The Riesling Retribution (16 page)

“You said only fifty were buried in that cemetery,” I said.

“Fifty-four,” he said. “Most of the others were lost and presumed drowned.”

“I’d like to see that river crossing,” Chance said. “How do we get to it?”

“There’s another path.” Tyler’s gaze strayed to my cane. “It’s pretty steep and it can be sort of treacherous.”

“How did the Union soldiers get up here?” I asked.

“Same path,” he said. “We could skip it and just check out the cemetery, if you want. Unfortunately there’s no place to really see the river from up here because it’s so overgrown with trees and bushes.”

“I’d like to see the river, too,” I said. “Let’s take the path.”

My shirt was already sticking to me and drops of perspiration trickled down my cheeks. Chance and Tyler mopped their faces with their shirts. Maybe we’d catch a stray breeze off the water to cool us off.

“If you guys are game,” Tyler said. “We follow that sign over there.”

“I’ll spot Lucie in case it gets too difficult,” Chance said. “Tyler, take Bruja’s leash.”

We weren’t talking about bungee jumping off the bluffs, just walking down a hill. The first time I let my disability become more of an impediment than it already was, I knew it was the beginning of not fighting back and letting it dictate my life.

“Thanks, but I’m sure I can manage.”

“We’ll have to go single file,” Tyler said. “It’s the only way.”

“Then Lucie should go in the middle.” Chance took my hand. To me he said, “Tyler knows where we’re going and I ought to bring up the rear.”

The scent of his cologne mingled with perspiration filled my head. “All right.”

The path, when we reached it, was narrower than I expected.

“Jesus,” Chance said. “How many soldiers used this?”

“About fifteen hundred,” Tyler said. “They got four horses and those cannons up here, too.”

“How in the world did they do that?” I asked.

“The worst problem wasn’t getting up here,” Tyler said. “It was getting back down when the Confederates went after them. Some Federals ended up sliding down on their butts with their bayonets extended so they literally ran into their comrades and killed them.”

He saw the expression on my face.

“Sorry. I know it’s disgusting.”

“How come so many drowned?” Chance asked.

“There were only three small boats to take them back to Harrison Island,” Tyler said. “It wasn’t enough. Some men tried to swim. Others just got caught on the floodplain, waiting. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for the Confederates.”

Tyler waited while Chance and I took in the magnitude of what it must have been like for panicked Union soldiers under fire being forced to retreat down this funnel-like path, knowing they’d be sitting ducks for the Confederates if they even made it to the river.

“How many did the South lose?” I asked.

“Only about twenty-five.” Bruja tugged on the leash in Tyler’s hand. “Ready?”

The path, laid out as a series of switchbacks, was as difficult to navigate as Tyler had warned. All three of us needed to put a hand out to steady ourselves on a fallen tree or a rock outcropping. No one spoke as we made our way down, but I could hear the breathing of the other two and the dog panting in the heat. Sweat stung my eyes and my clothes were as wet as if I’d gone swimming in them. Here and there blotches of sunlight penetrated the heavy canopy of trees, but the muggy air felt junglelike.

I tripped over a tree root and Chance grabbed my arm as I started to slide down the trail.

It took us nearly fifteen minutes to descend to the river. With each step I thought about what a protracted death this had been for the Union troops trapped at the edge of the cliff with too few boats to ferry them across the river. Once we saw the Potomac and Harrison Island, I wanted to get out of here.

The pea-green river was barely visible because of the many heavy, low tree branches that obscured our view. There was something flat and dead about this part of the Potomac. Nothing at all like the vibrant, swift-flowing river that was so entwined with the history and geography of Washington, D.C.

“Watch the mud and the tree roots,” Tyler said.

Chance unclipped Bruja’s leash and the dog waded into the river. He held out his hand to me. I took it as we walked around the
Medusa-like root system of a copse of trees to get a better view of the river and Harrison Island.

I shaded my eyes against the light reflecting off the water. “Doesn’t look too far to that island. I bet you could swim to it in under twenty minutes.”

“Maybe now. Back in 1861, the river probably covered the entire floodplain,” Tyler said. “Plus it had been raining hard for the past three weeks that October so it was higher than usual.”

“Who owns it?” Chance indicated the island.

“It’s private.” Tyler pushed his glasses up his nose. His face gleamed with sweat and the glasses slid back down again. “They use it for hunting, but nobody lives there.”

“We ought to think about starting back,” I said.

Chance nodded and slapped his thigh, whistling for the dog.

“Stand back,” he said as Bruja came ashore and shook herself off.

“When we get up top we’ll take the path by the cemetery,” Tyler said. “That way we’ll make a complete loop.”

The trip up the steep winding path didn’t seem as arduous, but maybe it was because I was relieved to be leaving the riverbank. When we reached the clearing, though, everyone was again breathing hard.

“Whose grave is that?” Chance pointed to a solitary stone marker a few yards from the cemetery.

“It’s where they think the Union commander fell. Colonel Edward Baker. He was also a U.S. senator at the time,” Tyler said, as we walked toward it. “There are bunch of different stories about what happened and where he was actually killed. His death just about destroyed Abe Lincoln. One of his sons was named for Baker. They were really close.”

Sunlight flickered on the small tombstone. Bruja, again on her leash, strained to examine it closer.

“It’s not far from the cliffs,” Chance said.

Tyler nodded. “That’s how we’re going to do it in the reenactment. Baker’s going to drop dead near Goose Creek after he arrives by boat. Then everyone’s going to rush him and fight over his body like they did in the real battle.”

“I feel sorry for whoever plays Baker,” I said. “That sounds dangerous.”

“Nah, we’ve got it under control,” Tyler said. “But it’s Ray Vitale. Your favorite person.”

“Who’s he?” Chance asked.

“A guy Lucie and I met the other night,” Tyler said. “Kind of hard-core. In charge of the Union reenactors.”

“Let’s check out the cemetery,” I said. “Then we should head back to the vineyard.”

Tyler unlatched the wrought-iron cemetery gate, giving it a shove so it creaked open. My eye fell on the raised lettering on the bronze plaque affixed to it. The bottom line read: “Interments—54. Known—1. Unknown—53.”

Chance began counting the white markers arranged in a semicircle around the flagpole, pointing at each one.

“There aren’t enough markers,” he said.

“There’s more than one person in each grave,” Tyler said. “And nobody knows who’s lying there, either, how many sets of remains are buried there.”

I leaned against the sun-warmed wall of red river rock and felt the heat penetrate my clothing through to my skin, thinking about the mingled bones of Union soldiers moldering in this little cemetery.

“I still think that’s ghoulish,” I said.

“At least they’re buried,” Tyler said. “Parts of ’em, that is.”

“The only one they could identify was James Allen?” Chance stood in front of the lone marker with a name on it.

Tyler nodded.

“We should go,” I said.

Chance unlatched the gate. “You okay, Lucie?”

“I told her the place was haunted by the spirits of the soldiers who never got buried in the cemetery, but she didn’t believe me,” Tyler said.

“And I still don’t,” I said.

Tyler grinned. “Oh, yeah?”

“All right, I’ll admit there’s something disturbing about the place.”

Tyler grinned. “Told you.”

“Wonder where those people got to?” Chance said as we reached
the parking lot and saw the same cars that had been there when we arrived. “Maybe they were watching us.”

“Okay,” I said, “enough with the scary stuff.”

He unclipped Bruja’s leash and smiled, climbing into the pickup. “See you home.”

Tyler and I got into the Mini. “I think Chance likes you, Lucie.”

“I think you have an overactive imagination.”

We drove out of the park. “So what’d you think?” he asked. “Pretty interesting place, huh?”

“It is. Thanks for showing it to me.”

“I know Quinn gave me time off today because he thinks I’m a screwup.”

“No he doesn’t. It’s just that a lot of things have been going wrong lately.”

“Yeah, and they always seem to be my fault.” He sounded peevish.

“Is Quinn too hard on you?” I glanced at his profile. He’d taken off his baseball cap again. The wind blew his reddish-gold curls so they framed his face like a cherub in a Raphael painting.

“He’s always asking me to do dirty jobs. Clean barrels. Clean tanks. Go out and pull leaves off vines one by one.”

“Tyler, that
is
your job. That’s what a cellar rat does. No one said it was easy work. Quinn and I do it, too.”

“Chance would be a lot easier on me.”

“Quinn runs the show. And if the work’s too hard or too boring, no one’s forcing you to stay, buddy.” I kept my tone light. “If something’s going on that I need to know about between you and Quinn, I expect you to tell me.”

“Don’t worry,” he said.
“Ad utrumque paratus.”

“You want to translate?” I glanced at his innocent-looking profile and wondered whether he was keeping something from me.

“Ready for anything, prepared for the worst.” He put his cap back on and adjusted it. “It means I can handle it.”

As it turned out, he was wrong.

Bobby showed up at the vineyard early Tuesday morning and found me in the courtyard deadheading flowers in the hanging baskets. Overnight the weather had shifted, bringing cooler temperatures and a tang in the air that smelled as though autumn would soon be here. The intense lapis hue of the summer sky had faded to steel blue, signaling that we were in for more changes including, possibly, an unwelcome visit from Hurricane Edouard.

I heard his shoes crunch on the gravel and looked up. He was dressed like a businessman in a sport jacket, dress shirt, and tie. His face wore the impassive expression of a cop, a stranger who was not my old childhood friend. I searched his eyes and wondered what went through his mind every time he had to deliver news that would crack open someone’s universe, as he was about to do to mine.

“I’d like to talk to you,” he said, helping me down from a stepladder next to one of the baskets. “I’ve got some news.”

“Is here okay, or do we need to go someplace else?” I set my pruning shears on top of the ladder.

“Here’s fine.”

I reached for my cane. “Shall we sit on the wall, then?”

“Sure.”

I looked out at the grape-heavy vines and the mountains. Thin clouds melted into the pale morning sky like a faded watercolor. I closed my eyes and wondered how bad his news was going to be.

“I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “Annabel Chastain came in yesterday to answer questions. After what she told us and based on some other evidence, we have reason to believe your father is responsible for the death of Beau Kinkaid.”

He didn’t sugarcoat it, I’ll give him that.

“You can’t really think—”

He held up his hand. “Wait. Let me finish. Leland Montgomery is dead and there’s nothing to prosecute. If Mrs. Chastain wanted to file charges against your father’s estate, it would go to civil court. The way it’s looking, I don’t think she plans to do that, meaning you’re off the hook. It’s over, Lucie, and we’re going to wrap this up.”

“Off the hook, except my father is a murderer?”

“Look, nobody knows how it went down. Maybe it was self-defense. Maybe not. But we have enough evidence concerning the feud between Beau and your father, plus a witness putting him at your home the day Annabel said Beau disappeared.”

“Dominique.”

“I appreciate her coming forward like that.” He pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and offered it to me.

“No, thanks.”

He unwrapped a piece and stuck it his mouth. “We’ve got a lot of active cases and you know how thin we’re stretched with all the budget cuts hammering us. This one’s pretty much open-and-shut. We caught a lot of breaks. Doesn’t usually happen on a cold case, but this time it did.”

“You said you had other evidence.” I still felt numb. “Do you mean the bullet?”

“We haven’t gotten final results back from the lab yet, but the bullet Junie found when he did the autopsy was pretty degraded,” he said.

“So you won’t know for sure if it was Leland’s gun?”

He repeated like a mantra. “We have enough other evidence—”

I cut him off. “I don’t understand why you believe Annabel Chastain. It’s her word against nobody’s. Dominique said Beau left our house alive. How come she couldn’t have done it?”

He looked out at the horizon before answering. I knew then that the other evidence—whatever it was—had finally damned Leland. Something he knew and I didn’t.

“Annabel and your father were having an affair. She has letters. Leland wanted Beau out of the way so he could be with her. It was more than a business feud, it was personal.” He reached over and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I had to tell you that.”

My throat tightened. An affair. Bobby was satisfied this was a crime of passion. That put a whole new spin on everything. Leland had a reputation as a womanizer so it all fit together, didn’t it?

“Dominique said Beau came to visit my father the day my mother went into labor with me. You’re trying to tell me my father was carrying on a torrid affair with another woman when I was born? That he wanted to leave my mother with a two-year-old and a brand-new baby?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen it happen.”

He pulled an envelope out of the breast pocket of his sport jacket. I didn’t need to look at the contents to recognize Leland’s stationery. An engraved envelope with “Highland Farm” embossed on the back flap. Bobby handed it to me.

“Read it. I need you to confirm that it’s your father’s handwriting.” When I hesitated he said, “Please.”

I removed the letter and read it. Leland wanted Annabel to leave Beau. He also wanted her to meet him to talk about it. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but Leland never had been one for poetry and roses.

“It’s his handwriting.”

“Thank you.” He took the letter and refolded it.

“If Beau drove up here to see Leland and never returned, there must have been a car.”

“We’re looking on your property, in case it’s still there,” he said. “But even if it’s not, he could have disposed of it elsewhere. He would have had plenty of time.”

In the poignant silence that followed, I wondered if Bobby believed I had lied to him all along.

“I’m not hiding anything, Bobby.”

“I never said you were. But it’s over now.”

“I still don’t understand why Annabel isn’t a suspect since she wanted Beau out of the way, too. And not to point out the obvious, but Leland didn’t leave my mother for her, did he?”

“Annabel claims to have guessed what had happened and was
so scared she’d get dragged into a murder as an accomplice that she ended the affair,” he said. “Told your father it was over, left Richmond, and kept a low profile using her maiden name until she got a divorce on the grounds of abandonment and married Chastain.”

“So she’s off the hook, too, isn’t she?”

He heard the scorn in my voice and his jaw tightened. “Let me tell you something. When I was at the academy, here’s what I learned in Law Enforcement 101: The best approach to working a case is the simplest. Don’t make it more complicated or convoluted than it is and don’t read too much into anything. Most crimes are committed out of necessity or passion. Your father was motivated by both. He owed Beau money and he was messing around with his wife.”

Then he delivered the coup de grâce. “Annabel agreed to take a polygraph test for us.”

“And?” My mouth tasted like I’d swallowed nails.

“She passed.”

Quinn found me sitting on the wall after Bobby left.

“I saw the cruiser,” he said. “You want to talk about it?”

I took some deep breaths until I could steady my voice. “They’re closing the investigation. Bobby says they have enough evidence to conclude Leland killed Beau.”

He sat down and put his arm around me, pulling me to him. “I’m sorry.”

I swallowed. “He says it may have been self-defense or not. But they’re not going to look any further since they’re satisfied he’s guilty. Dominique put Beau at our house the day I was born, which corroborates Annabel’s story. Plus Annabel produced a letter Leland wrote asking her to leave Beau. She and Leland were having an affair right before I was born.”

His arm tightened. “This storm will pass. You’re tough. You’ll get through it.”

“I don’t believe he did it.”

“I know, I know—”

“I’m serious. Leland did not kill Beau.”

“It’s probably hard to think straight right now. Give it some
time.” His voice was gentle. “It happened a long time ago. Who knows what the circumstances were?”

I lifted my head from his shoulders.

“That’s a good question.” I stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to someone who might know exactly what the circumstances were.”

He stared at me for a long time. “Be careful.”

In the sweet, nostalgic memories of everyone who pines for the bygone days of small-town America, there is always a General Store. An old-fashioned place that doesn’t necessarily have what folks need, but it does have what they wantsomeone who remembers their brand of tobacco and the kind of motor oil they bought last time, and who asks to see pictures of the new baby or the wedding without being prompted. The inventory is never computerized because it’s erratic and, besides, no one computerizes bloodworms or tomatoes fresh out of the garden of a local farmer. Our General Store had Thelma Johnson, who’d owned the place since God was a boy.

I parked outside the white clapboard building with its hipped tin roof and large picture window with the neon “Open” sign that now read “Ope.” Thelma had tied sleigh bells that sounded like Christmas every time someone entered or left through the front door, and that was her version of security. As always, the place smelled of coffee, baked goods, and some pleasantly undefined essence that came from the patina of age rather than an atomizer of canned wildflowers or spring rain.

In the cramped back room where she did her paperwork, she also kept her soap opera magazines piled high around the recliner where she sat to watch her shows. Talk shows, game shows, reality shows—but her favorites were her soaps because she always fell in love with the good-looking young hunks on the screen.

The bells jangled as I opened the front door. From the other room a quavery voice called, “Coming!”

Thelma was the caricature of a sitcom grandmother with her overdone makeup and too-young clothes. Today she was dressed completely in Robin Hood green—sleeveless polyester sheath dress
that fell two inches above her knobby knees, sequined stiletto sling-backs, and star-shaped faux emerald drop earrings. Her eye shadow, which I could see behind her thick trifocals, matched her dress. Her carrot-colored blush and lipstick were the same startling orange as her hair.

“Why, Lucille,” she said. “What a treat! I haven’t seen you in an age! Glad you stopped by. What can I do for you?”

“Just thought I’d come by and say hi. Get a cup of coffee and one of your muffins.”

She placed her hands on her hips and considered me. “Child, my momma may have raised ugly babies but she sure didn’t raise stupid ones. You came by for a lot more than just how-de-do. Why don’t you just set a spell and tell me all about it? I presume you want the usual.”

Thelma knew everyone’s usual. Mine was a fifty-fifty blend of whatever coffee she was brewing in the pot labeled “Fancy” and what she called “Regular.” Enough milk to turn it caramel colored, one sugar.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll be wanting a blueberry muffin. The berries are fresh from the farmers’ market in Frogtown.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Help yourself. The Romeos were in this morning extrahungry so you’re lucky I got anything left other than the paper to wrap ’em in.”

She tottered across the room in her stilettos and poured my coffee. I got my muffin from the glass cabinet that held all her fresh-baked pies, cakes, and breakfast items.

“What’s the coffee of the day?” I asked.

She winked. “I couldn’t decide between Jamaican Me Crazy and Sinful Delight, so I made both. How about Sinful Delight for you? A little sinning never hurt anybody every now and again, if you ask me.”

At least we were on the same page. I wanted to talk about a big sin. We sat facing each other in her cream-colored spindle-back rocking chairs. Thelma’s chair creaked comfortingly as she rocked and watched me drink my coffee.

I balanced the muffin in its white glazed paper wrapping on my knees. “These are great.”

“Lucille, honey,” she said, “you’ve been eating my muffins since before you knew how to walk, when Lee or your momma would bring you in here. You don’t have to make small talk with me. You can just cut right to the chase. I can see you’re dyin’ to.”

Thelma liked to boast that she had a mind like a steel trap—or, as she said, a steel trapdoor, which was probably more accurate. I was under no illusion that I would even make it home before everyone in two counties knew about our conversation. It would take either an elephant tranquilizer or direct threats to keep Thelma from reaching out all the way to the smallest roots of her thick grapevine and sharing what she knew—and I had neither.

“I came about my father,” I said. “You probably guessed that.”

“I do seem to have a special way of knowing what folks are thinking. A kind of extrasensible psychotic perception.” She smiled and smoothed her dress. “And of course, my God-given ability to talk to folks’ loved ones after they’ve passed.”

I tried not to look nonplussed at her description of her special powers and nodded. Thelma did have moments where she became temporarily untethered from the real world, especially her conviction that she could get in touch with those who now resided in “the Great Beyond” as she called it, via her Ouija board. Would she really remember events from nearly thirty years ago, or was I grasping at straws?

“I don’t want to talk to my father,” I said. “Just about him.”

“Now don’t you give me a look like you think communicating with the spirits is a lot of hokeypokey.” She wagged her finger at me. “I heard you were over to Ball’s Bluff yesterday. If you didn’t feel the presence of the spirits on those grounds—”