“Hardly seen you in days, lass,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Had some business to attend to in town,” I demurred.
“And you didn’t come to see me?” Patrick frowned.
Patrick and I had been friends since university days. He was a fellow journalist, now elevated to editor in chief of the Whisky Journal, a revered industry publication headquartered in Edinburgh. In the year since I’d found myself immersed in this strange new business, he’d often been a source of emotional support and trusted advice.
“Sorry. So much going on,” I hurried on. “I was up at the Larches today.”
“How’s Grant?” Patrick asked.
“Well…” I hesitated, causing both men to turn and regard me full-on. “You both need to know what’s going on, but please don’t let Grant know I told you. Let him tell you himself.”
Cam’s bright eyes reflected concern. “Tell us what?”
“Apparently, there are some complications from the concussion. Unexpected ones,” I paused for a moment but couldn’t come up with a gentler way to break the news. “Grant’s lost his sense of smell, and with it much of his sense of taste.”
The two men stared back at me in stunned silence. The full ramification of this news wasn’t lost on either one of them.
“Is it permanent?” Patrick asked.
“Hopefully not.”
Cam was still looking at me in disbelief. His rugged face looked as if it had aged before my eyes. “Hopefully?” he spat out. “What the hell does that mean? What are the odds in his favor? And if he gets his senses back, will they be the same as they were before?”
I reached over and put a hand on Cam’s arm. I knew Grant was like a son to him, and I could see the news had shaken him to the core. “The doctor says we need to be patient. It takes time for everything to come back to normal. There’s no reason to think that it won’t, but there’s still a chance. A chance Grant needs to be aware of.”
Patrick ran his hands through his hair, a grim look on his face. “He must be shattered.”
I nodded.
“What can we do to help?” Patrick asked.
“Try to keep him calm,” I said. “Patience is not his strong suit, as we all know.”
“He needs to be busy, not just putterin’ ’round at the house all day,” Cam insisted. “I ken he’s supposed to rest, but that woman’s keepin’ him on a mighty short leash.”
“The doctor recommended that he avoid making any significant business decisions, but that doesn’t mean he can’t come back to the Glen,” I pointed out. “He needs to be around the distillery for his own mental health and we need to find a project for him. Something to keep him busy and buy him some time.”
“We’ll be closed for maintenance for a few weeks this summer as usual,” Cam said. “Patrick and I were discussing scheduling some additional master classes. Maybe he could help with those.”
Patrick had been responsible for starting a series of master classes at the Glen—a program for those entering the whisky business and for the most ardent amateurs designed to showcase the distiller’s art up close and personal. Cam had been adamantly opposed to the idea at first, but had rapidly moved from benign tolerance to active involvement. He’d discovered that he had a gift for teaching, and once a month a group of eager young whisky fanatics descended on the Glen to learn the art of traditional whisky distillation from a master. Word of Cam’s technical skills and storytelling abilities had spread quickly, and our master classes were now booked through the spring of next year.
I nodded. “If you can get Grant to agree to give a talk or two, that might be good, but he’s not exactly his most engaging self at the moment. And all those bright young faces may just serve to remind him of what he may have to lose.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Patrick admitted.
“Certainly go ahead with the additional classes, but I have another idea I wanted to float. A way to get Grant back to working with his beloved whisky. What if Abbey Glen bottles a single-cask expression? No blending required, right? Straight from cask to bottle. It’s something we’ve never done before, and I hear they’re very popular these days. Serious collectors would love it, and best of all it would let Grant have a little time to regroup before he needed to start the complex process of blending again.”
I watched a smile cross Cam’s face that went all the way to his eyes. “You’ve come a long way, lass,” he said. “A year ago you didn’t know an Islay from an ice cream, and now look at you.”
Patrick leaned forward. “That’s not a bad idea at all. Abbey Glen has never put out a single cask before. I think it would be well received and it would be a draw to the cask-strength purists.”
“Not to mention we can charge a premium,” I added, leaning back in my chair feeling oddly victorious.
Patrick chuckled softly. “You really are getting good at this. To think I was worried that you’d never take to it.”
“Aye, you have your uncle’s marketin’ savvy, there’s no doubt,” Cam agreed.
“I’m trying,” I admitted. Emboldened by my initial success, I reached into my bag and pulled out a ceramic spirit bottle, one of several that I’d found in Ben’s collection. “What can you tell me about this?”
Cam took the bottle from me and turned it in his hands. “Late eighteen hundreds there were no glass bottles,” Cam said. “Better-quality whisky was stored in jugs like this and sold on to pubs and wealthy customers. They were used on and off up until the time that glass bottles became the norm.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve seen distilleries bottling in fancy crystal and charging an absolute fortune. How do you think collectors would respond to a ceramic bottle?”
“An interesting balance of old and new,” Patrick said slowly. “Did you have something specific in mind?”
As long as I was on a roll, I figured it was worth tossing out the second plan that had been percolating in my head. “What if we commissioned some special bottles from Rory?” Rory Hendricks was our resident celebrity recluse. Former hard-rocking, hard-drinking frontman for an eighties band called the Rebels, he’d retired to a farm at the north end of the valley and started a hobby business as a potter. I’d helped him with a complicated personal matter last year and he owed me, but more than that his work was exceptional. His coffee mugs graced my own kitchen, and his larger pieces were retailing for exorbitant prices at several trendy boutiques in London.
“He’s certainly swilled his share of whisky down the years,” I pointed out, “and he loves our product in particular. I suspect anything with his name on it would be snatched up by fans and whisky connoisseurs alike.”
Cam set the bottle down, rose, and poured himself another cup of coffee from the pot by the wall, raising an empty cup in my direction. I shook my head no.
“Think you might be onto somethin’ there, too,” he said finally. “Even an aging geezer like me knows the Rebels, and his pottery’s distinctive. In a good way, I mean. We’d have to make sure it passes all the bottlin’ standards, of course.”
“Naturally. And we’ll have to get Grant on board, but I was thinking we could ask Rory to knock out a few samples so we could run them by the appropriate authorities and see what they say. Sound reasonable?” I said, turning back to Patrick.
“I try to stay out of your business decisions,” he said, lifting his hands in the air. “Not my distillery, and I’m only really involved with the master classes, but as a whisky lover and a publisher, I think it’s a brilliant idea. In fact, maybe you should be giving a presentation or two at the master class. You have a real affinity for the marketing side of the business. What about it?”
“That’s way beyond my comfort level at this point,” I insisted.
Patrick shrugged. “Suit yourself, but think about it. I think you’d be brilliant.”
“Should I brief Grant on this when I go by to see him this afternoon?” Cam asked.
“He’s a bit on the touchy side at the moment,” I said. “Maybe let me have a shot at it first.
“Right.” Cam looked relieved. “I’ll leave it to you.”
“In fact, I think I’ll try to convince Grant to go over and meet with Rory. Get him out of the house for a bit.”
“If she’ll let him,” Cam muttered. “You should know that Brenna was over here yesterday.”
“What did she want?” I asked.
“Offering to help out in Grant’s absence.”
I could feel the heat rising inside of me. “Because the rest of us are incompetent?” I growled. “She’s got a lot of nerve.”
“Don’t think she meant to be rude,” Cam observed. He’d been a fan of Brenna’s in the past, but I sensed his enthusiasm was waning of late. “I imagine Grant can only suffer so much of her fussin’ around before he sends her off. Leaves her with some time on her hands.”
That was certainly what I was counting on. “She has her own business to worry about. If she’s got time on her hands, she should be focusing on that,” I groused. “What did you tell her?”
“Told her we could manage.”
More than bloody manage, I thought. I’d had two solid ideas today. Viable ideas. Potentially extremely lucrative ideas. With Patrick and Cam’s help we’d make plans that would be good for the Glen and good for Grant. We certainly didn’t need Brenna.
I left the office feeling smug, but I should’ve known better. Life never goes that smoothly—not my life, at least. I was about to find my way into a dark place again. A place of despair and destruction and, as always it seemed with me, death.
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Deadly Dram Page 30
