The Riesling Retribution (22 page)

He didn’t sound happy. “If Chance or Tyler had been here I would have said it was a definite possibility. But I’ve got Benny and Javier. They know what they’re doing.”

“Keep me posted,” I said.

“When I get a handle on it, you’ll be the second to know.”

I was glad, at least, he hadn’t said “If.”

I returned to the battlefield just before two o’clock after Gina called with an SOS that she was swamped at our booth and needed help. A line of cars clogged Atoka Road waiting to get through the south gate, which we had turned into the temporary main entrance for the reenactment. B.J. had arranged for a Scout troop to help manage parking and the sheriff’s department had a cruiser sitting at the gate. I didn’t recognize the officer leaning against his car eating what looked like a pork barbecue sandwich, but he waved me past the backup once I explained who I was.

Since my last visit, the place had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere. The VFW had set up a canteen-style trailer between the parking lot and the camps, where they sold hot food next to a homemade lemonade and limeade stand run by the Friends of the Loudoun Museum. The business association gave out bottles of water.

It was a sedate, well-mannered crowd that seemed to consist mostly of families with children. Some were dressed in period clothing, but they moved easily and unself-consciously around the booths as though there were nothing special about their attire. Many congregated at the sutlers’ tents—merchants who traveled from one reenactment to another selling Civil War goods.

I walked down the alley of large circus-sized tents, peering into open tent flaps at displays of uniforms, tents, cooking utensils, candles, quills, and other old-fashioned items heaped on wooden tables. A lace parasol draped over a tent stay fluttered in the breeze next to a hand-painted sign that read “Virginia Sutlery: Fine Purveyor of All Things Period.” Inside, a table lined with oversized mason jars of bright-colored penny candy caught my eye. Gina had a sweet tooth and she’d been working nonstop. I filled a bag with lemon drops, rock candy, and jelly beans, and was getting out money to pay for it when I heard a familiar female voice. Annabel Chastain.

“Oh, look. They’ve got licorice sticks,” she said, as I turned and saw her standing in the doorway with Sumner.

“That’s nice.” He sounded bored.

What brought them here? I’d thought Sumner had said they were leaving Atoka. Annabel caught sight of me and said something in her husband’s ear.

“Look, dear, here’s Lucie.” Her smile seemed strained.

“I didn’t realize you were coming to the reenactment,” I said.

“I’ll be outside, Annie,” Sumner said, without greeting me. “Come find me when you’re done shopping.”

“We were visiting your next-door neighbor,” Annabel said. “We saw all the cars as we were driving back to the Fox & Hound. I thought it might be fun to stop by. I didn’t realize it was going to be such a big event.”

Neither of my immediate neighbors was at home. The Orlandos were in Hong Kong on business. Mick Dunne, my ex-lover, was home in England visiting his ailing mother.

“Visiting my neighbor?” I said.

“Mick Dunne. Sumner is looking at one of his jumpers,” she said. “We’re considering purchasing it.”

I’d forgotten that Tyler had mentioned something about the Chastains looking at a horse.

“Mick’s in London,” I said.

“No, he and Selena returned from Cannes about a week ago.”

“Really?” Selena? His sister? Did he have a sister?

“Such a beautiful young woman. They make quite a good-looking couple. Seem so happy together.” Annabel’s eyes narrowed and she gave me a shrewd look. “Oh, dear. Have I said something inappropriate? I didn’t realize you and Mick had a history—”

How had she guessed about us?

“We have a business relationship.” I cut her off. “He’s starting a vineyard and we’ve been helping him out. I’d better pay for this. Excuse me.”

I turned to the cashier. “How much do I—?”

Behind me Annabel gasped as though she’d been stabbed by a sharp pain and cried out.

“You all right, ma’am?” the cashier asked.

“Mrs. Chastain,” I said. “Annabel. What is it? A heart attack? I’ll get your husband.”

“No, no—” She clutched her chest with both hands and her eyes were wide with shock. “Don’t.”

“She ought to sit down,” the cashier said.

“Can you get her to that chair over there while I find her husband?” I asked. “He’s probably right outside.”

But as I looked through the tent flap at the passersby, the only person I recognized was Eli, who was talking to someone dressed in a Confederate officer’s uniform. Sumner had vanished into the crowd.

“Eli! Can you come in here for a minute?” I called to him.

Behind me, Annabel moaned. “No, please. I don’t need help. Thank you all the same. Not him.”

“What’s going on?” Eli showed up at my elbow.

“This is Annabel Chastain,” I said. “She’s not well.”

“Let’s get her to that chair over there.”

The cashier transferred Annabel to his stronger arms.

“It’s okay, ma’am,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”

Eli guided her to the wooden chair as the cashier shooed away curious spectators. Annabel still looked pale and she hadn’t taken her eyes off Eli.

“You’re Leland’s son, aren’t you?” Her voice was soft.

Eli nodded. “Is there somebody—”

“No, no. Just give me a minute.”

As I watched her stare at Eli, I knew now what she’d said a moment ago when she’d cried out. My father’s name. She’d seen Eli before I had. He was a double for Leland, just like I resembled my mother.

Not him.
The worshipful way Annabel Chastain looked at my brother said it all. Now I knew for sure that Annabel did not spurn my father after Beau’s death. It had been the other way around. Leland had rejected her and she had never gotten over it.

Which meant that at least part of her story had been a lie.

Sumner Chastain appeared at his wife’s side and took charge, brushing me away like he was swatting an insect. He bent over Annabel, but not before he fixed me with a frozen look that implied I’d caused whatever was wrong with her. Eli had vanished to fetch a bottle of water, so it was just the three of us.

“You all right, darling?”

“I’m fine.” Annabel’s voice sounded stronger. “It was nothing. The heat got to me, probably. It’s a bit close in here. If we could just leave—”

Sumner helped Annabel to her feet.

“Thanks,” he said to me. “I’ll take care of this.”

I had to hand it to her. Perfect timing—or terrific luck—that Sumner hadn’t been there when she first saw Eli. If I could read that anguished look of love and longing on her face, Sumner would have figured it out in a flash. Somehow I didn’t think Annabel wanted Sumner to know she still had such strong feelings for my father.

After they left, Eli returned with the water. “Where is she?”

“Her husband whisked her away,” I said.

“She didn’t look too good.”

“That’s because she saw you. And you reminded her of Leland.”

Eli had been rolling the bottle between his hands. He stopped doing that and looked pained.

“What are you trying to say?”

“She’s still in love with Leland. It was written all over her face.”

“He’s dead and she’s married.”

“But it means she lied to Bobby.”

“So?”

“She didn’t dump Leland. He dumped her. Maybe she lied about other things, too. Maybe she killed Beau and got Leland to help her bury his body. Now after all this time, she gets her revenge. Sets up Leland as the killer and walks away from a murder.”

Eli twirled his finger next to his temple. “Luce, that woman has bird bones. I could feel them when I helped her to that chair. She’d probably have a tough time squashing a cockroach.”

“We’re talking about almost thirty years ago. She could have shot him and then persuaded Leland to drive down to Richmond to help her dispose of the body.”

“Right. So he goes to Richmond and then drives an hour and a half to Atoka with a dead body in the trunk of his car so he can bury Beau right here in his own backyard instead of dumping him in the James River or some landfill. Come on, babe.”

He had a point. Still, if Annabel lied about her relationship with Leland, she could be covering up other things.

“She’s a woman scorned, Eli. And now she gets the ultimate revenge. Pinning a murder she committed on her ex-lover.”

“Prove it.”

“Whose side are you on?”

He sighed. “You know whose side I’m on. But there’s no way you’re going to get her to admit what she did, if she did it, and Bobby has closed the case. Three strikes and you’re out.”

Eli handed me the water bottle. “Here. Drink this and cool off. Even if you’re right and she is a woman scorned, that means she’s mad and dangerous. You can’t stop her. Believe me, I ought to know. Brandi plans to clean my clock.”

I felt sorry for him, but I was determined to get Annabel to admit she’d lied. Too bad I wasn’t sure how to do it. Yet.

I stayed in our booth for the rest of the day, working alongside Gina. She wasn’t kidding about business booming, and it looked like we were on track to break last weekend’s sales record. Frankie and I
went over the receipts in my office at the end of the day. When we were done, she whooped with glee.

“This is amazing.” She pounded her fist on my desk, emphasizing each word and laughed. “You know we’re going to completely sell out of our Riesling by tomorrow, don’t you? It’s flying out the door it’s so good.”

I sat back in my chair. “I hadn’t realized we were that low. Hold back a few cases, will you? We’ve got problems with this year’s wine.”

“What problems?” She straightened the receipts and credit card statements into a neat pile.

“It’s not fermenting.”

“Why not?”

“Quinn doesn’t know why not. Or didn’t, last time we talked.” I glanced at the wall clock. Six fifteen. “He hasn’t called since noon. I think I’ll head over to the barrel room.”

“You two kiss and make up yet after yesterday?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She rolled her eyes. “For an intelligent woman, sometimes you can be so dense I swear light bends around you.”

“You may want to rethink that compliment seeing as I pay your salary.”

“Sticks and stones.” She picked up the receipts. “Go see him and straighten things out. It’s no fun around here when you lovebirds have one of your tiffs.”

Quinn was sitting in the same place I’d found him this morning—a chair at the winemaker’s table—but now his head was resting on his forearms and he was asleep. He didn’t stir when I pulled out a chair and sat next to him, moving the empty beer bottle he clutched in one hand out of his grasp.

His hair was longer than it had been in recent months—maybe a deliberate decision or maybe just too preoccupied with everything going wrong at the winery to get it cut. It curled in long tendrils down the collar of one of his oldest Hawaiian shirts, the one with the burgundy background and acid-green palm fronds. His head was turned so he faced me and, in profile, his sharp, well-chiseled angles reminded me of a relief on a coin. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and even the eye without the shiner had dark hollows under it, like another bruise.

“Just how long do you plan to sit there watching me?”

I jumped. “Don’t do that! You scared the wits out of me. Don’t tell me you’ve been awake the whole time I was here?”

He opened his good eye. “Yup.”

“You could have said something.”

He sat up. “It was more fun to watch you.”

“You had your eyes closed. Or it looked like you did.”

“Not entirely.”

“Frankie says it hasn’t gone unnoticed that we’re not on the best terms.”

“Nothing gets past Frankie. A wise and astute woman.”

I folded my arms. “Then let’s get this settled.”

“Sure. If you want to apologize, I’ll accept.”

“Me? Apologize for
what?”

“Not trusting me.”

“How about you brawling with Chance? You going to apologize for that?”

“He had it coming.” He held up his hand. “Wait, wait…hold it right there. We wouldn’t even be arguing right now if it weren’t for him. He set this up, Lucie. He wanted you to doubt me, wonder about me, and you bought it.”

“I do trust you,” I said. “I think Chance may have skimmed money from our crew. That’s why we always got guys with zero experience. Because we weren’t paying the going rate. Javier’s going to try to find some of the men who picked for us yesterday. See if they’ll tell him how much they got paid.”

Quinn slammed his hand on the table so hard I jumped again. “If I’d known that yesterday, he wouldn’t have walked out of here. They’d be carrying him on a stretcher.”

“Don’t go there.”

“I wish I had. He deserved it,” he said. “Apology accepted.”

I glared at him.

“And now on a completely different subject,” he said, “fermentation has started.”

“That’s nice.”

“Glad you’re so excited. It’s better than nice, but not by much. It’s going slower than it ought to. I need to keep an eye on it, but at least we have ignition.”

“That’s nice, too.”

He glanced at his watch. “You eaten dinner yet?”

“No.”

“How about Chinese? We can order in.”

“Here? When’s the last time you left this place?”

He paused to consider.

“It’s Saturday,” I said. “I bet you’ve been here since we picked on Thursday.”

“You could be right. All right, let’s eat at my place.”

“Why don’t you go home and take a shower and clean up? I’ll order the Chinese. We’ll eat at my house.”

“One, are you implying that I smell bad? And two, what’s wrong with eating at my house?”

“Forgive me, but one, I’d like to use bug spray on you right now, and two, I don’t want to eat out of the boxes with my fingers. Do you even own any dishes or silverware? More than one of anything, that is?”

“When I moved here from my cave in California, I did bring a few hollowed out gourds and some bones and spears.”

“See you at my place in, say, forty-five minutes. Any preferences or do you trust me to order?”

“Something that’ll set my mouth on fire. Why don’t we have dinner at the summerhouse? We could watch the Perseids.”

Quinn’s interest in astronomy—and the massive amount of information he knew about stars, comets, the galaxy, and everything celestial—still seemed out of character with the rest of his macho rough-and-tumble personality, at least to me. Shortly before Leland died, he’d given Quinn permission to use our summerhouse behind a large rose garden in my backyard as a place to set up his telescope and carry out his stargazing. Perched on a bluff overlooking a valley, the summerhouse had a breathtaking view of the Virginia Piedmont and the Blue Ridge. A few months ago Quinn bought what he told me was the Rolls-Royce of telescopes—a Starmaster. On a clear night when I looked through the lens I felt as though I had a front-row seat on the edge of the galaxy.

I’d learned a few things from him, including what the Perseids were—the galactic residue of a comet that produced a spectacular meteor shower visible every August, primarily in our hemisphere.

“Since you’ve been holed up here for the past two days,” I said,
“you probably forgot that Edouard is still hanging around. Today was nice, but a few hours ago the clouds rolled back in. We won’t be able to see a thing.”

He ran his hands through his unruly hair and rubbed his face like he was trying to wake up.

“Too bad. All right, I’ll clean up since you’re paying for dinner. It won’t take me forty-five minutes. More like half an hour.”

“How come I’m paying when you invited me?”

“It’s cheaper than paying me for working two days straight. The way I figure it, you get off easy with an order of kung pao chicken and moo shu pork.”

He showed up half an hour later in a clean pair of jeans and yet another of his endless collection of Hawaiian shirts, this one red, cream, and yellow with exotic-looking anthurium and birds-of-paradise on it. His hair was still wet but neatly combed. I’d changed, too, into a long cotton dress.

“I like that dress,” he said. “Suits you.”

He’d brought wine and flowers. A bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and flowers from a garden—not a florist—wrapped in pages of the
Washington Tribune.

The garden around his cottage was mostly low-maintenance shrubs. Nothing blooming that I could remember unless he’d done some recent planting. I unwrapped the newspaper and found sprays of lilies, gladiolus, tea roses, and bougainvillea.

“Thank you; they’re beautiful,” I said.

He heard the unspoken question and looked sheepish.

“I’m better at growing grapes than I am at flowers. Now that no one’s living over at Hector and Sera’s cottage, the garden has gone wild. I go by every so often to do some weeding. It’s a shame to see the place closed up like that. They’re Sera’s flowers. You probably guessed.”

Hector came to work at the vineyard when my parents planted our first grapes, serving as our farm manager until his death a year ago. He and Sera had lived in a cottage at one end of a small cul-de-sac near the winery. Quinn lived at the other end.

Chance had taken Hector’s job, but not his place. No one could take care of the vineyard as he’d done, and both Quinn and I hadn’t gotten over losing him.

Quinn followed me into the kitchen and uncorked the wine while I found one of my mother’s Sèvres vases and began arranging the flowers.

“I miss Sera,” I said. “And Hector and Bonita.”

He laid the cork on the counter. “I never should have gotten involved with Bonita. It went downhill when she moved in with me.”

I arranged a pink gladiolus stem between some peach-colored lilies. “I never should have gotten involved with Mick Dunne. But we did what we did.”

“It’s really over with Mick?”

“Yup. Annabel Chastain said he came back from Europe with a new girlfriend.”

“You mind?”

“Nope.”

I nearly asked him about Savannah, but before I could bring it up, he said, “Ever thought about letting Eli live in Hector and Sera’s cottage until he gets back on his feet? Shame to have the place empty.”

I tucked a spray of pink bougainvillea in the vase. “I don’t mind having Eli live here. This house is certainly big enough and it’s nice not to be by myself all the time. Besides, now that we have to hire a new farm manager, I figured we’d offer the house to whoever takes the job. Like Hector did.”

“It was kind of weird that Chance didn’t jump at the offer of a free place to live,” Quinn said.

“He said he’d all ready signed a one-year lease and couldn’t get out of it, remember?”