The Merlot Murders wcm-1

by Ellen Crosby

  I stood up and found bandages in the medicine cabinet. Then I packed my bags.

  Later I replayed in my mind that phone conversation with Eli. He’d been more than a little opaque about the details of Leland’s death. And he wanted to get the funeral over with as quickly as possible.

  Odd that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me why over the phone.

  Was my brother trying to cover up our father’s murder?

  Chapter 2

  I always ask for a window seat on an airplane so I can watch cities, mountains, forests, and rivers shrink to toylike size, distilled to their most intense colors and compact shapes. From the air, the sun-bleached city of Nice is sand and terra-cotta, its patina-worn limestone buildings with their bright orange roofs densely packed along the beaches at the Promenade des Anglais. The plane’s shadow moved like a bird across the tropical water of the Bay of Angels, which shifted from aquamarine to amethyst and finally to iridescent azure in the strong Mediterranean sunshine.

  The last time I’d seen it like this was when I’d arrived, intending to stay for a month or two after I got out of the hospital. But the healing process—both physical and emotional—would not be hurried. I remained, as the months lengthened into seasons and finally, two years passed. Slowly I fell in love with the south of France.

  Who wouldn’t? Life was endlessly pleasurable, even a bit hedonistic, on the sun-drenched, sensual Côte d’Azur. It moved slower here. It was uncomplicated. I’d found a job as an English language tour guide at the International Perfume Museum in Grasse. Pleasant and undemanding, it suited me fine. I moved slower, too, and I understood, finally, that it was going to be like that for the rest of my life.

  When I left Virginia, Leland had given me the keys to the farmhouse we’d inherited from my mother’s family. He might have warned me that it was now a shambles, but of course he didn’t. One look at the place and I knew he’d stopped paying our caretaker, Jean-Luc, who used to keep the eighteenth-century mas and its gardens immaculate. No doubt he’d diverted the man’s salary into one of his fringy business deals or used it to pay off debts.

  The first time I slept there during a rainstorm I discovered how badly the roof leaked. The plumbing dated back to Napoleon. The electrical wiring had a short somewhere, which meant that switching on a light or turning on the toaster could produce a life-threatening shock. I was forced to assert my ownership against the assaults of territorial and incontinent birds that dwelled in the eaves. In short, I inhabited a ruin.

  I advertised for a handyman, offering somewhat steady work in return for room and board and that’s how Philippe came into my life. Before long, he moved into my bedroom. They say you get what you pay for and he came free of charge, but in those days I didn’t care. In the beginning, it was all bliss.

  Before I left for the airport I’d written Philippe a note, which I taped to a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, explaining what had happened. It was one of the two places I knew he would look when he finally returned to France. I’d taken my wallet with me. Philippe would drift home when his money ran out.

  As Eli predicted, I slept on the trip across the Atlantic. When I woke, we’d left the gray-blue ocean behind and the plane was starting its descent. We moved inland and the landscape unrolled in pale green and clay-red checkerboards anchored by farmhouses, barns, and silos with silver domes that flashed like lighthouses when the sun caught them. In the distance the hazy sweep of the low-slung Blue Ridge Mountains bracketed the view.

  My family owned nearly five hundred acres near the small village of Atoka in the heart of Virginia’s affluent horse and hunt country. As the crow flies, it was about fifty miles from Washington, D.C. Our land had belonged to a member of the Montgomery family for more than two hundred years, a grant to my ancestor Hamish Montgomery for service to his country in the French and Indian War. He’d called it Highland Farm in honor of his regiment, the 77th Highlanders, whose exploits in that war were legendary.

  The farm was located in an area that straddled Loudoun and Fauquier Counties, a part of the Old Dominion romantically famous not only for great scenic beauty but also as a history-haunted place of glory and tragedy. The streets of Middleburg, the town next door to Atoka, were named for the patriots who founded the country—Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, among others—a number of whom had lived locally. It was also the site of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, or as we preferred to call it, “The War Between the States.”

  Twenty years ago my parents decided to try planting vines on a few acres—my mother’s passion, mostly. Before her death six years ago she had talked unceasingly about Virginia as the first place in the New World where anyone had tried to produce wine. She believed that what we were doing now was part of a historic continuum begun at the Jamestown settlements and spurred on by Thomas Jefferson, who had done much to foster a wine industry in the Commonwealth. I still remember her studying his vineyard notes from Monticello like some kind of Bible—Jefferson was considered the patron saint of Virginia vineyards—and that faraway look she’d get in her eyes.

  Then she would take me out in the fields where she taught me about the cycle of véraison, or ripening, as the grapes developed into mature fruit. Though she could have given me a complex scientific explanation for what was happening, she chose instead to tell her young daughter that the sun and the rain gave the grapes an indefinable quality known as goût de terroir, which means literally “the taste of the land.” No other grapes in the world—and no other wine—she assured me, would taste like ours. Never forget it, she’d said.

  I hadn’t.

  Eli was waiting for me, as promised, when I pushed my luggage cart through the double doors into the main part of the international terminal. He hugged me in the stiff-armed way brothers and sisters do and murmured in my ear, “I can feel your ribs. You’re a walking X ray, Luce.”

  Spoken by someone who’d lost sight of his own ribs some twenty pounds ago. At least. He had the beginning of a small, self-indulgent paunch. I pinched his new set of love handles. “I can’t feel yours.”

  So much for the greeting.

  “Yeah, well, I added a few pounds but it’s all muscle. I play a lot of tennis now. Come on. Let’s get out of here.” He commandeered my luggage cart. “Can you manage? We could get a wheelchair, if you want.”

  The first time he’d ever treated me like I was handicapped. “Why would I need a wheelchair? I can manage just fine, thanks.”

  “Don’t be so touchy, babe. Just asking.”

  It was also the first time he’d ever called me “babe.”

  I’d been expecting the brother who once went a month without brushing his hair to see what it would look like. The Eli who used to wear whatever he found on the floor in the morning, retrieving it from where he’d dropped it the night before as long as it didn’t smell too nasty. Instead I got a GQ model, dressed in a pale pink Lacoste polo shirt, khaki shorts, sockless in doeskin-soft Italian loafers with tassels. Someone who clearly understood the difference between mousse and gel and cultivated a regular relationship with a blow dryer.

  We emerged from the terminal into the sizzling white heat of a late-August afternoon. Eli whipped on a pair of Ray-Bans and I blinked in the hard light.

  “It’s a hundred and two,” Eli said, staring at his watch.

  “Degrees? Don’t tell me that watch is connected to the National Weather Service, too.”

  “I wish. I heard it on the radio driving here. I’m just looking at the time. We’re forty-two minutes behind schedule.”

  “This is as fast as I go, Eli.”

  He looked surprisingly uncomfortable. “Oh. Sorry.”

  He stopped behind a black Jaguar XJ so shiny I could see my reflection in it. The license plate said Eli 1.

  I’m not a car person. If it moves when you turn the key in the ignition, I’m happy. Two years ago Eli drove a beat-up Honda with a dented front fender.

  “New car?”

 
; He gave me the dumb-question look and hit the button on his key to turn off the alarm and unlock the doors. “Yup.”

  In the old days I would have razzed him about his new toy and the hair and the clothes. He would have retorted with something in kind in the ego-deflating way siblings have of keeping each other humble. But these were the new days so I said nothing.

  The Jaguar purred toward the tollbooth and slid onto the highway. Office buildings in various stages of construction sprouted like weeds after rain on both sides of the road. Red gashes in the clay soil looked like open sores where the earth had been bulldozed and flattened. Two years ago this had been farmland. Maybe if I’d seen the destruction unfold gradually it would have seemed less brutal.

  “When did all this happen?” I asked.

  “All what?”

  “All this building. Why do they have to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Destroy everything.”

  “While you were away,” Eli said, and I knew that any sentence beginning with those words was going to end in some kind of indictment, “progress happened.” He emphasized the word “progress.”

  “I don’t think this is progress.”

  “That’s because you spent the last two years in France in a fossilized village, where they have laws to protect every stone or patch of ground because Joan of Arc or DeGaulle might have walked on it. Look, Lucie, the world didn’t stop just because you weren’t around to watch it change.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Don’t you.”

  “Say what you want, these buildings are ugly. Look at them. All the same. Who builds this stuff?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said my-brother-the-

  architect, “we do.” He pointed to a building striped with pink stone and blue-mirrored glass. “My firm built that one. We won a design award for it.”

  Frankly he could have turned off the air-conditioning after that remark. The temperature in the car verged on glacial.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “I didn’t mean to insult your building.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.”

  I stared out the window. After a while I said, “What was it you wouldn’t tell me on the phone?”

  He sighed noisily. “Oh God. Where do I start? It’s Fitz. I want you to talk to him and tell him to knock off spreading these crazy stories about someone bumping off Leland. You’re his goddaughter. He’ll listen to you.”

  “What if they’re not crazy stories?” I asked. “You wouldn’t be covering up something, would you?”

  He looked at me over the top of the Ray-Bans. “Don’t be an ass.”

  “I’m not an ass. I just don’t believe Fitz would say something like that if there weren’t some truth to it.”

  “I hate to burst your bubble,” he said cruelly, “but Fitz is a barely functioning alcoholic. Catch him late enough in the day and he doesn’t know if he’s on foot or on horseback. Get it now? The elevator doesn’t make it to the top floor anymore. The porch light’s on but nobody’s…”

  “Stop it!” I yelled, covering my ears with my hands. “Please stop it!”

  He drove in silence for a while, but a muscle worked in his jaw and I knew we weren’t done.

  “Just suppose,” I said after a few minutes, “that he’s right. What about some of Leland’s business partners? What do we know about any of them, except that most of them probably live under rocks? What if Leland owed someone money and he couldn’t pay it back?”

  “And some hit man took him out.” Eli looked at me curiously. “That’s a hell of a theory for you, Luce. You, ah, wouldn’t be in financial trouble yourself, would you?”

  “Of course not. I’m fine. I got money from the accident settlement, remember?” What little I’d hung on to that Philippe hadn’t spent. Mostly in Monte Carlo.

  I still had nightmares about the midsummer’s evening we’d left the casino—he’d won, for a change—when two men wearing ski masks forced us off the Route de la Moyenne Corniche near the medieval mountaintop village of Eze. The view of the Mediterranean was spectacular from that height, especially at sunset. I wasn’t the only one who appreciated it. One of the men held a gun to Philippe’s head and told him in vulgar terms that he would be seeing the water from a much closer vantage point unless he handed over all his money.

  After they pistol-whipped him they took his belt and bound my hands tightly to the steering wheel of his Porsche. It took a long time before Philippe came around. When he did, my wrists were bleeding and I was still trying to untie his belt with my teeth. I wanted to go straight to the hospital and the police but Philippe said it was too dangerous. They’d find out. They’d come back for us.

  That’s when I knew it hadn’t really been a robbery. He owed someone that money. I realized, then, how much he was like my father, a charming façade masking a complete fake—the kind of man who’d swear over the phone he loved you while making the call from another woman’s bed.

  “Look, sweetheart,” Eli was saying as if he read my mind, “Leland’s so-called business partners were flakes who sold stuff like extraterrestrial real estate. Not the mob. I’m talking condo developments on the moon. Buy early for the best view of Earth. Losers. Like he was.”

  “You know, Eli, you’ve changed.”

  I saw the muscle twitch in his jaw again. “Let’s just say I got sick of watching Leland blow all of Mom’s money. I don’t know why you’re defending him, anyway. What did he ever do for you?”

  I stared mutely at my hands folded in my lap. Like mother, like daughter. And Eli didn’t know about Philippe.

  “Now you see what I mean, don’t you?” he said. “That’s why I need you to get Fitz off this crazy theory of his and make him stop talking. Come on, Lucie, you’ve been gone two years. It’s payback time. You owe this to the family and you’re the only one he’ll listen to.” He emphasized each word like he was talking to a child or a slow-witted person.

  “Hell, the gossip’s already started,” he added. “When I stopped by the general store this morning, Thelma was up one side of me and down the other. I told her Bobby said it was an accident. She clucked around for a while then said, ‘Poor old Lee. I guess we just ought to leave him lay where Jesus flang him.’ I told her that’s just what we intended to do. So now I want you to tell me that you’re with us on this. Got it?”

  Too bad those Ray-Bans were opaque. I couldn’t see Eli’s eyes at all. Though probably if I could, all I’d see would be my own reflection. No window on the soul there. If he still had one.

  “Us,” I said. “You mean Mia agrees with you?”

  He said tersely, “She’ll do whatever I tell her.”

  That figured. Though she hadn’t always been so compliant.

  Mia had been fourteen when our mother was killed one fine spring day, six years ago. The two of them had gone riding together. The child had returned to the stables alone hours later, barely coherent, as she tried to describe where Mom’s horse had stumbled, for no apparent reason, while jumping one of the low Civil War–era dry-stacked stone walls that rimmed the perimeter of the farm.

  She never regained consciousness. A small mercy. She died that evening. The doctor in the emergency room said later that she might have lived if she’d gotten medical care sooner.

  No one told Mia about that conversation, but still she had been too unwell to attend the funeral. Afterward Leland, whose interest in fatherhood had been borderline nonexistent when Mom was alive, escaped home as often as possible. It didn’t take long for Mia, left to her own devices while Eli and I were away at our respective universities, to acquire a tattoo, a boyfriend with a slow wit and a fast car, and a pack-a-day habit. When Jacques caught her and her boyfriend soused to the gills in the woods by the winery, even Leland agreed it was time to do something.

  Surprisingly he was the one who thought of asking our cousin Dominique to come
stay with Mia. The daughter of my mother’s sister, she was studying in Paris to be a chef. Leland persuaded Fitz to offer her a job at the Goose Creek Inn and promised free room and board in return for “keeping an eye” on Mia. He said it would be a great opportunity to perfect her English, along with the chance to work with a top American chef.

  Dominique told me later he’d described my sister as a sweet child with the morals of a Girl Scout who needed a “mother figure” to give her gentle guidance. It took less than twenty-four hours to figure out what he’d really meant was that she needed a Mother Superior-cum-parole-officer and a short leash. Mia hadn’t been overjoyed to report her comings and goings to her cousin after so much unsupervised hell-raising, but eventually she seemed to settle down and we were less worried about the road to perdition.

  “Well?” Eli said. “You didn’t answer me. We need to present a unified front on this. As a family.”

  The statement was freighted with so much latent irony that, for a moment, I thought he might be joking. But he was peering over the top of the Ray-Bans again. He was dead serious.

  I hadn’t had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours and my head still ached. Eli could be relentless when he wanted something, like a dog with a bone.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. Can we change the subject now, please?”

  “Of course. Actually, there is something else we need to discuss before we get home.” He paused. “The bad news.”

  He waited while that sank in.

  “Well,” I said wearily, “glad we got the good news out of the way first.”

  “It has nothing to do with Leland.”

  He had turned west onto Route 50 and the scenery was all farmland now. The Indians made the path for this road three hundred years ago when they were following the trail for buffalo, which probably accounted for its gentle twists and turns. Here, at least, nothing had changed. Miles of low stone walls that were pre–Civil War lined the sides of the road. Horses grazed serenely on stubbly brown fields and the corn was late-summer high. The traffic had petered out to a single John Deere tractor motoring amiably down the middle of the road. The driver gave way to let Eli pass, waving as we zoomed by.