The Riesling Retribution wcm-4

by Ellen Crosby

  “He was your friend, Seth, and now that he’s dead he isn’t around to defend himself. If you’re going to throw him under a bus—”

  Seth straightened up and I could see the hardness travel to his eyes. “I resent that, Lucie. No one’s turning against anyone and no one said a word about your father killing that man.”

  He walked away abruptly, weaving his way between the tables as the gaily striped umbrellas fluttered in the wind. A pretty tableau on a pretty day. I watched him sit down at his table and knew that I’d angered him. But I also knew something else.

  He’d ducked my question about whether or not he believed Leland was a murderer.

  Frankie came to me at the end of the day when Quinn and I were cleaning up in the little kitchen off the tasting room. The rest of the staff had gone, including Savannah, who had shown up to help for a few hours and promised to return on Sunday.

  “What gives, Lucie? We got calls all afternoon from the Romeos. All of them who were coming to that private barrel tasting tomorrow afternoon canceled. You know anything about that?”

  I stopped taking clean wineglasses out of the dishwasher. Quinn put down an empty cardboard box we used to store the glasses and regarded me warily.

  “I might.”

  “What happened?” Quinn asked. “It’s about Leland, isn’t it?”

  “I think I offended Seth Hannah.”

  “You think or you know?” he said.

  I twisted my dish towel into a knot and Quinn threw up his hands. Frankie looked like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to wait around to hear what came next or drop through the floorboards.

  “Why don’t I call the people on the waiting list and let them know we’ve got space all of a sudden?” Her smile didn’t make it all the way to her eyes.

  “Thanks, Frankie,” I said.

  “Good idea,” Quinn said. “You know how I hate doing tastings when there’s nobody there.”

  “I’d better get right to it.”

  The door swung shut as she left. Quinn folded his arms across his chest. “What exactly did you say to Seth to royally piss him off?”

  “I didn’t royally piss him off.”

  “There’s another expression for it?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  I ran a finger around and around the rim of a clean glass. “Bobby’s been questioning all the Romeos about Leland and Beau Kinkaid. Seth said he told Bobby that he didn’t know anything, but it didn’t stop him from insinuating that Leland probably did it because of the kind of person he was.”

  “Bobby’s a big boy. I’m sure he can separate facts from insinuation.”

  “You know what? If you repeat something often enough, regardless of whether or not it’s true, after a while people start believing it.”

  Quinn set down my glass on the counter and put both hands on my shoulders. “People,” he said, “are going to talk and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  He looked at me like I’d already lost not only the battle but the whole damn war.

  “No. Not this time.”

  “I can prove Leland’s innocent. That’ll stop the talk.”

  He let go of my shoulders. “There’s no way you can do that. No evidence, nothing. You can’t go up against Bobby.”

  “I can’t let the Romeos imply that because Leland and Beau had a business deal that went bad, he’s the obvious candidate to be the murderer. If that were true, I know a lot of people who’d qualify as potential killers. That includes me and a bunch of the Romeos themselves.”

  Quinn finished filling the wine box with clean glasses and closed it up.

  “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?” he asked.

  I folded the dish towel and slapped it on the counter.

  “They shouldn’t throw boomerangs.”

  Just like Saturday, Sunday’s first crisis erupted right before we opened. Eli’s wife, Brandi, walked through the front door of the villa and the room went quiet.

  There are those who spread joy and sunshine because they’ve got such positive, upbeat personalities that people feel good just by being around them. My sister-in-law was not one of these people.

  Beautiful, absolutely. Stunning, even a knockout. Unfortunately, although Brandi possessed the kind of classic dark-haired looks that made people think of kohl-eyed women who graced Grecian urns or inspired men to launch a thousand ships, it was paired with a personality as two-dimensional as a wine label.

  My brother had fallen hard for her and every time she wanted him to hang the moon someplace different—which she often did—he never thought twice about dropping everything to fetch the ladder. I do believe he’d commit murder for her without hesitating.

  At first I wondered if the two of them had set up this meeting and Eli had forgotten to mention she’d be dropping by. But the moment I saw the look of expectant hope in his eyes, replaced quickly by a mask of cool resignation, I knew it was unplanned and likely to be combustible.

  “Hey, princess.” Eli sounded wary. “You look pretty. New outfit? Where’s Hope?”

  Brandi wore an expensive-looking red sheath dress with a plunging neckline and a racy slit that exposed a tanned thigh. Black patent leather belt, black sling-back sandals. A ruby and diamond necklace and matching drop earrings. Eli could be in hock until the next millennium just from her jewelry purchases.

  Her heels clacked on the quarry tile floor as she crossed the room, tossing her head like a runway model, well aware that all eyes were fixed on her. Frankie disappeared into the kitchen, dragging Gina. Quinn, who had been taking wine bottles out of boxes along with Eli, stopped and folded his arms like a spectator watching a sports event. I quit filling goblets with the small oyster crackers we served during tastings. The air crackled like she’d just laid down a live high-voltage line.

  “Hope is with my mother. We need to talk, Eli. I’m broke and I need money. I can’t go on like this.” Her words came out in a torrent as she flung her Coach purse down on a bar stool. She seemed oblivious to her audience.

  My brother came from behind the bar like he was about to step into the lion’s cage without a chair or a whip.

  “Look, sweetheart, let’s go on outside and talk about it. I told you. I can’t get you anything for a few days—”

  “Don’t give me that crap. I’m tired of it. What do you expect me to do in the meantime? Get it out of thin air?” She snapped her fingers in his face. “I don’t even answer the phone anymore because it’s always a collection agency. I’m on goddamn tranquilizers now to deal with the stress. I don’t care if you have to rob a bank, but you’d better do something. Do you understand me?”

  Her voice, like her nerves, seemed to fray as she spoke. Eli took her arm.

  “Let’s go home, babe.” He sounded calm, despite the red rising on his cheeks. I wondered how often he’d placated her like this before. “We’ll talk about it there. Have dinner tonight, work it all out—”

  She wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “Don’t touch me! What are you, insane? It’s over, Eli. I told you already. The only reason you can come home is to get your stuff. What you haven’t moved out by the end of the day tomorrow will be on the street to be picked up with the trash.”

  Her words landed like blows, except they were meant to humiliate as well as wound. I held my breath and waited to see what my brother would do. For a moment the only sound in the room was the rushing of the wind through the open French doors.

  A muscle twitched in Quinn’s jaw. He was biting his tongue like I was as Brandi faced Eli, her beautiful features twisted into the uncontrolled fury of a harpy.

  “It’s still my house.” Eli maintained that surreal deadpan calm but now there was a steeliness in his voice. “And we’re going to finish this conversation somewhere else.”

  He grabbed her purse and thrust it at her. “Get going.”

  �
��Don’t you talk to me—”

  “I said, move it.”

  Brandi looked as if he’d actually slapped her, but for once she didn’t have a sharp-edged retort. Eli’s eyes met mine as she tucked her bag under her arm and stalked across the room, head high in an attempt to salvage her dignity. Eli followed, hands in his pockets, eyes straight ahead.

  I did not want to think about where the rest of that discussion would take them. Eli didn’t slam the door, but he did close it with some force.

  Quinn broke the silence first. “I’d give her a good spanking.”

  “I know you would. What do you bet Eli caves in and buys her something once he calms her down.”

  “A straitjacket?”

  “Only if Versace makes them.” I paused. “Look, I’m sorry about that scene—”

  “Forget it. It wasn’t your fault and no apology’s necessary.” He shoved an empty wine box under the bar. “I smell coffee in the kitchen. Frankie probably made a fresh pot. Let’s get some.”

  I nodded, grateful he was trying to get things back on track again.

  “I think we lost Eli for the day,” I said. “We’re going to be short-handed again.”

  “We’ll cope,” he said. “Just like we always do.”

  The rest of the day was as busy as Saturday had been so it turned out not to be too difficult to banish Eli and his problems from my mind for a few hours and concentrate on taking care of customers and making sure things ran smoothly. The tasting room and terrace buzzed with the conversation of couples and groups of friends who laughed and talked and seemed happy to be with one another for an afternoon. Quinn caught me watching at one point and squeezed my shoulder.

  “Don’t go there. You can’t solve Eli’s problems. He has to work them out for himself.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I know he does.”

  He patted me on the back like he knew I was fibbing and turned his attention to a good-looking young couple who just stepped up to the bar.

  At noon my sister, Mia, called from New York to say congratulations on twenty years and ask how everything was going. I said everything was going great, just great, and that Eli, with whom she also wanted to speak, couldn’t come to the phone right now but he’d call her later. I also said nothing about Beau Kinkaid or Leland being a possible suspect in his murder investigation.

  I hung up the phone feeling guilty for keeping so much from her, but my sister’s obvious happiness at starting a new life in Manhattan after a rocky period following our mother’s death had resonated in her voice. If I’d given off any vibes that anything was wrong she’d been too caught up in her own world to realize, so why spoil it? There would be enough time to tell her later—especially after the sheriff’s department investigation finally wrapped up.

  James Joyce was right. What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for.

  Besides, my heart was already grieving enough for both of us.

  By five thirty the last guests had departed. Frankie, Gina, and I were in the courtyard clearing up wineglasses and dishes and wiping down tables when my cousin Dominique showed up. She hugged me and, without asking, pitched in with the cleanup.

  When I was growing up my mother once remarked that it seemed apt that Dominique had been born on a Saturday since, like the old nursery rhyme, she truly was the child who worked hard for a living. Somewhere along the way, though, Dominique crossed over from hardworking to workaholic, becoming Saturday’s child without an off switch. Thin and sinewy as rope, she had hazel eyes and spiky auburn hair that looked like she cut it with gardening shears—which on her somehow seemed fashionable and chic. Though my cousin hadn’t lived in Paris for years, she still possessed that innate French sense of style that turned heads when she entered a room.

  “Why didn’t you come earlier for the party?” I asked. “Instead of for the drudgery?”

  She lit a cigarette. “Something came up at the Inn.”

  Something always came up at the Inn and she was always the only one who could handle it.

  “Looks like you had a good day.” She waved the hand with the cigarette to encompass the courtyard. “You must have made money hand over foot.”

  I smiled. “We did well. How’d it go with you?”

  She sucked on her cigarette and exhaled dragon smoke. “Eh, bien, the Romeos were in drinking at the bar,” she said. “They were talking about your father and that skeleton you found.”

  “Seth Hannah told me Bobby’s been questioning all of them about whether they knew him.” I shrugged. “No one did.”

  Dominique picked up two wineglasses, which still had remnants of red wine in them, and dumped one into the other. “Do they know who he is?”

  “Didn’t you hear? A former business partner of Leland’s. Beauregard Kinkaid. He went by ‘Beau.’”

  “Beauregard Kinkaid? Beau Kinkaid?”

  She repeated the name as she flung the wine over the wall in a graceful arc of bloodlike drops.

  She faced me, holding the empty glasses, a puzzled expression on her face. “I don’t want to open a Pandora’s box of worms here,” she said, “but I met Beau Kinkaid. He came to visit your father at the house the summer you were born.”

  Chapter 13

  “You met Beau Kinkaid?” I asked. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. He was not a nice man. I remember him.”

  I sat down in one of the patio chairs and stared at her. I’d just turned twenty-nine in July. Twenty-nine years ago Dominique would have been thirteen. Could she really be that certain she knew him?

  “The summer you were born my mother came from France to help your mother. She brought me, too.” Dominique expelled more cigarette smoke through her nostrils. “I remember Beau came to visit your father and they had a terrible argument. He was ugly and he scared me, but his name was Beau. It seemed odd.”

  Of course. In French, beau means “beautiful.”

  Still, I wondered how vivid—and accurate—her recollection could be. Even after spending the last few weeks looking through family photos for the vineyard slide show Frankie and I had put together, I’d been hard-pressed to recall long-ago events with any specificity. What memories remained had been as vague and impressionistic as the blurry, out-of-focus photos I’d discarded.

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  She ground out her cigarette on a plate that still had remnants of what looked like melted Brie on it.

  “Sorry, I’m afraid not. You know I didn’t speak English very well back then.”

  She kept grinding that cigarette and didn’t look up.

  “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  “I’m sorry, chérie. It’s not very nice.” Her smile was rueful. “Whatever happened during that conversation, it made your mother cry.”

  I closed my eyes as an image of my mother flashed in my head as clearly as if I’d been with her only yesterday. What Beau said to Leland must have devastated her. My mother didn’t cry often. Children remember those moments—the unsettling discovery that adults aren’t invincible and they can hurt enough to shed tears, too. My cousin’s story was sounding increasingly plausible.

  “You have no idea what they were talking about?”

  Dominique shook her head. “No, but it upset my mother, too. All that shouting.”

  “Who was shouting?” I asked. “My parents?”

  “Non, your father and Beau. We were sitting on the veranda when he showed up. Uncle Leland introduced us. Then he brought Beau into his office right away. After a few minutes, we could hear them hollering at each other.” She sat down across from me and lit another cigarette. “After Beau left, things got sort of crazy.”

  “Crazy, how?”

  “Because of you.”

  There was a half-open bottle of red sitting on one of the serving tables. I got it and found two clean glasses.

  “I need a drink,” I said.

  Dominique took the glass I handed her. “Tante Chantal went into la
bor with you that afternoon so my mother and your father took her to the hospital. They left me at home to babysit Eli.”

  “You mean Beau came to see Leland the day I was born?”

  Dominique nodded. “I was terrified he’d return when I was in the house all alone so I barricaded the doors with furniture and went to bed. When Uncle Leland and Maman came home from the hospital in the middle of the night, they had to break a windowpane so they could open a window to climb through. I was sleeping upstairs. I never heard them pounding on the front door.”

  If it hadn’t been so important, I would have laughed.

  “What happened after Leland and Beau’s argument? Do you remember Beau leaving or if Leland went with him?”

  Dominique drank her wine.

  “I don’t know what happened. When your mother went into your father’s office after Beau left, I was sent to my room. That’s when I heard her crying through the door to the office. By the time I was told I could come downstairs, my mother said Tante Chantal was lying down and that I needed to be quiet. Your father was gone.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. But Maman was furious because she had to telephone his friends until she found him so he could drive your mother to the hospital.”

  I stared into my wineglass. What could Leland have done to make my mother cry over a business deal gone sour? Had he lost money? Gotten involved in some shady scam?

  And where had he gone after Beau left the house?

  If this was the argument Annabel Chastain had been talking about, at least I now knew for sure that Beau left our house alive. But where did my father disappear to for those few hours, leaving his wife who was distraught over the quarrel between him and his business partner and only hours away from giving birth? Did Leland track down Beau to finish the argument in private? Or did he end things between them for good?

  I looked at my cousin. “You probably need to tell Bobby about this.”

  She swirled around the last of the wine in her glass, a somber expression on her face.