1 Died On The Vine

by Joyce Harmon

  “Can we see him?” I asked. “Just to make sure?”

  “I don’t see why not. He’s in the lounge. Just don’t come on too strong.”

  “You’re talking to a woman who tames feral cats,” I informed him as we rose from our chairs.

  “That’s good. Take the same approach with Craig,” Doc said with that wonderful smile.

  He led us into the lounge, which was filled with mismatched and worn-out furniture. Sitting in a hideous floral print chair by the window was Craig Southern. He was reading a Louis L’Amour, moving his lips silently as he read.

  “Craig,” Doc said, “these two ladies would like to talk to you for a moment.”

  Craig looked up from his book. I found myself being studied by the bluest eyes I have ever seen.

  My reaction was a disorienting mixture of disappointment and relief. Jimmy’s eyes had been gray.

  EIGHT

  I was just standing there like a stump, so Mary took charge. She approached Southern with a friendly smile and extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Mary Nguyen. Can we ask you a few questions?”

  Southern stood awkwardly and shook hands. “You Vietnamese?”

  “Amerasian, actually, my father was American.”

  Southern nodded wisely. “Plenty of them.”

  “Mister Southern, have you ever met a man named Colonel Obadiah Winslow?”

  Doc looked startled at the question and turned to me. “Was that the guy - ?”

  I nodded.

  “Met a lot of colonels,” Southern admitted. “But I can’t remember all their names.”

  Mary produced a photograph of Winslow from her bag. I recognized it as the publicity shot from the back of Winslow’s book. Southern studied it thoughtfully. Then he handed it back to her and shook his head.

  “No, ma’am, I’ve never met this man.”

  “He hasn’t been to see you recently?” I asked.

  Southern shook his head again.

  Doc chimed in. “I’ve heard of this Colonel Winslow. Seen him on TV, too. He’s never been here.”

  “Maybe before you came here,” Mary persisted. “When you were living in the wildlife preserve.”

  “Nobody came to see me but those rangers, and they just came to kick me out. I wasn’t bothering nothing,” Southern added sullenly. “No need to kick me out.”

  Doc gestured to one side. When we joined him on the other side of the room, he said in a low voice, “I sure wish you ladies had some connection to Craig. We don’t know what to do with him. He can’t stay here much longer; there’s really not much wrong with him.”

  Southern evidently had good hearing. “Got no place to go,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary whispered to Doc, “but this really isn’t our problem.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “We have an old mobile home on our property. It’s not the best accommodations in the world, but it’s got water and electricity – “

  “Cissy, are you crazy?” Mary hissed.

  I went back over to Southern. “Look, Mister Southern, my husband and I have a vacant trailer on our property if you need a place to stay. It’s out in the country, with woods on one side and a vineyard on the other.”

  I took an old envelope out of my purse and began writing directions to Passatonnack County. “This is really away from everything,” I went on. “A lot of people think it’s too isolated, more owls and eagles than people. My husband could use some occasional help in the vineyard, and I think you’d like Jack. He doesn’t talk much.”

  Southern was beginning to look interested. I handed him the piece of paper and told him, “The bus stops at the courthouse, but if you tell the driver you’re going to the Rayburns, she’ll drop you off at the turnoff to River Road. We’re two miles down, the second house. If you need a place to stay.”

  He took the paper and nodded awkwardly. “Thank you, ma’am, I’ll think about it.”

  We shook hands and took our departure. As we left, Doc urged us to “come back any time.”

  Back in the car, Mary said, “I’ve been given to understand that you adopt strays, but this must be a personal best.”

  “Tell me about it! We’d better go by the wine festival and warn Jack that we might be acquiring a tenant.”

  “I haven’t met him yet. I hope he doesn’t have a temper.”

  “He’s actually a very even-tempered man,” I admitted as we drove away from VietCare. “I try his patience sorely sometimes and he hasn’t booted me out yet.”

  “Must be nice,” Mary said. “I guess I’m still looking for someone patient enough to put up with me.”

  “Don’t give up, there are still a few out there.”

  Mary was studying the photographs now, the Winslow publicity still and the newspaper photo of poor Craig Southern.

  “The more we learn, the weirder this becomes,” she said. “Now it seems Winslow found a photograph that bore a superficial resemblance to your late husband, and deliberately tried to sell you a bill of goods.”

  “Not in character?”

  “This is the first phony that I can tag as deliberate fraud on his part. In every other instance, while there might have been fraud, Winslow could never be implicated. The most I could say for sure is that he seemed overly eager to fall for flimsy evidence of live sightings.”

  “He sure sounded sincere.”

  “He’s good at that,” Mary answered darkly.

  “But as for what he was up to, I’m totally in the dark.”

  “Where is this we’re going now?”

  “The Bull Run Wine Festival. Jack’s got a booth there.”

  “Yes, but what is it?”

  I was scandalized. “You mean you’ve never been to a wine festival?”

  “No. I guess my education is incomplete.”

  “I’ll say! But we’ll remedy that; this will be fun.”

  As we approached the fairgrounds, traffic backed up. Not everyone is as ignorant as poor Mary on the topic of wine festivals. We parked the car and paid our admission fees to a young man dressed as a Confederate soldier. He gave us each a wine glass.

  “Hold on to that,” I told Mary. “That serves as your ticket stub. Of course, it serves as a wine glass too.”

  “How much is the wine?”

  “If you’re buying bottles, the price varies, but the tasting is covered by the admission.”

  “Ooh, I like this already.”

  The fairground was dotted with tent canopies. Not all the tents were for wineries. The crafters and food vendors were out in force. The Yankee army had an encampment as well, with Civil War re-enactors describing Army life to eager youngsters.

  Jack had told me he was set up on the far side of the field. Of course, we didn’t go straight there. Too many temptations lured us into a zigzag path across the ground.

  Before too long, we had sampled wine at three different wineries. Mary took notes and helped herself to brochures. “This is a little outside my field,” she told me, “but I think there’s an article in it.”

  “I guess articles are everywhere if you’re a freelancer.”

  “You said it.”

  We also stood in a long line to get some funnel cake, watching as the dough was squeezed from the funnel into a lacy pattern, fried, dusted with powdered sugar and served on a paper plate. I love funnel cake, but always wind up liberally streaked with powdered sugar. But so what? It’s a festival.

  “Do you like it?” I asked Mary as she took a large bite of the funnel cake.

  “Mm-hmm!” She nodded enthusiastically.

  Before we reached Jack’s booth, Mary had fallen in love with a handmade pottery teapot with a goofy face, and flashed a credit card and made it her own. I was similarly smitten by a tapestry that would be perfect for the great room, but the price gave me second thoughts. I did take the woman’s card though. Who knows, maybe after the Qu’aot VIII manual is turned in - . I’m not usually psychic, but I could read the crafter’s mind. She was thinking
, “She’ll be back.”

  And finally, there was Jack’s booth, drawing a great deal more attention than our tiny winery usually rates. I murmured to Mary, “It’s probably not a good idea to tell Jack about Craig until things die down here a bit.”

  “Gotcha.” Mary nodded.

  “Hi, Honey,” I greeted Jack. “Look, I’ve brought Mary Nguyen. Can we help?”

  “Cissy, are you crazy?” Jack asked. “Here come the curious.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I did notice that people with familiar faces from the wine festival circuit seemed to be moseying artlessly in our direction in a vaguely purposeful way.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Jack belated greeted Mary. He turned back to me. “Why don’t you girls go on to the restaurant? I’ll be closing here in a bit and I’ll buy you dinner.”

  We nodded meekly and made our getaway. Mary muttered to me,” I normally don’t let men get away with calling me a ‘girl’, but if he’s buying dinner – “ She sighed. “I guess I’m just a food slut.”

  “If you’d been in the workforce in the seventies, you’d know there are a lot worse things you could be called,” I told her.

  We regained the car and drove to Jackson’s Tavern, my favorite eatery in Manassas, maybe in the known universe. Splendidly politically incorrect, Jackson’s specialized in hefty mixed drinks and huge slabs of meat.

  At my recommendation, we ordered the Special Margaritas, boatloads of tequila and lime and crushed ice and salt. Thus fortified, I responded readily to Mary’s questions about my early life with Jimmy. Through the tequila fumes, I wondered if I was about to become immortalized in an article. But then Mary asked, “How do you know whether or not a man is going to stay a little boy all his life? So many of them do, but when they’re younger, it’s harder to tell which ones have the capacity to turn into grownups.”

  “I don’t know. Jimmy was only twenty-five when he died. I’ve often wondered what he would have turned out to be. I remember some of the silly things he did – but I was silly too. The night we stayed at the Club late and drank all the admiral’s champagne. We both had hangovers the next day, but I was the one who went to all the package stores to find the right brand and replace the champagne before the admiral found out.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Mary declared with tipsy wisdom. “Why does the woman always have to fix things and clean up the mess? Just for a change, why can’t I make a mess and have some man fix it for me?”

  “I’m guessing you’re not thinking in abstract here.”

  “Not at all.”

  And she proceeded to tell me all about Mark, with whom she had recently broken up. I patted her hand and made soothing noises.

  Finally, Jack joined us. “Evening, ladies. I’ll have one of what you’re having.”

  We ordered large slabs of meat and ate with carnivorous gusto while telling Jack about our day. He was stuffed and mellow by the time I got to the part about offering Craig Southern the use of the trailer. He just sighed.

  “From what you’ve told me, I’d be surprised if the guy has the initiative to find his way to Passatonnack County, but I guess if he does, he can’t do much damage to that old trailer.”

  “And his presence might keep the local kids out of the vineyard,” I added.

  “That was your rationale for our fierce watchdog Polly,” Jack reminded me.

  “One of these days, I’ll predict something accurately, and then you’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I turned to Mary. “You’re the investigative type. What’s our next move?”

  Mary pushed her plate away and sat back with a sigh. “Tell that fellow I want a doggie bag.”

  “Yes, but about the murder?”

  “We’ll just poke around. Home and office are the next logical targets. We need to look at the money angle and try to find someone who knows what Winslow was up to with the picture scam.”

  “Okay, we can do that. Then what?”

  “After that, we’ll know what the next steps ought to be. I can’t predict that far ahead.”

  “Okay, we hang loose. I can do that too.”

  Jack chuckled. “And when you barge into Winslow’s home and office, why should these folks talk to you?”

  I thought about that. “Because we’re writers. We’re working on a story.”

  “Don’t forget to tell them about your previous credits,” Jack said skeptically. “Especially Taxamatic and Qu’aot VII – Death and the Dragon.”

  Mary turned to me. “Oh, was that yours? I loved Death and the Dragon! I thought I’d never get out of the tower.”

  “The Archbishop’s Revenge is supposed to be a doozy, too.”

  Turning back to Jack, Mary said, “And don’t worry about credits. I’ll show them my piece on the Texas S&Ls; they’ll fall all over themselves to keep on the good side of my word processor!”

  Jack sighed. “You girls have fun. I’ll probably be shutting down early tomorrow. I’m running out of wine.”

  “I guess it’s true that any publicity is good publicity,” I told him. “As long as you don’t get arrested.”

  I noticed that Mary winced at the ‘girls’, and then cringed at the comment about arrest.

  “I’m going to stake my reputation on this,” she said loftily. “No innocent person is going to be tried for this murder. That is the commitment of Mary Nguyen.”

  Bless her heart. She’d had two of the giant margaritas. Good thing I was driving.

  NINE

  The next morning after Polly’s walk, there were two phone messages requiring my attention.

  First stop was Julia’s. I had been urged thither by an excited message to “come and see what Mary brought me!”

  I found Julia in her office nook, which had achieved a state of ultimate clutter. The usual mess had been augmented substantially. Julia sat enthroned in the midst of stacks of folders and boxes of papers. “Look, Cissy!” she called out. “Mary brought me her notes for the book.”

  “Yes, but why?” I collapsed into a chair and stared at the debris.

  “I called her and reminded her that I wanted to help. I just mentioned that I was a retired bookkeeper, and she said this would be a perfect use for my skills.” She sounded smug.

  “So now you’re Robert Redford in All The President’s Men?”

  “Why not? He wasn’t even a bookkeeper.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “As long as you’re happy.”

  Next stop was the sheriff’s office. Not to see Investigator Dawson or Sheriff Peters, but in response to an urgent SOS from Gloria Leigh, the office secretary.

  The sheriff’s department is housed in the new administration building next to the courthouse. It was so new I could smell the paint.

  New building, old plants. Gloria had been adamant about bringing the house plants to the new offices. Pride of place by the window went to the huge and venerable snake plant which had been brought to the office by Gloria’s predecessor. This battle-scarred old veteran was older than I am.

  Gloria was thrilled to see me. A middle-aged lady given to fussy print dresses and glasses on a chain around her neck, she types about a billion words a minute and has adjusted with a moderate degree of comfort to the arrival of PCs in the office. But my work with EveryWare has convinced her that I’m some kind of computer whiz, so she calls me whenever something goes wrong with the computers.

  “Gloria, I keep telling you, I’m not a hardware geek.” I leaned on her desk and smiled.

  “Well, maybe I need a software nerd,” she smarted back. Gloria has been reading magazines to try to pick up the vocabulary.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “That computer salesman last year told me this machine had a 120 megabyte hard drive. Well, there’s only sixty now. Half the memory is gone! Surely that can’t happen by accident.”

  “I’ve never heard of it happening,” I agreed. “Have you lost any data?”

  “All my directories and files are still the
re, but my drive is about full. I can clean out my files and delete some old stuff, but I want to know where half my memory went.”

  “Good question. Let me look.”

  She stood up and I took her seat. Gloria is a model of efficiency, but you’d never know it to look at her desk. She has personalized and accessorized with a picture of her daughter in cheerleading attire, a statue of Winnie the Pooh holding a balloon, and any number of small plaques with cutesy or inspirational sayings.

  There was also a small note taped to the corner of the computer monitor with the password to the state’s crime computer on it, but I’m not their information security officer (in fact, I think Gloria is), so I let it go.

  I called up the directory of the C: drive, and sure enough, there was only sixty megabytes of memory. “How weird.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Hmm.”

  Then I noticed the Post-It note beside the computer. “Joe, ask the unicorn for the formula. Hank” That little note spoke volumes to me.

  I typed “D:”

  The computer monitor replied, “D>”

  “Aha! You partitioned the hard drive.”

  “I did not!” Gloria said indignantly. “What’s that mean, anyway?”

  “Half the drive is acting like a different drive and responding to a different designation.”

  “Well, I never did that. Why would I do that? What’s in there, anyway?”

  I called up the D directory. Just as I thought. “Bootleg computer games,” I told her. “Who else uses this PC?”

  “I guess the guys on the night shift.”

  “Well, they have a lot of computer games in here. I’d be willing to bet they didn’t go down to the computer store and drop fifty or so bucks on a game to bring in here. These are illegal copies. Don’t you people know that copyright infringement is a felony punishable by fine or imprisonment?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t even know these were in here.”

  “Didn’t know what were in here?”