“You didn’t have much of an option.”

She raised her right shoulder in a half shrug. “True. As it turned out, someone-perhaps with the name of Melvin-had pulled the fire alarm. There was no fire, but between the scene on the street and the fact that the video from the building’s security camera somehow hit the Internet and went viral, my boss let me go. He said I had become a liability to the magazine. No one could take me seriously. And so someone with the name of Melvin got my job.”

“That stinks,” Matt said.

Kate nodded in agreement. “It did. But I learned a few good lessons, including always use brand-name ink and watch out for guys named Melvin.”

Matt laughed. Kate Appleton might be an involuntary exhibitionist, but so far she’d shown herself to be smart and quick with an answer, and she wore her emotions on her face. His gut told him she was possibly a little nutty, but beyond that a decent person. And Matt generally went with his instincts.

“Now, about that job?” she asked.

He leaned forward, elbows on desk. “I’ll start by saying that the bad beer at Bagger’s was a problem on his end of the system. Granted, there’s a remote possibility it happened here, but that part of the process is under tight control, so I’m not talking to you to redeem my honor or anything like that.”

She nodded. “Okay. So long as the talk involves a job, I’m listening.”

Kate Appleton did not appear to be a believer in the theory of leverage, in that he had it and she did not. Still, she was bold. He appreciated that about to that aher. And, at the moment, she might just be exactly what he needed.

“There have been some incidents over the past few months,” Matt said, lowering his voice. “They didn’t start out as anything big or all that awful. In fact, for a while there, I just kind of put it down to a streak of bad luck.”

“What kind of bad luck?”

He leaned back in his chair and considered when it all started. “Well, call it ego, but I’d like to think that last spring, my first failed batch of beer in years was more than just a slipup on my part. Since then, it’s been small stuff… misrouted deliveries, flat tires on the delivery trucks… that kind of thing.”