by Ellen Crosby
“Quilts,” Granny Montgomery had told me, “are meant to be used. Years ago women used fabric from worn-out clothes or other fabric scraps for the tops and stitched together Domino Sugar bags for the undersides so they had something to put on their beds, or hang across windows and doors to keep out the cold. A quilt can last a hundred or more years if you take care of it. Don’t keep yours tucked away in a drawer or an old trunk.”
I wrapped the quilt around me and settled into the Adirondack chair. Quinn handed me a glass of wine. “Something is on your mind. It’s more than just that skull by the cemetery.”
“It’s nothing, really.”
“Your nose is growing.” He waited me out.
I sighed. “Okay. It has to do with something you said when we were out here one night a couple of weeks ago.”
“It’s hard to keep track of all the memorable stuff I say, since I’m so profound most of the time,” he said in a teasing voice. “How about giving me a little hint?”
I grinned. “You said the air we breathe right now is the exact same air as everyone who ever lived on earth, all the way back to the beginning of time. Cleopatra. Michelangelo. St. Francis of Assisi. Jack the Ripper. It hasn’t changed.”
In the darkness a match blazed as he lit up one of his Swisher Sweets cigars. “Ah,” he said. “That.”
The cigar tip glowed like an orange minimoon. “It’s true,” he said. “What does it have to do with that skull?”
Somehow he always managed to connect the dots at lightning speed. “It got me thinking about my family—my ancestors, I mean—everyone who lived in Highland House ever since Hamish built it two hundred and fifty years ago. Thinking about them as people, instead of names listed in the family tree in the Montgomery family Bible or headstones in the cemetery. Wondering what they said, how they felt, who they loved … what made them happy or angry.”
“Where are you going with this, Lucie?”
I sipped my wine before I answered him. “Nowhere, really,” I said, which wasn’t true. “But when I saw that skull today I had a feeling … actually more than a feeling that she and I are related.”
That part was God’s truth.
“I already figured that out,” Quinn said. “Look, you heard what Win Turnbull said. He can take a sample of your DNA and they can match it against the skull, so you’ll know for sure. The family record information in the Bible could probably help you figure out who she is once you know more or less when she lived. Plus there might be something in what’s left of your father’s genealogical records that didn’t get burned in the fire.”
The summer I moved home from France, a fire had destroyed part of the downstairs of Highland House—the library and the foyer took the brunt of the damage. The library, with my father’s valuable collection of rare first editions—mostly books on colonial American history and Virginia history—and many of his papers, had been almost completely gutted, except for his hand-carved gun cabinet.
“I know,” I said to Quinn. “In the meantime, there’s something wrong about that skull being where it is. I hope she didn’t … suffer when she died.”
“I know you do.” He reached for my hand across the narrow space between our chairs. “You do realize you might never know what happened to her or who she is?”
I nodded. “Even if we don’t find out, I want to have her properly buried in our cemetery. It doesn’t matter if she’s related to us or not. She deserves a decent burial.”
He squeezed my hand. “You’re a good person, sweetheart. Maybe you could talk to B.J. about how to handle something like this. I’m sure he’d know what to do.”
B.J. Hunt owned Hunt & Sons Funeral Home in Middleburg. He and three generations of Hunts had buried practically everyone who lived in Middleburg and Atoka for the last one hundred years.
“I’ll call B.J. once we find out whether there’s … more … of her to bury,” I said. “I hope we find out who she is. I’d hate to think of her ending up like The Urn.”
The Urn was a local legend; an ornate silver funerary urn containing the ashes of an unknown soul who had ended up in the vault of Blue Ridge Federal Bank in Middleburg. No one had ever claimed it and the record of the person who had originally left the ashes had mysteriously vanished. Every night the bank employee who locked up always stopped by the vault and wished The Urn good night. The practice had been going on for decades and by now folks believed something bad would befall the first person that forgot to wish The Urn sweet dreams.
Quinn grinned and stubbed out his cigar in an ashtray next to his chair, snuffing out the tiny orange flakes of fire until they were gone. “Want some more wine? Bottle’s almost empty.”
“Sure.”
There was one thing I hadn’t told him, something I wasn’t ready to discuss. At least not yet. After that remark he made about everyone breathing the same air—it was five weeks ago, to be precise—I’d sent away for a DNA ancestry test kit from the Genome Project. I also hadn’t told Eli, my older brother, or my younger sister, Mia, who lived in New York City. Mia would probably flip out and Eli was one for letting sleeping dogs lie. Knowing him, he’d warn that we might end up learning that one of our relatives was an ax-murderer or a serial killer.
I’d made sure I picked up the mail until the test kit came a few days later. That evening I’d locked myself in the bathroom, spitting until I filled a vial with enough saliva for the lab to test. Surprisingly it had taken longer than I expected to produce that much spit. Afterward I’d sealed it shut with a stabilizing ingredient that was supposed to keep the sample viable even if the return package detoured through the Sahara Desert or the North Pole.
The results, according to the Genome Project website, came by email in four to six weeks. That meant I should be receiving a notification any day now.
“There’s something else that might help figure out who she is,” Quinn was saying.
“Pardon?”
“Lucie. Are you listening to anything I said?”
“Sorry. I’m still thinking about her. And that grave, the way she was hidden in the storage shed.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “The grave. Didn’t you say almost every one of your ancestors is buried in that cemetery?”
I nodded. “That’s right. Everyone who lived in Highland House, as well as some of our close relations.”
“Well, if she ends up being related to you, we could probably figure out who she is by process of elimination.”
“You’re right,” I said. The mystery woman wouldn’t have a headstone in the cemetery, if she were a Montgomery.
Which meant we might be able to solve the riddle of who she was. But not why. Why bury her just outside the cemetery, without a coffin?
That question intrigued me even more. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me there were no good answers.
Three
During harvest we work flat-out, late nights and predawn mornings, seven days a week until all the grapes are picked and moved to either oak barrels or stainless steel tanks. Usually we start in August and finish in mid-to-late October. Because it’s our busiest time of year and everything else that happens depends on how well harvest goes, tempers have been known to grow frayed and sharp words get exchanged.
This year had been more difficult and more combustible than any I could remember. First we had a couple of rainy weeks at the end of August when we were supposed to pick many of the white wine grapes, which threw off our schedule—and every other vineyard in northern Virginia. What was worse, everyone was short of help because so many of the migrant workers had returned home or else were keeping a low profile for fear of deportation. The combination of lousy weather and not enough workers was bad all around. Everyone was scrambling. You couldn’t get a crew to come back and pick the next day if it had rained the day before. They had already moved on and were picking somewhere else and that vineyard wasn’t going to let them go.
There is an unwritten co
de of ethics among vineyard owners in our region that we help each other out, share advice and resources, rearrange schedules when possible, sell extra grapes if they could be spared and you needed a few more tons of some varietal to make your wine. Sure, we were competitors, but the Virginia wine industry was still in its fledgling stages and a rising tide lifted all boats. More to the point, the next time someone was in trouble it could be you.
But the altruism and help-thy-neighbor do-gooding seemed to dry up as soon as it became a problem to find enough workers to pick all the grapes. This year’s harvest had turned into a free-for-all, everyone for him- or herself, whatever it took to get the fruit picked. Quinn and I were getting ready for bed later that night when he mentioned the subject of picking our Cabernet Franc, which was the next grape that would be ripe enough to bring in. I’d forgotten all about it until he reminded me that he’d been testing Brix on the Cab Franc just before we met Antonio and Jesús at the cemetery.
“Depending on the weather over the next few days, the Cab Franc might be ready by Sunday at the earliest,” Quinn said as he slid into bed next to me. “But right now, with what the forecasters are saying about Lolita moving up the coast and heading our way over the weekend, I think we ought to pick on Saturday—get a crew in—rather than take our chances.”
We live and die by the weather and what Mother Nature does or doesn’t do, but weather forecasters are only human. Sometimes I think they’ve got one of the few jobs in the world where you can be wrong so often and still remain employed.
It’s painful to pick grapes before they’re ready, especially after the hard work you’ve done all season to care for and nurture them to this stage. Pick too early and they’ve got a high pH and low sugar. In other words, they’re not sweet enough.
“It’s only Monday,” I said. “The forecast could change half a dozen times between now and Saturday, especially if Lolita stays out to sea and downgrades to a lesser category or makes landfall farther up the coast and hits New York and New Jersey. I’d hate to pick early if the Brix is too low. The weather might still be warm enough afterward that the grapes could survive the rain. They’d be riper. Better.”
“I don’t disagree, but we don’t have the luxury of waiting to see what Lolita does and then get caught with no crew available. And if the weather cools off instead, we’ll have diluted the fruit by waiting. I say we line up guys to come in on Saturday and take our lumps.”
There is a saying among vineyard owners and winemakers that great wine is not made in the cellar; it’s made in the vineyard. It’s all about how you care for the grapes when they’re still on the vine that matters. Our job as winemakers—if I’m strictly honest—is not to screw up what nature and hard work in the field have given you once it’s time to make the wine. It’s less about the magic we perform to get the wine into a tank or a barrel—and eventually into a bottle.
I sighed. Quinn was probably right. So much of grape growing and winemaking was a crapshoot. Lolita would take whatever capricious or deadly turn she wanted to take. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
“Okay, we’ll pick Saturday,” I said. “But if we’re going to get that entire block done in a day, we need to hire at least one more person. Our crew is beat, you know that. No one has had a day off in weeks. We need someone competent, in addition to our guys and the migrant workers Antonio hires. Someone who can drive the tractor, weigh the grapes, do everything. I wonder if La Vigne could spare Miguel as a favor after all the help we’ve given Toby?” I paused and added, “I could ask.”
Quinn rolled over onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow. In the darkness I could just make out his profile limned by silvery moonlight. “You mean ask Jean-Claude, don’t you? Not Toby.”
I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. “Jean-Claude is the winemaker now. Plus Miguel’s a good worker. He knows what he’s doing, unlike some of the other guys. And since he and Antonio are practically related—or will be, after Antonio marries Valeria—the two of them work together really well.”
“You sound awfully defensive, sweetheart. Sure, go ahead. If you want to ask Jean-Claude, go ask him.” He lay down again and turned over so he was facing the wall, instead of me. “Fine by me.”
It wasn’t fine by him. I should have known.
Three months ago Tobias Levine, a retired diplomat with a career that included serving as secretary of state, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and ambassador to France, had bought the two-hundred-and-fifty-acre estate next door to us. In addition to the Greek Revival mansion, swimming pool, tennis courts, extensive manicured gardens, and guest cottages, the property also had a working vineyard and an elaborate complex of stables, offices, and training facilities for about twenty horses. Toby moved in with Robyn Callahan, his longtime partner, brought his own Thoroughbreds and polo ponies, and renamed the vineyard La Vigne Cellars, which was clever and catchy.
A few weeks after they had settled in, Toby and Robyn threw a lavish garden party to meet the neighbors. Toby also took the opportunity to introduce Jean-Claude de Merignac, La Vigne Cellars’ new winemaker. Somehow Toby had managed to keep the news that he’d hired someone from one of France’s oldest winemaking dynasties under wraps until that evening and it had the bombshell effect on everyone at the party that I somehow suspected was the intention. For me it had an especially devastating effect.
I’d been in love with Jean-Claude. Once.
Jean-Claude de Merignac had been my first big crush. I’d been thirteen. He was twenty-eight. He’d taken about as much notice of me as if I’d been an overly rambunctious puppy that kept getting in the way. Instead he saw me as my older cousin Dominique’s little American cousin: a gangly, awkward kid who still hadn’t gotten rid of all her baby fat, wore braces on her teeth, and had just started dealing with the agonies of teenage acne. My brother, Eli, and I had been sent to France for the summer, told by our parents that it was an adventure and an opportunity to spend time with our grandparents and cousins while improving our French. But both of us knew—as children always do—that we were being exiled abroad because Mom and Leland, who never wanted us to call him “Dad” or “Daddy,” weren’t getting along and hadn’t been for a while. Eli, who was fifteen, and liked to act as if he were already a man of the world, told me bluntly that having us out of the house and sending Mia, who was five, to Granny Montgomery’s in Charlottesville, would give our parents a chance to work things out. Or else they’d probably be getting a divorce.
Maybe that was why I clung to my fantasies of a love affair with Jean-Claude, because it kept me from thinking about the bleak prospect I might be facing back at home. Why I fell head over heels for Baron Armand de Merignac’s handsome, dark-haired, wealthy son, even though I knew he had a reputation as a playboy, an outrageous flirt, and a heartbreaker. If only he’d wait a few years until I got a little older, I could change him and he’d settle down.
The de Merignacs were one of the best-known families in the French winemaking world; they had owned their ivy-covered château in Bordeaux as far back as the reign of one or another Louis—the thirteenth or fourteenth, I could never remember—and their wine was on a par with such famously expensive premier cru vintages as Haut-Brion, Lafite Rothschild, d’Yquem, and Pétrus. Jean-Claude’s father was the tenth-wealthiest man in France, having also built an empire in the media world, as the owner of a successful Formula One race car team, and, most recently, as the new owner of The Flying Squirrel, the hottest cult vineyard in the Napa Valley.
Quinn didn’t know anything about my adolescent schoolgirl crush the night Toby introduced Jean-Claude, but it hadn’t taken him long to figure it out. For one thing, Eli—who was also at the party—told him.
“She was totally goo-goo-eyed for him,” he said. “You should have seen her. I practically had to drag her to the airport to get on the plane for Washington when it was time to go home.” Finally when Quinn wasn’t looking I punched my brother lightly in the arm and told him under my breat
h to knock it off.
It hadn’t helped, either, that Jean-Claude noticed me right away and once he realized who I was, his eyes had followed me all evening. To my surprise, he was just as devastatingly handsome as I remembered from nearly twenty years ago. Older, of course, and more rugged-looking, some gray at the temples, but it suited him. And still single, though over the years I’d heard through members of the family in France that there had been affairs, lots of them. Also a scandal—I didn’t know what—that had been kept under wraps, the story being that Armand de Merignac had bought off the right people in return for agreeing to exile his son from Bordeaux for the foreseeable future.
“Lucie, ma belle—mon amour—you look absolutely stunning,” he told me, his smile still dazzling as he handed me a glass of champagne. “You’ve changed since the last time I saw you. I hardly recognized you at first.”
I could feel Quinn’s eyes boring a hole through the two of us. “I hope so,” I said, my cheeks turning pink. “I was thirteen. And I’m engaged now, you know.” I held up my left hand with Quinn’s grandmother’s beautiful antique diamond engagement ring like a talisman warding off his fatal charm and attraction. “Let me introduce you to my fiancé.”
The meeting between Quinn and Jean-Claude had gone about as well as I could expect, especially since everyone already had a few drinks. The two of them shook hands, sizing each other up.