Рита Браун - Sour Puss

"Not a scratch."

"Huh?" Bo dropped his arms.

Arch stared down at the table for a second. "Poor guy. Toby was really losing it."

"What? Toby was hallucinating?" Bo sharply asked.

"Who knows? But strange as he could be, Toby in his right mind wouldn't see a wound that wasn't there." Arch's voice rose. "It is weird. It's like Forland's disappearance pulled a loose thread and the whole cloth unraveled."

"The Pittmans are peculiar, as we've noted," Fair added.

"For Christ's sake, every family in Virginia is peculiar. You all have been nursing your peculiarities since 1607." Bo poked a finger at both Virginia men but in good humor.

"Hey, you weren't born a Virginian, but you got here as soon as you could," Fair poked back.

"I deserve that." Bo smiled. "Well, I don't know about you two, but I have to earn a living."

As Arch paid the bill to mollify Bo—he paid Fair's, too, which was gracious—Bo begged Fair to call him if anything suitable became available for the Belgian couple.

As the three men drove their separate ways, Rick, Coop, and an entire team combed Toby's house. The department computer whiz hunched over the new computer Toby bought in the winter. Toby had bragged about its ASUS motherboard.

So far, every single thing that turned up in the computer, on his desk, and on his bookshelves related to grapes, agriculture. He had everything Professor Forland had published plus unpublished materials, works in progress. One had to be proficient in organic chemistry to read the late professor's work. Toby was. The computer whiz was not.

Toby Pittman's entire narrow existence— like that of his mentor, who had a somewhat wider sweep—was dedicated to the grape, to making wine.

In vino veritas.

23

Hy Maudant was back at White Vineyards by Wednesday. Bail had been set at one million dollars. When Hy's attorney paid it without comment, all of Crozet—indeed, all of Albemarle County—gasped at how rich he must be.

Hy strolled out of jail an almost free man. Paying the bail was his way of giving everyone the finger. Since he did not discuss his net worth, this cool forking over of the money made him appear really rich, powerful, and confident.

That's what he wanted people to think.

He no sooner arrived home than within twenty-four hours another crisis struck: a very late springtime frost.

Usually frost disappears by mid-April, not to return until mid-October. In recent memory, a frost blanketed central Virginia once as late as May 22. But on the other side of the dreaded—courtesy of the IRS—April 15, farmers and vintners usually breathed a sigh of relief.

This May 11, man and beast awoke to silvery meadows.

Hy immediately called in ten huge helicopters to hover over the vineyards at 120 feet. The ground temperature was twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. He ordered the machines an hour before daybreak. Had the frost been predicted, he would have called them the night before.

Jack Frost snuck up on everyone, especially the weatherman.

The helicopters, each at the cost of five hundred dollars per hour, pushed warmer air down to the ground. Four hours later, with the help of the choppers and the sunshine that bathed the hills and valleys, the mercury rose to forty degrees.

Hy saved his grapes. Whether or not he could save himself remained to be seen.

Arch Saunders, not three miles away, had a devil of a time renting helicopters, because Kluge Estate Vineyard, White Vineyards, Oakencroft, and King Vineyards had rented

everything within a three-hour flight radius of Albemarle County.

He finally managed to procure four, at six hundred fifty dollars an hour each. By the time the noisy machines flew off like giant dragonflies, Arch figured they'd lost ten to thirty percent of the crop. Rollie was furious.

The following day, May 12, the countryside glowed in sixty-seven-degree warmth.

Harry had no recourse to helicopters, but her Petit Manseng proved a tough variety. The grape survived through the centuries not only because of careful cultivation but also because of hardiness. Indeed, Petit Manseng was so old it had been used to baptize Henry IV of France in 1553.

Early on the evening of May 12, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, Harry had enough light to keep working. The varieties of sunflowers, redbud clover, and alfalfa that she selected were either native to the area or especially rugged.

Central Virginia weather could provide cold winters as well as sizzling summers. It was a crapshoot.

As Harry finished up, returning to thebarn to check on the horses, she wondered at the shock those early English settlers must have felt in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The American climate was harsher, the indigenous peoples were so different from Europeans. The wildlife and plant life, much of it, was new to them.

"Fair."Tucker heard his truck.

"He's been working so hard. The pace should be easing off by now," Mrs. Murphy remarked.

Pewter sauntered into the barn. "I'm here."

"So?"The tiger half-closed her eyes.

"Don't you want to know where I've been?"

"Sleeping in the house."Tucker trotted to the open barn doors to await Fair's arrival.

"If that's my reception, I'll keep my news to myself."Pewter walked out, pausing a moment for effect, then headed toward the back porch door, the flab of her belly swaying to and fro.

"If she thinks I'm going to beg, she's wrong."Mrs. Murphy watched the gray cat.

"Yeah, but what if she really knowssomething?"Tucker often fell for Pewter's machinations.

Mrs. Murphy considered this but forgot about it when Fair pulled up in his truck.

The two animals ran to greet him. He knelt down to make a fuss over them as Harry emerged into the fading sunlight.

"I'd like a kiss, too."

"With pleasure." He scratched Tucker's ears, then ran his forefinger along Mrs. Murphy's cheek before standing to embrace his wife. "Long day?"

"Yes, but the frost didn't hurt us, thank God."

"Got some other folks." He opened the driver's door again, running his hand where the seat back joined the seat bottom.

"What'd you lose?"

"Quarters. Fell out of my pocket."

"Don't you hate that?" she commiserated. "Always happens at one of the toll booths on Route 64 in West Virginia."

As they entered the kitchen, the phone rang.

Fair picked it up; his shoulders stiffened as he listened, then he said, "Good-bye."

"What was that all about?"

"Hy Maudant." Fair grabbed string cheese from the fridge.

"What does he want?"

"He said he saw me walking up the hill when he drove out. He's sorry he didn't stop, but he was, in his words, 'not in full possession of himself.' He said he was so rattled by the sight of Toby that he ran."

"How very convenient that Toby had his own gun in his hand."

Fair ate a long piece of string cheese, handing some to his wife. "Sure was. Saw Bo Newell the other day, and Arch, too, at the coffee shop. Wound up having breakfast with them once they got over themselves, and Arch actually paid. I figured he'd pay for Bo but not me. He'll never forgive me for winning you back."

"Honey, that was years ago, Arch and my time together. Tell me what happened."

"Oh, well, Bo said Hy wouldn't be that stupid."

"It's hard to believe he wasn't. He killed Toby and put Toby's own gun in his hand. What's so difficult to believe about that?" She played devil's advocate, because she'd begun to wonder herself.

"There's something to that, but it's not so far-fetched to think someone would lose their composure walking up to a freshly killed man. And there's something else that bothers me. I would have heard the shots. I didn't hear a thing."

"The other thing is, Toby called about Jed, and Jed's fine. How quickly did you get there after Toby called?"