A Tainted Finish: A Sydney McGrath Mystery (6 page)

Syd spent the remainder of the day avoiding the red folio on the kitchen table. Charlie made some phð earlier and managed to get Syd to eat some. Her first real meal in a few days strengthened her enough to take care of something she had been avoiding. She sat out on the deck looking out over the Gorge and the river with another bowl of phð broth in her hands. The crisp autumn day was beautiful. The angle of the sun cast a lovely green light on the tree branches and shrubs. The river glimmered in the afternoon sun, and the sky spread a vibrant periwinkle blue. She sighed and picked up her phone.

Marcus was a mess. She could read it over the phone. He was worried, then frantic before eventually becoming dejected. Syd felt terrible that she left him hanging so long. The hurt in his voice was painful to hear. She placated him and apologized, hoping to quell his feelings of rejection with less than genuine excuses. But he went on about it a bit too long, and she grew irritated. Which made her feel guilty, and finally angry that she had to call him to begin with.

“Look, I didn't get the manual on how to bury a parent,” she said in frustration through her clench jaw. He grew silent on the other end. She knew it was unfair, but she also knew that Marcus did not.

“Sorry, Syd,” he said softly. She sat in silence, listening to him breathe. She bit her lip and drummed her fingers on arm of the chair. “I’ll be down Friday. Charlie said Friday would be best. Unless you want me earlier? I could come earlier, Syd?” He whined slightly and Syd jumped out of the Adirondack in frustration.

“No, Friday’s best. You have classes.”

“I could help with arrangements.”

“Charlie and I have it covered.” She paced the deck, furious at herself for calling and unsure why.

“Okay,” he said, sounding defeated. “Should I book a hotel?” His tenuous whine tipped the scales.

“No. You’ll stay
here!
” She was almost shouting into the phone.

“Syd, I'm sorry…” His pleas only made her angrier. She hung up on him and paced the deck. A wave of anger overtook her and she squeezed her fists into a ball. She screamed, desperately wanting to hit something or someone. Instead she slammed her way back into the house, quickly changed into sweats, and running shoes and ran up the road into the forest.

She ran for a few miles, sprinting and screaming a piercing fury heard only by the startled crows watching from the trees. She ran hard until she was dizzy and wet with sweat, her face streaked with tears. She spent her energy running out into the woods and she found she had none left when she finally turned to make her way back home. She walked back slowly, feeling empty and blank, and oddly refreshed.

Charlie and Rosa were seated at the kitchen table nursing mugs of Mexican chocolate when she stumbled into the house past dusk. They exchanged worried glances and a sigh of relief when she walked in. Syd brushed past them and made a beeline for the shower.

~

Syd woke up before dawn the next morning. She made a pot of french press and sat down in the worn leather chair next to the picture window that looked out to the river. The lights from the bridge between White Salmon and Hood River sparkled in the chilly morning air. After her first cup of coffee she got up to retrieve the red folio from the kitchen but found a note on the table. It was written in a tidy back-slanted cursive, a left-handed smudge of ink smearing the page along the script in an all too familiar way. Syd was left-handed, but she hadn't noticed that Olivier was as well.

Sydney~

You were asleep when I came in for our meeting.
Here is an update

We are receiving Petit Verdot from Horse Heaven Hills on Monday, I think. I drove out today for samples. The PV is at 26 brix, pH of 3.7 and TA of 4.5g/L. A little overhung, I think, for your liking? I was not trusting the grower’s numbers and it turns out I was right. It needs to come off ASAP.

We are pressing the Grenache tomorrow. 5 ton. The crew will be here. No need for you to come up.

~I started the malolactic inoculate, will pitch tomorrow.

Ollie

She sat back in her chair with the note in her hand. Jack Bristol's words filled her head; his suspicions about Olivier. She grew resentful and ashamed that she had a scheduled meeting with him and had missed it. She felt light-headed after her shower the evening before and lay down for a few moments. She woke at 5 am the next morning.

She worked the note in her fingers, mulling over the loose ends of her uncle's life. She had inherited a tangle of a mess and was not sure if she could ever unravel it. She wondered if everyone's lives were so messy and undone. Her uncle lived what seemed to be such a boring life. His daily routine was mundane. But underneath it all boiled complex layers of conflict, love, and secrets. And it would all burn up with the man tomorrow.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she spoke out loud to the glowing orange and purple sunrise outside.

She got up and fixed herself some toast from the last of Clarence's famous bread. The smell of the toast dripping with butter made her smile. He would eat toast daily for morning breakfast, butter and crumbs getting caught in his reddish beard. Coffee and toast. He was not the gourmand people assumed. He was not so complex.

~

It was chillier than she expected when she stepped outside a few minutes later. Her boots slipped a little on the deck boards, a slight frost glimmering in the early morning light. She wore an old pair of double-fronted Carhartt's, a flannel from the mudroom cupboard, and her old muck boots, a mere sampling of the clothing left behind for her sojourn to a city life in Seattle. She welcomed the androgyny of work clothes; they were comfortable, loose-fitting, and snuggly warm. Still, she cupped her mug of steaming coffee in both hands for warmth while she made her way up to the winery.

The smell of Crush beckoned her at the bottom of the hill and grew more intense and inviting as she walked up the gravel road. Fresh herbaceous aromas hit her nose first, and she breathed in deeply. Her eyes welled up with tears. The overflow of emotion the smells elicited were complex and inexplicable. She smiled through the tears as she opened the large red doors of the winery. She moved around the building and opened the side doors. A wave of CO2 gas and fermentation aromas washed over her as she stepped back. She would have to wait to go inside. CO2 had built up in the winery all night long, and there was little air movement to expedite the evacuation of the gases.

She decided to wait it out in the vineyard and hiked farther up the hill. The slightly frozen gravel crunched under her feet, and the smells of the vineyard began to overcome the fermentation aromas from the winery below. She walked by the compost pile, which was smothered in a cloud of fruit flies. The frenzied compost was unthwarted by the frost, protected by the heat of the decomposition. Fresh stems and skins steamed in purple and green piles, and she scrunched up her nose to avoid sucking up tiny flies into her nostrils. She pushed farther up hill, beckoned by the view from the top of the vineyard. She stepped off of the gravel road and took a shortcut through a block of thick of vines. The vineyard was head-trained gobelet style, so her progress was unimpeded by trellis wires or rows. The stubby vines gnarled up from the ground like two-foot-long contorted arms, with hands cupped in supplication to the sun. These vines of Picpoul and Roussanne were harvested at least a month earlier, and the leaves were mostly yellow and brown. She frowned at the patches of red leaves intermittently peppering the vineyard.

At the top near the fence line Sydney stretched her arms up over her head and inhaled several deep breaths. The view was nothing short of majestic. To her right triumphed the tip of Mt. Hood, with its white peak still shedding the pink hue of sunrise. Directly to the east the sun hovered over the river in a vibrant orange. The black basalt cliffs of the Gorge cradled the sun on either side, reflecting an array of purples, grays, and pinks. She stood mesmerized, filling up her lungs with the sunrise, closing her eyes.

She jumped at the sound of the rifle shot fired from the vineyard next door. She followed a cloud of birds rush up from the vineyard as the gun reported another round. A half-dozen more shots were fired, each sending up a clammer of birds in different areas of the vineyard. She used to feel terrible for the birds until she understood the ruin they could cause a single vineyard in just a few short hours. Now she simply felt bad for her neighbor and wondered why he opted to forego bird netting this year. Bird shot was far less expensive, but it could make for some cold mornings chasing down the pesky marauders. Not to mention dealing with grouchy neighbors. She had never grown accustomed to gunshots in the early morning and she was even less so after her long stint in the city.

Movement caught her eye and she looked down to the Airstream parked below her neighbor's vineyard on her uncle's property. A man walked out and stood outside the trailer in the universal posture of a man urinating. He finished his business and arched his back into a long, elegant bow shape before bending and reaching for the ground. He lifted his arms to the side and then up again before arching his back further. Syd watched his morning ritual with the guilty pleasure of a voyeur, riddled with the kind of shame experienced by an onlooker who fiercely guarded her own privacy. Still, she watched him as he trudged across the north vineyard and down into the draw. She stood several hundred feet above him across the ten acres and mapped his way into the deep V of the landscape while he strode up to the winery. She started back down through the vineyard as she watched him. They met up outside the winery in front of the open large red doors.

“Good morning,” Olivier said, surprised to see her.

“Good morning,” she said with a nod and a modest smile. She found it unsettling that she meant it. She knew it meant she was feeling good.

“Did you do punchdowns?” he asked.

“No. No, I just got here, I opened the doors ten minutes ago.”

“Ah. I'll get started.” He walked into the winery, turning on lights and disappearing into the cool depths of the building. She listened to sounds of running water and the scraping of a ladder on the concrete floor.

Syd sat out on an Adirondack outside the winery, drinking in the remainder of the sunrise. She sipped her lukewarm coffee and pondered her own resilience. She felt fine for the moment. Somehow the sun, the vineyard, and the winery filled her with an unexpected buoyancy. She still felt the devastating pain in her chest, but her head somehow felt detached from it. She was awed by her sense of suspended grief. She became aware of the gracious gift of patience she had for herself; an acceptance of her own process. She invited the grief to settle in her chest and found a kind of comfort in the weight of it.

~

The day of pressing red wine passed similar to the day of crushing fruit when she first arrived. She and Olivier worked side by side in a graceful rhythm; two experienced winemakers falling into sync. Three other cellar hands busied themselves with cleaning and storing the tanks, and wrangling hoses and sump pumps. Two of them were familiar to Syd. Alejandro was the primary connection for cellar hands in the winery, and he often found help from his cousins and friends. Clarence was always better at working with the cellar hands than she had been. Most were Mexican or Salvadorian workers who lived permanently in the area. He spoke fluent Spanish and he managed to maintain a universally casual nature, with little need to flex his authority. She always felt awkward at the deference the workers showed her. She was never sure if it was because she was the niece of the
jefe,
or because she was female, or just because she was white. The racial disparity between Mexican and Salvadorian workers and white workers was not as obvious in the fields when she worked alongside them. But in the close quarters of the winery she was always aware of social stratification, and always deeply uncomfortable with it.

But now things had inexplicably changed. She felt more at ease with the cellar workers than in the past. She joked and flirted her way around the cellars hands. She could ask them to do a task without feeling bossy, and they clearly respected her decisions. She was grateful for this. She noted that Olivier was more aloof with the workers than she was. They stayed clear of him, even though she never observed him say or do anything unkind or dictating.

Alejandro disappeared in the vineyard after he realized he was not contributing much with Sydney on the forklift. He nodded at her when he entered the winery and avoided her eyes. They had known each other for years. Alejandro had loved her uncle like his own. He had strong feelings for her too. Many summers ago, they had a fling that caused a temporary rift between Alejandro and Clarence. But that was almost a decade ago, and she had all but forgotten about it. But she suspected that he didn’t dismiss their romance as easily as she did. Whenever she visited it took him a few days to warm up to her. She would sometimes catch him glancing at her out of the corner of her eye. Still, she wanted to talk to him.

She finally got her chance to corner him when the other workers began to clean equipment at the end of the day. She was outside, stretching and staring at the view. Alejandro drove down from the vineyard on an ATV, and she stepped out in front of him.

“Hey! You dodging out of work?” she asked, teasing him. Her question forced him to look her in the eyes. He shut off the 4-wheeler.

“Only one seat on the forklift,
senorita
,” he said. His smile was so full of sadness that it struck her in her sternum. She wanted to embrace him and hold him against the pain in her chest. But he stoically kept his composure. His dark eyebrows pulled together in a squint. His full lips stretched thin in a face meant for laughing. He swung his leg over the side of the ATV and stood up, staying as far away from her as he could muster for polite conversation. He looked down at his feet.