Ellen Crosby: The Riesling Retribution

A terra-cotta pot of red geraniums and variegated ivy lay on its side next to an old winepress. I knelt and tried to brush the dirt into the pot with my hands.

“Need some help?”

I looked up at Quinn. “Thanks.”

He took care of the dirt while I untangled the ivy and reset the plants. When we were done, he handed me a broken geranium.

I stared at it. “I could do with a drink.”

“Me, too. Why don’t I grab a growler and we can taste the Sauvignon Blanc?”

A growler is a bottle of wine we filled directly from one of the stainless-steel tanks or oak barrels. Though a lot of science and chemistry go into growing grapes and winemaking, there’s no substitute for drinking it at regular intervals to see how it’s coming along. We need to know how it tastes.

I nodded. “Everything still okay in the barrel room?”

“Yup. Generator’s working fine,” he said. “The villa’s okay, too, except there’s no power. Frankie got all the tables and chairs and umbrellas from the terrace moved inside in time, so no casualties there. But we’re going to have to stay closed until we clean up. Frankie said she’d be in early tomorrow to get started.”

Francesca Merchant ran our tasting room and had begun handling all our special events like concerts and festivals.

“If they ever figure out how to clone anything besides animals, Frankie would be my candidate for first human.” I tossed the geranium over the stone wall to the garden below. “How did we manage before we hired her?”

“We had you.”

I made a face. “Why can’t I decide whether that’s a compliment or an insult?”

He grinned. “I’ll get the wine. Let’s sit on the wall and drink here. The sunset’s going to be pretty tonight after that tornado.”

We sat on the low wall with its view of distant rows of vines and ridges of pines and deciduous trees. Framing the scene was the softly contoured Blue Ridge. The sun had turned the ribbon strips of clouds blood colored and the mountains had darkened from heathery blue to violet.

“I heard on the car radio that forty thousand households are without power in Loudoun County.” Quinn poured wine into two glasses and handed one to me. “Another twenty thousand in Fauquier.” He touched his wineglass to mine. “Here’s to not losing everything today.”

“To the glass half full. Did you get a chance to talk to anyone else who was at the roundtable?” I asked. “Anybody take a hit like we did?”

“When Harry Dye got back to his place he found he’d lost half of his crop,” Quinn said. “I can’t get hold of John Chappell at Mountain-view so maybe he lost phone service. No idea how bad it was there.”

I drank some wine. “Half the crop? Poor Harry. That’s going to kill him. Maybe we can sell him some grapes.”

Quinn pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and fished in his trousers for a lighter. “That’s going to be tough with what we lost.”

“Have you done the math?”

He bent his head and lit the cigar, puffing on it until the tip glowed. “It’s gonna be a big number. Buying and planting new vines, then all that revenue lost waiting three years until the first harvest. Throw in the expense of buying grapes from somebody else while we’re waiting for our vines to produce, if you want to go that route.”

Though it was common for vineyards to buy fruit from other sources, he knew I didn’t like doing it. Our wines came from our own soil, our own terroir, and I was proud of it.

“I don’t know. I can’t even think straight right now.”

Quinn rubbed his thumb across his chin, the way he always did when he was thinking.

“We lost about two acres, so about twenty grand for vines and labor. As for the production loss, with three tons an acre that’s six tons of fruit times three years of no wine. Nine hundred gallons, all red fruit. Probably ninety thousand dollars, give or take. Buying more fruit, if we decide to do that. About twelve thousand per harvest, so times three. That’s—”

“Thirty-six thousand plus ninety plus twenty.” I tipped my head and swallowed a lot of wine. “Damn. If we don’t buy fruit we’ve lost a hundred and ten thousand. If we replace it, it’s almost a hundred and fifty.”

“Guess we won’t be buying another tractor for a while,” he said.

“Guess not.”

“Let’s talk about replacing the fruit another time.” I stared into my wineglass. “I really can’t wrap my mind around it tonight.”

For a vineyard to be profitable—or at least, self-sustaining—it was necessary to make a certain amount of wine. Make too little and you go broke. The break-even number, as we’d figured it, was about ten thousand cases. Today’s loss meant we’d be teetering on the precipice.

He refilled our glasses. “How’d it go with those deputies?”

I shrugged as a pair of barn swallows swooped over our heads and flew into the eaves of the arcade.

“They asked a bunch of questions, then tried the good cop/bad cop thing to see if they could scare me into admitting I had some idea who it is out there.”

“And did it work?”

“It spooked me, yes. But I have no idea who he is.”

“He?”

“Bobby showed up with the medical examiner. I think he’s Australian. Junius St. Pierre. He said it was an adult male. Caucasian. He’d probably been buried there for thirty or forty years.”

Quinn tapped his cigar with his thumb and ash dropped onto the wall. He brushed it off.

“So it happened while your parents were living here?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

“Okay, what if it did?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they knew something. Your father—”

I cut him off. “I knew you were going to bring up Leland. My father didn’t murder anyone.”

He pretended to duck. “Whoa, sweetheart. I never said that. You’re being awful defensive.”

He was right. I was.

Leland had hired Quinn shortly before he died, but Quinn had spent enough time with my father to take his measure. A lousy judge of character, a sap for every crummy business deal that came down the pike, and a womanizer. Everyone in Atoka knew it, too. As my godfather, Fitz, used to say about him, when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Leland had been a man with a chronic itch from all the fleas.

“The minute word gets out about this everyone in town is going to try my father, convict him, and say something like, ‘What’d you expect from Leland Montgomery, anyway?’” I said. “Though they’ll do it behind my back.”

“People are always going to talk. You can’t stop that.”

“What you mean is, I can’t stop Thelma or the Romeos.”

They say three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. The exception to that rule would be if the one person still living was either Thelma Johnson, who owned the General Store, or one of the Romeos, a cantankerous group of senior citizens whose name stood for “Retired Old Men Eating Out.” Tomorrow morning the number-one topic of conversation around the coffeepot in the General Store would be the body on my farm. Maybe I should just give up and sell tickets.

“What’s the matter, Lucie?” Quinn said, when I remained silent. “You’re worried there might be something to it, aren’t you?”

The clouds were now dark against a bright sky and the layered lines of the Blue Ridge had blended into a single silhouette, reminding me of a negative from a print photograph. It was too early for the fireflies to begin their balletic performance, but as the birds quieted down, the cicadas’ comforting serenade became more audible. Usually I liked this time of evening, especially in summer, when everything seemed so peaceful.

Tonight, though, I felt restless and jumpy.