by Ellen Crosby
“Here?” I asked.
“Not right here. In the middle of the row.” He climbed off the Gator and I followed. He wanted to walk, not drive.
Here the rows were about as long as football fields, with the vines planted about three feet apart. We got to the spot and Quinn knelt down, pointing to a section of trellis. “That’s where the vine came down and we had to fix the wires and put in a new post.”
I leaned on my cane and knelt next to him, touching two of the frayed red hay bailing ties on the bottom wire where the vines had broken away. You couldn’t tell anything anymore, except for the newness of the post, which would weather after a couple of seasons. Then there’d be nothing left to physically mark the place where Leland had died.
“Who planted that rosebush?”
“Hector’s wife.”
“I’ll have to thank her.”
“That’d be nice. Hey, are you all right?”
I nodded.
“My old man took off and left my mother before I was born.” He reached over and moved away the canopy of leaves to reveal clusters of Merlot grapes. We were weeks away from picking them, probably not until some time in early October. “I never knew him.”
The sandy loam soil hadn’t compacted yet into concrete where they’d fixed the post and trellis. I picked up a handful and let it run through my fingers. Leland had been around, but I hadn’t really known my father, either.
“Eli said…” I paused.
“Yes?”
“He said there was a lot of blood. Where…?”
He looked uneasy. “There was. I wasn’t sure what to do about it, so I brought one of the coolers and poured water everywhere until it was gone. Kind of returning him to the land, if you know what I mean. It seemed okay, when I thought of it that way.”
“Thank you. That was very thoughtful.”
“You know what was strange?”
“What?”
“I found a bullet here when I did it. I thought it might have been…well, it was old. Really old. It must have been there for years.”
“It could have been from the Civil War,” I said. “We find things all the time. Bullets. Pottery. Even a belt buckle, once, from a Confederate soldier.”
He was silent, then he stood and held out his hand to me. I took it and he pulled me up. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
When we got back to the Gator, I poured the rest of my water bottle on Serafina’s rosebush.
He started the motor. “You still want to see those new sites?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go look at the future.”
His mouth curved in a small smile, but he didn’t say anything as he swung around and we drove away.
Highland House is set back more than a mile from Atoka Road, the main road, so much of our vineyard is actually in front of the house, though it’s not evident because we’ve got so much land. My mother and Jacques had planted only twenty-five of our five hundred acres in vines, yielding about five thousand cases of wine a year. In California, twenty-five acres is nothing, but in Virginia it’s a decent-sized vineyard.
“How many more acres were you thinking of planting?” I asked.
“Ultimately I was figuring on seventy-five. Fifteen thousand cases. I also think we don’t have to plant only French grapes.”
That would catapult us into the big leagues. It would also cost us a fortune. “You’re very ambitious.”
“We’d do it in stages.”
“We’ll have to.” It takes at least three years before a vine will yield fruit that can be used for making wine, real quality grapes, meaning there are three years of up-front costs before there’s a return on the investment.
Long ago my mother had cross-stitched a quote of Thomas Jefferson’s she liked that she’d framed and hung in her office. It read, “Wine being among the earliest luxuries in which we indulge ourselves, it is desirable it should be made here and we have every soil, aspect, and climate of the best wine countries.” Though Jefferson had tried for years to grow grapes at Monticello and encouraged a wine-making industry in Virginia, it had never happened during his lifetime. Now, sitting next to Quinn, I thought about the possibilities and promise of what could be, that here we did have the soil, aspect, and climate to plant vines that could yield world-class wines. Every reason to hope that we could do something extraordinary.
We had passed the last of the existing vineyards. I figured he was headed toward a series of old fields rimmed with more dry-stacked stone walls that checkerboarded the landscape. Beyond them, the terrain swept up to the highest point of our property. It was covered with trees and underbrush. If he wanted to use that hill, we’d have the additional expense of clearing it, but then slopes were the best place for siting vines.
He stopped by one of the stone walls and pointed to the hill. “Beginning over there,” he said. “It’s cooler and a different micro-climate from the rest of the vineyard so we could experiment. South-facing slope. Good drainage. It would be above any frost pockets and we’ll take out any impediments to cold-air drainage.”
I’d gotten out of the Gator when Quinn had been speaking and was about to head across the field.
“Umm.”
“Hey,” he said, “are you listening, or am I talking to the crows? Where are you going?”
I hadn’t been to this part of the farm for years, quite deliberately. The vegetation had changed the topography of the landscape, so at first I hadn’t been sure.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
After a few tries I found the small flat cross made of gray field-stones next to the wall. It was nearly buried by tall grass and weeds that I pulled away with my metal cane, using it like a scythe. I’d made the cross years ago to mark the place where my mother had fallen after Orion, her horse, had thrown her. I knelt and was pulling weeds when I heard Quinn’s footsteps behind me.
“I never saw that marker when I was here before.”
“You wouldn’t have. It was covered by brush.”
He grunted. “You bury a dog here or something?”
I finished clearing away debris around the stones and wiped the dirt off my hands on my jeans. I leaned on my cane and pulled myself up. “No.”
“What’s the cross for, Lucie?” he asked as we walked across the field to the Gator.
“My mother. Look, can we please get out of this heat?” I turned away from him.
“Sure,” he said gently. “Let’s go.”
When we got back to the Gator he said, “We don’t have to plant here.”
I shook my head. “She’d like it if we did.”
He chewed on a piece of wild chicory and said nothing.
“You know,” I continued, “my mother thought only the French could make good wine. I wonder what she’d make of you being the vintner here.”
He smiled that half-smile again. “Thomas Jefferson said every man has two countries. His own and France. I figure that makes me a little bit French. Besides, Jefferson’s good friend was Filippo Mazzei. A good paisano from Tuscany, just like my phantom father. Jefferson gave Mazzei two thousand acres near Monticello to grow vinifera in Virginia and produce some good Italian wine in the New World. So if an Italian vintner was good enough for Jefferson, it ought to be good enough for you. And your mother. Okay?”
I stared at him with my mouth open, as though he’d just spoken to me in perfect Attic Greek. “Well,” I said at last, “I guess so.”
“Good.”
We didn’t speak on the trip back to the winery. Quinn began humming relentlessly, something tuneless and off-key and loud enough to be heard over the puttering Gator. Like white noise, I tried to let it block my thoughts, but without much success.
Producing wine is as emotional a task as it is technical. To drink a glass of a wine you have helped create is to remember the weather that year, the events that happened in the world, and, inevitably, the events in your own life. As a result, I could never drink one of our wines fr
om the year my mother died, for it seemed I always tasted a sadness that had seeped into the finish.
I wondered if it would be the same with wine from this harvest, the year of Leland’s death—whether Quinn would somehow unintentionally infuse it with a sense of loss or whether he could overcome that and instead we’d taste his hopes and the promise of the future as he produced his first vintage in Virginia. I didn’t say any of this to him, because I didn’t want to jinx things.
But after he dropped me off at the house no matter what I did the sterile anonymity of Section A46, Row 4 stayed with me. I thought about Quinn washing away all that blood and the hasty funeral my brother had organized.
Leland hadn’t been out there in the vineyard alone. Someone—someone I knew—had been there with him.
Chapter 13
The house at noontime was worse than a blast furnace, and the heat so oppressive it weighed me down like the gravity on Jupiter. I took another shower and dressed without drying off. It helped for ten minutes and then I was as enervated and listless as I’d been before.
I’d been putting off making a trip to the attic, which would be even more suffocating and airless than the rest of the house, to retrieve one of the old fans, but it was getting down to choosing between the lesser of two evils. I rummaged in the kitchen for a flashlight, betting the lights would be burned out in the attic. When I found one, the batteries were dead so I pawed through more junky drawers looking for fresh replacements. After half an hour I quit looking.
I could buy batteries at the general store, which would be quicker than a trip to Middleburg. Besides, Thelma had already squeezed every bit of news about our family out of everyone else in Atoka, so there wasn’t much chance I’d get mugged for new gossip.
There was no one in the store when I walked in, even though three pickup trucks were out front, angled so they filled all the available pavement on either side of the gas pumps, the area Thelma liked to call “the parking lot.” The sleigh bells attached to the front door jingled as I entered. The store smelled, as it always did, of fresh-brewed coffee and pine-scented sawdust. Abruptly, voices in the back room stopped talking and a moment later, Thelma scooted out front. She was small and compact, a woman of “a certain age” as the French say, or, as she put it, “I’m not as young as I look.” She had the tornado energy of a twentysomething, but a lot of the old-timers said she was over seventy if she was a day. She was dressed completely in lime green from the bows in her bright orange hair to the killer pair of stiletto slingbacks. She wore the usual tonnage of makeup, though she’d gotten a bit whimsical drawing in her pencil-line eyebrows. I’d once heard her described as the Mata Hari of Atoka, with her va-va-voom style of dressing and her success at weaseling information out of her neighbors—but with the eyebrows she looked more like Spock from Star Trek.
“Lord love a duck,” she said when she saw me. “I swear, that Marissa is some hussy! They’ve just let her out of prison for forgery and already she’s trying to take away poor Katarina’s husband. And he doesn’t recognize her after all the plastic surgery she had after the fire so he believes every word she says. And her pregnant with twins by Diego, that gorgeous prison guard who’s really Dr. Lance Tarantino!”
“General Hospital? Days of Our Lives?” I guessed.
“A new one. It’s called Tomorrow Ever After. The characters are so real, Lucille, they’re practically like family. I just love that show.” She put her hands on her hips and studied me. “You know, child, you lost too much weight while you were over there in France. How much do you weigh now, anyway?”
“I don’t actually know. I’m okay, though.”
“Can’t be more than a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet,” she said. “You need to put some weight on, Lucille. I think there’s one blueberry muffin left from this morning’s delivery. Better’n those cross-ants you got in France, too. Hampton Weaver wanted it when he was here earlier, but Lordy, that man must be close to three hundred pounds and lookin’ like a doublewide trailer, so I said, ‘Hamp, you put that muffin back and you get yourself on a diet, you hear me?’ So you take it, now, and you eat it. On me.”
Stiletto heels clacking like castanets on the wooden floor, she crossed the room. The blueberry muffin sat, on its own, in the glass cabinet where she kept the fresh bakery items she ordered every day. She wrapped it in a piece of white paper and handed it to me. “Now eat that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She picked up a dish towel and polished imaginary fingerprints off the glass cabinet. “I heard that new winemaker of yours is over seeing Bobby Noland right now, trying to get him to speed up the investigation into poor ol’ Fitz’s death so you all can get back inside your winery.”
I coughed on a piece of muffin. “Mmmm.”
She eyed me. “So it’s true, then?”
I swallowed. “I don’t really know where he is right now. Where did you hear that?”
She stopped polishing and touched her hand to the back of her hair. “Why, from him. ’Course he didn’t actually say that’s where he was heading, but I know the receptionist over to the sheriff’s office. He’d called there a little while ago.”
“You still know everything about everybody, don’t you, Thelma?”
“Oh, I keep my oar in, Lucille. It’s what keeps me so young. People are so interesting, you know? And, of course, I just plumb love the socialism of my job.”
“I can see that.”
“He left here a few minutes ago,” she continued. “Nice-looking young fellow, except I wish he’d take off that jewelry. Worries me when a man wears a necklace and bracelet. Didn’t waste any time getting himself a girlfriend since he got here though, did he?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She smiled sweetly. “That dancer.”
“What dancer?”
“The one takes most of her clothes off.”
I stared at her. “Are we still talking about Quinn Santori? Our winemaker?”
“Who else?” She resumed polishing. “She works at Mom’s Place.”
“That night club on the way to Bluemont?” The joke about that particular strip joint was that all the men who went there told their wives or girlfriends they were going to “Mom’s,” which saved a lot of grief and questioning—until everyone wised up about their real whereabouts. “How did he meet her?”
“How do you think?”
“Oh.” He’d said he was headed over to Bluemont the other day when he took all our leftover food to the soup kitchen. He was probably going over to Mom’s for a little lunchtime…refreshment.
“She’s right pretty.” Thelma said. “’Course I’ve only seen her with her clothes on. She’s about your age, Lucille. I think at her place of work she goes by ‘Angel.’ Just one name, like some of those rock stars. Her real name is Angela Stetson.”
“Angela Stetson? I went to high school with her! She was really quiet. I don’t think I ever heard her say two words.”
Thelma arched her eyebrows, which was not a good idea since they disappeared under her orange fringe of curls. “Still waters, Lucille. Still waters.” She looked sly. “So what do you think about that?”
I’d finished my muffin and crumpled the white paper in my hands. “I think it’s his business who he sees. And hers. Do you have any batteries?”
“’Course I do. They’re over in hardware. What size do you need?”
“For a flashlight. D, I think.”
“Hardware” was all of half a row, just behind camping items, fishing lures, and ammunition. The other half of the row was seeds and greeting cards. You could get anything at Thelma’s, if you didn’t mind the lack of variety. We walked over to hardware.
“Here they are.” She handed me a package of batteries. “As long as we’re on the subject, what’s all this I hear about you and Gregory Knight? Is he trying to start a fire with you again, Lucille? And him sleeping with your sister, too. That boy has no shame. A regular Casablanca, he is, a real two-timer.”
Some government ought to hire this woman for serious under-cover work. Where had she heard that? “I don’t know what you heard but there is absolutely nothing going on between Greg and me.”
“Is that so? Well, let me tell you, my sources are the horse’s mouths themselves. I spoke to Gregory when he was in here this morning after getting off work at the radio station. He went redder ’n a tomato when I asked him. If that isn’t an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is.” She clacked over to the cash register leaving me to trail behind her while she rang up my sale in silence. Then she added her denouement. “I have it on good authority that last night he was seen in the throes of passion, kissing you for all the world to see.”
“Oh gosh, Thelma, it’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I knew it! You’re redder ’n a tomato, too, Lucille. You stay away from that boy.” She wagged a finger in my face. “He’s too dang good-looking for his own health and he knows it. I don’t like a person takes advantage of another. It isn’t right.”
“No, ma’am.” I started to move away from the cash register. “Thanks for the batteries and the muffin.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I know you’re looking out for me and I appreciate it. Really.”
“Well. ’Course I am.” Her voice softened and she seemed somewhat mollified. “But there is one more thing.”
“Yes?”
She put her hands on her hips and thought for a moment. “There’s something you need to know, child. I’ve been debating whether or not I ought to keep it a secret, but you know me. I believe it’s best if you just let it all hang out.”
“I know that.”
“You believe in the power of spirits, don’t you, Lucille?”
“As in alcohol? You mean wine?”
“I do not mean alcohol. I mean spirits. You know, communicating with…” She paused and looked significantly at me. “The Great Beyond.”
It wasn’t too hard to see where she was going with this. Years ago Thelma used to see a psychic over in Delaplane who happened to correctly predict that she would soon meet a tall stranger who had just come into a large sum of money and would ask her to marry him. She met the guy, all right. It’s possible he’s still doing time at some correctional facility in North Carolina for armed robbery.