by Ellen Crosby
“We agreed I’d pay you after we talk.”
“I haven’t got long. I’m leaving in a few hours.” The room was nearly empty except for a floor lamp with a torn lampshade, a dirty beanbag chair pulled next to the fireplace, and two wooden crates full of file folders. The words “Knight & Rust Auto Body” were stenciled in black on the sides of the crate. The air-conditioning was on and the thermostat had been set to “arctic.” I shivered.
Maybe a moving company had already come and taken away her furniture. Or maybe I was looking at the place fully furnished.
“I’d offer you a seat, but…” She gestured vaguely at the beanbag.
“I’m fine.” I leaned on my cane.
“What do you want?”
“Angela told me you quit your job because someone was stalking you.”
She walked over to one of the deep-silled windows and picked up a pack of cigarettes balanced against an overflowing ashtray. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?” She smacked the small box and extracted a cigarette, lighting it with the fluid movements of a well-practiced habit.
“You’re the one in a hurry.”
Through a blast of smoke she said, “It’s true. What’s it to you?”
“Who was it?”
She was standing almost in profile, caught in a shaft of mid-afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window. It cast her face in shadow and edged her silhouette—especially that russet hair—so she appeared to be backlit like some heavenly apparition. Another deep pull on the cigarette. “I don’t know.”
“Then how did you know it was an old man?”
“Because he left a calling card.” She crossed the room to the fireplace mantel and picked up a pair of eyeglasses. She came over to where I stood and held them out. “Know what these are? Old people’s glasses. You know, when you get old and you can’t read small print anymore? He left them when he tossed my house.”
I looked at the half-glasses and felt guilty relief. They weren’t Leland’s. He’d worn bifocals. “Some old man robbed you? What did he take?”
Sara shrugged. “Nothing. At least, I don’t think anything is missing. He just trashed the place. I mean, he trashed everything.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“He had a good time in my underwear drawer, let me tell you.” She stubbed out the cigarette in the too-full ashtray. “Some people are sick.”
“Did you report it to the police?”
She kept stubbing out the cigarette. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I occasionally have, uh, friends over after work. I had a guest that night. We shared a couple of joints and I didn’t want the cops around. Obviously I got on the wrong side of some jerk.”
“And you’re running away because…” I paused, trying to figure out how to say it. “Someone broke into your house and didn’t take anything?”
“Oh, please. Whoever it was tried to burn this house down.” She lit another cigarette. “With me in it.”
“Oh my God.” Not Leland. “What happened? When was this?”
“Two nights ago.”
Definitely not Leland. “You stopped him?”
“My friend smelled gasoline. It was three in the morning. We weren’t sleeping, thank God. He went outside. Next thing, I heard him shouting, then a car engine started and someone took off.”
“He didn’t go after him?”
“Not in his birthday suit he didn’t. His wife might have been a little upset if he got picked up for indecent exposure.” She inhaled deeply. “By then whoever it was probably was halfway to Philomont. Or wherever.”
“Do you mind if I have a look around your yard?”
“Knock yourself out. You won’t find anything. I hosed everything down the next morning.” Sara flicked an ash into the fireplace. “I still don’t know why you’re asking all this.”
Neither did I. Except there was some connection between us. I couldn’t figure out what it was. “I found your name and phone number in a file that belonged to my father, Leland Montgomery. Did you ever talk to him? Did he ever come to see you at work?”
She snorted. “There were loads of guys who came to see me at work. You lose track, you know? And, to be honest, when I’m up on that stage dancing, I never focus on the faces. I wear contacts and I take them out when I dance so everyone is a blur. That way I never know who is out there. It’s better that way.”
That explained her tough as nails machismo. “What about the other entertaining you do? They’re not faceless,” I said. “Are they?”
“No.” She flushed. “But it’s over now. I’m out of here. I’m getting so lost in New York no one will ever find me.”
“What about Greg Knight?”
“What about him?”
“He was hanging around you a lot at Mom’s.”
She stared pointedly at my cane. “Don’t tell me you’re still carrying a torch for him. He made you the way you are now.”
My turn to flush. The way I was now. Just what, exactly, was that? “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So what do you want to know about him?”
“Were you sleeping with him?”
Her laugh made me think of long shards of broken glass. She squashed her cigarette in the ashtray and mashed it down hard.
“Then why was he hanging around you?” I persisted.
“Our fathers were business partners,” she said. “He was looking for a few things that belonged to his old man. Thought I might have them. Rusty took all the stuff from the garage after Jimmy died.”
“What things?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Papers. Records.” She gestured to the crates. “He came over once and looked through these.”
“Did he find what he wanted?”
“I guess. I don’t know,” she said again. “He was here by himself. It would have been simpler if he took the crates like I told him to. Save me getting rid of them.”
“How long ago did he look through the papers?” I asked.
She looked at the ceiling and frowned. “Two months ago. Maybe a little less.”
“Did he give you money to help you get out of town?”
“What of it?”
So maybe Greg had been telling the truth. Sara was like a kid sister to him and he was helping her out of a jam.
“So where’s yours?” she added. “The money.”
I took it out of my purse and handed it to her. “Can I keep those glasses?”
“I don’t want them.” She stuffed the bills inside her sports bra. “You still haven’t said why you’re asking me all this. You think the old guy might have been your father? Is that it?”
“No!” I said sharply. “These aren’t his glasses.”
“Your fifteen minutes are up.” She shrugged then. “Time to go.”
She held the door as I left and slammed it behind me. I heard the chain slide back in place before I got to the first step.
Most of the grass in her backyard was dead and the garden beds were bare spots and weeds. I walked slowly around the perimeter of the house and saw nothing. The same in the garage, except for two foul-smelling trash bins with flies buzzing around them. I turned my face away as I lifted the lids and then looked inside quickly.
Garbage.
I glanced at the house and saw a curtain move in a window. Sara Rust, spying on me. Unless it was someone else.
I had assumed she was home alone. Maybe I assumed wrong and she was still entertaining.
I had to return Hector’s pickup, so I drove directly to the winery after leaving Aldie. The crush pad had been cleaned and someone had closed the hangar doors to the barrel room. I let myself in through the steel-plated side door. The exhaust fans made their usual heavy thrumming sound as they moved the cooling air around, clearing out the buildup of carbon dioxide. A grapevine thermometer on the wall near the door read sixty-seven degrees. The room needed to be between fifty-five and sixty-five. Jacques had drummed it into me the first time I left
the door ajar when I was about six years old that air and heat are the two greatest destroyers of wine.
I moved into the room and saw Quinn through the glass laboratory window. He poured something from a beaker into a row of test tubes, then looked up briefly and nodded at me before returning to his work. Joe and Hector were over by the row of stainless-steel tanks, on their knees straightening out hoses. I joined them, holding up the keys to Hector’s pickup.
“Your truck is in the parking lot. Thanks for the loan.”
“No problem.” Hector smiled, showing even white teeth against caffe latte skin, but he looked tired as he pocketed the keys.
“Where’s the Volvo?” Joe asked.
“Garage.”
“What happened?”
“It wouldn’t start this morning.”
“Tough break.” He leaned a ladder against the tank.
“I’ll do that, Joe,” Hector said as Joe put a foot on the bottom rung. “You take care of the hoses. You do a good job getting the seals tight. This tank and number five need to be racked into number seven.”
“I’ll get the clamps,” I said as Joe fitted the hoses between the smaller three-hundred-fifty-gallon tank, which had the ladder against it, and number seven, one of the large thousand-gallon tanks. I handed him the clamps and he fixed them so there was an airtight seal around the outlets.
Hector climbed the ladder as nimbly as a monkey and popped open the cover so the tank wouldn’t collapse as it emptied. We’d only forgotten to do that once and ended up with something that looked like a crumpled oversized soda can.
Joe turned on the pump. “How was harvest lunch?” he asked above the noise of gurgling wine moving through the hoses from the smaller to the larger tank.
“Okay. One of the guests was a congressman who brought his staff.”
“Great!”
“He was from California.”
“Oh. Hard sell, hunh?” He tapped his finger against the gauge on the side of the tank. “I think after we rack this and number five over and sugar them, Quinn wants to move everything into barrels. What’s left in the other tanks stays in stainless steel.”
The pump sounded like it was beginning to suck air. Joe switched it off, unclamping the hose and unlocking the large port-holelike panel on the front of the tank. “Hit that switch, will you?”
He opened the man-sized porthole door and disappeared inside the tank from the waist up, taking the hose with him. I switched on the pump again and heard him vacuuming the remaining wine out of the dish at the bottom. A minute later his voice reverberated eerily against the stainless steel. “Okay!”
I flipped the switch and he popped back out of the tank, like a life-sized jack-in-the-box. “Let’s get the other one. Number five.”
Hector moved the ladder and popped the top of the second tank. “Stop flirting with Lucie, Joe, and get the sugar and the yeast.”
Joe winked at me and left.
“You doing all right, Lucita?” Hector climbed down the ladder and reclamped the hose to the second tank. “Okay, you can turn the pump on.”
I obeyed. “I’m doing fine.”
“How come you didn’t tell Joe the truth about your car?” He saw the look on my face and added, “You’re lucky to be alive, you know?”
“How did you find out? Please don’t say it was Thelma. I won’t be able to go by the general store for a year.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Hollis Maddox dropped by. He said to tell you the Volvo’s at the Gas-o-Rama and the mechanic wants you to call him so he can tell you how much it’s gonna cost.” The pump was sucking air again so Hector switched it off. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I think someone tried to run me off the road last night.”
He vacuumed the rest of the wine from the dish. “I bet it was those kids. They get borracho—drunk—then they drag race along that flat stretch of Mosby’s Highway. Didn’t used to be like that when everyone knew everyone else around here. Now we got all those new subdivisions over in Leesburg and Sterling and parents too busy making money to spend time with their kids. So they get up to no good.”
“I don’t know who it was. It was just one car.” But it wasn’t drunk teenagers, either.
Joe returned with a fifty-pound bag of sugar slung over one shoulder and a large bucket of yeast. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Not at all,” I said quickly, as Quinn joined us carrying a tape measure, calculator, and a clipboard.
“Private conversation?” He pulled a wax crayon from behind his ear.
“Nope.” Hector said, glancing at me.
“Then let’s get the show on the road,” Quinn said.
I watched while Joe sugared the wine and Hector dumped the yeast into a bucket of distilled water. It hissed as it heated up, bubbling and foaming like witch’s brew. He poured it into the tank as I stirred the mix with a large paddle.
When we were finished Quinn and Hector set up more hoses for siphoning the wine into barrels. Almost as soon as we filled the casks and closed them, the wine began bubbling in the see-through air locks. The noise level in the room grew exponentially louder. Fermenting wine sounds like a roaring river.
“You all right, Lucie?” Hector joined Joe and me as we moved down the row, checking the air locks to make sure the seals were tight.
“I think it’s the CO2,” I said. “It’s making me dizzy.”
Quinn came up behind us. “We’re about done here. If you’re feeling light-headed, maybe you should take off. I don’t want you passing out and I don’t need you anymore.”
He moved on before I could reply. “Come on, chiquita,” Hector said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He spoke to Quinn in Spanish, “I’ll take her home. Then I’ll be back.”
“Don’t bother. You’ve done enough. Joe and I can take care of what’s left.” He, too, spoke Spanish and I’d noticed it was their preferred language of communication.
When we got to the parking lot Hector said, “How you gonna get around without a car, Lucita? Sounds like the Volvo will be in the shop for a few days.”
“Rent something, I guess.”
“You know,” he said, “you could borrow the truck if you want. Bonita left her car here when she went back to Colly-fornia. Her last year studying enology at U.C., Davis. I can use her Corvette. Needs driving, anyway.”
“That would be great, Hector. Thanks.”
“Only thing is, you gotta drop me back at the cottage.” He threw me the keys. “I need a ride.”
Hector and Serafina lived in one of the two remaining tenant cottages on our property—Quinn had the other one. They were located off the main road on a small dirt spur, near where the road split at the sycamore tree.
“So Bonita’s doing well at school?” I asked.
“Top of her class.” He smiled broadly. “She’s gonna be a first-class winemaker. You wait and see.”
“She had a good example.” I shifted the truck into first gear. “Maybe she could work here after she graduates. I don’t know how long Quinn will be around. We’ll need a first-class winemaker.”
“You got one. Queen’s a good man.” It sounded like a reprimand.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’m a good judge of what’s in here.” He laid a hand over his heart. “He knows what he’s doing with the grapes, too. I know you miss Jeck, but you would be loca en la cabeza to let Queen go. I don’t know why you don’t like him.”
“I don’t like him because he swaggers around here like he owns the place and I’m in the way.” I swerved a bit too sharply, overcorrecting to avoid a pothole. “He was fired from the last place he worked. Did you know that?”
“He was not fired. He left.” Hector put a hand on the dashboard. “They drive like this in France?”
“Like what? And the winemaker is in jail. The vineyard had to close. Those aren’t sterling references.”
We pulled up in front of the red-brick co
ttage, which sat serenely in a clearing in the middle of the woods. A fresh coat of paint on the wraparound porch and masses of late summer impatiens, geraniums, and petunias blooming in garden beds and cascading from window boxes made it look like something out of a fairy tale. Pink, white, and lilac Rose of Sharon bushes lined both sides of a fieldstone walk.
I turned off the engine motor.
“You know, this is a great country you got here, Lucita. I’m proud my kids are citizens. Because in los Estados Unidos you believe someone is innocent until they are proven guilty.”
“Do you really think someone as sharp as Quinn could be completely in the dark about what his boss was doing?” I folded my arms across my chest and stared through the windshield, unwilling to meet his eyes. “That’s a bit of a stretch, Hector.”
“I think when you respect someone, or love them, it can make you blind sometimes. Your mama was like that. She didn’t see any of your papa’s…ways. Some of the things he did that maybe he shouldn’t oughta. I think it was like that with Queen. He respected that winemaker, that Cantor.” He reached over and put his hand under my chin, turning me so I faced him. “Sometimes it’s not about the cabeza, chiquita. Sometimes it’s the corazón. Entiendes?”
I chewed my lip and nodded. He got out of the car and I started the engine. I saw him waving at me through the rearview mirror. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Don’t drive too fast!”
I waved a hand out the window. He was still standing there as I rounded a corner and could no longer see him.
The answering machine was beeping when I walked through the front door. Two messages. Kit, asking me to call her as soon as I could and Hollis Maddox giving me the phone number of the Gas-o-Rama, in case I didn’t have it.
A stair tread creaked behind me as I copied down the number. Mia, tanned and gorgeous, dressed in a white mini-skirt and a cropped black sweater. She stood at the top of the stairs carrying a bright red canvas suitcase in one hand. In the other, she held Leland’s revolver.
It was pointed at me.
Chapter 21
“Oh God. Please, Mia,” I whispered. “Don’t.”
“Who’s there?” Her voice sounded unnaturally high-pitched. I saw the flash of light and heard the bullet whiz past me. A vase filled with drooping flowers left from Leland’s funeral shattered as she screamed. I knelt and covered my face with my hands against an explosion of water, porcelain, roses, gladiolus, and dagger ferns.
