Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

After a short pause, she texted: U 2. And Eddie.

Smiling, I tapped Eddie on the head with the phone. “Hear that? The smartest kid in the world wants you to have a good night.”

“Mrr,” he said sleepily, and arranged himself deeper into the folds of the blanket.

My final lunchtime efforts had been to leave messages for two other people: my attorney, Shannon Hirsch, and Mr. Goodwin, a library patron in his mid-seventies. Donna had told me that she called her neighbor and he hadn’t heard from Faber in years. “He sounded relieved,” she’d said. “I asked him why, and he said Simon just wasn’t the same after the accident. Too many scars, mental and physical.”

Neither Shannon nor Mr. Goodwin called me, but as I told Eddie the next morning when hauling his carrier out to my car, “I just asked them to call if they knew anything. And I didn’t say it was urgent. So I might never hear from them at all.”

“Mrr!” Eddie said in a harsh way that sounded like criticism.

I shut the door on his second comment and we didn’t speak to each other until we arrived at the bookmobile’s garage, whereupon I apologized for slamming the door on what he had to say and he purred. I did a quick pretrip check of the vehicle, Julia arrived, and the bookmobile got on its way.

A few miles outside of town, Julia pointed out the front windshield. “What fresh you-know-what is this?” she asked in a deep, dark tone.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Pay no attention to it and it’ll go away.”

Julia made a hmphing sort of noise. “Putting your head in the sand. Let me know how that works out.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

“Thanks so much,” I told him. “The support and encouragement you provide is second to none. Without you . . .” I sighed and reached out for the windshield wipers, because it was now an undeniable fact that the low heavy clouds were releasing snow. Lots of snow.

“Time for a new theory?” Julia asked.

“It’ll go away,” I muttered. “Eventually.”

In morose silence, we drove through the thickly falling white stuff and parked at a gas station and convenience store whose owner had been happy to have her place become a bookmobile stop. The first patrons aboard were two youngsters squealing with joy at the weather conditions. As their father climbed the steps, they ran to the front, where Eddie was perched on the passenger’s seat headrest, gave him some pets, then ran back to me.

“Did you see, Miss Minnie?” asked the nine-year-old girl, who was grinning from large ear to large ear. “It’s snowing. Isn’t it pretty?”

I allowed that it was, in fact, pretty. And it was. I liked snow. And winter. And the three S’s of winter: skiing, sledding, and skating. October was a little early to be driving through it, that was all.

“We’re going to make a snowman,” said her eight-year-old brother. “It’s going to be this high!” He stood on his tiptoes, holding his hand above his head as far as he could reach.

His father smiled. “It’s good to dream big,” he told his offspring, then to me he said, “Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a backup plan.”

Laughing, I asked, “You have one in place?”

“With these two? You better believe it. Most times I have three or four.”

They moved forward to the shelves that housed the children’s books, where Julia met them and guided them to the latest Timmy Failure book. As the kids pounced on the volume and started reading it aloud to each other, a number of things started tumbling around in my head.

The early snow, which was making me think about the prewinter boardinghouse chores. How the lottery-winning Boggses flitted from house to house, never coming to a long rest. Mitchell’s comments about being underestimated. How Daphne Raab could be a poster child for passive-aggressive behavior. That Rob Driskell had been dealing with builders like Lacombe for years, if not decades. And about backup plans that involved children.

Children. Leese, Brad, and Mia were Dale Lacombe’s children.

That was what I’d been missing. That was what I hadn’t been taking into account when thinking about the murder.

I took stock of the action in the bookmobile. Julia was greeting a newcomer and the small family was settling down on the carpeted step to read more about Timmy’s adventures, so I felt free to wander up front and pull my phone out of my backpack. I tried Brad Lacombe, but ended up in his voice mail, so I took a deep breath and called Rafe.

“You know it’s Saturday morning, right?” he asked, yawning.

I squashed my mental image of him sitting up in bed, shirtless, his hair tousled with sleep. “Shouldn’t you be up already, cutting big pieces of wood into little ones?”

“Why would I be doing something like that on a morning like this?”

There were too many possible responses to that, so I moved on. “Who do you know that knows a lot about beer?”

“Me.”

“No, you just drink a lot of beer. I need to know about brewing. And not home brewing. I have a question about commercial operations. And it would be best if it was someone who works at the same place Brad Lacombe works.”

“You don’t ask much, do you?” He snorted. “But you did call the right person, because I know the exact person you need to talk to. Jake Yurgelaitis. Hang on, I’ll get you his number.”

As I sat on the edge of the console, Eddie jumped onto my lap and started purring. I half stood, Eddie clinging to my legs, and reached for the pad of paper and pen that lived in the computer desk. I sat back down and wrote as Rafe rattled off the number. “Thanks,” I said. “Will it help or hurt to say I got his phone number from you?”

“Good question,” Rafe said. “I won fifty bucks off him last week at poker, but he took me for sixty the week before, so I figure he still owes me ten—”

A loud crash! came through the phone. “Are you okay?” My breath caught tight in my throat.

“Me, yes,” he said. “Not so sure about this light fixture, though.”

“You’re working? I thought I woke you up.”

“Never said that. Silly you for making assumptions. You know you have a tendency to do that, right?”

And a tendency for spending the rest of my life alone. He started to say something else, but I cut him off. “Gotta go. Talk to you later.” I pulled in a deep breath to clear my head and heart and punched in the number for Jake Yurgelaitis. When he answered, I said, “Hi, my name is Minnie Hamilton, and Rafe Niswander told me you’re the guy to talk to about commercial beer operations.”

“Niswander?” Jake asked. “What’s he been saying about me?”

“That you took sixty bucks off him playing poker a couple of weeks ago.”

He laughed. “But did he tell you he got fifty off me last week?”

“Actually, he told me that first.”

“Sounds like Rafe,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “What’s the question?”

I gripped the phone tight. “In a commercial brewing operation, would it be possible for a nonemployee to intentionally contaminate a batch of beer?”

Jake didn’t say anything at first. Then, he slowly said, “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”

Belatedly, it occurred to me that since Jake and Brad worked at the same place, they were likely friends. On the other hand, they could be enemies and maybe it was Jake who—I cut off my thoughts and asked, “Could you please just tell me?”

“Okay,” he said after a pause. “First off, it depends on how tight your security is. Most places up here are pretty casual, so I’d say the odds are good someone could get inside a building without too much trouble. To actually contaminate a batch, you’d have to time things close, because the beer is tested every step of the way.”