Up In Smoke: Spirit of the Soul Wine Shop Mystery (A Rysen Morris Mystery Book 3)

by K. J. Emrick

  “It hit me, finally.” At the kitchen table, cups of steaming tea in front of them, Christina went through the whole story, slowly and methodically.

  The first thing she said after Josh had left was “Iknowwhodidit.” Everything after that had been a jumble until Rysen had suggested they sit and try again.

  “One of our local suppliers,” Christina said for the fourth time. “Well, he used to be one of our suppliers. Mason Blaithe. Remember him? The guy with the peach wine?”

  Rysen didn’t remember until she mentioned that wine. Tall, grumpy, haggard in both his appearance and his clothes. They’d started selling his wine in the shop three weeks ago. Christina had figured, peach wine, how could they go wrong with that? The bottle he’d given the sisters as a sample had been sweet and crisp, with just a hint of vanilla in the aftertaste. It would have made a great desert wine.

  Then, after three separate complaints from customers that required refunds to each, Rysen and Christina had sampled a bottle of the “Fuzzy Night” wine straight from their shelves. The golden yellow liquid had smelled the same, but it had tasted bitter and oily, and the aftertaste was definitely not vanilla. They’d wasted no time in returning the rest of the bottles and telling Mason that they weren’t interested in selling his product anymore.

  Mason had taken the crate of wine from their hands, then smashed it to the floor of the shop yelling and swearing that the both of them could go to Hell.

  “Okay, yeah, I remember him,” Rysen said. “He was mad. That doesn’t mean he burned down the shop. People say things all the time.”

  “Sure, sure. I know that, Ry. But think back. Remember the smell in the shop after the fire?”

  She did. It was hard to forget the mixed toxic aroma of ashes and burnt wine. “What about it?”

  “Brandon told us there was an accelerant used to start the fire. In the back in my office.”

  “Right. That’s where the fire started.” The image of her opening that door and the flames spreading out everywhere was still burned into her mind. No pun intended.

  “The smell was back there in the office, too,” Christina said. “Remember? Only, I don’t keep wine in the office. Only in the shop area and downstairs in the cellar. So why would there be a burnt wine smell in the office where the fire started?”

  Rysen followed that line of logic through. “You think the accelerant was wine?”

  “Sure. Why not? It’s highly flammable and if anyone found traces of it after the fire, they wouldn’t think anything of it because, hey, it’s a wine shop and there should be wine, right?”

  Sipping at her tea, Rysen mulled that over in her mind. It made sense. In a way. “So, you’re thinking that whoever set the fire used wine to make it spread faster, and that means it had to be someone who makes wine.”

  “Someone who makes wine,” her sister repeated with a smile, “and who hates us. I mean, who hates us? This is Cambria. We all know our neighbors and everyone pretty much gets along with everyone else. I mean, Beatrice even forgave you for dating Josh.”

  Well. Sort of, Rysen said in her own mind. Still, she understood what her sister was saying. Lighting a building on fire, with someone inside of it, certainly seemed personal. Like whoever was after them really was angry with them. Just like Christina was suggesting.

  “But what about the shipments to your shop that were being stolen when I first came back to town? What about you being poisoned last month? Do you think it was all the same person?”

  She nodded to every question. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? The guy is a local wine maker but he can’t get his stuff sold—”

  “Because it’s just awful when he makes a lot of it at once.”

  “—so he does everything he can to disrupt my business, thinking I’ll be glad to bring on a new supplier no matter how bad he is. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out he did this same thing to a bunch of other stores.”

  “Except for the burning down part.”

  “Well, yeah,” Christina had to admit. “Except for that part. Maybe we made him lose control when we refused to sell that pig’s swill he calls wine.”

  “Maybe.” Rysen fit the pieces together in her mind. Could be. It didn’t really seem to match the image of the shadowy figure she had imagined behind the scenes putting all of these plots into action, but it could have happened the way her sister described.

  Especially the part about the fire being set by someone who had lost control.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” Christina asked her after they had sat at the table in silence for a few minutes. “It all made so much sense in my head when I first woke up. Now, hearing me say it out loud, it just sounds kind of paranoid.”

  “I just don’t know if we have enough to suspect him,” Rysen said carefully. “I tell you what. Brandon and I can go talk to Mason Blaithe tomorrow. We’ll see if he has anything to say about the fire.”

  Her sister cast her a glance from the corner of her eye. “Are you sure you want to do that? I don’t know if Josh will like you hanging around with Brandon.”

  Rysen blew a breath over the top of her tea, stirring the already cool liquid in its cup, trying to hide a sigh. “We talked about Brandon being back tonight when he was here.”

  “And?” Christina prompted.

  “He said he doesn’t like Brandon being back in town, but he trusts me.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her sister smiled a knowing smile that only sister’s would understand. “It sure looked like he was, um, trusting you when I turned on the lights.”

  “Christina!” Rysen felt her face heating up. How much had her sister seen before she and Josh had put themselves back together? If she remembered, she had his pants unbuttoned and had been working on his zipper…

  Um. Right. She really needed to find a place of her own.

  With what money, though? She didn’t have hardly anything saved up, and now that the shop was going to be closed down for however long, she didn’t even have the paycheck from her sister to fall back on.

  Her life in Cambria had been so perfect, until now. A job she enjoyed, a man who loved her and paid her the right kind of attention, her family to support her. When she’d first come back here with her tail between her legs she had been dreading it, sure that everyone would hate her for leaving and that she would dry up here and blow away. Instead, she had come to love the town and its people and her life.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  “Let’s go to bed,” Christina said, as if she had read Rysen’s thoughts. “Things will look better in the morning. Maybe tomorrow we can even get Mason to confess to burning down the shop and we can get the insurance company to pay out after all.”

  That would be nice, Rysen admitted from behind a yawn. In the meantime, their whole life had just come to a grinding, crashing halt.

  Not that there still wasn’t a lot to do. Clearing out the rest of the wine stock. Deciding whether to sell to Beatrice. Hooking up with Brandon to investigate what had really happened…

  Halfway up the stairs she nearly tripped over her own feet. Hooking up? Did she just say she was going to hook up with Brandon? That was so not what she meant! Getting together with him. Professionally. To investigate. That was all!

  Grunting as she shut her bedroom door, she carefully blocked out all thoughts of Brandon’s cute smile or his handsome face or his liquid blue eyes…

  Damn it. She better not dream about him tonight. She hadn’t done that since…well. Actually, it had been last week. That didn’t mean anything! It was just a dream. What she and Josh had been doing down on the couch, that was the reality. That was real. That was what she had and what she wanted and Brandon had nothing to do with it.

  She argued with herself like that until she was in her pajamas and under the covers and sleep finally found her.

  And she dreamed.

  ***

  Christina and Rysen took separate cars the next morning when they left the house. Rysen went off to meet Bran
don at the diner, while her sister said she wanted to go and talk to their dad some more and see if there was anything else they could do. Otherwise, she had said with a heavy sigh, they might just have to take Beatrice’s offer. Not that it was a bad offer. Just that neither of them wanted to lose the shop.

  She found a place to park and walked up the sidewalk to the door of the Full Cup Diner. Brandon was already waiting for her. In a pair of black jeans and light brown hiking boots, and a blue cotton shirt, he still looked like a male model. Maybe from one of those calendars of burly men showing off their muscles while they held power tools.

  Rysen had always thought those pictures looked silly. Who would ever dress like that to use power tools?

  Of course, that didn’t mean she hadn’t owned a few of those calendars herself.

  “Got your text,” he said to her as she joined him at the table. “What’s up?”

  “How come you never say G’day?” she asked him before she could think better of it.

  His smile was amused. “On account of the accent?”

  “Right.” Now she was just embarrassed. “Isn’t that what Australians say?”

  “Tell you what. The next time we’re in Australia, I’ll say that to you every morning.”

  She flushed. That was not what she meant. “Um. I told Josh that you were back in town,” she said, thinking that she could use talking about Josh as a shield between them. He was just so damned attractive. It made her brain turn to putty every time he was here.

  “Oh?” was all he said. Then he picked up his coffee cup and took a long swallow. Was he smiling? She couldn’t tell, but she bet he was.

  Keep it together, she told herself. Fisting her hands in her lap, she still managed to be pleasant with the waitress when she came over, ordering a cup of coffee and a chocolate donut. “Put it on his bill,” she added. There. Take that.

  Brandon arched an eyebrow but didn’t argue. “So. What’s this about you having someone for us to look into?”

  Rysen told him Christina’s theory. She waited for him to say it wasn’t worth checking on, but instead he just steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips in thought.

  Then he shrugged and picked up his coffee cup again. “I didn’t get a smell of burnt wine in the office. There was an oily, greasy kind of smell there but that could have been from the fire burning the furniture or the walls or almost anything.”

  “I know,” Rysen agreed. “Christina was so sure, though. I think she’s just wanting it to be that way so bad that she’s remembering something that wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe. That happens. Of course, she might have found the one clue that both of us missed, too. So. Where does this Mason Blaithe live?”

  The waitress came back with her coffee and donut. Rysen waited for her to leave, staring at Brandon the whole time. “You think we should check him out?”

  “I do. For the moment I don’t have anything else to go on and one thing you learn in the security business is that you don’t ignore any lead, no matter how small or bizarre it might sound. You’ll learn that when you become a private investigator.”

  She tore off a chunk of the donut and popped it into her mouth. “You mean if I become a private investigator.”

  But he shook his head. “No, I mean when. Today starts your official internship with me. Remember, two thousand hours a year. That works out to about five or six hours every day.”

  “That much? That’s crazy!”

  “No, it’s just a lot. So. The time is,” he said, checking his wristwatch, “exactly eight-fifteen on this wonderfully sunny Thursday morning. Mark your calendar, because here you go.”

  Calendar. With men holding power tools. She wished she could get that image out of her head.

  Well.

  “Wait, I haven’t agreed to work for you,” she protested.

  “Not work for me. Work with me. Besides, what else have you got to do? Until your sister can reopen her shop you’re between jobs, as they say. What better time to try this?”

  She was tearing her donut into bits, not eating any of it. He was right. Investigating things was something she really wanted to do. She was good at it, and she enjoyed the excitement and the chance to solve problems and stop the bad people from doing bad things. Now she had the opportunity to start doing that for real. Why shouldn’t she take it?

  Josh. That was why. If he heard that she was not only hanging out with Brandon but working for him—with him, whatever—what would happen to his trust then?

  “I don’t know,” she finally said, hanging her head and letting her hair fall forward so that it would hopefully hide how red she felt her face becoming.

  “Nope, it’s already decided,” he told her, not missing a beat. “You and I are working together today and I’m keeping tabs on everything we do. At the end of the week they’ll be a paycheck for you. Hey, look at it this way. You were going to spend the day with me anyway, and now you can get paid for it. Whether you decide to do anything else with it or not is still up to you.”

  She tried to rearrange the pieces of her donut on the plate to fit them back into shape, but they didn’t want to stay together now that she had torn them apart.

  Why wasn’t anything ever simple in her life?

  If he noticed how distracted she was he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, his voice was cheerful and even maybe a little bit excited. “Now. Let’s get started. Where does this Mason fellow live?”

  Resigned to the fact that she was going to have to be with Brandon, for today anyway, and maybe the next few days while they investigated the fire, she told herself she may as well get paid for her time. It was just one more thing she was going to have to explain to Josh.

  It struck her that she had intentionally left this part out when she had talked to Josh. She hadn’t been ready to tell him.

  Would she ever be ready? He would try to argue her out of it, even though it was something she wanted for herself.

  “I’ll show you the way to Mason’s house,” she told him, downing half of her coffee and wishing there was time for more. “Let’s get going.”

  “Your car or mine?” he asked.

  She stopped halfway out of her seat. That was something she hadn’t thought about. Of course they were going to take the same car. It didn’t make any sense to take two. “Let’s take mine,” she said, thinking that at least if she was driving she could keep her mind on the road and not on him.

  “Aces. Lead the way.”

  The scenery around Cambria slipped away around them as she drove. Rolling hills. Trees, here and there. Acres and acres of grape vines waving in the wind, dotted with purple and red and green clusters ripening in the sun. Rysen wore her black Rayban sunglasses, the ones that hid even the corners of her eyes, so she was able to steal glances at Brandon without him knowing it.

  He sat without saying anything for most of the way. She appreciated him trying to give her space even here in the car, but she wished he would say something. It wouldn’t be half so awkward if they could just talk to each other.

  “So…two thousand hours a year,” she said. It was all she could come up with.

  “It sounds like a lot, too right, but really it just flies by.”

  “Is that how you got into this?”

  “Nope. I had to do it the hard way. For you it’ll be easy.”

  “Easy?” she asked. “That doesn’t sound easy. That sounds like a lot of work.”

  “Oh, come on now. You’ve already got an hour under that pretty belt of yours. Just one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine left to go.”

  “I’m not wearing a belt.”

  His eyes dipped down to her waist. She kept herself facing very carefully forward but at the same time she watched the expression on his face. She liked the way he looked at her. It was a mature kind of hunger she saw in his eyes. Similar to the way Josh had looked at her on the couch last night, just different. Somehow, different.

  This was going to be
really hard for her if he kept looking at her like that.

  She could do this. She could stay true to Josh and still spend time with Brandon. He was just a man. Just a gorgeous, helpful, beautiful man…

  Growling, she pulled her eyes back to the road.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine. We’re here.” They were, thankfully. Because how was she going to explain to him she was mad at herself for falling for him all over again?

  Mason Blaithe owned a few rundown acres of grapevines near the edge of the county. The soil out here was poor, the irrigation nearly nonexistent, and everything that grew suffered for it. Rysen saw the peach trees as they drove down the long and winding driveway leading up to the small home with its attached garage that had apparently been converted into a home winery.

  If this was where Blaithe had been making his peach wine, no wonder the few bottles they had sold for him had been so foul. How he managed to make that first sample bottle taste so good was beyond her. The rest had been crap.

  Brandon took his time looking around as they parked in front of the house with its cracked stucco walls. “Not much of an outfit, is it?”

  “A lot of people around here make their own wine in closets or their bedrooms. Everyone thinks they can make it rich selling their own brand.”

  “Does it work? Selling wine to get rich?”

  “Not usually. There’s a few private labels that catch on and make decent sales. Most of them stay on the shelves forever or get sold for a few bucks apiece. It’s hard to compete with the major labels like Corbett Canyon or Martini and Rossi.”

  “Easier to be the ones selling the wine?” he asked her.

  “Sure. Unless your shop gets torched.”

  He didn’t have anything to say to that and she was actually grateful for his silence this time. All these bad things, happening to her and her sister. There had to be a reason.

  Would they find it here?

  She followed Brandon up to the simple wooden door and waited while he banged on the door with the side of his fist. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder, and Rysen was afraid the door would break.