The Merlot Murders wcm-1

by Ellen Crosby

  “Are you asking if he knew about the money?” She nodded, smiling thinly, but I noticed she was strangling a piece of ivy. “He was as mad as a wet blanket.”

  “Was that what you argued about the day before he died?”

  “No.” One of the lamps teetered precariously as she jerked another piece of ivy and moved it into place. I caught the lamp before it tipped over. “Merde. We might not have enough ivy.”

  Ivy didn’t require this much angst. Changing the subject had been deliberate.

  “So what did you argue about? Did you know you were overheard fighting in his office?”

  She looked at me like I’d betrayed her. “We were arguing—discussing—whether his forgetfulness was the beginning of Alzheimer’s.” She reached into the pocket of her paisley Capri pants and fished out a smashed pack of cigarettes. “Don’t look so shocked. You weren’t the only one he kept in the dark. He managed to pull the rug over everyone’s eyes. Both his parents had it so he figured it was probably inevitable. His mother once attacked his father with a carving knife because she thought he was an intruder.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It was an accident that I found out about his parents.” She bent and cupped her hand around her cigarette as she lit it. “I bet that’s why he was taking antidepressants.”

  “Eli said he was drinking too much.”

  “He was. I think it was all related.” A cloud of smoke floated through her words.

  “So what was he forgetting?”

  “The usual. Names. Faces. Where he left his glasses or keys.” She shrugged. “I did some reading about it and I talked to Dr. Greenwood. You know it’s fatal, don’t you?”

  “No.” I tied a small strand of ivy into a knot. “I didn’t.”

  “Well, by that time, the person is delusional, like his mother was, or has hallucinations. It’s a horrible, undignified death at the end. You lose control of…everything.”

  “Do you think he might have been delusional the other night at the winery? Thought someone was after him or something?”

  “Dr. Greenwood—Ross—told me it’s a gradual decline. I don’t think he was at that stage yet.” She sucked on her cigarette. “But what do I know?”

  “Fitz thought Leland’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  She nodded and exhaled out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Bobby says it was. I believe Bobby.”

  “Did you tell Bobby any of this? About the Alzheimer’s, I mean? I assume he questioned you.”

  My cousin looked at me assessingly, then let her cigarette drop to the ground. “Of course I told him. I am not stupid, ma puce. I have a motive for Fitz’s murder, don’t I? He left me the inn as his partner, but he wasn’t ready to retire just yet. If he’d stayed on, with his condition deteriorating, who knows what might have happened? He might have wrecked everything he built. And the inn would be worth nothing. It’s no secret I wanted him to retire.” She ground out the butt under the toe of a sandal. “I didn’t kill him.”

  We finished arranging the last table in silence. Then she said, “I’m going back to the inn to take care of a few things. I want you to go home and change. Eli threw a fit about wearing Elizabethan costumes, so I decided to forget the whole idea. Be back here at five-thirty. Wear something pretty.”

  “Of course.”

  “And, Lucie?”

  “What?”

  “If you loved Fitz, you will say nothing about this. Bobby will keep it confidential, of course. And no one else needs to know. So promise me, chérie, that you will not mention it to anyone.”

  Another request for my silence. Dominique had as many secrets as Eli did. I shrugged. “Sure.”

  By the time I got back to the house to shower and change, Randy had come and gone. The spaces where the furniture had been—particularly the clock—screamed mute reproach at what I’d done. Dust bunnies the size of small boulders rolled across the floor like tumbleweed in the prairie. Though it was cooler inside than outside, I was sweating as I walked from room to room. The house was eerily silent.

  I was in the shower with cold water sluicing over me when I figured out what was wrong. I hadn’t heard the asthmatic hum of the air conditioner as it cycled on and off. When Highland House was built, there had been no heat, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They’d been added over the years as they became commonplace in most homes, generally in the late 1800s. Leland was the one who put in the air-conditioning. Unlike the heat and the electricity, which were added externally, the ductwork had to be tunneled throughout the house, which meant tearing into the lathe and plaster walls and making a colossal mess. My mother said afterward that Leland had handed over our money to the P. T. Barnum of the cooling business who knew a sucker when he saw one and promptly went bankrupt partway through the job. Leland found a retired plumber with dubious credentials who finished the work for a cut-rate price and, as we discovered later, installed a system that was left over from another construction project. It was too small for our house but by the time we figured out why the upper floors were always a lot warmer than the downstairs, it was too late to do anything.

  I wrapped a bath towel around myself and wandered through the bedrooms, placing my hand in front of the vents to feel whether any air, cool or otherwise, was blowing through them and maybe I was mistaken.

  I wasn’t.

  We needed every penny of the money Mac had given me to get through harvest. I might even have to sell a few more pieces of furniture, though if I kept that up, I’d be sleeping on the floor before long. Fixing the air-conditioning was a luxury.

  Anyway, it was nearly the end of August. From one day to the next, the light would change from the white-hot glare of summer to the slanting pale gold of autumn that would finish ripening the vines. The hammering heat would recede and the days would be pleasantly bearable for harvest.

  I could sleep in the hammock on the veranda. Somewhere in the attic, there should be a few portable fans. I’d done without air-conditioning in France for two years and I could get along without it for a few more weeks.

  * * *

  The dinner at the Ruins went well, under the circumstances. Most of the guests were unfamiliar faces and there were a lot of D.C. and Maryland license plates in the parking lot, so at least there were some folks who weren’t scared off by our macabre news. At dusk, we lit the candles in the hurricane lamps, which made a pretty necklace of yellow lights down the middle of the road, supplemented by the dancing orange flickering of the fireflies and the fairy lights in the nearby trees. Later still, Hector lit citronella torches, which glowed serenely in the still night air along the pathway leading to the amphitheater in front of Mosby’s Ruins. The quiet clink of glasses and china and the indistinguishable murmuring of voices was peaceable and pleasant.

  I glanced over at Eli, who had come straight from his office, shirtsleeves rolled up, as he helped Quinn open bottle after bottle of the Pinot Noir we were serving with the roast pork. Earlier he came to me and said quietly, “I’ve got Austin and Erica Kendall coming over to take a look at the house tomorrow. I’ll fill you in after dinner.”

  Austin Kendall was another Romeo and the owner of the largest real estate agency in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. His daughter Erica now ran the business, but Austin still got involved when listings were in the multimillions of dollars.

  Eli had just upped the stakes, setting up that meeting, and we both knew it. He’d also caught me off-guard.

  It was neither the time nor the place to discuss anything so I just said, “Yes, I think we should talk later.”

  After that, I stayed by the buffet table helping Dominique and her staff in an assembly-line preparation of dinner plates. Across from us, Joe Dawson and Greg Knight carved mounds of roast pork under the direction of one of the chefs from the Goose Creek Inn.

  Mia, who was ferrying the heaping platters of meat to the buffet table, set one of them down in front of me and said quiet
ly, “Greg and I stopped by the house on our way here. What happened to the clock? Is it being fixed or something?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Then where is it?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  She stared hard at me. “Lucie, you didn’t sell it, did you?” Her tone was somewhere between accusation and disbelief.

  “I had no choice. We needed the money to fix the motor on the destemmer. Plus we’ve got to pay the workers for harvest.”

  “How could you? That clock has been in our family for over a hundred years!” Her voice rose sharply and a few dinner guests looked our way. She stormed on. “I would have begged or borrowed the money instead. I never would have sold it!”

  It was completely out of character for Mia, the dreamy, artistic unmaterial girl, to get worked up over the loss of a piece of furniture, sentimental value notwithstanding. Mostly she fretted over more abstract matters like the hole in the ozone or space debris.

  I said, stunned, “If you’re so broken up about it, how come you’re willing to sell the house and the vineyard? I didn’t like it any more than you do.”

  “Assez!” Dominique shushed both of us. “People are watching. Back to work, please. Both of you.”

  Mia glared at me, then walked over to Greg, flipping her hair off her neck like the twitching tail of an angry cat. She’d been this edgy and irritable at Leland’s wake, but since then things had been okay. Now it was back to fireworks between us. Not because of the clock, either.

  I watched her touch Greg’s elbow, then pull his head down so she could whisper in his ear. He listened briefly before turning away. I caught a glimpse of the expression on his face. He looked irritated.

  I saw her face, too. She looked hurt.

  Though I avoided making eye contact with him, I knew he watched my every move for the rest of the evening like I was an exotic bird in a cage. As the evening wore on, it was obvious I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Mia, increasingly morose and unhappy, slammed a tray down in front of me, sending a spray of Pinot Noir sloshing from a glass and cascading in a graceful arc across my yellow sundress. I looked like I’d been shot.

  “Oops.” She smiled. “Sorry.” She wasn’t.

  “It was an accident. Forget it.” I poured sparkling water on a napkin and dabbed at my skirt.

  Someone was at my elbow. Quinn handed me a salt shaker. “What was that all about?” He, too, had changed his clothes. Yet another Hawaiian shirt. This one was brown and green with dancing martini glasses, parrots, and tropical foliage.

  “An accident,” I repeated taking the salt and sprinkling it on the largest stain, which turned dull purple. “Thanks for the salt. The tray slipped out of her hands. Anyway, it’s an old dress. It doesn’t matter.”

  “If you say so.” There was a nearly simultaneous scraping noise of many chairs being pushed back. “I’d better get going. Some of these old folks might need help navigating that path over to the Ruins. Don’t want anybody losing their footing and suing. You coming?”

  “I’ll help clean up here first.”

  I began stacking plates when someone said behind me, “You look like you could use this.” Joe Dawson held two glasses of Chardonnay. He smiled and handed one of them to me.

  “I probably shouldn’t until we finish cleaning up.”

  “Aw, go ahead.” He clinked his glass against mine. An ex-baseball player in his days at the University of Virginia, he’d been good enough to be scouted by professionals until a broken hand during a beach week surfing accident ended his career. He was tall and rangy, dark-haired with flecks of gray, and good-looking in the kind of wholesome, ruddy-cheeked way that went over big with the group of jailbait girls he taught. From what Dominique said, they revered him like a minor god. He smiled and flashed boyish dimples. “It’s good to have you home, sweetheart.”

  “It’s good to be home.”

  He drank some wine, gesturing to the empty tables with their hurricane lanterns still gently flickering and the fairy lights in the trees above. “Place is beautiful, you know? I just can’t imagine it without your family running things. I heard you’re giving the listing to Austin and Erica. They’ll do right by you.”

  “We’re not giving the listing to anyone. The vineyard’s not for sale.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Not according to your brother.”

  “He doesn’t have the final word.”

  “So who’s going to run the place? Not you, surely.”

  “Why not?”

  He said, in a schoolteacher’s patient voice, “Look, darlin’, you of all people know what punishing physical work it is. Only people who don’t have a clue what’s involved think we live in a Dionysian paradise where we toddle around with a glass of champagne all day and life’s a big party. And frankly, I’m not sure how to put this, but for someone who is…who doesn’t…” He stopped talking and looked embarrassed.

  “Use a cane?” I waved mine. “You mean, like Franklin Roosevelt shouldn’t have been president because he was in a wheelchair?”

  “Oh, come on, Lucie. You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “You know, one thing I’ve learned about being handicapped is that people tend to marginalize you right off the bat. We’re treated as a subclass of humanity because we’re broken, somehow, or deformed. Do you know what it feels like not to be given the same chance as everyone else? For people to assume automatically that you’re inferior?” It slipped out with more passion than I intended.

  Even in the darkness, I saw him flush. He set down his glass and mine and pulled me to him, brushing my hair off my face and tucking a strand behind my ear. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I really am. You know I’ll help out around here like I always do. As long as I’m still in town.”

  I pulled away. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Didn’t you know? I took a sabbatical from the academy. I’m off to Charlottesville in a couple of weeks. Finally gonna finish my dissertation. It only took me ten years.”

  “I hadn’t heard. The sound of hundreds of teenage hearts breaking must have been deafening when you made that decision.”

  He grinned, but it was rueful. “Yeah, well, maybe. Unfortunately the one heart it didn’t break belongs to your cousin. I think she’s pretty exasperated with me. Maybe some time apart, you know? The other night she asked me in her own special way if I was ever going to put my head to the grindstone and get my doctorate. I figured it was about time.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “And don’t worry about Dominique. She’ll come around. She’s just overworked right now.”

  “I know. Fitz’s death was a huge blow, too.” He picked up his glass and finished his wine. “Plus she’s nervous as all get out ever since she decided to apply for her U.S. citizenship. She’s been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in her sleep the past couple of nights.” He sounded gloomy. “I hope she doesn’t say ‘I pledge ingredients to the flag’ when she’s in front of the judge.”

  A dark-haired waitress with her hair in a long braid came up to us. She held out a laundry bag and waved it at Joe. “We’re clearing the dishes. Dominique wants you two to take care of the tablecloths.”

  “Whatever the boss wants.” Joe took the bag.

  “Come on,” I said. “This won’t take long. You can tell me about your dissertation.”

  “Nah, it’ll put you to sleep.”

  “Is that a nice way of saying I wouldn’t understand?”

  He flushed. “Sorry. I guess it was. You really want to know?”

  I nodded.

  “The title is ‘The Potential Economic and Social Implications of Thomas Jefferson’s Efforts on Behalf of a Nascent Wine Industry in Virginia’ but I might change it to what my students call it.” He handed me the laundry bag. “‘Grape Expectations.’”

  I laughed and he added, “Hold this open. I’ll clear off the tablecloths.”

  We moved systematically down the row of tables. “Can I ask you a favor?” he said a
moment later as he balled up a tablecloth and pitched it at the open sack.

  “Of course.” His aim was slightly off or maybe I moved. I shifted quickly and caught the tablecloth before it hit the ground.

  “Nice save. Look, when I was doing research on my dissertation, Leland used to give me carte blanche to use his library. He really does have the best private collection of books around on that particular aspect of Jefferson’s life. Do you think I could still come…?”

  “Sure, Joe,” I said. “Help yourself to whatever you need. Although the place is a mess. I don’t know how you can find anything. There are newspapers in there that quote what Noah said about the flood.”

  He grinned. “You want to get rid of them?” I nodded and he added, “Tell you what. I’ll stop by and fill up the back of my truck in the next day or two. I pass the recycling center all the time.”

  “That would be great.”

  “No problemo.” He chucked me under the chin. “Give me that sack. It weighs a ton.”

  We walked together toward a large white van with Goose Creek Catering stenciled on the sides in gold and green. Joe tossed the laundry bag inside.

  “I guess I’d better find Eli,” I said, “and get him to stop whatever it is he’s got going on with Erica and Austin before they show up at the house tomorrow.”

  “Jeez, glad I’m going to miss that conversation. Might as well try to stop gravity while you’re at it, changing Eli’s mind. He’s pretty determined to sell.”

  “Thank you so very much for that vote of confidence.”

  He looked down into my eyes. “I forgot. You may have the face of an angel,” he mussed my hair, “but you’ve got the disposition of a mule. Family trait. Good luck, sweetheart.”

  I heard applause and cheering from the Ruins before I’d gone very far on the dirt path that led from the road to the amphitheater. Though it was lit by Hector’s brightly burning citronella torches, it was hard to see the uneven ground in the shifting shadows. Getting caught in a crowd is one of the few things that still panics me. I moved to the edge of the path and missed seeing the large tree root.