Dead on the Vine: (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries #1 (A Cozy Mystery)) (23 page)

The show lasted for ten minutes, growing in intensity until the sky was filled with colored streaks and falling ash. All around me faces were turned toward the heavens, captains of industry and businesswomen as rapt as any child. The show ended in a blizzard of yellow sparks and flowering red fireworks. The crowd applauded wildly as the last light faded from the sky.

“Is wonderful!” Samson breathed wine fumes in my face. “Incredible!” His eyes were red rimmed. He was drunk. “I have never seen—so wonderful!”

“Samson!” Marjory yelled in my ear. “I wondered where you got off to. Let’s get everyone back to the tent. The night is young!”

“Show’s over!” she yelled at the crowd, and directly into my right ear. “Everyone back to the tent! Show’s over! Show’s ov—“

Kawumph!
An explosion five times more powerful than any of the fireworks shook the ground, lit up the vineyard like the sun and threw the wrecked red truck twenty feet in the air. It flipped over twice and flopped down into the Chardonnay vines, a ball of fire that immediately set the twisted old vines ablaze. Someone screamed and then everyone was screaming and people were running for cover. Only Marjory, Samson and I stayed stock still, watching her vineyard go up in flames.

The fire department arrived in time to save most of the Chardonnay, but the hoses dragged through the vines and the huge amount of water pumped onto the flames had done their damage. There would be no crop from those vines this year. Maybe not for years to come.

Marjory wouldn’t leave the back patio. She sat and watched her vines burn then flood, tears of rage and grief in her eyes. She spoke to no one except Samson, and then only in monosyllables.  When the flames were out and the last of the guests had departed, I pulled Samson aside.

My cellar foreman didn’t take his eyes off Marjory as he told me he would be staying the night, just to keep an eye on Marjory. He gave me his keys. Any other night I would have stayed as well, but I had Jessica to think about. I kissed Marjory’s cheek and she squeezed my hand hard enough to break my fingers.

“Michelle,” she said through her teeth. “She did this! Her and that bitch Laurel!” I tried to calm her down, but it was a losing battle. I finally left her and headed home.

I didn’t tell her that I thought she was right, but I would definitely tell Ben. Laurel was the only one who knew the police were interested in the truck. She must have called Michelle Lawford and ‘Kaboom!’ no more evidence.

Jessica was awake when I got home, in her room reading. Victor was on the living room sofa, sound asleep. Some protection! I didn’t wake him, just tossed a blanket over him and climbed the stairs. Jessica brightened considerably when I detailed Marjory punching Laurel’s lights out, but she dimmed again when I told her about the exploding truck and the ruined vines. She agreed with me and Marjory that Laurel must be involved. It was the only logical conclusion.

“So all of her Chardonnay was destroyed?”

“Seven to ten acres, burned, trampled and doused, so…” I shrugged. Poor Marjory.

“I feel like it’s my fault,” Jessica pulled a pillow across her chest and tucked her chin in it. “I know it’s not, but I can’t help it. If I had never loved Kevin—“ her eyes swelled with tears.

“That’s not true, Jessica,” I told her, though I was feeling guilty myself. Marjory had defended me and what had it gotten her? But Jessica and I weren’t to blame. “Blame Laurel and Michelle.”

Jessica nodded into her pillow, but the tears kept rolling. I kissed her forehead goodnight and crawled into my own bed. The last thing I remember was a replay of Marjory punching Laurel. I fell asleep smiling.

Samson called at six the next morning, waking me from a fitful sleep. He told me he was going to spend the day with Marjory looking over the decimated vines.

“There will be no crop this year,” he said. “The ground is waterlogged and the vines are wilting. Heat and flood.” Heat and too much water are the enemies of any good winemaker.

“Want me to bring your Jeep to you?” I asked, wiping sleep from my eyes.

“You will pick me up later?”

“Whenever you say. Just give me a call. How’s Marjory?”

“Sleeping. She took a pill of some kind. Maybe she sleeps for a long time,” he sounded like he hoped so. “I tell her men to clean up the burnt wood and the ashes. If she sleeps two hours, it will look much better.”

“Give her my love,” I told him. “If she needs me, call me.”

“I will.”

Samson rang off and I climbed in the shower. Clean and dressed, I went downstairs, made coffee and toast and drank the coffee as I smoked and watched the toast grow cold. At 7:00 A.M. I called Ben at home. He answered grumpily on the fourth ring.

“Hullo?”

“Hey Ben, it’s Claire. Catch you sleeping?”

“Caught me in the shower,” he said, his tone lightening. “How’s it going? I heard about the fire last night. What happened?”

Briefly, I told him about Marjory and Laurel’s confrontation and the truck’s explosion. “She’s the only one who knew that you were going to have the truck examined today.”

“That’s a theory,” Ben said carefully. “But she wasn’t the only one that knew. I knew about the truck. Midge knew about the truck, hell, half a dozen people up here did. Someone could have said something that got back to whoever blew the truck up. And, don’t forget, I already told you about Laurel and Michelle. The restraining order?”

“You don’t believe it’s possible?” I wasn’t buying the restraining order a bit; I had seen Laurel talking to Michelle just two days ago.

“Like I said, it’s a theory. Sure wrap up a lot of loose ends. I’ll pass it along to Priest. And we’re still trying to track down Michelle. Personally, I think she could have killed Kevin. She has a thing for Mrs. Harlan. Not a great leap of the imagination to picture Michelle killing Kevin, probably thinking she was helping Laurel. We’ll get her, though.”

“No leads on Michelle?” Ben seemed almost as determined as Priest to explain away Laurel’s possible involvement. But he was just trying to be fair, like a good sheriff. Priest could take some lessons.

“Nothing. Got an eye on her house and everyone in the county is looking for her. Wish I had more to go on, I’d like to get inside her house and poke around. Need a warrant for that. She’ll turn up, though. The crazy ones always do.”

“I’m sure she will,” I said, my thoughts drifting.

“What are you thinking?” Ben asked warily. “I’ve told you before, Claire, to let me do my job. Just stay by the house and keep your eyes open until Michelle’s in jail. I’ll send a car by once in a while to check on you.”

“In case Michelle decides to finish the job on Jessica?”

“Exactly. Keep an eye on your daughter and I’ll keep you posted.”

“All right,” I lied.

“Gotta go,” Ben said and we exchanged good-byes.

I finished my coffee, grabbed a set of hand clippers and went into the vineyard.

Most of the mist had burned off the valley below. The sun was up, and it was promising to be another warm day. Victor waved at me from the top of the tractor. He was mowing the field beside the vineyard. I waved back then strolled the aisles, looking over the green shoots jutting out from the withered-looking black canes selected at last year’s pruning. I clipped here, adjusted canes there and generally did nothing that really needed to be done as my mind restlessly rewound the events of the last week. I was thankful that Ben agreed that Michelle was probably involved in Kevin’s murder and the attempt on Jessica. But I didn’t think she’d done it alone. Laurel had stolen Jessica’s love letters to Kevin and given them to the police. Why would she do that if she weren’t involved in the murders? There was no good reason.

I looked over at the Harlan’s barn. It was dead quiet. Laurel’s car was parked out front, but there was no one in sight. No work had been done on the new vines since Kevin’s murder and they looked shaggy. His older vines needed a trim as well, and grass was sprouting in the aisles. It’s amazing how quickly man’s accomplishments can be devoured by nature.

I ate lunch in the kitchen with Victor, who was full of questions about the party at Marjory’s. I told the story for the third time and then took Jessica a plate while Victor returned to the tractor. Jessica didn’t eat much but that was no surprise. She looked better, though.

I called Marjory at 2:00. It took a while before she came to the phone, but when she did she sounded surprisingly chipper. I asked her about the vines and her mood dipped. Three or four acres would be a total write-off, but Marjory has seventy-five acres under vines so it wasn’t going to bankrupt her. When she got on the subject of Samson, I swear I could sense her glowing right through the phone.

“Claire, I’ve got to tell you how wonderful Samson is. He’s really cracking the whip over here,” she gushed. “I’m gonna steal that man away from you!” I felt a little trill of jealousy, and then disgust with myself. Samson deserved to be happy, and he could do a lot worse than Marjory. Right?

“I thought you might not be talking to me,” I told her. “I feel like it was my fault.”

“What?! We both know whose fault it was, and I told your Detective Priest this morning. That bitch Harlan.”

“Priest was there this morning? What did he want?”

“To talk about Michelle, or Mike the Dyke, as he called her. Tacky little man, but sexy in a freaky way.”

I made a retching noise. “Sexy as the bubonic plague. What did he ask about Michelle?”

“Work habits, attitude. I didn’t know much. Name and address, a couple of references.”

“Could you give me her address?” I asked on a sudden whim.

“Sure, but why?” I could hear Marjory shuffling paper. “I
had
it right here. Oh, there it is. I was using it as a coaster. Orange juice, my dear, with just a trace of vodka.” She laughed shrilly and I wondered how many ‘orange juices’ she had already downed.

“Just curiosity,” I lied.

“Ha! I know you Claire, you’re up to something. Just promise me all the juicy details?”

“Promise.”

She read off the address and I jotted it down on my purple pad then asked when I should pick up Samson. Marjory laughed, yelled “Never!” and slammed down the phone. I was smiling when I returned to the rows with my pruning shears.

Jessica didn’t want dinner, and Victor had another date, so I was stuck on my own. I did laundry and dusted and vacuumed. And every time I walked through the kitchen my eyes fell on Michelle’s address. I knew what I wanted to do, but fought it. ‘Trust in Ben,’ I told myself. But I’m not good at trusting men. Finally, I picked up the pad. The address was in American Canyon, a twenty-minute drive away.

“What the hell,” I said to myself. I climbed the stairs to Jessica’s room. She was awake, listening to the radio and writing in her journal.

“Hey babe,” I called as I pushed open her door.

“Hey Mom,” she replied without looking up.

“I’ve got to go out for a while,” I told her as I straightened the coverlet.

“Please, leave that alone,” she said, still writing. “You’re reminding me of why I had perfect attendance all the way through high school. I couldn’t stand the way you fussed over me if I stayed home sick.”

“Ah, a daughter’s love, all I could hope for,” I said with a roll of the eyes. “I’m going to arm the alarm before I leave. If you hear anything, call the police or Ben Stoltze. I scratched Ben’s home number on a pad beside her phone. “Got it?”

“Got it,” she said. I kissed the top of her head, locked up and went to my car.

The sun was dipping and the valley below was already sliding into the gloom, but the green and gold hills were brightly lit and as soaked in color as an impressionist painting. I tore my eyes away, started Sally and headed for American Canyon.

American Canyon would be just another suburb in most parts of California, but in Napa it has all the cachet of a slum. That’s just snobbery, really. There are some very nice areas in American Canyon. Unfortunately, Michelle didn’t live in one of those. The house she shared with two other vineyard workers was in a neighborhood of clapboard ranch-houses with orange asphalt shingles and tiny yards that backed onto a concrete drainage canal. The home had been painted white about a hundred years ago, but had turned a dingy gray streaked with orange from the cheap shingles. The front yard hadn’t been mowed or watered in years and was choked with foot-tall weeds and crabgrass. Two half-dead pine trees, more brown than green, were the only landscaping. The windows were dark and the oil-stained driveway was empty, which didn’t surprise me. Michelle’s friends probably weren’t the type to appreciate the police dropping in unannounced looking for Michelle. 

A party was shaking the foundation of the house two doors down. Cars choked the narrow street and throbbing rock music filled the night. People were hanging out in the front yard, laughing, smoking and drinking in the meager glow of a porch light. A few heads turned as I drove slowly past, mainly guys checking out the car. I should have driven Samson’s Jeep. I made the block and passed the house again. If Ben had men watching for Michelle, I didn’t see them. I pulled to the curb one block down, killed the engine and the headlights and lit a cigarette. As I smoked, I watched the street in my mirrors. A car stopped at the party and two people got out. There was a lot of yelling and cheering for the new arrivals. The music jumped five decibels as the front door admitted the couple. The rest of the street was dead quiet.

I had made no plan before I left the house other than to look over Michelle’s home, but as I sat smoking an idea formed, an idea born of my natural stubbornness and take-charge attitude. Ben had said they didn’t have enough evidence for a search warrant, but
I didn’t need one
. I wouldn’t break in, I decided, I’d just look in the windows. Probably. My hands started sweating as soon as I made the decision. I almost argued myself out of it, but I had come all the way here.

I took my old metal flashlight out of the glove box and slid out of the car, easing the door closed behind me, feeling a trace foolish. Miss Dick Tracy, I thought derisively and almost laughed. I crossed to the sidewalk and walked back to the corner.

The cross street dead-ended at an orange and white barricade. Beyond that was a field of three-foot tall weeds with the Mayacamas Mountains thrusting up in the dark distance, purple against the night sky. Already the chill and the damp were getting to me, and I hadn’t brought a coat. Fog was drifting up from San Francisco, turning the watery light of the quarter moon into a ghostly opalescence. I skirted the barricade and slipped into the weeds, jumpily looking over my shoulder. No one was in sight.

Twenty-five feet beyond the barricade was a ten-foot deep concrete channel. There was only a trickle of muddy water down the center of the thirty-foot wide ditch, but that didn’t comfort me. Every spring people are killed in these channels, which can flood with runoff from the mountains in a matter of seconds. I shuddered as I imagined a wall of water bearing down on me, but there was a more immediate hazard. The slope of the channel nearest the houses was mounded with bursting trash-bags and cast off appliances. It looked like everyone in the neighborhood pitched their trash over the back fence where it festered until the next flashflood carried it downstream. The slope itself wasn’t that steep, but a fall into that jumble of wreckage could be fatal. The stench alone was almost enough to kill me. I looked along the channel, thinking that maybe I could walk along the top of the ditch, but the house’s chain-link fences abutted the concrete lip of the channel. Unless I was going to start hopping fences, fighting family dogs along the way, I had to climb into the ditch.

“Or go home,” I whispered, eyeing the garbage. Glass and ripped metal glittered in the moonlight. From where I stood, there was no easy way down. I flicked on the flashlight and panned it over the mess, breathing through my mouth. One spot, two houses down, looked cleaner than the rest. I flicked the light off and tucked it into the waist of my jeans, grabbed the chain-link fence with both hands and inched along it, walking the top edge of concrete like a tightrope. I slipped once, my foot skidding on something rotten and foul smelling. I didn’t look too closely. I lost my grip for a second, banging my knee on the concrete edge, but managed to hook my fingers back through the fence’s links. Shaking and cursing under my breath, I hauled myself back up and continued on.

When I reached the gap in the trash I squatted on the lip of the channel, one hand still curled in the fence’s links. I heard a shuffling noise and the trash below me rustled. I flicked the flashlight on. A pair of red eyes shined back at me from the grizzled face of an old pit-bull that was enjoying a supper of dirty diapers. My breath caught in my chest and hardened into a rock. The dog growled low in his throat and backed away from me, a stained diaper hanging from his jaws. He retreated to the bottom of the channel, then trotted west, throwing red-eyed glances back at me. I kept the flashlight on him until he loped up the opposite side of the channel and disappeared into the weeds.

I flicked the light off and sat there, sweating, trembling but not with the cold. Where there’s one wild dog, there are twenty, I remembered my father warning me as a child. Back then the Valley had been truly rural and packs of wild dogs were not uncommon. Most farmers shot them on sight, but not my father. I had always respected him for that, but at that moment I wished I had a gun.

I didn’t want to move, but I couldn’t sit there forever. Carefully, I scooted downhill on my butt, kicking loose trash out of the way. The smell was awful and choking-thick down in the ditch where no wind stirred. At the bottom, I flicked the flashlight on, half-covering the lens. The last thing I needed was to be spotted by a nosy neighbor, or worse yet, shot by one.

The middle of the concrete ditch was wet, but clean compared to the slope. I moved down it quickly, counting houses. Rats wiggled through the trash, their beady little eyes glowing red in the flashlight’s beam. Some looked as big as the pit-bull, but they paid little attention to me and I returned the favor. I reached the slope behind Michelle’s home, dropped to my knees and started to climb, prodding trash aside with the flashlight. Halfway up, my hand came down in a pile of something that made a sick squish. I jerked my hand back, wet and rank. A present from the pit-bull or one of his friends. Thank god I was a mother, or the stench would have made me vomit. I wiped my hand on the concrete as best I could and kept climbing.

At the top of the slope, careful to keep my smelly hand away from my clothes, I clambered over the fence and dropped into the foot-tall weeds of the back yard. The weeds might have been unsightly, but they made good towels. With my hand a little cleaner, I crossed to the rear of the house, weaving through piles of beer cans and past a rusty lawnmower left dead at the end of a swath of shorter weeds. The yards beside me were dark. Only light from a few rear-facing windows broke the night.

I peeked in the first of three windows along the back of the house. A small bedroom with two mattresses on the floor and a third on an old iron bed painted white. Dirty clothes made mini-mountains on the floor. A stack of pornographic magazines filled one corner, and a cardboard box labeled Coors Light supported a lamp with a naked bulb. I flicked the flashlight off and moved to the middle window. A dirty kitchen, but not as dirty as the bedroom. A trashcan was stuffed with frozen dinner and fast food packages. More beer cans, plastic silverware and plastic cups cluttered the counter. But the cheap glass-topped table was clean and the floor looked like someone had mopped it not too many weeks ago.

The third window looked in on what I assumed was Michelle’s room. It was spotlessly clean. A white spread was fitted neatly over the bed, piled high with pastel pillows and topped with a lethargic, stuffed Sylvester the Cat. A pink ruffle peeked out below the spread. The furniture was antique-white trimmed in gold, a style they used to call the Little Princess when Jessica was a child. Pictures covered the dresser, mostly snapshots from what I could see, and posters dotted the walls, all of them the fuzzy kitty and Words-To-Live-By type. I didn’t see any cosmetics or any other clutter. Still, this room did not fit Michelle’s gruff and masculine demeanor.

I was about to flick off the flashlight, thinking that this had been a big waste of time, when I noticed the latch on the window wasn’t closed. I can resist anything except temptation. I looked left and right, considering. What the hell. I tried the window, half-hoping it would be painted shut. It slid up easily. Feeling like a middle-aged Nancy Drew, I threw a leg through the opening and climbed inside. I left the window open in case I needed to make a hasty escape.

After listening to the sounds of the house, refrigerator humming, dresser clock ticking, I crossed the room and opened the closet. I recognized the red plaid jacket hanging on the door hook. Jeans and T-shirts were neatly hung in the closet, but there were several dresses as well. Shoes and boots were lined up on the floor. A suitcase was on the top shelf along with a dozen cardboard shoeboxes. I looked at the boxes for a long moment, wondering how far I was going to take this? Not that far, I decided. I’d just have a quick look and be gone. I moved to the dresser and opened drawers. Everything was neatly folded, and the drawers looked full. Well, that made one thing certain, Michelle hadn’t left for good, or if she had, she had abandoned everything.