Ellen Crosby - The Merlot Murders

“Okay.”

She clasped her hands together and leaned toward me. “I can’t be too specifical about details,” she said, lowering her voice, “but I have it on good authority that your mother is absolutely committed, I mean committed, to your hanging on to the house and the vineyard.” She straightened up and put her hands on her hips again. “What do you think?”

What horse’s mouth told her that? “How do you know this?”

“Oh, the spirits often use me as their medium. I have excellent psychedelic powers. Your mother told me herself when she paid me a little visit.”

“My mother ? You’re quite sure it was my mother you were talking to?”

“I am positive. Charlotte and I were very close, Lucille.” I’d forgotten she used to call my mother Charlotte.

“I remember.”

“Though I admit,” she added, “that I was surprised when she called on me. It was the first time I’d heard from her. Since before, well, you know when.”

“When did you two have this discussion?”

“Why, just this afternoon,” she said. “I had my Ouija Board out because Muriel Sims wanted to talk to Henry. She likes to keep in touch pretty regular, you know, since he went over to the other side. And, plain as day after Henry left, there was Charlotte. I knew it was her because I didn’t understand what she was saying at first. I think it was something French. Too bad I can’t remember it now.”

“And she told you she didn’t want us to sell the vineyard?”

“Yes, indeedy.” She frowned, pursing her lips. “You’re sure you’re okay, Lucille? It isn’t too much of a shock? Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

“I’m glad you did.”

She looked relieved. “Well, that’s a big load off my mind. I might of figured. You know, you’ve got Charlotte’s backbone, child. And you look just like her. She was a beauty, was Charlotte. Shame your daddy didn’t…” She stopped and glanced down at her hands.

“Didn’t what?”

She started fiddling with the lime green bows, spinning them around like tiny propellers. “Oh my, how I do run on!” She looked at her watch. “Time for my next show.” She sidled toward the back of the room.

“Wait!”

She turned around.

“Do you think there’s a chance you might be hearing from Leland on that Ouija Board?”

She looked surprised. “Now, Lucille, this isn’t ‘Dial-a-Spirit’ I got going here. I cannot just summon people up willy-nilly. They choose their moments. And frankly, I don’t figure Lee would come to me with whatever’s on his mind, anyway. The man always did keep to himself. Folks don’t change their stripes, just because they’re dead. Tootle-oo, honey.”

She was back at her soaps before I made it to the door. Whoever was trying to pressure Leland to sell the vineyard had been remarkably discreet if Thelma hadn’t got wind of it. She would have either pumped me for more information or else spilled the beans about what she knew. Even the devil himself would have had a hard time keeping a secret from her. Someone had done a good job of covering his or her tracks.

When I got home, I put the batteries in the flashlight and went upstairs to the attic. Years ago Leland had a carpenter convert half the space into a bedroom for Eli. When I was small, it seemed a remote, distant kingdom, far from the rest of the house, a lighted outpost carved out of the cobweb-filled tomblike darkness. Eli hadn’t liked the room much either, though he refused to admit he believed the stories about dead ancestors’ bones rotting in its far recesses. When he was older, though, the bones stopped bothering him and he realized he could get away with anything in the privacy of his secluded eyrie. I never figured out how Mom didn’t smell the cigarette smoke on him, but by then I’d begun filching unlabeled wine bottles from the barrel room to drink with Kit over at Goose Creek Bridge, so I didn’t begrudge Eli’s tobacco habit.

Opening the attic door was like opening the door to a blast furnace. I waited until some of the pent-up heat dissipated before going in. The windows in the gabled front of the house, opaque from years of accumulated dirt and sealed shut with grime, were completely inaccessible on account of an obstacle course of dusty boxes, old suitcases, broken toys, appliances, and other things too wearying to catalog. I tried not to breathe the suffocatingly stale air. Luckily I found the fan almost at once, wedged near the door between a suitcase and a box with “baby clothes” written on the side in my mother’s handwriting.

It didn’t seem likely that someone as fastidious as she had been would have left either a priceless diamond necklace or her diaries up here. No heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. I shone my flashlight around the room. And mice.

I left, closing the door firmly behind me. Maybe I could get one of the barn cats to move in for a while.

The rotting plastic handle on top of the fan disintegrated as I carried it down the stairs. I watched it crash down the last few steps, the metallic sound reverberating like dissonant cymbals in the empty house. Fortunately it still worked when I plugged it in to an outlet in Leland’s bedroom. It sounded like an asthmatic on a bad day. I banged the top of the case, which only changed the noise to a new, more annoying whine.

The master bedroom, furnished with antique carved mahogany pieces from my mother’s family in France, was as disordered as the rest of the house and smelled of the same vague decaying abandonment that pervaded the downstairs. For months after my mother died, Leland had kept her clothes, her lipstick, her hairbrush, and even some lingerie she’d washed and left to dry in the bathroom untouched. Finally Serafina, who used to clean for us, put away the lingerie and makeup and hung up the clothes. It wasn’t healthy for Mr. Lee, she’d said, living and sleeping among the dead like that.

I didn’t want a living shrine for Leland, either, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch his heaps of clothes or his rumpled, stale-smelling bed linens just now. Maybe I could persuade Serafina to come back and help me sort though his things, like she’d done for my mother. It didn’t seem right to displace Leland’s personal effects just yet. It was too soon.

Frankly, the thought of trying to restore the house as it had been when my mother was alive seemed overly daunting on top of the more urgent problem of keeping the vineyard solvent. For hundreds of years my ancestors had managed to fuse the past with the present, burnishing memories that gave the house a patina of genteel nostalgia. As I looked around the bedroom, I couldn’t summon any of the regenerative magic of my family. Today as I sweltered in the late August heat, the place felt like a mausoleum.

I sat on the edge of the bed and rifled through the pile of magazines and papers on Leland’s marble-topped nightstand. It looked like he had taken to transacting some of his business from bed, instead of his office. The top piece of paper was a two-month-old bill from the company that made our labels. No doubt unpaid.

I pulled the wastebasket next to me and began tossing things. He’d obviously continued investing in what Eli called his “fly-by-night” scams. With money we didn’t have. The first one involved a soon-to-be-created tax haven off the coast of Central America. Some guy who called himself Prince Larry was building a pontoon island called “Heaven.” Reading between the lines, it would be a no-questions-asked place to park cash that couldn’t show up on a tax return or a set of corporate books. That would be in addition to the research center devoted to the study of eternal youth. First, though, the prince needed a little seed money to get going and Leland was one of the lucky ones to appear on his radar.