The Riesling Retribution wcm-4

by Ellen Crosby

  “And the other fifty percent he’s not.”

  “True.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Look, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re not in trouble.”

  “All the same, I’m betting it’s the other fifty percent,” I said.

  “You could be right.” He finished his coffee and set the mug on the bar. “Off the record, I hope you are.”

  After Bobby left I helped Frankie move the rest of the furniture outside and then drove over to help Quinn and the crew with the cleanup. Whether I was just plain tired or distracted—or both—within ten minutes I sliced up my index finger with my pruning shears like a rube picker.

  Quinn saw me trying to stop the blood gushing out of the wound and came over with the first aid kit.

  “What are you doing? You almost took your finger off. That cut might need stitches.”

  “It’ll be all right. It’s superficial.”

  “Give me your hand.” He tore off a strip of gauze and tied it around my finger. “Hold that for a minute. Look, why don’t you go do something else? We’ve got it covered here.”

  “There’s so much to clean up—”

  “Your head’s not in it right now. Give yourself a break.”

  He took my hand and untied the tourniquet, putting antiseptic on the cut.

  “I can put the bandage on myself,” I said. “You don’t have to fuss.”

  “If you get gangrene and die, you did leave the place to me, didn’t you?”

  “You sound so hopeful.”

  Did I imagine it or did he hold my hand longer than he needed to?

  Early in our relationship we’d agreed to keep our personal and professional lives separate—a promise that hadn’t been too hard to keep since we disagreed on just about everything. Add to that the fact we had nothing in common and didn’t fit the other’s profile of someone we’d like to go out with—he preferred good-looking sexy women young enough to be his daughter while I went for older men who broke my heart—and I knew if we ever got together it would be like the Titanic meeting the iceberg.

  But lately, like now, there had been moments when our eyes held each other’s and an electrical current that was new and a little dangerous seemed to pass between us.

  I removed my hand from his. “Rumors of my possible demise are premature.”

  He grinned. “Go on. Get lost and clear your head.”

  “Maybe I’ll go over to the cemetery and see what damage the storm did there.”

  He gave me a searching glance. “I hope you don’t find anything.”

  I nodded. We both knew he wasn’t talking about storm damage.

  The cemetery looked as wind tossed and littered with debris as everywhere else on the farm. The pewter vase that held my mother’s Renaissance roses had tipped over and was wedged between her headstone and Leland’s. The flowers, which I’d picked only yesterday, were wilted and the petals had gone brown on the edges. Most of the miniature American flags I’d placed at each gravestone for the Fourth of July had either fallen over or were tilted at crazy angles like rows of bad teeth. Branches and leaves covered many of the graves and stuck to markers.

  I was on my knees tidying the area around Hamish Montgomery’s weathered stone marker when a car drove up the road and cut its engine. I looked over the wall in time to see my brother climb out of his dark blue Jaguar. Eli worked for a small architectural firm in Leesburg, about fifteen miles away. For him to show up at the vineyard in the middle of the day meant he either needed something or he was in trouble—or both.

  “Hey, babe.” He closed the wrought iron gate with a clank and threaded his way between the rows of headstones. “Took me awhile to find you. What are you doing here?”

  I still hadn’t gotten used to Eli calling me “babe.” Or calling his wife “princess,” though that was a little more fitting.

  “Cleaning up.” I moved to the grave of Thomas Montgomery, who had been one of Mosby’s Rangers, and started picking up leaves and small branches.

  Eli squatted next to me and clasped his hands together. I knew he was taking care not to get dirty. Today he had on beige trousers and a polo shirt. Probably linen and definitely some designer like Hugo Boss or Armani, since that’s all he wore anymore. My sister-in-law, Brandi, saw to that since she chose his clothes. His shoes were soft-as-butter leather that looked Italian. Oakley sunglasses hung around his neck. It looked, also, like he’d had a manicure.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “You think I stop by only when something’s wrong?” He smoothed his gelled hair like a preening rooster and looked offended. “I was in the neighborhood so I figured I’d see how my little sister was doing after that tornado went through her vineyard.”

  “Oh.” I carried the leaves and branches over to the wall and dumped them on the other side. “That was thoughtful. We lost some grapes in the new fields. It could have been worse if it had damaged the winery or the house. Still it’s a huge financial loss.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sneezed and pulled a packet of tissues out of his pocket. “This is killing my allergies being out here. Tree pollen.”

  Checking on his little sister. Sure he was. “Did you hear what I said?”

  He blew his nose. “You lost grapes in the new field. The winery and the ancestral pile are still standing.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “What’s going on?”

  He wadded up the tissue. “I learned a little something today. Apparently you found an old grave on our land after the tornado came through. Not in this cemetery.”

  “Well, yes—”

  He folded his arms. “Thelma attached herself to me like she was superglued on when I stopped by the General Store just now. If Homeland Security ever hired that woman she’d be their top interrogator. She could wear anybody down in nothing flat.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “What do you think I told her? Nada. For the simple reason that I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about,” he said. “You should have seen the look on her face when she figured that out.” He did an uncanny imitation of Thelma’s high-pitched voice. “Well, now Elliot, do tell. How odd your sister didn’t tell you about that dead body. A person has to wonder if there’s something conspirational going on, don’t you think?’”

  “Conspirational, huh? You sound just like Thelma.”

  An accomplished mangler of the English language, in addition to being a world-class gossip.

  He tapped his fingers on his arms and glared at me. “I’m so flattered. How come you didn’t call?”

  “I’m sorry, Eli. Between the tornado damage and finding that grave, things were insane around here. Bobby came over this morning with a search warrant. They’re out there right now excavating the remains.”

  “Jesus.” He stopped tapping. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. The medical examiner said he reckoned the body had been there thirty or forty years. A Caucasian male.” I righted a flag in front of a marker of another ancestor who had fought in the Civil War. “Can you help me fix a couple of these?”

  Eli raised an eyebrow and indicated Leland’s grave. “Wonder if Leland knew him?”

  “Just because someone’s buried on our land doesn’t mean anyone in the family knew anything about it. We both know Leland didn’t have the best judgment when it came to business deals, but he would never kill another person and you know it.” I stood up and faced my brother.

  He threw up his hands like he was putting on brakes. “I just asked if he could have known him and you bite my head off. How can you be so sure he didn’t do it?”

  “Because of Mom. She would have known and she couldn’t have lived with it, that’s how.”

  “Leland kept secrets.” He walked over to our parents’ graves and fixed Leland’s flag.

  I joined him. “Not that secret. Not murder. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Yours,” he said. “Ours.”

  “I hope s
o.”

  He cleared his throat. “Hey, Luce?”

  “What?”

  “Got a little favor to ask you.”

  I knew it. “What favor?”

  I also knew the favor. Money.

  “I’m a little tight this month and I was wondering if you could—”

  I cut him off. “I can loan you three hundred, maybe four, but I want to know when you’re going to pay me back.”

  “Three or four hundred?” He looked startled. “You can’t do more than that?”

  “I can’t really do three or four hundred since I just took a hit that’s going to set us back well over a hundred thousand dollars. How deep in debt are you, Eli?”

  He ran his thumb along the edge of our mother’s marker. “It’s not too good. I’m on the verge of bankruptcy.”

  He spoke lightly, but I saw his throat constrict. It was probably worse than “on the verge,” but he wasn’t saying. I knew him too well. Still, he’d caught me off guard.

  “Bankruptcy? How could you let it get this far?” I stared at him. “You’ll lose everything.”

  He cleared his throat again. “Right now I just need enough to cover my August mortgage payment since today’s the first and it’s due soon. That’s all. I don’t want to lose my home, Luce. Brandi loves that house.”

  Of course she did. He’d designed it for her, giving her everything she wanted. Now they lived in a nouveau riche palazzo that combined the most garish extravagances of Versailles with the Disney Castle, including a multitiered fountain in the front yard that looked like he’d borrowed it from Trafalgar Square in London.

  “How much is your mortgage?”

  “We refinanced a few times to consolidate our debt.” He paused and said, without looking at me, “It’s just under eight thousand.”

  “Eight thousand?”

  He needed that just for his mortgage? What about everything else? Groceries, car loan—all of it? Could he cover those expenses, or were they down to eating the labels off cans?

  “Why don’t you sell something?” I said. “That antique Sarouk carpet you just bought for the great room. The gold faucets in the master bath. Anything.”

  He looked pained. “I haven’t got that kind of time. It’s not the first payment I’ve missed, so they’re already knocking on the door.” He laughed, but it was the self-mocking laugh of someone pushed to the edge. “We’re barely answering the phone because most of the calls are collection agencies. Besides, Brandi would just die if I started dismantling her dream house. You know I can’t do that to her.”

  “Brandi needs to go to credit card rehab, and I’m not joking. Cut up her cards, take away the checkbook, and give her a cookie jar with money in it. Tell her that’s it. You can’t go on like this. She’s as bad as Leland was, blowing money on junk she doesn’t even care about the next day,” I said. “That’s why you’re in so much debt.”

  “You are being unfair.”

  “I am being honest.”

  “Aw, jeez. Give me a break. I come to you for help and what do I get? A lecture.” He started pacing in front of our parents’ graves. “You’re the one talking about family and being on the same side. You could help me out if you wanted to. I’m not asking for a handout. I’ll pay you back once I get on my feet. I just need some time.”

  Sure. Like he’d paid his other creditors back. “You can’t repay me and you know it.”

  He stopped pacing and looked at me with an odd glint in his eyes. “How can you turn your back on me when you’ve got a five-figure sum in the vineyard checking account right now?”

  “How do you know that?” The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

  “Aha! Knew I was right. You do, don’t you?”

  I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. “It’s not my personal piggy bank, Eli. It’s a business account and that money is there to pay bills.”

  He spread his hands apart, palms up. “I’m tapped out, babe. Are you going to help me or are you going to throw your brother to the wolves?”

  It was a low blow, and he knew it. I wasn’t responsible for his problems. He was.

  “Giving you more money without doing something about the way Brandi spends it isn’t going to help anyone. You can’t pay me back the eight grand any more than you can pay your creditors back. Take the four hundred as a gift, okay? You don’t need to repay that.”

  He looked like I’d slapped him. “I don’t need your charity. Forget it. I’ll go elsewhere.”

  “Eli, wait!”

  But he was already moving toward the gate, raising his hand in a backward salute, dismissing me.

  “I gotta go. I’m late for something.”

  He slammed the gate, as I expected he would. I sank down by my mother’s gravestone.

  “Now what?” I asked her. “How did he do that? Why am I the one feeling bad?”

  Giving my brother money would be like giving alcohol to a drunk. He didn’t have his spending under control—and his wife was dragging him down to the depths I remembered from when Leland was alive. When we lurched from feast to famine, either flush with cash or nearly flat broke. Eli’s story was just a downward spiral.

  I paused at Leland’s marker as I left the cemetery. Years ago my mother hid a fabulous diamond necklace given to one of her relatives by Marie Antoinette because she knew if my father got his hands on it he’d sell it, just like he’d sold all her other jewelry to fund his business ventures. I’d found the necklace two years ago, hidden in a barrel in the wine cellar. Eli got a third of the money from its sale and had blown his share. I used mine to pay for our expansion and putting in new vines.

  Right after Leland died, a French live-in boyfriend had sweet-talked my bank in the south of France into letting him withdraw all my funds, claiming I needed the money because I was moving back to the States. As soon as I got home, I planned to call Blue Ridge Federal and check on my account.

  Not that I thought Eli could pull off the same scam, but I knew he was desperate enough to try anything. Including cleaning me out.

  Chapter 6

  I called Seth Hannah, the president of Blue Ridge Federal and an old family friend, the moment I walked through the front door. Like Leland, Seth was one of the Romeos and he used to play poker and hunt with my father. I’d long suspected Seth had a crush on my mother, as did so many men who were captivated by her beauty and indefinable French sense of style and allure.

  “What can I do for you, darlin’?” he asked.

  “Just checking my balance. I wasn’t sure if something cleared or not.” Or got cleared out.

  I heard some clicks of a computer keyboard and he quoted a figure that matched the one I had.

  “Happy to oblige, but you can do all this online, you know.”

  “I know, but I wanted to ask you about something and I can’t get that from a computer.” I wondered if he heard the relief in my voice that we still had funds to talk about.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I just want to make sure that no one besides me has access to that account,” I said.

  “Well, that’s how it’s set up, Lucie. Why’re you asking about this?”

  I hesitated and Seth waited.

  After a moment he said, “This wouldn’t be about your brother, would it?”

  “Please don’t say anything to anyone, Seth. He came to me for a loan just now and I turned him down. He knows I’ve got a lot of cash in that account.”

  There was a long pause. “It’s no secret your brother’s in a pretty deep financial hole, honey. You thinking he might try to cash a check of yours or something?”

  “When we were growing up and Eli got a bad report card or a note about detention, he used to forge my parents’ signatures. He could copy either one of them and you couldn’t tell they weren’t genuine.”

  “I see.” Seth cleared his throat. “Counterfeiting a check’s a serious crime, you know.”

  I was sitting in the foyer in one of my mother’s toil
e-covered Queen Anne chairs staring at Leland’s bust of Thomas Jefferson. I leaned back and pinched the bridge of my nose. The house was even warmer than it had been this morning. Although the windows were open, I felt like I was suffocating.

  “I know.”

  “I will tell you this. We get our share of forged checks and I can’t tell you how many times the forger was a relative or someone who had access to the individual’s financial information,” he said. “If you don’t trust Eli, you’d do well to put things under lock and key.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust him—”

  “Honey, you don’t have to beat around the bush with me. I know Eli’s a good man.” Seth made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “But who said, ‘I can resist anything but temptation’?”

  “Everyone?”

  This time he did laugh. “Look, I’ll put a note here in your file that you’re the only person authorized to handle transactions with this account. Will that settle you?”

  “I guess so. I feel awful about this, you know. Eli didn’t actually do anything.”

  “Better safe than sorry, Lucie. I’ve seen more people feuding over money than you can shake a stick at. You have no idea the stuff we’ve got here in folks’ safe-deposit boxes because relatives couldn’t come to an agreement over something. Hell, we even got an urn with someone’s ashes in the vault.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, ma’am. Whoever locks up for the night wishes him sweet dreams. Been doin’ that for going on sixteen years. We’ve gotten kind of attached to him.”

  “I hope that never happens to us. Feuding, I mean.”

  “Then talk to your brother. Get it out in the open.”

  “I couldn’t. He’s already mad at me because I wouldn’t loan him money for his mortgage payment.”

  “You want my opinion, honey?” I was going to get it, even if I didn’t. “I’ve known you and Eli and Mia since you were born. Your pa wasn’t always a straight shooter and it pains me to say that, but your mother was as rare and precious as a hothouse flower. She had more integrity in her little finger than most folks got in their whole body. If she were alive today, she’d be telling you to be square and honest with your brother.”