The Merlot Murders

Chapter 8

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.”

“It’s okay.” I picked up a dish and began washing it. “I’ve moved on.”

She looked at me shrewdly. “That’s a clean dish you’re washing.”

I set the dish on the counter and wiped my hands on the towel. “Okay, so I think about it.” I folded the dish towel, carefully aligning the edges and laid it on the counter. “I’m not Mother Teresa, but what’s the use? What’s done is done. I can’t think about ‘what if.’ That goes nowhere.”

She sucked hard on the cigarette again and eyed me up and down. “Then you are a saint. He walked away without a scratch on that beautiful face. If it was me, I’d want…I don’t know. I guess I’d want him to suffer, too.”

She squashed her cigarette in a saucer and sat down at the kitchen table, tracing a finger over a series of indentations in the soft pine. Eli’s math homework from about twenty years ago was memorialized when the numbers transferred through his paper to the table.

“It was an accident,” I said softly. “And I think we ought to change the subject.” I picked up the coffeepot. “Want some?”

She nodded as her mobile phone rang. “Hello…yes? Where? No, wait. Don’t do anything. I’ll be right over.” She disconnected and sighed, reaching for the coffee cup. “That was Joe. We’re still trying to figure out what to do about tonight. In spite of everything we still have one hundred and fifty people coming for a sit-down dinner and three hundred more for the opening-night performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off.”

“You’ll have to move the dinner to the inn,” I said. “Bobby shut down the winery completely.”

“It’s fully booked.”

“Then maybe we ought to think about canceling.”

She drank some of her coffee and reached for the pack of cigarettes. “Too late for that. Everything’s ordered…and paid for.”

“You’re saying you can’t give people their money back?”

She busied herself lighting another cigarette. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘robbing Peter to pay the piper?’”

“Sort of.”

She took a drag on the cigarette. “I ordered some new equipment for the catering company. The company I bought it from went bankrupt right after I paid for it.”

“Before you got the equipment?” What was it about my family and money? She and Leland weren’t even blood relatives. “So how much money are you talking about?”

“Seventy thousand.”

“You’re out seventy thousand dollars?”

“Closer to seventy-five. I’ve got it under control, though,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.” Her phone rang a second time and she glanced at it. “Joe. Again.”

She had another monosyllabic conversation, then hung up and rubbed her eyes. “He had some of Hector’s men haul the picnic tables from the orchards to use as buffet tables for tonight. But Hector needed the guys somewhere else so they left all of them sitting in the road over by the Ruins.”

“The men?”

“The tables. What a mess. I’d better get over there and straighten things out.”

“Leave them there,” I said. “Have the dinner right there in the middle of the road. There won’t be any cars coming through since everything is off limits. You could string lights in the trees and use hurricane lamps for the tables. It’ll be like fairyland.”

“That,” my cousin said, “is a brilliant idea.” She stood up and smiled tiredly. “I need to shower and change. Then let’s get over there.”

“You go ahead. I’ll have to join you later. The destemmer’s broken. Quinn needs eight hundred dollars to fix it. Today.”

“And where are you going to get that? Money. It’s always about money.” She picked up the pack of cigarettes and concentrated on rubbing a thumb across the cellophane wrapping. “You know, chérie, no one knows what I just told you, about the money, I mean. Be an angel. Keep quiet about it, won’t you?” She wasn’t really asking and her thin-lipped smile was chilly. “Besides, I’m taking care of it.”

I said uneasily, “Sure.”

She set her coffee cup in the sink as she left. A few minutes later I heard the pipes knocking in the walls and the sound of running water. Had Fitz known about the money? Dominique never explained what they argued about during that last conversation. Eli said they had quarreled over the subject of Fitz retiring.

Now that he was dead she wouldn’t have to explain the seventy-five thousand to him. Nor did she need to persuade him to retire.

Just what I needed. Another family member with a motive for murder.

The door to Leland’s study creaked as I opened it. Someone had closed the curtains and the hot, dark room smelled vaguely mummified. The air-conditioning seemed even feebler in here than in the rest of the house. I flipped on the light switch and saw the stack of yellowed newspapers that had toppled over, covering one of the floor vents. Opening the curtains set off a tornado of dust motes and the gloomy shadows became—wherever I looked—stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers piled carelessly and untidily on all flat surfaces or sticking out of shelves on the floor-to-ceiling cherry bookcases.

When my parents were first married, my mother had redecorated the study and she’d gone a bit mad in her use of the Montgomery tartan. Our ancient tartan was a lovely subdued heathery green-and-blue plaid, but for some reason, she’d decided to use only the modern tartan, a bold red-and-green plaid on a lavender background. She’d put it on the sofa, the recliner, an ottoman, and even the curtains. It was a lot of tartan in one room, even one as high-ceilinged and imposing as this one. Now, though, it was only evident in the faded sunbleached curtains. Everything else was covered with papers and books. The only place to sit was Leland’s desk chair.

I found his appointment book on top of a pile of books on the edge of the desk, opened to the date he died. I shuddered as I leafed through it. He’d never been much for keeping records. A few names—the Romeos, mostly—scribbled on some pages, but that was it. I closed the book and sat down in the chair, sneezing in another storm cloud of dust.

The edge of the hunter-green notebook-style checkbook we used for vineyard business stuck out from under a pile of unopened mail. “Final notice” was stamped in heavy black letters across an alarming number of envelopes. After my mother died Leland had moved the winery’s records from her study to his, and her tidy files and meticulous bookkeeping had quickly disintegrated into chaos. I slid the checkbook out from under the bills. There were dozens of missing checks with nothing written against them in the ledger. Half a dozen unopened bank statements had been stuffed in the back of the checkbook.

No way to tell if we had eight hundred dollars in the account—or eight cents. I reached for the telephone—under a copy of the Wine Spectator—and set it on my lap. We did our banking where everyone in Atoka banked, at Blue Ridge Federal. The private phone number for Seth Hannah, who handled our account, was written in my mother’s handwriting in the flyleaf of the address book, which I found in the top desk drawer. Seth’s secretary put me through right away.

“Lucie honey, there’s just over four hundred dollars in that account as of today,” he said immediately. He sounded friendly, but not happy. “You’re a bit late with your loan payments, as well.”

We had a loan. Wonderful.

“I’ll get it to you, Seth. I promise. But couldn’t you advance us just a little more to get us through harvest?” I asked.

“I’d like to, darlin’, but I’m afraid that dog just don’t hunt anymore. I’ll give you a little extra time to make your payment, though. That’s as much as I can do.” He paused. “I hear you’re going to sell the place, so I reckon we can settle up then.”

This probably wasn’t the moment to tell Seth we weren’t going to sell, so I didn’t. Instead I thanked him sweetly for throwing us a lifeline, although in reality what I’d probably gotten was more rope to hang myself.

Then I called my bank in France. At least I could get the few thousand dollars of remaining insurance money transferred back to the States.

I knew the woman who answered the phone. Gisèle. She sounded flustered and asked me to wait un petit instant. After a few thousand “instants” Bertrand Thayer, the manager, got on the line.

He sounded confused. “Mademoiselle, we closed that account for you yesterday,” he said. “Monsieur Broussard gave me your letter stating that you returned to the États-Unis and wanted him to withdraw the money to send to you. Usually we cannot close an account without the owner being present, but under the circumstances, we did you this favor. Your ami was very persuasive.”

I was silent for a long time.

“Eh, bien,” he said at last. “The letter had your signature on it, even the notaire, so we assumed it was genuine.”

“It probably was my signature,” I said, “knowing Philippe.”

“Désolé,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what to say. Unfortunately he asked for cash.”

Cash. So like Philippe.

He’d cleaned me out.