Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  That unachievable goal. To fill himself up enough to be hollow.

  He ate a second time. Purged. Brushed his teeth. Slept. Done with it, he promised himself as he closed his eyes. You’ve slipped, but you’re okay. Once is fine. Two hours later, waking up, doing it all again. He ran out of food. Nothing left in this fucking place. He found some individually wrapped biscuits near the kettle. Fortune. He tried to remember if Mary-Anne had a fruit bowl on the table downstairs. Couldn’t. Knew he was too tired to drive. Nothing useful in the room except two biscuits and a bottle of ’61 Grange.

  The bottle of Grange. That would fill him up. He got the corkscrew from the tea stand, near where he’d found the biscuits. Should he open it? It was too expensive. That would be wasteful. Waste. Like what they’d put into Liam—the stuff other people shit out. As if today were a day to take a stand on wastage. At his sickest, he was always poor. Every dollar on food. Either to fill himself up or just to make his fridge look normal if people came over. Fancy stuff too. The best brands. A fridge full of it, turned over every week in large green bins. Just to be normal. The bottle of wine, it had no value to him.

  Jack pulled out his phone. Googled the Grange as best he could, just out of curiosity. He felt weak and pseudo-drunk. Mistyped a few times. Got it up. Easy enough to find on an auction site. Three thousand. Okay. So not ten or twenty. But still, three grand. He turned the bottle over in his hand. The label was lightly yellowed. Old-fashioned type, like a newspaper. Penfolds splashed in cursive red across the top, bulletin type below. He chewed a biscuit, sludge in his gums. Fuck it, he thought. He’d promised not to sell it anyway.

  He tilted the bottle at the toilet bowl in a grim cheers; they’d share it soon enough. Stripped the red seal that topped the neck, peeling it around in one go. Cork bare in the neck.

  Three thousand. Part of his conscious brain kicked back in. Don’t open it. As if this expensive bottle were the last thinning twine that separated him from his old self. Four years sober. If that was what this represented, he was already doing shots, dancing on the bar. He plunged the corkscrew in. The cork came out easier than he’d expected for an old wine; he’d thought it would be soaked and swollen with time. Some of it sloshed down his knuckles. “Fifty bucks,” he said with a laugh. Raised the bottle to his lips. Drank as much as he could in a long swallow. Filled himself up.

  His first thought was that the wine had turned. The environment had perhaps not been consistent enough. There was grit in his teeth, not the smoothness of the red Andrew had shared up at the top of his silo. Of course, all wines were different. Maybe you weren’t supposed to slug it from the bottle. Of course you weren’t. That was like taking a bite of a Black Angus standing in a field. Still. Something wasn’t right. Jack couldn’t tell the subtleties of the flavors in a regular bottle. But this bottle had no subtlety. There was something around the rim of the bottle too. On the inside. Specks of dirt. Same as the grit in his teeth. Grit, dirt—$3,000 his arse.

  Something was definitely in the bottle. He pushed a finger in the neck and ran it around. It came out pale red, as if swished in bleeding gums—specks on the fingertip. Part of his brain knew this wasn’t right. Wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Poison. Fuck.

  How had he picked a poisoned bottle out of Andrew’s random selection? Did Andrew give him the bottle he pointed to? Or was there some sleight of hand? He tried to remember whether he’d actually seen Andrew get the exact bottle he’d pointed to.

  Don’t sell it… It’s to enjoy.

  Andrew was hiding something. Perhaps he did have something behind one of those doors. And he was killing anyone who got too close. Eliza had found it. Alexis, too. And now Jack.

  Poison. Jack started to panic.

  He didn’t feel ill. Then again, he’d never been poisoned before. Be rational. He tried to calm himself. Why hadn’t the others been poisoned?

  And then he knew what it was. And he thought back through everything and knew the wine hadn’t turned.

  Why would Andrew put something like this in a valuable bottle of wine?

  Unless.

  Unless it wasn’t valuable at all.

  He took another slug from the bottle, just to be sure. Dropped the half-full bottle. The curve of the bathtub caught it, so it didn’t shatter, guided it into a roll up the other side, riderless in a skate park. It came to rest, sideways, in the middle of the tub. Glugged. The air rushing in countered the liquid coming out, giving the flow an unnatural pendulum-like force, vomiting the wine in slow heaves.

  And Jack Quick, the man who couldn’t tell tannin from an oak bushfire when he’d arrived in Birravale, suddenly knew what had been added to the bottle: the smell in Andrew’s car; the earthy spice in the cellar; Sarah Freeman in the street, gathering up her broken, dusted shopping.

  Cinnamon.

  Chapter 32

  Lauren opened the door, went to close it again with one fluid motion of her arm.

  Jack got a few words in. “I know why he killed them now. Andrew—”

  That was all he could get out before the door clicked. He was standing on the porch, in jeans and a blue polar fleece. He knew she’d open back up. He’d gotten enough out. He was a TV producer after all—he knew how to build a cliff-hanger. He imagined her leaning, back against the door, cursing him, while her resolve faded against her curiosity. The sun was just up, slivers of light cutting through the steaming mist just beginning to dissolve. He’d had to wait until morning to come and tell her. He’d been too weak to see her. He needed the night to calm, to fish his acrobat, clinging to a rock and waiting for an errant ship, from the ocean. He’d slept little. Used the time for research. But he was filled with adrenaline now. Because he knew why he was wrong and why he hadn’t been able to solve the crime. He’d thought Lauren had been emotional about her brother. But he’d been the same.

  Because he had assumed Curtis had to be guilty of something. Because he needed that to justify his own regrets, to validate his own involvement, so that he could be some savior, out here, solving a murder. But because he’d already tried and convicted Curtis in the back of his mind, Jack had never really considered that maybe this didn’t involve him at all. The only question Jack really needed to answer was the one Lauren had posed several days ago: Why would someone want Alexis dead?

  He’d thought the motive was revenge. But put Eliza back in the picture, and that didn’t work. Because the motive was the key. For both murders. If they were to be linked, it had to be the same.

  Eliza had worked at Andrew’s winery. Before Alexis died, she would have been prepping for the pending appeal.

  They’d both found something. Something big enough to get them killed. Maybe the same thing that Eliza had tried to sell to Sam Culver in her voicemail.

  Four marijuana plants weren’t enough to kill over. But Andrew was peddling a different drug: Australia’s most expensive, in fact. And he wasn’t growing it. What both women had died for was so simple: the reason why Andrew couldn’t have an insurance analyst turning over his property.

  The door clicked open. Lauren stood with arms crossed, eyebrows raised as if to say This better be good.

  “Andrew Freeman’s wine”—Jack held up the near-empty bottle of 1961 Penfolds Grange—“is fake.”

  It was the Italian that Jack remembered first. The articles he’d read, at the start of everything, when he was reading up on wineries: the Italian who’d boosted his alcohol content with methanol, killing twenty-three and leaving dozens blinded and hospitalized. Jack had never had cause to consider that as more than a slightly interesting news piece.

  But he’d learned something up at Andrew’s cellar during the storm. And its meaning had sunk in as he’d accidentally slopped the Penfolds on his fingertips, immediately estimating the cash value. He’d realized the true value of Andrew’s vaults, thinking of it like a bank, but he still saw the individu
al bottles as drinks. He realized now—they weren’t bottles of liquid. They were gold bars. Picassos. And everything that came with those precious objects suddenly applied to wine: theft, counterfeit, forgery.

  The cinnamon in the Penfolds had collided with another thought, hunkered at the back of his mind. His friend siphoning old boxed wine to impress at dinner parties. Andrew examining the label of the bottle atop the silo, assessing the value, gently placing it back in the picnic basket. It wasn’t hard to do the research once he’d known what he was looking for. Cinnamon. Elderflower juice. Lemongrass. All used as additives to cheap wine to make them feel like vintages. There were a few ways Andrew could have gone about it. Collect the empty bottles of the expensive wines and refill them. Fake the labels.

  The fatal Italian wine was just the tip of the iceberg in a billion-dollar industry seriously afflicted by wine fraud. In South Africa, vegetable additives were added to sauvignon blancs, which went on to pick up several awards. That was harmless enough. Some wineries, though, had started adding silver nitrate. Silver nitrate is a toxic salt—the stuff that clever vampire slayers put in bullets in movies, but instead, it was being packaged up and sent out to family barbecues. People were in jail for forging wines. They were minor celebrities, it seemed, their names unspooling in the search results page by page: Rudy Kurniawan, Hardy Rodenstock.

  Again, Jack was stunned that a bottle of wine was enough to kill two people over. But like Sarah had told him, these weren’t just bottles of wine—they were art. Rudy Kurniawan had sold an estimated $550 million of counterfeited wine. He’d eventually been prosecuted by the FBI and was serving ten years in prison.

  Enough to kill over? Jack would drink to that.

  Christ, Lauren had even told him Eliza was partial to stealing bottles.

  He explained this to Lauren, standing on the deck, with her leaning against the doorframe. She held out a hand without saying anything. Jack handed her the bottle. She sipped the remnants, rolling her tongue over her gums.

  “Yep,” she said, examining the bottle, “that’s a 2018 Penfolds Strange all right.”

  “Does that look real?”

  “The bottle? Sure.”

  “So he’s recycling them?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he gave you this one because at least it was in a real bottle. The question is why he gave it to you at all.”

  Jack thought about his friend bringing his faux-expensive bottles to dinner. The lines he’d told Jack he loved to use: Oh, I just picked that up in Tasmania; you know, they’ve just come off a strong vintage; of course, you haven’t really tried merlot until you’ve been to the Southern Highlands. Relishing in the approval of his friends. Andrew was the same, telling Sarah to go back and get more wine, the ones in her arms not good enough for his VIPs. They were good enough, sure, but they weren’t fun enough. What’s life without a few thrills? Andrew had asked Sarah then, and later, Jack himself in the cellar. He’d sauced his collectors up on real wine and then fed them the fake shit. Then he’d sat back and laughed as they guzzled Andrew’s bravado in the form of cinnamon and elderflower juice. And then Andrew had washed the bottles out and sold them again. Give them what they’ve paid for.

  The restaurant wasn’t a restaurant. It was a turnstile.

  He thought of Andrew hesitating in the cellar. It wasn’t because Jack had picked a too-expensive bottle: Andrew had hesitated because he wasn’t sure what was actually in it. But he’d given it to Jack anyway. Perhaps because Jack knew nothing about wine. Perhaps for the thrill. He wanted Jack to hold Andrew’s guilt in his hands and, quite literally, piss it away.

  Serial killers leave calling cards—those “masterminds” Lauren hated. They take pleasure in dangling clues, sitting just out of reach. The famous Zodiac Killer left letters, for example. Andrew Freeman just smiled at his collectors with red lips. Patted himself on the back for his own cleverness as his marks drank away their own evidence.

  “He likes to brag.” Jack shrugged.

  He could see Lauren had reached the same conclusion. It was hard to disagree with Andrew’s pomposity. She still had questions.

  “What about the phone?” she asked. “And I think we still need to get the ax back, to build our case.”

  “Andrew wouldn’t have had time to come down from the silo. But Sarah would have. That’s why he came and got me. He knew that I’d been around here, too much probably. They must have tried before, but I was getting in the way. He wanted me up there, distracted, so that she could go and put the evidence back.” Andrew had fucked up though; he hadn’t kept Jack occupied long enough.

  “Who’s Hush?”

  “Maybe him. Maybe it’s irrelevant.”

  “I think he’s still important.”

  “Maybe,” Jack said. There was so much he didn’t know about Alexis. If Andrew was Hush, there were two motives—Sarah may have wanted her husband’s lover dead. She could have talked him into it, if Alexis knew about the wine. “But I think this bottle is the most important. We now know the meaning of Eliza’s voicemail—why she had something big but wasn’t sure if it was technically illegal. This would do well in the tabloids.”

  “It’s convincing. I’ll give you that.” But Lauren still seemed unsure, the look on her face like she was trying to connect all the dots, make it work. “I’ll come with you. Five percent, by the way.”

  “What?” Jack thought she was talking about the alcohol content of something.

  She turned back inside to grab a coat off a hook. “The problem with wine fraud is that once the bottles are in circulation, you don’t know if you’ve got a real one or a dud one. It’s not like a Van Gogh, where Andrew can only paint one copy. You also can’t open a twenty-thousand-dollar bottle of champagne just to check if it’s real. People like Kurniawan fucked the industry good, crippled the market, and now all their wines are still out there. They reckon that five percent of any collection is fake. That’s why we don’t collect here.”

  She looked at him knowingly. Jack stared at his toes. He didn’t need her to state the implication. I know about this shit.

  She said it anyway. “If we’d worked together properly, we would have figured this out ages ago. Of course I know about this, Jack. I run a fucking vineyard.”

  She stepped on the porch and buckled her coat. Jack thought he might have cooled her down a bit. But she was still pissed. She’d even called it a vineyard.

  “I’ll go to the police. If that’s what you want,” Jack said.

  “And miss out on your finale?” Lauren dropped her guard to flash a smile. “No way.”

  “We can’t go just yet,” Jack said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because of that.” He nodded behind her.

  There was a creaking and then Curtis was in the doorway. He sized up Jack, swung his gaze to his sister, who gave him the look of calm Jack had become accustomed to between them.

  “So,” Curtis growled, “you here to apologize?”

  “Not quite.” Jack looked at Lauren, then back to Curtis. “I’m here to borrow your gun.”

  Chapter 33

  Jack knew Andrew would run.

  The rifle hung by Jack’s side as he and Lauren walked up the drive. Curtis had elected not to come. In case someone gets shot, he’d said. Jack couldn’t tell if Curtis meant that he didn’t want to get mixed up in the aftermath, so he had plausible deniability, or he didn’t trust himself not to pull the trigger. The gun was light, but after walking up the hill, it was hanging heavy and pulled taut on his shoulders. He swapped hands. Sweat slicked the stock, where Jack gripped it like a club. He’d been too embarrassed to ask Lauren how to actually use it. He wasn’t planning on shooting anyone—he just wanted the threat. But if events turned, the gun was about as useless as a baseball bat. So. Club grip.

  It was too early for tourists, but Andrew’s Forester was in the drivewa
y. Jack jiggled the handle on the restaurant. Locked. Lauren walked around the side of the building and opened the recycling bin. Jack leaned over her shoulder as she rifled through it. There wasn’t a single bottle. Odd, Jack thought. A winery that doesn’t put wine bottles in their recycling. There was a regular bin next to it, filled with food scraps. Then compost. Next to that was not a bin, but a crate made out of wooden slats. Inside was a plastic tub with a sealed lid. Inside that, standing on end, were rows of bottles. Jack lifted one out and ran a finger over the rim. It came off reddened. Andrew must clean them in the cellar, Jack thought. Behind one of those doors.

  Andrew hadn’t even bothered to hide the empties very well. But maybe he didn’t have to. There had never been a flicker of suspicion. Did people in town know? Probably some of them did. Andrew gave the word, and the townsfolk fell into line. He’d given Brett Dawson a job he was unqualified for and new doors for his hotel. He’d repainted Mary-Anne’s house. Jack didn’t know what he’d done for people like Alan, but it wouldn’t surprise him if the handshake deal with the pub persisted, cash-in-hand fines for drunk drivers. So maybe they knew. Maybe they also knew that they depended on Andrew’s benevolence. This town, as Curtis had said, was not a town: it was Andrew up at the top and a rubble of houses at the bottom. Perhaps a few bottles of fake wine were forgivable when that wine was blood in the veins of the community.

  But Curtis was an anomaly. He’d come into town an instant millionaire with no need to be bought. And then all the attention Curtis brought with him, Andrew’s wine suddenly a source of much interest, seeing as half the town was dipped in it. If Eliza had found out the truth, and Andrew had killed her for it, maybe he wanted to nail two birds by sending Curtis away too. That had worked until Jack’s documentary had popped the cork again. Andrew declined to be interviewed, clearly hoping it would come and go, watched by few, cared about by fewer. But as the series went on, and it grew more and more popular, and then it started to look like Curtis might get out…