Ellen Crosby - The Riesling Retribution

“Yeah, and they always seem to be my fault.” He sounded peevish.

“Is Quinn too hard on you?” I glanced at his profile. He’d taken off his baseball cap again. The wind blew his reddish-gold curls so they framed his face like a cherub in a Raphael painting.

“He’s always asking me to do dirty jobs. Clean barrels. Clean tanks. Go out and pull leaves off vines one by one.”

“Tyler, that is your job. That’s what a cellar rat does. No one said it was easy work. Quinn and I do it, too.”

“Chance would be a lot easier on me.”

“Quinn runs the show. And if the work’s too hard or too boring, no one’s forcing you to stay, buddy.” I kept my tone light. “If something’s going on that I need to know about between you and Quinn, I expect you to tell me.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Ad utrumque paratus.”

“You want to translate?” I glanced at his innocent-looking profile and wondered whether he was keeping something from me.

“Ready for anything, prepared for the worst.” He put his cap back on and adjusted it. “It means I can handle it.”

As it turned out, he was wrong.

Bobby showed up at the vineyard early Tuesday morning and found me in the courtyard deadheading flowers in the hanging baskets. Overnight the weather had shifted, bringing cooler temperatures and a tang in the air that smelled as though autumn would soon be here. The intense lapis hue of the summer sky had faded to steel blue, signaling that we were in for more changes including, possibly, an unwelcome visit from Hurricane Edouard.

I heard his shoes crunch on the gravel and looked up. He was dressed like a businessman in a sport jacket, dress shirt, and tie. His face wore the impassive expression of a cop, a stranger who was not my old childhood friend. I searched his eyes and wondered what went through his mind every time he had to deliver news that would crack open someone’s universe, as he was about to do to mine.

“I’d like to talk to you,” he said, helping me down from a stepladder next to one of the baskets. “I’ve got some news.”

“Is here okay, or do we need to go someplace else?” I set my pruning shears on top of the ladder.

“Here’s fine.”

I reached for my cane. “Shall we sit on the wall, then?”

“Sure.”

I looked out at the grape-heavy vines and the mountains. Thin clouds melted into the pale morning sky like a faded watercolor. I closed my eyes and wondered how bad his news was going to be.

“I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “Annabel Chastain came in yesterday to answer questions. After what she told us and based on some other evidence, we have reason to believe your father is responsible for the death of Beau Kinkaid.”

He didn’t sugarcoat it, I’ll give him that.

“You can’t really think—”

He held up his hand. “Wait. Let me finish. Leland Montgomery is dead and there’s nothing to prosecute. If Mrs. Chastain wanted to file charges against your father’s estate, it would go to civil court. The way it’s looking, I don’t think she plans to do that, meaning you’re off the hook. It’s over, Lucie, and we’re going to wrap this up.”

“Off the hook, except my father is a murderer?”

“Look, nobody knows how it went down. Maybe it was self-defense. Maybe not. But we have enough evidence concerning the feud between Beau and your father, plus a witness putting him at your home the day Annabel said Beau disappeared.”

“Dominique.”

“I appreciate her coming forward like that.” He pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and offered it to me.

“No, thanks.”

He unwrapped a piece and stuck it his mouth. “We’ve got a lot of active cases and you know how thin we’re stretched with all the budget cuts hammering us. This one’s pretty much open-and-shut. We caught a lot of breaks. Doesn’t usually happen on a cold case, but this time it did.”

“You said you had other evidence.” I still felt numb. “Do you mean the bullet?”

“We haven’t gotten final results back from the lab yet, but the bullet Junie found when he did the autopsy was pretty degraded,” he said.

“So you won’t know for sure if it was Leland’s gun?”

He repeated like a mantra. “We have enough other evidence—”

I cut him off. “I don’t understand why you believe Annabel Chastain. It’s her word against nobody’s. Dominique said Beau left our house alive. How come she couldn’t have done it?”

He looked out at the horizon before answering. I knew then that the other evidence—whatever it was—had finally damned Leland. Something he knew and I didn’t.

“Annabel and your father were having an affair. She has letters. Leland wanted Beau out of the way so he could be with her. It was more than a business feud, it was personal.” He reached over and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I had to tell you that.”

My throat tightened. An affair. Bobby was satisfied this was a crime of passion. That put a whole new spin on everything. Leland had a reputation as a womanizer so it all fit together, didn’t it?

“Dominique said Beau came to visit my father the day my mother went into labor with me. You’re trying to tell me my father was carrying on a torrid affair with another woman when I was born? That he wanted to leave my mother with a two-year-old and a brand-new baby?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen it happen.”

He pulled an envelope out of the breast pocket of his sport jacket. I didn’t need to look at the contents to recognize Leland’s stationery. An engraved envelope with “Highland Farm” embossed on the back flap. Bobby handed it to me.

“Read it. I need you to confirm that it’s your father’s handwriting.” When I hesitated he said, “Please.”

I removed the letter and read it. Leland wanted Annabel to leave Beau. He also wanted her to meet him to talk about it. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but Leland never had been one for poetry and roses.

“It’s his handwriting.”

“Thank you.” He took the letter and refolded it.

“If Beau drove up here to see Leland and never returned, there must have been a car.”

“We’re looking on your property, in case it’s still there,” he said. “But even if it’s not, he could have disposed of it elsewhere. He would have had plenty of time.”

In the poignant silence that followed, I wondered if Bobby believed I had lied to him all along.

“I’m not hiding anything, Bobby.”

“I never said you were. But it’s over now.”

“I still don’t understand why Annabel isn’t a suspect since she wanted Beau out of the way, too. And not to point out the obvious, but Leland didn’t leave my mother for her, did he?”

“Annabel claims to have guessed what had happened and was so scared she’d get dragged into a murder as an accomplice that she ended the affair,” he said. “Told your father it was over, left Richmond, and kept a low profile using her maiden name until she got a divorce on the grounds of abandonment and married Chastain.”

“So she’s off the hook, too, isn’t she?”

He heard the scorn in my voice and his jaw tightened. “Let me tell you something. When I was at the academy, here’s what I learned in Law Enforcement 101: The best approach to working a case is the simplest. Don’t make it more complicated or convoluted than it is and don’t read too much into anything. Most crimes are committed out of necessity or passion. Your father was motivated by both. He owed Beau money and he was messing around with his wife.”

Then he delivered the coup de grâce. “Annabel agreed to take a polygraph test for us.”