5 Blue Period (8 page)

He sounded almost childish
ly petulant, but Juliet sympathized. Her own tastes ran to the small and Spartan. But the safety of small spaces was an illusion. Jails were small but not at all safe, at least for certain people, drug addicts among them.

“And I don’t know
what to do about Blue Period. My father and I didn’t agree about the business at all. He was all about science and profit and mechanization for volume production. He cared nothing for the art and history of the way my mother’s family made wine. He thought mechanization was a sign of progress and cared nothing about bettering the wine itself. Quantity over quality and he put so much energy into it.”

Juliet wondered how much of this sentiment had come from the Mulligans.

“I still care but.…” He paused again. “I don’t see a way to go back to what it was. He spent so much money building this … business. Maybe it would be better just to sell it and start over somewhere else. If I can sell.”

He would never start over.
He hadn’t that kind of drive.

The old building
they faced was overshadowed by the newer, more prosperous ones, a rose between two thorns. Juliet did not usually anthropomorphize, but she felt sorry for the older edifice. It was a rose between two sterile thorns and would be left to decay until it was condemned and they knocked it down.

“You know, an awful lot of life looks overwhelming when you take on the big picture and itemize everything that would need to be done to make it perfect. Breaking things into small steps and refusing to be rushed
into decisions can help a lot.”

The internal, nagging voice was asking Juliet what she was doing. She didn’t have an answer except that she pitied Edward Owens. And she understood what he was feeling
about the family business that had its claws in his psyche.

An obnoxious artist from France who styled himself as the modern da Vinci had once said to Raphael that his methods of recreating old pigments was too slow and old fashioned
, that he could easily do the job in half the time. Raphael had been working on a delicate restoration project at an old church and had replied gently that the artist should paint the master in his own style, and leave Raphael to paint da Vinci as da Vinci had intended.

If Edward was going to run the winery
the way his mother’s family had, he would have to make changes and that would mean exerting himself to take charge in a way that she doubted he had ever attempted. Or else he would have to bow to progress and learn to love the large spaces and volume production his father had created. It all came down to whether he could stiffen his spine and find the energy to do what he wanted.

“I like these older buildings. They feel very Spanish in style.
Would it be possible to use them still if they were repaired? Perhaps you could start a small line of old-fashioned boutique wines. Is there any reason Blue Period couldn’t cater to more than one market?” Juliet made herself sound optimistic. After all, with money almost anything was possible and he wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

Edward blinked and turned to stare at the incipient ruins
of the old winery. The walls weren’t so bad but the tile roofs were in a sorry state. Still, new roofs were put on houses every day. They could probably even be done before winter.

“
Maybe…. They are Spanish hacienda in style, you know, built before there was air conditioning. The walls are two feet thick and they are cool even in the summer.” Edward became more animated as he forced open the door of the nearest building. It wasn’t locked. The interior was dark and dust floated on the air which billowed out into the sun. “It’s a shame my father let them be abandoned, but maybe, with some repairs….”

“What is that one?” Juliet asked, indicating the squat building where Moira had been headed.
Its roof seemed in better shape than the others.

“That
’s the old bottling facility. They used to cut the cork there as well.” The animation died back slightly. “Blue Period doesn’t use real cork anymore. My father didn’t want to risk bad cork ruining the wine.”

“Does that happen often?” Juliet asked
randomly as they started for the building.

“Very rarely. But it can be a problem if the cork hasn’t been properly treated. It has to be boiled to kill the bacteria and fungus that can live in the bark.” Edward reached into his pocket and fumbled out a cigarette. His hands had the finest of tremors.

“But surely it can be done again. The Mulligans would have contacts, wouldn’t they?”

They reached the largest of the old buildings and Juliet opened the door
and checked on the threshold. Everything smelled of wine, old wine, sour wine. And bird droppings. It overpowered even the tobacco that Edward was smoking in deeply drawn breaths that seemed to eat up the cigarette an inch at a time.

Juliet didn’t approve of smoking but the act or else the nicotine
itself seemed to steady Edward. The tremor in his hands finally stilled.

“You know, I think this can be saved. And why can’t I run a second winery with
in Blue Period? The old equipment is here. With proper maintenance and some repairs it could be…. I need to go talk to Bannerman, maybe see about hiring a new manager….” His gaze refocused and he looked less dopey. There was even some color in his cheeks. “Thank you, Miss Henry. I was … I wasn’t thinking clearly. I guess it was the shock.”

“Not at all. And you give me a shout if you need anything. Raphael and I are just up the hill
if you need us.”

Juliet patted his arm just as Moira had and turned to leave. She hadn’t asked any of her
assigned questions but didn’t think that she needed to. Her gut was saying that Edward hadn’t killed his father. She would go spend her energies on someone else. If Raphael wanted to pursue him, that was his decision.

But first she wanted a look at where
Carl had been killed. There could be something to be learned by standing where he had stood and seeing what he had seen on the night that he died.

Feeling observed as she strolled toward the harvested fields, she pulled out her small sketch book
she always kept in her purse or her pocket and began to draw the skeletons of the battered vines. She would draw and then stroll, draw and then stroll. When her mind wandered, small imps appeared in her drawing, leering out of the twisted sticks.

There were plenty of clues about where the murder had happened, leaving aside a few bits of snagged crime scene tape
which still clung to the wires where the vines were espaliered. Juliet stood in the empty vineyard which she shared only with an orange cat and looked up at the cottages where she and Raphael—and Schneider—were staying. They looked like what they were, reasonably well-kept but not luxurious abodes.

“Hullo, cat. Shouldn’t you be off hunting mice
, or napping in the shade?”

The cat just blinked
and began to purr. He, at least, was enjoying the heat. Juliet shook her head at him.

There had been fog that night. Not as bad as on the evening following the party, but still
probably deterrent enough for anyone who didn’t know the area. Unless they had brought some very fancy equipment with them. Like an infrared scope.

Under the short wall that surrounded the patio the steep slope
up to the cottages was littered with shale and shards of shattered rock. The stone had yielded reluctantly but yield it finally had to picks or earthquakes and been splintered into vengeful scree that waited for the unwary, and the wall which seemed substantial from above hardly seemed adequate for holding back the rest of the hill and the three small cottages perched on the terrace.

However inadequate, i
t all looked undisturbed and covered in a fine layer of red earth dust. Had anyone come down it recently there would have been evidence of rockslide and some change in the even color of the earthen powder which covered everything when the harvesters were working.

If Schneider had crept up on Owens and killed him, it hadn’t been from the cottage
s. He would either have had to come up from the road, or via the winery, or….

Juliet began walking
and considering logistics.

It was also highly unlikely that he had had a gun at the party
so he would have needed to get one from somewhere before he went into the fields.

Had someone—maybe
Carissa—brought him a weapon?

And what of Owens? Had he suspected trouble
and armed himself before heading for the grape fields that night? Or did he always take a gun when walking after dark? There were wild animals around and some of them could have rabies. Maybe he kept firearms in the outbuildings. Certainly he was security conscious enough to hire guards. Maybe a gun wasn’t out of character.

It always came back to
who.
The how and why were fairly evident. There were so many people who had reason to hate Owens, one could pick and choose names all day long. But would he have met with any of his enemies out in the dark vineyard?

Staring at a bit of fluttering
paper caught in the wire where the new vines were espaliered, she thought about the used napkin that Owens had dropped on the table at the party.
Meet me at the old door
.

Had the handwriting been feminine? She
had assumed so at the time, but couldn’t really tell. No one wrote with hearts and flourishes on a soggy napkin and there had been no lipstick or perfume that she had noticed. Still, he might have gone to meet a woman, even an enemy. He would feel confident that he could out-think and out-fight any female.

Juliet turned and looked back at the facilities. The
new buildings could be dismissed since they had been in operation that night and were well lighted inside and out. They also lacked rear doors, young or old.

Of the original winery building
s only three backed onto the vines. Two had old doors.

Acting on her hunch, Juliet
started working her way around the old bottling facility, hoping that Edward would be gone by the time she got back and that she could risk asphyxiation from wine and bird droppings and take a quick look inside, but no such luck. He was there and now had two other men with him. She would have to wait to test her theory. Which she hated. It felt like the day she had turned in her resignation and then watched the clock slow to nothing while her boss went from meeting to meeting and only at the end of the day agreed to sign the papers that would return her to freedom and maybe let her regain her rupturing faith that there was a less duplicitous and complicated way to live.

She strolled
the field until she could go no further. She encountered a barbed wire fence strung between two rows of vines. Beyond it, she realized when staring at the thick and twisted vines still heavy with fruit, were Trefoil’s old grapes.

She turned again to look at the bottling facility. Yes, there was an old door there that opened right onto the
Trefoil fields and the fence did not reach all the way to the building. And the wineries’ grapevines were so close that someone could have stood on Trefoil grounds and shot Carl Owens the moment he stepped out the door and moved into the shadows where he wouldn’t be seen.

Did this narrow her list of suspects?

Getting onto Trefoil land was more difficult since it sat on a bluff, at least if the killer came via the winery itself. But one could easily park along the road and either climb over the fence, or cut it away, and then make their way through the old vineyard. Trefoil didn’t have security guards the way Blue Period did. Even with heavy mist, it wouldn’t be hard to follow a straight line up to the lighted buildings.

“Maybe,” she said to the cat who was still following her. “Just maybe
it happened this way. But this will take some proving.”

“Reow.” Then the cat walked up to the old door and sat there as though expect
ing Juliet to let him in.

“Whose kitty are you?” Juliet asked, but received no answer.

“So what are you thinking?” Raphael asked as they gathered around the very small table at the farthest reaches of the narrow, shotgun-style restaurant.

Chic
had come highly recommended, but as was so often the case with fashionable places, the atmosphere and setting were labored.

Part of the attraction
of the restaurant was a well-stocked wine bar, but it was one of those places that felt that every vintage and label offered needed to be on display. Like a woman who didn’t understand the concept of keeping a little mystery in the relationship that she could use to surprise her guests when the first rush of attraction was over.

Still, every table was filled with tourists who seemed to like the décor
and they filled up the small space with tight, tired voices that were determined to have some fun. The customers seemed a bit chloroformed by the heat and either burnt a shade of lobster or else sweating under their zinc-oxide sunscreen, which had the unfortunate effect of making their eyes look like bullet holes shot through their gleaming faces with small caliber ammunition, but the food and drinks kept coming and eventually began to do their work. The mood healed, proper internal temperature was achieved, and there was more genuine laughter.