A Tainted Finish: A Sydney McGrath Mystery

by Horn, Rachael

  She felt no sense of absolution, but she did feel a little lighter. Besides, there was one thing she could do for Clarence. She struggled with the medication bottle for a few minutes with her right hand, but she eventually managed to open it and took one of the Oxycontin with water. She stared out the window. It was too dark to see if the truck was back. She couldn't make out the Sheriff’s cruiser either. But Jim had said it was there, and she imagined it parked out in front of the house. The road to the winery was dark and ominous, but she knew it well. She would have no trouble in the dark without a flashlight. The way was branded in her. She took another pill, as an after-thought.

  Punchdowns would not be easy.

  After a few minutes of struggling with a pair of yoga pants under a black silk slip and her uncle's oil-slicker, she tiptoed her way onto the deck, closing the door silently behind her. She didn't want to wake up Charlie.

  Chapter 35

  Syd was grateful for the security lights that beamed on when she got near enough to trip them. She usually would have waved her arms around for the motion detector, but her right arm was cradling her left arm in the sling and she had forgotten about the motion detector anyway. She reached the door and struggled to unlock it with the hidden key. The doors opened freely to the outside. She remembered her dream with a shudder, the red doors opening inside and giving such resistance. She flung both doors open and waited outside, letting the gas escape. She sat waiting in the lighted area on an Adirondack chair until the light went off. She nearly panicked while she leapt up to set off the motion light again. She took a big breath outside and stepped inside to reach the panel of lights just inside the door. She didn't want to face the sudden darkness again while she waited.

  The night was crisp and gorgeous. The cold made the night air crystal clear, and she could make out the tendrils of the Milky Way in the midnight sky. The lights from the bridge on the river below shone bright, and the whistle of the train going by two miles away sounded much closer. She held up her left elbow in an embrace and began to feel a little better about herself. Maybe it was the painkiller kicking in, but she felt a warm surge coursing through her. She didn't mind being alone for the moment. The stars and the view were enough.

  After she waited a long while outside – certainly long enough to purge the carbon dioxide from the room – she entered the winery with trepidation and an alert nose. Once she was a few steps in, she realized it was safe to enter and she focused on her plan. First she would remove the covers of the tanks and find which wines absolutely needed punchdowns and which ones could stand to wait until she had help in the morning. There were still ten tanks left in active ferments; all of them placed in the middle of the winery. She would take their temperatures too. She wasn't sure how she was going to do the work with her right arm. She was always dominantly left-handed. She plotted how she might get the tool through the drying caps after sitting all day without submersion into the juice. They would be under a great deal of pressure and she would need strength. But she could devise a way to dig through the skins and make a hole to get it started. She had done it before, albeit using her stronger arm.

  In fifteen minutes she had managed to take the temperature of all of the tanks. She found three that needed immediate attention to release the heat and CO2 built up under the cap. She prepped a five-gallon bucket with steaming water and metabisulfite to dip the punchdown tool in. It slopped on the floor when she carried it with her clumsy right arm.

  She dug a hole in the skins of the first tank and tried to use the heavy punchdown tool. She experimented with every possible angle, but her right arm was not nearly as useful as she would have liked. She cursed her dominant left-handedness, feeling the burn of defeat when she realized that she could not maneuver the tool. Her right arm simply wasn't coordinated or strong enough. She carefully placed the punchdown tool back into the bucket of water, removed the overcoat, and sanitized her arm in the sulfur water. She stood on the stool and plunged her arm in the pomace up to her armpit, using her arm as a stir rod or a mixer. The ferments were warmer than the outside air, and she enjoyed the work on a visceral level. There was a sensual weaving of smells and sensations. It took her three times as long as it would have taken with a good arm and the tool, but she felt satisfied as she finished one tank.

  The next tank took longer than the first. She was growing tired, and worse, she felt loopy from the pain meds. She worked the skins with her right arm as she stood on the step ladder. The outside motion light had long gone out and the cold air of the autumn night crept into the open doors, making her shiver violently. The front of her nightie was wet from slopped wine. She knew she should have been miserable, but she had not felt so determined in a long time. She was taking care of the wine when there was no one else to do it.

  The last tank was the Tempranillo that had given Olivier such trouble two days before. It still had a slight off odor of hydrogen sulfide; a red flag for unhappy yeast. She took a Brix reading with the hydrometer and found that it was at 7 Brix. It had moved a little since Olivier brought it to her attention. Or had it moved? She couldn't remember. She considered just throwing in some diamonium phosphate, unnatural chemical nutrients that acted like candy for yeast. But adding nutrients now would be tricky. Adding too much would make the wine a lovely nutritious medium for future unwelcome spoilage yeasts, but too little would not stimulate the ferment. She would have to do further tests. She grabbed a sample of the juice after bathing her arm in the sulfur water. Her arm was now purple, even after all of the wine had been washed away. Stained. She pulled on the overcoat with her right arm in the sleeve and stood shivering, working to keep her mind from remembering the details of Clarence's purple stained hands. She padded back into the barrel room.

  The barrel room was a dark, familiar labyrinth of oak barrels stacked to the top of the twelve-foot ceilings. It smelled like vanilla, tobacco, and wood, a mixture of aromas that Syd loved with her entire being. She made her way through the first stack to find the bank of lights and switched them all on. She was not used to the way the barrels were lined up. They were usually stacked in a different direction, but she could see that the current system used less space. She made her way to the lab door off of the barrel room, somewhere near the middle of the maze.

  The fluorescent lab lights buzzed and flickered when she turned them on, which was a terrible nuisance for long stints in the lab. Syd found the small cylinders necessary to do a test in the spectrophotometer. An unfamiliar cell phone sat silently near the spectrophotometer, on top of a legal pad with cryptic notes in a familiar slanted masculine handwriting. She recognized it as Olivier's. She found comfort in knowing that he left his phone behind, sitting like a beacon or tether to this place. She opened the old-school flip phone and scrolled through the menu. He had five missed calls; four of them from Charlie and one from Alejandro. She scrolled down through his history and saw many recent calls from Madre. Some were from unknown numbers, but most were from Alejandro. She was surprised to see a few from Marcus. She scrolled down a few weeks back and stopped on a name. Clarence. Then another from Clarence, and then several more. Then a few from Antonia. She put the phone down and felt guilty for having pried. She looked around for the test tubes she needed.

  Syd filled the vials with wine to test the yeast assimilable nitrogen-YAN- content in the spectrophotometer. The test would help her determine how much nutrients to add to the stuck fermentation. She prepped the vial and calibrated the machine, remembering vaguely how to run the test. It had been several years. She used to do all of Clarence's lab work, but tonight in her OxyContin fuzz she couldn't remember the test procedure. She botched the sample on her first try. She thought about leaving it for the morning, but obviously Olivier thought it was important to run a YAN test too, and she didn't want to let him down. He could have done the additions already, but what if he hadn’t? Determined, she grabbed another beaker to get a sample of the Tempranillo, turning the light out as she left.

  The si
lence and darkness caught Syd off guard and she gasped. The barrel room was pitch black. She turned to find the lab door and turn on the lights, but she was disoriented by the new barrel arrangements and had to feel blindly along the wall. She put the beaker in her pocket to free her hand. She was nearly inside the lab door and reached for the lights, but she was shocked motionless at the sound of shuffling feet in the darkness.

  They were near her; very near her. Maybe a few feet away on the other side of the barrel stack.

  She stood petrified, holding her breath. Her ears strained to listen. A soft swish, maybe a hand on a barrel, barely audible. A slight moan of leather, possibly from shoes. She stood staring wide-eyed into the darkness. The winery and the barrel room were dark. But she could make out the faint glow of light from the motion lights outside. The gentle green glow terrified her more than the darkness. She realized the reality in front of her. Someone had entered the winery and turned off the lights. And he was now standing feet from her. Panic choked her, collapsing her throat. She gasped again reflexively. She knew immediately that the sound gave her away. She bolted toward the door, feeling her way along the barrels. There was only one way out of the lab, down one aisle of barrels. And once he stepped into the aisle with her she knew she was trapped. She struggled to quiet her breathing to listen. He was still far from her, possibly at the end of the aisle. She heard by the sound of his footsteps that he was moving quickly. She scrambled forward, acting before she could think.

  Her right hand darted into her pocket and she grabbed the beaker. She threw it on the ground on the other side of the barrel stack closest to her. The glass shattered everywhere. She stood motionless, listening. The sound of shuffling feet floated from her left to her right. She wasn't certain, but she felt like breaking the glass might have worked. She could wait until he made his way to the broken beaker and make a run for it.

  She stood frozen and listened for an eternity. She held her breath, held her body taut. Every muscle was poised. No sounds. No movement. She tried hard to remember the lay-out of the barrel room. She had only been in it a few times since the new arrangement. She had to choose her path carefully. A life-or-death choice she realized in a gulp of terror. Was he in the other aisle?

  She raced through her options, paralyzed by the choice in front of her. This man was certainly going to kill her. She was going to die if she couldn't get out of here. She had no weapon and she couldn't fight with her left arm in a sling. There’d be no one to help or hear her if she screamed. A chill ran up her spine, filling her with an icy resolve.

  Run! she screamed in her head and her feet accelerated into darkness.

  She hit her slung arm hard on a metal barrel head stave and cried out. Her right arm reached out frantically as she ran into hard, invisible obstructions. Her ears roared with raging waves of fear. She made for the distant green glow, barely visible from the barrel room. Her right arm felt along a wall as she neared the glow. She shuffled harder and bounded off of a shorter stack of barrels she had forgotten about. She spun toward the glow of light and stumbled to the ground. She used her right arm to push off of the floor and re-gain her footing.

  She was a yard from the barrel room door when her head jolted back with searing pain. She fell back onto the ground and into the man's legs. She rolled slightly over to her left side and freed her right arm. He held her hair in his hand and jerked her up, sending searing pain through her scalp. She hit back hard with her right arm, grazing his thigh. She threw another punch that landed in the soft tissue of his groin. She reached up again and grabbed a fist of whatever she could. She squeezed, punched, and wrung it violently. Suddenly, his screams were mixed with hers as her hair was pulled from her head. She thrust viciously with her hand again and felt a sudden relief of her searing scalp. She pushed off hard, wrenching her wounded arm as she tried to stand up. She stumbled and he leaned down over her, frantically grabbing at her with both hands. She swiveled on her butt and kicked his thigh as hard as she could. She kicked again and landed her foot in his groin. He stumbled backward and she crawled like a crab with one arm, scurrying several feet away. She rolled to her right side and bound up on her feet.

  She sprinted out the door and into the big room of the winery. The cold air rushed into her face like a beacon, and she forced herself out blindly into a fermentation tank. She spun around the tank and made a path through the other tanks. She could see the door twenty feet away.

  To her right she saw a dark figure and the flash of a long metal object. She paused for a split second and turned as she registered the sight. She sprinted forward again, only to stop suddenly as she was struck with a hammer of force on the back of her head. She fell like a bag of rocks to the concrete floor. Darkness filled her head, overtaking her with frightening coldness. Only one thought coursed through her fading consciousness – Olivier.

  Chapter 36

  He pulled the truck up the gravel drive, lost in thought. He would have to tell Sydney everything. He and Jim had decided it would be best coming from him, considering her recent outbursts toward Jim. Secretly he thought Jim was showing surprising cowardice for a sheriff, but he also understood. Jim was defeated in a way that men of his fortitude rarely were. He turned off the headlights and sat in the truck, contemplating the nightmarish day: Sydney getting shot, his helpless terror and anger, the guilt of having treated her so badly, and his pursuit of Rosa. And then it got much worse.

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, formulating some kind of plan in his exhausted mind. He knew she had lost almost everything. She would be grateful that he found Rosa. But the guilt of having missed her absence – of having known that her disappearance was odd but ignoring the nagging in the back of his mind – was unforgivable. Deep down, he feared it was a product of his own Argentine class snobbery; his father's gift to him. Rosa was the Mexican help. Did he ignore her absence because of his own classism? He shook his head. It was useless to blame himself. After all, he wasn’t the one who tied her up without food or water for days, beat her, and left her to die. He wasn't culpable. But the man who did this to Rosa wasn't sitting in a jail cell either. He shuddered and got out of the truck. He would sleep outside of Sydney's door himself if he had to.

  He moved across the drive under the clear night and paused to gaze up at the night sky. The tendrils of the Milky Way striped the black sky in muted celestial clouds. It was beautiful. A different night sky than the one he was used to in Argentina. But he wouldn't have to work hard to love this celestial offering. He could stay here indefinitely. His heart beat a little faster at the thought of seeing Syd, with her arm in a sling, still belligerent on her pain meds. He inhaled deep cool breaths and steadied himself as he thought of what to say to her. It wasn't over. He scanned the drive and the road for the cruiser that should have been parked outside the house. The sheriff cars had all been called to the shed where he found Rosa, including the one Jim had posted here. He was glad that he was back at least. He shuffled toward the house but stopped when a light caught his eye.

  The motion light flared on up in the winery. A moment later, just as Olivier looked up to the winery, the inside light shut off. He stared, trying to see who was coming out of the doors. He could hardly make out the doors from the distance, so he strode quickly up the drive. As he moved up the drive, the hair on his neck stood up and he began to step softly. He quickened his pace to a sprint on instinct. Something wasn't right. No one left through the doors. No one was leaving the winery. Someone went inside.

  He heard her scream as he reached the doors. He ran into the cavernous dark room and stared toward the sound of a struggle. She gasped and screamed again, her sounds punctuated by the grunts of a man struggling too. He strained to see in the darkness. He stepped lightly around the fermentation tanks to see Syd rushing blindly into the room, hitting hard against a tank and crumpled back. He grabbed the punchdown tool and raised it into the air to strike her assailant, who bound into the room a few feet away.

 
A flash of metal caught light, and Sydney collapsed to the ground. A flash of light from the punchdown tool momentarily lit up the attacker’s face. It was a face tinged with focused triumph as the man watched her fall. Olivier cocked his arms and swung with all his might in a violent, bone-breaking strike at the man's triumphant eyes. He fell back to the sickening sound of crunching bone and metal. It echoed as the man slumped onto the concrete. A deep scream bellowed from his lungs, echoing in his ears as he raised the metal tool to strike the prone and motionless figure again. But he heard a guttural whimper that ran a cool shiver through him and he lowered his weapon. He looked down at Syd, scratching her nails pitifully on the concrete. His weapon fell to the ground in a clatter of metal.

  Olivier fell to the ground next to her and turned her over onto his legs. He pulled her up to his chest and shushed her whimpering with frantic consolation. Her breath was labored and a gash in the back of her head bled freely. Blood pooled and congealed on the floor, mingling with that of the man lying next to them. The dark pool from his head was larger and seeped ominously from the other side of his body. Olivier held his left hand to Syd's scalp and felt the warm blood oozing between his fingers. Her skull was unnaturally soft under his fingers and his heart seized up in absolute terror. The room grew quiet, and he realized that she had stopped whimpering. Desperate, he remembered that his phone was in the lab. He gently lay her head against the cold floor and tried to rise on legs of mush. He cursed himself when his hands slipped on the floor, covered in blood as he tried to get up. He glanced at the man’s lifeless body as he crawled past him and shuddered. His head was twisted at an unnatural angle.