Ellen Crosby - The Merlot Murders

We walked through the ovenlike house to the driveway. Mason got into a silver Mercedes. Brandi nodded a cool good-bye as Eli helped her into the Jag. A moment later Mia bounded outside.

“What did you get?” I asked curiously.

She blushed and discreetly slid a slim plastic case out of her pocket. Birth control pills. “I, um, forgot the other day. I need to start being more careful. See you.”

She pulled out of the driveway before the others, the red Mustang churning gravel as she sped down the road. I had nearly shut the front door when I heard Mason’s voice. I left it slightly ajar and listened.

“What are you going to do, son?”

“We’re selling.” Eli sounded completely confident. “Lucie was talking some sentimental crap about hanging on to the house, but I’m sure she’ll agree to sell the vineyard. It’s too much hard physical labor, especially for someone in her…well, you know.”

“So she’d still keep the house? You’d have to sell the land in two parcels,” Mason said.

“Nah, don’t you worry. She’ll change her mind. I can talk her into selling this albatross along with the vineyard in return for letting her stay in the place in France. She hasn’t got the money or the stamina to maintain it, especially the way it’s deteriorated. Hell, Doc Harmon told me she was exhausted when she insisted on walking from the cemetery over to the winery after Leland’s funeral. She’s real touchy when you bring it up but just look at her. She’s a cripple now. She needs to deal with it.”

I’d heard enough. Quietly, I closed the door.

It probably wasn’t the smartest decision in the world to try to hang on to the vineyard when Leland had left us nearly bankrupt. Our new vintner seemed like the kind of guy you’d hire as a bouncer at a night club. Eli was right that Highland House, neglected for years, needed repairs that were well beyond our bank balance.

The vineyard had not been a business with a bottom line for my mother and Fitz, as Eli now saw it. It had been a labor of love. It was part of the goût de terroir —the taste of the land. The blend of the tangible—grapes, soil, and sunlight—and the intangible, which came from the passion and personality of the winemaker who created it. People had been trying to grow grapes in Virginia since the Jamestown settlement when the House of Burgesses, the country’s first legislature, required every male over twenty to plant at least ten grape vines. Years later Jefferson wrote that we could make wines to rival the best European ones.

My mother had been excited by the renaissance in Virginia wine making that took place in the 1970s, among the first to see the possibilities of converting some of our acreage from growing hay to growing grapes. To give up now on her dreams, when our vines were just coming into their best production years, was unthinkable.

In France I had learned, of necessity, to take life slower, to measure time by seasons, not deadlines. A life that required me to fit into nature’s schedule, and not the other way around, held great appeal. More pragmatically, I had been educated by Philippe, on the rare occasions when he was home, in the useful skills of carpentry, plumbing, plastering, and tilework. On my own, I’d cleared the land around the farmhouse and replanted the gardens. I was not—as my brother believed—completely helpless or useless.

He’d changed since he married Brandi. That was clear. But less clear was how far he’d go to please her, where his loyalties now belonged.

He was still my brother. We shared parents, genes, a life history. To imagine him tangled in some twisted twenty-first-century version of a Greek tragedy so he could have gold-plated faucets on his bathtub was lunacy.

I went back to the veranda and stared at the star-filled night sky. My Chardonnay was tepid. I flung it into the garden and watched the drops sparkle in the yellow light of a citronella torch. Who else, besides Eli and me, had known Fitz was stopping by the winery last night?

Could he have brought Brandi home, then doubled back and confronted Fitz in the barrel room? He had a motive and opportunity—but also an alibi, thanks to his wife.

I blew out the candles and went inside. Eli was right that the house was uncomfortably warm and anyway, I was now too restless to sleep.

The little key that Fitz had given me last night was upstairs in my bedroom. I went upstairs and got it, running my thumb and forefinger over its notched edge. Like most everyone in Atoka, Fitz never bothered to lock the door to his house. Maybe I’d take a little drive over there and have a look around. He might not have told me everything he knew last night about who was pressuring Leland to sell.

Though if I discovered Eli was connected to this business, then what? I might learn soon enough how far he would go to get what he wanted. Now that the house belonged to me.

I’d just moved to the top of the list of people who stood in his way.

I finally located the keys to Leland’s Volvo station wagon where I should have looked in the first place. In the ignition. The car probably qualified for antique vehicle license plates and it was clearly on its second trip around the numbers on the odometer. The last time I remember it reading eleven thousand miles, I’d been learning to drive.

Fitz lived just outside Middleburg on Possum Pond Lane. He had ten acres and a charming cottage that had been built in the 1920s. Over the years, he’d renovated and updated the place, especially the kitchen, which now was state-of-the-art professional. What I liked best about his house was that it sat on the edge of a pond he called Little Possum Pond. The pond was shaded by an enormous weeping willow and every year families of Canada geese would come and take up residence for the summer. Fitz fed them with scraps from the inn and fussed over them like they were his children. Word must have spread about the good deal to be found at Little Possum Pond, as the community of geese grew larger each year.

Tonight everything was quiet as I drove up the gravel driveway. The motion-sensor light by the garage came on, which unnerved me. There was no sign that the police had been here yet, which was good—for me. The nearest neighbors were at least half a mile away on either side and the house, which sat well back from the street, backed up on woods. Even if I turned on every light in the place no one would notice I was here.

I went in through the front door, which led directly into the living room. Of all the things I remembered about Fitz’s home, the most vivid was how it smelled—as if he’d just finished baking sugar cookies. That achingly familiar scent still lingered in the air.

I went first to the kitchen. It was as immaculate and pristine as always, except for the collection of booze—Armagnac, whiskey, and wine—that had new prominence on a Hoosier cabinet. I opened drawers and cabinets, not expecting to find anything other than what I did: enough kitchen equipment and utensils to send any gourmet cook to gadget heaven.

The living room was pleasantly masculine, the decor a gift from a local interior designer who adored his Double Chocolate Died-and-Gone-to-Heaven Cheesecake. What gave the room its personality, though, were the framed autographed photos on walls and tabletops, of Fitz with the great and near-great.

I walked over to the fireplace. Gloria, his interior designer friend, was probably responsible for the spectacular dried floral bouquet of nandina, holly berries, coneflowers, and black-eyed Susans that sat between the andirons. Fitz’s favorite work of art, a reproduction of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, hung above the photo-filled mantel. Gloria had tried for years to get him to put an original painting that fit more with her “country manor” theme in such a place of honor, but Fitz had ignored her. The aging school photographs of Eli, Mia, and me were tucked between the frame and the glass as they always were, as though we were dining with the Apostles. He’d changed our pictures every year at Christmas until we’d graduated from high school and been immortalized in caps and gowns.