The Riesling Retribution (14 page)

Beautiful, absolutely. Stunning, even a knockout. Unfortunately,
although Brandi possessed the kind of classic dark-haired looks that made people think of kohl-eyed women who graced Grecian urns or inspired men to launch a thousand ships, it was paired with a personality as two-dimensional as a wine label.

My brother had fallen hard for her and every time she wanted him to hang the moon someplace different—which she often did—he never thought twice about dropping everything to fetch the ladder. I do believe he’d commit murder for her without hesitating.

At first I wondered if the two of them had set up this meeting and Eli had forgotten to mention she’d be dropping by. But the moment I saw the look of expectant hope in his eyes, replaced quickly by a mask of cool resignation, I knew it was unplanned and likely to be combustible.

“Hey, princess.” Eli sounded wary. “You look pretty. New outfit? Where’s Hope?”

Brandi wore an expensive-looking red sheath dress with a plunging neckline and a racy slit that exposed a tanned thigh. Black patent leather belt, black sling-back sandals. A ruby and diamond necklace and matching drop earrings. Eli could be in hock until the next millennium just from her jewelry purchases.

Her heels clacked on the quarry tile floor as she crossed the room, tossing her head like a runway model, well aware that all eyes were fixed on her. Frankie disappeared into the kitchen, dragging Gina. Quinn, who had been taking wine bottles out of boxes along with Eli, stopped and folded his arms like a spectator watching a sports event. I quit filling goblets with the small oyster crackers we served during tastings. The air crackled like she’d just laid down a live high-voltage line.

“Hope is with my mother. We need to talk, Eli. I’m broke and I need money. I can’t go on like this.” Her words came out in a torrent as she flung her Coach purse down on a bar stool. She seemed oblivious to her audience.

My brother came from behind the bar like he was about to step into the lion’s cage without a chair or a whip.

“Look, sweetheart, let’s go on outside and talk about it. I told you. I can’t get you anything for a few days—”

“Don’t give me that crap. I’m tired of it. What do you expect
me to do in the meantime? Get it out of thin air?” She snapped her fingers in his face. “I don’t even answer the phone anymore because it’s always a collection agency. I’m on goddamn tranquilizers now to deal with the stress. I don’t care if you have to rob a bank, but you’d better do something. Do you understand me?”

Her voice, like her nerves, seemed to fray as she spoke. Eli took her arm.

“Let’s go home, babe.” He sounded calm, despite the red rising on his cheeks. I wondered how often he’d placated her like this before. “We’ll talk about it there. Have dinner tonight, work it all out—”

She wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “Don’t touch me! What are you, insane? It’s over, Eli. I told you already. The only reason you can come home is to get your stuff. What you haven’t moved out by the end of the day tomorrow will be on the street to be picked up with the trash.”

Her words landed like blows, except they were meant to humiliate as well as wound. I held my breath and waited to see what my brother would do. For a moment the only sound in the room was the rushing of the wind through the open French doors.

A muscle twitched in Quinn’s jaw. He was biting his tongue like I was as Brandi faced Eli, her beautiful features twisted into the uncontrolled fury of a harpy.

“It’s still my house.” Eli maintained that surreal deadpan calm but now there was a steeliness in his voice. “And we’re going to finish this conversation somewhere else.”

He grabbed her purse and thrust it at her. “Get going.”

“Don’t you talk to me—”

“I said, move it.”

Brandi looked as if he’d actually slapped her, but for once she didn’t have a sharp-edged retort. Eli’s eyes met mine as she tucked her bag under her arm and stalked across the room, head high in an attempt to salvage her dignity. Eli followed, hands in his pockets, eyes straight ahead.

I did not want to think about where the rest of that discussion would take them. Eli didn’t slam the door, but he did close it with some force.

Quinn broke the silence first. “I’d give her a good spanking.”

“I know you would. What do you bet Eli caves in and buys her something once he calms her down.”

“A straitjacket?”

“Only if Versace makes them.” I paused. “Look, I’m sorry about that scene—”

“Forget it. It wasn’t your fault and no apology’s necessary.” He shoved an empty wine box under the bar. “I smell coffee in the kitchen. Frankie probably made a fresh pot. Let’s get some.”

I nodded, grateful he was trying to get things back on track again.

“I think we lost Eli for the day,” I said. “We’re going to be short-handed again.”

“We’ll cope,” he said. “Just like we always do.”

The rest of the day was as busy as Saturday had been so it turned out not to be too difficult to banish Eli and his problems from my mind for a few hours and concentrate on taking care of customers and making sure things ran smoothly. The tasting room and terrace buzzed with the conversation of couples and groups of friends who laughed and talked and seemed happy to be with one another for an afternoon. Quinn caught me watching at one point and squeezed my shoulder.

“Don’t go there. You can’t solve Eli’s problems. He has to work them out for himself.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I know he does.”

He patted me on the back like he knew I was fibbing and turned his attention to a good-looking young couple who just stepped up to the bar.

At noon my sister, Mia, called from New York to say congratulations on twenty years and ask how everything was going. I said everything was going great, just great, and that Eli, with whom she also wanted to speak, couldn’t come to the phone right now but he’d call her later. I also said nothing about Beau Kinkaid or Leland being a possible suspect in his murder investigation.

I hung up the phone feeling guilty for keeping so much from her, but my sister’s obvious happiness at starting a new life in Manhattan
after a rocky period following our mother’s death had resonated in her voice. If I’d given off any vibes that anything was wrong she’d been too caught up in her own world to realize, so why spoil it? There would be enough time to tell her later—especially after the sheriff’s department investigation finally wrapped up.

James Joyce was right. What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for.

Besides, my heart was already grieving enough for both of us.

By five thirty the last guests had departed. Frankie, Gina, and I were in the courtyard clearing up wineglasses and dishes and wiping down tables when my cousin Dominique showed up. She hugged me and, without asking, pitched in with the cleanup.

When I was growing up my mother once remarked that it seemed apt that Dominique had been born on a Saturday since, like the old nursery rhyme, she truly was the child who worked hard for a living. Somewhere along the way, though, Dominique crossed over from hardworking to workaholic, becoming Saturday’s child without an off switch. Thin and sinewy as rope, she had hazel eyes and spiky auburn hair that looked like she cut it with gardening shears—which on her somehow seemed fashionable and chic. Though my cousin hadn’t lived in Paris for years, she still possessed that innate French sense of style that turned heads when she entered a room.

“Why didn’t you come earlier for the party?” I asked. “Instead of for the drudgery?”

She lit a cigarette. “Something came up at the Inn.”

Something always came up at the Inn and she was always the only one who could handle it.

“Looks like you had a good day.” She waved the hand with the cigarette to encompass the courtyard. “You must have made money hand over foot.”

I smiled. “We did well. How’d it go with you?”

She sucked on her cigarette and exhaled dragon smoke. “Eh,
bien,
the Romeos were in drinking at the bar,” she said. “They were talking about your father and that skeleton you found.”

“Seth Hannah told me Bobby’s been questioning all of them about whether they knew him.” I shrugged. “No one did.”

Dominique picked up two wineglasses, which still had remnants of red wine in them, and dumped one into the other. “Do they know who he is?”

“Didn’t you hear? A former business partner of Leland’s. Beauregard Kinkaid. He went by ‘Beau.’”

“Beauregard Kinkaid? Beau Kinkaid?”

She repeated the name as she flung the wine over the wall in a graceful arc of bloodlike drops.

She faced me, holding the empty glasses, a puzzled expression on her face. “I don’t want to open a Pandora’s box of worms here,” she said, “but I met Beau Kinkaid. He came to visit your father at the house the summer you were born.”

“You
met
Beau Kinkaid?” I asked. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. He was not a nice man. I remember him.”

I sat down in one of the patio chairs and stared at her. I’d just turned twenty-nine in July. Twenty-nine years ago Dominique would have been thirteen. Could she really be that certain she knew him?

“The summer you were born my mother came from France to help your mother. She brought me, too.” Dominique expelled more cigarette smoke through her nostrils. “I remember Beau came to visit your father and they had a terrible argument. He was ugly and he scared me, but his name was Beau. It seemed odd.”

Of course. In French,
beau
means “beautiful.”

Still, I wondered how vivid—and accurate—her recollection could be. Even after spending the last few weeks looking through family photos for the vineyard slide show Frankie and I had put together, I’d been hard-pressed to recall long-ago events with any specificity. What memories remained had been as vague and impressionistic as the blurry, out-of-focus photos I’d discarded.

“Do you remember anything else?”

She ground out her cigarette on a plate that still had remnants of what looked like melted Brie on it.

“Sorry, I’m afraid not. You know I didn’t speak English very well back then.”

She kept grinding that cigarette and didn’t look up.

“What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I’m sorry,
chérie.
It’s not very nice.” Her smile was rueful. “Whatever happened during that conversation, it made your mother cry.”

I closed my eyes as an image of my mother flashed in my head as clearly as if I’d been with her only yesterday. What Beau said to Leland must have devastated her. My mother didn’t cry often. Children remember those moments—the unsettling discovery that adults aren’t invincible and they can hurt enough to shed tears, too. My cousin’s story was sounding increasingly plausible.

“You have no idea what they were talking about?”

Dominique shook her head. “No, but it upset my mother, too. All that shouting.”

“Who was shouting?” I asked. “My parents?”

“Non,
your father and Beau. We were sitting on the veranda when he showed up. Uncle Leland introduced us. Then he brought Beau into his office right away. After a few minutes, we could hear them hollering at each other.” She sat down across from me and lit another cigarette. “After Beau left, things got sort of crazy.”

“Crazy, how?”

“Because of you.”

There was a half-open bottle of red sitting on one of the serving tables. I got it and found two clean glasses.

“I need a drink,” I said.

Dominique took the glass I handed her.
“Tante
Chantal went into labor with you that afternoon so my mother and your father took her to the hospital. They left me at home to babysit Eli.”

“You mean Beau came to see Leland the day I was born?”

Dominique nodded. “I was terrified he’d return when I was in the house all alone so I barricaded the doors with furniture and went to bed. When Uncle Leland and
Maman
came home from the hospital in the middle of the night, they had to break a windowpane so they could open a window to climb through. I was sleeping upstairs. I never heard them pounding on the front door.”

If it hadn’t been so important, I would have laughed.

“What happened after Leland and Beau’s argument? Do you remember Beau leaving or if Leland went with him?”

Dominique drank her wine.

“I don’t know what happened. When your mother went into your father’s office after Beau left, I was sent to my room. That’s when I heard her crying through the door to the office. By the time I was told I could come downstairs, my mother said
Tante
Chantal was lying down and that I needed to be quiet. Your father was gone.”

“Where?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But
Maman
was furious because she had to telephone his friends until she found him so he could drive your mother to the hospital.”

I stared into my wineglass. What could Leland have done to make my mother cry over a business deal gone sour? Had he lost money? Gotten involved in some shady scam?

And where had he gone after Beau left the house?

If this was the argument Annabel Chastain had been talking about, at least I now knew for sure that Beau left our house alive. But where did my father disappear to for those few hours, leaving his wife who was distraught over the quarrel between him and his business partner and only hours away from giving birth? Did Leland track down Beau to finish the argument in private? Or did he end things between them for good?

I looked at my cousin. “You probably need to tell Bobby about this.”

She swirled around the last of the wine in her glass, a somber expression on her face.

“Or I could just let dead dogs sleep,” she said. “No one but you knows I met him.”

In the silence that fell between us, I knew she wrestled, as I did, with the impact her news would have on my father’s case if she spoke to Bobby versus saying nothing. A Hobson’s choice that had already been made, ingrained in our psyches because of who our mothers raised us to be.

“It would probably go better for Leland if you kept quiet,” I said. “Telling the truth corroborates what Annabel Chastain told Bobby, especially since no one knows where Leland went after Beau left, or what he did. Until now.”

I shrugged and shook my head. Her smile was melancholy as she hugged me.

“Shall I call Bobby now or do you think it can wait until tomorrow?” she asked.

“Better get it over with. You wouldn’t want to change your mind.”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “There’s no way to sweep the rug under the carpet on this one, is there?”

“Nope,” I said, as she made her call.

The next article about the murder of Beau Kinkaid to appear in the
Washington Tribune
was not on the front page of the news section. Instead it showed up first thing Monday morning on the front page of Lifestyle. Lead story, this time above the fold. Pictures, too. The real kicker was the headline: “Sauterne Death: Who Killed the Victim in the Vineyard?”

I had never seen the photograph they used of Leland in his NRA cap. He’d probably been hunting and hadn’t shaved for a few days so he looked particularly scruffy. A real gun-toting wacko. Chastain Construction’s press machine had most likely provided the photo of Beau Kinkaid, who looked as all-American as a Boy Scout, sitting at a linen-covered table at some dinner event with a bank of American flags behind him. He was smiling, showing a lot of bad teeth, but even the smile didn’t hide the fact that, as Dominique said, the man was as ugly as a roach.

I read the article with growing disgust. The obvious conclusion any fool would make—though it was never explicitly stated—was that Leland, a man of dubious business acumen, blurred-edge morals, and questionable relationships, killed one of his former partners and had gotten away with it. Until now.

Frankie was the first to arrive at the villa. She came straight to my office and the guilty look on her face, when she found me at my desk with the newspaper lying open, made it clear she’d hoped to do something outrageous, like burning every copy she could get her hands on before I saw it.

“Too late,” I said. “But thanks.”

“I’m really sorry, Lucie.”

“Me, too. Anyone who still wondered whether Leland was innocent or guilty before reading this garbage won’t have any doubts now.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, her clear blue eyes filled with consternation. “They didn’t say he did it.”

“No, they just hinted, implied, insinuated, alluded, intimated…have I left any words out?”

“You’re doing fine.”

“I think I’ll take a drive over to Leesburg.” I stood up and reached for my cane.

“Do you think that’s wise?”

“Do you think I should let them get away with this?” It came out sharper than I intended.

Her cheeks reddened and she pressed her lips together.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be taking my anger out on you.”

“Maybe you could just ignore it. If you dignify it by reacting, it’ll just keep the whole thing alive. Don’t go over there and roll around in the mud.”

“They’re throwing it. Besides, how much more attention could we get than this?” I waved the paper. “We’re going to be bombarded with press calls all day. Wait and see. Anyway, it’s too late to ignore it.”

She gave me a warning look. “That article didn’t have Kit’s byline on it. Be careful, Lucie.”

The Loudoun bureau of the
Washington Tribune
was a small redbrick house on Harrison Street on the edge of Leesburg’s historic district. I parked on Loudoun Street in front of the quaint log cabin that now housed part of the town’s museum.

The last time I’d gone to see Kit when she’d been working in the D.C. office of the
Tribune,
I’d been required to pass through a metal detector, send my purse through an X-ray machine, and show my driver’s license, which had been scanned—bad-hair photo and all—and became my stick-on badge for the day. Even then Kit had to show up at the front desk and escort me wherever I went. That included the ladies’ room. But here in Leesburg, life was different. I opened the front door of the Loudoun bureau without knocking or being buzzed in and walked inside. The receptionist, whom I
knew from experience was working on the
Times
sudoku puzzle in pen, looked up as the door closed. Normally we exchanged chitchat, but today I nodded without speaking and walked straight through the large open room where reporters and photographers sat at their computers, to Kit’s office at the far end of the building.

Her door was open and she was leaning against the front of her desk, arms folded, one leg crossed over the other. Waiting for me. She’d been warned.

“I heard you left scorch marks on the ceiling on your way here,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re angry.”

I leaned on my cane with both hands. “That story was straight out of the gutter. How come you didn’t put it in the gossip column? Or maybe the comics, since it was such a joke?”

There were two pink spots on her cheeks. “I have nothing to do with Lifestyle. It’s a completely different part of the paper. Different editors, different staff.”

“Really? So where do they get their headline writers? Show up at the Comedy Club and recruit there? I’m sure that article sold a bunch of newspapers.”

The flush now stained her face and neck. “The story was supposed to run on Saturday,” she said. “I used up a lot of capital getting it delayed until today so it wouldn’t ruin your weekend and your anniversary celebration.”

We were going down a path of destruction, but now neither one of us was going to pull back.

“Too bad you didn’t use your capital getting it—what’s that journalism expression you use? Spiked?”

“There was no way they were going to kill that story.”

“It belonged in a supermarket tabloid, not a serious newspaper in a major metropolitan area.”

Kit uncrossed her legs and held on to the edge of her desk with both hands as she leaned toward me. “Believe me, I looked at that piece under a microscope when it showed up. Nothing in it is untrue, Lucie.”

“You yourself said Chastain Construction is spinning the way this story plays out.”

“I did not.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Wait.” Her voice was soft. “Let’s not leave it like this between us. Please, Luce. I wanted to come by after work today and ask you something. I was hoping…well, counting on, that you’d be my maid of honor.”

I saw the smear of lipstick on her front teeth from where she’d bitten her lip as she waited for my reply. We stared at each other across a chasm that had opened up in the few feet between us that seemed as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. Here was the one favor that symbolized what we’d meant to each other for so many years.

I struggled to control my voice. “Maybe this isn’t the best time—”

“Of course,” she said. “I understand.”

I turned and walked blindly out of her office, no longer caring that tears were flowing down my cheeks. Kit’s office door clicked shut, and a moment later I heard a muffled sound like a sob. I kept on walking, this time without even a nod to the receptionist, who said nothing as I passed her desk.

I stepped outside and closed the front door. From here, there was no turning back.