The Merlot Murders

Chapter 3

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.

“I’m glad Mom can’t see this,” I said, when he didn’t answer.

He turned off the engine and punched the button to unlock the doors, a bit savagely, I thought. “Knock it off, Lucie. You’ve got no right to say anything. You left, remember?”

He got out of the car, hoisted my suitcase out of the trunk and headed for the front door without waiting for me. By the time I got inside, he had already vanished up the sweeping spiral staircase. The exterior state of deterioration should have tipped me off to how bad the interior would be, but inside was worse. When my mother was alive the house smelled of lavender and lemon furniture polish and fresh-cut flowers. Now it stank of stale grease, stale air, and stale urine, like an animal might have squatted on the Aubusson rug every now and then. Half the bulbs in the Waterford chandelier were either burned out or missing, so the light was as dingy as the furniture and walls. What most disoriented me though, was the silence. My mother’s antique long case clock, whose quiet ticking sound and mellow chimes were as calming and familiar as breathing was stuck at twelve-thirty. How long had it been since anyone had bothered to wind it? It was like the heart of the house had stopped beating.

I heard Eli shout from upstairs. “Hey, shake a leg down there! We haven’t got all day.” A moment later he appeared at the upstairs railing. “Oh God. I’m sorry…”

“Forget it.” I walked over to the stairs. Since the accident, I needed to climb stairs the way a small child does, always the same foot first, my good foot taking the weight for the rest of my body. I hooked my cane over my right arm and gripped the railing, pulling myself up.

“Um, can you manage?” He sounded tentative. “I mean, do you need some help or something?”

I stopped and looked up. “With what? Climbing the stairs?”

“Uh…I don’t know. I mean, just checking.” He wiped his forehead with a folded white handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket.

“Look,” I told him. “Keep treating me like some kind of cripple and I’ll deck you with my cane first chance I get.”

He pursed his lips together but it wasn’t much of a smile. “Okay, I get your message. I’ll shut up. Maybe I’ll go call the funeral home and tell them we’re going to be eighteen minutes late.”

“You do that.”

When we walked into the B. J. Hunt & Sons Funeral Home—only twelve minutes late—my palms were so sweaty my cane kept slipping in my hand. Eli took my elbow and murmured in my ear, “You look like you’re dressed to go to a hunt club ball. You’re bound to scandalize the blue-rinse crowd and knock a few pacemakers out of kilter.”

My long black dress, it’s true, was more like something to wear to a fancy dress party than to a wake. “It’s not like I had any time to shop,” I hissed. “It’s the only black dress I own.” What I didn’t say was that all my dresses are long now so my twisted left leg is hidden from view.

“I wasn’t criticizing. You don’t look too bad in that. It looks kind of…French. You know, sexy.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

He held the door for me. “There’s something else I meant to tell you.”

All of a sudden he sounded nervous.

“Now?” I said. “Right this very second? Can’t you tell me after I see everybody? It already feels like I’m facing a firing squad. At least let me get through that.”

“Well, then you’d know.”

I stopped and looked at him. “What would I know?”

“That Brandi’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” I stared. “She’s pregnant?”

“Umhm.”

“So I guess this isn’t recent news if I could tell by seeing her.”

He tugged on the collar of his shirt like it was constricting his breathing. “Oh, it’s pretty recent. We haven’t actually known that long ourselves.”

“How long have you known?”

“Five and a half months.”

“Five and a half months?”

“Well, we waited to make sure everything was okay before we said anything.”

Men can be so dumb when they make up excuses. At least he spared me the real reason. I can never have children. It was one of the invisible consequences of the accident. At least he’d been considerate enough to figure it might be a sensitive subject.

We walked toward the elevator and I concentrated on my feet again.

“Sorry about the timing, Luce,” he added. “I meant to tell you sooner, but sometimes things don’t work out the way we mean them to, you know?”

Something in his voice made me glance up and there was no avoiding what came next. I looked straight into the depths of the get-lost-in-me eyes of Gregory Knight, who had shown up to pay his respects to Leland, and I saw heartache coming my way like a freight train.