I tried to quell the slow boil inside me. “Guess I’ll see you this evening at the wine thing.”
“Wine thing?” Lydia asked.
Gabe turned to her, his face animated. “It’s one of the harvest events. Zin and Zydeco. You might still be able to get a ticket. What do you think, Benni?”
“I have no idea. I suppose you can try.”
“Don’t worry,” he said to Lydia. “I am not without influence in this town. I’ll get you in.”
“Wonderful,” she said, beaming at him.
Oh, yes, wonderful, I thought.
“I am not without influence in this town. I’ll get you in,” I mocked Gabe to Scout while driving back to town. “What a pompous thing to say.” I growled and made a face at my dog. Scout whined and loyally licked my hand. I ruffled his head and blew him a noisy kiss. “You’re the guy for me, Scout. Always and forever.”
I drove past the museum, not feeling like facing either paperwork or the million and one questions and requests that always dogged me at work. Before I realized it, I found myself turning off on the road that led to the Seven Sisters ranch.
You’re not snooping, I told myself. You’re just going out to visit Bliss, see the horses, maybe tour the winetasting room that you missed the night of the engagement party.
It was almost three o’clock when I stopped at the stables where things were pretty quiet. A Mexican groom was preparing to wrap the legs of a bay mare with a swollen fetlock. Figaro, the masked barn cat, greeted me by weaving around my legs. I bent down and stroked the long black stripe on his back.
“Donde Senorita Bliss?” I asked the groom.
He shrugged his answer—I don’t know.
“Señora Cappy?”
He jerked a thumb up the road. “En la casa grande.”
In the big house. “Gracias.”
I wandered around, petting the horses, then decided to walk the quarter mile to the wine-tasting room and the rose garden, which was quite famous among San Celina’s flower set. It was a warm, pleasant afternoon, the temperature hovering around eighty. Walking through the garden might give me the time and solitude I needed to think about what I should do with this new information I’d acquired. The one person I was definitely going to avoid was Detective Hudson, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense when I was holding something back. I’d give this information to Gabe and let him talk to the sheriff’s detective.
It was a smart move leaving my car at the stable, because the parking lot was completely full and the winetasting bar as crowded as an airport at Christmas. Tourists were well into their wine weekend on this Saturday afternoon. There were two dark red limousines from Will’s Winetasting Tours parked in front of the rugged adobe tasting room. Chase, Etta, and two female employees were all pouring wine and chatting with customers. It appeared Emory was right. The murder had only caused business to pick up. Either that or a lot of these obviously out-of-town customers hadn’t heard about it yet. I left Scout comfortably situated under the shade of an ash tree with the command to stay and stepped inside the cool, spicy-scented tasting room.
Though the outside was adobe, the gift shop and winetasting room duplicated the Montana lodge theme of the big house. The gift items ran the gamut of pewter wine corks shaped like horse heads to glassware etched with the Seven Sisters logo to local salsas and hand-tinted postcards of the magnificent Brown house and rose gardens. I picked up a brochure that explained the history of the adobe structure and the rose gardens.
The long dark oak tasting bar with a brass foot rail and brown-and-white cowhide barstools must have set the family trust back a pretty penny. Hanging behind the bar, an original Donna Howell-Sickles watercolor of three cowgirls with strong thighs and sky-sized grins also told me no expense had been spared. A built-in fireplace was at one end with a dozen or so padded mission-style chairs surrounding it. Over the carved mantel was a professional portrait of the entire Brown family. I weaved my way through the chattering wine tasters and stared up at the photograph. Everyone’s smile was flawless and I couldn’t help but wonder how many shots it took the photographer to achieve this polished picture. I stepped closer. The smiles were perfect, but there wasn’t a genuine bit of emotion in one of them.
I stared a little longer at Giles’s face. What had he done that caused one of these people to murder him? Was it blackmail like his letter implied, or something else? Maybe Arcadia, as dramatic as her reaction had been that night, had, in reality, become fed up with his philandering. The switching of the guns did sound planned, as Detective Hudson said, but it could just as well have been a quick recovery by her grandmother and great-aunts who by no means lacked the nerve to pull it off.
I made a note to call my friend Amanda Landry, who was also the volunteer attorney for the folk art museum, to see if I could finagle her into loaning me her investigator, Leilani, for a day to see what kind of history she could find on Giles Norton, his family, and his extracurricular activities.
“Can I help you with something, Benni?”
The man’s voice startled me, and I turned, laughing nervously, to face Chase Brown. His face was already flushed with the explosive red color of a habitual drinker. Like his picture in the portrait above us, his lips smiled, but his eyes remained blank. He held a glass of dark red wine. “Are you here for a tasting?”
I shook my head no. “I came to watch Bliss work with the horses, but she’s not here, or at least the groom doesn’t know where she is. I was going to go on up to the house, but I decided to walk over and see the wine-tasting room and garden since I missed it the other night . . . ” I paused, suddenly aware that a small group of people were inching closer, listening to us.
“Why don’t we go outside?” he said in a low voice, taking my elbow. I tried pulling away politely, having always hated that controlling gesture, especially in men I didn’t know well. He let go when we got outside. “People are bottom feeders,” he said, taking a big gulp from the wineglass.
“I guess it’s been hard on everyone,” I said.
“You said it,” he said, gesturing toward the tasting room with the wineglass. A bit splashed out, staining his hand. He impatiently wiped it on his dark slacks. “Giles was basically a pain in the ass when he was alive, and he’s proving to be even more so now that he’s dead.”
I didn’t answer, hoping he’d continue. It was a well-known fact that Chase was half drunk most of the time, and there was no better place to get information than a partially drunk, irritated person.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, looking down at me out of red-veined eyes. “We had us some good times, me and Giles. The guy could shoot, no doubt about it. And hold his whiskey. He could hold his friggin’ whiskey.”
I nodded, as if agreeing that it was indeed a legacy to be proud of, the ability of one’s liver not to completely collapse while drowning in alcohol.
“But he was pushy,” Chase said, “and didn’t know when to take no for an answer. The man hated the word no.”
“I heard he wanted to take the winery international,” I said, trying to make it sound like casual chitchat.
“You heard right. Would’ve been a real coup for Seven Sisters. Lots more money. Lots more prestige. I could see the advantages better than some people.”
“So,” I said, hesitating only for a moment before barging in with my question, knowing this might be the only time I’d ever get a chance to ask. “You were going to vote in favor of the merger?”
He drank from his glass again, emptying it. “Where are my manners? Did you want any wine?”
“Not this early for me, thanks.”
He laughed and twirled the stem of the glass in his thick fingers. “There’s no cocktail hour for wine, honey. Why, there are places in Europe where people drink it for breakfast.”
“Well, I’ve never claimed to be a sophisticate. About the merger . . . ”
“It pissed off the Amazon queen, no doubt about it. But the last few days he had her
almost convinced to vote for the merger. Willow and Etta, too. Don’t know how he got the queen to even think about changing her mind, but he did.”
“The Amazon queen?”
“My dear mother, Capitola, herself. That’s what we call her. Not to her face, of course. The queen and her consorts. Giles and I did have our laughs. He was the only man who’d come into this family in a long time who wasn’t ball-stripped and beat into compliance by the women in this spider’s web. Caused him a good deal of grief, and if I had some wine, I’d toast him.” He held up his empty glass.
Before I could answer, a twentyish woman in tight red Wranglers and a silky print blouse walked up to us. “Chase, someone wants a taste of the ’92 Merlot, and you said no one’s supposed to pour that but you.”
“Be right in, honey,” he said. “Me and Ms. Harper here are having a little talk. Give us some privacy.”
She glanced at me, her pretty, freckled face frowning slightly before turning around and going back into the tasting room. Her irritated walk spoke volumes about their relationship.
I raised my eyebrows in a silent, inquiring gesture.
He twirled the glass by its stem and tried to look chagrined. “She’s kinda possessive. Which is ironic considering how free she is with her favors.”
I wasn’t about to touch that remark. “Who is she?” I asked.
“Just one of the tasting room girls. Giles brought her on. When he was through with her, she and I dated a few times, had a few laughs, a roll or two in the hay—literally.” He gave a cynical laugh. “She thinks that constitutes some kind of relationship. But she’s a good worker and usually a pretty fun gal. Sure you don’t want any wine?”
“No, thanks.” I held up the brochure in my hand. “I think I’m going to take a stroll through the rose garden, then go look for Bliss again.”
“No problem. You come by any time.” He gave me a wet, lopsided smile and moved his face within inches of mine. His breath was sour and stale-smelling. “My casa is always your casa.”
I took a step backwards, inhaling a shallow breath. “Uh, thanks.”
As I watched him walk back up the steps into the tasting room, I added his information to what JJ had told me. I had been surprised to hear that Cappy interceded for the tasting room girl when she was caught with Giles. Usually it’s the weaker person in a relationship, invariably the woman, who ends up losing a job or reputation whenever there’s an illicit affair. But I knew Cappy was a fair woman and the least pretentious of the sisters. Maybe she was truly trying to be egalitarian about the situation—assigning blame to both sides where it should be.
Then again, I thought, following a group of khaki-clad wine tasters toward the rose garden, maybe Giles had had something really big on her . . . or the family, giving him the kind of power that would keep his ex-lover employed even under his spoiled wife’s aristocratic nose. Did Arcadia perhaps have some knowledge about what Giles had on the family? Why else would she put up with one of her husband’s lovers working so closely with him in the winery?
It took me about an hour to see the entire garden, which, according to the shiny brochure, contained ten acres of every type of rose imaginable. Many bushes were in full bloom because of the late summer weather. The sheer number of them was breathtaking. Reading the names of the roses—Apothecary’s Rose, Yankee Doodle, Bride’s Dream, Secret, Golden Wings, Don Juan, Magic Carrousel—reminded me of the names conceived for wines and quilts. In the center of the garden was a great old queenly rosebush thick with large, heady-smelling blooms—white with red tips. Surrounding it were seven slightly smaller bushes in shades of pink, yellow, and red-orange. The way the flowers were planted almost duplicated the actual Seven Sisters quilt pattern that I’d looked up this morning in my encyclopedia of quilt patterns. I wondered if whoever had planted them had known that. In the quilt pattern there was one star or “sister” in the middle and six surrounding it, similar to the constellation after which it was named.
I glanced at the literature and saw the roses were hybrids named for the seven Brown sisters and their mother. The rose in the center was, naturally, Rose Jewel, the others Capitola Jewel, Willowdeen Jewel, Etta Jewel, Daisy Jewel, Dahlia Jewel, Beulah Jewel, and Bethany Jewel. The last four were obviously the two sets of twins who had died. What took their lives? Back in the early part of the century, it could have been anything. Many of the cemeteries around San Celina had tiny gravestones erected because of an encounter with influenza or some infectious disease that was incurable before our current medical advances. I wondered if the grandmother, Rose Jewel, thought much about the babies she’d lost so long ago. I sat down on one of the stone benches and listened to the trickling of the four fountains situated in each corner of the center courtyard. Wine tasters wandered up and down the rows, exclaiming over the roses, marveling at their size, abundance, and variety.
“Quite an awesome bush, isn’t it?” Susa Girard asked, sitting down next to me.
“It certainly is,” I agreed, surprised to see her. “Just how old is the Rose Jewel?”
“At least sixty years old,” she said. “It originally was up next to the house in a small rose garden that Great-Grandfather started. When he died, Grandma Rose couldn’t bear to look at them, much less care for them, so they were moved down here, and gradually this garden emerged. Jose, our ranch manager, has been the main caretaker since Great-Grandfather died. And with the winery, they’ve now become quite the attraction. It’s one of the biggest private rose gardens in California.”
“So it says here,” I said, holding up the brochure. We sat for a moment in silence.
“Benni,” she finally said. “I just talked to JJ a little while ago, and she told me about the note she found in Bliss’s possession. I have a confession to make.”
I didn’t say anything, but continued studying the slick brochure in my hands. This family had more secrets than a locker room of teenage girls, and it seemed as if I was destined to be a part of their clique.
“I...” She stopped, hesitated, then started again. “I was the one Giles sent it to. Bliss found it in my room and insisted on taking it.” Her voice faltered, causing me to look up at her. The finely etched lines around her eyes tightened as the sun passed from behind a cloud and brightened the air around us. “She said it would be better if she kept it. That it looked too . . . incriminating for me to have it in my possession.”
Keep it or destroy it, I wondered. It’s true that it implicated Cappy big-time, and Cappy had a good enough motive just with the conflict between the winery and the ranch.
“When did Giles give it to you?” I asked.
“Monday morning.” Her voice stayed low, and I had to move closer to hear her words above the laughing and conversation of other people.
“The day of the party?” Things were looking worse and worse for Cappy.
She nodded, breathing in short, shallow breaths.
“Did you show it to Cappy?’
She gave an ironic laugh. “I was going to wait until after the party so Bliss and Sam’s evening wouldn’t be ruined.” Sitting this close to her, I could see her strong resemblance to Cappy in her firm jaw and proud chin.
“Do you have any idea what he meant by ‘it’? What about the lily of the valley? Do you know the significance of that?”
“No.”
“Why would he give the note to you and not Cappy?” I asked.
“I have no idea. Maybe he thought I’d be able to talk her into doing what he wanted. Maybe he thought he could scare her by getting me involved. My mother is . . . ” She swallowed hard. “. . . very protective of her family. That’s not a secret, I’m sure you know.”
Maybe he’s the one who should have been scared, I thought. “And what he wanted her to do was vote to merge the Seven Sisters winery with Norton Winery.”
“Yes, but she never would have done that. It could possibly harm the breeding operation in a big way because the winery would take—some people would say destro
y—all the best grazing land. And more important, we’d be beholden to someone else, to Giles’s father, who Cappy’s hated from the first minute they met. Nothing would convince her to vote to merge our holdings with theirs.”
That’s not what Chase had just told me. I kept that to myself. “Why does Cappy hate Giles’s father?”
Her natural-colored glossy lips formed a wry smile. “Two peas in a pod is what I’d guess, though she’d throttle me if she ever heard that.” She smoothed down her yellow cotton skirt. “Benni, I don’t believe Cappy would ever hurt anyone. Not even to save her horses. Really, my mother does have a very high moral code.”
I didn’t answer. We never want to believe that people we know or care about are capable of terrible and cruel acts. One, it was too frightening to think we wouldn’t know evil even when it sat at the breakfast table with us, and two, it was even more frightening to think we’d harbor that same evil within ourselves.
I cleared my throat, feeling awkward and apologetic. “I’ll have to tell Detective Hudson, you know.”
“I wish JJ would have come to me first.” She left it at that, knowing better than to ask me not to. If JJ had gone to her mother first, there’s a good chance it would have stopped there.
“He seems like a fair man,” I said, folding the brochure over and sticking it in the back pocket of my jeans. “That note doesn’t mean Cappy did anything, but Detective Hudson will probably want to talk with you both again.” I tried to encourage her. “The fact you didn’t show it to her helps, I’m sure.”
Her face became still. A soft wind blew tendrils of gray-blond hair around her eyes, but she didn’t blink or brush them away. “I know that JJ put you in an awkward position, what with your husband being the chief of police. I apologize for my daughter. Normally she would have come to me first, but these days . . . ” Her voice trailed off again. It was a trait I was beginning to see was common for her.
“She just got scared. I was a convenient adult, I think. She was trying to keep you from being involved. Maybe she was afraid it would cause problems between you and Cappy.”
Seven Sisters Page 13