Ellen Crosby - The Bordeaux Betrayal

“Nice of you to put her up for the night.” I had to speak up over the noise of the pump.

“Yeah, well, I’m a nice guy.”

“Sometimes.” I smiled at him.

Or maybe he’d been a pushover for her again. Now he was her alibi for the burglary at Jack’s. Was Nicole using Quinn one last time? Wherever she’d been, I still thought she was somehow involved with that robbery.

“What made you think that werewolf was a fox?” He shut off the pump, interrupting my thoughts.

“Someone disemboweled a stuffed animal, poured red paint on him, and left him on my front doorstep Saturday morning. Freddie the Fox—maybe you’ve seen him in the shops in town.”

“I have. Jesus, that’s sick.”

“Whoever did it was probably trying to get me to cancel the Goose Creek Hunt’s meet here tomorrow. Scare me, I guess.”

“Did you tell Amanda or Shane or anyone from the hunt?”

“No. I didn’t want to upset them. By the way,” I said, “Shane’s coming over later this morning to ride their territory. Make sure the fences and jumps are all in order. You didn’t tell your friend he could come by and go deer hunting today, did you?”

He moved my hose to the next vat. “No. Look, Lucie, you should have told Shane. Or someone. What if this nutcase tries to sabotage those jumps? Putting barbed wire around them or digging holes where no one expects them? Someone could really get hurt. Riders. Horses. The hounds.”

The color drained from my face.

“Call Shane,” he said. “Get hold of him before he gets over here. I can handle the rest of these vats. Manolo will be here in a while, anyway.”

But I couldn’t find Shane and he still wasn’t answering his cell phone.

“I’ll call Amanda,” I said. “Maybe she can reach him.”

“Tell her everything,” Quinn said. “She needs to know.”

I got her just as she was getting ready to leave her house for a hospital board meeting. She didn’t speak at all while I told her about Freddie. When I finished she still said nothing.

“Amanda? Are you there?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” She sounded distracted. “Sorry. Just checking something.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Of course I did.”

“Can you reach Shane?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get hold of him. And I’ll do better than that,” she said. “I’ll be over there myself checking things out.”

“Be careful.”

“Count on it,” she said.

I hung up and told Quinn what Amanda had said.

“Your cousin called while you were on the phone,” he said. “She wants you to call her back. Something about lunch with her and your grandfather.”

“I just talked to Pépé,” Dominique said when I reached her, “and woke him up. I thought you two might come by for lunch. Or at least he could have his morning coffee here. I couldn’t get an answer out of him that made sense.”

“His big dinner with his friends from the Marshall Plan is this evening,” I said. “I think he wants to get his beauty sleep before he parties all night.”

“Probably burning the midnight oil at both ends as usual,” she said. “Well, let him sleep. Why don’t you come?”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

When the English slipped, something was up.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I left the vineyard shortly before noon. If Amanda or Shane were out riding somewhere on our land, I hadn’t seen a sign of either of them as I left the vineyard.

Out of habit I glanced in my rearview mirror as I got ready to pull onto Atoka Road. Red paint covered both stone pillars marking the entrance to the vineyard.

More blood.

I shut off the engine and reached for my cane. The fox had frightened me. This made me mad. When I found out who did it, they would pay.

The paint continued for about twenty feet along the left wall. It ended abruptly as though someone had come to the bottom of the can—or fled before getting caught in the act. It looked like the same red used for Freddie’s blood. I went over to the pillar and touched it. Dry. If it was the same paint, at least it was water-based and would wash off.

The pillars had been here for more than a century. The garish smears meant to look like a wound on the weathered stone were as repulsive as a bully beating up a grandmother for the lousy couple of bucks in her purse. I leaned my cheek against one of the pillars and wondered who was that sick. Less and less it seemed like the Orlandos.

I called Quinn. “Someone found a use for the paint left over from Freddie. Meet me at the front gate.”

He showed up almost immediately. “I’m calling the sheriff,” he said when he saw the mess. “Good thing you kept that stuffed animal.”

He pulled out his phone.

“Wait,” I said. “Don’t call yet.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe I ought to drop by and talk to the Orlandos first.”

Quinn looked disgusted. “And do what? Check their garage for empty paint cans?” But at least he snapped his phone shut.

“Whoever did this knows Claudia and Stuart are trying to stop the Goose Creek Hunt from riding through my farm. That’s not a large circle of people.”

“And?”

“I think the Orlandos are law-abiding citizens. If someone is trying to capitalize on their efforts to shut down foxhunting by making threats and defacing my property—and like you said, possibly even booby-trapping some of the jumps and fences—they’ll be as upset as we are.”

He opened the phone again. “And they’ll say just what I’m saying. We should call the sheriff.”

“As long as my family has lived here we’ve always been on good terms with our neighbors,” I said. “I don’t much care for Claudia and Stuart Orlando but we live next door to each other. Right now we’re not even speaking. At least this will give me a chance to try to remedy that.”

“We still need to report this.”

“We will. But you know as well as I do they’ll be the number-one suspects. I’d rather be the one to tell them to expect a visit from a deputy sheriff than have a cruiser show up in their driveway and blindside them. Then it really will be all-out war between us. Because they didn’t do this.”

Quinn traced the outline of red on one of the pillars with his finger. “You have a point.”

“There’s something else,” I said. “Whoever is responsible is going to clean it up. I don’t care if they have to use a toothbrush and dental floss. When they’re done, it’s going to look like nothing ever happened.”

He went back to the winery and I called Dominique on my cell, letting her know I was running late. I put the top down on the Mini, hoping the cool breeze would clear my head. The sky was Williamsburg blue and the sunlight, flickering through the branches of the trees, made stripes on my windshield like gentle lightning. Here and there a few leaves were brilliant yellow like Christmas ornaments on a tree. One morning I knew I’d wake up and suddenly everything would be flame-colored and I’d wonder how I missed the transition.

I got to the Goose Creek Inn just after twelve-thirty. The maître d’ spotted me through the lunchtime crowd, waving me over to his stand and kissing me on both cheeks. “She’s in the kitchen. Told me to let you know she won’t be long.”

“Some crisis only she can handle?”

He rolled his eyes. “ Chérie, they’re all crises only she can handle.”

“Doesn’t it drive you nuts?”

“I am used to her. Maybe you forget I have been here since your godfather was cooking in the kitchen. Now I have the pains in my legs and varicose veins from so many years of standing. I am used to those, also.”