Murder Alfresco #3 (2 page)

Feeling suddenly alone and more than a little timid, she began to wonder whether walking home was really such a good idea after all. There had been more reasonable options. Andre’s mountain bike was in the garage, for example. If she had really wanted her predawn exercise, she could have borrowed it and been home by now. Or she could have borrowed his car, asked one of his friends for a ride, or gone to sleep in one of the bedrooms. There was no excuse for her present predicament, she thought, feeling foolish. She stopped to consider turning around. What was she doing wandering around in the middle of the night? It would take too long to go back now. She would do just as well to finish what she’d started. Her mood soured. She went on, feeling both afraid of the ominous darkness and ridiculous for being afraid. For a thirty-two-year-old woman to be intimidated by a short walk at night in a familiar place was simply ridiculous. She mused on the darkness, which was a natural part of existence and served to liberate humans from the controlled productivity of daylight. Darkness meant freedom from work, obligation, decorum. Her spirits rose with the thought that humans, herself included, had grown excessively attached to the light, and had lost some wilder part of themselves because of it, and that in venturing out into the night she was recapturing part of this lost magic.

She walked on and her thoughts turned to Andre Morales, a recent and welcome addition to her life. She would call him when she got home. Maybe he wouldn’t have noticed she was gone yet. They were still in the very early stages of their romance, and he was no doubt still evaluating her character, as she was
his. Tonight’s performance would do little to inspire him. There would be a deduction from her account, that was certain. The only question was how much. He would probably assume it was part of a breezy streak in her personality. That would be a mistake. Sunny was anything but breezy. She’d always been accused of being too serious. Neurotic, possibly, by some people’s standards, but not breezy.

She stepped around the flattened carcass of a snake, long dead. Andre may as well know the truth sooner than later, which was that she did not always give social gatherings with new, interesting people priority over a solid night’s sleep. The idea was deeply subversive in Andre’s world, where solitude and sleep held about as much appeal as sit-ups and vitamins. To reject a party in order to go to bed was the act of a demented mind, or worse, a dullard. For Sunny, sleep made the difference between the joyful execution of the next day’s duties and a pained, amnesiac slog through them. For Andre, sleep foreshadowed death, and was the last recourse for a night, to be indulged only if nothing better was in the offing.

He and his staff could work until midnight, close the restaurant, drink and smoke until dawn, and still get up at eight. How did they do it? It was the same at other restaurants. The staff would close the door on the last customer and the night would begin. They possessed a social stamina Sunny could only admire. She wondered how late they would stay tonight. Even the most hearty among them had to go home to bed eventually. With that thought, she began to feel conspicuous. Anyone headed to Highway 29 from Andre’s house, and that would be almost everyone, would have to drive right past her. They would certainly wonder what she was doing out there alone. To walk beside the road, especially at night, and particularly alone, was
practically a criminal act. Only motorists in distress and deviants walked on roads at night. All decent, sensible, prosperous people drove cars, or at least rode bicycles. It was part of the modern tyranny of efficiency. Anything faster had to be better, and to choose a slower method of doing almost anything was tantamount to a declaration of mental instability. No one would appreciate the truth, that she simply wanted to be alone in the quiet on her way home, and even liked being outside in the open air. She tried to concoct a more convincing explanation in case a carload of Andre’s friends pulled up beside her and asked if she needed a ride. It would be embarrassing. The simplest solution was to jog. The less time she spent inviting the scrutiny of passing cars, the better.

Jogging turned out to be a good idea. It banished the night chill and pushed the shadow fears to the edges of her mind. She settled into the new pace. Soon she could make out the white lettering of the stop sign in the distance where the road ended at Fir Hill Drive. From there it wasn’t far to Madrona, then Hudson, then Adams, and finally the cottage on Adelaide with its plump white duvet and clean white sheets. Ah, bed. Bed! Soon she would be home and neatly tucked in.

Madrona ran as arrow-straight as Fir Hill, like most of the valley roads between the checkerboard of vineyards. From Madrona, the outline of far ridges of the Coast Range were visible to the east and west. Nearer were more vineyards, their vines lined up like ghost soldiers. She counted her steps in sets of twenty until she lost track of the number of sets. The white line lay thickly on the pavement like a satisfying glaze of sugar on gingerbread.

She’d been jogging down Madrona for some time when she heard a faint new sound. She stopped to listen, holding her
breath so she could hear. She heard the rumble of an engine, and a moment later the crunch of tires moving slowly across gravel. A hundred yards behind her lay the turnoff to Vedana Vineyards, marked by a mailbox and fieldstone pillars. The winery stood back the same distance or more from the main road. She searched the darkness. The outline of the cluster of stone buildings was just visible. From behind them, a light-colored vehicle emerged and turned onto the gravel lane coming toward her. The driver didn’t have his lights on. She watched. Why didn’t they have their lights on? Didn’t they notice? Should she wave them down and tell them? They would figure it out eventually. Besides, what if the driver was not the sort of person she wanted to meet in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night? She looked around. A leafy shrub stood next to the fence a few feet away.

There would have been plenty of time to move behind the shrub gracefully if she had not stepped halfway on a rock and stumbled when she jumped across the drainage ditch. As she got up, the vehicle, a white pickup truck, pulled out of the driveway and turned toward her. She was standing in plain view when the driver switched on his lights, blinding her as the truck accelerated past. She turned and stared after it. All she could see was its taillights, one more orange than the other, probably a replacement. They shrank away with the sound of the engine and silence took hold of the night again.

She stood in the road, staring after the truck. Something about it struck her as odd. Why had the driver waited so long to turn on his headlights? And what was he doing at the winery at this hour? Except for a pair of flood lights illuminating a few sections of landscaping, the winery stood in darkness. The stone buildings looked as stoic and somber as always, and the massive oak in the courtyard stood with its usual air of permanence, its
great spread of limbs forming a wide canopy. Except that it was not exactly the same. Something out of place swayed from its lowest limb. At this distance, the length of a football field, it was hard to discern the shape. All she could make out was a pale form twisting from the limb like a punching bag. The sight gave her a chill. It reminded her of a deer hung up for cleaning. She thought of what it could be. It was difficult to make out more than a rough outline from so far away. It could be a swing caught at a strange angle, or a piñata hung up for a party, or a kite. It could be any number of harmless objects caught or hung up in the tree.

She walked back to the driveway leading to Vedana Vineyards. A sign next to one of the stone pillars read, “No public tastings. Tours by appointment only.” She stared at the distant shape hanging from the tree and thought of the white truck. Vineyard surrounded the winery with its bare vines like uniform markers in a vast graveyard. She pulled her scarf closer and started down the gravel road.

The winery and its outbuildings
huddled in the mist at the end of the lane. Her steps crunched on the gravel. She thought of the mobile phone in her bag and wished she had remembered to charge it. Staring at the ground in front of her, she walked quickly. Her heart beat faster with each step and her ears strained to hear the slightest sound. Soon she was close enough.

Wisteria covered the front of the winery. It twisted thickly up posts and tumbled over the eave that shaded the front deck, where a pair of wooden doors were flanked by two large windows. Off to the side of the winery was a small grove of mature olive trees, which Sunny had admired from the road on a number of occasions. The buildings in back were newer and larger, and presumably housed the fermentation tanks, oak barrels, and storage facilities. In between the outbuildings was an open space for parking and maneuvering equipment. Sunny studied these elements while carefully avoiding the oak tree and its strange addition. She had decided to face it, but she had also decided to do so only when she was thoroughly ready. She already knew what it had to be, and if she was right, she wanted to look all at once, not catch sight of it out of the corner of her eye.

The form had been instantly recognizable from the main road, but her mind had resisted the obvious. It could not be that. Now she was close enough to see the climbing rose trained in espalier along the side wall of the winery and the tractor parked in the middle of the compound. She was close enough. It was time to look. She turned toward the oak tree and saw what she knew would be there, what she had desperately hoped she would not see.

Time stopped. Standing frozen in place, immobilized by fear, she listened too intently and heard too much. Where she knew there to be silence and ordinary night sounds, she now heard footsteps, the ominous creak of boards, shallow breathing, the rumble of a distant engine approaching. Whoever did this could still be here. She fought the impulse to run, instead holding her eyes on the vision before her. Hanging from the gnarled old tree, gently rocked by an imperceptible breeze, was a young woman.

She had been tied. Rope ran under her armpits, presenting her almost as if she were standing. Her slender bare feet tipped downward, her delicate toes nearly brushing the ground. A sweep of dark hair fell over her shoulder and onto her breast. She was naked except for the rope that bound her.

Sunny hardly breathed as she walked closer. The girl’s head had rocked forward onto her chest, her face slightly turned. Forcing herself to look, Sunny took in the large eyes, shapely eyebrows, and petite nose. She was young, maybe in her early twenties. A deep gash opened the flesh over her eye and a rose of color marred her cheek where she’d been struck. Even so, it was clear she had been pretty. Her delicately shaped features reposed gracefully even in the slackness of death. A blue, swollen tongue protruded from full lips. Sunny looked away.

The girl’s hands were bound behind her back and her slender body had been cruelly trussed. Bands of rough hemp rope pressed into her flesh, circling her torso at neat intervals sectioned by knots. The rope passed twice between her legs, pressing her sex between taut strands. A separate rope had been used to hang her from the branch, tied with expertise in an elaborate knot.

Sunny reached up two fingers and pressed them to the girl’s neck. The flesh was cold and lifeless, the veins still. Sunny stood before her, helpless. She wanted to take her down, but to do so she would need a ladder, and to hold her up to release the tension while she undid the knot around the branch. The girl would probably have to be cut down. The question was what to do now. It would take too long to go back to Andre’s house. She could go out to the main road and wait for a car, but there was no way to know how long that could take. No cars had passed since she’d set out. She checked her mobile phone in case it had miraculously recharged itself. Nothing. Next she tried the winery door and found it locked, of course. The window on the side of the winery was too high to reach and probably locked anyway. Frantically, feeling the onset of panic, she took up one of the hand-sized stones used to line the path to the winery door. The front windows were divided into panes about the size of a magazine. Starting in the lowermost corner, she smashed several, then knocked out the wooden bracing in between until there was a hole big enough to climb through. With any luck, an alarm was going off somewhere. Inside, she found a phone behind the front desk.

Sergeant Steve Harvey did not appreciate being woken up at something past three in the morning. He muttered a profanity when he heard who it was.

“This had better be important, McCoskey,” he said, his tone betraying the fact that he could already tell it was.

They seemed to run across each other on a regular basis. The last time Sunny had spoken to Sergeant Harvey was at the firefighters’ barbecue fund-raiser a week ago. The time before that, it was when she discovered wine fraud was the motive for the murder of a local restaurateur. Now Sergeant Harvey listened to what she had to tell him, interrupting once to ask her to hold on while he got the officer on duty headed over there, pronto. After a moment he came back on the line.