The house at noontime was worse than a blast furnace, and the heat so oppressive it weighed me down like the gravity on Jupiter. I took another shower and dressed without drying off. It helped for ten minutes and then I was as enervated and listless as I’d been before.
I’d been putting off making a trip to the attic, which would be even more suffocating and airless than the rest of the house, to retrieve one of the old fans, but it was getting down to choosing between the lesser of two evils. I rummaged in the kitchen for a flashlight, betting the lights would be burned out in the attic. When I found one, the batteries were dead so I pawed through more junky drawers looking for fresh replacements. After half an hour I quit looking.
I could buy batteries at the general store, which would be quicker than a trip to Middleburg. Besides, Thelma had already squeezed every bit of news about our family out of everyone else in Atoka, so there wasn’t much chance I’d get mugged for new gossip.
There was no one in the store when I walked in, even though three pickup trucks were out front, angled so they filled all the available pavement on either side of the gas pumps, the area Thelma liked to call “the parking lot.” The sleigh bells attached to the front door jingled as I entered. The store smelled, as it always did, of fresh-brewed coffee and pine-scented sawdust. Abruptly, voices in the back room stopped talking and a moment later, Thelma scooted out front. She was small and compact, a woman of “a certain age” as the French say, or, as she put it, “I’m not as young as I look.” She had the tornado energy of a twentysomething, but a lot of the old-timers said she was over seventy if she was a day. She was dressed completely in lime green from the bows in her bright orange hair to the killer pair of stiletto slingbacks. She wore the usual tonnage of makeup, though she’d gotten a bit whimsical drawing in her pencil-line eyebrows. I’d once heard her described as the Mata Hari of Atoka, with her va-va-voom style of dressing and her success at weaseling information out of her neighbors—but with the eyebrows she looked more like Spock from Star Trek.
“Lord love a duck,” she said when she saw me. “I swear, that Marissa is some hussy! They’ve just let her out of prison for forgery and already she’s trying to take away poor Katarina’s husband. And he doesn’t recognize her after all the plastic surgery she had after the fire so he believes every word she says. And her pregnant with twins by Diego, that gorgeous prison guard who’s really Dr. Lance Tarantino!”
“General Hospital? Days of Our Lives?” I guessed.
“A new one. It’s called Tomorrow Ever After. The characters are so real, Lucille, they’re practically like family. I just love that show.” She put her hands on her hips and studied me. “You know, child, you lost too much weight while you were over there in France. How much do you weigh now, anyway?”
“I don’t actually know. I’m okay, though.”
“Can’t be more than a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet,” she said. “You need to put some weight on, Lucille. I think there’s one blueberry muffin left from this morning’s delivery. Better’n those cross-ants you got in France, too. Hampton Weaver wanted it when he was here earlier, but Lordy, that man must be close to three hundred pounds and lookin’ like a doublewide trailer, so I said, ‘Hamp, you put that muffin back and you get yourself on a diet, you hear me?’ So you take it, now, and you eat it. On me.”
Stiletto heels clacking like castanets on the wooden floor, she crossed the room. The blueberry muffin sat, on its own, in the glass cabinet where she kept the fresh bakery items she ordered every day. She wrapped it in a piece of white paper and handed it to me. “Now eat that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She picked up a dish towel and polished imaginary fingerprints off the glass cabinet. “I heard that new winemaker of yours is over seeing Bobby Noland right now, trying to get him to speed up the investigation into poor ol’ Fitz’s death so you all can get back inside your winery.”
I coughed on a piece of muffin. “Mmmm.”
She eyed me. “So it’s true, then?”
I swallowed. “I don’t really know where he is right now. Where did you hear that?”
She stopped polishing and touched her hand to the back of her hair. “Why, from him. ’Course he didn’t actually say that’s where he was heading, but I know the receptionist over to the sheriff’s office. He’d called there a little while ago.”
“You still know everything about everybody, don’t you, Thelma?”
“Oh, I keep my oar in, Lucille. It’s what keeps me so young. People are so interesting, you know? And, of course, I just plumb love the socialism of my job.”
“I can see that.”
“He left here a few minutes ago,” she continued. “Nice-looking young fellow, except I wish he’d take off that jewelry. Worries me when a man wears a necklace and bracelet. Didn’t waste any time getting himself a girlfriend since he got here though, did he?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She smiled sweetly. “That dancer.”
“What dancer?”
“The one takes most of her clothes off.”
I stared at her. “Are we still talking about Quinn Santori? Our winemaker?”
“Who else?” She resumed polishing. “She works at Mom’s Place.”
“That night club on the way to Bluemont?” The joke about that particular strip joint was that all the men who went there told their wives or girlfriends they were going to “Mom’s,” which saved a lot of grief and questioning—until everyone wised up about their real whereabouts. “How did he meet her?”
“How do you think?”
“Oh.” He’d said he was headed over to Bluemont the other day when he took all our leftover food to the soup kitchen. He was probably going over to Mom’s for a little lunchtime…refreshment.
“She’s right pretty.” Thelma said. “’Course I’ve only seen her with her clothes on. She’s about your age, Lucille. I think at her place of work she goes by ‘Angel.’ Just one name, like some of those rock stars. Her real name is Angela Stetson.”
“Angela Stetson? I went to high school with her! She was really quiet. I don’t think I ever heard her say two words.”
Thelma arched her eyebrows, which was not a good idea since they disappeared under her orange fringe of curls. “Still waters, Lucille. Still waters.” She looked sly. “So what do you think about that?”
I’d finished my muffin and crumpled the white paper in my hands. “I think it’s his business who he sees. And hers. Do you have any batteries?”
“’Course I do. They’re over in hardware. What size do you need?”
“For a flashlight. D, I think.”
“Hardware” was all of half a row, just behind camping items, fishing lures, and ammunition. The other half of the row was seeds and greeting cards. You could get anything at Thelma’s, if you didn’t mind the lack of variety. We walked over to hardware.
“Here they are.” She handed me a package of batteries. “As long as we’re on the subject, what’s all this I hear about you and Gregory Knight? Is he trying to start a fire with you again, Lucille? And him sleeping with your sister, too. That boy has no shame. A regular Casablanca, he is, a real two-timer.”
Some government ought to hire this woman for serious under-cover work. Where had she heard that? “I don’t know what you heard but there is absolutely nothing going on between Greg and me.”
“Is that so? Well, let me tell you, my sources are the horse’s mouths themselves. I spoke to Gregory when he was in here this morning after getting off work at the radio station. He went redder ’n a tomato when I asked him. If that isn’t an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is.” She clacked over to the cash register leaving me to trail behind her while she rang up my sale in silence. Then she added her denouement. “I have it on good authority that last night he was seen in the throes of passion, kissing you for all the world to see.”
“Oh gosh, Thelma, it’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I knew it! You’re redder ’n a tomato, too, Lucille. You stay away from that boy.” She wagged a finger in my face. “He’s too dang good-looking for his own health and he knows it. I don’t like a person takes advantage of another. It isn’t right.”
“No, ma’am.” I started to move away from the cash register. “Thanks for the batteries and the muffin.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I know you’re looking out for me and I appreciate it. Really.”
“Well. ’Course I am.” Her voice softened and she seemed somewhat mollified. “But there is one more thing.”
“Yes?”
She put her hands on her hips and thought for a moment. “There’s something you need to know, child. I’ve been debating whether or not I ought to keep it a secret, but you know me. I believe it’s best if you just let it all hang out.”
“I know that.”
“You believe in the power of spirits, don’t you, Lucille?”
“As in alcohol? You mean wine?”
“I do not mean alcohol. I mean spirits. You know, communicating with…” She paused and looked significantly at me. “The Great Beyond.”
It wasn’t too hard to see where she was going with this. Years ago Thelma used to see a psychic over in Delaplane who happened to correctly predict that she would soon meet a tall stranger who had just come into a large sum of money and would ask her to marry him. She met the guy, all right. It’s possible he’s still doing time at some correctional facility in North Carolina for armed robbery.
“I believe in life after death,” I said carefully.
“Now, honey, I’m going to tell you something and I don’t want you to be too upset.”
“Okay.”
She clasped her hands together and leaned toward me. “I can’t be too specifical about details,” she said, lowering her voice, “but I have it on good authority that your mother is absolutely committed, I mean committed, to your hanging on to the house and the vineyard.” She straightened up and put her hands on her hips again. “What do you think?”
What horse’s mouth told her that? “How do you know this?”
“Oh, the spirits often use me as their medium. I have excellent psychedelic powers. Your mother told me herself when she paid me a little visit.”
“My mother? You’re quite sure it was my mother you were talking to?”
“I am positive. Charlotte and I were very close, Lucille.” I’d forgotten she used to call my mother Charlotte.
“I remember.”
“Though I admit,” she added, “that I was surprised when she called on me. It was the first time I’d heard from her. Since before, well, you know when.”
“When did you two have this discussion?”
“Why, just this afternoon,” she said. “I had my Ouija Board out because Muriel Sims wanted to talk to Henry. She likes to keep in touch pretty regular, you know, since he went over to the other side. And, plain as day after Henry left, there was Charlotte. I knew it was her because I didn’t understand what she was saying at first. I think it was something French. Too bad I can’t remember it now.”
“And she told you she didn’t want us to sell the vineyard?”
“Yes, indeedy.” She frowned, pursing her lips. “You’re sure you’re okay, Lucille? It isn’t too much of a shock? Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She looked relieved. “Well, that’s a big load off my mind. I might of figured. You know, you’ve got Charlotte’s backbone, child. And you look just like her. She was a beauty, was Charlotte. Shame your daddy didn’t…” She stopped and glanced down at her hands.
“Didn’t what?”
She started fiddling with the lime green bows, spinning them around like tiny propellers. “Oh my, how I do run on!” She looked at her watch. “Time for my next show.” She sidled toward the back of the room.
“Wait!”
She turned around.
“Do you think there’s a chance you might be hearing from Leland on that Ouija Board?”
She looked surprised. “Now, Lucille, this isn’t ‘Dial-a-Spirit’ I got going here. I cannot just summon people up willy-nilly. They choose their moments. And frankly, I don’t figure Lee would come to me with whatever’s on his mind, anyway. The man always did keep to himself. Folks don’t change their stripes, just because they’re dead. Tootle-oo, honey.”
She was back at her soaps before I made it to the door. Whoever was trying to pressure Leland to sell the vineyard had been remarkably discreet if Thelma hadn’t got wind of it. She would have either pumped me for more information or else spilled the beans about what she knew. Even the devil himself would have had a hard time keeping a secret from her. Someone had done a good job of covering his or her tracks.
When I got home, I put the batteries in the flashlight and went upstairs to the attic. Years ago Leland had a carpenter convert half the space into a bedroom for Eli. When I was small, it seemed a remote, distant kingdom, far from the rest of the house, a lighted outpost carved out of the cobweb-filled tomblike darkness. Eli hadn’t liked the room much either, though he refused to admit he believed the stories about dead ancestors’ bones rotting in its far recesses. When he was older, though, the bones stopped bothering him and he realized he could get away with anything in the privacy of his secluded eyrie. I never figured out how Mom didn’t smell the cigarette smoke on him, but by then I’d begun filching unlabeled wine bottles from the barrel room to drink with Kit over at Goose Creek Bridge, so I didn’t begrudge Eli’s tobacco habit.
Opening the attic door was like opening the door to a blast furnace. I waited until some of the pent-up heat dissipated before going in. The windows in the gabled front of the house, opaque from years of accumulated dirt and sealed shut with grime, were completely inaccessible on account of an obstacle course of dusty boxes, old suitcases, broken toys, appliances, and other things too wearying to catalog. I tried not to breathe the suffocatingly stale air. Luckily I found the fan almost at once, wedged near the door between a suitcase and a box with “baby clothes” written on the side in my mother’s handwriting.
It didn’t seem likely that someone as fastidious as she had been would have left either a priceless diamond necklace or her diaries up here. No heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. I shone my flashlight around the room. And mice.
I left, closing the door firmly behind me. Maybe I could get one of the barn cats to move in for a while.
The rotting plastic handle on top of the fan disintegrated as I carried it down the stairs. I watched it crash down the last few steps, the metallic sound reverberating like dissonant cymbals in the empty house. Fortunately it still worked when I plugged it in to an outlet in Leland’s bedroom. It sounded like an asthmatic on a bad day. I banged the top of the case, which only changed the noise to a new, more annoying whine.
The master bedroom, furnished with antique carved mahogany pieces from my mother’s family in France, was as disordered as the rest of the house and smelled of the same vague decaying abandonment that pervaded the downstairs. For months after my mother died, Leland had kept her clothes, her lipstick, her hairbrush, and even some lingerie she’d washed and left to dry in the bathroom untouched. Finally Serafina, who used to clean for us, put away the lingerie and makeup and hung up the clothes. It wasn’t healthy for Mr. Lee, she’d said, living and sleeping among the dead like that.
I didn’t want a living shrine for Leland, either, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch his heaps of clothes or his rumpled, stale-smelling bed linens just now. Maybe I could persuade Serafina to come back and help me sort though his things, like she’d done for my mother. It didn’t seem right to displace Leland’s personal effects just yet. It was too soon.
Frankly, the thought of trying to restore the house as it had been when my mother was alive seemed overly daunting on top of the more urgent problem of keeping the vineyard solvent. For hundreds of years my ancestors had managed to fuse the past with the present, burnishing memories that gave the house a patina of genteel nostalgia. As I looked around the bedroom, I couldn’t summon any of the regenerative magic of my family. Today as I sweltered in the late August heat, the place felt like a mausoleum.
I sat on the edge of the bed and rifled through the pile of magazines and papers on Leland’s marble-topped nightstand. It looked like he had taken to transacting some of his business from bed, instead of his office. The top piece of paper was a two-month-old bill from the company that made our labels. No doubt unpaid.
I pulled the wastebasket next to me and began tossing things. He’d obviously continued investing in what Eli called his “fly-by-night” scams. With money we didn’t have. The first one involved a soon-to-be-created tax haven off the coast of Central America. Some guy who called himself Prince Larry was building a pontoon island called “Heaven.” Reading between the lines, it would be a no-questions-asked place to park cash that couldn’t show up on a tax return or a set of corporate books. That would be in addition to the research center devoted to the study of eternal youth. First, though, the prince needed a little seed money to get going and Leland was one of the lucky ones to appear on his radar.
Another brochure advertised lunar real estate. Eli hadn’t been kidding. A group of Florida developers claiming to be affiliated with NASA were selling plots of land on the moon. They were currently seeking investors in the “preconstruction phase.”
I tossed the prince and the lunar condos in the trash along with a few other gems, but kept a folder called “Blue Ridge Consortium.” Inside was a single sheet of paper—a letter called “Preserving Our Heritage, Protecting Our Wilderness.” It was addressed “Dear Heritage Friend.” It, too, was an appeal for money.
“All donations to the Blue Ridge Consortium will allow us to continue buying land for the purpose of turning it into parkland. This land will never be developed,” the letter stated. “It will be your legacy to your children and your children’s children. We cannot allow the natural beauty of our region to be paved over to make way for shopping malls and condominium developments. Your generous donation will continue to preserve a region of great historic significance.” It was signed by Nate Midas, who was appropriately named. He owned a media conglomerate and had a stable full of prize-winning horses over in Upperville.
The minimum donation was $10,000. Depending on the size of the contribution, the organizers wanted to express their thanks. An all-expense-paid weekend at the Greenbriar. Box seats at the Kentucky Derby. Four days and three nights in Vail during ski season. A week in Tortola at a private villa. It was a safe bet we weren’t members of the consortium.
I could see through the paper that there was writing on the back so I turned it over. Doodling.
Mason’s name, with an elaborately embellished box around it. Two phone numbers at the bottom—outside the box—neither of which I recognized.
I reached for the bedside phone and dialed the first number. After a few rings an answering machine kicked in.
“Hi, it’s Sara. I’m not here. Leave a message and have an awesome day. Here’s the beep.” A singsongy girlish voice like a teenager. If she’d written the message, there would be little hearts instead of dots over the i’s. I hung up.
The second number rang half a dozen times then someone answered.
“Gas-o-Rama, whacanidoforyou?” He sounded Hispanic.
“Uh, nothing. Sorry, wrong number.” A gas station.
Whatever Leland had been up to before he died, he hadn’t left any obvious clues about who wanted to buy the vineyard. I reached in the pocket of my jeans for the little key Fitz had given me. I’d been carrying it around like a talisman, trying it out on anything in the house with a lock on it. The mantel clock in the parlor. The elaborately carved chest with its mother-of-pearl inlay containing the Bessette family silver in the dining room. Even the old bread box.
It would be just like my mother to leave whatever the key opened here in this room and Leland to never find it. I walked over to her mirrored dressing table, pulling open the drawers. They were empty. The drawer and cabinet of her matching bedside table were also empty. Under the bed was a different story. Besides the now-familiar basketball-sized dust bunnies were more newspapers and magazines. I used my cane like a hook and pulled some of them out so I could see them. Old copies of the Wine Spectator, the Post, the Tribune, along with the Loudoun and Fauquier regional newspapers, plus a robust collection of hard-core porn magazines with busty nudes in naughty or teasing poses on the covers.
The magazines needed to return to utter darkness where they came from—or some gutter—but when I tried to shove them back under the bed, something blocked the way. I knelt down and pulled out a shallow box that probably once held a case of beer but now was filled with papers.
More bills, these from months ago. Also a copy of the San Jose Mercury News from last January. The lead article on the front page explained why Leland had kept the paper. Next to the headline SOUR GRAPES: WINEMAKER JAILED was a photo of Quinn Santori and two other men. The subheading read BIOTERRORISM SCARE REVEALED FRAUD.
The jailed winemaker was not Quinn but a man named Allen Cantor, who had been the senior winemaker at Le Coq Rouge Winery in Calistoga, California. He’d been adulterating wine—with tap water, no less—and selling it under a different label to distributors in Eastern Europe and Russia. He’d gotten away with it for several years, making millions of dollars under the table, until someone analyzed a bottle of Chardonnay at a competition. The Homeland Security people got involved, suspecting possible bioterrorism and instead they uncovered fraud and embezzlement. Assistant winemaker Paolo Santori had not been charged, but the owner, Tavis Hennessey, fired him anyway.
Cantor’s personal financial records showed a man who was heavily in debt and on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Authorities suspected he’d merely moved money to an offshore bank and were pursuing the matter. A photograph taken in the wine cellar of Le Coq Rouge showed Tavis Hennessey, Allen Cantor, and Paolo Santori in happier times with their arms around one another’s shoulders. The last sentence quoted Hennessey who said he expected to close the winery.
Though he had a ponytail back then and he wasn’t wearing a Hawaiian shirt, it was clearly Quinn. I called directory assistance and got the phone number for Le Coq Rouge. An automated voice announced, not surprisingly, that the number was no longer in service. There was no forwarding number.
How long had Leland known about this? Had Quinn given him the article himself, been up front about his past? Had Leland decided to hire him, anyway? Someone with this kind of dicey background wouldn’t bother Leland in the least. Hell, people like that were his business partners. They probably got along like a house on fire.
It was also possible Leland hadn’t known anything about this. Maybe Quinn caught a lucky break when his new employer skipped the background check in a rush to find a winemaker after Jacques’s sudden departure. Obviously, though, Leland found out somehow about what happened in California.
Then what? Had Leland threatened to expose him? Dismiss him? In that case, Leland’s death had been convenient, even helpful, for Quinn. Not to mention he’d freely admitted going back to the Merlot block and cleaning up all traces of what had happened, even down to looking for the bullet that had killed Leland. Out in the vineyard this morning he’d tried to bully me, saying he was going to run things his way, listening to my opinion but doing what he pleased. With Leland out of the picture, Quinn probably figured now he had carte blanche, with no one to stop him from doing just that.
Which meant he, too, had a motive for murder.