The Chardonnay Charade

Chapter 8

Dominique stood at the maître d’s stand, her head bent over paperwork, as I opened the front door to the Inn. She looked up and smiled, then the smile faded.

“What’s wrong, chérie?” she asked. “You look upset.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied. “I just met Harry Dye in the parking lot. He apologized for what he said to Georgia the other night at the fund-raiser. It was awkward, that’s all.”

I skipped mentioning his altercation with Randy. So far, I didn’t think it was common knowledge.

“I heard about that scene with Georgia,” Dominique said. “I guess Harry bit off more of his foot than he could chew.”

“Something like that.”

“Are you hungry? I’ve made une salade niçoise for us.”

The place was empty, since lunch was over and dinner wouldn’t be served for a few more hours. Though I couldn’t see the bar from where I sat, I heard voices coming from that direction.

“Who’s here?” I asked.

“The Romeos. Who else?” Dominique led me to a corner table in the main dining room. She placed a folder on the table as we sat down. “They’re meeting about some letter Ross Greenwood found. Something to do with the man who killed Abraham Lincoln. Aaron Burr.”

“You mean John Wilkes Booth.”

“That’s the one. Weren’t they friends?” A waitress brought our salads and two iced teas almost immediately. “No, wait. Now I remember. They fought a duel.”

“Booth and Burr? Not with each other they didn’t. You’re mixing up your American wars. What kind of meeting?”

“The kind involving pitchforks, tar, and feathers.” Joe Dawson, Dominique’s sometime-fiancé, said as he walked into the dining room. He hooked a thumb in the direction of the bar and said to my cousin, “You ought to think about removing the knives from the tables in that room. Those boys mean business.”

Tall, dark-haired, and rangy, Joe had the kind of wholesome good looks that made him the perennial heartthrob among the sixteen-year-old girls he taught. He smiled, flashing boyish dimples. One more asset that charmed the socks off his adoring fan club.

“They’re that upset over Ross’s letter?” I asked.

“Hell, yeah. As far as they’re concerned, he just committed treason. Of course they’re that upset.” He came over to our table and kissed Dominique’s hair. “Can I join you or am I interrupting something?”

“A discussion of the vineyard menus for Memorial Day weekend,” Dominique said. “Have a seat.”

He picked up a fork and stabbed an olive off her plate, then sat down. She looked at me and rolled her eyes.

“Shall I ask the waitress to bring you a salad, Joe?”

He set the fork down and grinned at her. “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

Dominique opened her folder and passed me several sheets of paper. “I thought we should do simple, traditional summer menus. So a barbecue Sunday evening and on Monday, an old-fashioned picnic before the fireworks.”

I looked over the pages. “These are pretty elaborate.”

“A form of avoidance,” Joe said, reading over my shoulder. “Keeps her from worrying about her citizenship test.”

“Please,” she said gloomily, “I’m like a tiger at the end of my chair, studying for that test.”

“I shouldn’t tease you, sweetheart. You’re going to do just fine,” Joe told her. “If I can go back to school after ten years and get my doctorate, you can pass a civics test.”

“Joe’s right. You just need to brush up on a few things,” I added.

“I hope so.” She still sounded tragic.

Joe picked up his fork again and speared a piece of tuna. “I know so.”

“What are the Romeos saying about Ross’s letter?” I asked.

“That it’s as authentic as a three-dollar bill,” he said, through a mouthful of tuna. “It’s odd, though. Ross knows his stuff and he’s found some amazing documents in the past. I’m surprised he’d stake his reputation on something as contentious as this letter.”

“Why?” Dominique asked.

“Because Lincoln’s assassination will always be one of the great American mysteries.” He skewered an anchovy. “Just like JFK. Did John Wilkes Booth act alone or did someone hire him to kill Lincoln? And if Booth was hired, then who was he working for? Jeff Davis and Judah Benjamin? Edward Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War? Hell, one theory says the Catholics did it because Mary Surratt was a Catholic.”

“That sounds pretty fringy,” I said.

“Um-hum.” He chewed a tomato. “Including the notion that it might not even have been John Wilkes Booth who was shot at Garrett’s farm.”

Dominique shoved her plate in front of Joe and rolled her eyes at me again. “Then who was it?” she asked.

“A look-alike named James William Boyd. Booth survived his wounds and fled to Japan. So they say.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I happen to agree with you. But there are people who believe it’s true.” He looked around hopefully. “Any bread around here to mop up that vinaigrette?”

“I’ll get some. You’re impossible, you know that?” Dominique stood up and headed for the kitchen.

He grinned. “That’s why I love her so much and she loves me.”

“Marry her and make an honest woman out of her.”

“I keep trying to get her to set a date, but she’s always got a reason why the time’s not right.”

Dominique returned with a basket of rolls. “Time for what?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“So the Romeos are mad at Ross because he might have found a fake letter?” Dominique took a petit pain and passed the basket.

“The Romeos are mad at Ross because they don’t believe that Jefferson Davis, who was a good and decent man, would be part of a conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln as that letter implies,” Joe said. “They see Ross as one more Yankee taking a potshot at the South. Doesn’t matter whether the letter is real or forged. Either way it’s going to stir up a hell of a debate and open old wounds. He’s turned into a modern-day Benedict Arnold as far as they’re concerned.”

“‘Give me liberty or give me death,’” Dominique quoted.

Joe and I exchanged glances. “That was Patrick Henry, honey,” he told her. Then to me he added, “One or two more study sessions and I’m sure she’ll have this nailed.”

When Atoka was founded in 1838 it was known as Rector’s Crossroads, probably in honor of the Rector family, who, more than one hundred years earlier, received one of the last British land grants for acreage along the banks of Goose Creek. What put our town on the map was the meeting held here on June 10, 1863, when Colonel John Singleton Mosby met in the woods near the old schoolhouse with the men who would become Company A of the 43rd Battalion, better known as Mosby’s Partisan Rangers.

In the 1890s, the U.S. postal service decided that “Rector’s X Roads” was too similar in name to nearby Rectortown—and they were founded first. So postal officials handed the town fathers a book of three-to five-letter place names they’d helpfully prepared for other towns in the same predicament. After some discussion, the town settled on Atoka. Although that name had already been picked, the place was in Oklahoma Indian Territory. With minimal concern about a mix-up in the mail delivery, Atoka was approved.

Less than twenty years later our post office had gone the way of the dodo bird, although the general store still rented out mailboxes for anyone who wanted Thelma Johnson to take care of their mail. Randy Hunter had one of those mailboxes.

I pulled in next to a postage-stamp-sized piece of asphalt Thelma called the “parking lot” on my way back to the vineyard. If Randy left town for a few days, his mail would still be there. And Thelma, who had a photographic memory when it came to her customers’ personal business, would probably remember down to the minute the last time he’d been in to pick up his mail.

The general store, a small single-story building whose white-painted wooden exterior could have used some sprucing up, sat at the junction of Mosby’s Highway and Atoka Road. The red neon “OPEN” sign in the store’s front window had said “OPE” for so long, it was now a landmark by which people gave directions. The two old-fashioned, low-tech gas pumps out front still required paying Thelma at the cash register after you got your gas. Though she could have modernized and gone electronic years ago, “pay and go” meant a lost opportunity to chat up her customers.

If the Romeos had their collective fingers on the pulse of Atoka and Middleburg life, Thelma—in the nicest possible way—had her hand wrapped gently but firmly around its throat. Even if you swore on the graves of ancestors to keep a bit of gossip or news confidential, she had an almost hypnotic ability to wrangle it out of you.

She was leaning on the counter by the cash register, engrossed in a magazine, when I walked in. The silver sleigh bells on the door jingled and she looked up and smiled. Dressed in baby pink from head to toe, she even wore matching pink bows in hair a shade of coppery red that God never intended any person to have naturally. She wore the usual tonnage of eye makeup behind enormous trifocals that always made her look slightly bug-eyed.

“Why, Lucille! What a pleasant surprise! I haven’t seen you for ages. Come and sit a spell.” She closed the magazine and clutched it to her chest so I could see the cover. A heartthrob with an unbuttoned shirt, tanning-salon tan, bedroom eyes, and the kind of heavy gold jewelry around his neck that Quinn favored. It had to be one of her soap opera stars. Thelma—who was pushing seventy-five—loved ’em young and virile.

“I think there’s still some coffee in the one of the urns,” she said. “Can I pour you a cup? I got a cranberry muffin left, too.” The stiletto heels of her pink mules clacked like the keys on Leland’s old typewriter as she crossed the room. I followed her, the rubber tip of my cane a muted echo.

She gestured to two wooden rocking chairs next to the glass case that held the fresh-baked muffins and donuts she had delivered every morning. Three coffee urns with signs that read “Regular,” “Decaf,” and “Fancy” sat on an adjacent table next to the bank of glass and gilt mailboxes.

“Thanks, but I just had a late lunch at the Inn. I’m fine, Thelma.”

“Now, you sit. That foot looks like it’s botherin’ you, Lucille. You’re limping more ’n usual. The Inn, huh? That’s interesting.”

I blushed and sat down.

She sat across from me and leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees. “Now tell me everything.”

“Uh…”

“Why, Georgia, child! What did you think I meant? You’re the one who found her.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard everything already, Thelma.”

“Well”—she touched her hand to the back of her hair like she was primping—“I do like to keep up on what goes on. A person’s got to stay informed, Lucille. Especially in this day and age with all those terrorists running around here, there, and the other place.”

“Maybe there and the other place, but I doubt we’ve got too many terrorists in Atoka.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure, missy.” She sounded severe. “We get foreigners here all the time. Just today I met a nice young man who told me he originally came from the United Kingdom. That’s in England.”

“Young” in Thelma’s book was anyone under sixty.

“You mean Mick Dunne?”

“Why, yes. Ross Greenwood’s friend. Did you know he was best man at Ross’s first wedding? Apparently they go way back together. Roommates at some boarding school in Connecticut. Lordy, Stephanie took it so terribly hard when Ross left her for Georgia. I swear she still hasn’t gotten over it.” Thelma leaned closer. “And talking of Georgia, I heard tell she might have been having carnival relations with another man.”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me. Extracurricular s-e-x.”

I didn’t know whether to assume she knew about the autopsy or if she was referring to Randy’s affair with Georgia.

I feigned surprise. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

She smiled like a satisfied weasel. “Oho! So it is true! Your face is the color of a Big Boy tomato, Lucille. Who was it?”

“I don’t know.” She wouldn’t believe that, either.

She didn’t. “Sure you do. Georgia was carrying on with Randy Hunter, wasn’t she?” Thelma sat back in her chair, rocking gently and watching me, head nodding like a bobble-head doll. “I thought so. I sure hope he doesn’t turn out to be the one who killed her. Even if he does know how to handle those chemicals you use at the vineyard. The ones with the ozone in them. That stuff’s terrible.”

“I heard about Randy and Georgia, too,” I admitted. “Even though I don’t get why someone like Georgia would have an affair with someone like Randy.”

Thelma took off her glasses and cleaned them carefully on a tissue she’d tucked in the sleeve of her pink sweater. When she looked up, the Norma Desmond forever-young vamping was gone. Instead her eyes were full of the wisdom of a seventy-five-year-old woman who understood her mortality. “Honey, you’re too young to know what happens when a woman feels her age. All of a sudden you got this young, good-lookin’ hunk of a boy who’s passionate in bed and probably has a heck of a romp with her. So she feels like a sexy young girl again because he finds that flame burnin’ low in her and he knows how to kindle it into a blazing fire. Takes years off a woman, having a young man like that worshipping you.”

She spoke with such passion and longing that I wondered when the last time had been that some young man had ignited her flame into a blaze. I opened my mouth to speak when she put her glasses on and the old Thelma, with her va-va-voom persona, was back.

She cleared her throat. “Randy reminds me a little of my Tré.”

“Who?” Maybe she did have a boyfriend.

“Tré. He plays Dr. Lance Tarantino on Tomorrow Ever After. Such a nice young man, even if he does have to pretend he’s a serial killer. Even so, he’s got all the women in Silver Ridge just throwing their-selves at him. You ought to watch that show, Lucille. It’s just so real. These people are like family to me.”

“I’m sure they are,” I said gently. “Did you ever talk to Randy about Georgia?”

“I have my way of finding things out, but I never asked Randy direct, you understand. And Georgia…well.” She pursed her lips. “My store’s not classy enough for someone wears those Manolo Blanket shoes. She almost never came by.”

“When’s the last time Randy came in to pick up his mail?”

“Saturday morning,” she said promptly.

“We haven’t seen him at the vineyard since the fund-raiser Saturday night. Some people think he might have gone fishing.” Like I was doing right now.

Thelma rocked some more in her chair and regarded me thoughtfully. “Why, no, he hasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he would have told me. He gets all those catalogs and such about guitars and music and what have you. I swear that boy’s on more mailing lists than I am. Fills that itty-bitty mailbox right up, so I put everything in a special place for him. He’s right regular about collectin’ it, too. If he’s not coming in for a few days, he’s pretty considerate about letting me know.”

“So where do you think he is?”

She stood up and began polishing imaginary spots off the spotless glass cabinet. “I wish I knew,” she said. “I really wish I knew.”

“If you hear from him, will you let me know? I’m concerned about him, too.”

“I’ll do some pokin’ around,” she said, “and see what I can find out. Everyone just seems to bare their souls to me, Lucille, so if there’s any news, you can be sure I’ll know about it.” She paused and added, “Now, keep me posted on that nice Mr. Dunne.”

“Mick Dunne? The English terrorist? I doubt I’ll see him except at Georgia’s funeral. He’ll be gone in a few days.”

Thelma put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you go mocking me, child. And you’ll see plenty of him, believe you me. Told me he’s planning on movin’ here. He’s looking to buy a nice piece of property. A vineyard.”

“A vineyard? Are you sure?”

“’Course I’m sure. I have a memory like a steel-trap door.”

“He seems to have confided in you quite a lot.”

“I told you. It’s my God-given way with people.” She grinned, raising one painted-on eyebrow flirtatiously. “I happen to have a particularly good repertory with men.” She glanced at the clock above the cash register. “Lordy, will you look at the time? I missed the first five minutes of my show. I gotta scoot, honey. Be seein’ you.”

She was gone before I got to the front door. When I climbed back in the Mini and picked up my mobile phone from the console, I saw three missed calls and a message. I punched a button. All of the missed calls—within minutes of each other—were from Quinn.

I listened to the message. He was shouting. “Where in the hell are you? As soon as you get this, get over to Catoctin General. Hector just left here in an ambulance. He had a heart attack. It doesn’t look good. I’m on my way there now and I hope I’m not too late.”