by Nadia Gordon
The drab white cottage where Gabe Campaglia lived sat under an ancient oak tree. The yard, nothing more than bare dirt and a few patches of weeds, was littered with the year’s enthusiastic production of acorns. Similar structures, built to house vineyard workers during the wine boom that preceded Prohibition, dotted the landscape up and down the valley. They could be charming or squalid, depending on their upkeep; this one was just barely hanging on to the middle ground, with peeling paint and sagging front steps. Gabe Campaglia came to the door as she walked up.
“You’re up bright and early,” he said, orange juice in hand.
“I wanted to be sure to catch you,” said Sunny.
“Let’s see that hand.”
“It’s fine. It wasn’t that deep.” She held out her palms, one of which was covered with a big square bandage.
He studied the scrapes and peeked under the bandage. “Looks like you took a real winger.”
“Yep.”
There was a pause while she waited for him to invite her in. He took a sip of juice. “You might as well come in, I guess.”
“Thanks.”
Gabe’s house revealed a profound disregard for aesthetics. The front door opened onto a small living room furnished with a wood and plaid fabric couch of a style Sunny recognized from country dive bars and laid-back coffee shops in university towns. Its arms were threadbare and the cushions beaten into submission by decades of use. Behind the couch was a set of free weights that took up much of the room, and tucked in one corner was an old television set with rabbit ears on top. An upended white plastic five-gallon bucket served as a TV stand. There was a plastic lawn chair with a hunting vest draped over it next to the TV, and a thrift-store coffee table stuck in front of the couch. Resting on top of the coffee table was a rifle. Judging by the metallic, tingly, electric smell of gun oil, he’d just finished cleaning it. Sunny found the smell tantalizing, like the seductive gas fumes that used to rise up at the pump before accordion nozzles came on the scene. She used to linger in the room when her father cleaned his guns on rainy days. Wade’s house sometimes had that smell, too.
Gabe walked into the kitchen area and waved her toward a miserable little chair set up by the Formica table. The table, at least, had aged well, decoratively speaking, and its Art Deco chrome was still shiny. A dented metal lunch box sat open on the counter. In front of it was a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, an orange, and a plastic baggie full of cookies like the ones Rivka liked to make. Toast sprang from a toaster and Gabe began to smear butter on it. The kettle whistled.
“Here, let me do that,” said Sunny, taking over the butter and jam.
“You want tea? Juice?” asked Gabe.
“Tea? Sure,” said Sunny.
Gabe fiddled with the cellophane wrapping on a new box of Lipton’s tea, then cracked open a carton of milk and set it on the table. The jam was new, too. Soon an unopened box of sugar was added to the setting and they sat down. Sunny said, “You don’t normally have tea and toast for breakfast, do you?”
“Not usually. I didn’t think you’d like what I normally eat.”
“What’s that?”
“Leftover rice with lentil soup.”
She picked up a mostly empty bottle of Tabasco on the table. “With this?”
He nodded.
“A homespun variation on classic North African cuisine. Do you want me to cook you an egg?”
“There aren’t any. Besides, I need to get going.”
Sunny doctored her tea with milk and sugar and took a sip. “What were you really doing out there last night?” she said.
“Why don’t you answer that one first.”
“I was testing a theory. Trying to see if a person could walk to the lake from Wade Skord’s house without leaving the forest. A person can.”
“I could have told you that. No need to go out throwing yourself on the rocks at night.”
She glanced into the living room. “Isn’t that gun the same as the one used to kill Jack?”
“It’s similar, but that doesn’t mean anything, in case you’re thinking it was me who took him out. Anybody who hunts deer or has gophers owns a rifle, and that’s just about everybody around here.”
“And last night?” asked Sunny.
“I was doing the same thing as you. Snooping around. Curious.”
She sipped her tea. “What happened between your dad and Jack last Thursday?”
“The usual crap. Beroni throwing his weight around.”
She waited, but he didn’t go on. “What about Al Beroni? What is he like?”
“Nice enough guy. Fairly clueless. Rides around in his LeBaron and stays out of the way.”
“And what about Jack? What did he do all day, I mean generally? Your father said he didn’t spend much time at the winery.”
Gabe snorted. “Nope, he didn’t.”
“So what did he do with his time?”
“How should I know?”
“I just thought you might have an idea.” She stirred her tea. “And Thursday night?”
“What about it?”
“Where were you?”
“I think you know the answer to that already.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
He sipped his tea, his flat expression making it clear he wasn’t going to say anything else. She was getting frustrated, and she could tell he was enjoying it. She decided to try a new topic. “Did Jack have a girlfriend?”
“Sure.”
“What’s she like?”
“A knockout. Tall, long red hair, plenty of attitude. A real high-society bitch.”
“Is that Larissa Richards?”
“That’s her.”
Sunny thought for a moment. “Why does your father think Jack has another girlfriend who’s blond?”
Gabe smiled. “Even the royalty can’t get away with anything around here. The blonde was just the latest side dish. Probably somebody’s wife.”
“She’s married?”
“I assumed so. She seemed to want to keep her visits a secret.”
“How could you tell?”
Gabe smiled again. “Over at the winery, there’s a spot down at the base of the driveway where you can pull off and park. It’s part of an old logging road; you can’t see it much from the pavement. You can follow the old road on foot up to the back of the house. It pops out by the old stables where Jack’s place is. I saw her pulling out of that spot once, and another time I saw her car parked there. Every once in a while I walk down there for lunch. You can get to a nice spot by the creek that way.”
Now they were getting somewhere. He was having as much fun giving out information as he had been keeping it back.
“What kind of car?”
“One of those old Land Cruisers. Maybe an ‘84 or an ‘86. I think it was tan or pale yellow. Could have been off-white.”
“Do you know who this woman is?”
“No idea. I only saw her that once, just the back of her head. I saw blond hair and that’s about it.”
They sipped their tea. Gabe bounced his knee, probably getting anxious about the time.
“One more question?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Why did you hate Jack Beroni?”
He looked up, surprised. He set down his cup, pushed back his chair, and stood, indicating with a sweep of his hand that it was time for her to leave. At the door she stopped and looked up at him. What was it about him that made her want to push and shove? He stared at her, one tanned and callused hand on the door frame.
Gabe sucked in a breath and knocked on the door frame twice. “I guess I was just born to hate him.”
It was still early and visiting hours at the jail didn’t start for three more hours. The library, where Sunny was hoping to do a little research, wouldn’t be open for two. There was plenty of time for a trip up to Wade’s place to check on the grapes.
Outside Wade’s workshop, Sunny stepped into his old rubber boots and headed out into
the vineyard, being careful not to get her good clothes dirty. Particularly in the chill of a new morning, the grapes tasted delicious. Cool and sweet, they hung down in perfect clusters from the leafy green vines lined up across the hillside, an exhilarating sight. She took her time collecting samples of the fruit, with Farber tagging along behind her. After testing the Brix and packaging up some samples for Wade to taste, she stretched out on one of the chairs on the deck and let the sun heat up her face and arms.
Back in town, it was still too early to go to the library. She pulled into a parking spot in front of Bismark’s and went inside to kill half an hour. A smattering of locals sat singly at tables, reading the Sunday papers and looking pleased with themselves for getting up at a reasonable hour and for having the time and freedom to go to a café and relax over a cup of coffee. Before she even sat down, Sunny saw that the front page of the local paper was devoted almost entirely to Wade’s arrest, and included the picture the staff photographer had taken of him last year when they did a profile of Skord Mountain for the weekly column devoted to the wine business. She slipped the front-page section off the paper and folded it up. She’d decide later whether to show it to Wade.
At nine she walked over to the public library, where vineyard grew right up to the parking lot. A special building housed extensive archives devoted to the local history of the wine business, going back all the way to the Franciscan padres who planted mission grapes for making sacramental wine for Mass in the early 1700s. There was plenty in the library computer system about Beroni Vineyards. She found and perused several books, but they all addressed Beroni as it was today, mostly with slick color photography of the grapevines and the winery, looking regal in its ivy covering. Silvano Cruz had talked as if there was a long-standing rivalry between the two families, and what Gabe had said about being born to hate Jack also implied history. Whatever there was between the Campaglias and the Beronis, it was bound to predate both Gabe and his father. Searching under Campaglia, she hit pay dirt. There were two entries, both of which looked promising. One was a history of the early days of winemaking that included a chapter called “The First Wave: Early Pioneers from Agoston Haraszthy to E. Augustus Campaglia.” The other was an audiotape listed as part of an oral history made by the St. Helena Historical Society in the mid-seventies. The synopsis of one of the histories, told by a man identified as Patrick Munzio of Rutherford, included the entry “Stella Campaglia and the Cortona Winery.”
She checked the book first. A single paragraph devoted to E. Augustus Campaglia described him as an Italian-born merchant who had emigrated to the United States as a teenager and made a small fortune selling provisions to the would-be miners streaming into San Francisco after gold was discovered in the Sierra foothills in 1849. In 1879 he decided to retire to the Napa Valley countryside with his young wife and try another venture, winemaking. He bought three hundred acres of land in the hills above St. Helena and built a Victorian mansion on the prettiest rise, a fitting home for his new bride. Following the advice of Gustave Niebaum, who had just purchased Inglenook, he planted his acreage to Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, and Pinot Noir, and punched a vast cave into the rocky hillside for making and storing wine. A photograph on the page opposite showed the newly built mansion with Augustus and Stella Campaglia standing in front of it. The caption read, “E. Augustus and Stella Campaglia, Cortona Winery, 1881.” Augustus stared out from under wild, bushy eyebrows, looking fierce with determination, every bit the self-made man. Willowy Stella stood close to him, her arm hooked through his and her head dipped in uncertainty, or tenderness, or perhaps only avoiding the glare of the sun. Scrawny fledgling palms had just been planted to either side of the house in a half-moon following the new dirt driveway. They hadn’t added the front porch yet and many of the outbuildings were still to come, but it was unmistakably Beroni Vineyards.
The librarian brought over the tape player Sunny had requested. The machine was the size of a shoe box. Sunny found a place at a table and plugged in the headphones, loaded the tape, and punched PLAY. The interviewer, sounding like she was in another room, said, “First of all, why don’t you tell us your name and something about yourself?”
“My name…is Patrick Munzio.” He breathed heavily. “I was born in Sicily, but I don’t remember it. I grew up here, in St. Helena. I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“How long is that?” asked the distant interviewer.
“Eighty-four years. I’ll be eighty-five come January.”
His voice sagged and rasped as he described the Napa Valley of his childhood, the store where they would pick up goods ordered from the Sears catalog, the dust kicked up in massive clouds on the old dirt roads in summertime. Sunny fast-forwarded for a count of ten, then listened again. “There were orchards all up and down the valley back then. Prune trees, mostly, but also olive, almond, apple, pear. In the spring, the trees would be covered with blossoms. They smelled wonderful. You could stand in an orchard and feel the petals falling in the breeze like rain. The petals would be like a white carpet under the trees. They tore out the trees to put in the grapevines.” She punched fast-forward again, glancing at the synopsis. She listened again. In the background, the interviewer’s voice said, “What year was that?”
“Oh, I was a boy. Must have been 1895, 1896, 1897. All in there. We used to run around like wild things all through those orchards, and when they were gone, through the vineyards, too.”
She advanced again, then hit PLAY. The interviewer’s voice said, “—lived on the Beroni Vineyards Estate?”
The old man coughed and cleared this throat. “Back then we still called it Cortona. The Cortona Winery. My father went on calling it Cortona his whole life, and he worked there for ten more years after Old Man Beroni changed the name. He never thought Beroni should have had the vineyard in the first place.”
“Why was that?” asked the interviewer.
“I don’t know exactly. People didn’t talk to children about grown-up matters in those days. It was none of our business. We never heard much about what was going on. But I would find out. I was interested in everything having to do with wineries when I was a kid. Well, my whole life, I suppose. I think I got the impression that my father didn’t trust Old Man Beroni. He always liked Stella Campaglia, and he felt sorry for her after her husband died. Stella and Augustus were the ones who started Cortona. My father said Stella didn’t know how to run a winery, and after her husband died, Beroni came around to help keep the operation going. The next thing you know, Beroni owned the place and moved Stella and the boys to the housing for the hired hands, which was a house like the one we lived in, nothing fancy, and moved his own family into the Cortona mansion. My father resented that. He said on a number of occasions that it wasn’t right to move a widow and her children out of her home. He always said Beroni was a swindler who took advantage of a young widow who didn’t know any better. When I was older, my mother would send me up to see Mrs. Campaglia—that was Stella Campaglia—with a fresh pie or a basket of bread or a bag of vegetables from the garden. I knew her sons pretty well. I was a good deal younger than they were and I looked up to them quite a bit. I’d hang around the winery and try to help out, tapping down the must with a big stick during fermentation or taking a turn at cranking the old press. Those old crank presses were work. The Campaglia boys were running that whole operation even then—the winery, the vineyard, the cellar, everything. I figure they couldn’t have been more than sixteen, eighteen years old at that time.”
Sunny rewound the tape and returned the setup to the librarian, then made a photocopy of the photograph of Augustus and Stella Campaglia. Outside, she sat down on a concrete bench facing a gurgling fountain and called Monty Lenstrom on her mobile.
“Sun.”
“Monty.”
“What’s up?”
“What do you know about the history of Beroni Vineyards?”
“Not much, just the usual dross. Established at the end of the 1800s, owned an
d operated continuously by the Beroni family, legacy of decent Cabernet Sauvignons and above average Pinot Noirs, recent tendency to cash in on a recognized name by releasing grotesque quantities of mediocre Merlot sold for about double what they’re actually worth by any reasonable standards.”
“Who would know more?”
“Like about what, the winery?”
“Mostly about the Beroni family.”
“I guess Ripley Marlow might.”
“She’s related, right?”
“Al’s cousin.”
“Listen, Monty, how would you like to go pay her a visit? Like, for example, this morning.”
“This is about Wade, isn’t it? Sunny, why are you getting all mixed up in this stuff?”
“I’m not mixed up in anything.”
“You can’t go around grilling Jack’s extended family. Ripley is a very gracious person, but I think it’s a bit much to assault her on Sunday morning, especially when she is probably upset about Jack and not in the mood for company.”
“But it’s important. I’m sure she would like to know who killed Jack as much as I would.”
“It’s insanity. You’ve lost your mind.”
“Just call her and be ready. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
She slipped the phone into its pocket in her bag and headed for the police station, which was only about four blocks away. St. Helena had put on its best Mayberry face for a glistening Sunday morning, and the tourists in their ironed khakis and cotton blouses had come out in force, strolling past the quaint shops looking for ways to spend their money. Sunny marched up the street, making a list of points she needed to cover with Wade.
He looked tired when he came out of the holding area and shuffled into the metal chair across from her. The dark print of a sleepless night showed under each eye.