The Riesling Retribution wcm-4

by Ellen Crosby

  She looked puzzled. “Whatever you want. Let me bring it in to you.”

  I didn’t bother to insist that I could manage the tray, despite my cane. But as I left I saw her retrieve the newspaper and unfold it. Her hand went to her mouth and I knew she hadn’t known about the article.

  When she showed up in my office, I said, “Anyone who walks on eggshells around me is going to be fired. Got it?”

  She nodded wide-eyed, then burst out laughing. “Okay. I’m sorry. We’re all worried about you, Lucie.”

  “Forget it. I’ve got to deal with it. And no more hiding things from me, okay?”

  Her eyes grew big. “Sure.”

  Gina couldn’t lie any more than she could keep a secret.

  “What else?” I asked. “You know I’m going to find out sooner or later.”

  “Chance called awhile ago. Apparently they’ve already had to chase a couple of reporters and a photographer away from the place where you found the grave.”

  I groaned. “I didn’t know that. Someone should have told me.”

  “Don’t say you heard it from me.”

  As soon as she left, I called Chance. “We had reporters on the property?”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “I tortured someone.”

  “Guess I’ll lock up the sharp objects when you come over to the barrel room,” he said.

  “So it’s true?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately it’s true.”

  “I hate to detail one of the guys to babysit, but maybe someone should be out there keeping an eye on things until this quiets down.”

  “We sent Tyler. He took his musket. Said he needs the practice before the reenactment.”

  I yelped. “Shooting at the press with a Civil War musket? My God, Chance, are you out of your mind? Whose idea was that?”

  “Relax. He doesn’t have live ammo. Says he needs to practice loading and reloading so it doesn’t take him twenty minutes each time. He’s not going to shoot at anyone, even if it’s only blanks. Just scare ’em off.”

  “Call him and tell him absolutely no guns. You got that? I don’t care if it’s a water pistol. No guns.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll drop by and get it.”

  “Good. Do it now, please.”

  “Sure. But first any chance you might pay the crew this week? It’s Friday and they have this thing about liking to get paid regularly.”

  “I wrote a check and left it in the barrel room yesterday. Didn’t you find it? Just cash it as usual and pay them like you always do.”

  “I found it. But according to the folks at Blue Ridge Federal, you’re the only person authorized to do anything on that account. That includes cashing checks, especially ones made out to cash.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “One of the tellers. The lady with the blue hair and the mustache.”

  “It’s not a mustache, it’s…down. And I made some changes to my account about restricting the access. I guess they took it to an extreme. Let me call and straighten it out.”

  “Thanks. I’ll pay Tyler a visit, then drive back to Middleburg and try to charm old blue-hair one more time.”

  “Don’t take that musket to the bank. Drop it off somewhere.”

  “Probably have an easier time cashing the check if I did,” he said, and hung up.

  I paid the bills and waited until I cooled down before calling Kit Eastman.

  “Hey, kiddo,” she said. “I was expecting your call.” She sounded tired.

  “The front page of the Washington Tribune?” I said. “Aren’t there more important things going on in the world? Wars? A mortgage crisis? Unemployment? The environ—”

  “I’ll make sure you get invited to the next editorial meeting so you can remind us about all those things. I guess we just forgot. We can also discuss the declining readership of newspapers in general, and the Trib in particular, and when our next round of buyouts will come down, how many of us will get offers we can’t refuse. I mean that literally.”

  “So you put that article on the front page to sell newspapers?”

  “It may surprise you, but that’s our business. Or what’s left of it. Do you have any idea how many people get their news beamed to their cell phones these days? And that’s it, as far as what they read?”

  “Okay,” I said, “okay. Sorry about your lousy readership numbers. But that doesn’t mean you had to put that story on the front page.”

  “Au contraire. It’s exactly the kind of story that people are interested in,” she said. “A skeleton lying in a shallow grave for nearly thirty years out in tony horse-and-hunt country. Unearthed by a tornado, no less. People are fascinated. They want to know who it is and how he got there.”

  “And you’re going to turn it into a lurid tabloid scandal.”

  “Look, some poor schmo turns up dead in some godforsaken part of D.C., maybe somewhere in Anacostia, same circumstances, and what happens? People moan about the high crime rate in our nation’s capital and turn the page. One news cycle, the guy’s ancient history. You know as well as I do there’s a prurient interest in what goes on behind closed doors in the lives of the rich and famous. Especially people who play polo and foxhunt and send their kids to boarding school and men have names like Bunny or Fluffy.”

  “I’m not rich or famous. As for that stereotype, you live here, too. You know better.”

  She sighed. “I gotta go to the nine-thirty staff meeting.”

  “It’s ten o’clock.”

  “I know. And I’m holding the damn meeting. I know you’re upset, Luce. Why don’t you meet me at the Coach Stop at noon and we can talk about it? I’ve got an errand in Middleburg so I’ll be over there anyway.”

  “I guess you know they identified him,” I said.

  She knew immediately which “him” I meant. “Beauregard Kinkaid.”

  “You know anything about the guy?”

  “Not yet, but I will.”

  “I’m telling you up front that I never heard of him until Bobby mentioned his name. So I hope you weren’t planning to ask me any questions over lunch.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You lie worse than I do. See you at noon.”

  Before I left for Middleburg, I did an Internet search for Beauregard Kinkaid, which turned up nothing. Same result when I looked for Beau Kinkaid. Annabel Chastain, on the other hand, was a gold mine. Her name appeared as one of the organizers or main contributors at almost every major Charlottesville charity fund-raiser. The hospital. The symphony. A homeless shelter. The library.

  Chastain wasn’t her maiden name, either. It looked like she’d remarried since her name kept popping up along with Sumner Chastain, CEO of a construction company bearing his name. According to the website, Chastain Construction was a multiaward-winning leader in the industry, advertising itself as “one-stop shopping” for any type of building project from retail to residential to commercial. Most of their work was on the East Coast. They even had a slogan: “Building Your World, Building by Building.” Catchy.

  I was about to close down the search when I saw a link that intrigued me. A polo website. With a photo. Annabel and Sumner at a match in Florida presenting a check to the director of a program that rescued pets abandoned during natural disasters like the hurricanes that plagued that state and the entire Gulf Coast. The photo was grainy but at least now I knew what she looked like. A pretty, willowy blonde in a white pantsuit and a double strand of Wilma Flintstone choker pearls around her neck. Either she’d been a teenager when she married Beau or she took good care of herself—maybe both. Sumner looked old enough to be her father. White haired, black caterpillar eyebrows, heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and a movie-star tan.

  I printed out the picture and studied it. They looked at ease and in their element, but who was I to judge after chiding Kit for her stereotyped generalizations? I folded the page in quarters, shoved it in my purse, and left for Middleburg.

  I drove down M
osby’s Highway as it narrowed to two lanes and became Washington Street inside the Middleburg town limits—which was only a few blocks. If I continued east for another forty miles or so, I’d be in Washington, D.C., and what was a winding country road out here would gradually widen to accommodate lanes of thundering traffic and the second-worst rush hour commute in the country.

  But here in the western part of Loudoun County, we’d fought hard to keep our land open and green, and to preserve the charm and allure of villages like Middleburg, with its pretty main street of shops and restaurants owned and patronized by neighbors and friends. On weekends the town was always full of folks from D.C. who came to get away from the city’s relentless pace and brutal politics, and metropolitan suburbanites looking to escape the sameness of strip malls, big-box stores, and fast-food restaurants. I saw them at the vineyard, as well. What they wanted, it seemed to me, was reassurance that small-town America, with all the nostalgia and conjured images of a sweet, simpler life, still existed as a place they could reclaim, even if only for a few hours.

  The Coach Stop was one of those old-fashioned places, a fixture of Middleburg since the late 1950s that had retained its down-home atmosphere combined with family-style cooking. The restaurant was bustling with the usual lunchtime crowd and half a dozen people waved or called out hello, including all the waitresses, as I walked in. Kit waved from one of the booths. I slid into the semicircular banquette and we did the perfunctory air kiss.

  “I ordered onion rings already,” she said. “With ranch dressing.”

  She saw my face. “Oh, come on. Don’t give me that what’s-with-the-diet? look, will you? For the past month I’ve been totally stressed ever since I took over as bureau chief. Anyway, it’s only an extra ten pounds. You know I can take if off like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  The “extra ten” had actually crept up to an extra thirty, but that depended on when she began counting. And she’d been talking about the diet for years, long before she got her new job.

  “You asked me to remind you,” I said. “I’m only doing what I’m told.”

  “Well, don’t do it today. I’ll get back on track. But right now I’m still stressed.”

  Our onion rings arrived and we ordered. A chef’s salad and iced tea for me, a bacon cheeseburger plus a strawberry milk shake for Kit.

  She picked up an onion ring and dunked it in a blob of dressing she’d poured on her plate. “You’re mad at me. I can tell.”

  I took an onion ring and skipped the dressing. “I hope the Trib’s not going to turn this into a soap opera involving my family.”

  “Luce, Bobby did pick up your dad’s gun.”

  “You know about that, too?”

  Kit had been going out with Bobby for the past two years, but he bent over backward to make sure the sheriff’s department didn’t cut the Trib any extra slack. Kit sometimes complained that not only did she not receive any special favors, she had to work harder than her colleagues for the same information. But Bobby was adamant about no proprietary information leaks. If Kit knew about Bobby confiscating the gun, word must be all over town.

  “Someone saw the cruisers pulling out of the entrance to your vineyard this morning and went by the General Store afterward. My crime reporter happened to stop in for coffee and heard about it, so he called and pestered the life out of public affairs at the sheriff’s department,” she said.

  Her crime reporter could probably do a bang-up job of reporting if he parked himself in one of the rocking chairs at the General Store and just sat there all day. Sooner or later he’d know everything about everyone.

  “A lot of people own a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight,” I said. “It doesn’t mean Leland did anything.”

  “That’s what it was? A thirty-eight?”

  “You are trying to pump me for information, aren’t you?” I slumped back against the banquette. “How can you be so disingenuous?”

  The waitress showed up with our beverages. “Be right back with your food, ladies.”

  When she was out of earshot, Kit said in a low voice, “That’s not fair. I’m not being disingenuous and I’m not trying to pry anything out of you. But I am worried about you.”

  “You don’t need to be. I’m fine.”

  She picked up her milk shake and drank. When she set her glass down, she’d left a thick cerise lipstick kiss on the rim. Kit wore makeup like she was onstage at the Kennedy Center and needed to be seen in the balcony.

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.

  “You think Leland killed him, don’t you?”

  “The evidence is stacking up—”

  “What evidence? It’s all circumstantial.”

  Our meals arrived, silencing us again.

  Afterward, Kit said, “You know I’m on your side.”

  I picked at my salad. “I wasn’t aware there were sides.”

  “Come on, Lucie.”

  “Can we talk about something else? How about Beau Kinkaid? Did you find out anything about him?”

  She sighed and ate another dressing-drenched onion ring. “Not much. These days with the Internet all you have to do is be on some PTA committee and your name pops up on the school website. Unfortunately, Beau Kinkaid didn’t do anything that made him show up anywhere on the Web. Believe me, I searched. What I found out the old-fashioned way was that he was born in Richmond, June 30, 1939. Went to high school same town, no college record anywhere. Married Anne Gresham, no kids. Parents and a brother all dead.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Some people leave a bigger footprint in the world than others.” Kit shrugged. “The only one left who knows anything is his wife, Anne. Now married to—”

  “Sumner Chastain. I checked, too. And she’s ‘Annabel’ now.”

  “Well, the Chastain Construction machine is closing ranks around her. I called their house, and all calls are being forwarded to the company press office. The only thing I got was a two-sentence statement about Mrs. Chastain being distressed at the discovery of her ex-husband’s body and that she’s cooperating fully with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department,” she said.

  “You going to talk to her when she comes to town?”

  Kit finished chewing. “You bet.”

  “It’s weird she didn’t report that he was missing, don’t you think?”

  “You didn’t hear? He abused her and she wasn’t sorry he was gone.”

  “I heard. I still think it’s odd not to report it at all.”

  She shrugged. “You know, she could have blackmailed your father, if she suspected him of murder. Had the best of both worlds. That would be a reason not to report it.”

  “That’s an evil theory. She’d hardly be likely to admit something like that when she talks to Bobby, if that’s what she did. Besides, she seems to have remarried well enough that she wouldn’t need to blackmail anyone.”

  “Maybe. But after dating a cop for two years and hearing some of his stories, I’m less and less surprised at the stupid things people do that they believe they can get away with.” She pushed her plate away. “You want dessert?”

  “No, and neither do you. You could have drowned in that milk shake.”

  “Back to being my keeper, huh? Never mind, I’ve got to save room for dinner. Bobby’s taking me to D.C. tonight.” She raised an eyebrow so I could see all four colors of her Technicolor eye shadow as she signaled for our check. “He says he’s got a surprise for me.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “With Bobby, who knows? Maybe a visit to the police memorial and then pizza and a beer somewhere. His idea of fancy is a restaurant where the paper napkins are rolled around the silverware instead of in one of those dispenser thingies.”

  I smiled and she picked up the check. “On me. You’re feeding us this weekend. We’re looking forward to your party.”

  “Me, too, now that we have our power back on.”

  She walked me outside.

  “If
you find out anything about Beau Kinkaid, will you let me know?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “See you tomorrow at the anniversary party.”

  I drove home. Dead ahead of me were the mountains with their softly graded hues of blue. Solid and comforting, I usually never tired of the view. But today I couldn’t concentrate on anything except scenarios of what Annabel Chastain might tell Bobby about Leland’s role in her ex-husband’s death. With Chastain Construction’s press office stage-managing events, I had no doubt they would do whatever was necessary to protect Annabel Kinkaid Chastain.

  That included throwing my father to the wolves.

  Chapter 11

  I went back to the fields and spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up storm debris. When I got home that evening, Eli’s Jaguar was sitting in my driveway. I parked behind it and listened as piano music flooded through the open windows of the sunroom. It sounded like Chopin—something torrential and passionate played on my great-great-grandmother’s Bösendorfer concert grand, a wedding present purchased by her husband on their Austrian honeymoon. I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me. Eli could have gone to Juilliard or studied with some top teacher and actually made a living as a concert pianist, he was that talented.

  The piece crashed to an end with a dissonant chord Chopin hadn’t written. I went inside, wondering what had happened to bring my brother here again. Maybe he was even more desperate for money than the last time we’d spoken.

  He looked up from the keyboard when he heard me. Disheveled and unshaven, his eyes had the look of a dog that had been kicked repeatedly and had no idea why. In the cheery room filled with light pouring in through the banks of windows and reflecting off walls painted the color of liquid sunshine, he seemed dark, disturbed—and broken.

  I crossed the room and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. “What happened? Where are Hope and Brandi? Are they all right?”

  He shrugged and ran his finger across the top of the music stand as though checking for dust. “I suppose they’re all right. They’re probably at home.”