by Ellen Crosby
Quinn was kneeling by a small pump on the crush pad, fiddling with a hose clamp when I finally got there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a goofy-looking straw hat instead of the customary fatigues and Hawaiian print.
He looked surprised to see me. “I didn’t hear your car.”
“I walked. The Volvo’s in the shop.”
“You should have called. Someone would have run you over.”
I knew what he meant, but it still sounded strange. “It’s okay. Have we got enough help?”
“Ten guys from the camp. We should be good.”
“Angela coming, too?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Check those hoses, will you, and make sure the clamps are fitted securely? I’m going out to the field to get the first lot of lugs.”
“Sure.”
Whatever he had or hadn’t done in California, right now I needed him. Before he took off in the Gator our eyes met. What happened from now on depended on his judgment and intuition and how much we didn’t screw up what the grapes had already done for us. We are, essentially, farmers, tied to the whims of nature however much we try to control our destiny and the fruits of our harvest. Despite his arrogant cockiness, I could tell he was wrestling with the nerve-wracking second-guessing that happens when there are no sure bets. By the end of the morning we’d have a pretty good idea whether he was right…or wrong.
He left for the fields, the flatbed trailer fishtailing in the red clay dust as he sped away. I walked over to the pump and slowly bent down to check the clamps on the hoses as he’d asked.
In the distance, the putt-putting of the Gator sounded like bees at their hive. Hector was probably riding on the trailer as it moved up and down the rows, jumping off to pick up the lugs where the men had left them under the cooler shade of the vines. Occasionally the workers called out to each other in Spanish. Though a mechanical harvester—which looked like an alien space creature on stilts—could bring in the grapes faster and cheaper, we still picked by hand as they’d been doing since the time of the Romans. Most vineyards, the good ones, at least, did it the same way.
By the time Quinn arrived back at the crush pad with a full load of lugs, the rest of the crew was waiting. Someone turned up the volume on a boombox. One by one the men stripped off their shirts, laughing and singing with the pulsating Spanish beat. Quinn jumped off the Gator and started handing the lugs piled with translucent green-gold grapes to workers who set them on the scales. After they were weighed someone tipped the contents into the destemmer, then hurled the empty container onto a growing mountain of yellow plastic bins on the ground nearby.
Quinn joined me, eating grapes he’d picked from a bunch off one of the lugs. “Here, try these. They’re good. Nearly everything’s ripe.” He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the racket of the destemmer as it spat barky stems into a barrel.
Even at this early stage it was possible to tell what the final product would be. I ate the grapes he’d handed me. He was right. They were good.
“All right, hijos, let’s move everything into the press,” he shouted. To me he said, “Grab the end of the hose and make sure it’s aimed properly into that press.”
The heavy-duty hose swayed like a snake being charmed as he flipped the switch on the pump. I held on though the jolting reactivated every ache and pain the ibuprofen had quelled. I gritted my teeth and watched the sludgy mass of grapes work its way from the destemmer toward the press. It would take a couple of trips from the field before the press, a large stainless-steel tank with an enormous drum, was filled. But after so much rushing to get the grapes in before the heat became oppressive, at this stage we had to slow things down. The process of gently squeezing the grapes to release the juice would take an hour or two, depending on how much Quinn wanted to extract. Pressing too hard would make the liquid harsh and bitter so it was his judgment call when to stop.
The hose continued to thrash about in my hands as the last of the grapes moved into the press. “I’m going back to the field,” Quinn said to me. “What’s wrong? You got a toothache or something? Why are you making that face?”
“I think I pulled a muscle last night. You go on back to the field.”
He shrugged and left as a voice behind me said, “Here. I got that.” Joe Dawson took the hose out of my hands. “You don’t look too good, sweetheart.”
I took two more ibuprofen out of my pocket. “I’m okay. Pulled muscle. Thanks for the help.” I took the pills with a cup of tepid water from one of the nearby coolers we left out for the crew.
I knew Angela Stetson had arrived as soon as the catcalls and wolf whistles began. Dressed in bottom-skimming blue jean cutoffs, she also wore a deep V-neck hot pink halter top with “Babe” written in silver sequins and stiltlike hot-pink sandals.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Who in the world is that?” Joe asked.
“Your eyes look like they’re bugging out of your head,” I said. “It’s Angela Stetson. Quinn’s girlfriend. I thought you knew her.”
“What’d she do? Have a whole body transplant? Didn’t she go to school with you? I don’t remember her looking like that.”
“She took a lot of vitamins. Reel your tongue back in and keep an eye on things, will you? I need to talk to her.”
Angela appeared to be reveling in the attention she was getting as the men continued to grin and wink at her. She’d come a long way from her Marian-the-librarian persona of our high school days.
“Okay, hijos,” Hector said. “Everyone back to work. Leave the lady alone.”
“Can I talk to you?” I asked her. “Somewhere out of this heat?”
We walked together to the open hangar door to the barrel room.
Though it was only 9 A.M., the sun was already boiling. The air smelled of sweet wine mixed with the faintly unpleasant tinge of carbon dioxide as the grapes began fermenting. Black flies edged the outlines of the hangar door and yellow jackets swarmed anywhere we’d spilled the sweet, sticky grape juice. Quinn had turned the fans on earlier to clear out the CO2, but overnight it would build up in the airtight room to levels that could kill a person. We stepped inside. It was marginally cooler.
“I’ve never done this before.” Angela was chewing gum. “I think I’m overdressed.”
“Actually, you’re dressed too nicely. Those clothes are going to be filthy when you’re done.”
“I thought they stomped grapes in the nude.”
“Uh, some French vineyards still do it that way, but not us. It’s pretty boring but we use a nine-iron from Leland’s set of golf clubs and Eli’s old baseball bat.”
“That’s kind of special.” She arched an eyebrow. She’d worn full makeup, too. “Well, no big deal. I’m, like, totally washable. What did you want to ask me?”
“I was wondering if you knew whether Sara Rust is working at Mom’s Place tonight?”
“Nope. Not tonight or any other night. She quit yesterday. Gave Vinnie her notice and said she’s leaving town.”
“Why? Did something happen?”
“What do I look like, her mother? How should I know? We don’t talk a lot.” She blew a bubble and popped it. “But I heard from one of the other girls that she had enough and she wanted out.”
“Vinnie too hard on her?”
“Vinnie’s a pussycat. Nah, it was something else. Someone’s, like, stalking her. Some old guy was creeping her out, so she’s splitting. At least that’s what Desiree said.”
I thought of my pursuer last night in the black SUV. Whoever he was, he didn’t seem like an “old guy.” The car, the speed. Someone young. “Did she know who it was?”
“Nope.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you asking so many questions? What’s it to you?”
“Lucie!” Joe’s voice cut through a lull as someone turned the pump off. He was waving a mobile phone. “Dominique says she needs you right now down at the gazebo. Something about harvest lunch.”
&nbs
p; “Tell her I’ll be right there.” I turned to Angela. “Sorry. I better go. Thanks for the information.”
“Yeah, sure.” She was looking past me to where Quinn had just pulled up on the crush pad. He jumped out of the Gator and she ran to him, hanging her arms around his neck and swinging on him. He grinned foolishly down at her and put his silly hat on her head. They were like a couple of love-struck teenagers.
I left without looking back.
Dominique seemed tense and unhappy when I found her standing in the gazebo in front of a Limoges vase of pink and white roses.
“Can you take over today and run harvest lunch for me?” she asked.
“Sure. Why? Are you okay?”
She set down the pair of gardening clippers she’d been using to even the lengths of the roses. “Bobby called. He wants to see me.” She began haphazardly sticking roses in the vase.
“Give me those. I’ll do that.” I took the clippers. “Well, go talk to him then. How bad can it be?”
Her cigarettes were next to the vase. She picked up the packet and extracted one. “I don’t have an alibi for the time of Fitz’s death. I was alone at the inn when he was killed.”
“You didn’t do it, Dominique. There must have been someone who saw you. Do you remember what time you got to Joe’s?”
“Sure I remember. Two o’clock. I was listening to Gregory’s radio program in the car. He was talking to someone who wanted to know if she should leave her husband after twenty-four years of marriage because she fell in love with her UPS guy.” She lit her cigarette.
“Oh, yuck. Don’t tell me what he told her.” I finished with the vase. “Bobby can check on that. He should be able to ask Greg. They must keep some kind of log or record of callers.”
“Maybe.” She dumped the barely smoked cigarette into a Styrofoam cup of water. “Can you believe he told me if I don’t show up on my own he will send someone for me with the cuff links?”
“I can’t believe he’d do something like that.”
“I’d better go.” She gave me the list of lunch guests and left, still looking grim.
After I finished at the gazebo I borrowed Hector’s blue pickup and drove back to the house to change. Leland’s folder with the information on the Blue Ridge Consortium was still on his bedside table next to the phone. I sat on the bed and called Sara Rust’s number.
Her answering machine kicked in again and this time I left a message. “Hello, Sara, this is Lucie Montgomery. I’m a friend of Angela Stetson’s and I was wondering if I could talk to you. Angela said you’re leaving town and…”
“Hello? Who is this?” Monitoring her calls.
“My name is Lucie Montgomery and I…”
“Mia’s sister. Yeah, I know. Is she okay?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised. “She’s fine. I was wondering if we might meet?”
“Why?”
Angela was right about her being scared. “I think we have something in common. We ought to talk.”
“I’m sure we don’t, but if you want talk it’ll cost you.” I heard a click, like a cigarette lighter, then an expelled breath. “Fifteen minutes. A hundred bucks.”
“A hundred…? Oh, come on!”
“Good-bye.”
“Wait! Okay. A hundred dollars.”
“A hundred and fifty.”
“You just said one hundred!”
“Those were old prices, from a minute ago. Yes or no?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But since I’m paying for this, we’ll meet when it’s convenient for me. Three o’clock. And I’ll pay you after we talk.”
“What do I care? Fifteen minutes, as long as it’s before six and you come to me.” She gave me directions to an address in Aldie, then disconnected.
I changed into a white eyelet skirt and white sleeveless blouse and drove back to the vineyard.
Harvest lunch was a tradition established by my mother and Fitz. Jacques continued it after her death, though he abandoned the practice of having guests each day during harvest since we were generally running flat out and couldn’t spare the time or the manpower to take guests around the vineyard. More important, my mother wasn’t there to hostess the event, which included chaperoning the guests to make sure no one got too near the equipment or decided to take one of the bung hole covers out of an oak barrel “just to see” what was inside. The one time that happened, we didn’t discover it for months and ended up with a couple hundred bucks worth of red wine vinegar instead of a few thousand dollars of Pinot Noir.
Today the guests included a California congressman and his staff, three D.C. restaurant owners, a wine-tasting club called Les Amis du Vin from Charlottesville, and an event planner from a public relations firm who was looking for a place to host a dinner party for a group of international clients.
Whether it was because I was distracted or due to the constant needling from the California congressman—an unctuous white-haired man in a sharp suit who called me “little lady”—the lunch wasn’t one of our better ones. But Dominique, as usual, had out-done herself with the menu, having gone to the farmers’ market in Frogtown that morning making sure nearly all the produce had been in someone’s garden only a few hours earlier.
After the tour, we ate in the gazebo. It faced my mother’s wild-flower garden, a rioting mass of cosmos, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans, and a spectacular assortment of daylilies, whose colors ranged from sherbet pinks, yellows, and peaches to deeper oranges, golds, and plums.
The congressman, who sat next to me, represented a concrete district in Los Angeles not far from Hollywood. He kept haranguing me about the superiority of California wines. “You know, little lady, I had dinner at the White House the other night and what do you think they served as wines? Every course?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me they were California wines.”
“You bet, honey. They know their wines at the White House. Only the best.”
“Actually,” I said, “the first wines served at the White House were recommended by a Virginian. Thomas Jefferson stocked the wine cellar for George Washington and then for John Adams. And, of course, during his own presidency.”
He’d been chewing on a piece of grilled lamb with a fresh berry sauce. “The wines weren’t from Virginia, were they?” He grinned broadly so I saw the berry seed in his dentures.
“Give us time.” I stared at the berry seed. “Our winemaker came from Napa to work here in Virginia. Our climate is a lot like France and we do a lot of experimenting. I’m sure you know that a number of top restaurants in your district already serve Virginia wines.” I mentioned a couple of names.
“Good Lord.” He seemed visibly peeved, but not enough to refuse my offer of a refill. He also didn’t call me “little lady” or “honey” anymore. When he left, he bought a few bottles of Cabernet and Chardonnay, though he did wink at me and ask for the special “congressional discount.”
I gave it to him. “That’s in return for your promise to take one of these bottles along as a gift the next time you dine at the White House.” I didn’t wink back.
Dominique’s staff cleaned up while I sold more wine to Les Amis du Vin and spoke with the restaurant owners, two of whom wanted to come back and do a comprehensive tasting before choosing the wines for their wine lists. The publicist said her people would speak with my people to make arrangements for their “event.”
“I’ll let them know,” I said. Simpler than explaining that I was “my people.”
After the last guest left, I got in Hector’s pickup and headed for Aldie. The Scottish poet Robert Burns once described my ancestors as “a martial race, bold, soldier featured and undismayed.” The Montgomerys were one of Scotland’s oldest clans, warriors who came originally from Normandy—we were feared and respected. The symbol on our crest was a woman holding an anchor in one hand and a savage’s head in the other. Above it was our motto: Gardez bien.
Watch well. Watch out for us.
Driving down
Mosby’s Highway, I glanced constantly in my rearview mirror, in case someone was following me again.
This time I would be ready.
Chapter 20
Sara Rust lived in an old stone cottage on Mosby’s Highway, not far from the famous mill that had given its name to the village of Aldie during the Civil War, when the Gray Ghost and a handful of his Rangers routed two hundred Union soldiers who’d been out looking for him.
I parked on the dirt and gravel driveway and climbed the stairs to the front porch, leaning on the railing, which creaked and swayed under my weight. A couple of cardboard liquor boxes full of newspapers and what looked like heaps of old magazines and papers were scattered haphazardly across the porch. She was cleaning out the place and, by the looks of it, doing it in a hurry. I rang the doorbell but nothing chimed. After a moment, I opened the sagging screen door and used the tarnished door knocker.
The door opened a few inches. Sara Rust had chained her front door shut. The door closed again and I heard metal scraping metal as she released it.
“I’m Lucie,” I said, as she let me into a dingy stone living room. The embedded, stale odor of wood smoke and dampness hung in the air. The only light came from two small windows.
“I know who you are. Did you bring the money?” She had thick Titian-colored hair, which fell in massed curls around her shoulders, alabaster skin, and hazel-green eyes. She seemed familiar enough that I recognized her in the way you recognize people you don’t really know when you live in a small community. It must have been at least five or six years since I’d last seen her, though. Now she was tall and reed-slender, with that same suggestive sexuality about her that I saw in Angela. I wouldn’t have called her beautiful, but there was something about her that would make a man take a second look. Barefoot and dressed in a pair of raggedy jeans with holes in the knees and a sports bra that belonged at the gym, she looked her age until I saw her eyes. Someone had already knocked the sense of wonder out of her.
She also appeared to be scared and dead tired.