The Riesling Retribution

Chapter 5

I fell asleep in the hammock on the veranda. When I woke the next morning I was still in my clothes and the power was still out. The airless house felt like a sealed tomb. Out of habit I headed for the kitchen before remembering no electricity meant no refrigerator and no running water. At least I had a gas stove so I could heat water for instant coffee. The orange juice was nearly room temperature, which meant it wouldn’t be long before everything in the refrigerator went bad. I poured a glass of tepid juice, found a baguette in the bread box, and drank a cup of boiled-tasting coffee.

Upstairs I splashed bottled water on my face and rubbed a damp washcloth over the rest of my body. As I was on my way out the door, Quinn called on the landline to say he’d be in the field with the crew working on cleanup. I promised to join him after checking on Frankie in the villa.

The weather report on my car radio said the temperature would hit the upper nineties but promised low humidity and no rain. A newscaster reported that “only” thirty thousand homes were without power in Loudoun and another ten thousand were in the dark in Fauquier. They were working around the clock but it might take days to get everyone back online. No specifics whether that meant two or ten.

I switched off the radio. A lot of people still didn’t have electricity. Maybe we needed to plan for the long haul. At least the weather was good news. It had been a hot, dry summer so far, which was terrific for the vines. If we could get past yesterday’s setback, we might still have a good harvest with the grapes we had left. Maybe even a great one.

When I arrived at the villa just after eight, Frankie Merchant had already opened the four sets of French doors onto the terrace and was busy moving the wicker patio furniture back outside. Early morning sunshine made pale stripes on the Persian carpets and quarry tile floor. A light breeze ruffled the floor-to-ceiling curtains and the reproduction tapestry from the Musée de Cluny in Paris that showed winemaking and coopering in the Middle Ages. Half a dozen copies of the tasting notes for our wines blew off the tiled bar and sailed to the floor.

I retrieved the papers and put them back, weighing them down with a corkscrew. Most of the patio tables and the chairs with their green-and-white-striped cushions were still inside, stacked everywhere.

“I’ll help you with these,” I said. “Where’s Gina?”

“Late.” Frankie brushed tendrils of strawberry blond hair off her face. Her cheeks were pink and she was perspiring.

“You look like you didn’t get much sleep,” she said. “Want coffee?”

“Real coffee? I’d kill for it. Where’d you get it? The General Store?”

“You think I’d let myself get grilled by Thelma about what’s been going on around here? Please. I’d rather climb into a tank of piranhas.” She headed for the kitchen and called over her shoulder. “We got our power back at home. Came on around three a.m. I brought in a thermos.”

She returned, handing me a mug. We sank into patio chairs.

“I got here early and brought all the crews’ coolers home so I could fill them with ice water since it’s going to be a scorcher.”

“You’re an angel. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

She smiled a serene, knowing smile and crossed her legs, swinging a sandaled foot that showed off a perfect pedicure and stylish neon pink polish on her toes.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” she said. “There will be payback.”

I burst out laughing. “Whatever you want.”

She cocked an eyebrow as she sipped her coffee. “You think I’m kidding.”

I didn’t know much about Frankie’s past but I did know her children were grown and her husband worked for a D.C. law firm with hours so long he often slept at work. She’d taken this job to keep from going stir-crazy at home. I’d bet money when her kids were growing up she probably ran the PTA and never missed a sports game, concert, bake sale, or field trip. She was probably one of the stalwarts at school fund-raisers, the kind of person everyone counted on because she never let anyone down. Like now.

“I think we should have a backup plan for the weekend,” I said. “In case we don’t get our electricity back.”

“I thought I’d work on that today,” she said. “After I get this place cleaned up.”

Twenty years ago this weekend my parents had sold their first bottle of wine. We’d been planning our anniversary celebration for months.

“You going to talk to Dominique?” I asked.

My cousin Dominique Gosselin owned the Goose Creek Inn, a small auberge founded by my godfather forty years ago that had become one of the region’s most popular and well-loved restaurants. Over the years it increasingly attracted Washington’s high and mighty who liked its cuisine, romantic charm, and distance from the nation’s capital. Dominique probably knew more secrets than the CIA about off-the-radar trysts and furtive romances. Many nights when I dined there the Secret Service hung around being visibly invisible, keeping an eye on some guest and his or her “friend.”

“I thought I’d go over to the Inn for lunch, if that’s all right with you. Get things sorted out.” She grinned. “Your treat.”

The Inn’s waiters and waitresses often helped us out on weekends serving wine in the tasting room or working at our dinners. Goose Creek Catering, which Dominique also ran as part of the Inn’s expanding franchise, handled all our big events.

“You meant it about the payback, huh?”

The landline phone on the bar rang and I stood up.

“Let me,” she said. “You don’t want to take that.”

I heard her end of the conversation. “Sorry, no comment…no, she’s not available. We sustained a lot of damage from that tornado yesterday and she’s got her hands…no, we’re closed for the foreseeable future until our power is restored…the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department might be able to answer that…would you like the number?…no?…no problem…good-bye.”

She came back and flopped down in her chair. “I’ve lost count how many of those we’ve gotten.”

“Reporters?”

“You want to see the messages?”

I shook my head. “Who called from the Trib? I would have thought Kit would have tried to reach me directly.”

Kit Eastman was my best friend since we’d played together in the sandbox and, for the past two years, she’d been Bobby Noland’s girlfriend. A few months ago she’d been named Loudoun bureau chief for the Washington Tribune. A story like this would be a big deal for her paper. If it didn’t make the A section, it would at least be above the fold in Metro.

“From the Trib?” Frankie wrinkled her forehead. “Some guy. I think he’s new because I didn’t recognize his name. He got the standard reply. Maybe Kit’s going to drop by and ambush you here.”

“Maybe Bobby already told her all there is to know, which is nothing.”

Frankie stood up. “Speaking of Bobby,” she said, “he’s coming up the front walk. Looks like he’s got some papers. What’s that all about?”

I took a deep breath. “Search warrant.”

“Oh.”

Bobby looked like he’d slept better than I did, but he still looked tired. Frankie offered him coffee and he accepted. She left to get it and he handed me the paper.

“I’m sure you know what this is,” he said, leaning against the bar.

“Yep. I’ve got nothing to hide, Bobby.”

“I know. We’re just doing it nice and legal, that’s all.”

“What are your plans for today?”

Frankie returned with Bobby’s coffee, then busied herself sweeping the terrace.

“We’ve got guys out there with metal detectors right now looking for bullets or anything else like that.” Bobby picked up his mug and drank. “Might clear out some of your brush, too, if we need to expand our search. We’ll bag the remains and send them back to the lab. That’s the first priority.”

“You mean you’re taking him apart?”

“What do you suggest? Levitate him? There’s nothing to hold him together, no flesh.”

“Then you put him back together again in your laboratory?”

“Just like Humpty Dumpty.”

“Funny. More like a human jigsaw puzzle.”

There were 206 bones in an adult male. I’d found most of the skull and Bruja had unearthed one of the long bones—maybe a tibia or a femur. How many would Bobby and his crew find?

“It’s the only way to find out who John Doe is and how he got there.”

“So what happens next?” I asked.

Bobby squinted at me like he was weighing how much to reveal. “Take it easy, Lucie. I’m sure we’ll be talking. This guy has probably been here since before you were born. It’s someone else’s story.”

“But you and your deputies already think it has something to do with my family.”

He expelled a long breath and stared at the tapestry as though he might find the answer woven through the threads. “It isn’t engraved in stone, but there are a few things that happen so often in cases like this that you can almost predict how it’s gonna turn out.”

“Such as?”

“Such as fifty percent of the time, the victim is found on property owned or controlled by the perpetrator.”

“And the other fifty percent he’s not.”

“True.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Look, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re not in trouble.”

“All the same, I’m betting it’s the other fifty percent,” I said.

“You could be right.” He finished his coffee and set the mug on the bar. “Off the record, I hope you are.”

After Bobby left I helped Frankie move the rest of the furniture outside and then drove over to help Quinn and the crew with the cleanup. Whether I was just plain tired or distracted—or both—within ten minutes I sliced up my index finger with my pruning shears like a rube picker.

Quinn saw me trying to stop the blood gushing out of the wound and came over with the first aid kit.

“What are you doing? You almost took your finger off. That cut might need stitches.”

“It’ll be all right. It’s superficial.”

“Give me your hand.” He tore off a strip of gauze and tied it around my finger. “Hold that for a minute. Look, why don’t you go do something else? We’ve got it covered here.”

“There’s so much to clean up—”

“Your head’s not in it right now. Give yourself a break.”

He took my hand and untied the tourniquet, putting antiseptic on the cut.

“I can put the bandage on myself,” I said. “You don’t have to fuss.”

“If you get gangrene and die, you did leave the place to me, didn’t you?”

“You sound so hopeful.”

Did I imagine it or did he hold my hand longer than he needed to?

Early in our relationship we’d agreed to keep our personal and professional lives separate—a promise that hadn’t been too hard to keep since we disagreed on just about everything. Add to that the fact we had nothing in common and didn’t fit the other’s profile of someone we’d like to go out with—he preferred good-looking sexy women young enough to be his daughter while I went for older men who broke my heart—and I knew if we ever got together it would be like the Titanic meeting the iceberg.

But lately, like now, there had been moments when our eyes held each other’s and an electrical current that was new and a little dangerous seemed to pass between us.

I removed my hand from his. “Rumors of my possible demise are premature.”

He grinned. “Go on. Get lost and clear your head.”

“Maybe I’ll go over to the cemetery and see what damage the storm did there.”

He gave me a searching glance. “I hope you don’t find anything.”

I nodded. We both knew he wasn’t talking about storm damage.

The cemetery looked as wind tossed and littered with debris as everywhere else on the farm. The pewter vase that held my mother’s Renaissance roses had tipped over and was wedged between her headstone and Leland’s. The flowers, which I’d picked only yesterday, were wilted and the petals had gone brown on the edges. Most of the miniature American flags I’d placed at each gravestone for the Fourth of July had either fallen over or were tilted at crazy angles like rows of bad teeth. Branches and leaves covered many of the graves and stuck to markers.

I was on my knees tidying the area around Hamish Montgomery’s weathered stone marker when a car drove up the road and cut its engine. I looked over the wall in time to see my brother climb out of his dark blue Jaguar. Eli worked for a small architectural firm in Leesburg, about fifteen miles away. For him to show up at the vineyard in the middle of the day meant he either needed something or he was in trouble—or both.

“Hey, babe.” He closed the wrought iron gate with a clank and threaded his way between the rows of headstones. “Took me awhile to find you. What are you doing here?”

I still hadn’t gotten used to Eli calling me “babe.” Or calling his wife “princess,” though that was a little more fitting.

“Cleaning up.” I moved to the grave of Thomas Montgomery, who had been one of Mosby’s Rangers, and started picking up leaves and small branches.

Eli squatted next to me and clasped his hands together. I knew he was taking care not to get dirty. Today he had on beige trousers and a polo shirt. Probably linen and definitely some designer like Hugo Boss or Armani, since that’s all he wore anymore. My sister-in-law, Brandi, saw to that since she chose his clothes. His shoes were soft-as-butter leather that looked Italian. Oakley sunglasses hung around his neck. It looked, also, like he’d had a manicure.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“You think I stop by only when something’s wrong?” He smoothed his gelled hair like a preening rooster and looked offended. “I was in the neighborhood so I figured I’d see how my little sister was doing after that tornado went through her vineyard.”

“Oh.” I carried the leaves and branches over to the wall and dumped them on the other side. “That was thoughtful. We lost some grapes in the new fields. It could have been worse if it had damaged the winery or the house. Still it’s a huge financial loss.”

“Uh-huh.” He sneezed and pulled a packet of tissues out of his pocket. “This is killing my allergies being out here. Tree pollen.”

Checking on his little sister. Sure he was. “Did you hear what I said?”

He blew his nose. “You lost grapes in the new field. The winery and the ancestral pile are still standing.”

I put my hands on my hips. “What’s going on?”

He wadded up the tissue. “I learned a little something today. Apparently you found an old grave on our land after the tornado came through. Not in this cemetery.”

“Well, yes—”

He folded his arms. “Thelma attached herself to me like she was superglued on when I stopped by the General Store just now. If Homeland Security ever hired that woman she’d be their top interrogator. She could wear anybody down in nothing flat.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“What do you think I told her? Nada. For the simple reason that I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about,” he said. “You should have seen the look on her face when she figured that out.” He did an uncanny imitation of Thelma’s high-pitched voice. “Well, now Elliot, do tell. How odd your sister didn’t tell you about that dead body. A person has to wonder if there’s something conspirational going on, don’t you think?’”

“Conspirational, huh? You sound just like Thelma.”

An accomplished mangler of the English language, in addition to being a world-class gossip.

He tapped his fingers on his arms and glared at me. “I’m so flattered. How come you didn’t call?”

“I’m sorry, Eli. Between the tornado damage and finding that grave, things were insane around here. Bobby came over this morning with a search warrant. They’re out there right now excavating the remains.”

“Jesus.” He stopped tapping. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. The medical examiner said he reckoned the body had been there thirty or forty years. A Caucasian male.” I righted a flag in front of a marker of another ancestor who had fought in the Civil War. “Can you help me fix a couple of these?”

Eli raised an eyebrow and indicated Leland’s grave. “Wonder if Leland knew him?”

“Just because someone’s buried on our land doesn’t mean anyone in the family knew anything about it. We both know Leland didn’t have the best judgment when it came to business deals, but he would never kill another person and you know it.” I stood up and faced my brother.

He threw up his hands like he was putting on brakes. “I just asked if he could have known him and you bite my head off. How can you be so sure he didn’t do it?”

“Because of Mom. She would have known and she couldn’t have lived with it, that’s how.”

“Leland kept secrets.” He walked over to our parents’ graves and fixed Leland’s flag.

I joined him. “Not that secret. Not murder. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Yours,” he said. “Ours.”

“I hope so.”

He cleared his throat. “Hey, Luce?”

“What?”

“Got a little favor to ask you.”

I knew it. “What favor?”

I also knew the favor. Money.

“I’m a little tight this month and I was wondering if you could—”

I cut him off. “I can loan you three hundred, maybe four, but I want to know when you’re going to pay me back.”

“Three or four hundred?” He looked startled. “You can’t do more than that?”

“I can’t really do three or four hundred since I just took a hit that’s going to set us back well over a hundred thousand dollars. How deep in debt are you, Eli?”

He ran his thumb along the edge of our mother’s marker. “It’s not too good. I’m on the verge of bankruptcy.”

He spoke lightly, but I saw his throat constrict. It was probably worse than “on the verge,” but he wasn’t saying. I knew him too well. Still, he’d caught me off guard.

“Bankruptcy? How could you let it get this far?” I stared at him. “You’ll lose everything.”

He cleared his throat again. “Right now I just need enough to cover my August mortgage payment since today’s the first and it’s due soon. That’s all. I don’t want to lose my home, Luce. Brandi loves that house.”

Of course she did. He’d designed it for her, giving her everything she wanted. Now they lived in a nouveau riche palazzo that combined the most garish extravagances of Versailles with the Disney Castle, including a multitiered fountain in the front yard that looked like he’d borrowed it from Trafalgar Square in London.

“How much is your mortgage?”

“We refinanced a few times to consolidate our debt.” He paused and said, without looking at me, “It’s just under eight thousand.”

“Eight thousand?”

He needed that just for his mortgage? What about everything else? Groceries, car loan—all of it? Could he cover those expenses, or were they down to eating the labels off cans?

“Why don’t you sell something?” I said. “That antique Sarouk carpet you just bought for the great room. The gold faucets in the master bath. Anything.”

He looked pained. “I haven’t got that kind of time. It’s not the first payment I’ve missed, so they’re already knocking on the door.” He laughed, but it was the self-mocking laugh of someone pushed to the edge. “We’re barely answering the phone because most of the calls are collection agencies. Besides, Brandi would just die if I started dismantling her dream house. You know I can’t do that to her.”

“Brandi needs to go to credit card rehab, and I’m not joking. Cut up her cards, take away the checkbook, and give her a cookie jar with money in it. Tell her that’s it. You can’t go on like this. She’s as bad as Leland was, blowing money on junk she doesn’t even care about the next day,” I said. “That’s why you’re in so much debt.”

“You are being unfair.”

“I am being honest.”

“Aw, jeez. Give me a break. I come to you for help and what do I get? A lecture.” He started pacing in front of our parents’ graves. “You’re the one talking about family and being on the same side. You could help me out if you wanted to. I’m not asking for a handout. I’ll pay you back once I get on my feet. I just need some time.”

Sure. Like he’d paid his other creditors back. “You can’t repay me and you know it.”

He stopped pacing and looked at me with an odd glint in his eyes. “How can you turn your back on me when you’ve got a five-figure sum in the vineyard checking account right now?”

“How do you know that?” The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

“Aha! Knew I was right. You do, don’t you?”

I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. “It’s not my personal piggy bank, Eli. It’s a business account and that money is there to pay bills.”

He spread his hands apart, palms up. “I’m tapped out, babe. Are you going to help me or are you going to throw your brother to the wolves?”

It was a low blow, and he knew it. I wasn’t responsible for his problems. He was.

“Giving you more money without doing something about the way Brandi spends it isn’t going to help anyone. You can’t pay me back the eight grand any more than you can pay your creditors back. Take the four hundred as a gift, okay? You don’t need to repay that.”

He looked like I’d slapped him. “I don’t need your charity. Forget it. I’ll go elsewhere.”

“Eli, wait!”

But he was already moving toward the gate, raising his hand in a backward salute, dismissing me.

“I gotta go. I’m late for something.”

He slammed the gate, as I expected he would. I sank down by my mother’s gravestone.

“Now what?” I asked her. “How did he do that? Why am I the one feeling bad?”

Giving my brother money would be like giving alcohol to a drunk. He didn’t have his spending under control—and his wife was dragging him down to the depths I remembered from when Leland was alive. When we lurched from feast to famine, either flush with cash or nearly flat broke. Eli’s story was just a downward spiral.

I paused at Leland’s marker as I left the cemetery. Years ago my mother hid a fabulous diamond necklace given to one of her relatives by Marie Antoinette because she knew if my father got his hands on it he’d sell it, just like he’d sold all her other jewelry to fund his business ventures. I’d found the necklace two years ago, hidden in a barrel in the wine cellar. Eli got a third of the money from its sale and had blown his share. I used mine to pay for our expansion and putting in new vines.

Right after Leland died, a French live-in boyfriend had sweet-talked my bank in the south of France into letting him withdraw all my funds, claiming I needed the money because I was moving back to the States. As soon as I got home, I planned to call Blue Ridge Federal and check on my account.

Not that I thought Eli could pull off the same scam, but I knew he was desperate enough to try anything. Including cleaning me out.