The Winemaker

by Charmaine Pauls

Her eye caught the bottle of red wine she had opened to breathe for dinner. She looked at the oven and the casserole drying out inside. Wine or chicken? She poured a handsome amount of wine into a glass and slid to the floor.

  How to move forward, that was the question. She couldn’t go back. Her friends and family had thrown a big farewell party in her honor. She couldn’t pop her head around the door and say 'Hi, guys, I’m back’, barely three weeks later. Then there was her mother... She could already imagine the I-told-you-so look on her face. Her mother had been right about Marcos after all. She simply couldn’t swallow that humiliation, too. With no job and no money, what other option did she have? On top of that, she had only just enrolled for the tourism degree at the Universidad Católica de Chile. She had paid the registration, but she still owed the first semester’s fee.

  Her mind worked overtime, but she saw only one solution. Tomorrow she would cancel her degree application, cut her losses, and run. She would have to call her mother and ask for a bank loan to afford the plane fare. She took a big gulp of the wine. This was bad. This was really bad. Well, her mother didn’t name her after one of the bravest heroines of all antiquity for nothing. She’d survive.

  She drew a shaky breath, closed her eyes, and laid her head against the wall. There was a familiar, uncomfortable tightening in her chest. The hair on the back of her neck stood erect. Her scalped pricked. NO. She knew it was coming. There was no stopping it. White sparks cut into her inner eyelids. Light slashed into her brain. A split-second image flashed through her mind.

  She stared at the face of a man from above, as if she was bent over him. His handsome, boyish features were distorted with pain. Dust clung to his blond hair and powdered the long lashes that framed his moss green eyes. She felt heat, pain, and a stifling sensation of suffocation. The most terrifying was the amplified shaking. Maybe her body was shaking. It was a horrible picture, thick with unearthly feelings of dread. The kaleidoscope of white light became translucent, transforming into the intense physical pain that would drive her insane. She flicked her eyes open. Great, just fabulously great. Her emotional trauma had triggered something she hadn’t had since arriving in Chile—an unwanted vision.

  Chapter Two

  It took willpower to rise from the depths of her dream. The headache was a bubble trapped under the water of sleep, and waking would make it pop. A persistent noise was reeling her in from her subconscious world, like a fish on a hook. She fought to remain in the subliminal darkness of her slumbering escape. The noise won.

  It took several seconds to realize the sound came from the intercom next to the bed. She forced her eyes open. They felt glued together the way they usually did after a long crying spell. Her mouth was dry, her tongue spongy. Her mind was a ball of cotton wool. Pain. Someone was pinning up posters with a nail-gun in her brain. It was more than the habitual discomfort she experienced after her visions.

  Zenna glanced at the alarm clock. Seven thirty. No one in his or her right mind rang someone’s doorbell this early. Not in Santiago. The sun wouldn’t touch the mountain peaks before eight. Could it be an early beggar?

  Marcos?

  She sat up quickly and was rewarded for her effort with a painful thud in her head. Groaning, she dragged her body halfway from the bed to reach the receiver on the wall. She snatched it up.

  “Marcos?”

  A stranger’s voice on the other end told her she had been too optimistic. He spoke too fast. She didn’t understand a thing.

  “What?” Stretching the spiral cord, she leaned forward until her forehead rested on the parquet floor. She shivered.

  Geez, the house was cold. Figured. She had forgotten to turn on the central heating last night. To save money they only used the heaters after sunset. The sun warmed the house during the day. Marcos always switched on the heaters before going to bed.

  Someone repeated a mumbled greeting.

  She wasn’t in the mood for exchanging polite niceties when she had just woken from much needed sleep. “What?” she repeated rudely.

  The male voice replied in Spanish. The words tumbled into her ear, but no meaning registered. The man had a strange dialect. Although Zenna was fluent in the local language, having taught it to private students in London for nearly seven years, she couldn’t make out anything.

  Bollocks, this headache was splitting her head in two. Her eyes roamed to the empty wine bottle on the floor next to the bed. Her state most probably had as much to do with the aftereffect of her vision as with the fact she had polished off that bottle. On her own. Alone. Despair crept back into her senses. She couldn’t even remember how she had gotten to bed.

  She massaged a tender temple with one hand, trying to focus on the endless rambling in her ear. “Excuse me. Wait,” she interjected in Spanish, “but I don’t understand you. If it’s money you want, I don’t have any. In fact, bring me some when you find a few quid on the block. Good luck and bye.” She had thrown a dash of irritation into her tone for good measure. Of course her formal Spanish was a bit different from the Castellano spoken in Chile, but the sleep intruder should have gotten her drift.

  She had scarcely pressed the button to cut the conversation when the intercom buzzed again. Sighing and rolling her eyes, she wriggled her legs from the bed, and moved into a sitting position. What part of ‘go away’ didn’t he get? Whoever was ringing her bell, was mighty persistent.

  A sudden sense of doom flooded her, forcing her fully awake. More alert now, Zenna pushed the talk-button once more. “Listen, moron, whoever you are, I told you to go away. Now, stop harassing me at once or I’m calling the police.” She hung up. That should do it. This was a police fearing community.

  As if an unwanted attack of suspicious intuition wasn’t enough, it also dawned on her being alone left her vulnerable. Worse, she couldn’t for the life of her remember if she had locked the doors before dragging her wine-induced body to bed.

  She craned her neck to peek through the adjoining bathroom door and realized she had left the bathroom window blinds open and the lights on. Whoever was out there ringing her bell would have a bull’s eye view of her if they cared to look through the gaps between the wooden bars of the garden fence.

  Her eyes fluttered nervously to the area beyond her fence flooded in the yellowish glow of the streetlight. A man had his head pressed against her fence, peering at her through the bathroom window. Correction. They were looking. There were two men. Bollocks. Zenna jerked her head down. The hammering of her heart amplified the dull beats in her skull and increased the painful pressure in her brain.

  Zenna had never thought much of procrastinating. She often reacted on impulse to her own detriment. This situation required fast action. Despite her heart beating against her rib cage so hard it hurt, she left the intercom receiver on the floor to crawl on her hands and knees down the corridor toward the hallway door where she paused.

  She couldn’t move unnoticed past the floor-to-ceiling entrance windows that framed the front door, and she had to reach her mobile phone that lay on the shelf of the jacket stand. She looked down at her pajama pants and strappy top. All right. At least she managed to get into those before crawling into bed. Not having been naked when the men stared at her through her window was one positive thing.

  Daring a quick glance, she saw the two men, now apparently conferring with one another, stood in front of her pedestrian gate and their car blocked her driveway. Panic almost got the better part of her as her mind raced to her first logical assumption, robbers. Or worse? The men she had been running from for the past nine years, they wouldn’t have followed her all the way here. Would they?

  Another glimpse confirmed the men were still engaged in their conversation, facing each other. One of them, a big-bellied bear with a blue scarf and matching beanie, pointed at the house while talking animatedly. The other, dressed in a Sherlock Holmes type jacket and Basque beret, looked intently at the screen of his mobile phone.

  Zenna took a deep breath, he
ld it, and scrambled on all fours to the jacket stand. She reached up for her mobile phone without slowing her pace to the privacy of the kitchen. Once safely out of sight again, she slid down the wall facing the oven, very much in a similar way as she had done the night before. The painful association brought back unpleasant memories. Marcos. Not now.

  She flipped open her phone and stared at the screen. Who to call? Who could she call? Marcos? No, she wouldn’t humiliate herself like that. She imagined him reaching for his phone from Monica’s bed. Monica would ask who it was. He would answer, irritated, that it was his ex-girlfriend calling the morning after he dumped her before the sun was even up. He would ignore the call, believing she wanted to beg him to come home. He and Monica would giggle about it while cuddling under the warm blankets. No. He would only find her pathetic. She decided he didn’t need to know she sat in the freezing house, on the cold kitchen floor, scared witless, with a hangover from hell. She didn’t want to give him that much satisfaction. She was a big girl. She had taken care of herself all her life. She could take care of this.

  It would be foolish to risk it outside alone without understanding what the ominous men wanted. Who else did she know? She bit her thumbnail. She lifted her head, leaning it against the wall. From where her head rested she had an eye-level view of the virgin casserole, a leftover reminder of her failure. How many times had she been left over in her life? She felt like a cold, dried-out, and shriveled chicken. Who the hell ate boring chicken casserole anyway?

  She jumped with fright when the kitchen intercom buzzed above her head. This time the buzzing was obnoxious. The men outside were either getting serious, pissed off, or both. What was certain was they weren’t going to leave. They knew she was inside. For some reason, they were adamant on having a word with her.

  She tried frantically to gather her thoughts. Robbers wouldn’t dial her from the gate. They would have jumped the fence by now and discovered the front door was unlocked. The men who were constantly on her trail would have broken into the house long ago. This was something else.

  The intervals between the rings got shorter until only one drawn-out, continuous noise filled the kitchen and echoed from the bedroom communication system. She tried to think again. Who could she ask for help? She hadn’t met many people, yet. Certainly no one she could wake at seven-thirty in the morning to rescue her from two intercom harassers. In desperation, she selected the ‘contacts’ option on the phone menu. The first name that appeared was Ana Rosa. The neighbor.

  She should call her. She would know what to do. Ana Rosa was up early every morning. She had only met the neighbors two weeks ago, and it was Ana who had initiated the first meeting when she came over with a lemon meringue to welcome Zenna. She had been to their house for dinner once when Marcos was working late. Ana and Pedro, Ana’s husband, seemed to be kind people.

  She pressed the dial button. It took several rings before she recognized Ana’s greeting on the other end of the line.

  “Hi, Ana. It’s me. I mean, it’s Zenobia. Zenna. Your neighbor. I’m awfully sorry to bother you this early. Bollocks, I hope I haven’t woken you?”

  There was a chuckle on the other end of the line. “No, dear. I’ve been up for a good hour already. I’m preparing Pedro’s coffee. He has to leave for the hospital soon. Something must be wrong for you to call me this early, yes?”

  “Uh, yes, actually. Well, I don’t know who else to call. The thing is there are two men in front of my gate. They’ve been ringing my bell non-stop, and I don’t know what they want. I’m not sure if I should go out there and confront them or call the police.”

  “Two men? Did they speak to you? Did they say what they wanted?”

  “Yes, one of them spoke to me. He buzzed me from my gate. He talked too fast for me to make any sense of what he wants. They blocked my driveway with their car. Does this sound normal to you?”

  There was a short pause on the other end of the line. “Pedro is still getting dressed. My son, Etán, is here, visiting. He’s up. I’ll ask him to go see what they want. You stay inside. I’ll call you back in a minute.”

  “Fine. Thank you. Don’t you go out there. They may be dangerous. Maybe you should give your son a weapon, just in case. Or should I call the police? Haven’t there been some house robberies lately? Look, I don’t want to make my problems yours, but, frankly, I have no one else to call. Oh, God,” she pulled her fingers through her hair, “I babble when I’m nervous. I guess what I’m saying is I appreciate your willingness to help, but I don’t want anything to happen to you or your family.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to us,” Ana said with certainty.

  Zenna had sensed the sixty-year old woman’s strength before. She suddenly wished she possessed some of the senator’s wife’s courageousness.

  “Now, tranquila.” Ana spoke in a firm voice, like someone who was used to command. “Stay put and I’ll call you back.”

  Zenna flipped the phone shut, and got to her feet. She paced the kitchen floor anxiously. This didn’t feel good. Not one bit. Her stomach lurched when her mobile rang. “Ana?”

  “Zenna,” Ana’s voice was apologetic, “you’ll have to come outside. Etán says the men are police officers, and they are asking for you by name.”

  When Zenna’s voice caught audibly, Ana continued reassuringly, “I’ll come with you. Whatever this is, you need to be calm.”

  Zenna recognized the authority in the older woman’s voice. Ana was used to leading. She was telling Zenna to go outside and face those men, but right now, all Zenna wanted to do, was to run. What if her instincts were wrong, and these were the men who were after her in England? What if they had followed her all the way here?

  “Oh, God,” Zenna whimpered.

  “Zenna?” Ana’s voice sounded strict now. “Zenna, I need for you to calm down and come outside. If not, these men are going to come into your house by force. They have a warrant.” When Zenna still didn’t reply, Anna continued, concern now overriding her sharpness. “Zenna? Are you there?”

  Zenna swallowed. “Is your son still outside?”

  “Yes, Etán is there. I’m going now, too.”

  There was no other way. Zenna sighed in resignation. “I’m on my way.”

  She moved to the entrance on unsteady legs. At the front door, she only lingered to take her keys and her coat from the jacket stand. She didn’t bother running back to the bedroom for shoes because she could already see Ana walking with a straight back down the sidewalk.

  Zenna forced herself to appear calm as she opened the door and walked outside. The two men, Ana, and an unusually attractive, dark-haired man with a fair skin in a black suit, dress shirt and tie looked up when she opened the garden gate.

  She immediately recognized the drop dead gorgeous man from the night before. He was the garbage bin collector who had witnessed her utmost humiliation. He could only be Etán, Ana’s son. She cursed inwardly. Could her day get any worse? She tried to ignore him, letting her eyes brush over him fleetingly, and instead turned her attention to the men who called themselves police officers. They, in turn, looked her up and down.

  As if that scrutinizing look from Starsky and Hutch wasn’t enough, she saw from the corner of her eye Etán’s gaze glide from her uncombed hair down her neckline and shoulders, where it lingered. She couldn’t help but follow the path of his visual exploration to realize her coat had slipped open, revealing the thin pajamas underneath. She also couldn’t stop the flush that crept to her cheeks before gripping the fabric together at her chest. She was all too aware of his eyes completing their travel all they way to her bare feet. She was so freaked out she didn’t even feel the cold. Yet, her body reacted to the frosty morning air in shivers.

  “What’s going on?” Zenna looked from Ana to the men, suppressing another shudder that threatened to run down her spine.

  “Zenna, these two gentlemen are from the police,” Ana said.

  Zenna eyed their casual clothes suspiciousl
y. “So you said. Where are their uniforms?”

  The two men glanced at each other.

  Ana touched Zenna’s arm. “They are special detectives. I saw their badges.”

  One of the men, the one with the blue scarf and beanie, stepped forward, holding up the famous badge. “I am Detective Moreno.” He motioned to the man next to him. “This is Detective Gonzalo.”

  Zenna could barely understand what the man was saying. His accent sounded foreign. A sick feeling nestled in the pit of her stomach as she studied the badges that they held toward her.

  She brushed Detective Moreno aside with a flick of her hand. “Is it Marcos?”

  Ana shook her head and looked at the attractive man, who towered over the two detectives. “Zenna, this is my son, Etán. He’ll explain. He spoke to the detectives.”

  Zenna faced Etán squarely for the first time. His mouth was still frozen in a silly, amused smile. He had seductive lips. She could have almost forgiven him that grin. Almost. Obviously he found all of this highly entertaining.

  “Well?” she asked, crossing her arms and cocking her hip.

  Etán looked at her intently, his nostrils flaring ever so slightly, almost not enough for anyone to notice, but Zenna did.

  “Zenobia, I believe?” He extended his hand. “I’m Etán. We haven’t had the pleasure of meeting, yet.”

  She narrowed her eyes, hesitating, but then took the hand he offered only to find his fingers tighten around hers, pulling her toward him and planting the habitual greeting kiss firmly on her cheek. She could feel the heat emanating from his broad chest, reminding her of how cold she actually was. The contained quiver now broke loose and ran through her body. She pulled back abruptly, her hand still caught in Etán’s.

  Instead of returning words of greeting, she snapped at him. “Are we going to exchange polite small talk all morning, or is someone going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  Etán released her hand. He studied her for another second, his face a mask. “The detectives are here to arrest you.”