Ellen Crosby: The Merlot Murders

“You okay, Lucita?” he asked. “Why aren’t you going with the others?”

“I’m fine. I just need a little time before I go back to the house.”

“Sure, sure. I understand. We’ll be taking care of Mr. Lee now.” He made the sign of the cross. “We wait until you’re gone.”

“Thank you,” I said. As I walked away I could hear the rhythmic chipping sound of their shovels moving earth from one place to another, which seemed to be amplified in the ovenlike twilight stillness. I walked as quickly as I could down the road toward the winery.

If those cases of wine were still there then Fitz never made it before he disappeared. Maybe a cop had pulled him over for DUI and he’d spent the night in the drunk tank.

Next time, no matter what he said, I’d take his car keys.

The winery was located just past the stone bridge where Sycamore Lane crossed over Goose Creek. I made it to the bridge and sat on one of the parapets, resting my sore foot. In the gathering dusk the deep fissures in the streambed were still visible and there was only a pathetic meandering gleam of water that looked like someone had forgotten to completely shut off their garden hose. That was Goose Creek.

A pair of headlights caught me in their glare. A white pickup truck came down the road from the direction of the winery. The driver tooted his horn and waved a hand out the window as he pulled up next to me. Harmon Animal Clinic and a telephone number were stenciled in black on the truck door.

“Lucie honey, what are you doing here? Are you all right?” Doc Harmon was one of the Romeos, another of Leland’s poker and drinking buddies. He’d been at both the wake and the funeral.

He had the sad-eyed long face and countenance of a basset hound, but a pit bull’s aggressiveness when it came to treating farm animals humanely. Though his hands were the gentlest of anyone I knew, I’d heard he once punched out a farmer in Philomont after showing up unannounced to look after a sick colt and discovering a cockfight going on for the pleasure of a large group of spectators. Doc made the farmer donate the proceeds of his little side business to the animal shelter.

Besides his practice, which catered mostly to horses, he was on the staff of the Animal Swim Center, which specialized in rehabilitating injured animals. Increasingly he spent time on the road traveling to racetracks or even the Olympics with owners who wanted him available when one of their horses was competing.

“I wanted to walk a little before I went back to the house,” I said. “I was just heading over to the winery. I haven’t seen it since I came home.”

“You look all done in. It’s getting dark, too. Jump in and I’ll drive you there.” He peered at me. “You feeling all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “Hot. I forgot how wilting the humidity can be.”

“You could fry an egg on the hood of my truck, if you had a mind to,” he said. “You’re awfully flushed, darlin’. Let’s get you out of this heat.”

I went around and climbed into the passenger seat. He took my cane as I did so and propped it between us. “Stick working okay for you? You doing any physical therapy?”

“I was. And a lot of swimming.”

He grunted and backed up the truck, heading toward the winery. “Swimming’s good. Hydrotherapy. It works wonders for the animals, too, moving around in that water without having to worry about fighting gravity. Keep it up now, you hear?”

I nodded and he barreled down the road, pulling into the parking lot.

“Thanks for the lift, Doc. What were you doing at the winery?”

“Wanted to make sure the truck didn’t get caught in that mass of cars you got over at the big house. I’m on call. I got a few minutes, though. Need me to wait for you? Were you going to fetch something? I can run you back there when you’re done.”

“That would be great, if you don’t mind. I just need to check something. It won’t take long.”

“Take your time.” He lifted a mobile phone off a cradle on the dashboard. “I need to call the answering service anyway. This heat’s getting to the animals, too.”

I climbed down from the truck and walked up the fieldstone path to the winery. The rambling ivy-covered brick building was largely my mother’s design. She’d sketched dozens of pictures of ideas until she finally settled on one that harmonized the romantic neoclassical architecture she’d grown up with in France with the simpler colonial style of Highland House designed by Leland’s pragmatic Scottish ancestors. The result looked more like a graceful old villa than a commercial structure, which was exactly what she wanted—and what we’d named it.

She originally wanted the villa to be situated on a bluff much like Highland House but the architect she hired advised against it, urging her instead to build into the side of a hill. That way he could design the complex to take advantage of the natural cooling properties of the soil by locating the wine cellar partially underground. They found a place where the view of the Blue Ridge wasn’t quite as spectacular as she’d wanted, but the logistics worked for the cellar. Then he showed her a plan for a European-style courtyard and porticoed loggia that would connect the villa, which would consist of a tasting room, offices, and wine library, to the production area, where a crush pad, barrel room, and laboratory would be located. It was also close to the old dairy barn, redesigned as storage for the tractor and the other tools and equipment used in the fields. My mother fell in love with the whole idea.

The place was exactly as I remembered it though it seemed the ivy that grew on the building, extending its tentacles in graceful arcs over the windows, had grown even more lush and thick. In the autumn the leaves would become flame-colored and in winter, the bare brown skeletal vines would look like latticework twining elegantly on the brick façade.

The door was unlocked. I walked inside and flipped on the lights at the bank of switches. The cathedrallike coolness of the tasting room was a sharp but welcome relief from the withering heat. I read once that scientists have discovered the existence of “place cells” in the human brain, allowing us to store maps of locations that have particular importance or meaning. When we return to one of these mind-mapped places, our brain cells react differently, provoked by the potent cues of sight, smell, or sound associated with where we are. I stood in this room, which had been mapped not just in my memory but in my heart.

Even after so many years, it still retained my mother’s indelible stamp—her attention to detail, her love of beauty—everywhere I looked. It was a grand rectangular room with a vaulted ceiling and four sets of floor-to-ceiling French doors leading to the fieldstone terrace with its serene view of braided hills, vineyards, and the layered Blue Ridge in the far distance. There was an enormous open working fireplace in the center of the room with sofas and chairs pulled around it on all four sides. Persian carpets from my mother’s home in France covered the quarry-tile floors. Her paintings of the vineyard hung on the walls, along with a handmade reproduction of a tapestry from the Musée de Cluny in Paris, showing coopering and wine making in the Middle Ages. The tiled bar was at the far end of the room, with the brilliantly colored mosaic of grape-laden vines and fruits my mother had designed for the façade illuminated by one of the overhead spotlights, making the colors glow like jewels.

Directly off the main room an arched wrought iron gate led to the wine library with its deep leather chairs, wine barrel end tables, and our growing collection of books on colonial and contemporary wine making. A heavy door that always reminded me of the entrance to a monk’s cell led to a small corridor and the offices.