The Merlot Murders (3 page)

“Hell, the gossip’s already started,” he added. “When I stopped by the general store this morning, Thelma was up one side of me and down the other. I told her Bobby said it was an accident. She clucked around for a while then said, ‘Poor old Lee. I guess we just ought to leave him lay where Jesus flang him.’ I told her that’s just what we intended to do. So now I want you to tell me that you’re with us on this. Got it?”

Too bad those Ray-Bans were opaque. I couldn’t see Eli’s eyes at all. Though probably if I could, all I’d see would be my own reflection. No window on the soul there. If he still had one.

“Us,” I said. “You mean Mia agrees with you?”

He said tersely, “She’ll do whatever I tell her.”

That figured. Though she hadn’t always been so compliant.

Mia had been fourteen when our mother was killed one fine spring day, six years ago. The two of them had gone riding together. The child had returned to the stables alone hours later, barely coherent, as she tried to describe where Mom’s horse had stumbled, for no apparent reason, while jumping one of the low Civil War–era dry-stacked stone walls that rimmed the perimeter of the farm.

She never regained consciousness. A small mercy. She died that evening. The doctor in the emergency room said later that she might have lived if she’d gotten medical care sooner.

No one told Mia about that conversation, but still she had been too unwell to attend the funeral. Afterward Leland, whose interest in fatherhood had been borderline nonexistent when Mom was alive, escaped home as often as possible. It didn’t take long for Mia, left to her own devices while Eli and I were away at our respective universities, to acquire a tattoo, a boyfriend with a slow wit and a fast car, and a pack-a-day habit. When Jacques caught her and her boyfriend soused to the gills in the woods by the winery, even Leland agreed it was time to do something.

Surprisingly he was the one who thought of asking our cousin Dominique to come stay with Mia. The daughter of my mother’s sister, she was studying in Paris to be a chef. Leland persuaded Fitz to offer her a job at the Goose Creek Inn and promised free room and board in return for “keeping an eye” on Mia. He said it would be a great opportunity to perfect her English, along with the chance to work with a top American chef.

Dominique told me later he’d described my sister as a sweet child with the morals of a Girl Scout who needed a “mother figure” to give her gentle guidance. It took less than twenty-four hours to figure out what he’d really meant was that she needed a Mother Superior-cum-parole-officer and a short leash. Mia hadn’t been overjoyed to report her comings and goings to her cousin after so much unsupervised hell-raising, but eventually she seemed to settle down and we were less worried about the road to perdition.

“Well?” Eli said. “You didn’t answer me. We need to present a unified front on this. As a family.”

The statement was freighted with so much latent irony that, for a moment, I thought he might be joking. But he was peering over the top of the Ray-Bans again. He was dead serious.

I hadn’t had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours and my head still ached. Eli could be relentless when he wanted something, like a dog with a bone.

“Okay, okay. I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. Can we change the subject now, please?”

“Of course. Actually, there is something else we need to discuss before we get home.” He paused. “The bad news.”

He waited while that sank in.

“Well,” I said wearily, “glad we got the good news out of the way first.”

“It has nothing to do with Leland.”

He had turned west onto Route 50 and the scenery was all farmland now. The Indians made the path for this road three hundred years ago when they were following the trail for buffalo, which probably accounted for its gentle twists and turns. Here, at least, nothing had changed. Miles of low stone walls that were pre–Civil War lined the sides of the road. Horses grazed serenely on stubbly brown fields and the corn was late-summer high. The traffic had petered out to a single John Deere tractor motoring amiably down the middle of the road. The driver gave way to let Eli pass, waving as we zoomed by.

“So, what is it?”

“Greg Knight moved back home. He’s living in Leesburg.”

There was a long silence before I said, “When?”

“Six months ago.”

“How come no one told me?”

He cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”

He did know. “You might have warned me when you called last night,” I said.

Eli looked over at me the way you look at a grenade after someone just pulled the pin. “You never would have gotten on that plane.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said. “I just would have liked to know before I got here, that’s all. What’s he doing here, anyway? Bartending again? I thought he had some big radio job in New York. With CBS.”

“It was ABC,” my brother said, “and he did.”

“What happened? They fire him?”

Eli shrugged. “How should I know? We don’t talk anymore, not like before. Like I said, he’s living in Leesburg. He’s got a job working as a deejay at WLEE. With his own nighttime call-in show. Plays jazz in between talking to insomniacs or whatever weirdos are awake at three in the morning.” He cleared his throat again. “Not that I listen.”

For once it was my turn to look at him. “At least he won’t be at the funeral. I’d rather not see him right now and I can’t imagine he’d have the nerve to show up.”

“Actually,” Eli said, “you will and he does. There’s something else.” He gave me the grenade pin look again. “He’s seeing Mia.”

He knew better than anyone it was the last thing I expected to hear. “What, as her baby-sitter? He’s ten years older than she is.”

“He’s, ah, sleeping with her.”

“Very funny.”

He said nothing, just worked his jaw like he was trying to loosen a piece of food that got wedged between two teeth.

“He’s not really sleeping with her,” I said finally.

“Don’t tell her. She thinks he is.”

“Oh God, Eli! How could you let that happen? What happened to Ringo? Or Rocko…whatever his name was?”

“Who?”

“That guy she was dating. The one with the teeth.”

“Oh. Him. He’s at some military academy in Pennsylvania. On probation.”

“I don’t understand…” I said. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“You haven’t seen your sister in two years, babe. She’s changed.”

“Well, if she listens to everything you tell her, why can’t you put a stop to this?” I banged a fist on the wide console between our seats.

He should have been as upset as I was. He and Greg had been best friends since first grade. Then came the rain-wrecked night two years ago when Greg’s car slammed into the stone wall at the entrance to the vineyard. He’d actually gotten out and walked away, though he’d returned to watch while the Rescue Squad cut me free with the Jaws of Life. His friendship with Eli and our torrid summer affair had disintegrated into more pieces than a wall of Humpty Dumpties.

He came to the hospital to visit me precisely once during the months I was there. A mumbled apology as though he’d forgotten to pick me up for a movie date. That was it. Those fifteen minutes were acid-etched in my memory, marking the absolute nadir of the Great Depression—mine, that is—during the era when the doctors said I might never walk again. Then I heard that he moved to New York.

Eli wiped at a nonexistent smudge where I’d whacked the console. “Take it easy, will you? That’s hand-stitched leather. As for talking to Mia about Greg, it’s not that simple. Anyway, they’re consenting adults.”

Amnesia would have been convenient just then. Too many images of what Greg and I had done together flashed behind my eyelids. “Maybe I could talk to her…”

“Forget it, Luce. She’ll think it’s sour grapes. Look, do you honestly think he’s changed? He’s still the same Greg. Still with chicks hanging all over him, stuffing their phone numbers into his pockets, willing to cook him dinner or have his baby. Don’t ask me how the guy does it.”

I closed my eyes again. I didn’t have to ask. I knew.

“So is he…faithful…to her?”

“What do I look like? Dear Abby? You think he tells me he’s screwing around on my sister?”

We were taking a little stroll through land-mine territory. The rumors were that Greg had turned his predatory attention away from his affair with me for a brief fling with Brandi, Eli’s then-girlfriend and now my beautiful but vapid sister-in-law. He denied everything, of course, but Brandi finally told Eli after Greg went to New York that he’d practically raped her during what she said was a “friendly little drive.” Eli believed his wife.

I didn’t believe either of them. Not that any of it mattered anymore.

“So you don’t have a problem with this, then?” I asked. “Come on. You remember what happened that summer.
All
of it.”

He said nothing and just concentrated on the road, though he’d really goosed up the speed while we were talking. He took the left-angle turn at the Snickersville Turnpike so sharply the tires squealed.

I grabbed the armrest. “Eli, slow down, will you? You’re driving like a madman.”

“I can drive this road with my eyes closed.” But at least he let up slightly on the accelerator.

“Well, open them. You didn’t answer my question.”

“There’s nothing to say. Look, I’m sorry, Luce. I don’t want to go over ancient history. We can’t relive the past.”

I leaned back in my seat. For the second time, he was avoiding something. He’d gotten Mia to go along with him and now he wanted my silence, dressed up as family unity. He started worrying his tongue against his bottom lip again, lapsing into a brooding silence.

I stared out the window at the well-loved landscape of home. My days of exile in France were over. I was back for good. Eli was right that we needed to pull together, as it fell to the three of us now to run the vineyard. I had no intention of reliving the past but we had to lay some things, finally, to rest. There would be no sweeping the details of Leland’s death under the carpet, either.

The late-afternoon sun streamed in through the glass of the Jag’s tinted windows, refracting everything outside to a lovely liquid clarity that almost hurt my eyes. Inside the car, the murkiness was pervasive.

In vino veritas
. In wine there is truth.

About time I got some.

We passed the Wild Bird Sanctuary sign at the edge of the town of Middleburg. Route 50 narrowed and became Washington Street, an elegantly pretty tree-lined main street of small shops and cafés, where park benches lined the brick sidewalks and American flags hung limply from poles on the street lamps.

“I hate to rush you,” Eli said, breaking the silence, “but as soon as we get to the house you’ve got to change so we can get over to the funeral home. Brandi and Mia are already there. Dominique will be along as soon as she sees to a retirement party at the inn. Some senator’s throwing a bash.”

“It’s Leland’s wake. Can’t she leave that to someone else? I thought she had help.”

“Of course she does. But let me tell you, if she’d been around when God created the world, she probably would have insisted on supervising to make sure He didn’t screw up.”

“Dominique? Oh, come on. If she was any more laid back, you’d want to take her pulse to check for signs of life.”

“Not anymore. Now you just want to check it to see if she’s human. That catering company of hers has grown so much she’s bringing in almost as much money as the inn. So her spring is, shall we say, just a tiny bit overwound,” he said. “Then there’s the matter of her wanting to run the whole caboodle on her own after Fitz retires.”

“I didn’t know he was thinking about retiring.” I said, surprised.

“He’s not. She’s thinking about him retiring. You should see him at the inn these days when he joins his guests for happy hour. Like I said, for him happy hour never stops. Dominique is getting more and more pissed off about it, too. He’s an embarrassment, Luce.”

“Why do you always have to be so crude? He opened that restaurant before either of us were even born. It is what it is today because of him.”

“Will you calm down? It’s not like the guys in white pajamas are going to show up and haul him off tomorrow, though some time drying out is probably just what the doctor ordered. Anyway, all future plans about Fitz and the inn are on the back burner while the festival is on.”

“What festival?”

He glanced over so I could see his eyebrows raised above the frame of the Ray-Bans. “You mean you don’t even know about that? Our festival. The First Annual Montgomery Estate Vineyard Summer Festival.”

“Since when do we have a festival?”

“I just said it’s the first one.”

“I mean, how come we have a festival? We’re just a mom-and-pop vineyard.”

“No fooling,” he said. “But these days, everyone’s got one. So now we do, too. The only difference is most of the other vineyards don’t think they have to put on a production that would rival the opening ceremony of the damn Olympics.”

“Where do we get all the people to pull off something like this?”

“Where do you think? Dominique roped everyone in the family into it. And Joe, of course.”

“I thought that relationship was over.”

“Nah, he’s still crazy about her even if she thinks he’s about as ambitious as a slug. Hell, he’d hang the moon some place different if she wanted it. She’ll probably get around to asking, too. She’s got him doing just about everything else.”

The family had long since stopped placing bets on when Joe Dawson, a history teacher at an elite private girls’ school in Middleburg, would get up his nerve to ask Dominique to marry him. Now it was
if
he’d ask her.

“Like what?”

“She’s got some theater company coming in to do
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
this weekend at Mosby’s Ruins.”

The burned-out tenant house we called Mosby’s Ruins had been the temporary Civil War headquarters of Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the leader of what was probably the most famous guerrilla combat group of the Confederacy. It was thanks to his notoriety that Atoka got its name on the map.

Mosby’s nickname was “the Gray Ghost” because of the surprise commando raids he and his partisan Rangers used to stage on Union soldiers. They’d steal Union supplies, then disappear, hiding out in barns or smokehouses or behind the miles and miles of dry-stacked stone walls that checkerboarded the landscape. Our tenant house had been one of his many bolt-holes until Union men burned it.

As kids we played there even though it was unsafe, reenacting Civil War battles where the Confederacy always won. We used the crumbling weed-choked brick walls as ramparts and scared each other with sightings of Mosby’s ghost, who was said to appear on moonless nights, still looking for Union soldiers. Later, Greg and I used it as a secret place to make love.

“It’s been refortified since you left. We turned the main floor of the house into a stage for concerts, plays, performances.” He looked at me. “The place where you and Greg used to do it is a storage room now. We keep the scenery, lights, and equipment there.”

I turned red as he smirked. “How nice,” I said coldly.

He turned off Route 50 onto Atoka Road. We drove through the town of Atoka—which consisted of the general store with its two gas pumps out front, the farrier, and the Baptist church—and headed toward home. Though it had been less than an hour since we sped away from the airport and the new high-tech construction lining the highway, here the mailboxes still had the same names on them they’d had for decades and the homemade signs stuck in front yards advertising fresh peaches, tomatoes, and ’lopes were the same ones folks used every year.

Eli slowed the Jag, for once obeying the twenty-five miles per hour speed limit, as though recalibrating to the gentler, more languid pace I remembered. “Opening night for the play’s been canceled on account of Leland’s funeral,” he said, after a moment. “Switched to Friday instead. Along with the pig roast.”

“Pig roast?”

“You heard me. Dominique wants everyone to dress up in Elizabethan costumes to serve the guests. It’ll be a cold day in hell before she gets me to prance around in a pair of tights and some velvet doubloon.”

“Doublet.”

“Whatever. I’m not wearing it.”

We had come to the split-rail fence that marked the beginning of our land. Out my window was a long, clear vista all the way to the layered Blue Ridge Mountains. In front of us were the Bull Run Mountains, a sixteen-mile truncated spur of hills that always made me think of an old man’s worn down set of teeth.

The first thing I saw, marking the beginning of our Chardonnay block, was my mother’s Peace rosebush, which had exploded into a profusion of velvety yellow flowers the size of small cabbages, against glossy dark green foliage. The French planted roses with their vines for centuries because both were sensitive to the same pests and diseases. If the roses were suffering, it meant the vines would soon be in trouble, too, and in need of preventive measures against bugs or black rot or whatever else ailed them. Now with all the modern equipment we had for monitoring the soil and vines, the roses were there for beauty, and because my mother loved them.

Farther down another of her favorite hybrid tea roses, the blood-red Chrysler Imperial, indicated the beginning of the Pinot Noir. The middles, the spaces between the rows of vines, which we usually planted with bluegrass, were deeply cracked and brown. It obviously had been a hot, dry summer, but the vines would have thrived in weather like that.

I kept my face turned toward the window so Eli wouldn’t notice that my eyes were suddenly watery, and pretended to look for the smaller of our two apple orchards, which was just beyond the Pinot Noir.

“Hopefully we’ll get a good price for the place,” Eli said. “Considering the shape it’s in.”

He spoke in that same casual tone of voice so it didn’t hit me right away what he’d just said. When I realized, it was like a physical blow. “You’re not talking about the vineyard?”

“What else would I be talking about?” He sounded irritated, like he’d actually expected to have gotten away with dropping that bombshell into the conversation without me noticing. “Of course we’re selling. Mia and I certainly don’t plan to run it. And you don’t either, obviously.” His glance strayed in the direction of my feet.

I reddened and smoothed my ankle-length cotton dress, now badly pleated after sleeping in a cramped airline seat, and shifted my bad leg so it was less visible.

So this was what he hadn’t wanted to tell me on the phone. I never saw it coming. “You can’t be serious,” I said.

His lips were pressed together like he was trying to keep his cool and refrain from blurting out some insulting reply. I didn’t care what he said. This time he wasn’t going to bully me and win.

“You want to sell our home!” I said. “How could you? Our family’s owned that land practically since the country was founded. Everyone’s buried there…Mom…Leland…”

“The cemetery’s not a problem.” He cut me off, speaking rapidly. “I’ve got it all figured out. We’ll move them.”

He slowed the car and put on his turn signal. A row of cheerful burgundy, white, and green posters with an abstract design of grapes twining around musical instruments was plastered on the stone wall that marked the main entrance to Highland Farm and Montgomery Estate Vineyard. Mia’s artwork, almost certainly. She was the only one of us to inherit Mom’s artistic talent. The place where Greg’s car destroyed part of the wall was still visible, even with the posters covering the seam between the old and new stone, though the demolished stone pillar had been completely rebuilt. Eli turned into the entrance.

“That is an absolutely revolting idea,” I folded my arms and stared out the window.

“It is not. I’m not talking about throwing a bunch of coffins in the back of Hector’s pickup and carting them off to a landfill or something. There are ceremonies for situations like this. We’ll find another site, maybe build a mausoleum. It’ll be tasteful.” He sounded irritated. “Mia agrees with me, babe. And don’t tell me you can’t use the money like the rest of us.”

So much for family unity. He and Mia were going to gang up on me so it was two against one.

A cloud of red clay dust swirled around us as we drove along Sycamore Lane, the private gravel road that led to the house and the vineyard. The name came from the magnificent two-hundred-year-old tree, which had grown up a few hundred feet from the main entrance, dividing the road like a “Y” into left and right forks. Eli came to the divide and downshifted, pausing briefly in front of the enormous tree with its soaring branches and its crepelike bark, peeling like a bad case of sunburn. It had been here as long as my family and it could easily live another three or four hundred years.

“We’re broke, is that it?” I said. “Are you telling me we have to sell the place to pay off Leland’s debts?”

He glanced at me as he nosed the car to the right and headed directly toward the main house. No sentimental tour for my home-coming. Had we gone left—the road was an enormous loop—we would have first passed the winery, Mosby’s Ruins, the cemetery, and a large spring-fed pond.

“Calm down, will you? And don’t turn on the waterworks, either, Luce. I can’t take it right now. We’re not technically broke.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “I’m
not
crying. And you sound like a lawyer. Just tell me yes or no. Are we broke or not?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me. I’ve got time.”

“No, you don’t. We’ve really got to move. We’re twenty-one minutes behind schedule. I’ll fill you in later.”

“It wasn’t my idea to have the wake two hours after I got off the plane from France,” I said. “And you drove like a madman. You made up for a lot of lost time. We’ll be fine.”

“We’re the family. We
can’t
be late.”

He pulled the car into the curved drive in front of the house. Highland House, as it was called, was a harmonious mixture of Federal and Georgian architecture built of locally quarried stone. Not a pretentious or grand mansion, it possessed—at least to my eyes—a grace and elegance in its well-proportioned symmetry that made it seem somehow more substantial than it was. Scott Fitzgerald used to attend parties here when he came from Baltimore to visit friends in the area, and FDR dined with my grandparents the day he gave the dedication speech for the newly constructed Blue Ridge Parkway.

When my mother was alive, she’d made frequent pilgrimages to the gardens of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and to the Pavilion Gardens at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which he’d designed. I’d often gone with her on those trips, watching while she read his
Garden Book,
making plans to incorporate into her own gardens the harmony and beauty Jefferson had sought to achieve. Like him, she believed botany ranked near the top of the list among the sciences, and so it had happened that every year our home had been one of the most popular ones on the annual garden tour.

“Oh my God,” I said. “What happened?”

I stared through the Jag’s tinted window. Everything she had created was gone. The lawn was coarse and scrubby where there weren’t rock-hard bare spots. If I hadn’t known where the flowerbeds had been, I’d have thought the yard was always this weed-tangled and ugly.

The house hadn’t fared much better, for it looked depressingly seedy and run-down. The paint on the shutters, the large paneled door, and the fluted columns had gone mottled and grayish and was peeling in long scales. The moss-covered façade was stained below the bowed bay windows, two of which were mended with duct tape where the glass had cracked. Weeds bloomed in the chipped stone urns which sat on either side of the door. Our family motto,
Gardez bien
—“watch well” or “take good care”—carved in the stone lintel above the doorway was obscured by grime and lichen.