The Merlot Murders wcm-1

by Ellen Crosby

  Quinn introduced me as one of the owners but it was clear he was in charge. He stood behind a large old barrel on which my mother had stenciled the vineyard’s twining vine logo and used the top as a table for his notes and bottles of wine as everyone gathered around him. On the wall behind him hung another one of her cross-stitched prints, our logo and a quote from Plato—“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.”

  I stared at the print and thought of her as Quinn began talking, raising his voice so he could be heard over the hum of the fans and the gentle gurgling of the glycol-and-water solution circulating inside the refrigeration jackets on the stainless-steel containers. For someone who’d only been here a few months, he’d done his homework about our history.

  “We’ll start with our newest Chardonnay,” he said, moving to the tables behind and filling rows of glasses about a quarter full. “We just released it, so congratulations, everyone. You’re the first to try it. It’s been aged in French oak for about seven months, then bottle-aged for another year. My predecessor, Jacques Gilbert, used French-oak barrels exclusively, which are sweeter than American oak. We’re going to be mixing things up from now on and this year’s harvest will be aged in barrels purchased from a Missouri cooper. Come back in two years and see if you can tell the difference.”

  I leaned over and said in his ear, “I didn’t know that.”

  “That French oak is sweeter than American oak?”

  “That you were switching to American oak.”

  He smiled for the benefit of the crowd and murmured to me, “You do now. Let’s get these glasses filled, shall we?” He raised his voice and added, “We’re also planning to keep some Chardonnay exclusively in stainless steel. We’ll get a brighter fruit that way.”

  Another news flash. Jacques would have had a coronary.

  I helped him pour wine in silence, then we passed glasses through the crowd. “We always start tastings with the lightest wines,” he said. “This particular Chardonnay comes from some of our oldest vines. The older the vine the more complex the wine.” He raised his glass. “To your health, everyone.”

  There was a murmured response and quiet clinking of glasses.

  Quinn turned to me. “A good harvest.”

  “A very good harvest.”

  We drank in silence. The wine reminded me of Jacques. Elegant and smoky like the French oak he loved. Okay, some sweetness. What would Quinn’s American-oaked wine taste like? Big and brassy? Definitely no sweetness.

  “So how old are the vines this wine comes from?” the English woman asked.

  Quinn raised an eyebrow at me. “Uh, probably…eighteen to twenty years old. Or thereabouts.”

  I nodded. “Probably.”

  He leaned over. “I asked you for that information the other day. And where you bought the root stock.”

  “You’ll get it,” I said. “As for information, in the future I wouldn’t mind getting briefed about your plans in private before everyone else in the world hears about them.”

  “We have a deal,” he said in a low voice. “My running the place includes not questioning my every decision—or when I reveal it.”

  I set my glass down a bit sharply on the barrel. “What’s next?”

  “Merlot. We’re doing a vertical tasting.”

  As opposed to a horizontal tasting, which features the same wines from a region or varietal—such as Virginia Cabernet Sauvignons from the same year—a vertical tasting featured the same wine from the same winery, but grown in consecutive years. It was an ideal way to educate people because it became immediately apparent how the weather affected the way the same vines could produce such different wines from one year to the next.

  Quinn was good at leading the group through our last five Merlots, four in bottles that Jacques had blended with a small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon. The fifth and most recent harvest was still in barrels, where we always kept it for at least twenty months.

  “This wine will probably be in barrels for a total of sixteen, maybe eighteen months,” Quinn was saying. “I’ll siphon some from one of the barrels with this hose we call a ‘wine thief’ and you can see how it’s developing.”

  I chewed my lip and watched him work. Was he putting his own stamp so definitively on our wines, changing absolutely everything that Jacques had done, because of his ego? Or because it was a smart decision? He was moving a lot more aggressively than I’d realized.

  After the last person had left, either to buy wine at the villa or head over to the performance at the Ruins, it was just the two of us cleaning up.

  Finally he said, “I’ve been around enough women in my life to recognize the silent treatment when I’m getting it. You’re mad because I’m not coloring inside the lines the way you think I ought to be. I told you I’m not going to be put on a leash and you agreed.”

  “I didn’t think that meant changing absolutely everything we ever did.” I set an empty wineglass box on one of the tables and glared at him. “People buy our wines because of our reputation. Because of the reputation Jacques established for us. What do you think you’re doing, anyway?”

  “Me? What about you? Your grip on this place is getting more tenuous every day, from what I hear. You sold your soul to the company store, Lucie. Or Leland did. Now you have to pay back what you owe and you can’t.”

  “Do not underestimate me,” I said. “I can and I will.”

  “That remains to be seen,” he snapped. “I think we’re done here.” He strode around the room and began turning off banks of lights.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Closing up. Then, if it’s any of your business, I’m going to watch Angie. She’s doing something new for her last show. I’d like to see her.”

  How many different ways were there to take off your clothes? Somehow I figured Vinnie ran a cut-rate operation that didn’t include extras like costumes and accessories. “I’ll finish here,” I said. “You can go.”

  “I can handle it.” He walked over and stood in front of me, staring at me with those dark, intimidating eyes I’d noticed the first time I saw him—when he told me Fitz was dead.

  I said sharply, “You don’t need to be so defensive. I’d like some time alone here. Please leave.”

  “Suit yourself.” He let the door bang shut, on purpose, when he left.

  Maybe I was mistaken about him. I had thought he was extremely ambitious, just like me, and that we could be a good team professionally, even if personally we were about as compatible as bulls and china shops. But maybe “extreme ambition” was a polite way of papering over ruthlessness and greed.

  The article in the Mercury News said the police never found any of the money Allen Cantor had embezzled from Le Coq Rouge and that he’d probably parked it in some offshore account. What if he’d paid off his assistant winemaker as well, and bought his silence? The day Quinn took me out in the fields he said he might like to buy land in Virginia, own his own vineyard someday.

  Maybe he already had the money to do it. He obviously knew how dire our financial situation was. Maybe he’d been the one to make that fire sale offer and that’s why no one knew about it.

  Because it had been an inside bid.

  I drove too fast on the short trip back to the house, pushing the Volvo harder than it deserved. It responded like the workhorse it had always been, immune to my irritable mood. As soon as I was in the house I went straight to Leland’s office and found the copy of Crime and Punishment on his bookshelf. The Jefferson letter was, as Joe warned, not in good condition. I put it back on the shelf as the small clock on the fireplace mantel struck ten. On my way out of the room I stopped in front of my mother’s painting of Hugh Montgomery’s grave.

  There was something about it that eluded me. The clue to the necklace’s hiding place was either in the painting, or possibly at the cemetery itself. It wasn’t a random choice that she’d left the key and written the lines from Richard II in that note card.
Somewhere there was a locked chest and somehow—if I believed what she’d written—it was tied up in her life and honor.

  It was late, but I was in no mood to sleep. Instead I went to Leland’s once well-stocked wine cellar, now nearly empty. I picked out one of the few remaining bottles, a Pomerol, and brought it outside to the veranda. While it breathed, I lit every candle and torch until it looked like the entire place was bathed in liquid gold.

  Then I switched on the radio. WLEE. He was playing Coltrane. It matched my mood and perfectly plumbed the depths of my solitude and mined the ache in my heart. Why had I let him kiss me again? What was it that made me seek out the good-looking untamable bad boys like Greg and Philippe? Both were as seductive and dangerous as heroin and probably more addictive. Fatal charm. Devastating looks. James Dean bad-boy charisma. Any idiot knew how it was going to end. I always lost my heart to someone who didn’t have one.

  I always ended up alone.

  Fortunately no one was around when I woke up the next morning, cradling yet another empty wineglass in my lap, still dressed from the night before. The farm report was on the radio. Someone was talking about the drought and the toll it was taking on livestock all over the state. We were in for some relief though, the announcer said. After one hundred and thirty-three dry days, there was rain on the way.

  Not today, though. I walked to the edge of the veranda and looked out at the horizon. The sun was already punishing, a sharp-edged disk in a white-hot sky. The outline of the Blue Ridge was as soft and faint as a whisper.

  I ate breakfast, showered, and changed into a black tank top and jeans. Then I did something I’d been avoiding ever since I came home. I went to my mother’s study. The tight feeling in the back of my throat from the early days after her death was no longer there when I opened the door, but I did stand in the doorway for a while before I walked into the room. It had the museumlike quality of a shrine, preserved almost exactly as she’d kept it. The decaying odors that pervaded the rest of the house seemed not to have seeped into this space. Instead the chemical smells of paint and varnish hung in the air.

  I opened the windows to air out the room. Mia must have been using it as her studio. A sheet draped over my mother’s easel hid the outlines of a large canvas and on a table next to it were brushes, paints, and a much-used artist’s palette, where my mother always kept them. I lifted the sheet. A partially finished painting of four women drinking wine at an outdoor café. There was a lightness that was almost ethereal about the scene—the colors, the expressions on the faces, the filtered sunlight and soft shadows on hair and clothing. Had I not known better, it could have been my mother’s artwork—but it was my sister’s.

  I lowered the sheet and walked over to an antique trestle table where the phonograph sat. It looked like Mia had been listening to Mom’s old vinyl records. An early Jacques Brel—“Ballades & Mots d’Amour”—was still on the turntable. The album jacket lay next to it. I switched on the machine and the needle dropped into place.

  “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” One of his signature songs. “If You Go Away” it was called in English. It had been a huge hit here, too. Everyone had covered it, from Frank Sinatra to Dusty Springfield, but no one sang it like the man who wrote it. I listened to that cigarette-raspy voice lamenting heartache and loneliness. Then I went over to the bookcase and got my mother’s copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  She had bookmarked the page from Richard II with a pressed red rose. The edge of a petal crumbled when I touched it. I closed the book. Brel’s voice soared and he sang about sailing on the sun and riding on the rain. If I had been hoping for a clue to the location of the “jewel in a ten-times-barr’d-up chest,” I found none.

  The shelf below held her gardening journals, a neat row of green leather-bound volumes with gilt-edged pages and the title stamped in gold on the spine. I pulled out the first one and opened it.

  She’d written in French and, as I expected, there were detailed lists of everything she had planted. Even better, the book was filled with sketches, ideas for gardens she’d tried and discarded, as well as the final outcome. What I did not expect was that she also had written about her life, her marriage, her children. How odd that neither Fitz—nor I—had guessed that she would have chosen to weave together the history of her family and her gardens—her two passions—and that these were the diaries we’d been searching for.

  If I destroyed them as he’d wanted I’d lose any chance of recreating her plans. Who would care if I kept the books now? The meticulous accounting of plants, seeds, fertilizer, even the weather, probably wouldn’t interest Eli or Mia. I’d been the only one who liked helping in the garden. Eli used to pretend not to know the difference between a plant and a weed and Mia somehow successfully made a case for being allergic to dirt.

  I brought them all over to her desk and stacked them in a pile. Then I went through them in order. Each volume spanned two years and on the back flap my mother had listed important events and a page number, like an index. I read about people and places I had long forgotten. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words—especially when infused with emotion and warmth and the richness of well-observed detail—can bring back powerful memories.

  What was surprising was that she’d stopped writing for one two-year cycle—or else that volume was missing. I did some figuring, trying to recall what happened twenty years ago.

  From what she’d written in the previous volume it was obvious these were the years when the first vines had been planted, when Jacques and Hector had come to work for us. I had been eight years old, Eli was ten, and Mia wasn’t on the scene yet—though my mother would have been pregnant with her. It had been a busy, productive period. Odd that she would not have wanted to document it, unless the two births—Mia’s and the vineyard—kept her too busy to write.

  Brel was singing, “Je Ne Sais Pas”—“I Don’t Know.” It sounded jazzy and upbeat despite the words, another forlorn French song about lost love, except for the refrain.

  I know I love you still.

  If my mother and Fitz had an affair as I long suspected, had anything come of it? A daughter? I thought about that joyous picture I’d found in Fitz’s bedroom of him, my mother, and Mia. Even if Fitz were Mia’s biological father, I knew I would love my mother still. Would Mia?

  Everyone involved was dead, except my sister. If it were true, what would this do to her?

  Maybe there was no necklace belonging to Marie Antoinette in whatever Fitz’s key unlocked. Maybe it was, as Shakespeare wrote, the key to my mother’s honor and her life. Maybe she’d hidden the missing diary to protect her daughter—and Fitz. That’s why he wanted the diaries burned. He guessed the truth…or he knew it.

  I returned the books to the shelf and switched off the record player, slipping the record into the dust jacket. Mia’s sketchbook, which lay underneath, was open to a rough sketch of a design for the festival poster.

  Her cheerful ideas, including the one we’d used with our twining vine logo and the dancing instruments, were all there. I smiled as I turned the pages. A few blank pages, then more drawings, pencil sketches, quite different from her other work. I stopped smiling. She hadn’t been listening to Brel when she drew these. More like Wagner or Shostakovich. They were dark and macabre, the work of a tormented soul. Skeleton heads piled on top of each other in a room filled with wine casks. Another called Requiem of a face like Munch’s Scream standing over rows of coffins at the cemetery. The giant sycamore tree at the fork in the road, distorted so it looked like a crucifix dripping in blood. On the last page a robed figure with a hidden face held a sword at the throat of a woman kneeling before him. Her hair was filled with snakes, like Medusa, and her hands were clasped in prayer.

  Her face was mine.

  Chapter 16

  I slammed the book shut and flung it across the room.

  The image was so lifelike, so true, that I wondered if she’d used a photo or if she’d been able to draw my face
that perfectly from memory. The sketchbook had landed behind my mother’s desk. I retrieved it and opened it again to that last drawing.

  If it weren’t so hideous—and it weren’t me—I could admire it for her talent as an artist.

  Now what? Ask her about it? Pretend I hadn’t seen it? Were there more sketchbooks, more tortured drawings? Whose faces had she drawn in those? Fitz’s? Leland’s? More drawings of death and killing?

  I left the book where I found it, then got the keys to the Volvo. I didn’t know where I was going until I stopped at the cemetery. My old refuge.

  For a long time after my mother died, I used to talk to her headstone, telling her about my day, my problems, my life. Since my accident, we hadn’t spoken much.

  Today I had questions for both her and Leland. Was Fitz Mia’s father? If he was, had Leland known about it? It was an open secret that he had a roving eye, so by then did he care if she’d strayed? Maybe he’d sown a few oats of his own and I had other half brothers and half sisters out there somewhere who didn’t know about me, either.

  By the time my mother died, the state of my parents’ marriage—if the truth must be told—was like the Easter eggs we used to make as kids where we’d first prick pinholes in both ends and blow the raw contents into a bowl. We’d paint the shells with my mother’s paints or dye them pastel colors, then decorate them. They were always beautiful on the outside like small jewels, but so fragile—because they were hollow.

  I left my parents’ graves and went to sit by Hugh Montgomery’s sun-warmed headstone. Hugh was buried on the crest of a hill at the highest part of the cemetery from where there was a magnificent panoramic view of the Blue Ridge. I watched stray clouds make harlequin patterns of sun and shadow on the mountains, then closed my eyes.