Murder Brewed At Home (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 3) (5 page)

              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.

              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.

              And it got me to thinking about my liberal arts degree. How I took all these random courses in which I learned a lot of great stuff, and subsequently applied none of it throughout my life, save for a reference in a short story or two. One of the courses I took was, wait for it, Ancient Warfare. That's right, yours truly was at one point in her short life ankle-deep in naked Spartans duking it out over a piece of land or a woman or what-have-you. And for some reason I retained some of this stuff. I don’t know why. If I believed in Things Meant to Be for a Reason, I’d say this was providence. But I think sometimes a girl like me with a lint trap for a mind needs lint for her trap every so often, and the luck of the draw ensures that one day it may be some interesting fact I read once about the social structure of mud snail colonies, another day it may be the evolution of the avocado pit. This time, the thing that had lodged in my brain waiting to awaken when needed was the term "scytale.”

              The scytale was an ancient cipher used by the Spartans to send secret messages during times of war. A strip of parchment or papyrus or whatever they used back then was wrapped around a stick and a message was written on it, each letter appearing once per band of paper. When the message was complete, and the paper unraveled, the message was now garbled, and appeared probably in some fashion
exactly
the way mine did now.

              And I looked over at the only other thing that Maggie had told me to take: the spade. And I picked it up. And I wrapped that piece of masking tape around it, forming a type of spiral that reached halfway up the handle of the thing.

              And this is what I saw:

                            THEHOUSE

                            ATPOOHCO

                            RNEREBAY

              It didn’t take me long to insert the proper spaces between letters before I was able to read the message: THE HOUSE ON POOH CORNER EBAY.

              A quick search yielded a few results. Several people were listing various editions of the book on the auction website. One in particular caught my eye. A very old book that was listed at $5000 for a starting price, and looked amazingly like the editions on Maggie's bookshelf, the ones she'd said belonged to her mother.

              The ones she'd said weren't worth anything.

              Well, you bet I checked into this. First of all, the item description listed it as a "First edition, 1924, London – pristine copy.”

              I did a bit of digging. Yes, this was a first edition. No, it wasn't worth five grand.

              It was worth ten grand.

              Whoever listed this book did so with the intention of letting folks bid it up. Five g's was his let-go price.

              The seller was listed as "Cultured_Club". This was his only listing.

              Slightly more digging led me to the discovery that this title was the fourth in a series.

              Care to guess what the other three are? Yep. The ones sitting on Maggie's shelf.

              So I did some more digging. As it turns out, "Cultured_Club" had made a few more appearances online, mainly in some professional culinary arts forums. I didn’t really care about any of the posts, except for one – in which Cultured_Club asks about the origin of true Madagascar vanilla sold in the U.S., and whether or not it would be to his advantage to pick up some regional vanilla when he goes to Madagascar next month, and so on.

              And then I thought. Cultured Club?

              Culture?

              As in cheese?

              If anyone knew about this, it was the one who sent me this clue. I tried calling Maggie's cell phone. The number had been disconnected.

#

              "I've got some news for you," said Lester as we got out of his car and headed toward the beach for a leisurely late-afternoon walk. "I know how you are about these things, so I'm not going to call it
good
news, ok?"

              "Ok," I said, wary of his intent.

              "Just so we're clear on that. I'm making an effort here."

              "And I appreciate that, Lester."

              "We just got the results back from the second autopsy."

              "The second? For Kyle Young?"

              "Yeah, you didn’t know about that?"

              "Um, no."

              "Deaths at home. We always do two autopsies."

              "Is that a thing?"

              "It's a thing here. I guess to rule out suicide in the home for, you know, for insurance purposes..."

              "Say no more," I said. My stomach always churned clockwise whenever I thought about the many ways people profited from death, and the way in which they keep others from profiting.

              "Anyway," he continued, "it seems they found a tiny puncture near the hairline on the back of the neck. Not saying anything here either way, but that could indicate a point of entry for a syringe."

              "Meaning?"

              "Meaning that you were right, Madison? Are you happy now? I said it. We could have a murder case on our hands."

              I stopped just before the line where the pavement ended and the sand began. "So you're convinced?"

              "I'm more convinced than I was before, let's put it that w— excuse me."

              He held up a hand and pulled out his phone to look at a text.

              "Everything ok?" I said, noting the serious look on his face.

              He typed a quick response and then turned and headed back toward the car. "Come and take a ride with me."

              "Uh, ok," I said, hurrying behind. "Where exactly are we going?"

              "To the inlet over by the yacht club," he said, halfway into the driver's seat of his car.

              I got in quickly as he started the engine. I had just gotten my seat belt on as he tore out of the beach parking lot.

              "You mind tell me what's going on at the inlet over by the yacht club?"

              "I don’t mind at all," he said. "They found William Restocruz."

#

              The area was already blocked off and police weren't letting anyone near. It seems the body had been spotted by a Mr. and Mrs. Walter Greeley, a couple spending their tenth anniversary on the water. Lester stepped past the blockade and headed toward the Greeleys who sat hand in hand on a bench near the water. After chatting with them, he went down to the shoreline, where I gathered Mr. Restocruz's body was. I refused to go near it. I'm actually quite squeamish that way. Besides, having seen quite a few dead people within the last few months, I had had my fill, thank you very much. I waited till Lester got back. When he did, I saw he had an evidence bag in his hands.

              "He's a big guy," said Lester. "The water tends to bloat the body, but you can tell he was a body builder. My guys say it looks as though cause of death was a cardiac arrest. Of course, we won’t know for sure till we get the autopsy results."             

              "Cardiac arrest?" I said. "Not for nothin', but he doesn't exactly look like the most unhealthy guy in the world."

              "Could have been using drugs. Steroids. Speed. Anything to enhance his performance."

              "Ok, then why was he out here?"

              He was wearing running shoes. Looks like he may have been out for a run."

              "Like our boy Kyle."

              "I guess you can sort of say that."

              "And I guess he just fell into the water."

              Lester scratched his head and squinted off to the side. "Yeah, that is a puzzle."

              I pointed to the evidence bag at his side. "Is that what he had on him?"

              "Yeah." He handed the bag to me. I held it up to have a closer look.

              His voice softened to a whisper. "Listen, try not to let anyone see you handling that, will you? You're not even supposed to be here."

              "Aren’t you their superior?" I said, turning away from the rest of the cops milling about.

              "I'm in control of the scene, yes, but that doesn’t mean I can disrupt procedure by having a civilian handle evidence."

              The sun was starting to set, and despite the adequate lighting it was hard to get a good look at the bag's contents. I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight to see the contents of the bag more clearly.

              "Madison," Lester scolded.

              "Hush," I said. "What is this in here?"

              "It's a printout for a flight confirmation."

              "Yeah, I realize that. But what's TNR?"

              "I looked it up," said Lester. "It's the code for Ivato International Airport, serving Antananarivo, Madagascar."

              "Madagascar?" I said, almost chuckling. "Are you serious?"

              "Yeah, why?"

              I looked at him. "It's just...interesting is all." I wasn't sure if my boy Lester would appreciate how much work I'd been doing behind his back. "What was he doing going to Madagascar."

              "Well," said Lester, "that's just the thing. I don’t think he was going to Madagascar. Look."

              He donned a pair of nitrile gloves and took the envelope from me. He then extracted the flight confirmation printout and turned it over. On it, handwritten in small, neat, block letters was the phrase: