Ellen Crosby - The Riesling Retribution

“In that case, let’s get you back to your house so you can clean up and change.”

He traced his finger from just under my left eye along my cheekbone and showed me the smudge of dirt. My face grew hot at his touch.

“Ready?” he asked.

I pointed in the direction of the south vines, hoping he hadn’t noticed that I was blushing. “Not before I see the tornado damage to the vines. If the power’s out at the villa, then it’s out at my house, too. Which means I don’t have any water since the well pump won’t be working. I’m in no rush to get home.”

He shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go.”

He drove me by the broken-down Gator so I could retrieve my phone, which still showed no service.

“Where’s Quinn?” I asked. “Has anybody heard from him lately?”

“He called the barrel room just before I left to find you, wondering where you were. Said he was on his way back from that winemakers’ meeting. They didn’t even know there was a tornado over in Delaplane.”

“I’d better call him,” I said, “and let him know what happened.”

I borrowed Chance’s phone again and dialed in for my messages. Four, all from Quinn, exhorting me to call him right away and keeping me posted on his current whereabouts as he drove back to Atoka. By the third message he was shouting. The fourth was a long moment of silence followed by a groan and a curse before he hung up.

I dialed his number. He answered in the middle of the first ring, sounding mad. “Where the hell is she?”

He thought I was Chance. “Right here.”

“Lucie? Where have you been? How come you’re calling on Chance’s phone? How come it took you so long to call back?”

“Because we had a little situation with weather here, that’s why. I got kind of tied up.”

“I know, I know. The tornado. I was worried sick about you when I found out about it. Tyler told me you were gone and no one knew where you were. I think he’s been drinking.”

Tyler Jordan was one of our cellar rats and the son of a couple who owned a nearby bed-and-breakfast. We’d hired him to help out with the chores around the winery as a favor to his parents while he tried to figure out where someone who’d double-majored in classical studies and kinesiology in college might get a real job.

“Apparently the crew passed around a bottle of Scotch when the tornado came through. It was unbelievable, Quinn. Like a preview for the end of the world.” I glanced over at Chance. “I’m going over to look at the new fields with Chance. Looks like it probably passed through there.”

“The new fields?” His dismay was tinged with an extra measure of regret, more so, I thought, than if we’d lost some of our oldest—and most valuable—vines.

I knew why.

The vines in those fields were his, planted shortly after he signed on as our winemaker, the foundation of an ambitious expansion and gamble we hoped would catapult us from small boutique winery onto a national stage. Though Quinn would never admit it, those vines also represented his opportunity to emerge from the oversized shadow of Jacques Gilbert, his predecessor. Schooled in France in Old World ways of winemaking and production, Jacques’ stamp was still evident in our wines, our production, and in the field. Even now, we were still selling some of his wines.

The fact that I revered Jacques and my mother with near-to-saintly devotion had been at the root of most of the passionate debates between Quinn and me.

The loss of the new vines, though they were still a year away from their first harvest, meant it would take even longer before Quinn finally put his imprimatur on Montgomery Estate Vineyard.

“How bad is it?” he asked me now.

“I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

“Hang on, will you? I’m almost there.”

“Where are you?”

“Marshall. Almost to Maidstone Lane.”

“Marshall? Maidstone Lane? It’ll take you at least twenty, twenty-five minutes to get here.”

“No way. See you in ten.”

“Serve you right if you get a speeding ticket,” I said. “Nothing’s going to change if you get here faster.”

He groaned again and disconnected.

The tornado had mowed a sweeping path through the Syrah, Malbec, and the edge of the Seyval block. The devastation took my breath away. A few hours ago this had been a lush canopy of green, the vines aligned in neat rows like soldiers, representing promise and optimism and prosperity. Now there was nothing, nothing at all, just a tangled twisted mess of debris and ruin plowed back into the earth. The only thing missing was the salt.

I heard Chance suck in his breath next to me. “Wow.”

“We’ll have to get a Bobcat in here to clear this out.” My voice sounded like it was coming from inside a drum. “Start from scratch with new posts and trellises. New vines.”

“I’m sorry, Lucie.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I’d never seen tornado damage up close like this, but it was true what they said: A few yards on either side of the path it had taken, the vines were comparatively unscathed, almost like nothing had happened. “At least we can tie up the vines that were blown down by the wind.” It still sounded as if someone else were talking.

“Sure. I’ll get the guys on it right away. Now let’s get you home since you’ve seen what you wanted to see. You don’t need to deal with it this minute—”

“No.” I cut him off. “I need to do something. Get the crew out here. I want to start cleaning up today. And get someone to tow the Gator. We need all the equipment we’ve got.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, “if that’s what you want. There’s a box of trellis ties on the backseat. My pruning shears are there, too.”

“Good.”

He made the calls as I began tying vines to their trellis wires. Most of the work at a vineyard is tedious and mind-numbingly boring. Anyone who says any different—that we live in some kind of Dionysian paradise, spending our days wandering among rows of vines sipping a glass of wine as we survey God’s handiwork—is out of his mind. Quinn downs ibuprofen like candy for his aches and pains, as do I when I’ve been working in the fields. Some days a song gets stuck in my head and plays over and over like a loop, just to pass the time. Right now I couldn’t get the lyrics to “What a Wonderful World” out of my mind. Talk about irony.

Quinn showed up in the other Mule—we owned two of them, one red and one green, like Christmas—about twenty minutes later. Benny, Jesús, and Javier, three of our regular crew, came with him. I didn’t understand the rapid-fire Spanish they spoke as they climbed out of their seats, but I didn’t need a translation to understand shock and grief.

The look on Quinn’s face probably mirrored mine, as if he showed up at a funeral for someone no one expected to die. He was still dressed for the winemakers’ roundtable, pressed khakis and one of his favorite Hawaiian print shirts—the silver one with dancing pink martini glasses on it. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck with a cross hanging from it, a stamped silver cuff that was a gift from a Navajo friend on one wrist, and something with leather and steel on the other. Lately he’d started wearing reading glasses and those, too, hung around his neck on a leather cord. He’d probably forgotten to take them off after the meeting.

Most men couldn’t pull off that shirt and the jewelry without looking like they were overly in touch with their feminine side. Quinn, as near as I could tell, not only didn’t have a feminine side, his masculine side generally ran on overdrive. He was a strictly macho guy with a disciplined toughness that could come across as sexist if you happened to be a woman and he worked for you. Since I was, and he did, I was in a good position to know.