Pint of No Return

Pint

of

No Return

A Callie Stone Mystery

L.M. Fortin

Copyright © 2015 L.M. Fortin

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is either entirely coincidental or presented in a fictional manner and not as fact.

Cover design by L.M. Fortin

ISBN-13: 978-1512253986

ISBN-10: 1512253987

DEDICATION

For my Dad,

from whom I inherited a

fine appreciation of a good beer.

Prologue

She woke in total darkness.  This wasn’t the pleasant feeling of waking in the darkness of a cool room, lying in her bed beneath her grandma’s quilt.  There was no moonlight streaming through the curtains, no sound of the loose gasket on the toilet letting water run what seemed like every five minutes.  She’d have to fix that if she got out of here.  When she got out of here.  This wasn’t the darkness of a starry night lying out in the fallow field at the farm waiting for shooting stars to come cascading across the sky.  This wasn’t the inhospitable dark of the early morning paper route she had as a kid.  The newspaper’s shift from afternoon to morning delivery brought an end to her paper delivery days.   The dawn’s silence always unnerved her and although she could hear people or animals approaching her from a mile away, she felt uncomfortable without the usual ambient noise of the streets in the afternoon. Plus, she hated getting up that early in the morning. 

No, this darkness was complete, devoid of light and sound.  Maybe if she figured out where she was, she could figure a way out of it.  She groaned — just to test the acoustics, she told herself.  There was no echo, only a flat sound, indicating the space was small.    The air was warm and for a moment she was concerned with the oxygen level of this close space.  But then she reasoned if there had not been enough oxygen, she wouldn’t have woken up after being hit on the head.  She dismissed that thought.  Ah, hit on the head.  She had been attributing the feeling of water rolling down her forehead to sweat, but now wondered if it was blood.  Her head pounded so much she couldn’t localize the pain to one spot.  And head wounds always bled a lot anyway, right?  But if blood was still flowing, most likely that meant she hadn’t been here long.  Wherever “here” was.

The smell of alcohol hung heavy in the air.  She had been in several breweries the last few days, and the smell had become so pervasive she had stopped recognizing it as a unique odor until this moment.  She thought of Grandma Minnie’s blackberry pie.  Now there was an aroma to bottle and sell.  Callie hadn’t even let the last pie cool before she was digging into the thickened mass of berries surrounded by crust that was made the old way, with lard.  Callie realized the lard in the crust made the pie decidedly un-vegetarian.  She also realized her mostly vegan mother knew this, and Grandma Minnie knew she knew this, and it was part and parcel of the give and take between the two of them.  Mom ate the pie anyway, although she always took the smallest of pieces.  Callie could easily have eaten the crust by itself.  She wondered if she could get Grandma Minnie to make crust sticks just like bread sticks.  Then she could dip them in blackberry jam to increase the ratio of crust flavor to filling flavor.  She wondered if her random thoughts were the result of an oxygen starved brain. 

Her hands were tied behind her back and the rope seemed to be attached to a rope tied to her feet, so she couldn’t fully stretch out her body.  She was arched backwards, not painfully, but she couldn’t bend forward more than an inch or two.  There was some type of tape over her mouth and she could only breathe through her nose.  Good thing this wasn’t allergy season in Skinner.  Bending first forwards and then backwards, she could feel a wall both in front of and closely behind her.  Stretching her fingers behind her, she brushed the back wall.  It was rough and felt like wood and was slightly sloped both upwards and downwards.  There were grooves in the wood, spaced at regular intervals.  She moved her knees towards the front and discovered the front wall felt sloped as well. 

She felt sweat trickle down her back.  On second thought, having her arms and feet tied up behind her was becoming uncomfortable.  Well, thinking that way wasn’t helping get her out of her predicament.  She lifted her head off the ground and leaning forward, touched her nose to the rough surface.  It was definitely wood with a strong scent of beer.  Beer smell, sloped wooden sides with grooves?  Well, at least she now knew she was tied up inside of a barrel.

She could even picture the exact one.  Although many breweries had stopped using wood in the mid-20th century, the romance of the early origins of beer were on display in almost every tap house and brewery she visited.  Porous wood, with its potential for bacteria and passing off odd odors to the beer had mostly given way to modern stainless steel tanks and kegs.  That didn’t stop today’s purveyors of spirits from decorating their walls with cask fronts and sprinkling a few barrels around their tasting rooms.  As this one was large enough not to be too claustrophobic when it held a person, she thought it was one of the large display casks that sat on top of the bar, with the name of the brewery emblazoned on the front, making a perfect backdrop for tourist photos. 

She wondered how it was anchored on the bar.  She didn’t seem to be laying on any large bolts that could be conveniently unscrewed.  She supposed it had to meet some brewery safety standard lest it roll off and bowl over some unsuspecting ale drinker, sipping his umpteenth beer of the day while on a tasting tour and not light enough on his feet to dance out of the way.  If the barrel was on the countertop and she managed to get it rolling one direction or the other, what happened to her if it hit the floor?  Would she and the barrel both break?  Or possibly, as in old movie comedies, would she just go merrily rolling along until stopped by some other more comic incident?  

Then came the smell she had been anticipating, but hoped wouldn’t come.  Smoke.  Her assailant had threatened to set fire to the place and now kept that promise.  She thought she could already feel the temperature in the barrel going up, but knew that was only her imagination.  Probably only her imagination.  The smoke helped her decide as she knew the smoke would cause her to asphyxiate long before any actual flames reached her.  Better to take the possible chance of injury crashing on the barroom floor over the certain death by smoke or fire. 

Bound as she was, she couldn’t set up a traditional rocking motion back and forth, but maybe she could get one going that was more front to back.  She scooted her legs in front of her, head to the back, and tried to angle herself diagonally along the bottom of the barrel.  She still had to stay on her side as her hands and feet wouldn’t allow her to lay flat on her back.  Callie began trying to rock back and forth, trying to find some way for the barrel to release itself from whatever was holding it on the counter.  The action strained her abs.  How many times had she told herself to get a gym membership?  She swore to herself that if she got out of here, she’d spend three hours a week, minimum, working out.

She could feel the barrel shiver slightly, but it wasn’t the sort of shiver that implied a rolling movement.  In frustration, she kicked her feet and thumped them on the bottom of the barrel.  Immediately she groaned.  The only thing she was going to cause with that action was a dislocated shoulder. 

But the thump seemed to generate another noise.  She could swear she heard an intake of breath, or a sniffing sound.  Maybe someone was in the bar after all.  She grunted as loudly as she could and ignoring the pain in her shoulders, brought her feet down again.  She was rewarded with a bark.

Hops!  She could picture the compact Brittany spaniel and the red bandanna he wore tied around his neck.  She groaned and hit her feet on the bottom of the barrel once more.  The dog started barking constantly, seemingly at the barrel, from what she could tell.  For a moment, the barking was loud, but then faded away as Hops ran away.  Callie gnashed her teeth in frustration.   However, she reasoned, if the dog was there, there were also people.

Someone would come and find her.  She was sure of it.  She crossed her fingers as she kept on pounding her feet against the barrel.

Chapter One

The leaves were beginning to turn and after a fine summer at the farm the days were winding into September and autumn in Skinner.  Callie was feeling more pressure to find a place of her own to live. Although she liked living in the cottage more than she thought she would, she was conscious of being a burden on her mother.  Going into winter wasn’t as busy from a farming standpoint as the spring would be, so she knew her mother didn’t need the cottage for workers.  Callie needed to find another place to live before the end of winter.

During the summer Callie’s mom, as she had promised, had a closet added to the back of the cottage.  They moved the bed a few feet forward from the wall it was lying against and built another wall.  That wall extended from the sides of the bed by about a foot on each side.  That created a large open space behind the wall that was very much like a walk-in closet.

Coral had hired Noah Buck, a workman recommended by the couple who ran the hazelnut farm.  At first, he didn’t seem to understand the need for a large closet to be added in the back of the cottage.  Callie wasn’t sure if that was because he didn’t think it was necessary, or if he didn’t know how to build one.  Once Callie had made him understand his opinion on the use of said closet was not important to any of them, he got into the spirit of the thing. 

Both she and Coral were pleased by the results.  Noah had visited a store run by the local Habitat for Humanity chapter that sold recycled and repurposed building materials.  He fashioned the wall out of oak planks that had been flooring in its previous life, making the closet attractive, as well as what her mother considered sustainable.  The project had taken over a month.  Since then, Callie often found Noah in the kitchen, supposedly on his way to work at one of the nearby farms, stopping in for coffee and Grandma Minnie’s blueberry muffins.  Good thing Callie had a coffee maker since Coral and Grandma Minnie didn’t drink any.  He probably would have just brought his own, Callie thought, as Grandma Minnie’s muffins were more than enough reason to visit her kitchen.

Callie had finished her chores, dressed and headed to the house for breakfast.  Noah was sitting at the kitchen table.  He wore his daily outfit of a faded Chicago Cubs baseball cap with his sunglasses placed on the visor.  She had never seen him with the hat off, but could tell from the short stubble at the back of his neck that he most likely had light brown hair although it was flecked with gray.  Callie thought he might be a few years older than her mother.  He had on the same dark t-shirt and jeans he always wore.  Callie assumed he had a number of these shirts in dark blue, black and brown, as his outfits didn’t seem to vary from day to day except for shirt color.  She wished she could find a simple look like that and wear it every day. 

“What are you going to do with the windfall off of the apple trees?” Noah reached across the table to get butter for his second muffin of the morning.

“I’m not sure.  I made cider last year, but it’s such a messy process,” Coral said.  “I think I want to try something different.”

“I was talking with the Martins and they said they wouldn’t mind some for their goats.”  As Coral already had an agreement with the Martins to trade her own goat’s milk for their goat cheese, she found this idea appealing.  “Is there something special about feeding apples to goats?”

Callie rolled her eyes at Grandma Minnie.  Coral and Noah could talk any farming idea down to its last detail. Grandma Minnie was in one of her usual handmade smocks, one patterned with lilacs, but Callie realized her mom wasn’t wearing a Grandma Minnie made shirt, but was instead in a flattering gray and pink cotton blouse. Who was she dressing to impress?

Putting aside thoughts of her mother’s clothes, Callie said, “I’ll get a coffee in town.”

That caught Coral’s attention away from apples, goats, and Noah.  “Do you need the truck?”  Callie had yet to get a car. 

“If it’s available.  Otherwise, maybe you can just drop me off?”

“No, I’ll probably be sticking around the farm today, so it’s all yours.”

“What are you up to?” asked Grandma Minnie.

“I’m going to be meeting with some real estate folks to see if there’s someone I like enough to help me find a place.”

“You have a place here as long as you want it, Carline,” said Coral using Callie’s full name.

“I know Mom.  I just don’t want to stay so long that you don’t want me anymore.”

Coral laughed.  “I’ll let you know if that happens.”

After a morning spent meeting with several real estate agents and selecting a woman named Janna Cates, Callie felt she needed a break and stopped in at the Cloudburst Pub.

Callie hadn’t realized the wide variety of neighborhoods Skinner offered.  As a child, she had lived first on a street of nearly identical ranch homes and later in the more rural outskirts of town where her mother still was now.  In between those two locales were bungalows built in the ‘40’s, commune style homes if you wanted to explore group living through your inner hippie, and modern sleek condominiums.  Callie supposed the problem was one of too much choice or that she didn’t know in what type of house she wanted to live.

Jeremy Bilson was at the bar.  “Hey, Jeremy.  Nice stripe.”  Jeremy had added an orange stripe to the top part of his short spiked blond hair.  She sat down at the bar.

“I thought it was appropriate as we’re heading into fall.”  He wore his usual blue button down shirt and khaki pants, with a white apron tied around his middle.

“I always thought of September as the height of summer.  It’s always so nice here even if the rest of the country is beginning to cool down.  I think this is my favorite time of year in Skinner.”

“What?  Not a fan of the rainy spring?  Or the rainy winter?  Or, come to think of it, the rainy summer?”

She laughed.  “See, that’s exactly what I mean.  September seems to have the right amount of rain and sun.  This is the month I always remember how great it is to live here.”

“So you’re staying, for certain?”

“Yep.  I drove all my stuff back from New York last week.  Although I haven’t unpacked any of it, so I guess I can take off again if I want.”

“Why haven’t you unpacked?”

“I’m looking for a place to live.  I like my mom’s cottage, but I feel like I’m taking advantage of her.  She needs more help on the farm than I can give most of the time.”

“Coral Stone was never one to keep her thoughts to herself,” said Jeremy.  “If she didn’t want you there, I’m pretty sure she’d find a way to let you know.”

“I think I keep my grandma entertained,” she said.  “I give them something novel to argue about.”

Jeremy took her order, coming back with her favorite fish tacos a few minutes later.  As he was moving around the bar helping other customers, Callie couldn’t help thinking he was keeping his eye on her.  She was right, because as soon as she finished eating, he came back to where she was sitting. 

“So, if you’re staying in Skinner, what are you going to be doing?  I mean, other than working on the farm.  Are you looking for a job?”

Callie had been asking herself the same question on her long drive back from New York.  She had come to some conclusions about herself.  She truly enjoyed her profession and wanted to find something where she could keep organizing events.  She was even toying with the idea of starting her own company, but she was unsure that Skinner had enough events to support something like that.  Most people ran their own events, never thinking they could use professional help.  Somehow, she had to find a way to show it was worth the money to hire an event manager.

She shrugged.  “I’m not sure.  I know I want to stay with events, but I’m not sure how to get started without working for a hotel or something.  I have a little breathing space as far as money, so I’d like to try being out on my own.”

“Well, as you’re sort of between gigs, I may have a suggestion for you.  Have you ever run a brew fest?”

She shook her head.  “No.  I’m assuming it’s a place where people go to drink beer?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that.  There are usually dozens of brewers, each who get a table and they serve small samples of their beer.  It’s an opportunity for them to offer something new and see what people think or just advertise an old favorite.”

“So it’s like a trade show with booths and the like, but all the booths represent breweries?”

“Exactly.  The Skinner Bru-topia has been around for about ten years now, but year before last the major sponsor pulled out and the event got sold to some new organizers.  I think they could use a little help improving the event.”

“What’s your interest in this?” asked Callie. “And why me? I mean, I’ve never run a brew fest.” 

“Whatever is good for beer in Skinner is good for the Cloudburst Pub,” he said.  “You had never run a slug queen pageant before and look how well that turned out.”

She shook her head, thinking of the events of the past summer and the death of one of the pageant contestants.  The mayor turned out to be a murderer and one of the other contestants a drug dealer.   “Well, I guess the things that didn’t go well were really out of my control.”

“Exactly.  I have total faith if you can survive that, a brew fest will seem like a walk in the park.  What can go wrong?”

The next day, Callie drove her mom’s truck and parked in downtown Skinner.  The address Jeremy gave her was along one of the city’s main thoroughfares.  At one stage in the history of Skinner, the council had closed down McKenzie and Broadway Streets to car traffic, in order to make what they imagined would be an environmentally friendly car-free zone for shopping.  While the idea seemed nice on paper, in execution, the weather in Skinner didn’t lend itself to an outdoor shopping mall.  Instead of attracting more shoppers, the area gained more of Skinner’s population of people who were homeless.  Closing the roads to vehicles created a safe place to sleep without noisy traffic to disturb them.  Although the city council was pro-homeless, the potential shoppers found their presence a drawback to the whole pedestrian mall experience.  In the late 90’s the council saw the error of its ways and once again opened the area to car traffic. The shoppers and diners returned and businesses once again began to flourish.  However, the homeless had not departed and the two now lived in an uneasy coexistence.

Callie passed by the corner where her homeless friend Jacob usually resided, but he wasn’t there.  Since the mayor’s garden had been dug up and not replanted, she assumed he had found another corner better equipped to provide him lots of foot traffic for his panhandling.

Callie got to the Barley and Sheaf Taphouse just a few minutes before noon and found the door locked. There was a bench, so she sat there to wait for Walt and Yuki Eckman, the bar’s owners. 

She noticed a young man on the corner across from her. He was dressed well, wearing black corduroy pants, new brown boots and a dark blue parka.  That’s what made her notice him.  It was too warm for a heavy coat and the knit ski cap he was wearing.  He didn’t seem uncomfortably hot.  It wasn’t just the clothes, but his stillness that caught her eye, as he stood almost motionless and stared off at something in front of him.  She realized he was staring at his reflection in the window of an empty storefront.  It was a thousand yard stare and Callie wondered if he were ill or maybe on drugs.  He took a deep breath and raising his hands, began moving them as if conducting an orchestra, watching himself in the window at all times.

His gestures were precise, and it was obvious he had trained as a conductor or had played in an orchestra at some point in his past.  Callie wondered what path led someone from an orchestra to out of their mind on a street corner in Skinner.  For a moment, she wished she could hear the music he thought he was conducting.

The lock on the door rattled, and a middle-aged man pushed the door open.  “Callie?” he asked seeing her on the bench.  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“No, just a few minutes.  People watching in downtown Skinner is something not to be missed,” she said, rising and shaking his hand. 

“I’m Walt Eckman, come on in,” he said, leading her into the bar.  He was wearing a black t-shirt with the logo of the tap house emblazoned on the back in yellow.  His thinning brown hair was brushed back from his forehead, but he had smile wrinkles around his eyes and that offset any aging look from the lack of hair.

The main room of the Barley and Sheaf was filled with farmhouse style wooden tables with sturdy wooden chairs.  There were large decorative beer casks around the perimeter of the room, each branded with the names of Skinner’s local breweries.  Walt led her through the tables to the back where a black marble bar ran the length of the room.  From the number of tap handles she could see, Callie estimated there were around thirty different beers being offered.

A woman emerged from a door behind the bar.  “This is my wife, Yuki,” he said.  Yuki was also dressed in a taphouse t-shirt, but on her it seemed inappropriately informal.  Yuki Eckman’s somewhat Asian features and her waist length coal black hair made Callie think more of a teahouse located in the Far East rather than a taphouse in Skinner.

“Miss Stone, it is good to meet you,” Yuki said.  She had a slight accent Callie couldn’t place and spoke precisely, enunciating the words.  “May I get you something to drink?”