Ellen Crosby: The Merlot Murders

As kids we played there even though it was unsafe, reenacting Civil War battles where the Confederacy always won. We used the crumbling weed-choked brick walls as ramparts and scared each other with sightings of Mosby’s ghost, who was said to appear on moonless nights, still looking for Union soldiers. Later, Greg and I used it as a secret place to make love.

“It’s been refortified since you left. We turned the main floor of the house into a stage for concerts, plays, performances.” He looked at me. “The place where you and Greg used to do it is a storage room now. We keep the scenery, lights, and equipment there.”

I turned red as he smirked. “How nice,” I said coldly.

He turned off Route 50 onto Atoka Road. We drove through the town of Atoka—which consisted of the general store with its two gas pumps out front, the farrier, and the Baptist church—and headed toward home. Though it had been less than an hour since we sped away from the airport and the new high-tech construction lining the highway, here the mailboxes still had the same names on them they’d had for decades and the homemade signs stuck in front yards advertising fresh peaches, tomatoes, and ’lopes were the same ones folks used every year.

Eli slowed the Jag, for once obeying the twenty-five miles per hour speed limit, as though recalibrating to the gentler, more languid pace I remembered. “Opening night for the play’s been canceled on account of Leland’s funeral,” he said, after a moment. “Switched to Friday instead. Along with the pig roast.”

“Pig roast?”

“You heard me. Dominique wants everyone to dress up in Elizabethan costumes to serve the guests. It’ll be a cold day in hell before she gets me to prance around in a pair of tights and some velvet doubloon.”

“Doublet.”

“Whatever. I’m not wearing it.”

We had come to the split-rail fence that marked the beginning of our land. Out my window was a long, clear vista all the way to the layered Blue Ridge Mountains. In front of us were the Bull Run Mountains, a sixteen-mile truncated spur of hills that always made me think of an old man’s worn down set of teeth.

The first thing I saw, marking the beginning of our Chardonnay block, was my mother’s Peace rosebush, which had exploded into a profusion of velvety yellow flowers the size of small cabbages, against glossy dark green foliage. The French planted roses with their vines for centuries because both were sensitive to the same pests and diseases. If the roses were suffering, it meant the vines would soon be in trouble, too, and in need of preventive measures against bugs or black rot or whatever else ailed them. Now with all the modern equipment we had for monitoring the soil and vines, the roses were there for beauty, and because my mother loved them.

Farther down another of her favorite hybrid tea roses, the blood-red Chrysler Imperial, indicated the beginning of the Pinot Noir. The middles, the spaces between the rows of vines, which we usually planted with bluegrass, were deeply cracked and brown. It obviously had been a hot, dry summer, but the vines would have thrived in weather like that.

I kept my face turned toward the window so Eli wouldn’t notice that my eyes were suddenly watery, and pretended to look for the smaller of our two apple orchards, which was just beyond the Pinot Noir.

“Hopefully we’ll get a good price for the place,” Eli said. “Considering the shape it’s in.”

He spoke in that same casual tone of voice so it didn’t hit me right away what he’d just said. When I realized, it was like a physical blow. “You’re not talking about the vineyard?”

“What else would I be talking about?” He sounded irritated, like he’d actually expected to have gotten away with dropping that bombshell into the conversation without me noticing. “Of course we’re selling. Mia and I certainly don’t plan to run it. And you don’t either, obviously.” His glance strayed in the direction of my feet.

I reddened and smoothed my ankle-length cotton dress, now badly pleated after sleeping in a cramped airline seat, and shifted my bad leg so it was less visible.

So this was what he hadn’t wanted to tell me on the phone. I never saw it coming. “You can’t be serious,” I said.

His lips were pressed together like he was trying to keep his cool and refrain from blurting out some insulting reply. I didn’t care what he said. This time he wasn’t going to bully me and win.

“You want to sell our home!” I said. “How could you? Our family’s owned that land practically since the country was founded. Everyone’s buried there…Mom…Leland…”

“The cemetery’s not a problem.” He cut me off, speaking rapidly. “I’ve got it all figured out. We’ll move them.”

He slowed the car and put on his turn signal. A row of cheerful burgundy, white, and green posters with an abstract design of grapes twining around musical instruments was plastered on the stone wall that marked the main entrance to Highland Farm and Montgomery Estate Vineyard. Mia’s artwork, almost certainly. She was the only one of us to inherit Mom’s artistic talent. The place where Greg’s car destroyed part of the wall was still visible, even with the posters covering the seam between the old and new stone, though the demolished stone pillar had been completely rebuilt. Eli turned into the entrance.

“That is an absolutely revolting idea,” I folded my arms and stared out the window.

“It is not. I’m not talking about throwing a bunch of coffins in the back of Hector’s pickup and carting them off to a landfill or something. There are ceremonies for situations like this. We’ll find another site, maybe build a mausoleum. It’ll be tasteful.” He sounded irritated. “Mia agrees with me, babe. And don’t tell me you can’t use the money like the rest of us.”

So much for family unity. He and Mia were going to gang up on me so it was two against one.

A cloud of red clay dust swirled around us as we drove along Sycamore Lane, the private gravel road that led to the house and the vineyard. The name came from the magnificent two-hundred-year-old tree, which had grown up a few hundred feet from the main entrance, dividing the road like a “Y” into left and right forks. Eli came to the divide and downshifted, pausing briefly in front of the enormous tree with its soaring branches and its crepelike bark, peeling like a bad case of sunburn. It had been here as long as my family and it could easily live another three or four hundred years.

“We’re broke, is that it?” I said. “Are you telling me we have to sell the place to pay off Leland’s debts?”

He glanced at me as he nosed the car to the right and headed directly toward the main house. No sentimental tour for my home-coming. Had we gone left—the road was an enormous loop—we would have first passed the winery, Mosby’s Ruins, the cemetery, and a large spring-fed pond.

“Calm down, will you? And don’t turn on the waterworks, either, Luce. I can’t take it right now. We’re not technically broke.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “I’m not crying. And you sound like a lawyer. Just tell me yes or no. Are we broke or not?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me. I’ve got time.”

“No, you don’t. We’ve really got to move. We’re twenty-one minutes behind schedule. I’ll fill you in later.”

“It wasn’t my idea to have the wake two hours after I got off the plane from France,” I said. “And you drove like a madman. You made up for a lot of lost time. We’ll be fine.”

“We’re the family. We can’t be late.”

He pulled the car into the curved drive in front of the house. Highland House, as it was called, was a harmonious mixture of Federal and Georgian architecture built of locally quarried stone. Not a pretentious or grand mansion, it possessed—at least to my eyes—a grace and elegance in its well-proportioned symmetry that made it seem somehow more substantial than it was. Scott Fitzgerald used to attend parties here when he came from Baltimore to visit friends in the area, and FDR dined with my grandparents the day he gave the dedication speech for the newly constructed Blue Ridge Parkway.