Male/Male Mystery and Suspense Box Set: 6 Novellas

by Lanyon, Josh

  “My little brother.” Carson whirled away again and narrowly avoided crashing into the man who had appeared soundlessly behind her.

  “Why, Jeff, you startled me!” Carson’s Georgia drawl suddenly seemed to go still-slower and stickier. Austin could practically see the peach juice dripping from every vowel. “I thought you were still in bed.”

  Jeff certainly looked like he had just crawled out of bed. He was wearing a snug pair of faded jeans low on his tanned hips and nothing else. His blond hair was appealingly tousled. His light eyes met Austin’s over Carson’s curly head. He winked.

  “Why, honey chile, what would be the point without you?”

  “You!” She smacked his muscular brown arm. Austin expected to hear a fiddledeedee! at the least, but no. She settled for the love tap. “Mr. Gillespie, this is Jeff Brady. He’s a…friend.”

  In a perfectly normal—well, for a Southerner—tone Jeff said, “Hi, Mr. Gillespie. Nice to meet you.”

  “Hi,” Austin replied.

  “You’re here to catalog the wine cellar?”

  “That’s right.” Austin smiled politely in answer to Jeff’s white smile. Jeff Brady was just too good-looking. Austin didn’t trust anyone that handsome. Jeff looked like he should be selling toothpaste or seducing a congressional page.

  “You’ve got a job ahead of you.”

  “He does, doesn’t he? That cellar’s one thousand square feet if it’s an inch.” Carson smiled at Austin too. “Well, come on. Time’s a wasting.” She turned, her gown swirling like churned butter around her.

  “Nice dress,” Jeff said as she passed him. He smiled at Austin again, and Austin smelled the scent of his shampoo: green apples.

  As they started down a long staircase, Carson inquired, “Are you married, Mr. Gillespie?”

  “No.”

  “Goody!” Carson threw him another of those friendly, flirtatious glances. It was probably second nature to her, but it made Austin self-conscious.

  They turned down another hallway. The decor seemed to consist of dark wainscoting and a couple of chandeliers that looked ready to fall out of the ceiling.

  Carson chattered blithely as they made their way down the murky corridor. “It was such a shock Granddaddy going like that. I don’t mean in the arms of Miz Landy, because we all knew about that peccadillo. I mean his heart giving out. We all thought the doctors had removed it with his appendix years ago. I guess it’s a blessing, really.”

  “A blessing? Really?” Austin offered, since she clearly expected some comment from him. He was concentrating on not walking under the sagging light fixtures in case they tore loose and crashed down.

  “Oh yeah. What do they call that medical condition when people start stockpiling lots of useless junk?”

  “Collecting baseball cards?”

  Carson laughed. “You! Naw, hoarding. That was Granddaddy. He was always buying and hoarding wine. Whatever money was left, it’s all gone now. Or at least it’s down in the cellar.”

  She chattered cheerfully all the way down the narrow stairs that led to a scratched, dark wood door. A key stuck out of the tarnished faceplate.

  “It’s not locked?” Austin asked, shocked. This wasn’t merely tantamount to leaving a liquor store standing open; given the fortune in wine reputedly stored in the cellar, it was equivalent to leaving a bank unlocked.

  Carson opened the door. “It’s never been locked.”

  On the other side of the door was an even more rickety staircase. They went down it, Austin taking pains not to step on the hem of Carson’s dress and send them both plummeting to their deaths.

  A bare bulb threw muddy light against the dingy walls. The cellar smelled of damp and mold and even-less-pleasant things. At the bottom of the staircase, an elderly black man in a dark suit was spraying a can of Raid as though it were air freshener. He turned at the pound of their feet on the wooden steps.

  “Faulkner, Mr. Gillespie is here to catalog Granddaddy’s wine,” Carson announced. To Austin, she said, “Faulkner is what I guess you’d call our faithful family retainer.”

  “Uh…” Austin had grown up with full-time domestic staff, but he couldn’t imagine referring to anyone as a faithful family retainer.

  “Suh,” Faulkner said. The exaggerated, deferential tone was at odds with the shrewd dark gaze that met Austin’s. Faulkner was probably in his late sixties, his lined skin still supple looking, though his gray hair and mustache were grizzled.

  Carson hitched up her dress and frowned at a black-soled foot. “When we used to be rich, Faulkner was our butler. He was a better butler than he is housekeeper.”

  “You shouldn’t be running barefoot in this cellar, Miz Carson.”

  Miz Carson ignored that. “Oh good. Everything is already set up for you.” She gazed at the card table and folding chair beneath the gently swinging lightbulb. “If you need anything else, just ask Faulkner. He’ll be pleased to give you any help you need.”

  “Thanks, I should be all right.” Austin held up his laptop case. “I’ve got your grandfather’s—”

  She interrupted blithely, “Oh, I wouldn’t put too much stock in Granddaddy’s record keeping, Mr. Gillespie. He was never one for figures, especially at the end. Well, not the arithmetical kind!” She threw the former butler a sly look. Faulkner remained as impassive as one of the battered statues lining the front drive.

  Gazing about himself, Austin feared Carson was probably right. But if even half the bottles Dermot Cashel had claimed were in his cellar existed, this cobwebbed dungeon would prove a treasure trove.

  “I’ve set up a table and chair for you over here, sir,” Faulkner said, as though Austin could possibly have missed the effort at creating a work space—positioned as it was beneath a giant spiderweb. “I’m afraid there’s no electrical extension.”

  There was barely electricity, if the pallid light from overhead was anything to go by.

  Austin thanked him and moved to the table, setting down his laptop case.

  “I guess I’ll leave you to it,” Carson said after a moment as he removed his laptop. “Will you join us for lunch?”

  Austin, his attention caught by the nearest rack, bottles blanketed in velvety dust, barely registered that. “Yes, thank you,” he said automatically.

  “We’ll see you at one o’clock,” Carson called, grabbing her full skirt in two fists and trotting up the staircase. The stairs shook beneath the energetic pound of her feet. Faulkner unhurriedly followed. The door slammed shut behind them with the finality of the last nail in a coffin lid.

  Austin turned his attention to the wine racks. He lifted a bottle from the nearest shelf and gingerly wiped the dust away to study the label. His heart jumped.

  A 1970 Château La Gaffelière. The La Gaffelière was a Bordeaux that generally aged well. The 1970 should still be powerful with a good tannin structure. This was a very promising start. Austin returned the bottle to its cradle and looked around for something to wipe the dust off his hands. He should have worn jeans and a sweatshirt, that was obvious, but he preferred to introduce himself to the client looking as professional as possible. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, but that came later.

  Gingerly wiping his hands on an oil-stained rag, he moved along the tall racks, looking but not touching.

  Cheval Blanc, Gruaud-Larose, DRC, Lafitte, Mouton… Oh yes. This was most definitely worth the trip from DC. Austin could admit now he’d had his doubts when he’d learned Martyn, North, & Compeau had been hired to catalog and evaluate the late Dermot Cashel’s extensive wine cellar. He’d even suspected Whitney might be trying to get him out of town in order to further his own plans for bringing his girlfriend on board.

  But this was the real thing. Even without the Holy Grail of the legendary Lee bottles, this was an appraisal Austin wouldn’t have trusted to anyone else.

  And if the Lee bottles really did exist?

  If they did exist, it was going to be fun trying to find them. As far as
Austin could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to the way the shelves had been organized. Bottles of whites and reds were mixed—as were years and vineyards.

  He reined in his impatience to delve and returned to the card table, where he switched on his laptop and watched the screen for a wireless connection. No signal. Not even the promise of a signal. Austin sighed. Annoying not to be able to access his e-mail, but he could do that at the hotel this evening. He clicked on the document file he’d saved to his hard drive, and glanced over his notes.

  The spreadsheet before him was his own rough effort at estimating the contents of the Ballineen cellar based on the crinkled, purple, ruled sheets of notepaper he’d received from Whitney. He’d deliberately underestimated. The purple stationery and nearly illegible writing did not induce confidence. But even underestimating—and not counting in the Lee bottles—the Ballineen cellar added up to a treasury.

  If by some miracle the Lee bottles were here, the chances of their being the real thing were slim. Who could forget the drama of the Jefferson bottles in the 1980s? The greatest wine hoax ever? The very thought of another Jefferson’s bottles scandal was enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. Not many careers could have withstood that hit. His would have hit the reef for sure. Fortunately, in 1985 Austin had been four years old and rarely drunk anything stronger than Yoo-hoo.

  But had the Jefferson bottles been the real thing? That was the seduction, wasn’t it? The allure. Because wine wasn’t merely a beverage. Wine was history and art and romance and civility and culture…and maybe a bit of magic.

  Austin moved his cursor down the spreadsheet, noting quantities, and then glanced at the towering shelves around him. It was probably going to be easier to take it shelf by shelf, listing the contents and location and then matching it against the inventory sheets.

  Especially since the cellar wasn’t kept locked. For all he knew the family had been enjoying the Lee bottles with their fried-chicken dinners over the four weeks since Dermot Cashel’s death. It was a sickening thought, but it had to be faced. Austin was pretty sure from what he’d seen of the self-titled “daughter of the house,” she wouldn’t know a bottle of Montrachet from a bottle of Asti Spumante. There was no reason to hope the rest of the clan was any more savvy.

  Not that there was anything wrong with drinking what you liked to drink—or not drinking at all, for that matter. Austin really wasn’t that much of a wine snob, and growing up in Harrison Gillespie’s house had been all about learning restraint. Moderation in all things was one of his father’s guiding principles—except when it came to marriage.

  As a matter of fact, good old Robert E. Lee himself hadn’t been much of a drinker. Lee had put his thoughts about the use of liquor in writing: “My experience through life has convinced me that, while moderation and temperance in all things are commendable and beneficial, abstinence from spirituous liquors is the best safeguard of morals and health.”

  Austin pulled a legal pad and pen out of his laptop case. He mapped the cellar floor plan and layout, sketched the shelving units, and labeled each one: A, B, C, and so on. He numbered the individual shelves.

  At least the thick stone walls of the cellar ensured that the temperature remained cool and stable.

  Shrugging out of his jacket, he hung it over the back of the folding chair, rolled his sleeves up, and loosened his tie. He picked up the pad and pen and moved to the first shelf.

  Forty minutes later his hair, shirt, and shoes were covered in dust, and the palms of his hands were black. He had never worked on quite so cruddy a site. It was bad enough that he considered going back to his hotel and changing then and there, but it was a thirty-minute drive back to the town of Madison.

  The smell of insecticide was fading, only to be replaced by something worse. Far worse.

  It smelled like something had died down here.

  Austin continued to work—he was on the bottom row of the first shelf—but he began to feel queasy. The smell was truly awful. Did they keep the garbage bins down here? Or were the canned goods going bad?

  He put down the pad and pen and wandered back through the maze of tall shelves and racks. The light dimmed the farther he moved into the recess of the cellar. He was going to need a flashlight when he worked back here. The back portion was nearly in darkness. The shelves and broken furniture threw bizarre geometric shadows against the dingy walls.

  Austin’s sense of unease, of disquiet, mounted. At the end of the farthest aisle, he stopped and peered more closely at the floor. It was hard to tell in the poor light, but it looked like…

  What was that?

  He took a hesitant step forward.

  Something white and waxen rested in the aisle. It sort of looked like a hand stretching out from behind the very last shelf.

  Austin stopped.

  Yes, it looked like a hand: palm up, fingers outstretched…

  He moved warily, reluctantly, forward another step.

  It was a hand. A man’s hand. Not just a hand, because it was attached to a wrist, and what the wrist might be attached to…was concealed by the tall shelving.

  “Hello?”

  His voice sounded nervous in the cavernous chill of the cellar.

  He took another unhappy step forward. He could now make out gray fingernails and dark hair on the backs of curled fingers. He could see every detail, it seemed, every freckle, every hangnail—not that there were any hangnails, for this man’s hand was manicured. He could see the glint of a gold watch too. It was as though Austin had suddenly developed bionic vision. Time seemed to slow as he took another dragging step forward.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  He already knew the answer to that. No one who was all right had gray fingernails and skin the color of wax. No one who was all right was that motionless.

  The toe of his shoe stopped a couple of centimeters from the lax fingers. Austin closed his eyes, opened them, and made himself look around the corner of the shelf.

  The man lay on his back. He was middle-aged. Maybe older. His clothes—expensive clothes—were rumpled and dirty. He needed a shave. His mouth was slack and open, his lips blue-gray. His black hair was mussed and had fallen in his dull, sunken eyes. He stared sightlessly up at Austin.

  Chapter Two

  Austin drew hastily back. He leaned against the shelf and closed his eyes, sucking in a couple of deep, quavery breaths.

  “Crap.”

  He needed to do something. What? It was so unbelievable. He peered around the shelf again.

  Yes. Believable or not, it was still there. He was still there. The dead man.

  The only dead person Austin had ever seen before was his mother. He had been nine, and even in death she had been very beautiful. Beautiful but not alive. Despite the things one read about the dead, she had not looked like she was sleeping. This guy did not look like he was sleeping, and he was not beautiful.

  Who was he? What was he doing back here? How had he died?

  Austin couldn’t tell at a glance, and he didn’t want to look more closely than that.

  He turned and walked very calmly, very quietly back to the front of the cellar, then up the stairs, through the scratched and paint-blistered door, and up the next flight. It seemed strange to be moving with such calm deliberation when people in movies either fainted or screamed and ran, but that was probably shock. Or maybe this was shock. This blank lack of feeling.

  A man was coming down the first flight of stairs. He wore black jeans and a black sweater. He was too much like Carson to be anyone but a brother. Same slim build, dark eyes, dark curls. He checked at the sight of Austin.

  “You’re Gillespie?” He too had that soft Southern inflection.

  “Yes. I just found—”

  “I don’t think y’all should be down there on your own.”

  Truer words were never spoken. Austin started to speak again, but the man, his own age or younger, said, “I tell you what. I’ll stay down there with you. I’m C
ormac Cashel.” Cormac was scowling, but the look he directed at Austin was definitely a considering one.

  In another time and place, Austin might even have welcomed that au courant appraisal. He and Richard had split up three months ago, and he just hadn’t had the time, energy, or inclination to get out and meet people. As rattled as he was, he couldn’t help noticing that Cormac was very attractive, though his interest seemed a bit surreal at the moment.

  “I found something in the cellar,” Austin blurted.

  Cormac went rigid. “Then it’s true? You’ve found them? You found the Lee bottles?”

  “No. No, I mean there’s someone down there.”

  “Oh.” The eager attention faded. “That’s Faulkner. Don’t let him scare you.”

  “No, it’s not Faulkner. It’s…someone else.” It occurred to Austin that the corpse in the cellar probably belonged to a family member and that he was about to deliver terrible news. “He’s not…well.”

  “That’ll be Daddy,” Cormac said sardonically. “He’s often not well. Y’all want me to throw him out of there so you can work?”

  “Uh…I don’t know how to say this…”

  Footsteps pounded lightly down the stairs, and another figure appeared behind Cormac. Austin recognized the too-handsome Jeff Brady. He’d put on a white tailored shirt but still exuded a sexy, just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-not-because-he-was-sleeping air. He halted, spotting Cormac and Austin, and Austin guessed that Brady had been planning to pay him a visit too.

  Maybe there was no TiVo this far from town?

  “Something wrong?” Brady asked, looking from one man to the other.

  “Naw,” Cormac said, throwing him a look of dislike.

  “Yes,” Austin said. He wasn’t sure why he was now talking to Jeff, except that he had the impression that Jeff was not part of this family. Plus Jeff appeared able to handle pretty much anything that came his way. A sort of cool, smiling authority; Beauty Stuart confounding the Union commanders.

  “What is it?” Jeff inquired. “Or would you rather show me?”