The Merlot Murders wcm-1

by Ellen Crosby

“Like hell he wouldn’t. I’m not sure who it was came around talkin’ to your daddy trying to persuade him to sell the place but let me tell you, that so-called ‘accident’ Lee had was mighty peculiar, if you ask me.”

  I could just make out the expression on his face in the warm yellow light that shone through one of the windows behind us. True, he smelled like he’d drunk enough to float an ocean liner, but he also seemed in control of his faculties. He was watching me gravely.

  I’d been holding on to the railing to keep my balance. My grip on the smooth, worn wood tightened. “You really think someone killed Leland because he wouldn’t sell the vineyard?”

  “I do.”

  “Then why kill him? Now he’ll never sell it.”

  “True, my chair. But Eli wants to. And he got Mia to go along with him, didn’t he?”

  Though the heat was so oppressive it seemed I could chew it, I shivered. “You don’t think that Eli had something to do with Leland’s death?”

  He stared at me, nodding so slightly that it could have been a small tremor brought on by the booze. But it wasn’t. He’d filled in the missing piece of the puzzle that Eli hadn’t supplied.

  “That’s murder,” I said, raising my voice. He shushed me and I added more quietly, “Not my brother. I don’t believe it.”

  “Child,” he said gently, “I’m not accusing Eli of colluding with someone to have Leland murdered. All I’m saying is that whoever wanted to buy the place might have known Eli would sell if Lee wasn’t in the picture.”

  “What about Bobby Noland?” I asked. “He said it was an accident.”

  He snorted. “What would he say? By the time he got there, the site was so contaminated it was impossible to tell what the hell really happened. The workers trampled everything that might have been evidence and what they didn’t mess up, Hector’s dogs did. Then there was a power failure at the morgue the night Lee’s body got there.”

  “Oh God.”

  He leaned forward. The sultry August heat seemed to intensify the rank smell of the alcohol so it came through his pores, mingled with perspiration and the sweet scent of his cologne. “That’s why Eli got the body released so soon and the whole thing’s gonna be hushed up. It was a hell of a break for your brother. Now he’s got the green light to sell the place. Pay off some of that heap of debt he’s sunk into.”

  There was a small sound in the bushes at the far end of the porch and I jumped. “What was that? And what heap of debt?”

  “Probably a stray cat. That little princess he married is very high maintenance, sugar.” Fitz sounded annoyed. “Don’t tell me he didn’t tell you about the palace they’re building over near Leesburg?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s going to be Versailles when they’re done. Or the Disney Castle. I heard she wants a big ol’ fountain with swans floating around right there in the front yard. There’s no way can they afford a place like that on Eli’s salary.”

  “Then he needs the money.”

  He brushed a strand of hair off my cheek and tucked it behind my ear. “Exactly. And what he doesn’t need is all the bad publicity from a murder right there in the vineyard if he’s trying to put it on the market. See what I mean?”

  I saw. “So do you think Eli’s involved with this person? Whoever might have had Leland killed?”

  “People do a lot of things where money’s concerned. It’s a powerful motivator, especially when you haven’t got it and you need it. I don’t think Eli had anything to do with this directly, you understand,” he said. “But when you lie down with dogs, my chair, you get up with fleas.”

  “God, Fitz. Do you know what this means?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing it means.” He leaned forward and put his hands on my shoulders. “Since I’m part owner of the vineyard, thanks to your sweet momma, I get a vote in all this. You and me, we’re two against Eli and Mia. Without a majority vote, Eli can’t sell.”

  “What are you doing?” Eli’s voice cut through the darkness. Both Fitz and I jumped this time, knocking over my cane, which clattered noisily on the porch floorboards.

  He was standing in the shadows at the opposite end of the porch with his hands in his pockets. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? We’d been speaking quietly, but our voices could have carried.

  “Talking,” I said sharply. “What are you doing, sneaking around like that? Good Lord, Eli, you scared the wits out of us.”

  “Look who’s talking about sneaking around. You’re the one who left.” He sounded irritated. “Do you realize you’ve been gone twenty-one minutes? People are asking for you. Thelma’s here now and so are Joe Dawson and most of the Romeos. You need to come back inside. You have obligations, Lucie. Family obligations.”

  “Sorry, Eli,” Fitz said, picking up my cane. “It’s my fault she’s here so long. She was feeling a bit woozy, that’s all, so we came out for some fresh air. Then we got to talking and catching up on things. She’ll be right along in.”

  “Okay.” Eli stood there with his arms folded and waited.

  “I’m coming, Eli.”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “I need you now. Thelma wants to have a sing-along of Leland’s favorite songs.” He sounded grim. “I’m counting on you to distract her.”

  This time we both heard the slamming of the front door as he left.

  “I’d better go,” I said. “He’s pretty upset. Do you think he heard anything?”

  “Naw.” Fitz took my hand and slipped something small and hard into my palm. “Here. Don’t lose it,” he whispered. “It was your mother’s.”

  “What is it?”

  “A key.”

  “I know that. A key to what?”

  “Possibly a jewelry box.”

  “Why are we whispering? And how come you didn’t say anything about this until now?”

  “Your mother didn’t want Lee to know. It was among some papers she left me. Private papers. I was…going through them recently. This seemed like the right time to turn the key over to you.”

  “He’s dead. Do we still have to whisper?”

  “Don’t you sass me, child. I did it for your own good.”

  I stared at him. “Did what? And Mom kept her jewelry box on the dressing table in her bedroom. She never locked it. When I was little she used to let me try on the fabulous jewelry she inherited from Grandmama Bessette.”

  “You must have been very young to have worn those.” He sounded disgusted. “Because she sold them all, one by one.” He saw the look on my face. “You didn’t know, did you? She did it to bail your poppa out of debt. I’m sorry, my chair. I don’t mean to upset you, but it’s time you knew the truth.”

  “Then what’s this for?” I held out the key.

  “The one thing that’s still left. At least I think it is. Her diamond necklace. Ever seen it?”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Once. She wore it to the White House when she and Leland went to a dinner for the French Prime Minister. I never saw it again.”

  “It’s worth a fortune, Lucie,” he said in a low voice. “Not to mention the provenance. Your mother told me it belonged to Marie Antoinette. It came into the possession of that countess who was your ancestor. The one who was Thomas Jefferson’s friend.”

  “The Comtesse de Tessé,” I said. “Do you think my mother hid it? Marie Antoinette’s necklace?”

  “I hope so.” He closed my hand around the key. “No one has seen it since she died. At first I figured Leland sold it, but he swore he didn’t. Maybe for once he told the truth. That’s why I never said anything about this key. I wanted to make sure there was something left for you children that Lee couldn’t squander. If you sold the necklace now, you’d have enough to pay off the vineyard’s debts. I’m sure your momma would understand. You just have to find it first.”

  He squeezed my fist so tight the key cut into my palm. I winced and he
loosened his grip. “Sorry, sugar.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you for this,” I said, finally.

  “Well,” he said, and something in his voice made it clear he was going to tell me precisely how I could do just that, “there is something you could do for me.”

  I extracted my hand. He sounded vaguely Faustian. “What is it?”

  “There’s something else that hasn’t been found since your momma died. Her diaries.”

  “My mother never kept a diary,” I said.

  It had been a family joke that Chantal Montgomery was single-handedly responsible for Atoka having its own post office rather than us being lumped in with Middleburg. I never saw her desk when it wasn’t heaped with stacks of writing paper, boxes of note cards, pens with different colored ink, sealing wax, and embossed address labels. During her life she had written thousands of letters, postcards, and notes. But as many times as I’d watched her writing, her head bent over some piece of correspondence or her gardening journals as Edith Piaf warbled “La Vie en Rose” on one of her old records, I didn’t ever recall seeing a diary.

  Fitz clasped his hands to his chest and for a second, I thought he might be having a heart attack. “I am not asking you if she kept a diary. I am telling you she did. And when you clean out that compost heap of a house that used to be your mother’s pride and joy—and I know you will—you are going to find them. And then…” He shook a finger in my face, revving up with the fury of a Bible-belt preacher taking a sinning congregation to task. “And then you are going to turn them over to me.”

  Them. More than one. “Why?”

  “So I can burn them. It’s what she would have wanted.”

  My mother baked cookies for every school bake sale, library fund-raiser, and church social I could remember. She sewed our Halloween costumes by hand and never missed a sports event, dance recital, or school concert. She read the same bedtime stories over and over and decorated elaborate birthday cakes in cute shapes and knitted mittens with animal faces on them.

  She was not someone who wrote a diary that needed to be burned. Her life—to continue the metaphor—was an open book.

  At least I’d always thought it was.

  “What makes you so sure?” I asked. “I mean, I think I would have known…”

  “Honey.” Fitz pulled me to him and stroked my hair. His voice was soft in my ear, a gentle wheeze. “You’re gonna give them to me when you find them, you hear me? Let your poor momma rest in peace. I’m asking you.”

  “Yes,” I said, and my voice quavered. “I suppose I am.”

  “Good.” He crushed me in another bear hug. “Now go along inside, like Eli said. They’re waiting on you.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Lord, no. I came to see you, that’s all. I already made my peace with Lee.” He stepped back, stumbling unexpectedly.

  “Careful!” I grabbed his arm to steady him and he clung to it, pulling like it was a lifeline. I let go of my cane and wrapped the other arm around a porch balustrade to keep us both from falling. We swayed together until he found his footing.

  “Whoops.” His chuckled giddily. “Almost lost my step there, didn’t I?”

  “Why don’t you come inside, Fitz? Rest a bit.”

  “Naw, I’m fine. Besides I need to get over to the winery. We’ve got a wedding tomorrow afternoon at the inn and the bride and groom ordered some bottles with custom labels. Quinn said he’d leave the cases out for me.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be driving…”

  “Don’t you start, Lucie. How do you think I got here?”

  “Please, Fitz?” I smiled. “Let me take you to the winery after the wake is over. We can talk some more. Come on.”

  His genial bonhomie evaporated. “Now you pay attention, you hear? You’ve been listenin’ too much to that brother of yours. He ought to mind his own business for once. I am fine and I know what I’m doing. So stop patronizing me!”

  “I’m not…”

  “Oh yes, you are. And you of all people ought to know better.” He stabbed a finger at my chest. “Robs a body of his own dignity when people act like you can’t take care of yourself, doesn’t it, my chair? It’s humiliating.”

  I was silent, wondering how I’d betrayed myself and let him find the soft place in my shell of invulnerability.

  He nodded. “I thought you’d understand. Go inside now.” He still sounded cross, but he leaned over and his lips brushed my forehead. “Good night, sugar.”

  A moment later the darkness swallowed him except for the tapping sound of his receding footfalls and then the noise of a car door slamming.

  I went slowly back to the Green Room. Fitz had turned the tables neatly so that now it was Eli’s motives I was wondering about. Everything he’d said had made sense. If only he hadn’t begun slurring his words right before he left.

  Upstairs, I could hear them singing. “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” One of Thelma’s favorites.

  Eli met me at the door, scowling. “Just in time to close the barn door after the horse bolted. Thanks a bunch.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What happened to Fitz?”

  “He went over to the winery to pick up some cases of a special label wine for a wedding. Who’s Quinn?”

  “Quinn Santori. The new Jacques.”

  Jacques had been both our winemaker and viticulturist since my parents first opened the vineyard. The rootstock for the original vines came with him from France, so in the beginning we produced only vitis vinifera, the so-called noble wines made from Old World or European grapes. He had lived in one of the tenant houses on our property, but most of the time he was either in the fields or at the winery.

  “Where’s Jacques?”

  “He had a stroke a few months ago. His daughter came over from Giverny and took him back to France.” He took my elbow. “Come on. Maybe we can head her off before she starts ‘Climb Every Mountain.’”

  “A stroke? When did that happen? Somebody could have told me.” At least now I knew why Jacques hadn’t answered my last letter.

  “I guess we forgot. Sorry, babe.” He smiled pleasantly, but his eyes were mocking. One more life event I’d missed during my long absence. He jostled my arm. “Let’s go.”

  I still had Fitz’s little key in my hand and it fell, bouncing on the wooden floor. Eli reached down automatically and picked it up. “What’s this?”

  “My suitcase key.”

  I didn’t intend to lie. But as he handed it over our eyes met. He knew Fitz had just put me wise to what was really going on.

  I closed my hand around the key and smiled back. “Thanks.”

  “Sure. Come on.” He turned away and I followed him into the Green Room. I realized then that I didn’t trust him.

  Though judging by the expression on my brother’s face, it was pretty clear that he didn’t trust me, either.

  Chapter 5

  The punishing heat didn’t let up for Leland’s funeral. The Blue Ridge had vanished, bleached by the haze until it disappeared, blending into the colorless sky. The horizon looked disturbingly flat and closed-in. Eli reported before we left for the funeral home that when Hector’s men dug the grave for the coffin, they broke a shovel trying to penetrate the concrete-like clay soil. The drought was reported as the lead news story on the local radio station, instead of being lumped with the rest of the weather forecast.

  Once again, everyone in town showed up for the short ceremony, crowding in to our brick-walled cemetery, standing shoulder to shoulder, drenched to the skin in heat-seeking dark clothing. It seemed surreal as all funerals do, the bizarre intersection of time when Leland was and wasn’t among us—a lifeless body inside a glossy wooden casket soon to be lowered into the ground. I stared at my mother’s headstone, unable to clearly conjure the sound of her voice in my head anymore, however much I might want to hear it again.

  The bagpiper played “Amazing Grace,” and it was achingly lovely. Next to me Mia sobbed
quietly into a handkerchief. I put my arm around her thin shoulders, half-expecting her to pull away and gratified when she leaned against me protectively. I stroked her hair. Eli reached over and took her hand.

  Then Reverend Martin said, “Please bow your heads.”

  After a few minutes I noticed Eli glancing at his watch. His lips were moving.

  “Stop it, will you?” I whispered behind Mia’s back. “It will be over when it’s over. Leland won’t come back and haunt you if it doesn’t end precisely at sunset. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

  “It’s far from perfect,” he snapped. “Fitz was supposed to give one of the eulogies. He’s not even here. Mason’s doing it instead.”

  I looked around. “Where is he?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  Reverend Martin cleared his throat loudly and Eli and I looked up. He was staring directly at us. Mason Jones, our lawyer, was standing next to him, hands clasped around a Bible. I blushed and quickly bowed my head as my brother did the same. We didn’t speak again until after the last note of “Taps” sounded as the sun disappeared, leaving a Technicolor sky behind.

  “So what’s going on with Fitz?” Eli asked in a low voice. He handed me his handkerchief. “Here. Your mascara’s running.”

  The three of us were standing in an untidy receiving line at the gate to the cemetery with Dominique. Mia was no longer crying but her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

  I pressed Eli’s handkerchief against my watery eyes. If I started to cry, she’d lose it again, too. I tried to keep my voice steady. “I don’t know. Do you think he’s all right?”

  “This isn’t like him.” Dominique twisted her jet-bead necklace around her fingers until it became a choker. “I can’t imagine where he could be.”

  “He reeked of booze last night,” Eli said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to light a match near him. Maybe he went home, had a few more belts, and is still sleeping it off.” He looked at me pointedly. “You were the last one to see him, weren’t you?”

  “I suppose I was,” I said. “He told me he was coming here to pick up some cases of specially labeled wine for a wedding. I assumed after that he was going by the inn.”