The Riesling Retribution

Chapter 21

Sumner Chastain appeared at his wife’s side and took charge, brushing me away like he was swatting an insect. He bent over Annabel, but not before he fixed me with a frozen look that implied I’d caused whatever was wrong with her. Eli had vanished to fetch a bottle of water, so it was just the three of us.

“You all right, darling?”

“I’m fine.” Annabel’s voice sounded stronger. “It was nothing. The heat got to me, probably. It’s a bit close in here. If we could just leave—”

Sumner helped Annabel to her feet.

“Thanks,” he said to me. “I’ll take care of this.”

I had to hand it to her. Perfect timing—or terrific luck—that Sumner hadn’t been there when she first saw Eli. If I could read that anguished look of love and longing on her face, Sumner would have figured it out in a flash. Somehow I didn’t think Annabel wanted Sumner to know she still had such strong feelings for my father.

After they left, Eli returned with the water. “Where is she?”

“Her husband whisked her away,” I said.

“She didn’t look too good.”

“That’s because she saw you. And you reminded her of Leland.”

Eli had been rolling the bottle between his hands. He stopped doing that and looked pained.

“What are you trying to say?”

“She’s still in love with Leland. It was written all over her face.”

“He’s dead and she’s married.”

“But it means she lied to Bobby.”

“So?”

“She didn’t dump Leland. He dumped her. Maybe she lied about other things, too. Maybe she killed Beau and got Leland to help her bury his body. Now after all this time, she gets her revenge. Sets up Leland as the killer and walks away from a murder.”

Eli twirled his finger next to his temple. “Luce, that woman has bird bones. I could feel them when I helped her to that chair. She’d probably have a tough time squashing a cockroach.”

“We’re talking about almost thirty years ago. She could have shot him and then persuaded Leland to drive down to Richmond to help her dispose of the body.”

“Right. So he goes to Richmond and then drives an hour and a half to Atoka with a dead body in the trunk of his car so he can bury Beau right here in his own backyard instead of dumping him in the James River or some landfill. Come on, babe.”

He had a point. Still, if Annabel lied about her relationship with Leland, she could be covering up other things.

“She’s a woman scorned, Eli. And now she gets the ultimate revenge. Pinning a murder she committed on her ex-lover.”

“Prove it.”

“Whose side are you on?”

He sighed. “You know whose side I’m on. But there’s no way you’re going to get her to admit what she did, if she did it, and Bobby has closed the case. Three strikes and you’re out.”

Eli handed me the water bottle. “Here. Drink this and cool off. Even if you’re right and she is a woman scorned, that means she’s mad and dangerous. You can’t stop her. Believe me, I ought to know. Brandi plans to clean my clock.”

I felt sorry for him, but I was determined to get Annabel to admit she’d lied. Too bad I wasn’t sure how to do it. Yet.

I stayed in our booth for the rest of the day, working alongside Gina. She wasn’t kidding about business booming, and it looked like we were on track to break last weekend’s sales record. Frankie and I went over the receipts in my office at the end of the day. When we were done, she whooped with glee.

“This is amazing.” She pounded her fist on my desk, emphasizing each word and laughed. “You know we’re going to completely sell out of our Riesling by tomorrow, don’t you? It’s flying out the door it’s so good.”

I sat back in my chair. “I hadn’t realized we were that low. Hold back a few cases, will you? We’ve got problems with this year’s wine.”

“What problems?” She straightened the receipts and credit card statements into a neat pile.

“It’s not fermenting.”

“Why not?”

“Quinn doesn’t know why not. Or didn’t, last time we talked.” I glanced at the wall clock. Six fifteen. “He hasn’t called since noon. I think I’ll head over to the barrel room.”

“You two kiss and make up yet after yesterday?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She rolled her eyes. “For an intelligent woman, sometimes you can be so dense I swear light bends around you.”

“You may want to rethink that compliment seeing as I pay your salary.”

“Sticks and stones.” She picked up the receipts. “Go see him and straighten things out. It’s no fun around here when you lovebirds have one of your tiffs.”

Quinn was sitting in the same place I’d found him this morning—a chair at the winemaker’s table—but now his head was resting on his forearms and he was asleep. He didn’t stir when I pulled out a chair and sat next to him, moving the empty beer bottle he clutched in one hand out of his grasp.

His hair was longer than it had been in recent months—maybe a deliberate decision or maybe just too preoccupied with everything going wrong at the winery to get it cut. It curled in long tendrils down the collar of one of his oldest Hawaiian shirts, the one with the burgundy background and acid-green palm fronds. His head was turned so he faced me and, in profile, his sharp, well-chiseled angles reminded me of a relief on a coin. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and even the eye without the shiner had dark hollows under it, like another bruise.

“Just how long do you plan to sit there watching me?”

I jumped. “Don’t do that! You scared the wits out of me. Don’t tell me you’ve been awake the whole time I was here?”

He opened his good eye. “Yup.”

“You could have said something.”

He sat up. “It was more fun to watch you.”

“You had your eyes closed. Or it looked like you did.”

“Not entirely.”

“Frankie says it hasn’t gone unnoticed that we’re not on the best terms.”

“Nothing gets past Frankie. A wise and astute woman.”

I folded my arms. “Then let’s get this settled.”

“Sure. If you want to apologize, I’ll accept.”

“Me? Apologize for what?”

“Not trusting me.”

“How about you brawling with Chance? You going to apologize for that?”

“He had it coming.” He held up his hand. “Wait, wait…hold it right there. We wouldn’t even be arguing right now if it weren’t for him. He set this up, Lucie. He wanted you to doubt me, wonder about me, and you bought it.”

“I do trust you,” I said. “I think Chance may have skimmed money from our crew. That’s why we always got guys with zero experience. Because we weren’t paying the going rate. Javier’s going to try to find some of the men who picked for us yesterday. See if they’ll tell him how much they got paid.”

Quinn slammed his hand on the table so hard I jumped again. “If I’d known that yesterday, he wouldn’t have walked out of here. They’d be carrying him on a stretcher.”

“Don’t go there.”

“I wish I had. He deserved it,” he said. “Apology accepted.”

I glared at him.

“And now on a completely different subject,” he said, “fermentation has started.”

“That’s nice.”

“Glad you’re so excited. It’s better than nice, but not by much. It’s going slower than it ought to. I need to keep an eye on it, but at least we have ignition.”

“That’s nice, too.”

He glanced at his watch. “You eaten dinner yet?”

“No.”

“How about Chinese? We can order in.”

“Here? When’s the last time you left this place?”

He paused to consider.

“It’s Saturday,” I said. “I bet you’ve been here since we picked on Thursday.”

“You could be right. All right, let’s eat at my place.”

“Why don’t you go home and take a shower and clean up? I’ll order the Chinese. We’ll eat at my house.”

“One, are you implying that I smell bad? And two, what’s wrong with eating at my house?”

“Forgive me, but one, I’d like to use bug spray on you right now, and two, I don’t want to eat out of the boxes with my fingers. Do you even own any dishes or silverware? More than one of anything, that is?”

“When I moved here from my cave in California, I did bring a few hollowed out gourds and some bones and spears.”

“See you at my place in, say, forty-five minutes. Any preferences or do you trust me to order?”

“Something that’ll set my mouth on fire. Why don’t we have dinner at the summerhouse? We could watch the Perseids.”

Quinn’s interest in astronomy—and the massive amount of information he knew about stars, comets, the galaxy, and everything celestial—still seemed out of character with the rest of his macho rough-and-tumble personality, at least to me. Shortly before Leland died, he’d given Quinn permission to use our summerhouse behind a large rose garden in my backyard as a place to set up his telescope and carry out his stargazing. Perched on a bluff overlooking a valley, the summerhouse had a breathtaking view of the Virginia Piedmont and the Blue Ridge. A few months ago Quinn bought what he told me was the Rolls-Royce of telescopes—a Starmaster. On a clear night when I looked through the lens I felt as though I had a front-row seat on the edge of the galaxy.

I’d learned a few things from him, including what the Perseids were—the galactic residue of a comet that produced a spectacular meteor shower visible every August, primarily in our hemisphere.

“Since you’ve been holed up here for the past two days,” I said, “you probably forgot that Edouard is still hanging around. Today was nice, but a few hours ago the clouds rolled back in. We won’t be able to see a thing.”

He ran his hands through his unruly hair and rubbed his face like he was trying to wake up.

“Too bad. All right, I’ll clean up since you’re paying for dinner. It won’t take me forty-five minutes. More like half an hour.”

“How come I’m paying when you invited me?”

“It’s cheaper than paying me for working two days straight. The way I figure it, you get off easy with an order of kung pao chicken and moo shu pork.”

He showed up half an hour later in a clean pair of jeans and yet another of his endless collection of Hawaiian shirts, this one red, cream, and yellow with exotic-looking anthurium and birds-of-paradise on it. His hair was still wet but neatly combed. I’d changed, too, into a long cotton dress.

“I like that dress,” he said. “Suits you.”

He’d brought wine and flowers. A bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and flowers from a garden—not a florist—wrapped in pages of the Washington Tribune.

The garden around his cottage was mostly low-maintenance shrubs. Nothing blooming that I could remember unless he’d done some recent planting. I unwrapped the newspaper and found sprays of lilies, gladiolus, tea roses, and bougainvillea.

“Thank you; they’re beautiful,” I said.

He heard the unspoken question and looked sheepish.

“I’m better at growing grapes than I am at flowers. Now that no one’s living over at Hector and Sera’s cottage, the garden has gone wild. I go by every so often to do some weeding. It’s a shame to see the place closed up like that. They’re Sera’s flowers. You probably guessed.”

Hector came to work at the vineyard when my parents planted our first grapes, serving as our farm manager until his death a year ago. He and Sera had lived in a cottage at one end of a small cul-de-sac near the winery. Quinn lived at the other end.

Chance had taken Hector’s job, but not his place. No one could take care of the vineyard as he’d done, and both Quinn and I hadn’t gotten over losing him.

Quinn followed me into the kitchen and uncorked the wine while I found one of my mother’s Sèvres vases and began arranging the flowers.

“I miss Sera,” I said. “And Hector and Bonita.”

He laid the cork on the counter. “I never should have gotten involved with Bonita. It went downhill when she moved in with me.”

I arranged a pink gladiolus stem between some peach-colored lilies. “I never should have gotten involved with Mick Dunne. But we did what we did.”

“It’s really over with Mick?”

“Yup. Annabel Chastain said he came back from Europe with a new girlfriend.”

“You mind?”

“Nope.”

I nearly asked him about Savannah, but before I could bring it up, he said, “Ever thought about letting Eli live in Hector and Sera’s cottage until he gets back on his feet? Shame to have the place empty.”

I tucked a spray of pink bougainvillea in the vase. “I don’t mind having Eli live here. This house is certainly big enough and it’s nice not to be by myself all the time. Besides, now that we have to hire a new farm manager, I figured we’d offer the house to whoever takes the job. Like Hector did.”

“It was kind of weird that Chance didn’t jump at the offer of a free place to live,” Quinn said.

“He said he’d all ready signed a one-year lease and couldn’t get out of it, remember?”

The doorbell rang and Quinn looked hopeful.

“Is that the delivery guy? I’ll get it. I could eat a horse.”

“My wallet’s in my purse in the foyer.”

“My treat,” he said, and winked at me.

We ate on the veranda. The sky was still heavily clouded and the air had the closed-in feel of being inside a bell jar. Quinn lit all the candles and the torches while I prepared the table.

He poured the wine and sat across from me at the glass-topped dining table. We touched glasses and our eyes met.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers.”

“How did the reenactment stuff go today?”

“It went all right. We’re invited to stop by tonight.”

He paused in the middle of scooping a helping of kung pao chicken out of the box.

“That square dance?”

“It’s not a square dance.” I took the chicken and handed him the rice.

“You really want to go?” he asked. “Sorry, but I still don’t get all that playacting stuff. Just seems weird to me, pretending you live in another century and refighting a war that your side lost.”

“Then maybe you should come and see what it’s all about.”

“The extent of my dancing doesn’t go beyond the hokeypokey.”

I laughed. “We’d have to be in period clothing to dance…whoa! Hold on. I’m not asking you to wear a Confederate uniform and bad shoes.”

“You’d better not. Besides, I’d be Union. We’d be on different sides.”

“You wouldn’t have to do much pretending after all, would you?”

He grinned. “We won.”

I took a pancake for my moo shu pork off a Styrofoam plate. “Around here, you’re on the wrong side.”

“Art imitating life?”

“You’ll never guess who I ran into at the reenactment site,” I said. “Annabel and Sumner Chastain. Dropped by on their way back from Mick’s. They might buy one of his horses.”

“Tyler mentioned they were still around. Guess that explains why. Want some plum sauce?”

“Sure. Annabel happened to see Eli. She almost passed out.”

“That’s the effect your brother has on older women?”

“Real funny. Eli looks just like Leland. Annabel was still in love with my father, Quinn. Leland broke it off with her. Not the other way around.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means she lied to Bobby.”

“You’re still trying to pin it on her that she killed Beau, aren’t you?”

He refilled our glasses.

“Lucie.” His voice was gentle. “You’ve got nothing to go on. Her story’s going to stick, you know that. Bobby closed the case.”

I drank some wine.

“You sound like Eli,” I said.

He shrugged.

“Did you ever read Hamlet?” I asked.

He squinted. “Who didn’t? Required reading in high school.”

“Remember when Hamlet talks about catching Claudius for murdering his father when he reenacts the play with that traveling group of actors? When he says, ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’?”

He stared at me. “You going to stage something in that reenactment that will make Annabel reveal she killed Beau? Are you serious? Did she even say she would be there tomorrow?”

“No, but I bet she will. I think something’s still eating at her and she can’t let go of it.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I’m still working it out.”

He looked skeptical. “You’d better watch it.”

“Don’t worry.” I reached for the fortune cookies and held them out. “Choose.”

We broke our cookies open at the same time.

“Your many hidden talents will become obvious to those around you.’” Quinn grinned. “These things are so true. What’s yours say?”

“Distant water does not put out a fire.’” I crumpled it up. “How about if we head over to the camp?”

We took his car. On the drive over I thought about what I hoped to pull off with Annabel Chastain. Hamlet had indeed caught Claudius out when he staged his play within a play. But by the time the final curtain went down, nearly everyone in the Danish royal family was dead.

I wanted the truth to be revealed, not more senseless deaths. Little did I know that I would not get my wish. A fire I knew nothing about had ignited and there was no water, distant or otherwise, to put it out. In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to that fortune cookie.