Ellen Crosby - The Chardonnay Charade

“I’ll have to drop by and see him.”

“He’d like that. Thanks, Noah.”

His desk chair creaked as he sat back in it. “I haven’t seen you since that nasty business with Georgia at the vineyard. I was so sorry to hear about it. She wasn’t one of my favorite people, as you might imagine, but still. We’re all God’s creatures. It shouldn’t have happened.”

“That’s very charitable, considering what she did to you.”

“It’s finished.” He picked up a pencil and held it between his index fingers, studying it as if he were gauging its length. “I guess all that’s left is for the sheriff to arrest whoever did it.”

“They’re looking for Randy Hunter,” I said.

“So I understand.” Noah set the pencil down.

“Were you around when Amy Dye and her goddaughter ran into Randy the other day?”

He shook his head. “No, but Jennifer was. I heard about it, of course. Gabrielle—I think that’s her name—apparently has quite a temper on her. Jen and Amy had a job on their hands getting her calmed down.”

“It’s Gabriella. What did she say?”

Noah pulled his glasses off his forehead and looked through the lenses as if seeing into a crystal ball. “If you really want to know, you should ask Jen, honey. She can fill you in better than I can.”

“I think I will.” I blew him a kiss. “See you, Noah.”

I found Jennifer Seely out in the back watering bedding plants, as I’d been told. She handed off the hose to one of her employees and said, smiling, “What can I do for you, Lucie? You find everything you need today?”

I’d known Jen for most of my life, since she’d been two grades behind me in school. A pretty, quiet-spoken girl with her father’s sunny temperament who wore her straight brown hair beguilingly in a long French braid, you could count on her to win a blue ribbon at the county fair each year for something she’d grown in her garden. After high school she went to Virginia Tech to study agriculture, never doubting that her destiny was taking over the nursery one day.

“I just talked to your dad,” I said. “Randy Hunter hasn’t shown up for work at the vineyard since last Saturday. I heard about what happened here when he ran into Harry Dye’s goddaughter the other day. Gaby Manzur.”

My unanswered question hung in the air.

Jen’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, it was quite a scene. Thank God Amy dragged her out of here right away. She was hysterical. Screaming and completely out of control. I was afraid she was going to start hitting him or throwing things.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing worth repeating.” She seemed uncomfortable. “Called him a bunch of names. Said she hated him for what he’d done to her and that he’d pay for it someday. Poor Randy. I felt so sorry for him. He looked like he had no clue who she was and why she was saying all those horrible things.”

“He did?” I found that hard to swallow.

“Well…he told me afterwards he remembered meeting her, but he kind of went blank on the details. Uh, there was alcohol involved.” We had moved over by the little market packs of petunias and she’d automatically begun deadheading the flowers, avoiding my eyes. Finally she looked up. “Look, he told me he wasn’t exactly a saint when he was growing up. But he’s changed. He’s a good guy now.”

“Yes.” No point mentioning that, good guy or not, I thought he was the prime suspect in Georgia’s murder. “Do you have any idea where he is?”

Jen shook her head. “It’s not like him to drop out of sight like this. Even the rest of the band doesn’t know where he went.”

She held a bunch of dead petunias in one hand. We both stared at the spent flowers.

“I guess you probably heard the rumors about him and Georgia Greenwood,” I said. “And now that Georgia’s dead—”

“Of course I’ve heard.” She cut me off. “It’s a load of crap. Randy told me why he was seeing Georgia. One of her cousins owns a recording company in Nashville. She was going to set up a meeting between her cousin and Randy after he finished cutting his CD. The reason Randy and Georgia were seeing each other was business. Not some stupid affair.”

“He said that?”

“He wouldn’t lie to me. I know him, Lucie.” She was adamant.

Hadn’t he lied to her about Gaby Manzur? Or did he really have amnesia about a sexual relationship that produced a child? Either way, Jen sounded pretty defensive.

“So you and Randy are close, then?” I asked.

“We’re friends. I was dating Josh for a while, so I saw Randy all the time.”

“Josh?”

“The drummer in their band. We broke up, but I still hang out with the guys. I go to most of their gigs.”

“When’s the last time you talked to Randy?”

Her answer was evasive. “I left a couple of messages on his mobile asking him to get in touch.”

“Did he?”

She hesitated, then said, “No. The last time I called, his mailbox was full.” A walkie-talkie on her hip beeped and she unclipped it. “This is Jennifer.”

A garbled voice said something about a customer needing help with plants for a shade garden.

“Tell her I’ll be right there.” She smiled a tight little smile. “Gotta run, Lucie. Can’t keep the customers waiting.”

“Before you go,” I said, “were you and Randy involved…?”

“I told you already that Randy and I are just friends. So let it go, okay, Lucie?”

She turned and stalked away. I watched her leave and headed for my car. Though the story about Georgia’s cousin’s recording studio was plausible, it didn’t sound right considering how defensive Jen had been when I asked about Randy.

That mobile phone was his lifeline. She admitted he hadn’t returned any of her calls and now his voice mailbox was full.

As far as I was concerned, that meant one of two things.

Either Randy was hiding out.

Or he was dead.

Though it would have been faster to take the Snickersville Turnpike to Aldie and pick up the main roads to Leesburg, I decided to take the long way on the winding back roads. It gave me time to speculate on why Jen might be lying about her relationship with Randy. If he’d killed Georgia and she knew something, then Jen was an accessory to murder. All the reason in the world to tell a few whoppers.

Unless there was something else. Something I hadn’t figured out yet.

I followed the turnpike to Mountville, where it made an elbow-shaped turn thanks to Ezekial Mount’s decision back in the 1800s to plant a single apple tree in the middle of the road and call it an orchard. In those days the town laws forbade disturbing orchards, so the pike had to be rerouted around the tree. While the tree was long gone, the kink in the road remained.

You could drive for miles without ever running into another car on these bucolic country lanes edged with undulating gray ribbons of low stacked-stone walls dating from Civil War days. Usually I liked the solitude and the serenity as the view opened up each time I rounded one of the many serpentine turns to reveal farmhouses, barns, and stables with their backdrop of sweeping expanses of fields and pastures dotted with placid cattle and expensive thoroughbreds—and always the lovely, hazy Blue Ridge Mountains defining the scene. But today I stared at the mountains and wondered where the hell Randy was.

Alive or dead, the answers lay with him.

I pulled into the parking lot at Catoctin Hospital about twenty minutes later and got Hector’s flowers from the backseat of the Mini. Hector was asleep, but Sera, who’d been reading in an uncomfortable-looking fake leather chair next to the bed, stood up and came over when I tapped gently on the door. She wore her steel-gray hair in a bun, as neat and tidy as everything else about her. As she got up, she removed her glasses, letting them hang around her neck on a silky black cord. I caught sight of her book. A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway.