Ellen Crosby: The Merlot Murders

“Go to hell.”

He threw the bundle in the air with one hand and caught it easily. “Guess I’ll have to hang on to these. I bet they’ll come in pretty handy if I need to do any more motivating.”

I lunged for him again. I heard the crack as the gun connected again to the side of my head. I hung on to the workbench because the room started spinning.

“I’m getting tired of hitting you.” He sounded weary. “Let’s get this over with. Move. Over behind those big tanks. It’ll take longer for someone to find you there.” He grabbed me roughly by the arm and shoved me. “Get up. Get going.”

The gun was in my ribs again. I staggered, leaning heavily on the golf club, as we walked around the corner to where we kept the ladder and the hoses. Quinn, or probably Hector, had put the ladder back on the hooks after I’d used it last night trying to break out of the place. But one of the hoses was on the ground, which was unusual. Among other things, it was a safety hazard. I stumbled around the mass of coils, avoiding the spots where the concrete was still wet.

With the air-conditioning on and the fans blowing, the concrete should have been dry. I glanced again at the nozzle, which had an automatic shut-off. Maybe they’d left so fast on account of the fire that the water was still on. If so, the pressure would have built up inside the hose.

I dropped the golf club and it clattered on the concrete floor.

“What are you doing?” he snapped. “Pick that thing up.”

I would only have one chance. I bent to get the club and reached, with my other hand for the hose. I twisted the nozzle so it was aiming at him and pressed the trigger. The water hit him right in the eyes. He yelled and fell back, temporarily blinded, waving the gun in my direction. I was nearer to him than I’d been to Mason. I hit him full in the face with the golf club. He screamed again, a high-pitched keening sound and blood spurted from his mouth and coated his teeth. The gun flew out of his hands and bounced off a wine barrel, landing somewhere out of sight.

It was my lucky day for men wearing the wrong shoes. Greg turned toward the noise of the gun hitting the floor and slipped on a wet patch of concrete. He lost his balance as his legs went out from under him and banged the back of his head against the metal corner of a stand of wine casks. He hit the floor, moaning, with a hand covering his mouth.

To get the gun meant walking past him and risking the chance that he could still knock me down or else circling the long way around the wine casks and letting him out of my sight for a few seconds. I chose the latter, scanning the floor, the adrenaline jolt of my little victory mutating to fear. He’d begun moving as soon as I did. I heard him scrabbling around like a crab.

His hand was on the gun before I could pick it up. I brought the golf club down hard, for a second time, and connected with his wrist. He yelped again and I thought I’d stopped him, but he just reached for it with the other hand, now completely covered in blood from his mouth. He aimed and squeezed the trigger.

I closed my eyes. Somehow he missed me. The bullet hit a wine cask, which sprang a leak like a geyser, shooting red wine over both of us. He slumped to the ground and the gun fell from his hand. I hooked the golf club around it and putted it to where I could pick it up.

He was unconscious, but breathing.

Quinn got to us even before Bobby and Hector arrived. Greg was lying in a pool of wine. I looked at the cask. Merlot.

“You okay?” Quinn scooped me up in his arms. “You’re a mess.”

“You always have something nice to say about how I look,” I mumbled.

He looked at Greg. “Bad year for Merlot, hunh?”

I thought about the necklace as he carried me outside. “Maybe. But things might be improving. It might be a good harvest after all.”

“That so?”

“You promised you’d stay through harvest.”

“I’ll keep my word.”

“What about afterward?”

He set me down carefully on the grass and touched one of my bruises. I winced. “Sorry,” he said. “What did your man Jefferson say? ‘I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.’”

“The history of the past is finished,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “You need to move on.”

For nearly four centuries—since the first colonists arrived in Jamestown in 1607—Virginians have been making wine. Elated to discover abundant wild grapes growing on the shoreline of the James River, the settlers took only two years before they produced their first harvest. The results, unfortunately, were less than stellar as the native American grapes produced wine that tasted and smelled like wet dog.

By 1618, the Jamestown settlers abandoned local grapes and began importing French vines—and French winemakers. But these delicate vines, known as vitis vinifera, weren’t well suited for the heat, humidity, and pests found in Virginia. The vines either died or didn’t bear fruit. Nevertheless in 1619 the House of Burgesses—stubbornly determined to cultivate a home-grown wine industry—passed a law requiring every male colonist to plant twenty vines. For every dead or non-fruit-bearing vine, the fine was a barrel of corn. Not surprisingly, the House of Burgesses acquired a lot of corn.

Over the years the Virginia legislature continued unsuccessfully to foster a wine industry, even as tobacco was becoming the true cash crop. More than 150 years after Jamestown, Thomas Jefferson, one of Virginia’s most famous native sons, tried to grow grapes at his beloved Monticello. Convinced Virginia had the right soil and climate for producing grapes that would rival European wines, Jefferson died without seeing his dream realized.

Yet his fellow Virginians persisted, and by the 1800s cross-pollination between European vitis vinifera and American grapes created the first American hybrids such as the Alexander, Norton (a Virginia native), Catawba, and others. However, the Civil War, which was hard fought on Virginia soil as nowhere else, caused many vineyards to be destroyed or abandoned. Shortly afterward California wines arrived on the scene and rapidly cornered the lion’s share of the U.S. market. It took Prohibition, arriving in Virginia three years before Congress made the U.S. a dry country in 1919, to finish off what little was left of the industry.

The mid-1970s saw a renaissance in grape planting in the Commonwealth thanks to new success growing French hybrids such as Seyval Blanc, Vidal Blanc, and Chambourcin, along with agricultural breakthroughs finally allowing vitis vinifera grapes to flourish in Virginia. In 2004 the state government in Richmond produced a strategic blueprint for the industry that traces its lineage directly to Jefferson’s long ago dreams. Known as Vision 2015, the goal is to establish Virginia—already a serious contender in national and international markets—as a producer of world-class wines.

Thomas Jefferson would be proud.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Juanita Swedenburg and the late Wayne Swedenburg, owners of Swedenburg Estate Vineyard in Middleburg, Virginia, for the hands-on experience, technical help, and insight they gave me while researching this book. It goes without saying that any mistakes on matters involving wine or the workings of a well-run, small vineyard are mine. Gordon Murchie, president of the Vinifera Winegrowers Association, also provided assistance with historical information.

I hope the good people of Loudoun and Fauquier Counties will forgive the liberties I took with geography—especially re-routing Goose Creek and playing a bit fast and loose with county boundaries—in that beautiful region of the Commonwealth.