The Merlot Murders (8 page)

Mia glanced at him wide-eyed.

“That’s not how your daddy set things up,” Mason folded his glasses and set them on top of his papers. “He didn’t want to have to choose who got which house—and there was no way to divide two houses three ways. So he came to this arrangement—on his own, I might add. You know how Lee liked gambling.”

Eli helped himself to more Scotch. “I guess I’d better get the dice.”

“Now?” I stared at him. “You want to do it
now
?”

“Why not? You can’t practice for this, you know.”

“Very funny. I’m really tired.”

“Let’s get it over with.”

I looked at Mason, who nodded. “Just as well.”

Eli went back inside the house, the screen door banging noisily behind him.

“Do you want another drink?” I asked Mason.

He reached for the bourbon. “I think I will. You having something, too, darlin’?”

“The white wine must be in the refrigerator. I think I could use another drink, too. Mimi, you change your mind? Want something?”

She was sitting on the love seat Indian style, picking the petals out of her daisy and setting them in a pattern on the coffee table. She looked up. “You haven’t called me that in years.”

“Old habits.”

“Nothing, thanks.”

Eli held the dice, clacking them in his hand when I came back to the porch with an open bottle of last year’s Chardonnay.

“These are the only ones I could find.”

“The Monopoly dice,” Mia said. “Where were they?”

“Are those legal?” I asked.

“In the drawer of the telephone table in the foyer,” Eli said. “And dice are dice.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Hand them over.”

He clacked them together again.

“He had trick dice when we were kids,” I explained to Mason.

“I was eight.” He slapped them into my open hand. “Oh, all right. Since you’ve got them, you roll first.”

I blew on the dice, closed my eyes, and tossed them. They sounded like pebbles as they bounced on the glass table. Before I could open my eyes, I heard Eli’s voice and the elation was unmistakable. “Three! You rolled a three!”

So he’d won, after all. Now he had the legal right to sell the house and the vineyard and there was nothing I could do to stop him. His two votes and Mia’s in favor of selling stacked up against my lone vote to hang on to it and run the vineyard ourselves. He’d probably have the
FOR SALE
sign up first thing tomorrow morning. Sooner, if he could find somebody who’d do it tonight.

“Your turn, Eli,” Mason said, after I sat there, mute, staring at my brother.

“Sure.” He scooped up the dice and winked triumphantly. If we’d been younger and Mason weren’t around, I might have done something to wipe the smirk off his face.

But we were older and I’d just lost my home by throwing a stupid three with a pair of Monopoly dice. Now Eli could have a swan swimming around a big fountain in the front yard of some castle he was building in Leesburg. I picked up my glass and drank long and deep.

The dice cracked against the glass table like bullets before ricocheting off the edge and clattering to the floor.

“Nice move,” I said.

“Where’d they go?” Mia asked.

“Over here.” Mason pointed under an end table. He stood up and peered at the spot he’d just indicated. “It’s too dark. Hand me that lantern, will you?”

Mia gave it to him. “Be careful or you’ll get lamp oil on yourself.”

He bent over cranelike and angled the light nearer to the floor. “If that doesn’t beat all.” He stood up and set the lamp back on the table. “Snake eyes.” He pulled a folded handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped his hands.

“What?” Eli said.

“A two. You rolled a two.” He refolded the handkerchief and stuffed it carefully back in his pocket.

“Lucie
won
?” Mia sounded incredulous.

“A three beats a two,” Mason said.

“Are you sure it’s a two?” Eli asked. “It’s pretty dark.”

“Check for yourself, son.” Mason looked levelly at my brother and, for a moment, I thought Eli actually might get down on his hands and knees and crawl under that end table. But if he did, it was as good as calling Mason a liar.

He shifted uncomfortably and looked away. “It’s okay. I’m sure you’re right.”

“Well, we’ll talk about all this later, children,” Mason stood and picked up the folder. “I’d best be getting home now.”

“Lucie and I’ll be talking about things, too,” Eli said, glancing at me.

“What’s going on?” Brandi, wide-eyed and alert, stood at the door to the veranda.

“Well, hello there, angel face. Nothing’s going on. Mason just stopped by for a drink.” Eli had jumped up at the sound of her voice. “Did you have a good nap?”

“I’m hot,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“Of course, princess. We’ll leave right away. I’ll bring the car up to the front door so you don’t have to walk too much.”

If he could have, I’m sure he would have driven it right on to the veranda so princess didn’t have to walk at all. I don’t know why it grated on me so much, but Eli’s transformation into the arche-typal touchy-feely sensitive male seemed about as genuine as those publishing house letters announcing you’ve just won $10 million. He hadn’t exactly been in touch with his feminine side when he dated Kit. Back then, his idea of a fun evening was for her to watch him play Formula 1 video games all night with the guys at one of the truck-stop restaurants on Route 29.

As he walked past me, he leaned over and said in a calm, low voice, “You need to be reasonable about all this, Luce. We’ll be talking.”

“I’m always reasonable,” I said quietly, but I could feel the skin prickle on the back of my neck.

“I’ve got to get something upstairs,” Mia said. “Then I’m going, too.”

We walked through the ovenlike house to the driveway. Mason got into a silver Mercedes. Brandi nodded a cool good-bye as Eli helped her into the Jag. A moment later Mia bounded outside.

“What did you get?” I asked curiously.

She blushed and discreetly slid a slim plastic case out of her pocket. Birth control pills. “I, um, forgot the other day. I need to start being more careful. See you.”

She pulled out of the driveway before the others, the red Mustang churning gravel as she sped down the road. I had nearly shut the front door when I heard Mason’s voice. I left it slightly ajar and listened.

“What are you going to do, son?”

“We’re selling.” Eli sounded completely confident. “Lucie was talking some sentimental crap about hanging on to the house, but I’m sure she’ll agree to sell the vineyard. It’s too much hard physical labor, especially for someone in her…well, you know.”

“So she’d still keep the house? You’d have to sell the land in two parcels,” Mason said.

“Nah, don’t you worry. She’ll change her mind. I can talk her into selling this albatross along with the vineyard in return for letting her stay in the place in France. She hasn’t got the money or the stamina to maintain it, especially the way it’s deteriorated. Hell, Doc Harmon told me she was exhausted when she insisted on walking from the cemetery over to the winery after Leland’s funeral. She’s real touchy when you bring it up but just look at her. She’s a cripple now. She needs to deal with it.”

I’d heard enough. Quietly, I closed the door.

It probably wasn’t the smartest decision in the world to try to hang on to the vineyard when Leland had left us nearly bankrupt. Our new vintner seemed like the kind of guy you’d hire as a bouncer at a night club. Eli was right that Highland House, neglected for years, needed repairs that were well beyond our bank balance.

The vineyard had not been a business with a bottom line for my mother and Fitz, as Eli now saw it. It had been a labor of love. It was part of the
goût de terroir
—the taste of the land. The blend of the tangible—grapes, soil, and sunlight—and the intangible, which came from the passion and personality of the winemaker who created it. People had been trying to grow grapes in Virginia since the Jamestown settlement when the House of Burgesses, the country’s first legislature, required every male over twenty to plant at least ten grape vines. Years later Jefferson wrote that we could make wines to rival the best European ones.

My mother had been excited by the renaissance in Virginia wine making that took place in the 1970s, among the first to see the possibilities of converting some of our acreage from growing hay to growing grapes. To give up now on her dreams, when our vines were just coming into their best production years, was unthinkable.

In France I had learned, of necessity, to take life slower, to measure time by seasons, not deadlines. A life that required me to fit into nature’s schedule, and not the other way around, held great appeal. More pragmatically, I had been educated by Philippe, on the rare occasions when he was home, in the useful skills of carpentry, plumbing, plastering, and tilework. On my own, I’d cleared the land around the farmhouse and replanted the gardens. I was not—as my brother believed—completely helpless or useless.

He’d changed since he married Brandi. That was clear. But less clear was how far he’d go to please her, where his loyalties now belonged.

He was still my brother. We shared parents, genes, a life history. To imagine him tangled in some twisted twenty-first-century version of a Greek tragedy so he could have gold-plated faucets on his bathtub was lunacy.

I went back to the veranda and stared at the star-filled night sky. My Chardonnay was tepid. I flung it into the garden and watched the drops sparkle in the yellow light of a citronella torch. Who else, besides Eli and me, had known Fitz was stopping by the winery last night?

Could he have brought Brandi home, then doubled back and confronted Fitz in the barrel room? He had a motive and opportunity—but also an alibi, thanks to his wife.

I blew out the candles and went inside. Eli was right that the house was uncomfortably warm and anyway, I was now too restless to sleep.

The little key that Fitz had given me last night was upstairs in my bedroom. I went upstairs and got it, running my thumb and forefinger over its notched edge. Like most everyone in Atoka, Fitz never bothered to lock the door to his house. Maybe I’d take a little drive over there and have a look around. He might not have told me everything he knew last night about who was pressuring Leland to sell.

Though if I discovered Eli was connected to this business, then what? I might learn soon enough how far he would go to get what he wanted. Now that the house belonged to me.

I’d just moved to the top of the list of people who stood in his way.

I finally located the keys to Leland’s Volvo station wagon where I should have looked in the first place. In the ignition. The car probably qualified for antique vehicle license plates and it was clearly on its second trip around the numbers on the odometer. The last time I remember it reading eleven thousand miles, I’d been learning to drive.

Fitz lived just outside Middleburg on Possum Pond Lane. He had ten acres and a charming cottage that had been built in the 1920s. Over the years, he’d renovated and updated the place, especially the kitchen, which now was state-of-the-art professional. What I liked best about his house was that it sat on the edge of a pond he called Little Possum Pond. The pond was shaded by an enormous weeping willow and every year families of Canada geese would come and take up residence for the summer. Fitz fed them with scraps from the inn and fussed over them like they were his children. Word must have spread about the good deal to be found at Little Possum Pond, as the community of geese grew larger each year.

Tonight everything was quiet as I drove up the gravel driveway. The motion-sensor light by the garage came on, which unnerved me. There was no sign that the police had been here yet, which was good—for me. The nearest neighbors were at least half a mile away on either side and the house, which sat well back from the street, backed up on woods. Even if I turned on every light in the place no one would notice I was here.

I went in through the front door, which led directly into the living room. Of all the things I remembered about Fitz’s home, the most vivid was how it smelled—as if he’d just finished baking sugar cookies. That achingly familiar scent still lingered in the air.

I went first to the kitchen. It was as immaculate and pristine as always, except for the collection of booze—Armagnac, whiskey, and wine—that had new prominence on a Hoosier cabinet. I opened drawers and cabinets, not expecting to find anything other than what I did: enough kitchen equipment and utensils to send any gourmet cook to gadget heaven.

The living room was pleasantly masculine, the decor a gift from a local interior designer who adored his Double Chocolate Died-and-Gone-to-Heaven Cheesecake. What gave the room its personality, though, were the framed autographed photos on walls and tabletops, of Fitz with the great and near-great.

I walked over to the fireplace. Gloria, his interior designer friend, was probably responsible for the spectacular dried floral bouquet of nandina, holly berries, coneflowers, and black-eyed Susans that sat between the andirons. Fitz’s favorite work of art, a reproduction of Da Vinci’s
Last Supper,
hung above the photo-filled mantel. Gloria had tried for years to get him to put an original painting that fit more with her “country manor” theme in such a place of honor, but Fitz had ignored her. The aging school photographs of Eli, Mia, and me were tucked between the frame and the glass as they always were, as though we were dining with the Apostles. He’d changed our pictures every year at Christmas until we’d graduated from high school and been immortalized in caps and gowns.

A small pile of mail stuck out from behind a mantel photo of Fitz with his arm around Julia Child. I pulled out the papers and sat down on his leather sofa. His latest phone bill, the electric bill, and an invitation to an upcoming Musicfest summer concert in Leesburg.

The last item was a yellowing envelope on which the heavy impression of a key was visible. I lifted the flap and pulled out a note card, which bore the same key impression. Years ago my mother had reproduced a few of her watercolors of the house and the vineyard, turning them into note cards. She’d sold them at the winery or given them as gifts.

This painting—the original—hung in Leland’s office. The weather-etched tombstone of Hugh Montgomery, who had been one of Mosby’s Rangers, was in the foreground. The serene sun-dappled Blue Ridge floated in the distance. My mother had often gone to the cemetery to paint, saying there was something particularly special about the light there. She used to take me along for companionship, leaving me to read a book or explore the sun-warmed gravestones of my ancestors, memorizing the inscriptions on the markers while she worked.

The verse inside the note card was written in my mother’s graceful penmanship.

Shakespeare. She loved Shakespeare. I knew the precise location on the bookshelf in her study where she kept her well-worn copy of his complete works.

I stared at the quote, unable to connect it with the key. Was the reference to “a jewel in a ten-times-barr’d-up chest” a hint about the location of the jewelry box where Fitz suspected the necklace was hidden? If it was, Fitz hadn’t found it—or perhaps he hadn’t had enough time to look. He’d said he’d only recently gone through her papers.

I slipped the card into the envelope and looked down at the fireplace hearth. Though it was summer, there were ashes in the grate. I moved the floral arrangement to get a better look. A fragment of a blue satin ribbon gleamed faintly among the charred papers. I poked the debris with tongs from a nearby stand. Other than the ribbon, all else was ash and cinder. He must have burned their correspondence, except for the envelope with the note containing the key—just like he’d wanted to do with her diaries.

I searched the rest of the cottage, leaving the bedroom suite for last. On his bedside table was a photograph of his parents. Next to it in a dime-store bright brass frame was a picture I’d never seen of Fitz and my mother. She was holding Mia, who was probably not more than a few months old. It was taken at the winery, in the courtyard loggia, probably in summer because a profusion of geraniums spilled out of a wine cask next to where they stood. Mia, completely toothless, grinned giddily, and Fitz and my mother looked radiant. I picked up the frame and slipped the photo out, holding it so the light from the bedside table lamp reflected off it.

A faint but unmistakable impression of a key. The photo had been in the envelope. Mia would have been too young to know why that picture held such special significance for my mother and anyone else who might know was dead.

I set it back on his nightstand and walked into the master bathroom. Fitz was taking enough medicine to keep a pharmacy in business. I recognized the drug Leland used to control his cholesterol and another to lower blood pressure, but it was the antidepressant that surprised me the most.

I closed the medicine cabinet and stared at my haunted reflection in his mirror. Alcohol and antidepressants. The worst combination in the world. How long had he been hiding the fact that he was depressed? Had Dominique known?

How could I have let him walk away from me last night?

I drove home and went directly to my parents’ bedroom and my mother’s dressing table. Her jewelry box, a family heirloom passed down through generations of Montgomery women, had originally belonged to Leland’s great-great-grandmother Iona. I found it where it had always been and wiped away the dust with the side of my fist. It was not locked and Fitz’s key didn’t fit the lock, either. I lifted the polished burled wood lid with its mother-of-pearl inlay surrounding the initials IEM.

Iona Esmé Montgomery’s velvet-lined jewelry box, which once held the Bessette family jewelry, was empty. Judging by that coat of dust, it had been that way for a long time.

I slept badly for a second night, despite the lingering effects of jet lag. When I woke the next morning I felt the same muddled lack of clarity I remembered from my days in the hospital, a nonrestful drug-induced slumber that, combined with the oppressive humidity, felt like someone had their foot on my chest. Downstairs a door slammed and I heard male voices.

I looked around the room, disoriented until memory clicked into place. I was home, not in France. I squinted at the alarm clock in the liquid gray light. Just after 5
A.M.
Quinn said he was moving the winery operations over to the house today. He hadn’t wasted any time.

I got up and showered, changing into jeans and a black-and-white striped tank top. Quinn was in the dining room, pacing the floor, a mobile phone clamped to his ear, restless and seemingly impatient with whoever was on the other end of the line. Every time he passed the china cabinet, he picked up a different piece of my great-grandmother’s Limoges or her silver and studied it as he paced. He was still wearing the combat fatigues, but he’d swapped the Hawaiian shirt for a T-shirt with a Harley-Davidson logo on it. He hadn’t shaved, which made him look even scruffier than I remembered from yesterday. I went over and took a Sèvres bud vase out of his hand and set it back on the shelf. Then I went through to the kitchen.

I poured coffee and juice and made toast and slowly took everything out to the veranda on one of my mother’s hand-painted vintage Tole trays, my cane hooked over one arm. I sat on the stone wall at the edge of the veranda and looked out at the view.

Directly below me was a series of stepped-down terraces heavily planted with azaleas, rhododendrons, dogwood, and cherry trees. The vineyards were off to the north and south, where the terrain was gentler, and weren’t visible from here. Our property ended at a private gravel road that led to our neighbors’ stud farm. Their barns and the neat pastures outlined by split-rail fences, where a few horses grazed picturesquely, looked impeccable compared to the wilderness on our side of the road. Beyond their farm, the land rose gently again and became a forested ridge of deciduous trees that would turn flame-colored in autumn. Framing everything should have been the soft blue-gray layers of the Blue Ridge, but they had been whited out once again by the heat and humidity.

When people say “old as the hills” I’m sure they mean the Blue Ridge, which have existed since before the Himalayas came to be and were grandfather-old when the Alps erupted. Now they were worn to nubs, a smallish mountain range like a series of dowagers’ humps, just under five hundred miles long and not so wide you couldn’t hike across them in a day if you were determined.

The screen door banged behind me. Quinn sat down, coffee mug in hand, his legs dangling over the ledge. “I can borrow a few pieces of equipment from John Chappell over at Hogsback Mountain Winery.” He sipped his coffee. “When you see Eli, tell him I need to talk to him, will you? The motor on the destemmer’s broken. It’s going to cost eight hundred bucks, give or take, to get it fixed. I’ll need the money today.”

I was pretty sure Eli didn’t have that kind of spare cash lying around anywhere, after what Fitz had told me about the state of his finances. Nor had I realized the immediacy of our need for money.

“You mean…from Eli?”

His eyes narrowed. “I don’t care which one of you gives it to me, if that’s what you mean. I’ve been dealing with Eli for financial matters since…” He paused. “Since a few days ago. If you want to give it to me now that’s fine by me.”

“I’ll get it to you by the end of the day.”

His face was bland but his eyes were skeptical. “Fine, then. I’ll call Carlyle’s and order the part right now.”

The screen door banged shut as he left. I finished my coffee and followed him inside. Dominique, barefoot and wearing an oversized T-shirt from the prep school where Joe taught, was spooning fresh-ground coffee from the grinder into the coffeemaker. She looked up when she saw me and spilled coffee on the counter.

Her eyes looked like two bruises.

“I’ll take care of that.” I crossed the room and took the scoop out of her hands. “I like my coffee strong after two years in France but you’re making paint stripper.”

Her pale smile seemed more like a grimace. She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the counter and lit one with shaking hands.

“I thought you quit,” I said, wiping up the spilled coffee.

“I did.”

“You slept here last night?”

She exhaled a cloud of smoke through her nostrils. “I couldn’t stay at Joe’s. I wanted to come home. I tried not to wake you.”

“Are you all right?”

“Who would do this?” She chewed on a fingernail and her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t understand. Who would do such a thing?”

“Someone took the payroll money out of the safe in the lab. Bobby thinks Fitz might have surprised whoever it was.”

“I should have gone. I should have picked up those cases. He asked me to go for him and I…” She sucked hard on her cigarette. “It should have been me.”

I pushed the button on the coffeepot and after a second, it started to gurgle. “How long had he been depressed?” I asked. “How long had he been taking antidepressants?”

She looked stunned. “I don’t know. He was taking pills? How did you find that out?”

“I, uh, found them.”

“He’d stopped confiding in me. He was very angry with me.” She blew out another fierce stream of smoke. “The last time I spoke to him we argued. You can’t imagine how much I wish I could take it back and do it over again.” She froze. “
Mon Dieu
. I’m so sorry. Of course you can imagine. You must relive that accident every day of your life. What a stupid thing to say.”