Ellen Crosby - The Merlot Murders

They knew me, too.

“Well, I’ll be,” the woman said. “You’re the Montgomery girl, aren’t you? The older one. Linda.”

“Lucie.” The jackhammers wouldn’t quit.

“That’s right,” she said. “Lucie. Thelma was just telling me about you. I’m Ellie Maddox. Maybe you remember me? I used to work the checkout at Red’s Hardware in The Plains. I knew your folks real good, they were in all the time. And this here’s my husband, Hollis. Are you all right, honey? Maybe we ought to take you to Loudoun General.”

I shook my head and was immediately sorry I did. My brain felt like it had come loose from its moorings. I put both hands on the ground to stop the dizziness. “No hospital. I want to go home.”

“Well, you ain’t going anywhere in that car.” Hollis shone the flashlight on the Volvo. “That’s Lee’s car, isn’t it? Hell, those Volvos are built like tanks. You’re lucky, young lady, that you weren’t in one of them convertibles the kids are driving nowadays. You do somersaults in a car with no roof over your head and we wouldn’t be here havin’ this conversation.”

“Hollis,” Ellie admonished. “Look at her. She doesn’t care about that stuff right now. The child looks like she’s about to keel over. Let’s get her home.”

“Fine,” he said, “but she’s gonna care tomorrow when she doesn’t have any vehicle.” To me he added, “If you want, I’ll call Knight’s in the morning and have your car towed for you.”

“Call who tonight?” Their halos were growing fuzzier. I could hardly make out the features on their faces anymore.

“ Knight ’s. The garage over to Aldie. I’ll call them in the morning !” He raised his voice like he was talking to someone who didn’t understand English.

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Good.”

“Used to be Knight & Rust Auto Body. You remember, don’t you?” he said. “I still call it that ’cept now it’s Gas-o-Rama or some fool name, but they still got a halfway decent mechanic. Not as good as old Jimmy Knight, but then nobody’s as good as Jimmy, God rest his soul. Not even Rusty was that good. There wasn’t nothing he couldn’t fix if your car was acting up. Did great body work, too. He coulda fixed this car so it would look newer than the day you bought it.”

“Hollis,” Ellie warned. “There you go, running your mouth again. She’s gonna faint or something. Let’s get her out of here.”

Ellie was still fussing about the hospital, but when Hollis fished my cane out of the Volvo, I managed to walk reasonably steadily to their car, leaning on his arm. They agreed, reluctantly, to take me home.

As soon as they drove away I locked the front door. The lock groaned when I turned the key, nearly frozen from lack of use. I slid the deadbolt into place with some effort, then went into Leland’s study and knelt by his gun locker. His old .22-caliber handgun was where he’d always kept it and so was the ammunition. I loaded the gun and—with excruciating slowness—climbed the stairs to my bedroom. No more sleeping on the veranda.

I lay in bed, exhausted and aching, the thrumming noise of the old fan blowing barely cooled air over me acting like white noise, blocking out all thoughts.

Except one.

Someone tried to kill me tonight out on Mosby’s Highway.

It was still dark when my alarm went off. I turned on the light and saw the gun. It took a moment before I remembered why I’d put it there and still longer before I remembered that the reason the alarm had gone off so early was because today was harvest. I sat up, moving like an arthritic marionette. The first thing I did was unload the bullets, putting them and the gun in the drawer of my nightstand. My head throbbed from the effort.

I took a shower that turned my skin the color of cooked lobster. It helped the stiffness but I needed drugs. I had forgotten about the bottle of postaccident painkillers that was still in the medicine cabinet. Past its sell-by date, but they’d still be potent. My hand hovered between that bottle and the ibuprofen next to it.

It had been pure hell weaning myself from the pain-free bliss of those drugs. Right now it would be so easy to start again.

I picked up the ibuprofen and took two with a glass of water. Then I shook out a half dozen bullet-shaped capsules and shoved them in my jeans pocket. I flushed the pain pills down the toilet.

Surprisingly after two cups of coffee and a toasted baguette, the ibuprofen kicked in and I felt somewhat human. Eli’s bicycle was in the carriage house, but I wasn’t sure I could navigate the pedals with my bad foot and my aching joints. There was nothing else with wheels or a motor that was going to get me to the winery. The darkness was slowly fading and the air was cool and still. I decided to walk.

Quinn was kneeling by a small pump on the crush pad, fiddling with a hose clamp when I finally got there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a goofy-looking straw hat instead of the customary fatigues and Hawaiian print.

He looked surprised to see me. “I didn’t hear your car.”

“I walked. The Volvo’s in the shop.”

“You should have called. Someone would have run you over.”

I knew what he meant, but it still sounded strange. “It’s okay. Have we got enough help?”

“Ten guys from the camp. We should be good.”

“Angela coming, too?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Check those hoses, will you, and make sure the clamps are fitted securely? I’m going out to the field to get the first lot of lugs.”

“Sure.”

Whatever he had or hadn’t done in California, right now I needed him. Before he took off in the Gator our eyes met. What happened from now on depended on his judgment and intuition and how much we didn’t screw up what the grapes had already done for us. We are, essentially, farmers, tied to the whims of nature however much we try to control our destiny and the fruits of our harvest. Despite his arrogant cockiness, I could tell he was wrestling with the nerve-wracking second-guessing that happens when there are no sure bets. By the end of the morning we’d have a pretty good idea whether he was right…or wrong.

He left for the fields, the flatbed trailer fishtailing in the red clay dust as he sped away. I walked over to the pump and slowly bent down to check the clamps on the hoses as he’d asked.

In the distance, the putt-putting of the Gator sounded like bees at their hive. Hector was probably riding on the trailer as it moved up and down the rows, jumping off to pick up the lugs where the men had left them under the cooler shade of the vines. Occasionally the workers called out to each other in Spanish. Though a mechanical harvester—which looked like an alien space creature on stilts—could bring in the grapes faster and cheaper, we still picked by hand as they’d been doing since the time of the Romans. Most vineyards, the good ones, at least, did it the same way.

By the time Quinn arrived back at the crush pad with a full load of lugs, the rest of the crew was waiting. Someone turned up the volume on a boombox. One by one the men stripped off their shirts, laughing and singing with the pulsating Spanish beat. Quinn jumped off the Gator and started handing the lugs piled with translucent green-gold grapes to workers who set them on the scales. After they were weighed someone tipped the contents into the destemmer, then hurled the empty container onto a growing mountain of yellow plastic bins on the ground nearby.

Quinn joined me, eating grapes he’d picked from a bunch off one of the lugs. “Here, try these. They’re good. Nearly everything’s ripe.” He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the racket of the destemmer as it spat barky stems into a barrel.