The Merlot Murders (10 page)

Kit was sitting on the battleship-gray wooden swing on the deli’s front porch when I got there. Today she wore a shocking pink sleeveless shirtdress with a gold belt, gold stiletto mules, and more troweled-on makeup. She held up a white paper bag and waved it at me. “You’re late. I ordered. A Reuben with the works for me and a vegetarian on a croissant for you. I also got us each an iced tea, even though what I could really use is a drink.”

“Me, too.”

She squinted at me. “You look like something they forgot to shoot. We don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. We could go some place more private.”

“Too late for that,” I said. “Thelma must have had the bullhorn out this morning.”

“I, er, heard about you and Eli throwing dice for the house. Wish I’d been there to see his face when he lost.” She grinned. “Congratulations.”

“Who told
you
?”

She jerked her thumb toward the door to the deli. “Hazel did, when she was making our sandwiches. She gave me your dill pickle since she remembered you hate them.”

I sat down in the swing next to her and leaned my cane against the porch railing. She handed over my sandwich and the tea and for a split second, time rewound and we were a couple of kids whose feet didn’t touch the ground yet, sitting here exactly like this, doing exactly what we were doing right now. For a flash of a moment I saw us as we had been, filtered through the refracted light that made the grass greener and the skies bluer. A time when life was simple and our problems inconsequential.

If education is what’s left after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned, then memories—especially the good ones—are, as someone once said, a second chance at happiness. The swing creaked as it always did and the street noises of Middleburg faded to a peaceful thrumming of blurred summer sounds. We ate in silence.

“I stopped by the inn,” Kit said after a while, “looking for your cousin.”

“She’s over at the Ruins trying to organize this dinner we’re having tonight.”

“The pig roast? You’re going to go through with that?”

I bit into my croissant and nodded.

“She didn’t waste any time.” Kit stuck a straw in her iced tea and sucked on it. “Fitz isn’t even dead twenty-four hours.” She looked sideways at me. “You know Dominique’s got a motive, Luce.”

Had Kit already found out about the money? I said neutrally, “What makes you say that?”

“They had a huge argument the day before he died. She threatened to kill him.” She drank more tea and fiddled with her straw. “I was at the inn having lunch when it happened. On my way to the ladies’ room.”

“They were arguing right there in the lobby?”

“More like in his office.”

“His office is nowhere near the ladies’ room.”

“So sue me. I took a little stroll to walk off a piece of cheesecake.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You snooped!”

“I guess that means you don’t want me to tell you what she said.” She glanced sideways again when I was silent and grinned. “I knew you’d want to know. She wants to take over running the inn by herself and he told her no way.”

“I already heard that from Eli.”

“Yeah, but did Eli tell you that she said Fitz couldn’t stop her?”

“She threatened him?”

“It sounded like it to me. Too bad I never made it past French 1. She didn’t count to ten or say anything about colors or the days of the week. What does ‘John ate Mark’ mean?”

“John ate…oh, Lord.
J’en ai marre.
It means ‘I’m sick of it.’”

“Well, she said that a few dozen times.” She lowered her voice. “Then
he
said something about having her green card yanked for what she’d done.” She narrowed her eyes, which with all the mascara she was wearing made it look like her eyelids had temporarily fused together. “The next thing you know he’s dead.”

“Dominique did
not
kill Fitz,” I said. “Whatever it sounded like. Besides, you heard Bobby. We were robbed. Fitz surprised that guy Zeus, or whoever it was, in the middle of taking the payroll money out of the safe in Quinn’s lab.”

“The cases of wine Fitz was supposed to pick up that night were in the villa,” Kit said. “What was he doing in the barrel room?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he saw a light or the door propped open and went to check it out.”

“Maybe.” She stood and collected our sandwich wrappers and iced tea cups. “You want dessert? I saw a few pieces of Hazel’s homemade peach pie when I got our sandwiches. The peaches are from her orchard.”

“No, thanks.”

“A latte? With a shot of hazelnut or chocolate syrup in it?”

“Just coffee.” I reached for my cane and started to stand up. “Black.”

“Sit there. I got this.” She opened the screen door to the deli. “Well, it was just a theory. That robbery sounds too pat to me.”

The door banged shut. I leaned my head against the swing and pushed off the floor with my good foot. So maybe Fitz did know about the seventy-five thousand dollars. Dominique hadn’t actually told me what the argument had been about.

Kit returned holding a tray with some whipped cream concoction in a soup-bowl-sized mug, my coffee, and a large slice of peach pie. “I brought two forks,” she said.

“I couldn’t.”

“I can’t finish this myself.” She dug her fork into the pie. “What are you going to do after you sell the vineyard? Go back to France?”

“We’re not selling.”

She said through a mouthful of peaches and crust, “Eli change his mind?”

“Nope. But now that I own the house, I have two votes in the company and I vote not to sell.”

“What did Mr. Control-Freak say when you told him?”

“We didn’t exactly have that talk yet,” I said. “But what can he say?”

“Jesus, Luce. Plenty. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when you tell him. Eli doesn’t lose an argument. You know that.” She picked up her mug and stirred the slurry mixture of chocolate, whipped cream, and coffee. “So who’s going to run the place?”

“I am. And Quinn. And Hector.”

“Quinn,” she said. “Somebody ought to send that man to charm school. He’s a bit tough to take. I never understood how Leland could have thought he would replace Jacques.”

“Eli said he was the low bidder for the job.”

“I believe it.” She paused. “Are you sure you’re capable of taking on something like that? I mean, it’s a hell of a job for a normal person and…” She broke off. “Oh God, I wish I hadn’t said that. I’m really sorry.”

“That last summer before the accident,” I said, “before I was supposed to go to law school, I spent every day helping Jacques in the fields and in the winery. Remember?”

“Yes, but…”

“I’m not a neophyte. I’ve helped with harvest since I was old enough to hold a pair of pruning shears. I know what I’m doing. Give me a little credit, Kit. Eli’s got a career and Mia’s not interested in the winery. I am. I love it here. Why shouldn’t I run my family’s vineyard?”

“What happened to law school? And saving the planet? You could probably get your old job back or work for some other environmental group. You were good at that.” She set the plate of peach pie in my lap and handed me the clean fork. “Finish this. You’ve gotten so skinny you’ll blow away in the next strong wind.”

“I want to continue what my mother started.” I picked up the fork. “After the time I spent in France, I understand even more why it was important to her.”

“Because the French drink a lot of wine?”

“Because the French know how to live.” I chewed on a fresh peach from Hazel’s orchard and closed my eyes. “I mean, in France everyone slows down to…enjoy life. It’s hard to explain. But taking time over a meal, shopping for the ingredients, preparing the food, choosing the wine…and then lingering to talk after it’s finished. Or even sitting in a café with a coffee or a glass of wine. People enjoy that. Here they think you’re loony. Or lazy. Everyone’s in such a rush to grab something at some fast food place and keep on going like life’s a big race and the first one to get to the finish line wins. In France you want to enjoy the journey.” I opened my eyes and glanced at Kit. “You think I’m strange, don’t you?”

She scraped the last of the whipped cream from her mug and licked the spoon. “I think you’ve changed.”

I drank my coffee as a monarch butterfly landed on the railing close by. “I like the fact that wine is somehow connected to so many pleasurable things in life. It’s got romance, history, mystery…what more could you ask?” The butterfly disappeared gracefully into the bushes below. “I like the fact that archaeologists found wine jugs in the tombs of the pharaohs and that Noah is supposed to have owned the first vineyard.”

“That sounds more like the old you. An impossible romantic.” She stood up and brushed crumbs off her dress. “Well, okay. Count on me for moral support. You’re gonna need it if you take on your brother. He’ll do anything to please the Queen Bee and I’m sure she’s the reason he’s so hot to sell the place. She wants him to build her Buckingham Palace.”

“I heard.”

She walked me to the Volvo and waited while I got in and rolled down the window. “Hey,” she said, “with all that talk about lingering over a glass of wine, how about meeting for a drink down at the Goose Creek Bridge like the old days? I’ll even bring the hooch.”

“I’ll come, but I’m bringing the wine. The stuff you used to bring either tasted like motor oil or grape soda pop.”

“Fine,” she said. “Be a wine snob. See you.”

Some of the haze had evaporated for the first time since I’d come home and I could see the faint outline of the Blue Ridge as I drove back to Atoka. There were no glacier white peaks that awed like the Alps did, just a lovely blue line of gently folding hills older than time.

George III had once declared them the easternmost boundary of colonial settlement, since they were a naturally prohibitive barrier. What lay beyond them seemed uncertain and possibly dangerous.

Just like my future.

When I arrived at Mosby’s Ruins, Quinn Santori was helping Dominique set up for the dinner, along with Hector and the rest of the crew. The cast of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was gone, but a few people were fiddling with scenery and lights and the air was heavy with the fragrant smoky scent of spit-roasted pig.

Quinn took the cash Mac had given me and stuffed it in his pocket without a word. It was hard to tell if he was surprised that I actually showed up with it, since he immediately turned his attention to two sweat-drenched Mexicans who were stoking the coals in the charcoal pit underneath the gently hissing, sizzling pig.

I joined Dominique, who was setting up buffet tables and covering another in aluminum foil to be used later as a carving station for the meat.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. We started laying ropes of ivy down the middle of the row of linen-covered picnic tables, twining them around the bases of the hurricane lamps she’d placed every few feet. “Did Fitz know about the problem with the equipment you ordered?”

“Are you asking if he knew about the money?” She nodded, smiling thinly, but I noticed she was strangling a piece of ivy. “He was as mad as a wet blanket.”

“Was that what you argued about the day before he died?”

“No.” One of the lamps teetered precariously as she jerked another piece of ivy and moved it into place. I caught the lamp before it tipped over. “
Merde
. We might not have enough ivy.”

Ivy didn’t require this much angst. Changing the subject had been deliberate.

“So what did you argue about? Did you know you were overheard fighting in his office?”

She looked at me like I’d betrayed her. “We were arguing—discussing—whether his forgetfulness was the beginning of Alzheimer’s.” She reached into the pocket of her paisley Capri pants and fished out a smashed pack of cigarettes. “Don’t look so shocked. You weren’t the only one he kept in the dark. He managed to pull the rug over everyone’s eyes. Both his parents had it so he figured it was probably inevitable. His mother once attacked his father with a carving knife because she thought he was an intruder.”

“Oh my God.”

“It was an accident that I found out about his parents.” She bent and cupped her hand around her cigarette as she lit it. “I bet that’s why he was taking antidepressants.”

“Eli said he was drinking too much.”

“He was. I think it was all related.” A cloud of smoke floated through her words.

“So what was he forgetting?”

“The usual. Names. Faces. Where he left his glasses or keys.” She shrugged. “I did some reading about it and I talked to Dr. Greenwood. You know it’s fatal, don’t you?”

“No.” I tied a small strand of ivy into a knot. “I didn’t.”

“Well, by that time, the person is delusional, like his mother was, or has hallucinations. It’s a horrible, undignified death at the end. You lose control of…everything.”

“Do you think he might have been delusional the other night at the winery? Thought someone was after him or something?”

“Dr. Greenwood—Ross—told me it’s a gradual decline. I don’t think he was at that stage yet.” She sucked on her cigarette. “But what do I know?”

“Fitz thought Leland’s death wasn’t an accident.”

She nodded and exhaled out of the corner of her mouth.

“Do you?” I asked.

“Bobby says it was. I believe Bobby.”

“Did you tell Bobby any of this? About the Alzheimer’s, I mean? I assume he questioned you.”

My cousin looked at me assessingly, then let her cigarette drop to the ground. “Of course I told him. I am not stupid,
ma puce
. I have a motive for Fitz’s murder, don’t I? He left me the inn as his partner, but he wasn’t ready to retire just yet. If he’d stayed on, with his condition deteriorating, who knows what might have happened? He might have wrecked everything he built. And the inn would be worth nothing. It’s no secret I wanted him to retire.” She ground out the butt under the toe of a sandal. “I didn’t kill him.”

We finished arranging the last table in silence. Then she said, “I’m going back to the inn to take care of a few things. I want you to go home and change. Eli threw a fit about wearing Elizabethan costumes, so I decided to forget the whole idea. Be back here at five-thirty. Wear something pretty.”

“Of course.”

“And, Lucie?”

“What?”

“If you loved Fitz, you will say nothing about this. Bobby will keep it confidential, of course. And no one else needs to know. So promise me,
chérie,
that you will not mention it to anyone.”

Another request for my silence. Dominique had as many secrets as Eli did. I shrugged. “Sure.”

By the time I got back to the house to shower and change, Randy had come and gone. The spaces where the furniture had been—particularly the clock—screamed mute reproach at what I’d done. Dust bunnies the size of small boulders rolled across the floor like tumbleweed in the prairie. Though it was cooler inside than outside, I was sweating as I walked from room to room. The house was eerily silent.

I was in the shower with cold water sluicing over me when I figured out what was wrong. I hadn’t heard the asthmatic hum of the air conditioner as it cycled on and off. When Highland House was built, there had been no heat, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They’d been added over the years as they became commonplace in most homes, generally in the late 1800s. Leland was the one who put in the air-conditioning. Unlike the heat and the electricity, which were added externally, the ductwork had to be tunneled throughout the house, which meant tearing into the lathe and plaster walls and making a colossal mess. My mother said afterward that Leland had handed over our money to the P. T. Barnum of the cooling business who knew a sucker when he saw one and promptly went bankrupt partway through the job. Leland found a retired plumber with dubious credentials who finished the work for a cut-rate price and, as we discovered later, installed a system that was left over from another construction project. It was too small for our house but by the time we figured out why the upper floors were always a lot warmer than the downstairs, it was too late to do anything.

I wrapped a bath towel around myself and wandered through the bedrooms, placing my hand in front of the vents to feel whether any air, cool or otherwise, was blowing through them and maybe I was mistaken.

I wasn’t.

We needed every penny of the money Mac had given me to get through harvest. I might even have to sell a few more pieces of furniture, though if I kept that up, I’d be sleeping on the floor before long. Fixing the air-conditioning was a luxury.

Anyway, it was nearly the end of August. From one day to the next, the light would change from the white-hot glare of summer to the slanting pale gold of autumn that would finish ripening the vines. The hammering heat would recede and the days would be pleasantly bearable for harvest.

I could sleep in the hammock on the veranda. Somewhere in the attic, there should be a few portable fans. I’d done without air-conditioning in France for two years and I could get along without it for a few more weeks.

The dinner at the Ruins went well, under the circumstances. Most of the guests were unfamiliar faces and there were a lot of D.C. and Maryland license plates in the parking lot, so at least there were some folks who weren’t scared off by our macabre news. At dusk, we lit the candles in the hurricane lamps, which made a pretty necklace of yellow lights down the middle of the road, supplemented by the dancing orange flickering of the fireflies and the fairy lights in the nearby trees. Later still, Hector lit citronella torches, which glowed serenely in the still night air along the pathway leading to the amphitheater in front of Mosby’s Ruins. The quiet clink of glasses and china and the indistinguishable murmuring of voices was peaceable and pleasant.

I glanced over at Eli, who had come straight from his office, shirtsleeves rolled up, as he helped Quinn open bottle after bottle of the Pinot Noir we were serving with the roast pork. Earlier he came to me and said quietly, “I’ve got Austin and Erica Kendall coming over to take a look at the house tomorrow. I’ll fill you in after dinner.”

Austin Kendall was another Romeo and the owner of the largest real estate agency in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. His daughter Erica now ran the business, but Austin still got involved when listings were in the multimillions of dollars.

Eli had just upped the stakes, setting up that meeting, and we both knew it. He’d also caught me off-guard.

It was neither the time nor the place to discuss anything so I just said, “Yes, I think we should talk later.”

After that, I stayed by the buffet table helping Dominique and her staff in an assembly-line preparation of dinner plates. Across from us, Joe Dawson and Greg Knight carved mounds of roast pork under the direction of one of the chefs from the Goose Creek Inn.

Mia, who was ferrying the heaping platters of meat to the buffet table, set one of them down in front of me and said quietly, “Greg and I stopped by the house on our way here. What happened to the clock? Is it being fixed or something?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then where is it?”

“It’s a long story.”

She stared hard at me. “Lucie, you didn’t sell it, did you?” Her tone was somewhere between accusation and disbelief.

“I had no choice. We needed the money to fix the motor on the destemmer. Plus we’ve got to pay the workers for harvest.”

“How could you? That clock has been in our family for over a hundred years!” Her voice rose sharply and a few dinner guests looked our way. She stormed on. “I would have begged or borrowed the money instead. I never would have sold it!”

It was completely out of character for Mia, the dreamy, artistic unmaterial girl, to get worked up over the loss of a piece of furniture, sentimental value notwithstanding. Mostly she fretted over more abstract matters like the hole in the ozone or space debris.

I said, stunned, “If you’re so broken up about it, how come you’re willing to sell the house and the vineyard? I didn’t like it any more than you do.”

“
Assez
!” Dominique shushed both of us. “People are watching. Back to work, please. Both of you.”

Mia glared at me, then walked over to Greg, flipping her hair off her neck like the twitching tail of an angry cat. She’d been this edgy and irritable at Leland’s wake, but since then things had been okay. Now it was back to fireworks between us. Not because of the clock, either.

I watched her touch Greg’s elbow, then pull his head down so she could whisper in his ear. He listened briefly before turning away. I caught a glimpse of the expression on his face. He looked irritated.

I saw her face, too. She looked hurt.

Though I avoided making eye contact with him, I knew he watched my every move for the rest of the evening like I was an exotic bird in a cage. As the evening wore on, it was obvious I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Mia, increasingly morose and unhappy, slammed a tray down in front of me, sending a spray of Pinot Noir sloshing from a glass and cascading in a graceful arc across my yellow sundress. I looked like I’d been shot.

“Oops.” She smiled. “Sorry.” She wasn’t.

“It was an accident. Forget it.” I poured sparkling water on a napkin and dabbed at my skirt.

Someone was at my elbow. Quinn handed me a salt shaker. “What was that all about?” He, too, had changed his clothes. Yet another Hawaiian shirt. This one was brown and green with dancing martini glasses, parrots, and tropical foliage.

“An accident,” I repeated taking the salt and sprinkling it on the largest stain, which turned dull purple. “Thanks for the salt. The tray slipped out of her hands. Anyway, it’s an old dress. It doesn’t matter.”

“If you say so.” There was a nearly simultaneous scraping noise of many chairs being pushed back. “I’d better get going. Some of these old folks might need help navigating that path over to the Ruins. Don’t want anybody losing their footing and suing. You coming?”

“I’ll help clean up here first.”

I began stacking plates when someone said behind me, “You look like you could use this.” Joe Dawson held two glasses of Chardonnay. He smiled and handed one of them to me.

“I probably shouldn’t until we finish cleaning up.”