Ellen Crosby - The Merlot Murders

We finished arranging the last table in silence. Then she said, “I’m going back to the inn to take care of a few things. I want you to go home and change. Eli threw a fit about wearing Elizabethan costumes, so I decided to forget the whole idea. Be back here at five-thirty. Wear something pretty.”

“Of course.”

“And, Lucie?”

“What?”

“If you loved Fitz, you will say nothing about this. Bobby will keep it confidential, of course. And no one else needs to know. So promise me, chérie, that you will not mention it to anyone.”

Another request for my silence. Dominique had as many secrets as Eli did. I shrugged. “Sure.”

By the time I got back to the house to shower and change, Randy had come and gone. The spaces where the furniture had been—particularly the clock—screamed mute reproach at what I’d done. Dust bunnies the size of small boulders rolled across the floor like tumbleweed in the prairie. Though it was cooler inside than outside, I was sweating as I walked from room to room. The house was eerily silent.

I was in the shower with cold water sluicing over me when I figured out what was wrong. I hadn’t heard the asthmatic hum of the air conditioner as it cycled on and off. When Highland House was built, there had been no heat, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They’d been added over the years as they became commonplace in most homes, generally in the late 1800s. Leland was the one who put in the air-conditioning. Unlike the heat and the electricity, which were added externally, the ductwork had to be tunneled throughout the house, which meant tearing into the lathe and plaster walls and making a colossal mess. My mother said afterward that Leland had handed over our money to the P. T. Barnum of the cooling business who knew a sucker when he saw one and promptly went bankrupt partway through the job. Leland found a retired plumber with dubious credentials who finished the work for a cut-rate price and, as we discovered later, installed a system that was left over from another construction project. It was too small for our house but by the time we figured out why the upper floors were always a lot warmer than the downstairs, it was too late to do anything.

I wrapped a bath towel around myself and wandered through the bedrooms, placing my hand in front of the vents to feel whether any air, cool or otherwise, was blowing through them and maybe I was mistaken.

I wasn’t.

We needed every penny of the money Mac had given me to get through harvest. I might even have to sell a few more pieces of furniture, though if I kept that up, I’d be sleeping on the floor before long. Fixing the air-conditioning was a luxury.

Anyway, it was nearly the end of August. From one day to the next, the light would change from the white-hot glare of summer to the slanting pale gold of autumn that would finish ripening the vines. The hammering heat would recede and the days would be pleasantly bearable for harvest.

I could sleep in the hammock on the veranda. Somewhere in the attic, there should be a few portable fans. I’d done without air-conditioning in France for two years and I could get along without it for a few more weeks.

The dinner at the Ruins went well, under the circumstances. Most of the guests were unfamiliar faces and there were a lot of D.C. and Maryland license plates in the parking lot, so at least there were some folks who weren’t scared off by our macabre news. At dusk, we lit the candles in the hurricane lamps, which made a pretty necklace of yellow lights down the middle of the road, supplemented by the dancing orange flickering of the fireflies and the fairy lights in the nearby trees. Later still, Hector lit citronella torches, which glowed serenely in the still night air along the pathway leading to the amphitheater in front of Mosby’s Ruins. The quiet clink of glasses and china and the indistinguishable murmuring of voices was peaceable and pleasant.

I glanced over at Eli, who had come straight from his office, shirtsleeves rolled up, as he helped Quinn open bottle after bottle of the Pinot Noir we were serving with the roast pork. Earlier he came to me and said quietly, “I’ve got Austin and Erica Kendall coming over to take a look at the house tomorrow. I’ll fill you in after dinner.”

Austin Kendall was another Romeo and the owner of the largest real estate agency in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. His daughter Erica now ran the business, but Austin still got involved when listings were in the multimillions of dollars.

Eli had just upped the stakes, setting up that meeting, and we both knew it. He’d also caught me off-guard.

It was neither the time nor the place to discuss anything so I just said, “Yes, I think we should talk later.”

After that, I stayed by the buffet table helping Dominique and her staff in an assembly-line preparation of dinner plates. Across from us, Joe Dawson and Greg Knight carved mounds of roast pork under the direction of one of the chefs from the Goose Creek Inn.

Mia, who was ferrying the heaping platters of meat to the buffet table, set one of them down in front of me and said quietly, “Greg and I stopped by the house on our way here. What happened to the clock? Is it being fixed or something?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then where is it?”

“It’s a long story.”

She stared hard at me. “Lucie, you didn’t sell it, did you?” Her tone was somewhere between accusation and disbelief.

“I had no choice. We needed the money to fix the motor on the destemmer. Plus we’ve got to pay the workers for harvest.”

“How could you? That clock has been in our family for over a hundred years!” Her voice rose sharply and a few dinner guests looked our way. She stormed on. “I would have begged or borrowed the money instead. I never would have sold it!”

It was completely out of character for Mia, the dreamy, artistic unmaterial girl, to get worked up over the loss of a piece of furniture, sentimental value notwithstanding. Mostly she fretted over more abstract matters like the hole in the ozone or space debris.

I said, stunned, “If you’re so broken up about it, how come you’re willing to sell the house and the vineyard? I didn’t like it any more than you do.”

“ Assez !” Dominique shushed both of us. “People are watching. Back to work, please. Both of you.”

Mia glared at me, then walked over to Greg, flipping her hair off her neck like the twitching tail of an angry cat. She’d been this edgy and irritable at Leland’s wake, but since then things had been okay. Now it was back to fireworks between us. Not because of the clock, either.

I watched her touch Greg’s elbow, then pull his head down so she could whisper in his ear. He listened briefly before turning away. I caught a glimpse of the expression on his face. He looked irritated.

I saw her face, too. She looked hurt.

Though I avoided making eye contact with him, I knew he watched my every move for the rest of the evening like I was an exotic bird in a cage. As the evening wore on, it was obvious I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Mia, increasingly morose and unhappy, slammed a tray down in front of me, sending a spray of Pinot Noir sloshing from a glass and cascading in a graceful arc across my yellow sundress. I looked like I’d been shot.

“Oops.” She smiled. “Sorry.” She wasn’t.

“It was an accident. Forget it.” I poured sparkling water on a napkin and dabbed at my skirt.

Someone was at my elbow. Quinn handed me a salt shaker. “What was that all about?” He, too, had changed his clothes. Yet another Hawaiian shirt. This one was brown and green with dancing martini glasses, parrots, and tropical foliage.

“An accident,” I repeated taking the salt and sprinkling it on the largest stain, which turned dull purple. “Thanks for the salt. The tray slipped out of her hands. Anyway, it’s an old dress. It doesn’t matter.”