Long Time Gone (4 page)

From the corner of his eye, Erik saw Janie stiffen. He leaned forward quickly. “I intend to give it my best shot, Mr. Mayor.”

“I’m sure you will. I just hope that’ll be enough.” Pittman nodded at the table, his smile flattening slightly. “Good night, y’all.”

“Fuckin’ asshole,” Pete muttered, watching the mayor work his way back to the door.

“Always has been. Don’t take it seriously.” Janie pushed her beer away, turning to Erik. “Come to Brenner’s with us. We’ll buy you dinner to celebrate.”

“Thanks anyway. I think I’d better head home. I’ve got work tomorrow.”

Janie frowned. “They’re not making you start now, are they?”

“Sure.” Erik managed a grim smile. “They haven’t had a real chief of police since March, when Olema finally gave up on his appeals and hit the road.”

Pete shook his head. “Holy crap. You don’t even get a day off?”

Erik pushed himself to his feet. “There are no days off in my business. Thanks for the support. See y’all later.”

As he shambled toward the door, he was aware of several dozen pairs of eyes boring into his back. He had a feeling that would be par for the course, at least for the foreseeable future.

Chapter Three

After two days of tasting room duty, Morgan was supremely grateful when she turned the place over to Kit Maldonado. Kit was Allie’s niece, taking time out from her studies at UTSA. Morgan felt a little guilty about hiring her away from Allie’s bakery, but both Allie and Kit assured her it was okay, and Kit handled her duties at the winery like a pro. Of course, her main duties were smiling, pouring and talking, but she was a whiz at all three, plus she was drop-dead gorgeous, with straight black hair and eyes like obsidian. At least the number of male visitors coming to the tasting room should pick up.

If only she looked a little older. Just glancing at her, Morgan would have pegged her age at maybe eighteen. She had a feeling Kit would need to keep her ID on hand in case a wandering Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission agent should happen through.

“You may be able to taste hints of grapefruit in this viognier,” Kit cooed to a couple of tourists sitting at the tasting room counter as Morgan walked through.

Morgan herself tasted nothing but grapes in the viognier, but it wasn’t really lying to say otherwise. People tasted what they wanted to taste. Or sometimes what they’d been told to taste.

Outside on the covered patio, a group of enthusiastic, sweaty volunteer pickers drank bottled water to cool off. Cooling off was necessary—by ten, it was at least eighty-five degrees in the shade.

A new group of pickers stood underneath the live oaks, rubbing on sunblock and adjusting their hats before they headed for the vineyard. Morgan gave everyone garden snips and led the way to the nearest group of vines. She ran through her spiel about how grateful the winery was for their help and then showed them how to clip the grape clusters off the vines.

Ciro was there too, of course, directing the professional vineyard crew as they picked up the crates of grapes the volunteers had filled and dumped them into a container to be carried to the destemmer. He gave the volunteers a narrow-eyed glare, but at least he didn’t tell this group to stay the hell out of the way, as he had with the first group in the morning.

Morgan took a deep breath and tried to relax her shoulders. The volunteer pickers were her idea, yet another reason for Ciro to complain about her performance.

She breezed back through the almost-cleared vines, smiling at the pickers and the perpetually scowling Ciro. Then she headed back to the winery building, where she escorted some of the volunteers out to watch the destemmer and the crusher while Kit poured malbec and chardonnay for the others and babbled on about tannins and balance and berry overtones as if she really knew what she was talking about. Maybe she did.

At eleven, Allie showed up with the catering truck. “Having fun? Did they actually pick anything?” She cocked an eyebrow at the milling groups of pickers, now mostly gathered in the shade around the patio.

“They pretty much did it all, actually. Ciro and the pros will go through and get any clusters they missed, but we got all the sauvignon blanc done.”

“Better you than me, kid—the temperature’s up in the nineties.” Allie grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler on the patio, then started unloading the catering truck with some help from the winery crew and Ciro’s son, Esteban.

Morgan ambled back to the cement slab outside the holding-tank room. The grapes tumbled through the augur on the destemmer, fruit separating from stems and leaves, then passed into the crusher. Some beaming volunteers watched the machines. Most of them had already had at least one glass of wine, and they were perfectly happy to watch the grapes they’d picked being turned into juice.

She watched the bellows move in and out on the crusher. Not exactly thrilling. When she’d first visited her father at the winery as a kid, she’d expected a big vat of grapes with Lucy and Ethel stomping around in their scarves and peasant blouses. The real thing was a lot less romantic.

Allie corralled her a few minutes later to help set up tables on the covered patio that had a view of the Cynthiana vineyard and the hills beyond. Morgan poured water and wine and reminded herself that she wasn’t really being a waitress, praise be, since she was more or less running the show.

Once the volunteers had taken their seats around the tables, she went into marketing mode again. She helped serve. She wandered from table to table to talk to the volunteers. She gave a toast after the meal was over to thank everyone for coming, making them feel like guests instead of volunteer pickers who took home a free bottle of wine as payment.

Finally, as the volunteers wandered out, some stopping in the tasting room to pick up a few more bottles to take with them, Allie pushed Morgan into a chair and handed her a plate with a sandwich and a scoop of fruit salad. If she hadn’t, Morgan would probably have forgotten to have any lunch at all, as she had for the last two days.

She shook hands and said goodbye to the last of the pickers, then allowed herself to settle back into one of the easy chairs in the office. She wondered if they’d made any money from extra sales today. They could use it. It cost a heap to run a good winery. And Cedar Creek was good. Everybody who entered the tasting room could see that, just based on the medals hanging from wine bottles on the trophy shelf.

If they could just increase their sales a little, maybe they could expand beyond Texas and then bring in more people to help run the daily operations. She bet Dr. Castleberry didn’t manage his own winery, judging from the pictures she’d seen of him at society events in Dallas. Castleberry probably had a whole raft of people to make sure the tasting room did okay and that the on-site sales were brisk. Instead, Cedar Creek had Morgan, who not only did that but all the other day-to-day scut work too. And didn’t do it nearly well enough to suit Ciro and Carmen.

Morgan sighed.
Right. Guts up, kid.
They’d have to sell a whole lot of wine before Dad and Ciro considered expanding their sales or bringing in anybody other than family to manage the daily operation of the winery.

Gee, being an independent businesswoman was fun.

Erik came back to the office from his morning patrol a little after one. He stood at the front sorting through the mail that the dispatcher had left for him. So far his first week in charge hadn’t been that bad.

A little weird, maybe, but not bad.

Every once in a while, Ham Linklatter shot him a poisonous look from his desk at the front of the room. He didn’t bother Erik much, although he did provide occasional entertainment.

Linklatter was the dumbest human being he’d ever met, and that included the bank robber who’d written a note to the teller on a deposit slip that included his name and address. Linklatter brought new meaning to the word “dumb”.

And the dumbest thing Linklatter was currently doing was trying to sabotage Erik. He hadn’t yet stooped to leaving thumbtacks on his chair, but Erik figured it was only a matter of time. After five days with Erik as chief of police, Ham’s creativity was beginning to run low.

So far Linklatter’s sabotage was more irritating than dangerous. It had actually started a couple of weeks ago when Ham had lost the key to the police cruiser and then pretended Erik had misplaced it. Unfortunately, he’d mentioned the fact that he’d lost it in front of Nando, who publicly reminded him. Now Erik kept the extra keys at the front desk where Ham couldn’t get at them without permission.

Earlier this week, Linklatter had hidden the extra paper for the printer and told the dispatcher Erik had forgotten to order any. The dispatcher, Helen Kretschmer—one of the scariest women Erik had ever met—gave Linklatter five minutes to produce the paper before she skinned him. Linklatter had complied.

Since then, he’d confined himself to muttering behind Erik’s back, although not so far behind that Erik couldn’t hear him. Now Linklatter sat at his desk at the front of the station, writing up a traffic report and scowling.

Erik sighed. Amusing though it was to watch Linklatter trying to plot, somebody needed to be out on the street.

“Linklatter,” he called, “aren’t you supposed to be on patrol?”

Linklatter gave him another scowl. “Soon as I finish this report. And check out the keys to the cruiser. Be a lot easier if they were someplace where I could just pick ’em up on my way out.”

Behind the counter, Helen Kretschmer snorted.

Erik sighed again and walked back to his office.

Olema had done at least one thing right in his time as chief—he’d fixed up the chief’s office. The station house had been built in the sixties, and not much had been done to it since, beyond adding air-conditioning and a couple of computers. But the chief’s office took up half the width of the building, and the desk looked like it belonged in a corporate headquarters somewhere.

Of course, given the former chief’s level of competence, that corporation might be Enron.

Olema had cleaned out his desk before he’d gone, and neither of the sheriff’s deputies who’d filled in had brought anything with them, so Erik had lots of space for his two legal pads and three ballpoints.

He rummaged through his desk drawer, looking for the spare set of keys he’d had made up for the cruiser, until he heard a loud male voice from the front.

“Well, then, who can I talk to?”

Helen’s voice rumbled in the background as Erik walked out to her desk. She wasn’t loud, but then she didn’t need to be. Most people dove for cover whenever she turned her gimlet gaze their way. This guy, whoever he was, seemed more intrepid than most.

“Goddamn it, Helen,” he bellowed, “I ain’t talking to Linklatter. I need somebody who can actually do something.”

Erik sped up slightly, rounding the corner in time to see Helen narrowing her eyes, probably preparing to turn whoever it was into stone. “What seems to be the problem, Helen?”

The man who stood in front of Helen’s desk was smaller than his voice. He wore jeans and a faded work shirt. His buff-colored Stetson sat on the counter in front of the desk.

Helen stood with her sturdy arms folded across the breadth of her chest. She wasn’t a tall woman—Erik figured maybe five foot four—but she was built like a fireplug, and every inch was muscle. Although he’d never seen her in anything but long sleeves, he was willing to bet she had a skull tattooed on her bicep. Her short, graying red hair frizzed around her head in the kind of permanent his granny used to wear. Her eyes were gunmetal gray, and he’d seen one look freeze a shouting drunk in his tracks. Give her a Glock and she’d be unstoppable.

“Mr. Powell here has a problem,” Helen said, her voice shimmering with disdain. “I don’t know what, except that he doesn’t know how to use a normal tone of voice or how to talk to a lady.”

Erik figured the lady in question was Helen, no matter how unlikely that seemed. “What can we do for you, Mr. Powell?”

“You can find out who’s poisoning my stock, that’s what you can do, goddamn it!” Powell folded his arms across his chest, like a mirror image of Helen, despite the fact that she had fifty pounds on him.

Erik sighed. “Come on into my office and tell me about it.” He heard Linklatter sniff as he headed back up the hall.

It took a few minutes to calm down Powell enough to get to the point, but Erik figured that was par for the course with Powell, who struck him as a man who needed to talk himself out before he got to the point.

“So far I’ve lost a couple of kids,” Powell grumbled. “And the mother’s pretty sick too.”

Erik blinked. “You’ve got a lost child?”

Powell snorted. “No, goddamn it! Kids. Goats. Two of my goats died after they drank the water in my stock tank, and another one’s sick. Somebody poisoned my tank!”

Goats. Right.
Konigsburg, where there were more goats than people. Erik put down his pen. “Maybe the water went bad.”

“No, sir! No, it did not.” Powell shook his head vigorously. “The water was just fine two days ago, and then this morning I found those goats. Got Dr. Toleffson out there looking after the nanny now.” He squinted at Erik suddenly, as if he’d just made the Toleffson connection.

Erik wrote himself a quick note.
Goats. Sick. Cal.
“Did you call the TCEQ?”

“What the hell is TCEQ? No, sir, I called you. This here’s a crime, goddamn it!” Powell pursed his lips. He looked like he had a bad case of heartburn.

“TCEQ is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. They’ll test your water to see what’s wrong. They can tell us whether it’s a natural problem or not.” Erik flipped through the Rolodex on the desk, looking for the TCEQ card.

“Does that mean you’re not gonna come out and have a look-see?” Powell’s heartburn appeared to have gotten worse.

Erik took a deep breath. The town had every reason to distrust its own police department. One former chief had been a gold-plated crook and the other had been a blockhead. Part of his job was to try to repair that damage.

And if he wanted to hold on to the job for real, he needed to get Konigsburg straightened out and running right.

He nodded. “I’ll come take a look later this afternoon.”

Morgan sat on the patio, shaded from the late-afternoon sun, and tried to stay awake. She’d been up since four in the morning, getting ready to meet the volunteers, then running the harvest, giving winery tours, serving lunch, and finally, thank god, selling the pickers a whole bunch of wine.

Using volunteers to pick the grapes during small-crop years wasn’t all that efficient, but it did have its compensations. Mainly, it was cheap. Ciro might snarl about it, but he’d let her go ahead, after she’d explained that other wineries were doing it successfully.

Suck it up, Morg. Great marketing, and you know it.
Now if she could only convince her father that doing some actual planned marketing was as important as watching the destemmer. And that she could do both.

Across the patio, the winery dogs, Skeeter and Fred, looked longingly at the door to the tasting room. They were hot, poor babies, and tired and they wanted to go inside.

But Arthur, as usual, was draped across the step, blocking the pet door.