Murder By The Pint (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 1) by Belle Knudson Page A

home. I was dog-tired. The caffeine had done nothing for me. Maybe it was decaf after all.
                  The next day, Lola Tarkington was dead.

Chapter 16
     
                  "Apparent suicide," said Detective Moore.
                  I was just as shocked as you can probably imagine. We were having lunch at Ernie's when he casually brought it up as a matter of town gossip.
                  "How?" I said over my salad.
              He took a breath. "It's not pretty. She ran herself a bubble bath and took a Manhattan cocktail with her, only it had a lethal dose of boric acid mixed into it. She died almost instantly. One of her clients discovered the body when he showed up for an appointment."
                  I couldn’t believe it. I was further disturbed when he told me the death occurred several hours after I'd been to visit her.
                  "Impossible," I said.
                  "I know it's hard to believe."
                  "No, Lester, you don’t understand. She was a content, positive, confident woman. There was no mistaking it. She couldn’t have been suffering from any sort of depression. Not the kind that gives way to suicide, anyway."
                  He shook his head. "I've seen cases of suicide before. The ones without warning signs are rare, but they do happen. One of the greatest tragedies about depression is the sufferer's ability to hide it. And when you factor in her solitude..."
                  I shook my head back at him. "You guys are missing something."
                  "Pardon me?"
                  "You heard me. Check your forensics guys' diplomas."
                  "Now listen here—"
                  "No, you listen. There's something odd going on here. This woman is paid to leave me a note and then suddenly she's—"
                  "Wait," he said, "hold on. Back it up a second. Paid to leave you a note?"
                  Whoops. I felt a hotness creeping around my collarbone. "I guess I forgot to tell you about that," I said sheepishly.
                  "Wait, she left you that note?"
                  "Not her. Her nephew."
                  He threw his fork down onto his plate, causing a few adjacent tables to look up from their meals. "You knew this and didn’t tell me."
                  "I was going to tell you."
                  "Were you now?"
                  "Hey, don’t start being a cop all over my salad here. I can’t help it if the pressures of running a microbrewery are clogging up my brain. Anyway, you guys are supposed to be doing your job."
                  He put his head in his hands. "Ok, listen. I'm going to forget about this for a moment. And I'm going to be fair and polite and kind to you. I'm sorry you're under pressure, but I need you, Madison Darby, to come clean with me and tell me what you know about this case and what you don’t know."
                  I told him what I knew of Lola Tarkington, which wasn't much, but was more than he knew. He looked down and nodded silently at his plate while I spoke, absorbing every detail, pausing me once or twice to ask for a detail here and there. He never looked at me while he did this, which I thought was kind of sexy, I'm sorry. He's a smart guy, Lester Moore. Smart is sexy.
                  "So that's it," I said.
                  He said nothing, but just sat and stared at his plate.
                  "Hello?" I said, waving my hand in front of him.
                  "What?"
                  "You tell me."
                  "There's nothing else to say. Only that we have ourselves a real mystery here. We have the suicide of a woman indirectly linked with the disappearance