Wrong Side Of The Paw

Chapter 17

In my search for knowledge, I poked around with Google, used every type of social media in my librarian’s arsenal, and made phone calls to everyone I could think of who might have any useful information.

What I found out from my lunchtime Internet efforts was a Simon Faber owned a house in Independence, Missouri, that had been listed for sale at $245,000. I found a Simon Faber who’d been listed as a speaker to the Rotary Club of Sacramento, California, on the topic of how increasing accessibility would increase retail sales. I also learned that Simon Faber had self-published a book on growing roses. Whether or not any of these Fabers was the right one, I did not know.

In the afternoon, all the voice mail messages I’d left at noon came rolling back. Kristen told me she remembered the car accident, but couldn’t have given me Simon Faber’s name if her life had depended on it. “I was maybe twelve years old,” she said. “Did you really expect me to remember?”

“You can remember every amount of every ingredient in every dish you’ve ever cooked,” I replied. “Why not one guy’s name?”

“Duh,” she said. “I care about the cooking. People, not so much.”

There was a bizarre disconnect in her logic, but I let it go.

“Does this have anything to do with Dale Lacombe’s murder?” she asked, suspicion strong in her voice.

“Not sure,” I replied, and said a quick good-bye before she could start scolding me.

My aunt Frances was next to call back, apologizing for leaving me all alone the previous night in the boardinghouse.

“Eddie kept me company,” I said. “Besides, it’s expected that affianced couples spend the night together every so often. That’s if they’re not already cohabitating.”

“Shacking up?” She laughed. “At my age?” Then she told me what she could recall about Simon Faber. “He lived out on the north shore road, a few doors down from a cousin of Everett’s.” She paused at the mention of her long-deceased husband, then went on. “I remember Everett’s cousin saying Simon was strictly Memorial Day to Labor Day. Nothing before, nothing after. It was far more common back then. Now folks come up all year round.” She sighed. “Almost makes you want to move to the Upper Peninsula.”

I’d heard that comment many times from others, but no one ever seemed to pack up and go. I loved the UP, but I loved Chilson more. “Anything else?” I asked. “About Faber?”

“He was a big antique car buff,” she said. “He built a garage at his cottage, which in those days was very unusual, because he didn’t want his cars to get any unnecessary exposure to sun and rain and wind.”

Rafe’s return call that evening, on the other hand, was less useful. I was on the couch reading, with Eddie on my lap, when my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen and went all tingly when I saw Rafe’s picture smiling at me. I took in a long breath and thumbed on the phone. “Hey.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“You don’t remember Dale Lacombe’s car accident?”

“I’m lucky if I remember what I had for breakfast this morning.”

“You always have the same thing for breakfast,” I pointed out.

“See my problem?”

My laugh turned into an inexplicable sob that I forced into a cough. “You really don’t know anything?”

“Nope. Why do you want to know?”

“Just looking into some things for Leese,” I said vaguely. “Do you know anyone who might know what happened to Simon Faber?”

“Nope,” Rafe said. “I was just a pup back then and he was a summer guy who lived out on Janay Lake. We didn’t cross paths.”

“You are no help,” I said. “But thanks for calling.”

“Anytime I can be less than useful, you know where I live.”

I shut down the phone, knowing that my former habit of dropping by his fixer-upper was gone for the foreseeable future. To keep from dwelling on that depressing topic, I made myself think about who else might have information about Simon Faber.

“You know what?” I asked Eddie, who was happily putting my legs to sleep. “I should ask Dana Coburn.”

A few months ago, the geniuslike young Dana had helped me with the history of one of the original Chilson families. Since then, she and I had texted each other on a regular basis (with her parents’ permission, of course), and we were developing a solid friendship.

I sent a quick text to Dana. Know anything about a Simon Faber? Car accident 23 years ago, east of Chilson. Sure enough, a few seconds later, I saw the sequence of fading in and fading out dots that meant she was texting me back. Then the message came through: No.

Thanks anyway, I texted in return, and was about to tuck the phone away when she came back with: Want me to find out?

My reaction was immediate and instinctive. No. The last thing I wanted was for Dana to get mixed up in a murder investigation, even peripherally and from her winter home in Chicago. Just wondered. Have a good night.

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.”

“But it could be done?”

“Well . . .” He hesitated. “Sure.”

That was good, but I needed more. “Would it be hard? I mean, could someone who’s never worked in a brewery do it?”

“I’d say so. It would take a little know-how, but someone could probably figure out how by spending a couple of hours on the Internet.”

After thanking him, I ended the call and started another one.

“Hey,” Josh said. “Don’t tell me that bookmobile laptop is down again. I spent half the day yesterday doing the upgrade.”

“It’s fine.” As far as I knew. “I have a question. Did you hear about all the servers at Bowen Manufacturing going down?”

“Yeah. Kind of weird. That shouldn’t happen.”

Exactly. I pressed on. “Could someone have done that intentionally? Someone who didn’t work there?”

“Depends on their security measures.”

It was déjà vu all over again. “But it could be done?”

There was a hesitation about the same length as the one with Jake. “Sure. If you knew what you were doing.”

“What if you only kind of knew what you were doing?”

He snorted. “Then it might be even easier.”

“Seriously?”

“No. You’d have to know something about computer servers, but if you had half a brain and knew what kind of servers they had, you could probably do some Internet surfing and figure out what to do. Might take a few hours, but it could be done.”

I thanked him, ended the call, and sat there, thinking.

“Minnie?” Julia asked.

Blinking away the web of assumptions I was spinning, I got to my feet, deposited Eddie on the headrest, and went to do my job.

• • •

As soon as the returned bookmobile books were hauled through the snow and into the library and the bookmobile was tucked in for the night, Julia headed off and Eddie and I made our way to my car. Just as I was buckling the carrier in, my phone rang. It wasn’t anyone in my contacts list, but it was a local number and seemed familiar.

“Minnie?” a man asked. “This is Jake Yurgelaitis. We talked earlier today.”

Rafe’s beer guy. “Sure. What’s up?”

“Well, your question about maybe an outsider contaminating the beer got me wondering, so I started looking at the video from our security cameras for the week before those people got sick.”

Video. Security video. Why hadn’t I thought to ask if they had security cameras? Mainly because it didn’t seem to me that beer was worth protecting, but I knew millions, if not billions, of people disagreed with me. “The police haven’t looked at those?”

“Why would they?” he asked. “No one thought there was anything going on. Until now anyway.”

The world went still. “You saw something?”

“These cameras only activate when there’s movement, so it really didn’t take long to review the files, but yeah, I saw a guy I’ve never seen before climb the stairs to the top of that tank. I couldn’t see what he was doing—his back was to the camera the whole time he was up there—but when he came down the stairs, I got a good look at his face.”

My chest was tight and I reminded myself to breathe. “What did he look like?” My words tumbled out. “Young? Old? Fat? Thin? Unique tattoo?” Preferably one with a name and an address.

“Old,” Jake said promptly. “He was using a cane.”

That narrowed it down a little, but the fastest-growing demographic in this part of Michigan was the upper age bracket. “But you saw his face,” I said. “Do you think you’d know him again if you saw him?”

“You bet,” Jake said confidently. “On one side he had this thing going on with his skin, like he’d had nerve damage or something. And his eyes didn’t track together. It was kind of creepy, watching it.”

Bob Blake? What on earth would he be doing there?

My brisk walking pace slowed as the connections finally snapped into place with a solid click. Donna’s neighbor had said Simon Faber had gone through all sorts of surgeries, including orthopedic, eye, and plastic. Bob Blake had difficulties walking and had something odd with his face and his eye.

All of which meant, at least to me if not to law enforcement and the court system, that Bob Blake was Simon Faber.

And this meant that Simon Faber was Leese’s new client. The client she was going to meet with on a Saturday, but which one? Today was Saturday. Was Leese going to be alone with the man who’d killed her father, the man who’d sabotaged the careers of her brother and sister? No. No no no . . .

I thanked Jake for his call, asked him to save the video for the police, cut him off practically in midsentence, and trying not to panic, called Leese.

“Hello, this is Leese Lacombe,” said her voice mail.

“Call me as soon as you get this,” I said. “It’s an emergency.” I tried her land line and got the same response. I looked at Eddie, who was sitting so close to the front of his carrier that his fur was sticking out through the wire gate.

“I have to go out to Leese’s house,” I told him. “What do you want to do? Go home to an empty boardinghouse”—because Aunt Frances and Otto were headed to Traverse City for a concert at the City Opera House— “or go for a drive in the snow?”

“Mrrowww!” he said.

“Glad you agree,” I said, starting the car and turning the defroster on high. “No time like the present to remember how to drive in the snow. Steer in the direction of the skid, brake gently, anticipate what the other guy is doing. All that.” I popped the trunk and rummaged around for the snow brush, finding it underneath a folding chair and next to the jumper cables.

By the time I cleared the hood, front windshield, roof, rear windshield, and dropped the brush into the backseat, the car was warm and toasty. “Timing is everything,” I told Eddie, who, judging from the tone of his snores, agreed completely.

Driving my small sedan through five inches of wet, heavy, slushy snow was far different from driving the bookmobile, and I used the brakes tentatively as I approached the intersections.

“This isn’t so bad,” I said to an uncaring Eddie. “I’m glad you have such confidence in my driving skills that you can sleep through all of this. Some cats would be all tensed up and whining.”

“Mrr,” he said through what I assumed was a yawn.

I glanced over and saw that he’d repositioned himself and the tip of his nose was now sticking out between the wires. “Nice look. Could you possibly look any dorkier than you are looking right now?”

“Mrr.”

“Wow, I could have sworn you said you could, in fact, look even dorkier, but I don’t see how . . . oh, geez . . .” I stopped having a one-sided conversation with my cat and focused on my driving. A deer had tiptoed out of the woods and was standing in the middle of the road.

I tapped the brakes and felt the metallic rush of adrenaline surge through my body. The deer, a buck with at least six points on his antlers, stared straight at me.

“Move!” I shouted.

Either he heard me, or far more likely, he had already decided it was time to move, because he suddenly leapt into action. His hooves skittered on the road’s snowy surface but eventually found traction, and he sped off the road and into the same trees from whence he’d come.

“Mrr!”

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that we almost hit a deer and . . . oh, never mind.” Since he hadn’t seen the deer, talking to him about it would make even less sense than our normal conversations.

For the rest of the ride out to Leese’s house, though, my thoughts were a little jangled. Coming so close to hitting the deer had unnerved me; it was the closest I’d ever come. I’d lived Up North more than four years and everyone told me it was only a matter of time before I hit one, but I was planning on being the first resident of Tonedagana County to never ever hit a deer in her entire life.

“Of course, that’s assuming I live here the rest of my life.” The thought was a new one. I shook my head, but the idea stuck. There was no real reason for me to stay. Assistant library director jobs turned up all over the country at regular intervals. I might not be able to work driving a bookmobile into the mix—okay, almost certainly I wouldn’t be able to—but you never knew.

“What’s left for me here?” I murmured. The boardinghouse would soon be no more. Aunt Frances was getting married and wouldn’t need my company. Kristen’s single status was also on the edge of change. Jennifer was settling into place as library director, and she seemed intent on making so many changes that I could easily anticipate a future in which Minnie didn’t play a part. And since Rafe was never going to be more than my friend, maybe it was time for me to think about moving.

I was young and almost debt-free. If I wanted to travel, if I wanted to live in another part of the country, now was the time. After all, I had no real reason to stay.

“Except I don’t want to go,” I said out loud.

Not in the least. Travel was all well and good, and as soon as I finished my last student loan payment, I wanted to plan a trip to Wales, with the primary intent of visiting Hay-on-Wye, a town famous for its plethora of bookstores. “Just imagine,” I told Eddie. “A town of fifteen hundred people that has more than twenty bookstores. How cool is that? Then I want to visit all the horse race courses from the Dick Francis books. And remember when I read 84, Charing Cross Road? I wonder if there really is something at that address. What do you think? Want to come along to find out?”

“Mrr,” said my cat.

I smiled, then felt a wave of sadness. Who would travel with me? Though I had no real problem traveling alone, it would be more fun to go with someone. But who?

“Stop it,” I told myself as I flicked on the turn signal to make a left into Leese’s driveway. This was no time to feel sorry for myself. Leese and Brad and Mia were the ones who mattered at this point. I needed to stop the self-pity and focus on the situation at hand.

“Hey, look,” I said, even though Eddie couldn’t see much more than the car’s console. “Someone’s here.”

“Mrr.”

“How can I tell? There are lights on in the front room and there are some weird-looking footprints angling out of the tire tracks in the driveway and leading to the front door.” Not only did the footprints look strange, but the very existence of footprints was odd because there was no car in the driveway. Maybe it was a neighbor, or—I had it!—an elderly client who had been dropped off by a caretaker or a loving family member. And that was why Leese hadn’t answered the phone; she was busy doing lawyer stuff.

It was about time something good happened to Leese and I was smiling as the car slid to a stop.

“Okay, pal.” I unbuckled my seat belt. “This shouldn’t take long, so—”

“Mrr!”

“You’ll be fine in here. It’s not that cold out. Besides, you have a fur coat and—”

“Mrr!!”

My shoulders went up in a vain effort to cover my ears and protect them from the piercing sound of my cat’s shrieks. “Eddie, geez, will you—”

“MMMMMRRRRRRRR!!!”

“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll bring you with me, okay?”

He instantly subsided. “Mrr,” he said quietly.

I shook my head as I unbuckled his carrier. “Some days it’s really hard to believe you don’t understand a word that I’m saying. Okay, maybe you understand ‘kitty,’ and your name, and I think you have a good idea what the word ‘no’ means, even if you pay no attention whenever I say it to you. And you know ‘treat’ and ‘outside.’”

We were now out in the actual outside, and inside was clearly a better place to be. A stiff wind was blowing out of the northwest, bringing with it pellets of snow that beat against my face.

“N-not v-very nice out here,” I said, my words coming out in a stuttering shiver. I’d dressed appropriately for a bookmobile day in late October, not for walking into the teeth of the season’s first winter storm. We reached Leese’s back door and I knocked, though if she was with a client in the front office, she might not hear. I hesitated about barging inside, but a thumping buffet of wind convinced me to move before Eddie and I became casualties of the storm.

I opened the door, hurried inside, and closed the door behind us.

“Leese?” I called. “It’s just Minnie.” And Eddie, but I didn’t feel the need to announce that, especially if she was with a client.

There was no answering reply.

Huh.

Well, maybe she and her client were deep in a serious discussion and didn’t want to be interrupted. I stood there, listening, and heard nothing except the hum of Leese’s refrigerator.

“Now what?” I asked.

Eddie, however, had no words of advice.

“That’s a first,” I muttered as I walked up the few steps to the kitchen. I set the cat carrier down and gave my cat a long look. If I left him in the carrier, he was bound to start howling again, and I didn’t want to interrupt Leese’s consultation.

I set the carrier on the floor and unlatched the door. “Be good,” I said, and set him free.

Eddie, being Eddie, continued to stay inside. As I watched, he pushed himself into the back corner and made himself small. Which is a hard thing for a thirteen-pound cat to do, but cats are amazing creatures.

I went to the cupboard for a bowl, added water, and put it in front of Eddie, who didn’t even sniff at it. I rolled my eyes at my contrary cat, returned to the cupboard, and got myself a glass of water.

Still, I didn’t hear a sound from the front room.

Was it possible that Leese had gone somewhere and left the lights on? It didn’t seem likely, but the complete silence was getting on my nerves. I tried to remember what the tire tracks in the snow had looked like, how filled they’d been with snow, but I’d been so busy with my thoughts that I hadn’t paid much attention.

I stood at the sink, peering out through the window at the driveway, but couldn’t tell. A tire track expert I was not. Besides, the afternoon was already growing dark.

“Well.”

Leese was gone. She had to be.

Feeling a little like a creepy burglar, waltzing into someone’s home when it was empty, I washed my cup, dried it, and put it away. I did the same with Eddie’s untouched water bowl and was about to head out when I decided to poke my head into the front office, just to make sure everything was okay.

I crossed the kitchen and the formal dining room, which was functioning more as a library than anything else, and went into the front hallway, where there was a door to her office. It stood slightly open. By this time I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure that Eddie and I were the only ones in the house, so I pushed at the door with little concern.

Leese was sitting behind her desk, staring at me with wide eyes. She yelled something, but I couldn’t hear what she said because her mouth was gagged shut. Her ankles were tied to the chair and her hands were tied behind her back.

I rushed forward, hands out, reaching for her gag, wanting to help, wanting to find out if she was okay, when strong male hands grabbed at me from behind.

“Don’t move,” growled a deep voice.