Here With Me (18 page)

George looked at Melody and knew fairly
quickly, by the look of panic in her pretty eyes, that she’d had no
part in the plan. Probably was afraid that between the two of them,
they’d say or do something that would give them away.

Pearl turned to her sister. “Do you want to
come with us?”

Genevieve looked at both George and Melody.
“Sure,” she said agreeably. “Why the hell not?” She whistled at the
dogs and then made some kind of hand motion that had them heading
for the porch. Then she reached into her skirt pocket and pulled
out a faded, crushed hat, which she pulled low onto her forehead.
“What’s first?” she asked.

“The cave,” Pearl answered. “After all, it is
my pride and joy.”

He’d never been in any cave that caused him
to have much pride or joy. They’d been dark, damp, and generally
uncomfortable. He slipped the camera strap over his shoulder and
followed Pearl and Melody, who walked arm-in-arm. He walked next to
Genevieve, who hummed a little tune under her breath.

They walked past the wine shed, past the
cement paddock, and then practically into the side of the hill. Two
thoughts hit him at the same time. One, he’d never seen a cave with
a door on it and two, it was nicer than most people’s houses.

It was brightly lit inside, with electric
lights every three or four feet. The floor was a smooth and shiny
cement and the walls were a light gray. He rubbed the palm of his
hand across them.

“Shotcrete,” Pearl said. “It’s ten inches of
pea gravel, sand, and cement with a coat of paint added in at the
end. Come on. There’s more to see.”

Surely the rest of it could not be so
grand.

But it was. In a few minutes, he stood in the
middle of a wide circle, with five tunnels leading off in all
directions like spokes on a wagon wheel. In each tunnel he could
see racks of wine barrels, three or four high, similar to what had
been in the wine shed.

“This was Grandfather’s dream,” Melody said.
“He died three months after excavation began. Grandmother finished
it.”

He couldn’t tell which grandparent she was
prouder of. “It’s spectacular,” he said. “You use it to store
wine?”

Pearl nodded. “Yes. It’s an expensive
proposition to dig a cave of this size but the payback comes rather
quickly. The temperature in here is about fifty-eight degrees
year-round. That’s really optimal for wine storage. Before we had
this, we needed to cool the wine shed to that temperature, and that
was a very expensive electric bill to pay each month.”

He’d wondered if people had to pay for the
power that ran the electric lights. George could hear the sound of
men’s voices coming from one of the tunnels. He walked over and
looked. Pearl joined him. “What are they doing?” he asked.

“Topping off barrels. Even in this natural
humidity the wine evaporates and we need to refill the barrels to
avoid oxygen getting in and ruining the wine. Each barrel loses
about a gallon a year in here. If it was above ground, it would be
more like four gallons. So, that’s more payback.”

“Amazing,” he said. He couldn’t think of
another word that came close to describing the cave.

Pearl laughed. “It’s always a delight to see
a person’s face the first time they see this. But we should be
going. There are other things I want to show you.”

He turned to leave the way he’d come in but
Pearl, Melody, and Genevieve were headed the other direction. He
followed them and realized quickly that the cave had a back door.
They exited less than thirty feet from the cement paddock area
behind the wine shed. He figured that was no accident. No doubt the
closeness between where they processed the grapes and where they
stored the finished product had been by design.

Pearl stopped in front of the machine that
Arturo had warned George away from that morning, when he’d said it
was reserved for Montai and his father. “There’s always work to be
done but in September and October, the pace becomes almost frantic.
During the crush—that’s what we call our harvest—grapes are brought
here by the truckload. They are washed and then put in this baby,”
she said, patting the machine lovingly. “Here they get destemmed
and then crushed.”

It was starting to make a little sense. “And
that’s wine?”

“No. Not yet. That’s
must
—a mixture of
juice, skins, seeds and pulp. The next steps are a little different
depending on whether we’re making a white wine, say from Chardonnay
grapes, or our Cabernet Sauvignon, which is the red wine you had
for dinner last night. With white wine, we press the grapes next.
That separates the juice from the rest of the must.”

“But it’s not the same for red wine?” George
asked.

“No, red wine actually gets its color from
the clear grape juice having a chance to come in contact with the
skin of the red grape. So primary fermentation begins while the
juice is still mixed in with the grape skins.”

“What’s fermentation?”

“Fermentation is nothing more than the
process of converting the sugar in the grapes into alcohol and
carbon dioxide, which is simply released into the air. It happens
when yeast, which is a naturally occurring organism on the skin of
grapes, comes in contact with the juice. It’s basically a simple
chemical process. It does, however, cause heat, and too much heat
can be detrimental to the quality of the wine.”

Genevieve pulled an orange feather from
behind her ear and handed it to him. “Orange is for clarity of
thought. I figure you could use it about now.”

“Thank you,” he said. He stuck it in his
pocket, right next to the purple one that she’d given him this
morning. If she was right, he now had clear thoughts and a sense of
purpose to carry them out. He walked over to one of the tall silver
tanks. There was a ladder, taller than he’d ever seen, leaning up
against it. He stepped around it and ran his hand over the dimpled
side of the tank. “All that happens inside of here?”

“Yes,” Pearl answered. “With red wine, the
must rises to the top during fermentation and it’s someone’s job to
punch it down, or mix it all up again, to make sure that there is
sufficient contact between the skins and the juice. These extension
ladders come in handy. The dimples you see are refrigeration to
counteract the heat.”

“Speaking of heat,” Genevieve said. “It’s
damn hot out here.”

Pearl looked upward and studied the clear
sky. “It is, isn’t it?” she said, like she’d just suddenly noticed.
It was clear that when Pearl Song got a chance to talk about her
wine, she took notice of little else. “Are you hot, darling?” she
asked Melody.

“Not bad, but I should be getting over to the
wine shed. I told Bernard that I’d start the data entry today.”

“All right. Lessons are over for today,”
Pearl said. “Besides, I’ve kept you from your lunch, George. Go on
in the house and Bessie will fix you something. Then, if you want
to find Arturo, he said he’d be in Lot C. That’s the fifteen acres
straight west of here. You can take the four-wheeler or if you
prefer, saddle up Brontë. There’s a patch of olive trees nearby she
can graze under.”

He didn’t know what a four-wheeler was but if
it was anything like a car, it couldn’t be good. “That’s an easy
choice,” he said honestly. “I’ll take Brontë.”

Melody put out her hand. “I can take your
camera upstairs,” she said.

He hesitated, then felt stupid. It was just a
camera. Even if she pulled it out and looked at it, there was
nothing that would make her think it was anything but an old camera
in really good shape. He relaxed his shoulder, let the strap fall,
and then handed the box to her.

Their fingers met and for one brief moment,
they were each connected to the other, and to the camera box.
Pearl, Genevieve, even the buildings around them seemed to fade
into the background. There was only Melody and him and his
camera.

And he could smell the hearty scent of pig
roasting on a spit and could hear the gentle murmur of voices in
the background. Sarah. John. Fred Goodie and his intended bride,
Suzanne. It was all exactly as it had been the night he’d taken the
picture of Sarah.

He jerked back and the camera would have
dropped to the ground if Melody had not been quick to grab it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, wrapping her arms around the sturdy
box.

He sniffed the air and listened. Nothing. He
looked around. Genevieve and Pearl stood there, their eyes wide
with interest but giving no other indication that they’d smelled or
heard anything odd.

“George?” Melody asked. Her pretty eyes, more
violet today than blue, were filled with concern.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll see you ladies
later.” He turned away quick, not sure that even he was a good
enough liar to carry off this one.

***

Melody spent most of the afternoon working in
Bernard’s small office, at the rear of the wine shed. To get there,
she’d walked a bit nervously past the stacks and stacks of oak
barrels, half expecting one to jump out of its rightful place and
take flight. But they’d all behaved, staying quite still.

She spent the first two hours entering data.
Between Bernard and Gino, they tracked everything. Rain amounts,
daily temperatures—both the high and the low, sulfur applications,
pruning schedules, and everything else in between on an almost
acre-by-acre basis. Making great wine wasn’t a paint-by-the-numbers
kind of activity, but yet, the numbers mattered. When the grapes
were ready to harvest, they’d match all the numbers up and try to
figure out what worked and what didn’t.

She ran out of paper printing off Bernard’s
reports. She started opening filing-cabinet drawers and was
surprised when she came across several drawers that were locked.
She couldn’t remember them ever having to lock any of the drawers.
Nobody came into the office area except family and Bernard and
Gino.

She finally found the extra paper in the
closet and just as she was finishing her reports, Bernard knocked
on the door.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

She wiggled her fingers and flexed her
wrists. “I’m out of shape. I used to be able to do this all
day.”

“There’s no hurry. It just needs to get done
sometime over the next couple weeks.”

“I heard some voices earlier. Was that
you?”

“Yes. Tilly had one of her tours and there
was a man who was insisting that when a wine has a vanilla taste,
it’s because we’re adding vanilla extract.”

She pretended to be shocked. “That’s not
true?”

Bernard rolled his eyes. “You’d have been
proud of me. I didn’t tell him he was too stupid to live.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re much too
nice for that.”

He snorted. “I hear we’re having a party in a
couple days.”

She wasn’t surprised that he knew. Since this
was his home, too, Grandmother would not invite thirty friends for
dinner without letting him know in advance. “Grandmother seems to
think it’s the thing to do. I don’t want it to wear her out,
though.”

“If it does,” he said, picking up a stack of
the papers she’d printed and leafing through them, “it would be a
good kind of worn out. The kind that comes from pleasure.”

They heard a knock on the door and Tilly
stuck her head in. “Bernard, I need you again. I swear, this guy
thinks his ten-dollar tasting fee entitles him to twenty questions.
He’s fascinated by fermentation.”

Bernard rolled his eyes but Melody knew it
was mostly habit. Grandmother had told her along time ago that
Bernard, like most winemakers, was part artist and part scientist.
The artist in him wanted to create his masterpiece in private, to
brood over it, to enjoy some anguish awaiting the end product. The
scientist in him wanted to finitely examine each element of the
process and to discuss it at length, to ponder the implications of
varying the process, and to document it to death.

When there were questions from visitors,
inevitably the scientist won out over the artist. He’d already
followed Tilly out the door before Melody remembered she’d meant to
ask him about the locked drawers.

She turned off the computer, cleared her
workspace, and stood, absently rubbing her stomach. Jingle’s
movements were becoming stronger, more defined. The delicate
flutters were fast-turning into deliberate flips and it made her
smile to think of Jingle swimming around, like the fish in
Grandmother’s pond.

George had liked the pond and she’d thought
he’d understood why it and the garden were important to her. But
then he’d seemed almost impatient to leave, had even said something
about wasting time.

Maybe he’d come to his senses and realized
that Grandmother’s little dinner party was likely to give him
indigestion. There’d be well-meaning neighbors and longtime family
friends who’d be naturally curious about the marriage.

He’d do fine. She, on the other hand, if past
performance were truly an indicator of future performance, would be
a mess. She’d stumble over her words and her explanations would be
so circuitous that she’d be lucky if she didn’t strangle
herself.

As abrupt as he’d been in the garden, he’d
still been gracious when Grandmother had insisted they tour the
place. He’d asked good questions and his interest had seemed
genuine. Grandmother had loved it and it had been wonderful to see
how excited she’d been to show it all to George.

She needed to remember to thank him again.
And then she was going to ask for a favor. They needed to rehearse
for the dinner party. Well, fine,
she
needed to rehearse.
But he needed to help her. Tonight, when they
retired for the
evening
, they could make sure they had their story straight.
She was hip-deep in this muck she’d created. If she weren’t
careful, it would suck her in, like quicksand in the old horror
movies.