by Penny Warner
“To cash in on the boutique trend, I guess. I heard her wines haven’t been selling well the past few years. Apparently she just recycled her stock with new labels.”
“Javier, do you think Rob—” I stopped midsentence. Javier was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw Allison standing behind me.
I got up from her seat. “Sorry. I just wanted to congratulate Javier on his win.”
Javier also stood. “Excuse me,” he said abruptly, and walked away, headed in the direction of the restrooms.
“So, anything new on the murder?” Allison said, taking her seat.
“No. Have you heard from Marie? Or Rob?” I asked.
“I turned my cell phone off during the games,” she said. “Too distracting.”
Wow. This woman was something else.
“Well, good luck.” I started to walk away.
“I don’t need it,” she said. “I’ve always had good luck.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded and made my way back to my seat, tired of trying to find something redeeming in Allison. So far all I could see was a cold, self-centered, wannabe diva.
I wondered if I’d be adding murderer to her list of traits.
Chapter 10
PARTY-PLANNING TIP #10
When serving wines at your wine-tasting party, begin with dry wines first; then serve red wines, and finally sweet wines. If the guests drink sweet wines first, like dessert, that may ruin their taste for the drier wines. Of course, by the end of the tasting, the guests may not care what they’re drinking…
I returned to my seat to finish the last bingo games. So far, neither Mother nor I had won. Two elderly gentlemen won the next two games, and I noticed that Allison jumped up from her seat and hustled over to congratulate each of the men personally, with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. When a woman won the next game, however, Allison remained at her place.
“Crap,” Helen said, after her latest loss. “Deanna Mitchell wins a game almost every week. She’s probably cheating somehow.”
Surprised at her language and outburst, I turned to Helen, who up until this moment had been quietly daubing her sheets with yellow ink.
“You really think she might be cheating?” I asked her.
She shrugged, but her tight lips quivered as if eager to say more.
“Larry says it isn’t easy to cheat at bingo these days,” I said, prompting her.
She leaned over to me and whispered, “Larry is a fool.”
That was harsh, I thought. Was this about something else? Maybe jealousy over Larry’s interest in my mother? She might have been their same age, in spite of her heavily lined face, graying hair, and formless figure.
I decided to ignore her last comment, but she cursed again when a woman at the front of the hall called out, “Bingo!” after the next game.
“This is all JoAnne Douglas’s fault,” Helen mumbled, throwing down her dauber.
“What did you say?” I said, not sure I heard her correctly over the loud chatter.
“JoAnne Douglas. She’s jinxed the game.”
“What do you mean?” I wondered why this woman thought JoAnne could have anything to do with bingo.
Helen harrumphed. “Like I said, she tried to stop our games. She said gambling was contributing to the decay of the Napa Valley. Made a lot of people mad, me included. Then she goes and gets herself killed. Bad omen.”
“How did you hear about JoAnne?”
She grunted. “It’s all over town. There are no secrets for long around here. Word spreads faster than a vineyard fire.” She crossed herself and kissed her fingertips.
Helen appeared to be full of superstition, but I wondered if she had more to say that could be important. I decided to poke the bear. “It seems like quite a few people had a grudge against JoAnne.”
“More like who didn’t—other than her shyster lawyer. Thinks he’s a rock star with all those billboard and bus-bench pictures of his mug around town.”
Billboards? “You don’t mean Kyle Bennett?”
She nodded. “That bloodsucker made money off everyone, including her.”
These were probably the words of an angry, aging woman blowing off steam because she was losing at bingo, I thought. So far she’d spoken in generalities. Did she have something specific to say? I tried a different approach in my questioning.
“So Kyle worked for JoAnne?” It sounded like Kyle, now representing Rob, might have had a conflict of interest.
“Tight as a cork in a bottle, those two,” Helen said, pulling at the side of her hair. When one side seemed to hang down farther than the other side, I realized she was wearing a wig, and the gray hair at the temples was her real hair poking out from underneath. “He helped her with all her political crap, and she paid him well for it. Bought himself a fancy car and a fancy suit. Too bad the killer didn’t get him too.”
Whoa. I hoped there wasn’t a gun in her bingo caddy.
“Any idea why JoAnne had it in for the Christophers?” This chatty woman was becoming a gold mine of information.
Helen daubed the free spaces on her next bingo sheet as she talked. “JoAnne never stopped yapping about the Christophers. And his neighbors—that movie guy and the ex-governor. She accused them all of using ‘marginal land’—the hillsides, the streams.” Helen used stiff finger quotes for the term. “She claimed they were ‘ruining the wine country.’” More finger quotes.
The movie guy and the ex-governor? Apparently Nick Madeira’s and Dennis Brien’s vineyards were also targets of JoAnne’s political agenda. And if that was the case, perhaps they should be considered suspects in her death.
“You’re talking about the Madeiras and Briens?” I asked to confirm. I didn’t want to go around putting random suspects on my list.
Helen set down her dauber and rubbed her hands. Arthritis, I suspected. Maybe this woman was older than I’d originally guessed. “Yep. JoAnne claimed those vineyards would endanger the trees, then the hillsides would erode, and then the streams would be polluted with their pesticides. Yak, yak, yak. I heard she sued all three of them because they weren’t ‘green enough’ for her. Accused them of fouling the streams and reservoirs for their own ‘personal gain.’” In spite of her arthritis, she loved using those finger quotes.
“Really?”
She shrugged. “Hell, everyone uses pesticides. There wouldn’t be any wine if they didn’t. A little pesticide ain’t gonna kill you.”
I smiled at her attitude toward health. “Did any of them try to stop JoAnne somehow?” Besides murder, I thought.
Helen snorted. “I heard they all ‘donated’ to her cause, which means they paid her off. That’s when she supposedly dropped the lawsuits.”
The announcer’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “The last game of the day will be another Postage Stamp Bingo. Everyone ready?”
Helen focused her attention on her sheets, hovering over them as if they were already winners. I missed hearing the first ball, too busy thinking about what Helen had said. I tried to focus on the next couple, but my mind kept fleeing back to her words. The woman may have been getting on in years, but she was still as bright as her yellow dauber. I wondered if there was some other agenda behind her anger toward JoAnne, other than the fact that the dead woman had tried to interfere with Helen’s bingo life.
“Cee-five,” the caller said.
“Bingo!” Larry shouted while I was still trying to catch up with the last three numbers called.
Mother clapped and squealed with delight. Constance leaned over and said, “Congratulations,” to Larry, while Helen mumbled something—no doubt the word “crap.”
A man wearing a waist apron came over to Larry, took his winning bingo sheet, and handed it to a player at a different table. The player confirmed the winning numbers and returned it to the apron man, who pulled out an envelope. He counted out two hundred and fifty dollars and gave it to Larry with a “congratulations.” Larry gave the apron man a five-dollar tip,
then turned to Mother and handed her a twenty. She grinned with delight.
I glanced over at Allison and Javier to see their reaction to the win. Javier was eating another candy bar. But Allison had disappeared.
“Do you ever worry about being robbed?” I asked Larry as he escorted us to the parking lot. His arm was around Mother’s waist, guiding her along, a big, jovial grin on his face. This man was a happy winner.
He shook his head. “Not here. Karna, the security guard, watches the door and parking lot. She’s good about making sure we’re all safe in our cars until we drive off. After that, we’re on our own.”
I looked back at the building. Sure enough, Karna the guard stood watching as the crowd, mostly elderly, dispersed in the lot, entered their cars, and left the premises. I wondered if Larry had tipped her too. Apparently it was protocol to share a little of the wealth, and he’d been very generous.
“Larry,” I said, after he helped Mother into my car. “That woman sitting next to me—Helen? Does—did—she have any kind of grudge against JoAnne Douglas? She seemed to imply that JoAnne sued some of the winery owners and then dropped the suit when they ‘donated’ to her political cause. Do you know anything about this?”
Larry’s beaming smile drooped. “Don’t listen to Helen. She’s a cantankerous old lady who’s still angry that JoAnne tried to bust up bingo. Helen takes her game very seriously, in case you didn’t notice.”
“I sensed that,” I said. I opened my car door and got in, then turned to Mother.
She waved to Larry as he headed for his own car, an aging Volvo; then she looked at me blankly, as if she’d forgotten where we were.
I smiled at her and patted her leg. Glancing at the clock on the MINI’s dashboard—four p.m.—I asked, “Thirsty?”
She reached over and patted my leg back. “I’m so dry I’m spitting cotton,” she said, quoting Marilyn Monroe from Bus Stop.
I started the engine.
I found the Douglas Family Winery location using my iPhone GPS app. We pulled up in front of an aging but still charming Victorian house a mile or so from the Purple Grape. The sign that welcomed visitors read, “Open Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” but a makeshift sign that had been propped on a sawhorse at the driveway entrance announced, “Closed.”
“You know I don’t drink, Presley,” Mother said. “Not since my third husband died. And you shouldn’t either. Besides, this winery is closed. See the sign?”
“I’m not surprised, considering they’ve had a death in the family.” I opened my car door, stepped out, and walked around to my mother’s side.
“Presley! Is this that poor woman’s place?” she asked when I opened her door.
“It sure is. Shall we have a look around?”
Mother eyed me, then reluctantly stepped out of the car. “I don’t like this…”
“It’ll be okay. Come on. I just want to see if any of her employees are around. Maybe I can find out more about JoAnne Douglas.”
Mother followed me down the stone-paved path to the Victorian’s double doors, her heels clicking on the hard surface. A sign overhead read, “Welcome to the Douglas Family Winery, Since 1923.” I knocked, then tried one of the ornately carved doors. No response. I stood back, scanning the large, gingerbread-laced house, and spotted a small cottage off to the side that looked like a miniature version of the grand home.
I headed over with Mother in tow, wondering if there might be someone living there. Had JoAnne stayed in the cottage rather than the large house? I knocked on the door. Again, no answer.
“Hey!” I heard a voice call from the double-door entrance where we’d just been. We walked back over.
“Hi,” I said, shading my eyes from the late afternoon sun. “Sorry to bother you. I’m Presley Parker and this is my mother—”
“We’re closed,” the twentysomething woman said, cutting me off. She stood in the doorway wearing a white shirt, black skirt, and low, sensible pumps. The black stitching on the shirt read “Douglas Family Winery.” I guessed it to be a uniform. Underneath was a name tag that read “Natalie.” “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“Yes, but—”
She started to close the door.
“Wait!” I rushed forward and held the door. “I’m not here for wine tasting. I’d like to talk to…uh, JoAnne.”
Natalie’s eyes narrowed. “Who did you say you were?”
I gave her my name again and introduced my mother.
“How did you know Jo?”
I decided not to reveal my hand too soon. “I…met her the other night, at the culinary college. She told us to…stop by, and she’d show me around her winery.”
Mother looked away, no doubt unable to face her lying, conniving daughter. I just hoped she didn’t blurt out something and give me away.
“Well, I’m sorry, but Jo…she was killed last night. Her lawyer advised us to close the winery until he can review her will and figure out what we need to do.”
“Oh my God. What happened?” I asked, trying to look taken aback. I’d learned that feigning ignorance garnered more information that bluntly asking for it. “Was it an accident?”
Natalie shook her head. Her long dark hair rippled and she tucked one side behind her ear. “The police said she was murdered.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you the one who talked to the cops?”
“Yes, they were here. Asking questions. Snooping around. They took our neighbor in for questioning, but I haven’t heard anything more.” She paused. “You look familiar…”
“Presley,” Mother interrupted, “I’m feeling a little light-headed…”
I glanced at her. She looked fine, especially with that twinkle in her eyes. Apparently she could be just as sneaky and conniving as her daughter.
I turned back to Natalie. “Do you think we could come in for a glass of water? My mother’s not feeling well.”
Natalie paused for a moment, then opened the door wide enough to allow us in. I inhaled the intoxicating scent of wine mixed with oak barrels and nearly salivated. The wood-paneled tasting room was large enough to hold at least fifty people and featured a square bar in the middle with room for a dozen tasters along each side. Inside, fresh glasses hung upside-down from a wooden structure overheard, within arm’s reach of the pourers.
Mother sat down on a stool at the bar, while Natalie ducked under the bar and pulled out a bottle of water from a small refrigerator in the center. She poured the water into a wineglass and passed it to Mom, looking at her with caring brown eyes.
“Thank you, miss,” Mother said, taking the glass. She sipped the water.
“It’s Natalie. Natalie Mattos.” I guessed her to be about twenty-five or so, well spoken, intelligent, and attractive, with light makeup and full lips.
“You work here?” I asked, taking a seat beside my mother.
“For about a year,” she said. “Right out of college. Got my degree in oenology but couldn’t find a job as an associate wine maker, so I ended up serving wine. This is a competitive market and tough to get hired.”
“Sounds like a fun job,” I said, “pouring wine all day, meeting people…”
“It’s not, believe me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Most of the tourists just want free wine. We’re one of the few that doesn’t charge for tastings. They don’t buy much—at least not here—probably because we don’t have cute wine labels with funny sayings on them. The college kids and bachelorette partiers just get drunk, become obnoxious, and throw up in the bushes on their way out.”
I remembered those days fondly.
“What was JoAnne like to work for?”
“She was okay. A real stickler for everything being green. The cabernets she produces are certified organic, using only sustainable farming. She’s got over a hundred solar panels on the roof, which reduces the greenhouse gases and air pollutants. She never used any synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, just compost and stuff like that. Everything has to be soci
ally responsible and environmentally sound to preserve the ecosystem,” she said. Lacking any facial expression as she spoke, she came off like a tour guide spewing a memorized speech.
She must have caught the tiny smile on my face. “We have to tell everyone that stuff. Jo makes us. Made us, I should say. We were even encouraged—I should say highly encouraged—to drive hybrid cars to work or we might find ourselves suddenly laid off.”
Wow, JoAnne Douglas really was a fanatic. Remembering something I’d heard at the bingo hall, I asked Natalie, “Did she sell any specialty wines here? I heard she had some boutique wines available.”
Natalie’s dark eyebrows furrowed. “Not that I know of. Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, just a rumor,” I said.
“Well, don’t believe everything you hear,” she said. “Some people have nothing better to do than to gossip about other people.”
Mother pushed her glass toward Natalie and got off her stool. “Thank you,” she said to the young woman; then to me she announced, “I’m feeling better, Presley.”
I stood. “Thank goodness, Mom. You had me worried.”
Mother rolled her eyes at my acting skills.
“My pleasure,” Natalie said. She took the glass, set it in a sink under the counter, and wiped the bar clean of moisture droplets. Ducking out from under the bar, she led us to the double doors. She opened them, letting bright afternoon sunlight into the dark, sensuous tasting room. The aroma of wine was overwhelmed by the scents of spring flowers that lined the walkway.
“Thanks again,” I said to Natalie before we headed down the front steps. At the bottom, I turned back.
“Natalie, any idea who might have killed JoAnne?”
“No clue,” she said. “It could have been anyone, I suppose. She had more enemies than friends, it seemed. I felt sorry for her. She just wanted to protect the environment, but to most people, she went about it the wrong way. And now I’m out of a job again—with a hybrid car to pay for.”
Chapter 11
PARTY-PLANNING TIP #11
The question of spitting arises when you’re hosting a wine-tasting party. Most Americans consider spitting rude, but it’s quite acceptable, even necessary, at a tasting event, since spitting helps keep the tasters from becoming intoxicated. However, never spit across another person; spit a jet stream into a spittoon through pursed lips, and make sure there are no drips on the floor, the countertop, or your shirt.
