Wrong Side of the Paw

by Laurie Cass

  “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, b
ut 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.