“That sucks. Did… uh?” Toni cleared her throat. “Speaking of the winery, did you two hear about what I found at Nico’s last week?”
“Oh holy shit, are you talking about that finger?” Jackie’s eyes were the size of saucers. “Frank and Nico were talking yesterday. What is that? Who loses a finger and just leaves it in someone’s tractor? Did Nico flip his shit?”
“What?” Luna’s eyes went wide. “Someone lost a finger?”
“But no one knows who!” Jackie said. “Nico says it’s not any of his guys. Danny says none of the harvesting crew got hurt. But some asshole’s been messing with Nico’s crews and stuff, so Frank thinks maybe whoever is messing with Nico is the one who lost a finger.”
“What happened?” Luna said. “It got cut off?”
“Honestly, it looked more… ripped off.” Toni shuddered. “It was really gross.”
“Are the police doing anything about it?” Luna asked.
Jackie shrugged. “What are they gonna do? They asked at the hospitals, according to Max, and no one came in with a missing finger.”
“You ask Leah?”
“I asked Leah too. None of the nurses have seen anything like that.”
“What about Aunt Gloria?”
“She’s a large animal vet,” Toni said. “Do you really think someone’s going to go to a vet if they lost a finger?”
“Maybe.” Luna narrowed her eyes. “Was there a lot of blood?”
Toni shook her head. “Hardly any. On the finger or the tractor where we found it.”
“Huh.”
Her older sister was a scientist like Katherine. Toni wondered if her mind was going to the same place. “You’re wondering if there’s a whole body out there.”
Luna shrugged. “I mean, it would make sense. Nico’s place is pretty remote.”
“I know. That’s why I like living out there.”
“Luna’s right,” Jackie said. “If there was a body out in those hills, it could turn into a mummy before someone found it. There’s no cell reception or anything. If you got lost…”
“Who’s lost though?” Toni asked. “If it was someone from Moonstone Cove, someone would have reported them missing by now. Don’t you think?”
“Maybe a weekender?” Luna asked. “There’re a lot of people from LA and the Bay Area with vacation homes around here now.”
“True.” Jackie shrugged. “Well, if no one finds it, eventually the coyotes will.”
* * *
Toni finished her dinner and wandered out to the side yard where a bunch of the guys were playing horseshoes. Or rather a convoluted Dusi-rules version of the game with way more than four players and a lot more wine. It was a gathering of grown men who immediately reverted to teenage antics as soon as they were around their cousins.
Toni adored all of them.
“Hey, boys.” She leaned her elbow on an old wine barrel they were using as a table.
“Toni, get out of here!” her brother Frank shouted. “Nico, you better not—”
“Antonia!” Nico spread his arms with a grin that said he was on his third glass of wine, minimum. “A case of wine if you’re on my team.”
“You dickhead,” Frank hissed. “She’s my sister.”
“She’s my neighbor.” Nico held out a horseshoe. “Take the horseshoe. Turn to the dark side.”
She squinted at Frank, then at Nico. “Don’t you already owe me a case of wine for fixing your tractor?”
“Technically you didn’t fix it, but all that will be forgotten if you join my team.” Nico stepped between her and Frank. “Forget him. Remember when he cut your hair?”
“I was seven!” Frank said. “And I did a good job.”
“If you’d been blind, you did a good job.” Nico blocked Frank. “Just come on my team, Toni. We’re already six up.”
“Sorry.” Toni shot Frank a dismayed grin. “He’s right. About the haircut and the neighbor thing.”
“Oh man!” Frank stalked back to his side of the horseshoe pits, ignoring the betrayed faces of his team members.
It was well known among the Dusis that Toni was preternaturally gifted at horseshoes. She readily admitted it was her only athletic skill. As she lined up behind her cousin Ray, she elbowed Nico.
“What’s up?” Nico threw a careless arm around her.
“Any news from Max or Drew on that finger?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “And no one is talking around the ranch either. I thought for sure someone was going to cop to messing with the tractor when the police started questioning them, but not a word. I told Max they needed to go out to Fairfield’s place.”
Max was their younger cousin who was on the police force. He was working his way up to detective and idolized Drew Bisset.
“They haven’t gone out there yet?”
“Max said— Hold on.” Nico stepped forward, set down his wineglass on a large barrel, then tossed the horseshoe. It hooked once around the center stake before it jumped off and fell in the sand.
Nico cursed under his breath as Frank jeered him from across the lawn. “Serves you right, you rat!”
Nico flipped him off and walked back to the barrel to grab his wineglass. “Max said they called out to Fairfield’s office, but the secretary said he was in the city. Didn’t know when he’d be back.”
There were two more throws before hers, so Toni hung back and spoke in a low voice by Nico’s shoulder. “Did someone tell you about him and Marissa?”
He gave her a dark look. “I heard. Not from her, of course. She can’t be bothered to spare me or the kids any bit of embarrassment. They had to hear it from some shitty little gossip at school.”
“You know I think she’s an idiot, but there is an upside to all this.”
“Oh?”
It was Toni’s turn. She stepped forward and, ignoring the whistles and shouts from across the lawn trying to distract her—an accepted and expected part of Dusi-rules horseshoes—landed a perfect ringer around the center stake.
The cousins across the lawn booed and her own team cheered.
“Nine up!” Nico shouted. “Suck it, Frank!”
“Nico!”
Everyone fell silent when Toni’s mom called from inside the house.
“Yeah, Auntie Rose?”
“Watch your language, young man.”
Toni put a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing.
“I will.”
“Serves you right,” Frank yelled.
“Frankie!” Toni’s mom called again. “Come inside and talk to your father.”
The “oohs” and laughter rose from the lawn as Frank Dusi grabbed his beer and walked inside without a word.
“You know he probably wants to talk about the farm,” Nico said. “Your dad doesn’t care that Frank called me a dickhead.”
“Probably because you kind of are.”
“Harsh.” Nico elbowed her. “See if I send Henry over to help with your vines again next weekend.”
Don’t be suspicious. Don’t be suspicious. “Please, you know he’s obsessed with my vines. You can’t keep him away.” Shit, was that suspicious?
Nico cast her a glance. “He’s obsessed with something, all right.”
She kept her voice low. “If you say anything about that man to my sisters—”
“Relax, I don’t want to torment the poor guy. I’m sure you do that enough, extinguishing all hope in his little crush.”
Little crush? Oh, that was great. “So as I was saying about Marissa and your nemesis—”
“Oh yes, can we get back to literally my least favorite subject in the world?” Nico grumbled. “Please, can we?”
“I’m just saying that if they have something going on, maybe she’ll finally sign the divorce papers. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” he said. “But I’m not holding out much hope. He’s probably just messing with her to needle me.”
“You think
he hates you that much?”
“I think he hates that people see me as a real winemaker and him as an out-of-town wannabe.” Nico threw his head back and finished his glass. “Trust me, if Whit Fairfield could get rid of me by snapping his fingers, he’d do it in a heartbeat, and it wouldn’t be because of my ex-wife.”
Chapter 6
“So what do you know about Whit Fairfield?” Drew Bisset didn’t wait for her to close the door to her office before he began questioning her.
Toni blinked and kicked the door shut. “You came to my place of business to ask about Whit Fairfield?”
“Did you think I just wanted to hang out?”
“I thought we bonded last spring, Drew.”
Drew let out a clipped laugh. “Sure we did.”
“Why are you asking me?”
He’d interrupted Toni when she was working on a new project, which was kind of annoying, but it also gave her an excuse to retreat into her office and recharge because she was feeling the urge to crawl under her desk and sleep as soon as the clock hit two o’clock these days.
Because you’re pregnant, dumbass.
She ignored her own mental chiding because she was also firmly in denial.
Drew sat in the chair on the far side of Toni’s desk and slouched down. “I’m asking you because you know nearly everyone in town in a way that I don’t, you’re incredibly perceptive, and you and your friends tracked down a serial offender last spring.”
Toni spoke carefully. “Those are all sort-of-true things.”
“And I trust your read on people.”
Silently, Toni said, Since I can tell when anyone is lying and can usually tell what their motivation is, that’s a smart move, Detective.
Out loud she said, “I mean… I know what I know. Don’t you have a read on people too?”
He frowned and folded his hands, resting his chin on his fingers. “I got a read on your cousin. I got a read on this Fairfield guy. The problem is, there’s a whole other layer I know I’m not seeing.” He pointed at Toni. “And I think you might be able to shed some light on it for me.”
“You know there are rumors that Fairfield’s seeing Nico’s ex, right?”
He waved a careless hand. “I heard, but from what I can tell, that’s good riddance on your cousin’s part, right?”
“Yeah. Marissa’s the one who filed for divorce, but now she won’t sign. Nico pretty much hates her guts, but he’d be thrilled if she got a serious boyfriend because she might actually sign the divorce papers then.”
“Sad.” He shook his head. “That’s a sad situation for both of them.”
“Yeah, it is.” Toni sighed. She could feel that the sentiment from Detective Bisset was sincere. “No one in our family celebrated when she left him even though most of us don’t like Marissa much.”
“So the read I get from over at the Fairfield place is that the employees like their boss, he pays them well, and that Fairfield isn’t all that bad, he just comes across as kind of an asshole at first. Also, they all think your cousin is arrogant, stubborn, and old-fashioned. And that Nico likes to make things difficult for Fairfield and his whole crew just because your cousin doesn’t like the guy.”
“You got that from his employees?”
Drew nodded.
“So… you got the ‘he’s not that bad’ bit from the people that Whit Fairfield pays?”
Drew shrugged. “Fair point. But they seemed pretty sincere.”
“And what did you get from Nico’s people?”
“That Nico’s a hard boss, but everyone respects him. He minds his own business and the only thing he’s really obsessed with is winning awards for his wine while Whit Fairfield is the devil incarnate who wants to raze the Dusi winery, burn the oak trees, and turn all of Moonstone Cove into a wine theme park.”
Toni pursed her lips. “I mean… that may be slightly exaggerated, but the wine theme park idea has merit.”
Drew cracked a smile. “So I’m pretty clear what your cousin and his employees think about Whit Fairfield. What do you think about him?”
“Me?” Her eyes went wide. “What does it matter what I think?”
“For all the reasons I said when I came in. You’re a good judge of people and you know everyone.”
Toni glanced at the 1968 Chevy Corvette she’d much rather be working on in the garage.
Or a nap. A nap would be good.
“Am I getting paid a consultant’s fee or something for this?”
“My wife makes excellent brownies.”
Toni considered the offer. Her sweet tooth was already acting up. “Deal.” She cleared her throat and leaned back in her chair. “So what do I think about Whit Fairfield?”
“Yep.”
She reached into the small fridge sitting on her desk and pulled out a ginger ale. Maybe the sugar would wake her up. “You want one?”
Drew narrowed his eyes. “I’m good.”
She cracked it open and took a drink. “I know it’s not just my cousin. No one in town really likes Fairfield. Lots of people put up with him because he has so much money. He’s an arrogant SOB who thinks he knows more about making wine because he hired a fancy guy from Napa Valley to come down here and show everyone up. He may have thought he was hiring an expert, but this isn’t Napa, and people didn’t take it that way. People think that Fairfield thinks he’s better than people from the Cove.”
Drew glanced down at her desk calendar, then met her eyes. “And people from the Cove think he’s less because he’s not local.”
“Speaking from experience?”
“This town can be brutal to new people.”
“I know.” She thought about how much Megan used to hate Moonstone Cove. “It takes a while for people to break out of their shell around here. But once we do, we’re loyal. And people in the wine business around here? They’re suspicious of fancy packaging.”
“Whit Fairfield is fancy packaging?”
“Oh yeah. Personally, I think his wine is… fine. Nothing special. But he’s cozied up to enough wine reviewers who buy into his plans for the town that they tend to cut him slack. He set the bar low for himself, so he leaps over it every time.”
“Slack they don’t cut your cousin?”
She took a deep breath and tasted the temperature of the air. Drew was searching for something, but he seemed genuinely curious. She didn’t pick up any negative vibes when the man mentioned Nico, nor did he seem antagonistic toward Fairfield.
Toni leaned forward. “Okay, real talk? The winery was never a big deal in the family until Nico decided to change that. My grandpa liked to diversify, if you know what I mean, but the vegetable farm was the moneymaker. Still is, to be honest. So Grandpa grew some grapes, raised some cattle, helped my dad and my uncle start this place, helped my Aunt Gina start her restaurant. All that stuff was good. And the vineyards always made money.”
Drew nodded. “Okay. I’m getting the picture.”
“But we never really made Dusi wine—like an upscale label—until Nico went to my grandpa and asked for the reins to do something bigger than just grow the grapes. And making really good wine is way different than growing grapes. So for him, making a name for himself and Dusi wine really is an obsession. He’s worked his ass off to start to get critical respect for a winery that a lot of people around here considered kind of on the level with stuff you buy in jugs, you know?”
“Okay. And he resents Fairfield because…?”
“The guy bought his way in. He didn’t work at it. He just threw money at the idea, and because he was a new name with fancy credentials, critics and restaurant people around here ate it all up and thought Fairfield walked on water when a lot of them would barely answer Nico’s calls.”
Drew nodded. “Interesting.”
“Yeah. So I get that some of Fairfield’s employees are annoyed that people don’t like their boss, but to be fair, he’s made a lot of enemies with his attitude. And he’s not above playing dirty tricks. He
used shell companies to buy all his property. No one knew he was accumulating that much acreage. And the people who didn’t want to sell? A lot of them got harassed big-time.”
“Harassed how?”
“Oh…” She spread her hands. “Broken equipment. Busted wells. A barn fire once. Hiring extra harvesting crews just to keep them from picking for someone else.”
“I’ve never heard anything about any of this stuff,” Drew said. “Are you sure it’s not just rumors?”
“People aren’t going to report shit like that. It’s not the way things work around here. Did my cousin call the police when his tractor up and quit? No. He called me. Plus no one ever linked anything back to Fairfield. The guy’s not dumb. But you tell me it was a coincidence that every single person who resisted selling to him ended up doing it in the long run.”
“And you think Nico’s next on the list?”
“I think Nico has land Fairfield wants. And if playing dirty worked in the past, why not keep doing it?”
Drew rubbed his chin. “I’m gonna have to think on all this.” He sat up straight. “But thanks, Toni. I really appreciate the time. You’ve given me a much better picture of the situation.”
“So are you going to question Fairfield about Nico’s tractor? And that finger? Because honestly, what the hell? Who just leaves a finger lying around?”
Drew walked to the door and opened it. “I definitely want to ask him some questions. When I can find him.”
Alarm bells started going off all over Toni’s brain. “What do you mean?”
“I mean when I got the message from his secretary here that he was in the city, I called up to the Fairfield Enterprise offices in San Jose. And they told me that he was down ‘at the ranch’ for a while.”
Toni blinked. “So his office up there thinks he’s down here?”
Drew nodded. “And his office down here thinks he’s up there.”
“So what you’re saying is… he’s missing.”
“Except no one has reported him missing.”
“Oh.” Her stomach sank. “Shit.”
Fate Actually: Moonstone Cove Book Two Page 5