Murders and Metaphors

by Amanda Flower

  He laughed. “Why are you here tonight? Why do I think it’s for the same reason that I am?”

  “Nathan invited Grandma Daisy and me, yes, but I think we are both here for the same reason because of the murder. Do you think something will happen tonight?” I asked.

  “I’m here to make sure nothing happens.”

  “Me too.”

  He grinned. “Rarely does nothing happen when you and Daisy are around, which makes me extra glad that I came.”

  “We really appreciate you all coming out to cut the last of the grapes!” Grant said, interrupting us. The younger of the Morton sons stood on a chair in the middle of the room. “It’s been a rough week for our family, but we are so grateful to have so many friends and family to help with gathering the grapes. Together we will make short work of it. There is a table just behind me with knives and clippers. You can use either. Let’s have some fun!”

  The audience clapped. I searched the faces for Nathan but didn’t see him. I turned to say something to Rainwater, but the police chief was gone.

  I frowned and followed the line of the people picking up tools to cut grapes. When I reached the table, I selected a pair of clippers instead of the curved knife. I couldn’t use it after seeing one sticking out of Belinda’s back.

  Grant smiled at me. “Clippers. Good choice.”

  I nodded and stepped away from the table so the next person could make their selection. My goal for the night was to avoid Grant as much as possible.

  I filed out of the winery with the other grape harvesters. I still didn’t know where my grandmother was. The longer I was separated from her, the more worried I became. I wasn’t sure how far Grandma Daisy was going to take the sting idea.

  I stood in a row of grapes. There was a plastic bin every few feet to put the grapes into, and strings of bare bulb lights hung over each row so we could see what we were doing. I started to cut and put my grapes into the container.

  I worked for a few minutes until the woman next to me groaned, and I looked at her.

  She smiled. “My clippers broke. They must be an old pair. I need to go back for another.”

  “Here, take mine. I’ll go find another pair.” I handed her the clippers.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  She thanked me, and I walked back to the big house. As I did, I passed Grant and Jake Zule standing close together. This was the second time I had seen the two men talking. The last time had been at the winemakers’ guild meeting. I ducked behind the next row of grapes and listened.

  “You told me that this feature would be about my vineyard, and now you are telling me it’s not,” Grant said.

  “I’m sorry. I just checked my email and my editor wants a broader piece about ice wine in general. He doesn’t want it to be about any one place. I will still paint Morton Vineyards in a favorable light, but it will be a very small mention.”

  “That’s not going to work. You promised me a story about my vineyard, highlighting what I do for it. Not my parents, not my brother.” Grant’s voice was hard.

  “That’s not what the editor wants. I have to write what he wants and be honest.”

  “Was taking the money that I gave you for a good review honest?”

  I shivered as I remembered another passage from Little Women that I had read. The passage I’d thought Emerson had accidentally pointed to when he knocked the book off the bookcase. “ ‘Money is a needful and precious thing,— and, when well used, a noble thing,—but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for.’ ”

  The murder was about money. That had been right all this time.

  Jake said something I couldn’t hear.

  “I’m not taking the money back,” Grant said. “That’s my ticket to control you. I’m sure your editor would love to hear about you taking bribes.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Jake said. “You would be ruined.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’m a Morton. I can get away with anything.”

  I shivered.

  “I can’t do as you ask,” Jake said in a strained voice. “I’m sorry.”

  There was a scuffling sound, and I almost got up to see what was happening.

  “Let go of me!” Jake said.

  A moment later, Jake ran by my row of grapes back to the main house. I shivered as I crouched there in the cold. I had to find Rainwater and tell him what I’d learned. If Grant was willing to bribe Jake, what else would he do for a good review? Would he take it as far as murder? In that moment, all the clues that the books had been pointing me to solidified. I thought about the quotes the shop’s essence had made me read, the ones about doing “something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead.” All that time I had thought that had been about Belinda, but I had been wrong. The shop wasn’t directing me to Belinda the victim, but to Grant the killer. Grant had always lived in Nathan’s shadow, and he had wanted to do something great to prove himself. He had tried the fraud scam last summer, and when that didn’t work, he had thrown himself into the vineyard, setting up the national retail deal. Even so, his parents had deferred to Nathan on decisions about the vineyard. That had to have made Grant angry, angry enough to kill.

  A strong hand wrapped around my upper arm, yanking me up from the ground, and another hand covered my mouth. “Let’s go for a walk, Violet,” Grant whispered in my ear.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I gagged at Grant’s hand over my mouth. It tasted like salt. He forced me to walk into the deepest part of the vineyard, away from the ice wine grapes to the summer vines where no one would be.

  “Settle down, Violet,” Grant whispered in my ear. I could feel his hot breath on my neck.

  I felt the point of a knife in my back. I knew it was the same sort of knife that had killed Belinda.

  “I’m going to move my hand from your mouth, but if you scream, I will cut you, and if you try to run away, I also have a gun. I will shoot you in the back. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Good girl.” Grant removed his hand.

  My mouth was dry. “Grant, you can’t kill me. There are all these people here. You will never get away with it.”

  He laughed. “I’ve killed before in a crowd and wasn’t caught.”

  My blood ran cold. I had been right; he had killed Belinda. I had to get away from him, but the knife was still pressed against my back. I didn’t take the time to think or be afraid. I donkey-kicked him in the shin as hard as I could.

  Grant yowled in pain and loosened his grip enough for me to wrench my body away from him. As I ran away, he sliced at me and cut a hole in the back of my coat.

  “You can’t get away,” he yelled after me.

  Yes, I could. I knew I could. Grant knew the vineyard, but what he maybe didn’t remember was that I knew it too. Not much had changed at Morton Vineyards since I was a teenager, and I was going to use that to my advantage. I thought that I could run through the vineyard and around to the big house.

  The soles of my boots slipped on the icy ground. Even in snow boots, I couldn’t get any traction. I realized that it was fear that was holding me back. The shocking part was that it was fear of a man I had known all my life. I had grown up with Grant Morton. When we were younger, I had even considered him a friend. I had never thought that one day he would try to kill me. He was Nathan’s younger brother. A boy I had played hide-and-seek with as a child. A man I was playing a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with now.

  I had to run along the long rows of vines. I couldn’t break though the rows. There was netting over all the vines and frozen grapes to keep the wildlife from eating them before they could be harvested for ice wine.

  I came around the side of the last row before I could see the house. Grant had pulled me so far away from it. The lights of the winery were so inviting. I ran so fast, I didn’t realize that someone was in front of me until I collided with him.<
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  Nathan grabbed me by both of my arms. “Violet, what’s going on? Why are you running?”

  Grant ran up behind us. He was panting.

  “Nathan, we have to find Rainwater. Grant killed Belinda and tried to kill me too.”

  Grant laughed. “She’s crazy. Are you going to believe her or your own brother?’

  “Did you kill Belinda, Grant?” Nathan asked in a low voice.

  “So what if I did? I did the world a favor. She was a horrible woman,” Grant snapped.

  My breath caught. I couldn’t believe that he’d confessed.

  “How could you?” Nathan asked. “Did you even think about the winery or our parents?”

  I blinked. Why were the winery and their parents the most important things to consider when taking a woman’s life? I would have thought that a woman’s life would be the only consideration. I tried to get away from Nathan, but he held me fast.

  “Nathan, please let me go,” I said.

  He ignored me. “How could you, Grant? You’ve ruined everything that our family has built.”

  “I did it for you, for our family. I heard what she was going to write about the family wine. It was a horrible review! It would ruin us just as we were about to sign that big retail deal and go nationwide. A poor word from Belinda Perkins would have ruined everything. I—we—had been working too long and too hard to let this ruin us. She called our ice wine barely tolerable over sweetened grape juice. After everything that Mom had done to bring her back to the village and set up that book signing for her. I couldn’t let her ruin us.”

  “Grant, you can’t kill someone if they are going to write a bad review,” Nathan said in a low voice.

  “I did it for the family.”

  “You did it to save your deal.”

  Grant’s face clouded over. “That deal is what is going to keep the vineyard afloat. You are no help at all while you spend all your time playing mayor, and when you’re not doing that, you’re chasing after Violet.” He laughed. “Don’t you see, big brother, she didn’t pick you. Everyone knows it’s Rainwater she wants.”

  Nathan looked stricken by his brother’s words.

  Nathan wouldn’t let go of me. Why wouldn’t he let go? “Nathan, let me go,” I said.

  He held me tighter and glared at his brother. “Violet and I are meant to be together. Everything works out for our family in the end, or it would have if you hadn’t ruined everything.”

  “I haven’t ruined it yet. We can pretend none of this happened, can’t we Nathan, just like my other schemes over the years?”

  “I’m tired of cleaning up your messes,” Nathan snapped.

  “But you will still do it, won’t you? A Morton can’t be embarrassed. Isn’t that what we have been trained to believe?”

  I had had it. I couldn’t listen to this anymore. I kicked Nathan in the shin just like I had his brother and wrenched my body away from him. “I’m calling the police.” I turned to run away from them back to the safety of the winery, to my grandmother and to Rainwater.

  “Wait!” Nathan cried. “Don’t call the police just yet. We have to decide what to do.”

  I turned back around and stared at Nathan. “Decide what to do? We know what we have to do. Grant killed Belinda. We have to tell the police. Adele Perkins has been wrongfully accused.”

  “Nathan,” Grant said in a soothing voice. “You don’t want to do that. You know what this would do to our parents. Do you want to be the one that puts them through this?”

  “Nathan isn’t putting them through anything,” I snapped. “It’s you.”

  “I saved the winery!” he shouted loud enough that I hoped someone cutting grapes nearby would hear. “I saved the entire family. They should be thanking me for what I did, not the other way around.”

  It was in that moment that I realized Grant was delusional. There wasn’t anything that anyone could say that would convince him that he wasn’t within his rights to kill someone else for family honor and family business, but Nathan, Nathan should know better. I looked at the man who was the boy that I had once loved. Nathan’s face was pale, and his eyes darted in all directions as if they couldn’t focus on one point.

  “Nathan, you can’t seriously be thinking of letting him go,” I whispered.

  “It will kill our parents if he goes to prison. It’s better if he just leaves. Will you leave, Grant?”

  “Sure, big brother, whatever you want.”

  “What about Adele?” I asked. “He framed her. She’s in jail because of Grant right now, and she didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “If your beloved Chief Rainwater is any good, he will figure out that she was framed and let her go,” Grant said. “Either way, by the time he figures it out, I will be long gone.”

  I remembered being arrested and being accused of a murder I had never committed. It had been the most terrifying and humiliating experience of my life. I very well imagined what Adele was going through, and she had done nothing to deserve that. It had happened to me because of the Mortons, and it was happening to her because of the same family. I couldn’t allow it.

  “Violet, just let him go,” Nathan said in a hollow voice. “He can start a new life somewhere else.”

  I stared at Nathan. I supposed that for all those years, I had blamed Nathan’s parents for his betrayal twelve years ago more than I had blamed Nathan. I had always believed that any big decision as to how to deal with the bad press after Colleen’s tragic death had come from the elder Mortons. When I returned to the village last summer, Nathan had asked me to forgive him, and I had because, again, I had thought most of the hurt was because of his parents. Maybe it had been then, but at this moment when Adele Perkins was accused and Grant Morton was the one who had killed Belinda, it wasn’t the elder Mortons creating the cover-up. This moment, when Nathan wanted to let his brother go and allow another person go to prison for the crime, was Nathan all grown up, standing on his own two feet and making the wrong choice.

  “I can’t do that,” I said quietly. I wasn’t even sure that he could hear me. I turned to go. “You’ve disappointed me, Nathan.”

  Grant laughed. “The problem with you, Violet, and people like you, you think when push comes to shove, people will do the right thing, but that just isn’t true. When push comes to shove, people will look out for themselves. Nathan is doing what he has to do.”

  “Vi?” Nathan pleaded.

  Against my better judgment, I turned back to look at him. I stared at his dark-brown eyes, eyes that I had once found comfort in during the darkest time in my life when my mother died. “I’m leaving, Nathan, and I’m going to find Rainwater. That’s all there is to it.”

  I turned and walked away, and there was a crack in the still air. Just as the sound came, I felt myself thrown to the ground. Nathan landed on top of me.

  I groaned and pushed Nathan away. It was then that I realized that he had been shot. Grant had not been lying about the gun.

  Grant dropped the gun on the frozen ground and removed his winter coat, balled it up, and pressed down hard on the bullet wound in Nathan’s side.

  “Nathan! Nathan! I’m so sorry. You can’t die.” Grant pressed his cheek against Nathan’s chest. “Brother, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Gently, I picked up the gun. Grant didn’t seem to notice, and I didn’t bring it to his attention. My hands shook as I put the gun in the pocket of my coat, praying that the safety was on. I removed my phone from the opposite pocket and made the call that I should have made the moment the book’s clues came to light in my mind.

  As I made my call to Rainwater, I saw Grant cry over his brother. Theirs had always been an intense rivalry. Their parents had pitted them in competition against each other their entire lives. At least I knew now that the Morton boys, despite everything, loved each other, and that was something I hadn’t known before.

  Epilogue

  A January thaw was a welcome relief at the end of the month. It was a brief resp
ite from what had been a grueling winter so far. For me, the temperature hadn’t been as hard as dealing with my own past and of course the murder. I needed time to breathe and think. Two things I rarely allowed myself to do.

  As I opened the front door to Charming Books that morning, it seemed the entire village had a case of spring fever. Villagers were out walking their dogs and calling to neighbors. We all knew that winter wasn’t done with us yet, and we were enjoying this momentary break. And this chance to gossip. There was plenty to gossip about. Grant Morton was in prison. Nathan was in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound. He had also resigned from the office of mayor, saying that he wanted to spend more time with his family and help with their business. Even after everything that had happened, Nathan’s loyalty was to his parents.

  I thought of a quote the shop’s essence had showed me from Little Women. “Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow …” I had mistakenly thought that since Little Women was a novel about four sisters, the quotes had been about the four Perkins sisters, but I had been wrong all along. The shop’s essence hadn’t wanted me to focus on four sisters but on two brothers. Nathan was the brother always in the sunshine and Grant was the brother always in shadow.

  I hoped for Nathan’s sake that he could put their lives back together, but it would be without me. I had spent too much time worrying over Nathan and being hurt by the Mortons. I’d let it go.

  Emerson wove around my feet and walked out onto the front porch. He leaped onto the railing and walked back and forth across it like a tiger prowling his cage.

  I thought it was best if everyone in Charming Books got a little fresh air. I went back into the shop and retrieved Faulkner’s perch. He cawed angrily when I moved it outside.

  I shook my head at him. “You need to get out more. It’ll be good for you.”

  He flapped his wings and a moment later flew through the shop’s open front door and landed on the perch I had brought outside. He fluffed his wings. He was twice the size he normally was. He buried his beak under his right wing. I shook my head. “You know, if Grandma Daisy hadn’t adopted you when you were a little chick, you would be living out here all the time, including the coldest part of winter.”