The Merlot Murders wcm-1

by Ellen Crosby

  Last night’s conversation with Fitz in the tropical darkness, his whispered accusations and revelations in the shadowy recesses of that porch, still haunted me. For the rest of the evening I’d felt like a sleepwalker, the jet lag clouding my judgment about what was real and what I’d imagined.

  “If he was supposed to stop by the inn, he never made it,” Dominique said.

  “Maybe somebody should go look for him,” Brandi suggested. “But not you, Eli. I need you to stay with me.” She folded her arms protectively over her belly. She’d been playing the baby card with a heavy hand ever since I’d laid eyes on her. Last night at the wake she’d had Eli dancing around like a Mexican jumping bean, getting her water, fanning her, massaging her feet. At this rate, by the time the blessed event rolled around he’d probably go into labor for her.

  “Are you all right, angel?” He looked worried.

  “The heat.” She put a hand to her forehead. “I need to lie down.”

  “We’ll go right away,” he said. “I brought the Jag. Anyone else want a ride?”

  “I’ll go with Greg,” Mia’s voice still shook. “He said he’d wait for me.”

  I’d noticed him standing with a few of the Romeos next to an ancient oak tree. He’d nodded to me when we gathered for the service, but we hadn’t spoken. Mia left us, threading her way through the crowd and ran into Greg’s arms, clinging to him. He bent his head and I could see him talking to her. She nodded and began crying again.

  I looked away, feeling mildly ashamed like a voyeur caught watching an intimate moment.

  “I’ll go,” Dominique was saying. “I should check on my staff. I need to make sure there’s enough for everyone to eat.”

  “We could feed Lee’s Army,” I said, “with what the neighbors dropped off before the service. Plus all the catered food you brought, Dominique.”

  “Well, yes,” she said, “but I just hired two new girls and they’re a little green behind the ears.”

  “In that case,” Eli said, pulling his keys out of his pocket, “let’s go. Come on, Lucie. You’re coming with us, of course.”

  “You go on without me. I need to clear my head. I’ll catch up. Maybe I’ll go the long way and stop by the winery.”

  Eli looked irritated. “I don’t think you ought to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because. For one thing it’s going to take you a long time.” He saw the expression on my face. “That’s not what I meant. What I’m saying is everyone expects you to be at the house.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Leave her, Eli,” Brandi said. “Let her do what she wants. Can we please go?”

  He turned back to his wife, who looked bored and unhappy. “I’m sorry, babe. Of course we can. We’ll go right now. Dominique? You ready?”

  Dominique squeezed my arm. “Be careful,” she murmured. “And forget about Mia and Gregory, okay?”

  The three of them walked toward the Jaguar, and Eli’s headlights swept past me a moment later.

  There was no one left at the graveside except Hector and two young Mexican workers who were standing about fifty feet from the gate, leaning on shovels. Hector raised his baseball cap in a small salute and walked toward me. The others followed. For an old man, Hector still moved with the compact fluid grace of a panther. I reckoned he had to be close to sixty-five, maybe even older. Now he and Fitz were the only ones left who could remember every one of our harvests.

  “You okay, Lucita?” he asked. “Why aren’t you going with the others?”

  “I’m fine. I just need a little time before I go back to the house.”

  “Sure, sure. I understand. We’ll be taking care of Mr. Lee now.” He made the sign of the cross. “We wait until you’re gone.”

  “Thank you,” I said. As I walked away I could hear the rhythmic chipping sound of their shovels moving earth from one place to another, which seemed to be amplified in the ovenlike twilight stillness. I walked as quickly as I could down the road toward the winery.

  If those cases of wine were still there then Fitz never made it before he disappeared. Maybe a cop had pulled him over for DUI and he’d spent the night in the drunk tank.

  Next time, no matter what he said, I’d take his car keys.

  The winery was located just past the stone bridge where Sycamore Lane crossed over Goose Creek. I made it to the bridge and sat on one of the parapets, resting my sore foot. In the gathering dusk the deep fissures in the streambed were still visible and there was only a pathetic meandering gleam of water that looked like someone had forgotten to completely shut off their garden hose. That was Goose Creek.

  A pair of headlights caught me in their glare. A white pickup truck came down the road from the direction of the winery. The driver tooted his horn and waved a hand out the window as he pulled up next to me. Harmon Animal Clinic and a telephone number were stenciled in black on the truck door.

  “Lucie honey, what are you doing here? Are you all right?” Doc Harmon was one of the Romeos, another of Leland’s poker and drinking buddies. He’d been at both the wake and the funeral.

  He had the sad-eyed long face and countenance of a basset hound, but a pit bull’s aggressiveness when it came to treating farm animals humanely. Though his hands were the gentlest of anyone I knew, I’d heard he once punched out a farmer in Philomont after showing up unannounced to look after a sick colt and discovering a cockfight going on for the pleasure of a large group of spectators. Doc made the farmer donate the proceeds of his little side business to the animal shelter.

  Besides his practice, which catered mostly to horses, he was on the staff of the Animal Swim Center, which specialized in rehabilitating injured animals. Increasingly he spent time on the road traveling to racetracks or even the Olympics with owners who wanted him available when one of their horses was competing.

  “I wanted to walk a little before I went back to the house,” I said. “I was just heading over to the winery. I haven’t seen it since I came home.”

  “You look all done in. It’s getting dark, too. Jump in and I’ll drive you there.” He peered at me. “You feeling all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Hot. I forgot how wilting the humidity can be.”

  “You could fry an egg on the hood of my truck, if you had a mind to,” he said. “You’re awfully flushed, darlin’. Let’s get you out of this heat.”

  I went around and climbed into the passenger seat. He took my cane as I did so and propped it between us. “Stick working okay for you? You doing any physical therapy?”

  “I was. And a lot of swimming.”

  He grunted and backed up the truck, heading toward the winery. “Swimming’s good. Hydrotherapy. It works wonders for the animals, too, moving around in that water without having to worry about fighting gravity. Keep it up now, you hear?”

  I nodded and he barreled down the road, pulling into the parking lot.

  “Thanks for the lift, Doc. What were you doing at the winery?”

  “Wanted to make sure the truck didn’t get caught in that mass of cars you got over at the big house. I’m on call. I got a few minutes, though. Need me to wait for you? Were you going to fetch something? I can run you back there when you’re done.”

  “That would be great, if you don’t mind. I just need to check something. It won’t take long.”

  “Take your time.” He lifted a mobile phone off a cradle on the dashboard. “I need to call the answering service anyway. This heat’s getting to the animals, too.”

  I climbed down from the truck and walked up the fieldstone path to the winery. The rambling ivy-covered brick building was largely my mother’s design. She’d sketched dozens of pictures of ideas until she finally settled on one that harmonized the romantic neoclassical architecture she’d grown up with in France with the simpler colonial style of Highland House designed by Leland’s pragmatic Scottish ancestors. The result looked more like a graceful old villa than a commercial structure, which was ex
actly what she wanted—and what we’d named it.

  She originally wanted the villa to be situated on a bluff much like Highland House but the architect she hired advised against it, urging her instead to build into the side of a hill. That way he could design the complex to take advantage of the natural cooling properties of the soil by locating the wine cellar partially underground. They found a place where the view of the Blue Ridge wasn’t quite as spectacular as she’d wanted, but the logistics worked for the cellar. Then he showed her a plan for a European-style courtyard and porticoed loggia that would connect the villa, which would consist of a tasting room, offices, and wine library, to the production area, where a crush pad, barrel room, and laboratory would be located. It was also close to the old dairy barn, redesigned as storage for the tractor and the other tools and equipment used in the fields. My mother fell in love with the whole idea.

  The place was exactly as I remembered it though it seemed the ivy that grew on the building, extending its tentacles in graceful arcs over the windows, had grown even more lush and thick. In the autumn the leaves would become flame-colored and in winter, the bare brown skeletal vines would look like latticework twining elegantly on the brick façade.

  The door was unlocked. I walked inside and flipped on the lights at the bank of switches. The cathedrallike coolness of the tasting room was a sharp but welcome relief from the withering heat. I read once that scientists have discovered the existence of “place cells” in the human brain, allowing us to store maps of locations that have particular importance or meaning. When we return to one of these mind-mapped places, our brain cells react differently, provoked by the potent cues of sight, smell, or sound associated with where we are. I stood in this room, which had been mapped not just in my memory but in my heart.

  Even after so many years, it still retained my mother’s indelible stamp—her attention to detail, her love of beauty—everywhere I looked. It was a grand rectangular room with a vaulted ceiling and four sets of floor-to-ceiling French doors leading to the fieldstone terrace with its serene view of braided hills, vineyards, and the layered Blue Ridge in the far distance. There was an enormous open working fireplace in the center of the room with sofas and chairs pulled around it on all four sides. Persian carpets from my mother’s home in France covered the quarry-tile floors. Her paintings of the vineyard hung on the walls, along with a handmade reproduction of a tapestry from the Musée de Cluny in Paris, showing coopering and wine making in the Middle Ages. The tiled bar was at the far end of the room, with the brilliantly colored mosaic of grape-laden vines and fruits my mother had designed for the façade illuminated by one of the overhead spotlights, making the colors glow like jewels.

  Directly off the main room an arched wrought iron gate led to the wine library with its deep leather chairs, wine barrel end tables, and our growing collection of books on colonial and contemporary wine making. A heavy door that always reminded me of the entrance to a monk’s cell led to a small corridor and the offices.

  I went there first, turning on more lights, to look for the wine Fitz should have collected. It was more likely that it would be here than in the barrel room, which was a bonded wine cellar. We never moved wine out of the cellar until we planned to sell it because we had to pay the sales taxes right away. There was no sliding by that rule thanks to mandatory monthly reports filed with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

  I must have been expecting to see Jacques’s office, with its familiar collection of photographs, awards, vintage silver bottle-stoppers, and the antique map of France during the reign of Charlemagne on the wall behind his desk. Instead the room was bare—a small shock—completely devoid of any personal effects belonging to the new winemaker. Maybe Quinn Santori had decided to use the smaller office next door, which had been my mother’s. I looked in and wished I hadn’t. The room had been turned into a dumping ground for cases of wineglasses used for tastings, rolls of labels for our various wines, and a half-filled box of corks. There were also several opened cases of wine, but none with customized labels.

  Perhaps Quinn had left the wine behind the bar. I went back to the main room and found it.

  So Fitz hadn’t come here after all. Maybe Eli was right that he went for yet another drink after the wake. Alone, except for whatever inner demons he was carrying around.

  I was still behind the bar when the door to the tasting room swung open. The man who entered was probably in his mid-forties, wearing a pair of green and brown camouflage trousers, a loud print Hawaiian shirt, and more jewelry than I was. Two heavy gold chains, one with a cross on it, and a thick gold bracelet on his right wrist. No earring though. His military brush cut was mostly gray and he had “don’t-mess-with-me” eyes that were calculating and unnerving.

  “Can I help you?” He wasn’t really asking. He was probably wondering what I was doing behind the bar.

  “You must be Quinn,” I said. “I’m Lucie Montgomery. I was looking for some cases of wine that you left for Fitz Pico last night.”

  “We found ’em,” he said. He sounded grim.

  “The wine? Isn’t this it?” I gestured to the cases on the floor.

  “Fitz,” he said. “We found Fitz.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s in the barrel room. Call 911, will you?”

  I had visions of Fitz, passed out on the floor of the barrel room since last night. “Is he all right? Doc Harmon’s outside…I know he’s a vet, but…”

  “Yeah, get him in here, too. I got Jesús throwing up all over the place.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The poor kid was in the middle of transferring the Merlot into one of the purged tanks when he realized it wasn’t empty.”

  My heart started pounding like war drums. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I thought you’d know. I’m saying Fitz is deader ’n a doornail. He was inside that tank. Death by almost instant asphyxiation.”

  Chapter 6

  Some people can deliver disastrous news as calmly as if they’re reporting on the weather, blunting the shock and horror of their words. It took a long moment before I understood what he’d just said.

  I said numbly, “There would have been pure carbon dioxide in that tank.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “My God, what was he thinking? I need to go to him. He’s my godfather.”

  “He doesn’t need anything from anyone anymore.” He sounded brusque and businesslike. “Call 911 and get that doc over to the barrel room pronto. My cell phone’s dead or I would have done it already. Then I saw this place lit up like a Christmas tree. Now that I know it’s only you, I need to get back there.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  He looked up at the ceiling and I could almost hear him count to ten. “Look, I understand how you must be feeling, but I don’t need two people barfing all over the place. Help me out here. Make that call like a good girl, okay?” He turned and walked out.

  So this was our new winemaker.

  I called 911 like a good girl.

  Doc Harmon and I were on the lawn outside the villa with Jesús, who looked pale and scared, when Bobby Noland drove up in a brown-and-gold Sheriff’s Department cruiser. Fortunately he hadn’t turned on the lights and sirens or it would have alerted everyone at the main house—meaning almost everyone in Atoka—that something was happening at the winery. The place would be a mob scene in no time.

  Eli was right behind Bobby in the Jaguar.

  I’d switched on the outdoor lights, which included floodlights and fairy lights strung in several of the bushes and trees. Bobby walked across the lawn, caught in the wash of light, still with the swaggering bantam way about him that he’d had in high school. I hadn’t seen much of him in the dozen years since he’d graduated.

  He started talking from ten yards away. “What happened? The call came in when I was still over at the house. Y’all got enough food there
to last you till the cows come home. The dispatcher said someone was hurt bad at the winery.”

  He and Eli reached our little group. Bobby pointed to Jesús. “This the guy?” He nodded to me. “Hey, Lucie. Didn’t get a chance to see you earlier. Sorry for your loss.”

  Up close Bobby looked like he’d aged more than he should have, but maybe it was the uniform and the holstered gun on his belt. When he took off his cap his sandy hair was short and bristly as a porcupine’s. In high school it used to hang in his eyes sheepdog style, which always made him look like he was hiding something. Now I could see his eyes. He wasn’t hiding anything, including how tired he looked.

  I still had Eli’s handkerchief from earlier in the evening, damp again from fresh use. I twisted it around my fingers like a strand of rope. “Thanks, Bobby. It’s Fitz. Jesús here’s the one who found him.”

  He’d been unwrapping a piece of bubble gum, which he was about to put in his mouth. He stopped and said, “Fitz Pico? Where is he?”

  “In the barrel room.”

  “What was Fitz doing in the barrel room?” Eli asked.

  “I don’t know. But he was in one of the stainless-steel tanks. It had been purged. Injected with pure carbon dioxide.”

  “Oh my God,” Eli made a small choking sound and coughed. Our eyes met for a second before he turned away. He looked upset. But not grief-stricken.

  “Fitz was in one of those big silver tanks?” Even in the artificial light, I could see Bobby go pale under his dark reddish suntan. He spoke into a microphone attached to a shoulder strap. “Send backup. Montgomery Vineyard.” He turned away and muttered again into the microphone. Then he said, “Where’s that winemaker of yours? Santini?”

  “Santori. Quinn Santori,” Eli said as I added, “In the barrel room.”

  “Shit. He better not of messed anything up.” He turned to Doc Harmon. “I could use some help, Elvis.”

  “Sure thing. You all right, son?” Doc looked at Jesús, who nodded.

  After they left Eli grabbed my elbow, dragging me next to a small border garden of red salvia and white impatiens where Jesús couldn’t hear us.