by Lanyon, Josh
“Topiaries. That’s right.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. No, Ty’s very artistic. But that doesn’t cut any ice with Faulkner. So it’s always kind of…tense when Tyrone is staying with us, because Auntie Eudie and Faulkner butt heads over his…administration.”
“His what?”
“I guess I’ll leave you to it,” Carson announced with one of those bewildering changes of subject. She headed for the staircase. “Now don’t forget about lunch. Jeff is coming.”
Austin froze. “Jeff?” he repeated as though the concept of Jeff was utterly foreign. In some ways that was probably true.
“Sure! You remember Jeff?” She chuckled. “He remembers you.”
What the hell did that mean?
Austin must have had a peculiar expression, because Carson confided, “When I told him you were back, he insisted on coming to lunch. I think he’s partial to Auntie Eudie’s greens. What do you think?”
“So you and Jeff are still seeing each other?”
Carson giggled. “Oh Lordy. I think we’ve seen all there is to see of each other.”
Austin opened his laptop, turned it on. He was angry with himself for asking such a question—and for caring about the answer. One night. That’s all it had been. And he thought these people were crazy?
“Jeff is a PI. Did you know that? Henry Williams hired him to find Dom.” Carson seemed enormously amused at the idea that Jeff had been poking around Ballineen—literally—on a job. Or maybe it still hadn’t occurred to her that Jeff had been using her. Austin swallowed all the things he would have liked to say.
Carson continued up the rickety staircase, calling cheerfully, “I’ll send Tyrone down to you. You just tell him what you want him to do.”
“I honestly don’t need any help.”
“Don’t be silly.”
She trotted away up the stairs.
Overhead, Tyrone the Possible Jailbird Artist and Faulkner the Faithful Family Retainer continued to exchange loud pleasantries. Austin brought up the file with the Ballineen inventory.
He stared unseeingly at the list before him.
It hadn’t totally escaped him that he might run into Jeff, but he’d been fairly sure Ballineen would be a Jeff-free zone since Jeff’s purported main interest in Carson had been her connection to Dom Williams. Austin had even assumed that once that connection was revealed, Jeff wouldn’t be welcome at Ballineen. But he’d got it wrong. Jeff, it seemed, was a regular fixture at the old homestead.
What was up with that he-remembers-you business? Had Jeff told Carson what had passed between them?
No. No, if only because Jeff would never reveal that he’d been to bed with another man.
Austin rubbed his forehead tiredly. He couldn’t deal with this right now. Could not deal with Jeff. It felt as if his whole life was coming apart. If he had to run into Jeff again, he wanted it to be when he was feeling strong and successful and in control, not when he felt like a loser professionally and personally—and with the memory of this last romantic failure vivid in his mind.
Resting his face in his hands, Austin breathed quietly, trying to gather himself for the job ahead. He’d been on the move ever since he walked out of the house in Maryland. Suddenly he was exhausted.
Where do I go from here? For years he’d convinced himself he was building something, achieving something: excelling at a career he found satisfying and rewarding—and maybe even, eventually, earning the respect of the people he loved. Now he discovered that the people he loved didn’t even believe in the validity of his sexual orientation, let alone his career choice. His job was hanging by a thread. In fact, if he had any guts, he’d cut the thread himself. He had failed with Richard; he had failed professionally—
He caught motion out of the corner of his eye. A spider had dropped from the web above him and was crawling over his keyboard. Austin brushed it away, rose, and moved the card table out from under the web. He decided to postpone his breakdown for the comforts of the hotel bar that evening.
A short while later Tyrone arrived downstairs. He was about twenty, tall, and strikingly good-looking, despite the tattoos that covered both arms. He wore baggy, distressed jeans and a white-and-purple WAR GOING ON T-shirt.
“Miz Carson says you need some help down here?”
“I honestly don’t have anything for you to do,” Austin told him. The last thing he wanted was help. He wanted to stay so busy he didn’t have one spare second to think about the all-too-swiftly-approaching lunchtime and the inevitable encounter with Jeff.
Tyrone’s face fell. He’d probably been looking forward to escaping yard work in that humid heat for a while. “I could be a big help to you. I’m a hard worker, sir.”
Austin wasn’t sure he bought the puppy-dog eyes and humble expression, but he relented anyway. It was a huge task, and whether he wanted to admit it or not, he could use help—unless he wanted to spend the next month in the spider-festooned bowels of Ballineen.
“All right. You read me the labels, and I’ll check for them on the inventory list. If they’re not on the main list, we’ll add them to a separate tally sheet.”
“Thank you, suh!” Tyrone said, sounding for an instant like Faulkner at his most ironic.
In the end, Austin’s decision to accept Tyrone’s help was a good move. Not only did it halve the work involved in moving from table to shelves, but Tyrone turned out to be surprisingly charming. He asked a lot of well-founded questions about wine and winemaking, which kept Austin’s mind blessedly occupied.
“You’re an artist. Is that right?” he asked during a rare lull.
Tyrone gave him a cheeky grin. “That’s what Miz Eudie say. She should know.”
“Did you grow up around here?”
Tyrone’s smile faded. “I grew up in Atlanta. My mama used to send me to stay here to keep me out of trouble.”
“Can’t you get into trouble in Madison?”
Tyrone’s smile returned—momentarily sharkish. “If you know where to look, you can.” He picked up the next bottle and read the label.
Austin considered this as he checked the inventory list. He could see Madison might not be the first choice for a streetwise kid from Atlanta, and something told him Faulkner was probably not the most patient guardian for a teenage screwup. Not that Tyrone was a teenager anymore.
“Do you miss Atlanta?”
Tyrone offered another of those wide grins and declined to comment.
Eventually one o’clock rolled around, and Austin’s stomach began to knot with nervous dread. He wondered what would happen if he just kept working and didn’t go upstairs? They couldn’t force him to eat lunch, after all.
“What about this bottle?” Tyrone inquired, holding up a 1959 Hermitage La Chapelle. “Is this a valuable one?”
“That’s about a ten-thousand-dollar bottle of wine,” Austin said carefully. “Don’t drop it.”
“Wow! Ten thousand dollars for a bottle of wine. Looks like the Crazy Cashels are going to be swimming in bread.” Tyrone replaced the bottle with exaggerated care.
“The Crazy Cashels?” Austin inquired curiously. “Is that how people around here think of them?”
“Yeah, but they’re not so bad. You just gotta know how to handle them.” He watched Austin click on the inventory sheet. “You going upstairs?”
“Eventually.” Austin checked the time on his desktop. One twenty. His palms started to perspire. He wiped them on his jeans. Really, what the hell was his problem? He and Jeff had had a nice time together, and that was that. So, okay, yes, he would have liked to see Jeff again, and Jeff had not been averse to that. He had said Austin should call if he was ever in town again.
Yeah, that was the part that hurt. Because Jeff was also not averse to never seeing Austin again.
“When do you think you’re going upstairs?” Tyrone asked a few minutes later. At Austin’s look of inquiry, he said, “I want to know when I should take my dinner break.
”
“Sorry, I didn’t think about that. You can go now.” Austin glanced at his desktop. One thirty-five. His heart sank. “I’ll see you when you get back.”
Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Cormac appeared, scowling as usual. “Were you coming up to dinner?” Austin hesitated. Cormac put in, “Or we could just have ours down here and talk?”
Austin glanced at Tyrone, who was smiling to himself as he pulled a comb out of his pocket and ran it across his stick-straight hair.
“I think we’d better go up,” Austin said, pretending not to notice Cormac’s disappointment.
* * * * *
“There you are.” Auntie Eudie greeted them as they entered the dining room. “Mr. Gillespie, you sit right here between me and Cormac.”
Austin self-consciously took his seat next to Cormac and across from Carson. A quick glance placed Jeff on the other side of the table and down one. Jeff looked absolutely unchanged, but then how changed could he be in the space of a month? His green gaze met Austin’s across the brown-and-white china. He offered his heartbreaker smile.
“Hi, Austin. So they sent you back after all.”
“Hi. Yes.”
Auntie Eudie handed Austin a large bowl of some really revolting-looking green mush she referred to as collard greens, and he was able to turn away. He made sure he stayed busy passing salt and pepper and butter and biscuits and anything else he could lay his hands on. But eventually he ran out of busywork, and when he risked a look down the table, Jeff was staring at his plate with a somber expression.
Austin’s phone rang. He apologized, checked it, and saw that the call was from Ernest. The temptation to leave the table and take the call was great, but Austin resisted.
When he glanced up again, Jeff was smiling his way. It was an oddly tentative smile.
Austin smiled politely back.
Roark, who had been eating since Austin entered the room, put his fork down and said grimly, “How much longer is this inventory supposed to take?”
“It’s going to take at least a week merely to count everything,” Austin answered. “Longer to authenticate.”
“Why?”
“You’ve probably got a thousand bottles down there. Everything from two-dollar Charles Shaw to 1959 Hermitage La Chapelle. And not shelved in any particular order that I can see. This isn’t a job you want me to rush through.”
Roark looked unconvinced on that point as he picked up his fork and resumed eating. He glowered at Austin.
A bare foot brushed lightly over Austin’s ankle. He sat up straight. Carson winked at him from across the table.
Faulkner entered the room carrying a carved ham on a platter. He lowered it carefully to the table.
“My, my, doesn’t that smell delicious?” Auntie Eudie murmured. “You’re in for some real down-home Southern cooking, Mr. Gillespie.”
“It smells great.” Austin was confident no morsel of food could possibly wind its way through his digestive tract, given the knots his stomach was in every time he looked at Jeff. Nonetheless, he bravely took some of everything and shoveled it in, washing it down with swallows of toothachingly sweet iced tea.
Afterward he remembered almost nothing of the meal itself or the conversation, although everyone seemed to eat and talk continuously. All his awareness seemed centered on Jeff, who, as far as Austin could tell, was doing his level best to charm the birds off the trees—or more likely, the moths out of the draperies.
At the end of the meal, Roark pushed his chair back and, weaving slightly, announced he had work to do.
Hopefully it was nothing that involved heavy machinery. Austin waited till Roark safely cleared the doorway before saying, “Same here. That was a wonderful lunch, though.”
Carson asked, “Is Tyrone making himself useful?”
“Yes, he is. He’s very helpful.”
“That’s nice. Maybe his last…stay in Atlanta did him some good, bless his heart.”
“That boy is badly misunderstood,” Auntie Eudie murmured, helping herself to another slice of cobbler. “You know, he’s a very talented artist.”
Cormac snorted. “I guess you can call forgery ‘art.’”
“Any sign of the Lee bottles?” Jeff asked, speaking directly to Austin for the first time since he’d greeted him.
“No. Nothing so far.” Austin’s gaze seemed to tangle up in Jeff’s before he was able to look away.
“More iced tea?” Auntie Eudie asked of no one in particular.
Austin shook his head.
* * * * *
Back downstairs, Austin found himself on his own, Tyrone still on lunch break.
He picked up the legal pad and studied it, then walked over to the shelf where they had left off. He picked up the next bottle. A 2008 Sutter Home chenin blanc. From the sublime to the ridiculous. He sighed.
From up above, the cellar-door hinges squeaked loudly, followed by the quick, light tread of someone coming downstairs. Instantly Austin’s neck muscles went so tight he thought he was going to throw his back out. He knew who it was without having to turn, but he turned anyway.
Jeff reached the bottom step, glanced casually around the cellar, and walked up to Austin. He was smiling and seemed perfectly relaxed.
“You didn’t call me.”
“Sorry?”
“When you got in last night. You should have given me a call. I would have made time to get together.”
“I’m flattered.”
Jeff’s blond brows drew together. “Why’s that?”
Austin let it go. “I got in pretty late last night.”
“Oh. Well. What time do you think you’ll be wrapping it up today?”
Illogically, as much as Austin did not want a confrontation, his anger mounted at Jeff’s easy acceptance of the situation between them. He, on the other hand, didn’t even know what the situation was. He said shortly, “I don’t know. I’m going to try and work as late as I can tonight. I want this job done as fast as possible.”
Jeff’s smile faltered, recovered. “How’s the boy genius?”
“What?”
“Your kid brother. Has he adjusted to the idea of boarding school yet?”
“He’s getting there.” Austin stared determinedly at the shelf of wine in front of him.
There was a fresh X on the dusty label of the 1959 Hermitage La Chapelle. Had Tyrone marked the bottle for some reason?
Austin scanned the shelves he and Tyrone had inventoried. There were several bottles with those small X’s. He moved to the shelves they hadn’t got to yet. No X’s in the grime and dust. Were these marked bottles wines Tyrone wanted to learn more about? Was it a coincidence that all the bottles Tyrone had marked were very valuable?
He became aware that the pause following his reply to Jeff was beginning to stretch too long.
Jeff said quietly, “You riled at me about something?”
Riled? No, Deputy Dawg, I’m not riled. Why would I be riled? Austin gave him a steady, direct look. “Me? No.”
Jeff stared at him for a long moment. “Yeah, you are. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He made himself add, “I’ve got a lot to do. That’s all.”
After an astonished second, Jeff said, “Pardon me for taking up your valuable time.”
Austin opened his mouth, but Jeff had already turned and was vanishing back up the stairs.
Chapter Nine
The thunderstorm started around three.
The feeble light overhead flickered, went out, and as Austin reached blindly to steady himself in the inky darkness, flared back on while the old house shook in the wake of a long, booming roll of thunder. The bottles rattled musically on their shelves.
“Crap,” Austin muttered. The power was probably going to go for good any minute, and he was going to have to crawl out of the cellar on his hands and knees.
He waited grimly. The lightbulb swung gently back and forth, throwing eerie shadows.
Austin returned to work,
and though the house shook and groaned beneath the storm’s onslaught, the power did not go off for more than a few seconds at a time.
Tyrone finally returned around three o’clock carrying a ghetto blaster. He apologized for taking so long to get back. “Womenfolk,” he said with a wink.
Womenfolk? Did people really still say that? Not in Austin’s neck of the woods. Did people still say neck of the woods?
“I noticed you marked some of the bottles,” Austin commented. “Did you have questions about them?”
Tyrone looked startled and guilty. “No.”
He hadn’t denied marking the bottles, Austin noted. Surely he would have if he was up to something?
They resumed work, picking up where Austin had left off. Tyrone’s ghetto blaster pumped out a frenetic song about bombs over Baghdad.
Tyrone said, “I guess I was just fooling around, not paying attention.”
“Hmmm?”
“When I drew in the dust.”
“Oh sure.”
Tyrone was smiling at him, a bright, guileless grin, but Austin couldn’t help thinking that it had taken him a long time to come up with an explanation. In fact, Austin had forgotten about the X’s until then. He began to puzzle uneasily over Tyrone’s earlier questions and interest.
He was guiltily aware that he might be suspicious simply because he knew Tyrone had a criminal past. And that, of course, could explain why Tyrone was still worrying about the X’s. He was probably used to being everyone’s favorite suspect the minute anything remotely suspicious happened.
Around five o’clock they reached a long line of Madeira. Austin’s heart sped up. This might be it. The wine in the Lee bottles was Madeira. His gaze fell on four empty spaces in a row on the rack.
Four. Just like the Lee bottles.
“Something wrong?” Tyrone asked from right behind him.
“This is odd.” Austin glanced back. Tyrone was staring at him with peculiar intensity. Austin pointed out the four empty slots.
Tyrone shrugged. Austin could smell his perspiration and his musky aftershave. Both of them were very strong up this close. Nerves. Tyrone was nervous. Why?
