“Sorry, Syd,” he said softly. She sat in silence, listening to him breathe. She bit her lip and drummed her fingers on arm of the chair. “I’ll be down Friday. Charlie said Friday would be best. Unless you want me earlier? I could come earlier, Syd?” He whined slightly and Syd jumped out of the Adirondack in frustration.
“No, Friday’s best. You have classes.”
“I could help with arrangements.”
“Charlie and I have it covered.” She paced the deck, furious at herself for calling and unsure why.
“Okay,” he said, sounding defeated. “Should I book a hotel?” His tenuous whine tipped the scales.
“No. You’ll stay here!” She was almost shouting into the phone.
“Syd, I'm sorry…” His pleas only made her angrier. She hung up on him and paced the deck. A wave of anger overtook her and she squeezed her fists into a ball. She screamed, desperately wanting to hit something or someone. Instead she slammed her way back into the house, quickly changed into sweats, and running shoes and ran up the road into the forest.
She ran for a few miles, sprinting and screaming a piercing fury heard only by the startled crows watching from the trees. She ran hard until she was dizzy and wet with sweat, her face streaked with tears. She spent her energy running out into the woods and she found she had none left when she finally turned to make her way back home. She walked back slowly, feeling empty and blank, and oddly refreshed.
Charlie and Rosa were seated at the kitchen table nursing mugs of Mexican chocolate when she stumbled into the house past dusk. They exchanged worried glances and a sigh of relief when she walked in. Syd brushed past them and made a beeline for the shower.
~
Syd woke up before dawn the next morning. She made a pot of french press and sat down in the worn leather chair next to the picture window that looked out to the river. The lights from the bridge between White Salmon and Hood River sparkled in the chilly morning air. After her first cup of coffee she got up to retrieve the red folio from the kitchen but found a note on the table. It was written in a tidy back-slanted cursive, a left-handed smudge of ink smearing the page along the script in an all too familiar way. Syd was left-handed, but she hadn't noticed that Olivier was as well.
Sydney~
You were asleep when I came in for our meeting. Here is an update
We are receiving Petit Verdot from Horse Heaven Hills on Monday, I think. I drove out today for samples. The PV is at 26 brix, pH of 3.7 and TA of 4.5g/L. A little overhung, I think, for your liking? I was not trusting the grower’s numbers and it turns out I was right. It needs to come off ASAP.
We are pressing the Grenache tomorrow. 5 ton. The crew will be here. No need for you to come up.
~I started the malolactic inoculate, will pitch tomorrow.
Ollie
She sat back in her chair with the note in her hand. Jack Bristol's words filled her head; his suspicions about Olivier. She grew resentful and ashamed that she had a scheduled meeting with him and had missed it. She felt light-headed after her shower the evening before and lay down for a few moments. She woke at 5 am the next morning.
She worked the note in her fingers, mulling over the loose ends of her uncle's life. She had inherited a tangle of a mess and was not sure if she could ever unravel it. She wondered if everyone's lives were so messy and undone. Her uncle lived what seemed to be such a boring life. His daily routine was mundane. But underneath it all boiled complex layers of conflict, love, and secrets. And it would all burn up with the man tomorrow.
“Why didn't you tell me?” she spoke out loud to the glowing orange and purple sunrise outside.
She got up and fixed herself some toast from the last of Clarence's famous bread. The smell of the toast dripping with butter made her smile. He would eat toast daily for morning breakfast, butter and crumbs getting caught in his reddish beard. Coffee and toast. He was not the gourmand people assumed. He was not so complex.
~
It was chillier than she expected when she stepped outside a few minutes later. Her boots slipped a little on the deck boards, a slight frost glimmering in the early morning light. She wore an old pair of double-fronted Carhartt's, a flannel from the mudroom cupboard, and her old muck boots, a mere sampling of the clothing left behind for her sojourn to a city life in Seattle. She welcomed the androgyny of work clothes; they were comfortable, loose-fitting, and snuggly warm. Still, she cupped her mug of steaming coffee in both hands for warmth while she made her way up to the winery.
The smell of Crush beckoned her at the bottom of the hill and grew more intense and inviting as she walked up the gravel road. Fresh herbaceous aromas hit her nose first, and she breathed in deeply. Her eyes welled up with tears. The overflow of emotion the smells elicited were complex and inexplicable. She smiled through the tears as she opened the large red doors of the winery. She moved around the building and opened the side doors. A wave of CO2 gas and fermentation aromas washed over her as she stepped back. She would have to wait to go inside. CO2 had built up in the winery all night long, and there was little air movement to expedite the evacuation of the gases.
She decided to wait it out in the vineyard and hiked farther up the hill. The slightly frozen gravel crunched under her feet, and the smells of the vineyard began to overcome the fermentation aromas from the winery below. She walked by the compost pile, which was smothered in a cloud of fruit flies. The frenzied compost was unthwarted by the frost, protected by the heat of the decomposition. Fresh stems and skins steamed in purple and green piles, and she scrunched up her nose to avoid sucking up tiny flies into her nostrils. She pushed farther up hill, beckoned by the view from the top of the vineyard. She stepped off of the gravel road and took a shortcut through a block of thick of vines. The vineyard was head-trained gobelet style, so her progress was unimpeded by trellis wires or rows. The stubby vines gnarled up from the ground like two-foot-long contorted arms, with hands cupped in supplication to the sun. These vines of Picpoul and Roussanne were harvested at least a month earlier, and the leaves were mostly yellow and brown. She frowned at the patches of red leaves intermittently peppering the vineyard.
At the top near the fence line Sydney stretched her arms up over her head and inhaled several deep breaths. The view was nothing short of majestic. To her right triumphed the tip of Mt. Hood, with its white peak still shedding the pink hue of sunrise. Directly to the east the sun hovered over the river in a vibrant orange. The black basalt cliffs of the Gorge cradled the sun on either side, reflecting an array of purples, grays, and pinks. She stood mesmerized, filling up her lungs with the sunrise, closing her eyes.
She jumped at the sound of the rifle shot fired from the vineyard next door. She followed a cloud of birds rush up from the vineyard as the gun reported another round. A half-dozen more shots were fired, each sending up a clammer of birds in different areas of the vineyard. She used to feel terrible for the birds until she understood the ruin they could cause a single vineyard in just a few short hours. Now she simply felt bad for her neighbor and wondered why he opted to forego bird netting this year. Bird shot was far less expensive, but it could make for some cold mornings chasing down the pesky marauders. Not to mention dealing with grouchy neighbors. She had never grown accustomed to gunshots in the early morning and she was even less so after her long stint in the city.
Movement caught her eye and she looked down to the Airstream parked below her neighbor's vineyard on her uncle's property. A man walked out and stood outside the trailer in the universal posture of a man urinating. He finished his business and arched his back into a long, elegant bow shape before bending and reaching for the ground. He lifted his arms to the side and then up again before arching his back further. Syd watched his morning ritual with the guilty pleasure of a voyeur, riddled with the kind of shame experienced by an onlooker who fiercely guarded her own privacy. Still, she watched him as he trudged across the north vineyard and down into the draw. She stood several hundred feet above him
across the ten acres and mapped his way into the deep V of the landscape while he strode up to the winery. She started back down through the vineyard as she watched him. They met up outside the winery in front of the open large red doors.
“Good morning,” Olivier said, surprised to see her.
“Good morning,” she said with a nod and a modest smile. She found it unsettling that she meant it. She knew it meant she was feeling good.
“Did you do punchdowns?” he asked.
“No. No, I just got here, I opened the doors ten minutes ago.”
“Ah. I'll get started.” He walked into the winery, turning on lights and disappearing into the cool depths of the building. She listened to sounds of running water and the scraping of a ladder on the concrete floor.
Syd sat out on an Adirondack outside the winery, drinking in the remainder of the sunrise. She sipped her lukewarm coffee and pondered her own resilience. She felt fine for the moment. Somehow the sun, the vineyard, and the winery filled her with an unexpected buoyancy. She still felt the devastating pain in her chest, but her head somehow felt detached from it. She was awed by her sense of suspended grief. She became aware of the gracious gift of patience she had for herself; an acceptance of her own process. She invited the grief to settle in her chest and found a kind of comfort in the weight of it.
~
The day of pressing red wine passed similar to the day of crushing fruit when she first arrived. She and Olivier worked side by side in a graceful rhythm; two experienced winemakers falling into sync. Three other cellar hands busied themselves with cleaning and storing the tanks, and wrangling hoses and sump pumps. Two of them were familiar to Syd. Alejandro was the primary connection for cellar hands in the winery, and he often found help from his cousins and friends. Clarence was always better at working with the cellar hands than she had been. Most were Mexican or Salvadorian workers who lived permanently in the area. He spoke fluent Spanish and he managed to maintain a universally casual nature, with little need to flex his authority. She always felt awkward at the deference the workers showed her. She was never sure if it was because she was the niece of the jefe, or because she was female, or just because she was white. The racial disparity between Mexican and Salvadorian workers and white workers was not as obvious in the fields when she worked alongside them. But in the close quarters of the winery she was always aware of social stratification, and always deeply uncomfortable with it.
But now things had inexplicably changed. She felt more at ease with the cellar workers than in the past. She joked and flirted her way around the cellars hands. She could ask them to do a task without feeling bossy, and they clearly respected her decisions. She was grateful for this. She noted that Olivier was more aloof with the workers than she was. They stayed clear of him, even though she never observed him say or do anything unkind or dictating.
Alejandro disappeared in the vineyard after he realized he was not contributing much with Sydney on the forklift. He nodded at her when he entered the winery and avoided her eyes. They had known each other for years. Alejandro had loved her uncle like his own. He had strong feelings for her too. Many summers ago, they had a fling that caused a temporary rift between Alejandro and Clarence. But that was almost a decade ago, and she had all but forgotten about it. But she suspected that he didn’t dismiss their romance as easily as she did. Whenever she visited it took him a few days to warm up to her. She would sometimes catch him glancing at her out of the corner of her eye. Still, she wanted to talk to him.
She finally got her chance to corner him when the other workers began to clean equipment at the end of the day. She was outside, stretching and staring at the view. Alejandro drove down from the vineyard on an ATV, and she stepped out in front of him.
“Hey! You dodging out of work?” she asked, teasing him. Her question forced him to look her in the eyes. He shut off the 4-wheeler.
“Only one seat on the forklift, senorita,” he said. His smile was so full of sadness that it struck her in her sternum. She wanted to embrace him and hold him against the pain in her chest. But he stoically kept his composure. His dark eyebrows pulled together in a squint. His full lips stretched thin in a face meant for laughing. He swung his leg over the side of the ATV and stood up, staying as far away from her as he could muster for polite conversation. He looked down at his feet.
“We’re finished now, anyway,” Syd said after a long pause. He nodded at the ground like a soldier waiting for orders. He looked like a young lost boy. “I went up in the vineyard today,” she said. “Do we have leaf roll in the Picpoul?”
“No. Not leaf roll. Red blotch. It is similar. A cousin virus.” He turned and walked up the hill in big strides and Syd followed. He had the graceful stride of a well-proportioned man, not too much taller than Sydney. His dark hair was curly and shined around a gorgeous brown face with nearly black eyes. She watched him in admiration as he trudged ahead of her. They stopped next to the block that puzzled Syd earlier that day. She was winded and dizzy from the steep climb up the hill, and she steadied herself on his sleeve reflexively. He was breathing normally and smiled as he glanced at her hand on his sleeve.
“They don't have Stairmasters in Seattle?” he teased.
“Looks like you could use a Stairmaster here,” she retorted nodding at his growing belly. Alejandro had easily gained 25 pounds since she saw him last. “You're looking prosperous.”
“Hey, gordita, mi novia is a good cook,” He clutched his paunch with two hands and jiggled it proudly.
She smiled at him gratefully. He used to call her gordita as a term of endearment. He was the man who taught her to embrace her curves and size-10 hips and D-cup bra while she lambasted herself in the mirror with the cliché self-torture of young women everywhere. Her hourglass body didn't look anything like the emaciated photoshopped models she saw in magazines. But Alejandro gently taught her about her own rare beauty over the course of a long summer in the hot Airstream under the stars.
He reached out and plucked a dry, reddish leaf from a vine next to him.
“No curl, see? The leaf is flat. Also, the veins are red here. With leaf curl, they are green.” His calloused index finger traced the veins in the leaf.
“What do we do? Pull them out?” She looked down at the entire vineyard. She figured maybe two percent of the vines showed red leaves.
“It is the only thing we can do. But it won't save us from infecting the entire vineyard. Everybody up here has it. I was up in Ted's lower block this weekend. They have it much worse than we do. But it is only a matter of time before it takes over.” He frowned, his black eyebrows arching together.
“What are they doing about it?” she asked.
“Gringos? Nada, as far as I can see. But I think they are worried. When I was up in Ted's vineyard I saw a group of them walking around up there. Some kind of secret meeting, you know? A jefe meeting.” Alejandro feigned a half-mocking Chicano accent when he talked about the gringos. They had a long understanding about the differences between Mexican-Americans and white folks in these parts, especially with respect to the vineyards. Alejandro referred to the owners as gringos, and his Mexican and Salvadorian friends as the workers. Ownership was always defined in racial terms. He made no attempt to hide his contempt of the gringos and their lack of expertise with the vines. But Syd knew there was much more to the management of the vines than their health. Ripping out vines meant delayed production, and growers lived on short margins as it was.
“Why do you think it was a secret meeting?” she asked.
“They all looked around suspiciously to see if anybody was around. And they parked their Beemers behind the trees. Over there.” He pointed to a copse of Douglas firs that separated the two vineyard blocks from one another a couple hundred yards from the fence line.
“They didn't see you?”
“I'm invisible, Grasshopper. I move with the wind.” There was a long-standing joke between them about the ubiquitous and thus invisible nature of
Latino workers and being completely ignored by the gringos.
“What were they doing?”
“They mostly just stood around and pointed at the vineyards. Come to think of it, they didn't really look at the vines. They just stood and pointed out the easements and roads. They didn't walk around much. No one had boots.” He shook his head in derision. “I was too far away to hear them. But Jack was the one leading the conversation.”
“Jack Bristol?”
He nodded.
“Who else was there?”
“Francois.”
“Francois Bertrand?”
He nodded. “And The Feldman guy, the one who almost bought us out. And that little fucking weasel prick, the wine critic.”
“Joe Donner?”
He nodded, waiting for her reaction. It dawned on him that the meeting of the jefes must have had little to do with red blotch. He watched as she paced back and forth with her hands on her hips. She paced for a full five minutes.
“Why on Earth would Jack Bristol, Francois Bertrand, Hans Feldman and Joe Donner be skulking around behind our winery, Alejandro?” she asked softly. “When was this?”
He thought for a moment. “Sunday, around four,” he said. His eyes grew wide at Syd's furrowed brow. She turned silently and wandered down the path in a trance while Alejandro fought a superstitious tingling at the back of his neck. Clarence was found dead only a few hours later.
~
The sun was sinking fast by the time Syd got back down to the house. She realized she was starving. Charlie was waiting for her on the deck in an Adirondack rocker, cupping a large snifter of caramel-colored liquid. Syd plopped down next to her.
“Long day?” Syd asked. She took the glass from her and smelled it. She swirled and gulped without further ceremony.
“Yeah, you could say that,” Charlie replied with uncharacteristic melancholy. She reached over and snatched back the glass.
A Tainted Finish: A Sydney McGrath Mystery Page 6