The Riesling Retribution wcm-4

by Ellen Crosby

  “Guess you were dying to do it,” he said.

  “Will you shut up?” both of us said in unison.

  He grinned some more and leered at us over his beer.

  “So now you work full-time for the medical examiner?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “They can’t afford me full-time. I only get called in on the cases where there’s been so much decomp the medical examiner can’t do a proper autopsy.”

  “What else do you do,” Quinn asked, “when you’re not working for the county?”

  “Teach forensics in northern Virginia and D.C. Every so often I get to go back to Egypt to do research.”

  “That must be pretty cool.” He eyed her.

  “It is. The pyramids are incredible. If you’ve never been, you ought to visit them sometime.”

  Her unspoken invitation lingered in the air as a large bird flew out of the woods and sailed above us.

  “A red-tailed hawk,” Quinn said, filling the awkward moment of silence. “Look.”

  We watched as it turned west toward the mountains, a graceful silhouette against the peach-colored early evening sky. What remained of the sunlight bronzed the treetops as though they’d been burnished and the light breeze felt like a warm caress. Pockets of sunshine filtered through the branches like spotlights, shimmering on the leaves like moving water.

  “I ought to be going,” I said. “You two stay and drink your beers.”

  “You haven’t finished your wine,” Quinn said. “What’s your rush?”

  Savannah swung a leg over the arm of her chair and rocked it back and forth. The red high-tops were dirtier than they’d been this morning.

  “Quinn says you’re reenacting the Battle of Ball’s Bluff here pretty soon.”

  “The weekend after next,” I said.

  “I’d like to see it,” she said. “I know the cemetery quite well.”

  “I’ve heard it’s haunted,” I said. “That spirits of soldiers who were never properly buried come back to roam the battleground.”

  Quinn snorted. “That is such a load of crap.”

  “I’ve heard those stories. And I know people swear by them. They also claim they see Mosby’s ghost.” Savannah drank her beer. “Sorry, you two. When the spark of human life is gone, it’s gone. A skeleton is nothing more than what’s left after the really important stuff isn’t there anymore.”

  “It’s still part of who that person was,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  Savannah looked taken aback. “Of course. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mean to imply that it’s nothing but a pile of bones. I always show respect for the remains I examine. In fact, when I’m at the museum in Cairo I give my skeletons names.”

  “That’s kind of weird,” Quinn said.

  “Not really. The Egyptians believed the way to keep a person alive in the afterlife was by speaking his or her name, saying it out loud. That’s why the enemies of the pharaohs tried to destroy their monuments, carving out or slashing the names. By doing that you erased the person in the afterlife.”

  “So you believe you’re keeping someone alive, even though he’s dead, because you say his name?” I asked.

  “It’s more like paying homage to the Egyptian belief that a person’s name is an integral part of who he is.”

  “And you never sense that person is present—that he’s there, somehow—when you’re talking to him, saying his name?”

  “Sorry, no.” She shook her head. “Although I know plenty of people who do believe in that kind of stuff. I even know people who claim to be the reincarnation of Tutankhamen. Or one of the other pharaohs.”

  “You must have some interesting friends,” Quinn said.

  Savannah smiled. “I attend a lot of seminars, especially ones that relate to ancient cultures. They show up there.”

  “Claiming to be Tutankhamen?” he asked.

  “In the flesh. We, uh, call them ‘pyramidiots.’ I know that’s not very nice, but some of these people…” She twirled her finger by her temple. “It can get pretty strange.”

  Quinn motioned to Savannah’s empty beer bottle and my wineglass. “Another refill, anyone?”

  “No, thanks,” Savannah said. “Two’s my limit. Besides, I ought to be going. Thanks for the beers and the hospitality. You’ve been very kind.”

  “Why don’t I walk you to your car?” Quinn said.

  “I’d like that.” She stood and turned to me. “Thanks again, Lucie.”

  “It was nothing.” I started to put the empty bottles and my glass on the tray.

  “Leave that. I’ll take care of it,” Quinn said to me. “See you in the morning, okay?”

  “Sure. Good night.”

  I reached for my cane and left without looking back. Quinn was already talking to Savannah about showing her the barrel room, persuading her not to leave just yet.

  When I got home, I went directly outside to the veranda and watched the Blue Ridge disappear into the velvet blackness of the night sky. After a while I went inside and got another bottle of Riesling. Then I lit all the torches in the border garden and all the candles scattered on the tables until it felt like I was sitting in a gilded bath of fire. For a long time, I rocked back and forth in the glider, listening to the night sounds of the cicadas and frogs and the occasional owl, as I slowly drank glass after glass of wine.

  Someone once said that if you wish to keep your affairs secret, you should drink no wine. But if there was no one around—and certainly no affair—then it didn’t matter, did it?

  Quinn woke me the next morning when the sun was already bright and hot in the sky. I was still in the glider wearing yesterday’s clothes. My empty Riesling bottle lay on the floor and my wineglass sat on the glass coffee table among multiple sticky rings of sloshed wine.

  “Now I know why you didn’t show up for work.” He picked up the bottle. “Been drinking up all our profits single-handedly, have we?”

  I held my head between my hands. “Please don’t. I feel dreadful.”

  “I’ll make some coffee and get the aspirin. Don’t move.”

  “Don’t worry.” I lay back down and closed my eyes.

  He was back a short while later with two mugs and an aspirin bottle sticking out of the pocket of his jeans. “Here. Drink this.”

  He sat down next to me. As usual, he’d brewed coffee strong enough to strip paint.

  “Thanks.”

  “Something you want to talk about?” he asked. “I knew you were upset last night when you left. I was going to call you, but things went kind of late with Savannah.”

  “It’s okay.” I felt numb, except for a headache the size of Pittsburgh. Did “kind of late” mean breakfast?

  “I’ve got some good news. You’ll like this.” He blew on his coffee. “Savannah’s teaching schedule is sort of erratic so she gets days off here and there. She agreed to help us out during harvest when she’s free.”

  “She’s going to work for us?”

  “Yup. She’s a real quick study. I took her over to the barrel room and showed her around after you left. Gave her a little education about winemaking. She’s excited about doing this.”

  “That’s nice.”

  I drank more coffee.

  “That’s all you’ve got to say? ‘That’s nice’? We could use the help, you know. People like her don’t fall off trees.”

  He’d set the aspirin bottle on the coffee table. I shook out two tablets and swallowed them with a big gulp of coffee. He was right. We could use Savannah’s help. I needed to pull myself together and get over any issues I had with how he felt about her. And jealousy. I needed to get over that, too.

  “I’m sorry. I guess everything that’s happened the past few days finally caught up with me last night. You’re right. We could use her.” I set down my mug. “Why don’t I shower and change and meet you at the winery?”

  “Sure. Come on over when you’re up to it.” He patted my knee like I was a child. “There’s something I want to
talk to you about.”

  “What?” My heart began thudding against my rib cage.

  “It can wait.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me now.”

  “If you say so.” He cocked his head. “It’s about the Riesling.”

  “The Riesling?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to pick it all at harvest. I’m thinking about leaving about a third of the crop on the vines until the first frost so we can make ice wine.”

  Ice wine is a highly concentrated sweet dessert wine made from frozen grapes. No one in Virginia made it because it was such a risky and expensive venture. If the grapes stayed frozen, we could pick them at any time. But a hard frost at night, then warmer temperatures the next day meant the fruit would thaw and start to rot and we’d end up with nothing.

  I massaged my forehead with my fingers. “It’s an interesting idea except there’s not a big market for dessert wines. Certainly nowhere near the demand for our Riesling. You know that. Plus we’re one of the very few vineyards in Virginia that make it. I think we’d be better off picking everything now. Look at what we lost already with the tornado damage.”

  “Why don’t we have this conversation when you’re not hungover?”

  “I am not hungover.”

  He patted my knee again and stood up. “Sure you’re not. Go take your shower and wake up, okay?”

  I heard tires on gravel as a car pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the house.

  “Expecting someone?” he asked.

  “Nope.” Another car followed the first one.

  “Sounds like a party. Shall I get it or do you want to?”

  “I’ll go. Can you, uh, clean—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get rid of the evidence. Drink more coffee. You got breath that would stop a charging elephant.” He picked up my bottle and glass as the doorbell rang.

  “Coming!” I called, then dropped my voice. “A charging elephant?”

  “Better than a whole herd.”

  He disappeared down the back hall to the kitchen as I opened the door. Bobby Noland stood there with Biggie Mathis and Vic Fontana behind him. He held out a folded paper.

  “Morning, Lucie. I got a search warrant here for your father’s gun cabinet. I believe you still have his guns? All of them?”

  I took the search warrant and nodded, not trusting my voice or my breath.

  “We’d like to take a look, if you don’t mind.”

  It didn’t matter whether I minded or not. He was just being polite, and that small courtesy, I figured, was because we had known each other for so long.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked finally. “Did you identify the body already? Savannah Hayden was out here yesterday looking for something. What did she do, work all night?”

  Maybe that meant she hadn’t been with Quinn very long, after all.

  “We, ah, had a breakthrough,” he said.

  A breakthrough that brought them to Leland’s gun cabinet.

  “You know who it is, then?” I leaned against the door frame. My legs felt weak and my head was starting to spin again. “Did you identify the remains?”

  “His name is Beauregard Kinkaid. Went by ‘Beau.’ Ever heard of him?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “According to his ex-wife, Beau had a falling-out with your father over some business deal they had going on. He told her he was going to pay your father a visit and straighten things out.”

  I did not like where this was going. “And did he?”

  “She doesn’t know. It was the last time she ever saw him.”

  Chapter 10

  I opened the door wider and let Bobby inside. Fontana and Mathis followed, filing past me with their eyes averted as though they wanted to spare me any further embarrassment.

  Bobby pointed across the foyer to the library, which had once been Leland’s office. “The room over there, guys.”

  He knew our house probably as well as he knew his own. I half wished he’d been a stranger. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so betrayed and vulnerable.

  “You want to get the key?” he asked me.

  Leland always kept it above the doorjamb, which was out of my reach. I showed Bobby where to feel for it as Quinn arrived in the foyer.

  “Morning, Bobby,” he said. He leaned over and said in my ear, “What’s going on?”

  “They have a warrant to search Leland’s gun cabinet.” My eyes locked on his, beseeching him not to ask any more questions.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “It’ll be okay.”

  I wondered if it would.

  My father’s gun cabinet was a large glass-fronted hutch that sat on top of a two-drawer base. As gun cabinets go, it was top-of-the-line. Cherry, rather than the customary oak or pine, so it matched the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and all the other woodwork in the room. A deer standing atop a mountain had been etched into the glass, but even so, it was possible to see that the collection of firearms inside was equally impressive.

  “His revolvers are in those drawers?” Bobby asked.

  “Yes. The one on the left. Ammunition is on the right.”

  Biggie Mathis knelt, his joints cracking, and removed my father’s Smith and Wesson .38. The room was silent as he placed it in a bag along with a couple rounds of ammunition.

  When he was done, Bobby thanked him and asked if he’d wait outside with Fontana. This time both of them acknowledged me as they exited the room, as somber as if they were leaving a wake.

  Bobby glanced at Quinn, but before he could speak, I said, “Quinn can stay, Bobby. I want him here.”

  “Okay.” Bobby positioned himself in front of us, feet apart and hands clasped together, like a lawyer about to bring it home in his closing remarks to a jury. “I wanted to let you know that Annabel Chastain, Beau Kinkaid’s ex-wife, is driving up from Charlottesville to talk to us. I’m sure you and I will be talking after that.”

  “How did you identify him so quickly?” I asked. “There must have been something obvious…”

  Bobby looked like he was debating how much to tell me. Finally he said, “We caught a lucky break when we found that missing mandible. Kinkaid had some dental work done, a special kind of metal implant in his jaw that actually had a serial number on it. We traced him that way. His dentist also took care of the ex-wife. The guy was retired but he remembered that blade thing he put in. Apparently they were pretty rare thirty years ago.”

  Then why had they sent Savannah back? What else were they looking for?

  Bobby saw the look in my eyes.

  “I’ve said enough,” he said. “The investigation’s not finished.”

  “Can you at least tell me why Beau’s ex-wife never reported the fact that he didn’t come home after his meeting with Leland, not once in thirty years?”

  “Because she wasn’t sorry he didn’t come home,” Bobby said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said he abused her.”

  Until now, every time I pictured those bones out in the field I’d had only an out-of-focus image of a man in my head with no idea about his life or what kind of person he’d been. Now I knew he was married and someone who beat his wife.

  “Doesn’t that give his ex-wife a motive for killing him, too?”

  “We’re checking into that. Right now she’s agreed to come in for questioning of her own free will,” he said. “Look, try to take it easy and we’ll go through this one step at a time. You’re not in any trouble.”

  “Sure.”

  Bobby nodded at Quinn. “I’ll see myself out.”

  After he left, Quinn pulled me into his arms. “It’ll be all right,” he said into my hair. “We’ll get through this.”

  My voice was muffled on his shoulder. “I may not be in any trouble, but I sure as hell feel like I’m on trial.”

  Quinn urged me to take yet another day off and get lost somewhere, but as I told him, that only made it look like I had something to hide. It didn’t
help that Gina Leon, who worked in the tasting room with Frankie, was overly solicitous when I arrived at the villa, fussing over me while trying to pretend it was business as usual. It meant word had already gotten around about Beau Kinkaid and Bobby’s visit to confiscate Leland’s gun.

  A lot of our customers wanted dark-haired, dark-eyed Gina to wait on them—especially the men, who liked the way she laughed and flirted, tossing her head and flashing her dazzling smile. Her personality was as effervescent as champagne fizz, but I learned to be careful what I said around her. I knew Gina was well-intentioned. She just leaked like a sieve.

  Now she picked up a cream-colored vase filled with hydrangeas that had been sitting on an oak trestle table we used for additional wine tastings when the bar got too crowded.

  “I made coffee and bought some croissants at the bakery in Middleburg. If you sit on the terrace, I’ll bring you a tray as soon as I change the water for these flowers. The Trib’s on the bar.”

  “Why are you fussing over me?”

  “Who’s fussing? I’ll pour coffee in a mug and slap a croissant on a plate.”

  “Gina—”

  “Stop arguing. Go on out. I’ll be right there.”

  I got the newspaper and went. The day was drenched in sunshine with a sky the limitless blue of a picture postcard. A soft breeze stirred the impatiens and pansies in the planters and hanging baskets and the air smelled of freshly cut grass. Most days it was the kind of glorious weather that made you glad to be alive. I unfolded the paper.

  The short article about the body in our vineyard was at the bottom of the front page of the Washington Tribune. Kit Eastman, my oldest and dearest friend in the world, had written it. The paper must have gone to bed before they identified Beau because he was still referred to as an “unidentified victim.” I was in the middle of reading when Gina arrived with the coffee and croissant.

  Her eyes darted back and forth between the newspaper and my impassive face.

  I folded the paper and set it aside as though I’d been looking at something as innocuous as the weather report.

  “Maybe I’ll take this in my office,” I said. “I’ve got bills that need paying.”