A Tainted Finish: A Sydney McGrath Mystery (2 page)

“Maybe. Alejandro and the crew would have been drunk. They were pretty torn up last night. It could have sat for days. We would have had to find refrigeration, and the fruit might have soured.” He glanced down at her, checking her reaction. He was offering a flimsy argument, but she appreciated the gesture. She had been an ass by any standard. She grabbed the bourbon from him and took two more pulls surveying the tidy counter space in front of them.

“This your handiwork?” she asked, waving at the organized shelves. The fraternal prodding of the whiskey was beginning to loosen her tongue.

“Clarence is a genius, but I have no idea how he works this way.” He smiled at her, but his expression changed slowly as he realized his blunder. Her face blanched. A simple tense change could mean so much.

Sydney looked down at her feet, suddenly feeling an immense gravitational pull on her chest. Her head whirled and her knees collapsed under her as she slid down the side of the tank onto the cool concrete floor. A violent
Guh!
escaped from her chest, and she began to weep loudly, heaving grotesquely. She curled into a ball and pressed her wet face against the concrete, surrendering to the grief that had stalked her all day.

Olivier tried to wrestle her into some kind of comforting embrace, but she was taken in a wave of loss so violent that he knew she wasn’t aware of his presence. Instead he stroked her thick black hair and finished off the bourbon, eventually letting his own tears fall freely.

Syd jumped out of bed wearing only a sheet that she wrapped around herself in a blurred hurry. She cursed the quiet, persistent knocking on the kitchen door. She opened the door to see Jim Yesler in uniform, hat in hand and a bereft look on his face. She stepped forward instantly and hugged him, burying her face in his chest. Something about seeing a man like Jim Yesler overwrought with grief was heartbreaking. When she finally let go of him his choked sobbing had abated. She slowly realized by his growing embarrassment that she was hardly dressed.

“I think I left my bag in the car. Up at the winery,” she explained, tugging on the sheet above her chest.

He nodded without a word, turned on his heels, and made out of the door on a welcome errand.

Syd rummaged around the kitchen for a french press and coffee beans, still holding onto the sheet with one hand. She lit the huge black enamel Ada stove and started the kettle. Next to the stove sat an expensive Italian espresso maker, her uncle's preferred mode of morning caffeine. The hundred-year-old farmhouse kitchen was equipped with modern conveniences, but she preferred the rusticity of her childhood. She moved around the familiar old kitchen with muscle memory. Her bare feet on the cold wood floorboards felt safe and grounded. The smells of the house all emanated from the kitchen; from the subtle aroma of baking bread to the sourness of the current batch of pickled vegetables in the huge crock on the metro rack under the window. They were all familiar and comforting. A half loaf of bread lay on the cutting board on the island next to a colorful bowl of tomatoes. The kelly green walls glowed with a vibrant freshness and reminded her of the day when Clarence picked out the color. He had chosen a butter yellow. But she was feeling snarky that day and chose the bright green in a juvenile act of subtle rebellion. He quickly embraced it and learned to love it with the grace of a man who would sacrifice everything for love.

She moved to the stove and filled the coffee press with boiling water. From the window she watched Jim Yesler swing her heavy bag like an airy satchel, crunching down the steep gravel road from the winery in long-legged strides. His hat was back on his head and he wore the Sheriffs' uniform that she remembered as a child. He looked exactly the same.

He came into the house without ceremony and placed her suitcase in front of her in the middle of the kitchen. She raised the roller handle and rolled it into the back bedroom without a word.

When she returned she was wearing jeans, flip flops, and an old red WSU sweatshirt. Jim had already pressed the coffee plunger and was pouring it into the hand-thrown ceramic mugs she had set out. She heard the muffled chime of the Westminster mantle clock downstairs and patiently counted ten chimes.

“I need you to ID the body,” Jim said after a full five minutes of looking for words in the bottom of his coffee mug. Syd nodded and smiled apologetically.

“I don't know where my keys are,” she said. She looked him in the eyes with controlled despair. The terrible weight in her chest that had been nagging at her since she jumped out of bed felt heavier by the minute. She began to wonder if she could walk at all, let alone drive. She couldn’t remember where she left her purse, her keys, or her phone. She vaguely remembered the day before; the work in the winery and her breakdown last night. The fogginess in her head was as consuming as the hole in her chest. She felt worse than hungover. She felt wretched.

“I'll drive,” he said paternally. He was the sheriff now. She looked at him curiously, wondering how difficult it must be for him to regulate his emotions at a time like this.

“But how will I get back?” she asked. She was surprised by how young she felt when he used this voice.

“I'll take you back, Siddy-biddy,” he said. He smiled sadly and pulled her to his chest again.

~

The half hour drive to the coroner's office gave Jim plenty of time to explain the details of the night before last: the 911 call, the response time, the list of people who were at the winery when he showed up. He was on duty and he was the first responder. He had always kept a special eye out for Blackwell Winery and the folks who lived there, so he wasted no time getting to the scene. But Clarence was already dead when he arrived. There was nothing he could do, he said helplessly. The assistant winemaker had found her uncle submerged in a tank of red wine, drowned. He kept the worst details to himself. He called her around midnight after two torturous hours spent trying to figure out what to say.

She looked at his dry rough hands on the steering wheel while he talked. He fit in the cruiser like a puzzle piece, all six-foot-four of him. The cruiser smelled like leather and sweet male sweat, a smell she always thought belonged to the man. She was a little afraid of him as a child. He was her best friend Charlie's father and the only source of envy she had for her friend. Charlie and Jim were extremely close, especially after Charlie's mom died of cancer when they were teenage girls. He was just as attentive to his adult daughter. Jim sent Charlie notes and gifts, and traveled the 240 miles to Seattle almost monthly to take his daughter to the opera or a Mariner's game. She would occasionally tag along with Charlie and Jim, although he invited her to almost every outing they had. She loved them dearly, but lately she began to define the strange feeling she had when she was around them as envy. It embarrassed her to feel that way toward her best friend.

“I talked to Charlie this morning,” he said as he glanced at her, almost reading her thoughts.

“I didn't call her,” she said, her voice flat. “Actually, I did, but it was at 2 am, from the car. But I couldn't talk. She kept saying
hello
and she was getting mad, like I was some kind of creeper.” She smiled sadly at him and swallowed back a sudden wooziness.

“Yeah. You're lucky she couldn't taze you through a phone line,” he said halfheartedly. He was always proud of his tough little girl. Syd nodded silently.

“She's coming down tonight. She told me to tell you she'll do the arrangements for you.”

“I'm. . . I can do it.” She realized as she said it that she really couldn't do it herself. Suddenly she felt desperately alone. She wanted Charlie with her so badly. Charlie was like a sister. She was family. Charlie knew her issues with Clarence. Charlie knew about every fight and challenge Syd threw back at her uncle. She understood what Syd faced with his cryptic, eccentric efforts at parenting. Still, Charlie understood her uncle like no one else. She admired Clarence with quiet awe and always defended him, even during the worst storm – when Syd left her Fulbright scholarship at Oxford to attend sommelier school. It infuriated Syd that Charlie could empathize with her own hurt but still maintain an unwavering reverence for Clarence. But Charlie was special like that.

“Have you heard from Marcus?” Jim broke the silence.

“Who?” she asked.

“Uh, Marcus. It's Marcus, right? You two still together?” Jim looked ready to backpedal out of unsteady ground. Boyfriend issues with his girls were always hit or miss.

“Oh. . .Marcus. Yes, we’re still together.” A feeling of wretchedness swept over her. She was unsure if it was coming from her head or her stomach.

Jim squished his face in hesitation. “Charlie says you might want to call him. She says he's frantic.”

“Oh.” A moment later she squealed, lurched forward, and vomited on the floor at her feet.

~

“It smells nothing like the movies in here,” she said, feigning humor to Jim. He looked at her with concern. “I've never been to the morgue.”

He wanted to ask her if she had ever seen a dead body before. He knew she was pre-med in college. He certainly didn’t want to cause another bout of nausea, so he decided to keep his mouth shut. Besides, it wasn't just a dead body. It was her uncle she would be looking at, and he wouldn't look like she had remembered. Honestly, Jim was a bit haunted by the transformation of Clarence Blackwell.

“This is the coroner's office,” he said, gently guiding her by the shoulder into a small room adjacent to what looked like a reception area. Her wet flip flops squished in conspicuously vulgar sounds on the linoleum tiles. They had to wash the vomit off her feet and pant legs with a hose they found outside the county buildings. Her jeans were wet almost to the knees and she was trembling. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder tighter, hating his job. He felt utterly helpless.

They stepped through the next door with trepidation and Sydney squished into a room filled with an odd mix of smells: wine, something earthy and woodsy, terpenes, and a kind of chemical sweetness. She was surprised at how comforting the aromas were at the same time that her sterile surroundings seemed so surreal. She looked at the form on the table in the middle of the room, astonished.

Clarence was purple. The deep lines in his 64-year-old weathered face were traced in dark purple that looked like dried African mud. He was bloated, like most drowning victims. Thankfully his eyes were closed, which Jim saw as blessing. He had seen his eyes when the EMTs had shown up at the scene, and they were so deeply stained that they were almost solid black. His thick white hair was now stained reddish purple, and it stuck strait out in tufts like a gruesome troll doll. He reminded Jim of a Marvel comic villain.

Syd stood anchored three feet away from the body, eyes wide and mouth agape. She stared for what seemed like an eternity to Jim, but may have been only a minute. Then she stepped forward and laid her hand on the nearest large purple hand resting on the cold stainless steel table. She was used to purple-stained hands; a winemaker’s hands were almost always stained in various shades of purple. She lifted it to her face and examined the palms, tracing the calluses and lines with her finger. She turned the hand over and noticed a swollen knuckle protruding outward over the index finger. She ran her finger over it and pressed into the lump. Signs of bruising had begun, but there was a surprisingly little amount of swelling.

“He dislocated his finger,” she whispered to herself.

“His hands aren't always like that?” Jim asked quietly.

“He's left-handed, like me. He was doing punchdowns. How could he do that with a dislocated finger?” she asked flatly.

“Maybe it happened during the, uh, drowning?”

Syd stepped back and stared at the gruesome face and body in front of her, a steely look in her eyes. Every trace of the desperate little girl she had been a few moments ago were now gone.

“Why would my uncle drown in a tank of wine, Jim?”

~

The car ride back seemed to take forever, and Syd couldn't stop fidgeting. She ran every possible scenario in her head and bounced a few of them off of Jim in a breathless stream of theory and anecdote. She sat picking the skin on her lip, a nervous tick she had when she was deep in thought. Was it a heart attack? An aneurysm? Did he fall and hit his head?

“Who found him, again?” she asked, picking the skin off her lip in a fury.

“The foreign . . . uh, the Argentinian kid,” Jim answered, hesitant to indulge her in her new state of mind.

“Olivier? The winemaker?”

Jim nodded. She sat hunched in her seat, silent for a while. Her brows furrowed as she worked her nails on her bottom lip.

Half-way through the drive, she let out a deep sigh, “Why would my uncle drown in a tank of wine?” But this time the question was couched in a tone of deep curiosity that Jim found utterly disarming and dangerous. He shuddered involuntarily.

Clarence held the punchdown tool with the deftness of a swashbuckler. He twirled it overhead and lunged it at imaginary foes for her amusement. She would hang her head over the side of the tanks and watch him as he deftly walked barefoot on their edges, the aromas from the fermenting wine singeing her nostrils. The long stainless pole was attached to a welded flat disc. The disc had four large holes that let the skins seep through the flat surface of the tool like a giant potato masher. At first he would cut into the fresh cap of skins in the tank at an angle and pull upward to make a hole. Then he would plunge the punchdown tool deep into the skins and churn them under the juice in a swirling jerking motion, like the dervish dancers she had seen the previous summer. Sometimes he looked like a circus performer or a dancer himself, wielding a tool from side to side and walking a tight-rope above her. He was graceful and confident, and she loved him best during punchdowns.

“Punchdowns are an art form,” he said one evening when he was pleasant and playful. “The skins have to be agitated and engulfed in juice, but never damaged or bruised.” He stood poised high above a tank of Mourvedre, waiting to have its first punchdown of the fermentation.

She stood on a stool, barely able to look into the tank. She was only six. A sudden waft of gas hit her and she pulled back with a contorted face.

“Yes, Sydney. That’s gas burning your nose. Carbon dioxide. CO2. The yeast eat up sugars and nutrients and produce CO2. Taste it.” He squatted on the edge of the tank and reached down with a beaker from his pocket. He handed her the beaker of half-fermented wine. It tasted sweet and fizzy.

“CO2 makes pop fizzy too. But we can't breathe it. It’s a poison to us. This is why you aren't allowed in the winery without me during Crush. This is why we can’t go into the winery right away when the doors are shut. Do you understand?” He nodded toward her. She nodded back, bored.

“How many times do you have to tell me this? Geez!” She bopped her head with her hand.

“I'll keep telling you until you stop sticking your nose in the tanks right after I open the lids,” he said, mocking her girly voice.

“Then how do the yeast live in CO2?” she asked after a minute, her fingers working at the skin on her lower lip.

He stopped the punchdown tool and smiled down at her.

“They can get poisoned too, actually. And they can breathe oxygen in the wine or live for a while without oxygen. Aerobic versus anaerobic. Yeast are remarkable organisms.”

“Can we breathe aerobic or anaerobic?” she asked.

“We can only breathe air. Aerobic. Oxygen mostly. We’re certainly inferior to yeast in a vat of wine.” He smiled and she knew it was a good question.

“But what if a person got stuck in there?” she asked, her dark brows furrowed.

Clarence raised his brows at her in one of his wordless answers.

“Do people die doing punchdowns?” she prodded.

He openly winced at her childish voice - still echoing a recently outgrown lisp - asking such an adult question. Her casual relationship with death was a painful vestige of her orphaning that often jarred him. He grimaced through the tight knot in his throat.

“Sometimes, yes,” he said soberly. “But only because they made very stupid mistakes. And no one at Blackwell's would ever do such a thing.” She smiled a toothless smile up at him as he leaped over to another tank and plunged the tool deftly into the cap, releasing more noxious gas into the air around her.