along with most of Carl's Cove. It was one of a family of houses all sort of crammed in together along this stretch of road. None of us boasted anything resembling a front yard; just a tiny piece of property suitable for landscaping with flowers, and a waist-high fence of white pickets with a quaint little swinging gate out front. Up the stairs and into the house, I was treated to country-style claustrophobia at 2500 dollars a month – a bargain for Carl's Cove.

  Settling in, we had wine and Junior's pizza and sausage rolls on the floor – the traditional moving-in meal. And then I passed out and slept as if I had been awake for a week.

  Chapter 3

  My first day as boss, I donned my Batgirl kicks and headed out into the chilly early morning spring. What a joy it was to live here; to be able to walk to work through such quaint, Old World splendor. I passed the old Masonic temple – converted sometime in the 1960s into a hall for weddings and bar mitzvahs, and through a line of cherry blossoms lighting up in the sunrise with a Disney dream of glowing pink and an aura of orange. I felt my walk slowing a bit. Before I knew it, I was strolling to work. I felt as if my life stress of not having made it as an author by the age of thirty-eight was evaporating up into the trees at that very moment. It was quiet as a church here, none of the early morning bustle you get elsewhere, especially in the industrial town where I'd previously been living.

  Throughout Main Street, a couple shop owners where just starting to arrive to prepare for their days. Even though most of the boutiques didn’t open until nine, the eateries were alive and kicking at this hour. I could smell freshly baked bread wafting down the street. What a scent of heaven that was on a spring morning.

  I finally reached the end of Main Street and the microbrewery that bore my name. It still hadn’t hit me. This place was mine. My name was on it. True, it was my grandfather's name, really. But as far as the world was concerned, it was my name now. I was somehow okay with that.

  Gerry was already there when I arrived, as were most of the workers – all five of them. Today was a shipment day, which meant that a bunch of cartons were sitting on the floor where we needed to work and they needed to be opened up, sorted through, and cleared out. All of us were expected to pitch in. I was used to this. Many a shipment day I was down at the old place, a box cutter in hand, slicing open boxes and removing packs of ingredients. Sacks of grain came in fifty-pound bags that I lugged to Gerry's amazement. I don’t do gender politics as a rule, but I have to admit it is fun to hear men twice my size grunting when they lift these things – and me not uttering a sound.

  I instantly recognized the vendor name on one of the cartons – cleaning products. That one was for me.

  Okay, we're getting to know each other here. And I suppose that if we're going to spend some time together, you might as well know something about me.

  I have what is sometimes referred to by some people as "a germ thing." Mind you, this isn’t like your run-of-the-mill OCD where I'm scared to shake hands with people. There is some logic to it. Let's put it this way: What would you say is the key to making great beer? Ingredients? Mmm, yeah, the stuff has to be of good quality, and it has to be fresh. Technique? Maybe. But, you understand, that stuff can be tweaked easily. A lack of quality ingredients can be made to work with a little love and care. Technique comes with the territory – you learn this stuff or you fail. No, the key to making great beer lies in one word and one word only: sanitization. Boiling up a batch of beer is like sending out a wake-up call to every piece of bacteria within a hundred-foot radius. There's nothing they love to chew on more than a batch of fresh brew. And there's nothing that can spoil a good batch of fresh brew like bacteria. This rule was constantly drilled in to me when I was a kid, and the lessons stuck. Consequently, I'm a bit of a stickler about germs and cleanliness. Like I said, nothing to be scared of. But don’t let me catch you picking something up off the floor and eating it. As far as I'm concerned, there is no five-second rule. And don’t let me ever, ever catch you not washing your hands after you've hit the head. The human body is a walking petri dish.

  Now that we got that over with, let's continue. Where was I? Ah yes, the cleaning supplies. I extracted industrial-sized bottles of cleaner and sanitizer, ticked them off on the inventory sheet – we still did things the old-fashioned way here at Darby – and proceeded to the next carton.

  I recognized the vendor on this one too. Fresh hops.

  To the uninitiated, if grain gives beer a personality, hops give beer attitude. The dried green leaves come in many different varieties, much the way grapes do for wine. Each variety of hop carries with it a 'tude all its own. If you want good ol' American sass, you go for the Simcoe variety. If you want a cultured English gentleman, you go for East Kent Goldings. And so on. I tore into this carton of fresh Amarillo Gold hops like a kid on Christmas.

  That's when I found the diamonds.

  That's not a metaphor. As a writer, I use metaphors all the time. No, these were diamonds. A bag of them. Sitting in a carton surrounded by bags of hops.

  I blinked twice. I had to.

  Maybe they were fakes. There's a portion of my brain that kicks in when I'm faced with the highly improbable. It's gotta be a fake. Someone's pulling my leg here. (I was never any fun at magic shows.)

  I picked up the tightly wrapped baggie. It was the size of a softball and twice as heavy. The diamonds danced around inside.

  Gotta be glass, I thought. Someone's playing a joke. Or someone dropped these in here by mistake. A bunch of costume jewelry meant for a theater prop department. Or fake stuff for a jewelry maker.

  Sure, the hop farmer reaped his harvest, went through he tr
ouble of drying the leaves, packing them up, and then said, you know, I just happen to have this bag of fake jewelry lying around here, what better way to get rid of it than to send it along to Darby? Sure. Made perfect sense.

  I called Gerry over.

  He scratched his bald head, stroked his bushy beard, and said, "Huh."

  "They can’t be real," I said.

  "Huh," he said again, this time taking the baggie of diamonds from me and turning it around in his hands. "There's one way to find out." He peeled open the bag and took out one of the stones.

  Let me just say here that any one of these rocks would have made an engaged finger strain under the size of it. The things were huge.

  Gerry walked over to a desk he kept in the corner of the brewery. It was littered with books and papers and looked as though it had been splattered with every substance imaginable. A computer sat there, fearing for its life. Gerry walked over to it and cleared a small space of its refuse, exposing the stained surface of a glass desktop. He ran the stone over it.

  There was no mistaking the sound. And there was no mistaking the six-inch scratch the thing made across the surface.

  Gerry and I looked at each other.

  I had one thought: What was the chance of randomly pulling out the only real diamond in that bag? And then I had a second thought: We'd better call the police.

  #

  Ok, so it was a strange first day. But honestly, other than the mysterious bag of diamonds in the hops shipment, the rest of the day was rather uneventful. With the bag of diamonds safely in the hands of the Carl's Cove Police Department, I spent the day getting used to the flow – literally and figuratively – of the business. I was happy that Hildy wasn't always lingering around to get in my hair about appearances. It wasn't yet peak season so there wasn't much by way of tastings. A couple came in for a tasting around one o'clock and that was it. All in all, it was a good first day for me. We had an oatmeal stout fresh in the fermenter; and a pale ale, a black lager, an amber ale, and a hefeweissen all freshly off the line. Everything tasted as good as I remembered it. These were all my father's recipes, obeyed to the letter. Gerry had great respect for his uncle.

  The cops had taken down a few bits of information. My name, the name of our hops rep, the address of the farm where they came from, and that was about it. I have to admit, I was curious about the mystery package. I asked the officer if he could keep us informed as to the outcome of the case. He took a growler of pale ale with him for the weekend.

  The next few days involved my stumbling around the place looking for some grounding. I was anxious to know everything, to just step in and be the boss without any guidance. Hildy stopped in once, laying out her plan for the peak season. Carl's Cove had a few town-sponsored festivals coming up this summer that were guaranteed to pack the place full of tourists. It was Hildy's job to make sure we were going to be ready for them. Gerry and I adjusted the brew schedule accordingly.

  Chapter 4

  A few days later I just happened to be sitting stretch-legged on a beach blanket, fending off a blitzkrieg of birds.

  How I got here is of no importance. Let's just say though that all I wanted was to go for a run and then sit and eat a tuna salad sandwich on the beach. It was my day off, my first one since I’d gotten here. And a beach on Carl's Cove is one of the all-time great spots to spend a day off.

  So I sat down, grateful for my still-working legs, and saw out of the corner of my eye one grizzled gray monster swoop down at me from my left just as I brought the sandwich to my lips. I rocked back and swiped at it with what I now know was a pretty feeble gesture. And that's when another swooped in from the blind spot on my right. I bent to my side in an awkward motion, an attempt to tuck the sandwich under my body.

  Funny things strike you in moments like this. Like, for instance, the plain fact that I'd chosen to take tuna salad to the beach. No one should ever take tuna salad to the beach. It ranked up there with the stupidest things I'd ever done in my life.

  A third gull, then a fourth approached. Soon a half a dozen were diving and dipping like yo-yo tricks, each one attempting to harvest the contents of my fanny pack I had opened in my lap, not to mention the prize nestled tightly under my personage.

  Now I know you're all thinking of Alfred Hitchcock. I was too. And you know how in Hitchcock's film things always seem to go from bad to worse? Well, this is about when my hair came out of the clip and flew about, as if each strand were engaged in its own private campaign to fend off the avian attack.

  Then, another intruder. This one on two legs.

  He was a mere speck on the boardwalk, and then he grew and grew, and soon he was close enough to wave his arms wildly around me. And now the two of us were engaged in some sloppy pas de deux of graceless flailing and whooping.

  And that's when this would-be Captain America reached down under my body, groping for the sandwich. Parts of me not meant to be groped in this manner brushed against the back of his hand.

  A feathered fiend swooped down and I took another awkward swing...and caught him hard across the jaw.

  "Get away from me!" I screamed.

  "I'm trying to help," the man screamed back. "Gimme the sandwich!"

  Something relented – the wind, the vice grip of my right hand around his wrist, a couple of the birds – and he got the sandwich out and tossed it as far up into the air as he could, expelling a great deal of breath and voice as he did so.

  The birds swirled in a frenzy up and around the airborne lunch.

  And so I snapped. I don’t know why. It just seemed like this is what needed to happen. I attacked the stranger's back with a barrage of doubled fists that knocked the wind out of him and brought him to the ground where he curled up and waved his hand repeatedly, as if to speed the departure of the violence with a hasty goodbye.

  He got his wind back and hurled a hoarse, unintelligible ball of slur and spit at me. "Stop!" he finally said, though the s, t, and p were soft.

  I towered over him, my face burning with rage. "Are you trying to communicate with me?"

  "Stop!" he said, more intelligibly.

  "What is your problem?"

  "I was trying to help you!"

  "I didn't need your help," I yelled.

  "Don't tell me you didn't need my help. You were about to be killed by sea birds."

  I paused, my anger turning to disappointment and frustration. "That was a good sandwich."

  "It felt like one," he said. "I'm really sorry." He held up his arms. "Truce?"

  I stood there and stared at him, my windbreaker snapping like sails around me.

  That's when I realized it: Oh, my god, he was gorgeous. Blue eyes, crystal blue, set into a chiseled face with a hard, sturdy jaw. He had short black hair that waved ever so slightly as it flowed back across his head.

  "If you want," he said, rising from the sand, "I'll get you a new sandwich."

  "I want that one," I said.

  "Come on, man, it's gone."

  "Man?"

  He brushed the sand off his pants. "What?"

  "I'm sorry I hit you," I said. And I was. "I didn't mean it."

  "You didn't?"

  "I mean the first time. I was aiming for the birds."

  "That's great. You got me in the jaw."

  "I know. Are you okay?"

  "My back hurts. You knocked the wind outta me, man."

  "I'm very sorry about that."

  "And my sandwich is gone," he said with a rigid face. "I was really looking forward to it."

  We shared a short laugh at that one.

  "Was it tunafish?" he said.

  "Yeah. How did you know?"

  "I smelled it from my car. Who takes tuna fish to the beach, anyway?"

  "You're looking at the only woman left."

  "Want me to make you a tunafish sandwich?"

  I gave him a generous smile. "I think I can manage. Thank you, though."

  "I make a good sandwich, man."

  "What's w
ith the man?"

  "I'm serious. I'll make it up to you. I'll use your kitchen so you trust me."

  I laughed again. He had this great delivery. Serious face, but with an inflection that was unmistakably joking. "Ah, you'll make me a sandwich. And it won't be poisoned?"

  "Exactly."

  "You're quite a fool, you know that?"

  "I'm Lester." He held out his hand.

  Shake. "You're a fool, Lester." I think I was blushing. Thank goodness the wind was blowing on my face.

  He smiled at me, and he stared right into my eyes, and said, "Now what's your name?"

  "I'm not telling you my name!"

  "Alright, then I'll just call you Tuna Lady."

  "Wonderful."

  "Bird Attack on the Beach Lady."

  "Call me Madison."

  "Do you go by Maddie?"

  "No, because I hate Maddie. No one calls me that."

  "Then I'll call you Maddie."

  "I can see where this is going." I began gathering my things.

  "Yeah," Lester said, "you may wanna close up that fanny pack."

  "There's no food in it. Just iced tea."

  "Doesn't matter. The birds can smell the residual tuna in it. And once they come and find out there's no tuna in there, they'll go after your face, Maddie. Here, let me give you a hand."