Ellen Crosby - The Riesling Retribution

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.”

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.