Murder By The Pint (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 1)
Read Murder By The Pint (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 1) Online
Authors: Belle Knudson
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Cozy, #Crafts & Hobbies, #Contemporary Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Humor, #Detective, #Sagas, #Short Stories
MURDER BY THE PINT
Microbrewery Mysteries, Book 1
Belle Knudson
Copyright © 2015
All Rights Reserved
. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
First of all, I know what you’re thinking, and no, the brew biz isn’t just for men. At least that's what they told me when I found out I'd inherited the family business, Darby's Ale House of Carl's Cove, Long Island.
The executor of my father's will, this dour-looking old dude with the worst hair this side of Donald Trump, explained it to me just that way: The brewing business isn’t just for men. Well then, thank you very much. I feel much better now.
Now would you mind explaining to me what a 38-year-old ex-lit professor is supposed to do with a brewery she really wanted no part of from the start?
Let me just say this: I loved my father. And let me just say that I have no problem talking about that guilty sense of relief when the sufferer of a very long illness finally shuffles off this mortal coil. We all felt it. But I also had no problem expressing my indignation at his wonky bequest. Why would he leave the business to me? True, I had experimented with homebrewing beer in my youth, but only because it was expected of me. My entire family has been steeped to the gills in hops and grains for literally as long as I can remember. I don’t remember a single summer without a saison, and I don’t remember a single winter without a Christmas porter. Brewing was as much a part of our home as heating bills and Thanksgiving dinners.
My father would often make test batches in our kitchen. Now let's see, how do I describe the smell of a homebrew? Imagine a bowl of oatmeal. Now dump a cup of rubbing alcohol in it and squeeze some fresh lemon juice in there as well. Smell that? Now throw a loaf of yeasty bread in the oven. There it is: homebrew.
I was sixteen before I realized houses weren't supposed to smell like this.
And before you ask, yes, I was allowed to drink at that age. Younger even. I never got drunk. Wasn't allowed to. But I did take sips and samples, and I was allowed a glass of low-alcohol, or "session,” beer on holidays and special occasions. Listen, if it was good enough for Pip from
Great Expectations
, it was good enough for me. At least Pip's father never made him toast the ancient Egyptians. They invented the stuff, you see. That's what kind of childhood I had.
Despite my moaning, I still have fond memories. The fondest of them all may very well be the sense of Nirvana-like peace I felt after The Talk.
The Talk, as it came to be known soon after it happened, occurred just after my eighteenth birthday. I was graduating tenth in my class, I had a pretty decent social life (more on that dip into the depths later), and I was set on my college plans. Literature. That was it. Nothing more or less. I wanted to be a writer.
I wasn't ignorant. I knew exactly what my father wanted from me, which caused me so much anxiety that I actually developed a skin rash in the latter part of my senior year. Still, somewhere inside his giant, squishy heart, I think he knew. I always had my head buried either in a book or in a journal. Reading or writing. That's pretty much all I did. Every once in a while I'd be summoned to put the book down in order to go and help with milling grains or harvesting the hops we grew in our backyard. And then it was right back to my livelihood. My father saw it. He wasn't ignorant either.
So when I sat him down that night in May – I can remember him in his flannel shirt, one of a collection that he refused to give up until the weather made him sweat – he listened as I poured my heart out. He had a beer in front of him and he nursed it as he listened. And I cried because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
When it was over, he hugged me and told me he only ever wanted me to be happy. And that's when I felt a relief that I'd never felt in my life. My rash went away later that week.
Okay, so fast-forward. The craft beer revolution takes off in America, thanks to pioneers on both coasts. My father and grandfather abandon their old ways and embrace the new. Darby's Beer is reinvented, thanks to savvy PR and great product. The family moves from Syracuse to Long Island and opens up the first Ale House in Port Jefferson. It absolutely destroys everyone. People take the ferry from Bridgeport just to come and have a taste of the new Darby's. We hire the best chef on the island to serve up some delicious pub fare to compliment the brews. I help out in the kitchen on my weeks home from school and waitress in the summer. Life is good. No, scratch that. Life is grand.
I get my master’s. I enter the educational system with all the youthful idealism that is characteristic of folks like me who head toward bright lights without noticing the Mack truck behind them. My idealism gets shot. My passion goes down the toilet. I endure relationships that resemble sub-plots from the worst soap operas you've ever seen. I start getting migraines. I quit.
End of story.
Almost.
Somewhere in there I'd fallen off submitting my stories to literary magazines. And somewhere in there I started again and actually got a few of them published. That's about when the migraines began, for I'd almost forgotten what I wanted to be in the first place: a writer.
Dad died and left me a decent amount of money. I could finally get started on my writing career.
And then the Mack truck finally ran me over.
"
The brew business isn't just for men
..."
As if
that
was my objection!
Before I continue, I have to tell you that somewhere in there as well, the business had expanded enough to open up a new Ale House in Carl's Cove.Let's talk a little about Carl's Cove.
It's where I solved my first murder.
Sorry, am I getting ahead of myself? I do that sometimes. But let's talk about Carl's Cove.
If you've never been there, I recommend it. It's a truly strange place. Picture a New England fishing village populated by Stephen King characters, then toss in a bunch of Hamptons money and see what happens. You get this bizarre amalgam of a town: part scary, part ritzy, part trendy, part old school. And none of it seems to mix properly. But a Hamptons hot spot is a Hamptons hot spot. I don’t know who makes the trends. Maybe there's some secret code word issued over some obscure bandwidth, and the text message goes out to Taylor Swift and Ina Garten and Billy Joel, not to mention Paul McCartney and Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick – because they all seem to show up at around the same time. And suddenly, bang! The new hot spot. In comes more money, in comes more people. And what was once Long Island's biggest whaling village is now a haven for high-end stores selling sixty-dollar T-shirts that say "Blubber's For Lovers" in big glittery letters that scream "I AM SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN SOMEWHERE".
Me, I wanted no part of it. Congrats, I said. Good luck, I said. If you need me, I'll be accepting the Pushcart Prize, thank you very much.
Trouble was, for reasons known to no one but him, my father decided to put everything he had into Carl's Cove. He closed the Port Jeff location and made Carl's Cove his baby. My mother took care of the books. My cousin Gerry was the Master Brewer. Various cousins and uncles filled in here and there when needed.
And then Dad died, and there was no one in the family left to carry on the Darby name. It was me, Madison, Dad's only child, who was heir to a throne made of malted barley.
So I said yes. Of course I said yes. For Dad. No one else.
So I boned up on my brewing techniques, and with a little help from Gerry, re-familiarized myself with the wonderful world of beer.
And wouldn’t you know it, something strange and wonderful happened: I fell in love with it.
Until I discovered a dead body in the alley behind the pub.
I'd arrived in Carl's Cove like a flitting doe, innocent, wide-eyed, and gentle. And like anyone embarking on a new venture, I was eager to dig in. It wasn't ideal life, but there was eagerness there, I'll admit. It was a lot like the first day of school. You just want to get in there, see how the water is, wear your new kicks and crack open that sparkling, untouched notebook.
My cousin Tanya drove me in. We were going to share a house together. Rent in Carl's Cove is not for the squeamish. Better to have a roomie.
It was May, not yet peak season, but peak season was getting close. Here's the thing about Carl's Cove: you kind of want to avoid it between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I honestly don’t know where all those hordes come from. Sometimes I think they're zombies freshly emerged from the earth, only their linen pants are too white. As my mother says about the summer people: summer people, some are not.
But I digress. We rolled in down Main Street. Despite numerous attempts to modernize it due to its steady increase in popularity as a haven for Hamptonites, Carl's Cove has retained pretty much the same appearance it always had. Sure there are a few new storefronts, and it’s guaranteed you'll pay more money in any one of them than you would for the same merchandise twenty miles west of here, but all in all, the place is relatively unchanged. What began in the late 1700s as a whaling town is no longer that. However, the official town logo is a whale and thus there are whales everywhere, from whale-shaped candy to wrought-iron bedposts with whale shapes twisted into the framework. The entire town is whale happy.
We passed by the IGA, owned and operated by the same family for about three generations now. Next to that was a ten-cent drugstore that sells nothing for ten cents, but for some reason they still call it the ten-cent drugstore. "You can pick'em up at ten cents," is a phrase you hear a lot around here.
Junior's pizza is across the street from there. Junior is actually Paoulo Montefiore, born Sol Lipshitz. Sol grew up in Manhattan and worked for Columbo's pizza. At thirty he stole away to Carl's Cove, changed his name to Paoulo Montefiore, and opened up Junior's. The paper nicknamed it Columbo's East.
Toward the end of the street you have your Dock Street Theater, home of the Dock Street Theater Group, a gaggle of artists with a list of patrons boasting some pretty lofty names – mostly retired celebrities – but if this were thirty years ago, the DSTG would be the most envied of any artistic collective in the country.
Next to that is Bebo's Gourmet Ice Cream, hand-churned for twenty-five years and counting. Now listen, you may have had waffle cones, but you haven’t had waffle cones, you know what I mean? I don’t know what Bebo puts in them, maybe she gets some bizarre Trinidadian spice shipped in, or maybe it's some illegal and highly addictive. Maybe the latter. I've more than once found myself sitting up in bed, jumping as if from an ice water shock, not with any nightmarish fear or anxiety, but with an intense craving for one of those crispy, warm, sweet, chewy, checkered treasures peeled steaming from the iron and lovingly rolled and shaped by the tender hands of Bebo herself. You oughta try it. And you oughta try their pear and pomegranate ricotta gelato. Or just go for the vanilla with a drizzle of fudge. Tell them Madison Darby sent you.
Where was I? Ah yes, of course. Exit Bebo's with cone in hand and start walking southwest, toward the water. If you walk slowly – stroll, take in the view, breathe, eat – the moment you've slurped down that last bit of creamy goodness, you've arrived at Darby's Microbrewery. Tanya dropped me off and drove to the new place to get us situated somewhat. And I walked into my future.
I came in to a virtual fanfare. You would have thought the Queen of England or the Pope or Madonna was entering the place. The staff, all eight of them, were lined up. No one was working. The place was at a complete stand still.
A robust, Nordic-featured woman approached – all business attire and sprayed hair tightly wrapped.
"Ms. Darby, welcome to your brewery!" she said jovially.
"
Micro
brewery," I corrected her with a smile.
She returned the smile. "Oh, we don’t use that word, do we fellas?" She threw a glance backward. "Mr. Darby abhorred it."
"Did he now? Well, that's what we are, isn’t it? I mean, we produce about ten thousand barrels a year. Anything below fifteen is officially a microbrewery."
She looked a little uncomfortable, as if something she ate was giving her cramps. "Yes, but Mr. Darby didn’t like the word, that's all. He felt it was limiting to the creative spirit."
Five minutes in town and already I was getting impatient with these people. "Alrighty then, what did he call it?"
The Nordic woman shrugged. "A brewery."
That was Dad for you. Good old utilitarian Dad.
She thrust out a spear-straight arm. "Forgive me," she said, "Hildy Ulfsson, Events Planning and Public Relations for Darby."
I took her hand. It was cold, massive, and perfectly manicured to the point where I though it may have been a fake hand altogether. "Charmed," I said, lying.
"I'd love to show you around," she said.
"And I'd love to be shown," I said, "but I really gotta hit the head."
Everyone I've ever met has tried to dissuade me from using phrases like this. Dad had done a brief stint in the army at the tail end of Vietnam. He wound up being sent to Germany. He was the luckiest draftee in the history of that awful war. Believe me – he never forgot to count his blessings. Anyway, that stint gave him a colorful vocabulary: "head" for toilet, "number 10" for anything bad, "dinky dow" for crazy, "86 it" for discard, and a number of others inappropriate for polite conversation.
Brunhilde looked like I'd just sprouted devil horns. "Certainly," she said.
Emerging from the private bathroom in my father's/my office, I found Brunhilde standing there at full attention, hugging a clipboard.
"I noticed you brought a bag," she said. "Clothes?"
"Yeah," I answered, "And other essentials. I sent a bunch of stuff ahead."
"Ah huh." She stood there smiling at me.
I stood there and smiled back.
"Perhaps you'd like some privacy," she said.
I shook my head. "Mmm no, I'd like to tour the place."
She stepped in closer. "My dear..."
Sorry to interrupt here, but let me just say that if you address me as "my dear" in anything close to a condescending tone, you just might as well punch me in the teeth, for I regard both as different expressions of the same thing: a declaration of war.
"My dear," she said, still smiling, "it may behoove you to dress appropriately for your official presentation before your staff.
I guess she didn't like my tie-dyed tee and black capris. Not to mention my Chuck Taylors with Batgirl on them.
"I think I'm fine," I said. "Let's go."
She seemed to be searching for words. "My dear, there's a reason we send correspondence on fine stationary with our official letterhead, and there's a reason that when we present ourselves to the public we dress accordingly; it conveys an image, one we here at Darby have worked extremely hard to achieve."
Maybe I was just a bit ragged and road weary from my trip, but my patience was cellophane thin now, and Helga here just poked it with an ice pick.
"Ok," I said, "let's get a couple of things straight. First of all, if you're going to be addressing the owner of this establishment, you will cease and desist all usage of the phrase 'my dear,' otherwise it makes me want to punch something. Second, I wear what I wear, you know why? Because it conveys an image.
My
image. It's who I am. If your staff – excuse me – if
my
staff shrinks at the sight of sneakers and tie-dye, well then, I'll just have to get a new staff is all."
I actually felt a little better. This ownership thing was looking like it may actually work out after all.
But I gotta hand it to Helga. She held her own.
"My d—, Ms. Darby, I worked hard at cultivating Darby's presence in Carl's Cove. You have to understand that what I do, I do for a reason."
"Understood," I said.
"And you also have to understand that my formula has worked. Your father hired me to do a job and, confound it, I've done it."
Confound it?
"Furthermore," she continued, "if you and I are going to have a successful business relationship, and if you value the future of Darby, it may behoove you to follow at least some of the advice I offer to you. This is Darby. This is Carl's Cove. A newly transplanted person such as yourself can’t possibly understand what it takes to run this business successfully in such a town. This is where I come in. When your father hired me, he said, 'Hildy,' he said, 'we're gonna have the finest brewery on the planet.' I took that as a direct order. You need me here, Ms. Darby, if I may."
"Point taken," I said. I was done with arguing. Brunhilde was going to be a problem and I was going to have to figure out a way to deal with it. "Now let's have a look around," I said.
It killed her that I didn’t acknowledge anything she'd said with a full heart.
#
For me, this was like walking through my childhood neighborhood. Now I realize not all of you out there may have had the one-of-a-kind experience of growing up in and around breweries, so let me just say that the first time you walk into one, it's probably a bit like stepping into NASA's jet propulsion labs for the first time. Or perhaps a Martian invasion is a better metaphor. Huge, hulking vessels made of stainless steel – mash tuns we call them – loom before you. Inverted cone-shaped vessels known as fermenters loom behind them, like a second flank of alien infantry behind the front line of attack. Thick ropes of silicone tubing wriggle out of their sides like umbilical cords. Freestanding posts with panels of control switches stand like commanding officers. There are hoses and spigots and buckets as well as some specialty equipment you've never seen before. Workers sometimes sport goggles and thick, bright green rubber gloves, some wear chest-high waders, some wear rubber fishing boots. The cement floors are slicked with wetness, the residual of unavoidable spillage swept away into large drains. And there are grains and hops sprinkled about like petals at a wedding.
And then there's the smell. Like I said, I love it. Alcohol meets oatmeal meets lemon drops. It's a pervasive smell that gets into your pores. It's like working in a pizza parlor.
My cousin Gerry was still the master brewer here. I was thankful for that. I hadn't seen Gerry in years. He was my partner in crime when we were kids. He'd put on a stack of pounds since I last saw him. He obviously served as official taster in more than one capacity here. He gave me a huge bear hug that almost squeezed out my spleen. I was truly happy to see him. I felt home.
Brunhilde nudged me on, showing me the equipment and the daily order of operations. She knew her stuff, I'll give her that.
Gone, however, were the various uncles and aunts and cousins who used to mill about the place. Quite literally – milling grain is one such task these honorary employees would routinely perform. My mother still worked here, but she was in semi-retirement. She still oversaw the books from home though.
Throughout it all, Hildy ushered me through the place as if her job depended on it, which I guess it did, for all intents and purposes. She had a consistent professional air that I kind of liked, but it just wasn't what I expected in a microbrewery. That kind of corporate gait is fine for an investment firm. Here, it stuck out like...well, like a business suit in a microbrewery. There's no other way to put it.
When the tour ended, I was exhausted. There wasn't much to see, but I'd travelled all the way from Syracuse, what should have been a six-hour drive but wound up being closer to eight with rest stops and traffic once we got onto the island close to the city. Long Island is the fish and Manhattan is the hook in its mouth, is how I explain it to those who've never been. No matter what time of the day or night, what day of the week, what time of the year, everything comes to a halt once you cross that hook and enter onto the body of the fish. And it stays that way for about an hour or so. Then suddenly you're moving again, only you feel like you've been drained of all your life energy by a psychic vampire in the form of a toll collector. And then it's three hours before you hit Carl's Cove on the other end of the island, the southern tail of the fish, or the South Fork, as it's known by those who live on it.
And speaking of live, the house was a cute little cottage close to Main Street. Just big enough for two people, as long as they took turns breathing. The place had been built in the late 1700s, along with most of Carl's Cove. It was one of a family of houses all sort of crammed in together along this stretch of road. None of us boasted anything resembling a front yard; just a tiny piece of property suitable for landscaping with flowers, and a waist-high fence of white pickets with a quaint little swinging gate out front. Up the stairs and into the house, I was treated to country-style claustrophobia at 2500 dollars a month – a bargain for Carl's Cove.