Murder With A Chaser (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

through a stranger's garbage.
                  She seemed to have trouble finding the words. "What...are...you...doing?"
                  I looked up at her, exasperated. "Sorting."
                  "Why are you sorting the trash?"
                  "It's not ours," I said.
                  "It's not ours."
                  "Nope." I went back to sorting.
                  "Can I ask whose it is?"
                  "Not is ," I said, " was . It belonged to Eli Campbell."
                  "Eli Campbell."
                  "Yes."
                  "The celebrity chef."
                  "That's right."
                  "Didn't he just... I mean, weren't you there when he..."
                  "He just died, yes. And I'm searching through his trash. And I could really use some help."
                  Tanya, you should know, has a heart bigger than anyone I've ever known in my life. Only when it comes to me, for some reason. If we weren't related, we probably wouldn’t be friends at all, we're that different. But we are best friends, and always will be. And true best friends. Which means that when one half of the duo is up to her armpits in a dead celebrity chef's garbage, the other half has no other real choice but to roll up her sleeves and get in there too. Out of love.
                  And so it was that five minutes later, we both had cups of coffee, and we both sorted Eli Campbell's garbage into meticulous piles of paper, food, toiletries, and one horrible pile with the benevolent label "Other".
                  I hated the Other pile. There were some things in that pile that, I think, were alive. We swept the Other pile into the corner of the porch once it became obvious that it was a pile of garbage full of mystery and horror.
                  We focused on paper, food, and toiletries.
                  First of all, we were very surprised to see that Eli Campbell was a fan of canned sardines in oil. Nothing against anyone who likes canned sardines in oil. We just didn’t see Eli Campbell as the canned-sardine type. Tanya reminded me of an ex-boyfriend of hers that was British – this guy Nigel. Nigel used to love eating sardines on toast. He said he used to eat it as a child and that it was sometimes regarded as a kind of British comfort food. Tanya and I were nauseated by the thought of it then, as we were now, picking through three-day-old cans that smelled every bit as nasty as you can imagine. I half-expected every cat in the neighborhood to come padding around the corner at any minute.
                  It didn’t hit me until right about then that I had no idea what I was looking for. I didn’t even know how to interpret any of this garbage. How does one read a person's garbage anyhow? All I could think was that I had to be at work later, and that here before me was a big pile of garbage that would have to disappear off my back porch before I left. That left me not a whole heck of a lot of time to find something, if anything.
                  The toiletries section was relatively small, so I looked there first. There were used razors—thank God for protective gloves, which were thick latex – not an insurance against cuts but certainly a help—and there was a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste: Crest Extra Whitening formula. And there was a discarded inhaler – Albuterol, the same type I discovered in Campbell's trailer that day.
                  This latter I turned around in my hand a minute. Here was something very private indeed. Eli Campbell was a big, intimidating personality. The fact that he used an inhaler to treat asthma would have certainly detracted from that image. Staring at that inhaler, I thought about how someone might use this little secret of Campbell's to their