Quinn turned right on Sycamore Lane after we passed through the south vineyard. It was the longer way to my house.
“I want to look at the Pinot and the Chardonnay in the north fields,” he said. “Let’s see how much cleanup we’ve got over there. That wind did a lot of damage.”
Though the tornado had not passed through here, it had taken its toll in downed leaves, limbs, and small branches. The private gravel road that wound through the vineyard in a lazy ellipse was littered with debris. Wherever I looked, fresh green leaves carpeted the ground.
“Have you checked on your house yet?” I asked as we passed the private cul-de-sac where his cottage and the now-empty farm manager’s house sat on the edge of the woods.
“Nope.”
He swerved to avoid a large limb and stopped the Mule with a lurch that made me grab the dashboard. I was about to ask what he was doing when I saw that he’d leaned forward so his elbows rested on the steering wheel and his fingertips covered his mouth. He was staring at the old sycamore—or what was left of it—with an expression of shocked disbelief.
The tree that had given the road its name had stood here as long as my family owned this farm. Something—wind or, more likely, lightning—had cleaved it down the middle. The right side had fallen across the road, creating an impenetrable barrier that seemed to reach the sky. What remained upright, a jagged spear of new-looking wood, made me think of a wound so deep it exposed bone.
My eyes filled and I looked away so Quinn wouldn’t see the tears. Losing that tree was like a death in the family.
“I’m sorry, Lucie,” he said.
“I wish it had been any tree but this one. I even wish it had been my house. That could be rebuilt.”
“I know.”
It was pointless, but I asked anyway. “Do you think an arborist can save it?”
He started the Mule and shifted into reverse. “I wish I did, but honestly I think it’s too far gone.”
I nodded and wiped my eyes with the back of my grimy hand.
“We’ll still try,” he said.
“Must have been an incredible lightning strike to bring it down like this.”
“I’ll get some of the guys over here with chain saws to clear the road. Let’s hope nothing else came down between here and your house.”
“Can you let me know when they do that?” I asked. “I can’t bear to watch. I need to be sure I’m somewhere else.”
“Of course.” His voice was gentle. “I promise, I’ll take care of it. We’ll do our best to save it.”
We drove through more storm-wrought debris but encountered nothing as devastating as the sycamore. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until he pulled into the circular driveway to my home. Built more than two hundred years ago by my ancestor, Hamish Montgomery, and named in honor of the 77th Highlanders, his regiment that had fought in the French and Indian War, Highland House was a graceful blend of Federal and Georgian architecture made of stone quarried from our land. Hamish had carved the Montgomery clan motto—“Garde bien”—in the lintel over the door like a talisman. “Watch well. Take good care.” Except for more small branches scattered on the lower-pitched roofs of the two wings, the house looked exactly as it had when I left this morning.
I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks.
“At least it spared the buildings,” Quinn said, pulling up at the front door.
“I know.” I let out a long breath. “We’re lucky. It could have been so much worse.”
“Wonder how long we’ll be without power,” he said.
“A couple of days, I imagine.”
“How are you going to manage a shower with no water?” he asked.
“The water tank will be full, so at least I can get cleaned up even if it’s tepid water.”
“I think I’ll just go—what’s your French expression?—au naturel until we get power restored.”
“You mean miss the weekly bath on Saturday night?”
He grinned. “Listen, princess, I bathe and shave every day. I change my underwear.”
“I’m not touching that.” I climbed out of the Mule, glad to be back to our usual exchange of banter. “And I’d better get ready before the sheriff’s people get here.”
“Any idea who that body is?” he asked. “Maybe it’s some black sheep relative who didn’t make it inside the family burial ground.”
“I thought of that. But there’s no coffin and it looks like he was just dumped there in a shallow grave.”
“What makes you so sure it’s a he? Maybe it’s a she.”
I shuddered. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
“Guess so,” he said.
Inside, the house was still and airless. Already I could feel the weight of the outdoor heat filtering into the two-story foyer as it reclaimed the dry air-conditioned coolness. Upstairs, my bedroom would probably soon be unbearable. At least I could sleep in the hammock on the veranda, as I’d done when the air-conditioning system died two years ago. I found camping lanterns, candles, and flashlights in the front hall closet and put them next to Leland’s favorite bust of Thomas Jefferson in the foyer alcove. Then I climbed Hamish’s grand spiral staircase, watching dust motes swirl around the Waterford chandelier in the dying daylight.
I’d nearly lost the house once in a fire, but I’d rebuilt what had been destroyed. Thank God this time I’d been damn lucky.
I took a sponge bath instead of a shower to save water and didn’t bother to dry off. The landline on my bedside table rang as I was in the bathroom pulling my wet hair into a ponytail. The answering machine would be knocked out, but at least the phone worked.
“Two deputies are waiting at the villa for you, and you’ll be happy to hear the Gator is back in business,” Quinn said when I answered.
“I’ll be right there. What was wrong with the Gator?”
He snorted. “Someone put the gas-and-oil mixture we use for the weed whacker in the tank. I figured it might be some dumbass stunt like that. I drained the tank. Caught it before it fouled the plugs and we had a real mess on our hands.”
“So it was an accident.”
“Accident my ass. Those gas cans are labeled in English and Spanish plain as the nose on your face. The only way you could have screwed up is if you had your eyes closed while you were filling the damn gas tank,” he said. “If I find out who did this, he’ll be cleaning wine barrels from now to harvest.”
“I’ll talk to the guys and say something about paying attention and being more careful.”
“That would include your boy Chance.”
“He’s not ‘my boy.’ Plus he knows better. It might have been Tyler. He can be sort of scatterbrained.”
“You mean the Tyler who caused a volcano this morning when Chance let him top off one of the barrels of Pinot?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed a spot on my forehead. A volcano was our term for filling something too full. If the wine was still fermenting and someone overfilled the barrel, it caused the kind of explosion that resulted from shaking a bottle of beer and opening it, or popping a champagne cork too quickly. Not something anyone wanted to happen to a five-thousand-dollar barrel of wine.
“Yes, okay, that Tyler. Maybe he shouldn’t be topping off barrels anymore.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t be working here.”
“I promised Jordy and Grace—”
“Yeah, yeah. That we’d babysit him until he finds a real job. Wherever he goes next, he shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy equipment or be around sharp objects.” I heard him sigh. “You’re the boss, so if you want him to stay, he stays. But wait ’til he forgets to take the valve off one of the tanks and it blows up. Or runs the forklift through it. I do plan to say ‘I told you so.’”
“You know, I was sort of dreading the meeting with those deputies,” I said. “But after all that cheery news, I think I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Because they can’t wait to talk to you.”
Though I knew a few of the deputies who worked for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, I didn’t recognize either of the men who waited by their cruisers when I pulled up in the winery parking lot five minutes later. Their name tags said Mathis and Fontana. Mathis was a gray-haired African American built like a football linebacker, with eyes that looked like they could pin me to a wall, metaphorically speaking. Fontana was small and muscular, dark haired and dark eyed. His uniform stretched taut across his chest, showing off the physique of someone who hit the gym regularly.
After we got through the introductions, Mathis said, “How do we get to where you found the body?”
“It’s probably best if I take you there in one of our ATVs,” I said. “Some of the terrain is pretty rough on a car, especially if you don’t have four-wheel drive.”
Mathis sat next to me on the drive over to the grave site and flipped open a spiral notebook. He asked the usual questions.
“Has anyone else been to the site besides you and Mr. Miller?” His voice reminded me of melted butterscotch.
I knew the two of them were going to hate my answer.
“Chance’s dog, unfortunately. I’m sorry. It was an accident. She found a bone near the skull and started playing with it.”
“You let a dog dig around a grave site?” Fontana said.
“We stopped her as soon as we realized what she was doing. But she wasn’t the first animal to get hold of that bone. The ends had already been chewed.”
I pulled up a few feet from where I’d found the skull and they got out. Mathis must have had a sixth sense for locating dead bodies because he walked straight over to the place before I could tell him where it was. For a heavy man, he moved gracefully. He knelt and pulled on a pair of latex gloves he got from his back pocket. Fontana photographed the scene. I stayed out of the way and waited.
“Vic,” Mathis said, “you’d better call it in. Have them get hold of Noland. And bring a search warrant.”
I’d known Bobby Noland, one of my brother Eli’s close friends, since we were kids. By the time Bobby was in high school, he’d gone from the honor roll to the detention hall, hanging out with a tough crowd who spent nights getting wasted on booze and drugs at the fields near the old Goose Creek Bridge. At least, that’s what I heard. After he graduated I figured Bobby’d leave town, but he surprised everyone by saying he wanted to fight for his country and signing up for the army. Two years later he came home from Afghanistan with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star he didn’t want to talk about and joined the sheriff’s office. By the time he made detective and got assigned to Narcotics, he’d picked up another award for bravery. A year ago he moved to Homicide.
“You won’t need a search warrant,” I said to Mathis. “You’re welcome to do whatever you need to do.”
Fontana joined us. “Noland and the ME are coming. Also a crime scene guy, but that’s it for now. Everyone else is busy handling tornado stuff,” he told Mathis. To me he said, “Thanks, but Biggie, here, likes to do things by the book, so we’ll be getting that search warrant just the same. Saves a lot of headaches down the line, especially if we have to go to court.”
Biggie. I’d bet money that’s not what his mother named him. But I wasn’t going to object if Mathis wanted to dot his i’s and cross his t’s by getting a search warrant, so I nodded in agreement.
“Do you have any idea how long he’s been here?” I asked.
“Long enough to change the terrain,” Fontana said. “See how much greener the grass is around here? And that indentation where the ground has collapsed? You’d see it pretty good if you looked down from above—if you knew what you were looking for.”
He did an air sketch with his finger indicating where the earth seemed to have settled. “If that other bone belongs to this body, the remains could be pretty scattered. A grave needs to be at least six feet deep so an animal won’t dig it up. This one looks like it’s no more than two feet.”
Mathis stood up and I heard the joints in his knees crack. “You’re quite sure you have no idea who this might be, Ms. Montgomery? An old family feud, maybe? Ever hear anyone talk about something like that? How about any skeletons in the closet?” He smiled with his eyes as he peeled off his gloves, but if there had been a wall, I would have been pinned to it. “No pun intended.”
I tried to meet his gaze. “We wouldn’t be normal if we didn’t have our share of problems and a few family secrets, but I can tell you for sure that there are no skeletons in the closet that would lead anyone to kill someone, if that’s what you mean.”
Mathis kept that laser vision trained on me and I did my best to project self-assured confidence.
“We own five hundred acres, Deputy Mathis. It’s a lot of land. Whoever did this, a complete stranger, could have come and gone without anyone ever seeing him or her.”
Mathis nodded, but the expression on his face said he’d heard that one a million times before.
“We’re certainly going to check that out,” he said. “And I appreciate your cooperation.”
“We need to rope off the crime scene,” Fontana said. “That means you and any of your employees, and that dog, have to stay away from the area until our investigation is finished.”
“Do you have any idea how long that might take?” I asked.
Mathis tucked his gloves in his pocket. “As long as it takes. Two, three days. Maybe longer. Depends what we find.”
“After all this time what could you possibly find?” I asked. “Surely it’s been too long?”
“You’d be surprised,” Mathis said. “Locard’s principle doesn’t usually let me down.”
I took the bait. “What’s that?”
“A killer always leaves something at the scene of a crime or else takes something away with him.”
“Always?”
He nodded. “Always. That’s why it’s Locard’s principle. Make no mistake, Ms. Montgomery. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, if this turns out to be a homicide. So if there’s anything else you want to tell us, now would be a good time.”