Ellen Crosby: The Merlot Murders

He came to the hospital to visit me precisely once during the months I was there. A mumbled apology as though he’d forgotten to pick me up for a movie date. That was it. Those fifteen minutes were acid-etched in my memory, marking the absolute nadir of the Great Depression—mine, that is—during the era when the doctors said I might never walk again. Then I heard that he moved to New York.

Eli wiped at a nonexistent smudge where I’d whacked the console. “Take it easy, will you? That’s hand-stitched leather. As for talking to Mia about Greg, it’s not that simple. Anyway, they’re consenting adults.”

Amnesia would have been convenient just then. Too many images of what Greg and I had done together flashed behind my eyelids. “Maybe I could talk to her…”

“Forget it, Luce. She’ll think it’s sour grapes. Look, do you honestly think he’s changed? He’s still the same Greg. Still with chicks hanging all over him, stuffing their phone numbers into his pockets, willing to cook him dinner or have his baby. Don’t ask me how the guy does it.”

I closed my eyes again. I didn’t have to ask. I knew.

“So is he…faithful…to her?”

“What do I look like? Dear Abby? You think he tells me he’s screwing around on my sister?”

We were taking a little stroll through land-mine territory. The rumors were that Greg had turned his predatory attention away from his affair with me for a brief fling with Brandi, Eli’s then-girlfriend and now my beautiful but vapid sister-in-law. He denied everything, of course, but Brandi finally told Eli after Greg went to New York that he’d practically raped her during what she said was a “friendly little drive.” Eli believed his wife.

I didn’t believe either of them. Not that any of it mattered anymore.

“So you don’t have a problem with this, then?” I asked. “Come on. You remember what happened that summer. All of it.”

He said nothing and just concentrated on the road, though he’d really goosed up the speed while we were talking. He took the left-angle turn at the Snickersville Turnpike so sharply the tires squealed.

I grabbed the armrest. “Eli, slow down, will you? You’re driving like a madman.”

“I can drive this road with my eyes closed.” But at least he let up slightly on the accelerator.

“Well, open them. You didn’t answer my question.”

“There’s nothing to say. Look, I’m sorry, Luce. I don’t want to go over ancient history. We can’t relive the past.”

I leaned back in my seat. For the second time, he was avoiding something. He’d gotten Mia to go along with him and now he wanted my silence, dressed up as family unity. He started worrying his tongue against his bottom lip again, lapsing into a brooding silence.

I stared out the window at the well-loved landscape of home. My days of exile in France were over. I was back for good. Eli was right that we needed to pull together, as it fell to the three of us now to run the vineyard. I had no intention of reliving the past but we had to lay some things, finally, to rest. There would be no sweeping the details of Leland’s death under the carpet, either.

The late-afternoon sun streamed in through the glass of the Jag’s tinted windows, refracting everything outside to a lovely liquid clarity that almost hurt my eyes. Inside the car, the murkiness was pervasive.

In vino veritas . In wine there is truth.

About time I got some.

We passed the Wild Bird Sanctuary sign at the edge of the town of Middleburg. Route 50 narrowed and became Washington Street, an elegantly pretty tree-lined main street of small shops and cafés, where park benches lined the brick sidewalks and American flags hung limply from poles on the street lamps.

“I hate to rush you,” Eli said, breaking the silence, “but as soon as we get to the house you’ve got to change so we can get over to the funeral home. Brandi and Mia are already there. Dominique will be along as soon as she sees to a retirement party at the inn. Some senator’s throwing a bash.”

“It’s Leland’s wake. Can’t she leave that to someone else? I thought she had help.”

“Of course she does. But let me tell you, if she’d been around when God created the world, she probably would have insisted on supervising to make sure He didn’t screw up.”

“Dominique? Oh, come on. If she was any more laid back, you’d want to take her pulse to check for signs of life.”

“Not anymore. Now you just want to check it to see if she’s human. That catering company of hers has grown so much she’s bringing in almost as much money as the inn. So her spring is, shall we say, just a tiny bit overwound,” he said. “Then there’s the matter of her wanting to run the whole caboodle on her own after Fitz retires.”

“I didn’t know he was thinking about retiring.” I said, surprised.

“He’s not. She’s thinking about him retiring. You should see him at the inn these days when he joins his guests for happy hour. Like I said, for him happy hour never stops. Dominique is getting more and more pissed off about it, too. He’s an embarrassment, Luce.”

“Why do you always have to be so crude? He opened that restaurant before either of us were even born. It is what it is today because of him.”

“Will you calm down? It’s not like the guys in white pajamas are going to show up and haul him off tomorrow, though some time drying out is probably just what the doctor ordered. Anyway, all future plans about Fitz and the inn are on the back burner while the festival is on.”

“What festival?”

He glanced over so I could see his eyebrows raised above the frame of the Ray-Bans. “You mean you don’t even know about that? Our festival. The First Annual Montgomery Estate Vineyard Summer Festival.”

“Since when do we have a festival?”

“I just said it’s the first one.”

“I mean, how come we have a festival? We’re just a mom-and-pop vineyard.”

“No fooling,” he said. “But these days, everyone’s got one. So now we do, too. The only difference is most of the other vineyards don’t think they have to put on a production that would rival the opening ceremony of the damn Olympics.”

“Where do we get all the people to pull off something like this?”

“Where do you think? Dominique roped everyone in the family into it. And Joe, of course.”

“I thought that relationship was over.”

“Nah, he’s still crazy about her even if she thinks he’s about as ambitious as a slug. Hell, he’d hang the moon some place different if she wanted it. She’ll probably get around to asking, too. She’s got him doing just about everything else.”

The family had long since stopped placing bets on when Joe Dawson, a history teacher at an elite private girls’ school in Middleburg, would get up his nerve to ask Dominique to marry him. Now it was if he’d ask her.

“Like what?”

“She’s got some theater company coming in to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream this weekend at Mosby’s Ruins.”

The burned-out tenant house we called Mosby’s Ruins had been the temporary Civil War headquarters of Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the leader of what was probably the most famous guerrilla combat group of the Confederacy. It was thanks to his notoriety that Atoka got its name on the map.

Mosby’s nickname was “the Gray Ghost” because of the surprise commando raids he and his partisan Rangers used to stage on Union soldiers. They’d steal Union supplies, then disappear, hiding out in barns or smokehouses or behind the miles and miles of dry-stacked stone walls that checkerboarded the landscape. Our tenant house had been one of his many bolt-holes until Union men burned it.