Murder Brewed At Home (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 3) (6 page)

             
Chester Street & Biggs Avenue. 30 yds past large tree on corner.

              "I know where this is," I said.

              "Is it where I think it is?"

              "It's on Kyle Young's running route."

              Lester smiled. "Then it's where I thought it was."

#

              I'd driven by Maggie's house a couple of times. In the span of two days, she'd not been back. Her cell phone had been disconnected. I had no choice but to call in an anonymous missing persons report.

              In the meantime, while Lester was off checking out the area indicated by the flight confirmation note in the dead man's pocket, I felt it was my duty to follow up on the email sent to me by "Kyle Young" and signed by "MC.” If I could nail down that it was indeed Maggie Childsworth who sent that email pointing me toward – if I was correct – Owen Schiff, the husband of Daisy from Whey Cool, I may have a little extra for the police to go on.

              But how to accomplish this bit of snoopery?

              "Hideous," said Mitch the mailman.

              I hadn’t been paying attention to him. We were in our new tasting room, with the smell of freshly cut cedar all around us, but my mind was obviously someplace else. Mitch had a pint of our signature pale ale in front of him.

              "
Now
what's wrong?" I said indignantly.

              "Your malt was fresh for this batch?"

              "You're kidding, right?"

              He shook his head behind another sip.

              "You suggesting I would use anything less than fresh ingredients?"

              "There's an unexpected tartness to this, is all. I thought it may have been because the malt wasn't fresh."

              The stress had gotten to me, and I snapped at him. "Listen, you carbonated lunkhead, if you can’t find a way to appreciate my wares, I suggest maybe you go and haunt whatever corner of the earth exists where they haven’t heard enough about you to ban you for life...yet."

              He sat there, pint in hand, frozen mid-air, with a look of utmost shock and stupefaction on his bearded face.

              He put down his pint, picked up the square of napkin on which it had been resting, wiped the corner of his mouth, and said, "I'm really very sorry."

              "Are you?"

              He stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time. "You're the only one left. They won’t allow me into any other place here in Carl's Cove."

              "So it's
not
because you love my beer."

              "On the contrary, I like the beer. I like the company even more."

              I allowed a reluctant smile to break through. "You could be a little nicer."

              "I don’t know if I could," he said. "I try to be nice. Something happens between my brain and my mouth. I don’t know what it is."

              I pointed to his pint. "That one's on the house."

              He looked at the glass, then at me. "What do you need?"

              "How do you find out the origin of an email someone sent to you?"

              He paused, and then said, "Are you serious?"

              I rolled my eyes. "Yes, Mitchell, I'm serious."

              A smile appeared in the corner of his mouth and he took a deep breath. "You look at who sent it to you. Usually in the header there's a number – usually a set of four numbers of two or three digits each, separated by periods. You call that an IP address. Copy it, and then look it up online. There are a ton of sites that'll help you find the origin of an IP address."

              "That's it?"

              "That's it."

              "That will tell me who sent it?"             

              "No, that will tell you the location. Beyond that, you’re on your own."

              "I guess location helps."

              "Helps what?"

              "Drink your free pint and stop asking me questions. I have to think."

              I picked up a bar rag and swabbed non-existent stains off the bar as I thought. I looked at Mitch.

              "You're a funny guy."

              "But looks aren’t everything?" he answered.

              "No," I said, "really. I'm amused by you. What I'm saying is: it goes both ways. I like having you around. You like my beer. You have impossible standards but they are standards and for that I'm grateful. Just know that. I like having you around."

              He raised his glass with a smirk, sipped, and said nothing.

#

              The IP address pointed me to the Carl's Cove library. It was a crisp morning when I left the house and walked about a quarter of a mile up the road to where the library was.

              Let me explain something. You enter Carl's Cove from the north and all traffic slows to twenty-five miles per hour. That's the speed limit. It's not so bad. You get used to it. Besides, you get to enjoy the scenery as you head toward Main Street. But there's always some entitled punk in a Maserati who thinks he's above it all, some kid who's here for the weekend or something, and
he's
the real reason for the speed limit. The library on the corner of Main and Harper Way is in a state of perpetual renovation from money garnered from the speed trap. I wouldn’t be surprised if the speed limit changed back to forty or even fifty once the place is fully renovated –if it ever is.

              So I sidestepped a giant hole in the paved walkway that was guarded by two cones with a flimsy piece of yellow tape across them. I had to step onto the lawn to do so. There was dew on the ground and I got grass stains on the upper soles of my Batgirl kicks. But I digress.

              I was a woman on a mission.

              The library is housed in a century-old building that looks like a Masonic temple. I think it actually was a Masonic temple at one point. All these ghosts of Masons still haunt the place, probably in the 600 section in the upper west corner, where no one goes. Me, I just had to go to the information desk where the public computer check-in was.

              Librarians, bless their hearts, are notoriously guarded when it comes to information about patrons, and I hope they always are. I'm actually glad my job was as difficult as it was.

              But I'm getting ahead of myself.

              I approached the desk, and there sat the Mother of All Librarians. I actually looked around to see if there were any cameras filming this. For starters, she had her hair up in a tight silver bun. She had on a floral print dress whose material no doubt had once adorned someone's Southern table for Sunday dinner. She was matronly and comforting, soft-voiced, and peered at me over horn-rimmed glasses. For a second there, I was expecting for her to offer me a Werther's Original.

              All this pleasant exterior gave way the moment I asked to see who it was that checked out the computers on such and such a day. The mask came off, and I was met with the coldest stare this side of Mount Everest. It was as if she thought I was a fluffy bunny rabbit looking for food, and then took off her glasses, and cleaned them, and put them on again, and then saw that I was in actuality a carny geek who bit the heads off chickens and was looking to graduate to something less beaky.

              Her answer was an emphatic, "All patron information is confidential."

              Had not her opinion of me as an intrusive identity thief already been firmly established, I would have offered her some free beer as a bribe. Luckily, better angels stayed my mouth.

              She stared at me, as if the sheer force of her gaze was capable of willing me away. It worked, and I sidled off feeling as dejected as a wallflower.

              Before I got too far, I heard someone trying to get someone else's attention. "
Psst
."

              I looked over and saw a pudgy man in his fifties, dyed-brown hair and beard, thick glasses, and...

              "Mitch?" I said.

              He was peering at me from the reference shelves. He had some kind of computer programming manual in his hands.

              "What's the matter with you?" he said quietly, but sharply.

              "Mitch, did you follow me here?"

              "No, it's my day off."

              "You spend your days off in the library?"

              "No, I'm spending today in the library."

              "Huh," I said.

              "Don’t let her see you talking to me. Come around here into the stacks."

              I ducked around the corner and there, surrounded by a wealth of computer knowledge, received a scolding from Mitch.

              "You can't just go up to a librarian and ask her to see someone's private information."

              "It's not private. It's their IP address."

              "It's associated with private information."

              "What if the person was in violation of their rules of online conduct?"

              "Do you have proof of that?"

              I hesitated. "No."

              He nodded. Then looked around the corner. "You have the IP address written down?"

              "Yeah," I said, starting to feel somewhat annoyed by the interrogation.

              "Let me see it," he said, snapping his fingers impatiently.

              I handed it to him with a dagger shooting out of my eyes.

              He looked at it, and then said, "Wait here."

              I watched him approach the library custodian, an older man in overalls – another character out of central casting – with a sad, friendly face and a couple of days' worth of salty stubble on his face. Mitch whispered to the man. The two smiled and laughed. The conversation seemed interminable. And then the miracle happened. Mitch handed the man the slip of paper on which I'd scrawled the IP address.

              "I'll be over in Reference," Mitch said to the custodian in a normal voice as he walked back toward me.

              "Do you mind filling me in?" I said.

              "
Shhh
," Mitch said with a smile. "Watch."

              I did. I watched the custodian make his way over to the information desk, dragging a large garbage pail behind him. I watched him empty the wastepaper baskets from under the desk into the larger receptacle. Then he chatted with the librarian for a moment. And the two shared a chuckle. And then, while she busied herself with something or other, the custodian went to a computer over on the far side of the desk and typed, alternately shifting his gaze from my slip of paper to the computer screen.

              He lifted his head up, then down. Seemed to mumble something to himself. Then he walked over to a large book on the desk and flipped back a few pages. The librarian didn’t seem to care much about what he was doing, and even peripherally moved her coffee cup out of the way for him. I could see that the pages of the book were transparent with little plastic pockets in which held the library cards of patrons using the computers. He stopped on one page and took a card out of the pocket. He then walked back over to where Mitch and I were standing in Reference.

              "Here you go," he said to Mitch, eyed me without a word, and then turned and retrieved his large pail.

              Mitch handed me the card.

              "What's this?" I said, a bit stupefied by the whole procedure.

              "That's your guy."

              "You mean to tell me—"

              "He knows the place inside out. He's here after hours. He cleans up after everyone who walks in and of those doors. You have to know where to go for information. For me, it’s a guy like old Bill there who keeps his eyes and ears open 24/7."

              "You're amazing, Mitch. I mean it."

              He nodded. "Now can I get back to my research in peace?"

              "Of course," I said. I started to walk out, and then turned. "Wait, why am I holding someone else's library card?"

              He shrugged. "It’s not like Bill to just up and steal it. My guess is that it was left here and they tried contacting the person to no avail."

              It was only now that I looked at the card. That is, I looked at the name on the card.

             
Vernon Abel.

             
You don't have to have a degree in advanced mathematics to figure out whom I was going to visit next.