Murder Brewed At Home (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 3) Page 4

  "I hear from people who are avid runners," I said, "that running takes up their lives almost 24/7. They don’t even get a chance to read. Is that true?"

  She laughed. "Somewhat. You get caught up in the lifestyle, chatting with others about it, researching footwear, the latest trends…"

  "Apps?"

  "Apps, certainly."

  I guess I was feeling exceptionally bold, for I said, "I read an article recently that you can share info with others. Like a network."

  "Absolutely."

  "I imagine it's a kind of friendly competition."

  "It's supposed to be friendly," she said with a chuckle. "It isn’t always. The info gets shared, sometimes in real time, and you get encouragement and cheers from your network, and then you go onto social media and see this passive-aggressiveness from them."

  "In what way?"

  "It's hard to explain. It's all a big cliquey club, but there's infighting. Arguments over how to time yourself, about technique. It gets personal."

  "Huh," I said. "I guess I'm having trouble picturing how that's so, but then again, I guess some people are just like that – passive-aggressive, I mean. Did you ever have personal experience with that?"

  "Of course. Our dear departed Mr. Young was one such character. He made quite a few enemies. How many people were in his running network?"

  "Just two."

  "There you go," she said, shaking her head in disappointment. "No doubt he started off with about ten or twenty. You lose 'em quickly when you act like that."

  "Like what?" I said, looking her in the eye.

  "Like a self-righteous jerk. I'm sorry, I know it's rude to speak ill of the dead, but he was self-righteous, always bragging about his running stats and turning the whole thing into a competition of strong vs. weak, rather than fostering a positive atmosphere, and...oh, I know I shouldn’t be telling you this..."

  She paused, and I prayed to the gods of gossip that she'd eventually continue.

  "He was," she began again, "cheating. What's worse is that he sort of bragged about it. Not in any overt way. Just little jokes about getting away from the wife, or how running provided a great excuse for having an affair. Like I said, they were obvious jokes, but you joke about something like that often enough and people start getting suspicious."

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Why did I remain friends with him? I don’t know. I guess I'm just not the type of woman who ends friendships."

  We said our goodbyes and she told me to call her for whatever I needed. And I prepared for my next interview.

  Chapter 5

  Allan Chu washed his hands diligently as I watched. He, like Maggie, had answered my email pretty quickly, saying he was "eager to help out in any way possible.”

  And now, here I was in his kitchen, watching him wash his hands. He'd just gotten finished preparing a marinade for pork tenderloin.

  "I hate handling meat," he said. "All kinds of bacteria."

  He was a man after my own heart, Allan Chu was.

  "You sure I can't get you anything?" he said.

  "No, I'm fine. I just want to chat a little bit about Kyle."

  "What do you need to know about Kyle?" he said to his cutting board as he worked a knife around an onion.

  "Well, for starters, I know he was a bit of a philanderer and—"

  "Do you have any evidence for this accusation?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Uh huh," he said, continually watching his knife.

  "Mr. Chu, the night Kyle died, he went out for a run and turned on his running app. As a part of his network, you may have been able to see his route. Could there be any reason you know of that Kyle would have wanted you to know where he was and when he would be there?"

  "Offhand, no. But is that really a theory? I mean, people turn on their apps when they go running. Why do they need an ulterior motive to turn them on?"

  I could see this was going to be one of those interviews that are about as much fun as a root canal without Novocain.

  "Did you know Kyle outside of the runners' network?"

  "Nope. We hooked up there."

  "What did you think of him personally?"

  "I didn’t know him personally. Through the social media interaction, I'd say he was an ok guy."

  "I know he'd make certain off-color jokes about cheating on his wife. What did you think of that?"

  "I really didn’t care. They were just jokes. No one can joke anymore these days without someone analyzing it to death."

  "Well," I said, unable to hold back any longer, "anyone who says something like that without knowing all the facts is in danger of the listener forming the perception of him as a raging ignoramus."

  He finally looked up from his cutting board, mid-chop.

  "I think I made myself perfectly clear. Kyle's marriage was in the dumps. He was clearly no longer interested in his wife. He goes on a social media network and starts making jokes about leaving her. Now, knowing this, please don’t make the idiotic assumption that they were 'just jokes' again, please."

  "You're no longer welcome here in my home," Allan Chu said calmly. Then he turned back to the cutting board. "My wife and kid will be home soon. I have to get dinner ready. You know the way out."

  I turned to leave, kicking myself for allowing my anger to get in the way of the interview. I guess the private eye biz was not unlike any other craft: you learn by trial and error.

  Still, my job here wasn't finished. I turned back to Allan and asked him the million-dollar question:

  "Where were you that night, Allan?"

  He looked up at me, again in mid-chop. "I was here at home with my family," he said. He resumed preparing his dinner as I left the house.

  #

  It was time to go back to work. I figured I could put in an appearance, check my emails, and negotiate with Gerry to be the acting CEO for a few weeks while I cleared my head.

  Upon entering the brewery, and getting a whiff of that fresh pizza dough smell of malted barley, the citrus tang of hops, and that impossible-to-classify aroma of yeast that beer geeks like me describe as "estery,” I felt like I was seeing a long-lost friend.

  I didn't want this. I wanted to come in here and say, "Man, oh man, who in their right mind would choose this for a living? Giant stainless-steel tanks and fermentation chambers and stacks of fifty-pound sacks of grain? What a disgusting place!"

  But no, I didn’t say that. Instead, I felt like I wanted to throw my arms around one of those giant stainless-steel tanks and coo to it: "Awww, my sweetheart, did you miss mommy?"

  Alright, I'm exaggerating slightly.

  But I did find that what I didn’t mean was the day-to-day numbers end of the business. It was all about the beer for me. Everyone here cared about the product. Somehow along the way I got turned around, and all I saw all day was figures and projections, and plans, and more plans and quotas and blah blah to the blah and blah.

  This was a mixed blessing then. I was thoroughly obsessed with the Kyle Young case, but I needed to get back to the basics of the brew biz. I would in due time, I thought, and I suddenly felt a thousand times better. A knot that had been in my stomach for weeks had suddenly unraveled. It was exquisite.

  With a renewed fervor, I dove into the backlog on my desk, tossing aside anything having to do with numbers and figures and projections, and only focusing on those things that were solely about the manufacture of great beer. There were folks out there who'd be glad to handle the corporate paperwork, I thought. I'll run an ad. We'll bring someone in.

  I opened up my email inbox.

  The latest in a long list of unanswered correspondence was an email from Kyle Young.

  I blinked twice. It couldn’t be him. Kyle Young was dead.

  The subject line was blank.

  I clicked to open it and read it with my heart slightly racing.

  Third from the right in front of my house is a pine sapling. You saw them. Behind that look for newly dug earth
. You'll need nothing more than a garden spade to quickly dig up the dirt. There's one there. Go at night. Keep digging until you find a cigar box. Take spade with you so I know you've been there when I get back.

  MC

  I thought for a moment. MC. Maggie Childsworth. It had to be. I remembered the row of saplings in front of her house. How Maggie had gotten a hold of my email address was not an issue. Anyone searching around on our website would eventually find it. But why would she take such precautions to hide her identity?

  It wasn't a very good job of hiding. Anyone with a little bit of computer savvy could hunt her down. She obviously wanted to hide for the time being, but not so well that I didn’t know who she was.

  I called Gerry on the intercom and told him I'd be out for the rest of the day. I didn’t wait for his response.

  #

  Maggie's house at night was a spooky place. There were no lights on the property, which meant that I'd be working by moonlight alone. I didn’t want to run the risk of anyone seeing me by using a flashlight.

  Don’t think I didn't check to see if there was anyone home. I did and there wasn't. So I crept around to the right side of the house. It was hard to see, but I found the sapling she'd written of. It was about three feet high, standing sturdy in a man-made pile of rocks. I groped around behind it, and discovered the handle of a spade jutting out of the dirt.

  It was a laborious task to say the least to be digging by the light of the moon and nothing else. But thankfully it wasn't long before I found the cigar box. My back aching, I stood up and opened the box.

  Nothing in there. At all.

  Now, life is full of uncertainties. I know that. But I also know that sometimes you reach a point where you're confronted with just one uncertainty too many. And that's when there's a problem, because some people will find themselves doing rather foolish things in order to undo just one of those uncertainties.

  So, you may ask what was going through my head at this point. You get a strange email that looks like it's from a dead man but turns out to be from some previously thought innocuous acquaintance to the dead man, and this note is telling you to go and dig up a cigar box by the light of the moon. Furthermore, this person is nowhere to be found.

  All I can say is this: I have a dangerous streak in me. Call it a thrill-seeking streak if you will. I guess that's as good a name for it as anything else. But over the course of the past year I'd found that this streak has been lying dormant inside me for most of my life. I realized that in some strange way I actually enjoyed the danger of it all.

  I also realized that someone who enjoys danger should probably not put herself in the path of said danger without any protection. I'm not one for guns. But I am one for a Swiss Army knife lent to me by a certain friend/boyfriend – a knife that I forget to give back to him.

  So to answer the question: this knife was what was on my mind. I whipped it out and fumbled around for something I could use to break into Maggie Childsworth's house. There was an attachment there that kind of looked like those thin metal picks that you use to dig dirt out from under your nails. That would work for the pick. All I needed now was something to use as a tension wrench. There was a tension wrench on this thing, but in order to use these two tools together as a lock pick, one of them would have to go.

  I made the decision and was sure that Lester would forgive me over time.

  I went around to the back door to the house and crouched down on the porch. There I pressed the thin nail picker thing onto the concrete and bent the Swiss Army knife up as I pressed. It wasn't long before the thing went pling! glittering in the moonlight as it sailed over my head, landing on the concrete behind me.

  Great.

  I was now kowtowed on the porch, my face getting very intimate with the concrete, my hands groping freely. This is not how I pictured the glamorous life of a private eye.

  Note to self: get an authentic lock-picking set.

  Finally, my hand brushed over it. I picked the thing up and knee-walked over to the door.

  Picking it was pretty easy, once armed with the right tools. There is a slight rush when you actually get it and hear the thing give with a click and a turn.

  I entered Maggie Childsworth's house with a strange and slightly sick feeling. I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. I was trying to think of what I would say were the lights to spring on suddenly, and was confronted with the sight of Maggie Childsworth pointing a gun at me. The word "oops" came to mind, and nothing else.

  I brought the cigar box in with me. Inside here, I felt a little less conspicuous about flicking on my trusty Boy Scout pocket flashlight. I put the box down and slowly snooped through the place. I remembered the layout somewhat, which was a plus. The last thing I needed was to knock into an unexpected table and send a priceless antique shattering. I made my way into the living room, and I saw the shelves of books. I took a look at the three untitled volumes on top, the ones that belonged to Maggie's mother. They were faded and splotched, a sickly greenish brown color. I'm not sure what the book collector's term for it is, but I can tell you that my term for it would probably run along the lines of "icky.” Pulling the first book out, I saw that it was a very old copy of When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne. The next one was Winnie the Pooh by the same author. And the last was Now We Are Six, also by Milne. These looked to be rare editions.

  I replaced the books and went snooping around upstairs. Maggie's bedroom was neatly kept. It was a room that until only recently had been occupied by two people. There were various empty areas, one perhaps being formerly taken up by a Bowflex machine or something similar. I went to the closet and saw that, though it was half-empty, its emptiness was not due to it's being devoid of men's clothing. Maggie, it seemed, either didn’t own a great deal of clothes, or had left town with a bunch of stuff from her closet. The terseness of her note had reinforced that suspicion.

  There was a box on the floor of the kind used for archiving old business documents and records. I put the flashlight in my mouth and lifted the lid carefully. There were a ton of old magazines in there. Most of the titles were fishing hobbyist titles. The address on the subscription label identified Mr. Todd Childsworth as the subscriber. These were the things at the end of a marriage that folks must hold on to when they think that it might not be truly over. The big stuff goes: joint purchases, exercise equipment, clothes. What's left behind are those things that grew over time, that became so embedded in everyday existence that their lingering here now could be regarded as the sole proof that there was even someone here to own them in the first place. Those are the things one points to when one is grieving; and the grieving doesn’t end until those things are gone.

  But I digress. I'm getting melodramatic here. I am a frustrated writer, after all.

  There seemed to be nothing left in this house for me to look at, if there ever was at all. And lingering here was getting me edgier by the minute. I was sure to replace everything as it was and, taking my empty cigar box along with the spade I used to dig it up, I left the way I came in, locking the door as I did.

  Chapter 6

  Home again, and tired. And in possession of an empty cigar box and a spade that didn’t belong to me. I put the thing down on the kitchen table and stared at it. It was this dirt-smudged thing that you don’t really see anymore. A kind of relic from an older time. Once again, here was an obvious leftover from Maggie's previous relationship. A box of Macanudos.

  Not being a cigar smoker, often I find the aficionados of this particular pastime to be quite like connoisseurs of great beer. They know what they’re looking for. Often I've tried to get into it, with little luck. However, that never stops me from trying. I love the aromas of fine foods and drinks, and I love picking out the very things that make up those aromas. So, when I held this open box in my hand, I did what any strange person with my palate for obscure tastes would do: I stuck my nose in and closed my eyes and took a whiff.

  Cigars, good ones, have a loamy, earthy aroma
, with undertones of dark spices. Some cinnamon in there, and a little nutmeg as well. Maybe I'll give it a try one day, I thought. And opened my eyes.

  And that's when I saw it.

  Along the inside perimeter of the box was a thin piece of tape with letters running vertically along the length of it. It was a strange sight. From what little experience I've had with cigars and their storage, I'd yet to recall a box that looked like this. And here it was before me now.

  The human eye is pretty good when it comes to detecting fakery, or at least something out of place. And my eye did just that the moment I got over the strangeness of what I was looking at. This was put there by someone. The letters were hand-drawn. The tape, though obviously carefully placed, was unevenly placed.

  Carefully I unpeeled the strip and held it before my eyes, like looking at a roll of developed film.

  A code of some sort? Was this what I was meant to find?

  I didn’t know what to make of it. Random letters written vertically down the length of the tape, one after the other. It had to be a code.

  I got out a notebook and began scribbling profusely, listing the letters as they originally appeared, and then rearranging them; trying to tease some order out of the chaos. Nothing.

  The letters, twenty-four in total, ran as follows:

  T A R H T N E P E H O R O O E U H B S C A E O Y

  For an hour I sat there, turning the letters around every which way, combining them, and substituting them with different letters, to no avail.

  Until I looked over to my right and saw the spade.

  Now, I am by no means a gardener. Some folks have a green thumb; my thumb is brown and shriveled. I don’t know why. I think it may be a recessive gene in the family because my mom was an avid gardener. Point is: I was no stranger to this particular kind of tool. What I was a stranger to was its handle. Most spades I've seen have a handle that widens toward the end in order to accommodate the palms of modern primates. This one, on the other hand, was perhaps an older model from another time, back before words like "ergonomic" and "comfort grip" entered the vernacular. This was just a single, consistent width from base to spade.