The Merlot Murders (25 page)

He almost spat. “That was Greg.”

“Greg killed Fitz?” I stammered.

“Had to. Fitz came upon him when he was at the winery that night. He figured everyone would be at Lee’s wake and he wanted to go through things in case Lee had been sloppy and left anything around that might get back to him. So he made it look like a robbery, guessing you’d think it was one of your migrant workers.”

“I met Greg leaving the wake as Eli and I arrived. What did he do, rebroadcast his show that night, too? Until somebody figured out it was an old show, it looked like he always had an alibi, didn’t it?”

“He did have it all figured out,” Mason said. “He shacked up with Mia and screwed her until he got her to see reason about agreeing to sell your land. Then he had Brandi work on Eli. He had some old letters she’d written him. She wanted him to pay for the abortion and I guess he finally coughed up a little something.”

“Abortion?”

“Yes,” he said, “they had quite the fling.”

So Brandi wasn’t faking her difficult pregnancy. “That’s sick.”

“He’s not a nice guy,” Mason said. “Then you came home. Greg was getting tired of Mia anyway, so he decided to work on you. He bet he could get you to go to bed with him within a week. But you wouldn’t cooperate, would you? I think he really wanted to do this without it getting messy.”

“It got messy enough that you tried to set Sara Rust’s house on fire so you could get rid of the records from Knight’s Auto Body.”

There was a distant rumble of thunder. It could have come straight from hell. “Aren’t you the clever girl,” he said. “Guess we’re going to get that rain, aren’t we?” He motioned with his gun. “Let’s get on with it. I don’t want to get this suit wet.”

“Don’t do this. You haven’t killed anyone. Don’t.”

“Don’t be difficult, sugar.”

“I’m not jumping.”

“I’m going to have to shoot you, then.”

“Then do it.”

He raised his hand and aimed. I looked away.

“Goddamnit, Lucie! Jump!”

I looked over at him. He was furious.

“No.”

“Then I’ll have to make you.”

It’s still hard to remember precisely how it happened, but he did make a lunge for me. I swung the golf club at him, as hard as I could. The hooked end caught his hand, knocking the gun out of his grip. He yelped with pain and staggered to regain his balance. But I think those nice wing tips must have been brand new, because he slipped on the gravel like it was greased. He stumbled forward and pitched toward the low wall. God help me, but I swung at him again. He went over the ledge head first. His scream reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West as she melted to her death.

I got to the parapet and looked down. He lay crumpled, face down in the dry creek bed. He’d landed among some river rocks. I was sure he was dead. If we got the kind of rain that the skies seemed to be promising, there’d be water flowing there again and maybe it would wash him downstream toward the Potomac.

I got back to the Mercedes, hobbling as fast as I could across the rough ground. There had been a car phone on the dashboard. I didn’t remember him locking the doors. Not only was the car unlocked, he’d left the keys in the ignition.

I took the phone out of the cradle and punched the button with the little green telephone on it. Greg’s name flashed on the display. I hit the button again and the LED display flashed that it was calling his number.

He answered instantly. “I’m leaving the house. I’m finished with the gasoline. You got rid of her, didn’t you?”

I disconnected.

I jammed the phone back in the cradle. The Mercedes started like a charm as the phone rang again. Greg, calling back.

The ringing stopped and the message icon blinked a few seconds later. How long did I have before he wondered why Mason wasn’t answering the phone? I backed out onto Mosby’s Highway and raced for home. When I finally looked at the speedometer, it read eighty. Sixty in the Volvo and you’d need a chiropractor. I slowed to fifty to take the turn onto Atoka Road.

A wispy column of smoke floated upward as I turned onto Sycamore Lane. Was I too late, or would I meet him head on as I drove toward the house? He said he was leaving.

The taillights of Hector’s blue pickup, fishtailing as it churned dust, were disappearing down the road that led to the house as I headed toward the divide at the sycamore tree. At least help was on the way and Hector and the others knew about the fire. In the distance, sirens sounded faintly along with more thunder. But no rain—yet.

Highland House was made of stone and stone doesn’t burn. They’d probably said that when Sheridan’s men burned the Ruins. That fire had left…ruins.

I turned left at the divide toward the winery. Greg’s convertible satin the handicapped spot in the parking lot. He’d put the top up, probably on account of the expected rain. I parked and got out next to his car and saw a gun on the passenger seat. He’d locked the doors.

Wherever he was—the villa, the barrel room—I probably didn’t have much time before he returned. I lifted the golf club over my head and swung hard at the canvas roof. It bounced with such kick-back my arms nearly came out of my shoulder sockets and I staggered backward.

I needed something sharp. Mason’s car keys were attached to a slender silver monogrammed case. I opened the case. A nail file.

I jabbed at the plastic back window and made a small puncture. From small things big things come. I continued stabbing. The sirens grew louder as I worked, until finally the trucks screamed up Sycamore Lane.

The hole in the window was now wide enough to put my arm through. Unfortunately I needed the arms of a chimpanzee to reach the gun. I tried the golf club, angling like I was trying to hook a fish. Then I heard him behind me. He yanked me off the car and threw me to the ground. The golf club remained stuck in the plastic at a crazy angle.

“My car! What did you do to my car?”

I landed hard on my elbows and skidded in the brittle grass. What was it about men and cars?

“Fixed your air-conditioning.” I wasn’t as intimidated by him as I’d been by Mason.

He unlocked the car with his sensor and got the gun. Then he shoved the golf club through the hole so it came at me like a spear. I ducked and it hit the ground next to me. I grabbed it and pulled myself up.

“Move.” He picked up what looked like a metal strongbox that had been on the ground next to him.

“Where are we going?”

He seemed to be thinking. “The barrel room.”

“No.”

“I’m not asking. Move.” He gestured with the gun. “What’s Mason’s car doing here? Where is he?”

“Dead.”

He stopped walking. “You’re lying.”

“Why don’t you go see for yourself?”

“I will,” he said, “when I’m done with you.” This time he shoved the gun into my ribs. “What happened?”

I had known him since I was six years old. We’d played together, studied together, and made love together. Unlike Mason, he’d really killed someone. Fitz. He wouldn’t hesitate to use that gun.

Maybe I could stall for time. Maybe they’d put the fire out right away at the house and someone would come back to the winery. “He fell off the bridge at Goose Creek. What’s in the box, Greg?”

The gun was in my ribs again. “Shut up and get going.”

We had reached the door to the barrel room, which was ajar. When they took off for the house, closing up was probably the last thing on anyone’s mind. He opened the door. “After you.”

We went inside and he frog-marched me down an aisle between rows of stacked wine casks, stopping at the far end by Jacques’s workbench. The tools, usually neatly hanging on a pegboard above the bench, were heaped on the floor. The wine barrel with my mother’s painting of the vineyard’s logo was in pieces, the staves splayed open in a tidy circle.

“Why did you destroy that barrel? That was my mother’s artwork!”

He said nothing, but his eyes roamed over me, then swept the room. He hadn’t figured out what to do with me.

“That strongbox was in the barrel, wasn’t it?” I said. Maybe I could get him to talk and use up more time. “How did you know it would be there?”

“My old man designed the box for your mother. I was there when she asked him to do it.”

“You knew it was here, all these years?”

“Not exactly. Fitz told me.” He paused. “Well, actually he told you.”

The only conversation I’d had with Fitz had been when we were alone, outside on the porch at Hunt’s Funeral Home.

“You couldn’t have heard! You left as I was coming in!”

He shrugged again, looking disarmingly sheepish as he smiled. “Funny, isn’t it? I left my blazer over the back of a chair upstairs. It had my wallet, my key card to get into the studio—everything was in it. I didn’t plan to eavesdrop, but I guess I got lucky.” He laughed lightly. “I practically dove into the bushes when Eli slipped out the front door. You heard me, you know, but you were so intent on what Fitz was saying, and hell, he was half in the bag so he told you it was a cat.”

“So you knew he was going to the winery?”

He spread his hands apart, the gun in one, the strongbox in the other, still smiling with that “boys will be boys” kind of rogue’s pleasure. “What can I say? Lucky break.”

“Not for Fitz it wasn’t.”

“Don’t start with me.” The smile disappeared. His handsome face still reminded me of something from a Roman coin, but now I knew which god he resembled. Janus. The two-faced one. “I guess we’d better get this over with. Give me the key, Lucie.”

“Whatever is in there won’t mean anything to you.”

The strongbox must have been heavy, because he set it down on the workbench. He flexed his fingers, then caressed the barrel of the gun almost lovingly. Those hands had once touched me like that.

“How do you know?” He pointed the gun at me. “Bang. It was the only painting she signed on the back, not the front. She also added the drawing of the vineyard logo and those vines. Her signature was a duplicate for what was on that wine barrel, right down to the logo.” He pointed to the destroyed cask. “Anyone would have figured it was just a fancy way of signing her name. But then I got hold of my old man’s invoices. Your mother told him she needed a box that would protect the contents from damage against damp if it was stored at a constant temperature of around fifty to fifty-five degrees.”

I shuddered. “Here.”

“Bang, bang.”

“Please stop saying that.”

His smile was like an ad for toothpaste. “So I assume what’s in here is that necklace that belonged to Marie Antoinette,” he said, almost casually. “Or else your mother went to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

“Whatever is in there doesn’t belong to you.”

“It does now. Give me the key or I’ll shoot you.”

“No.”

After what he did to Mia, I should have expected what came next. He raised his arm and clubbed me on the side of the head with the butt end of the gun. My brain exploded and I fell against the workbench. He frisked my pockets and pulled out Fitz’s key.

“Why did you make me go to all that trouble, sweetheart?” He sounded genuinely disappointed. “Don’t make me do that again. Now let’s see what we have here.”

The necklace, even more exquisite than I remembered, flashed brilliantly as he pulled it out of the box. “Christ,” he said. “I guess I hit the jackpot. And what else is there?”

He held up a stack of letters tied together with a blue satin ribbon. I’d seen charred remains of a ribbon like that in Fitz’s fireplace.

“Whatever’s in here must be pretty important to hide them away with these rocks. Why would anyone want to hide a bunch of old letters? What’s in them, Lucie? You know, don’t you? Some skeleton in the Montgomery family closet?” He didn’t have to move too many muscles for that smile to turn ugly.

“Go to hell.”

He threw the bundle in the air with one hand and caught it easily. “Guess I’ll have to hang on to these. I bet they’ll come in pretty handy if I need to do any more motivating.”

I lunged for him again. I heard the crack as the gun connected again to the side of my head. I hung on to the workbench because the room started spinning.

“I’m getting tired of hitting you.” He sounded weary. “Let’s get this over with. Move. Over behind those big tanks. It’ll take longer for someone to find you there.” He grabbed me roughly by the arm and shoved me. “Get up. Get going.”

The gun was in my ribs again. I staggered, leaning heavily on the golf club, as we walked around the corner to where we kept the ladder and the hoses. Quinn, or probably Hector, had put the ladder back on the hooks after I’d used it last night trying to break out of the place. But one of the hoses was on the ground, which was unusual. Among other things, it was a safety hazard. I stumbled around the mass of coils, avoiding the spots where the concrete was still wet.

With the air-conditioning on and the fans blowing, the concrete should have been dry. I glanced again at the nozzle, which had an automatic shut-off. Maybe they’d left so fast on account of the fire that the water was still on. If so, the pressure would have built up inside the hose.

I dropped the golf club and it clattered on the concrete floor.

“What are you doing?” he snapped. “Pick that thing up.”

I would only have one chance. I bent to get the club and reached, with my other hand for the hose. I twisted the nozzle so it was aiming at him and pressed the trigger. The water hit him right in the eyes. He yelled and fell back, temporarily blinded, waving the gun in my direction. I was nearer to him than I’d been to Mason. I hit him full in the face with the golf club. He screamed again, a high-pitched keening sound and blood spurted from his mouth and coated his teeth. The gun flew out of his hands and bounced off a wine barrel, landing somewhere out of sight.

It was my lucky day for men wearing the wrong shoes. Greg turned toward the noise of the gun hitting the floor and slipped on a wet patch of concrete. He lost his balance as his legs went out from under him and banged the back of his head against the metal corner of a stand of wine casks. He hit the floor, moaning, with a hand covering his mouth.

To get the gun meant walking past him and risking the chance that he could still knock me down or else circling the long way around the wine casks and letting him out of my sight for a few seconds. I chose the latter, scanning the floor, the adrenaline jolt of my little victory mutating to fear. He’d begun moving as soon as I did. I heard him scrabbling around like a crab.

His hand was on the gun before I could pick it up. I brought the golf club down hard, for a second time, and connected with his wrist. He yelped again and I thought I’d stopped him, but he just reached for it with the other hand, now completely covered in blood from his mouth. He aimed and squeezed the trigger.

I closed my eyes. Somehow he missed me. The bullet hit a wine cask, which sprang a leak like a geyser, shooting red wine over both of us. He slumped to the ground and the gun fell from his hand. I hooked the golf club around it and putted it to where I could pick it up.

He was unconscious, but breathing.

Quinn got to us even before Bobby and Hector arrived. Greg was lying in a pool of wine. I looked at the cask. Merlot.

“You okay?” Quinn scooped me up in his arms. “You’re a mess.”

“You always have something nice to say about how I look,” I mumbled.

He looked at Greg. “Bad year for Merlot, hunh?”

I thought about the necklace as he carried me outside. “Maybe. But things might be improving. It might be a good harvest after all.”

“That so?”

“You promised you’d stay through harvest.”

“I’ll keep my word.”

“What about afterward?”

He set me down carefully on the grass and touched one of my bruises. I winced. “Sorry,” he said. “What did your man Jefferson say? ‘I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.’”

“The history of the past is finished,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “You need to move on.”