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Authors: Ellen Crosby

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BOOK: The Riesling Retribution
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“What are you doing here?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“You think I stop by only when something’s wrong?” He
smoothed his gelled hair like a preening rooster and looked offended. “I was in the neighborhood so I figured I’d see how my little sister was doing after that tornado went through her vineyard.”

“Oh.” I carried the leaves and branches over to the wall and dumped them on the other side. “That was thoughtful. We lost some grapes in the new fields. It could have been worse if it had damaged the winery or the house. Still it’s a huge financial loss.”

“Uh-huh.” He sneezed and pulled a packet of tissues out of his pocket. “This is killing my allergies being out here. Tree pollen.”

Checking on his little sister. Sure he was. “Did you hear what I said?”

He blew his nose. “You lost grapes in the new field. The winery and the ancestral pile are still standing.”

I put my hands on my hips. “What’s going on?”

He wadded up the tissue. “I learned a little something today. Apparently you found an old grave on our land after the tornado came through. Not in this cemetery.”

“Well, yes—”

He folded his arms. “Thelma attached herself to me like she was superglued on when I stopped by the General Store just now. If Homeland Security ever hired that woman she’d be their top interrogator. She could wear anybody down in nothing flat.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“What do you think I told her? Nada. For the simple reason that I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about,” he said. “You should have seen the look on her face when she figured that out.” He did an uncanny imitation of Thelma’s high-pitched voice. “Well, now Elliot, do tell. How odd your sister didn’t tell you about that dead body. A person has to wonder if there’s something conspirational going on, don’t you think?’”

“Conspirational, huh? You sound just like Thelma.”

An accomplished mangler of the English language, in addition to being a world-class gossip.

He tapped his fingers on his arms and glared at me. “I’m so flattered. How come you didn’t call?”

“I’m sorry, Eli. Between the tornado damage and finding that grave, things were insane around here. Bobby came over this morn
ing with a search warrant. They’re out there right now excavating the remains.”

“Jesus.” He stopped tapping. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. The medical examiner said he reckoned the body had been there thirty or forty years. A Caucasian male.” I righted a flag in front of a marker of another ancestor who had fought in the Civil War. “Can you help me fix a couple of these?”

Eli raised an eyebrow and indicated Leland’s grave. “Wonder if Leland knew him?”

“Just because someone’s buried on our land doesn’t mean anyone in the family knew anything about it. We both know Leland didn’t have the best judgment when it came to business deals, but he would never kill another person and you know it.” I stood up and faced my brother.

He threw up his hands like he was putting on brakes. “I just asked if he could have known him and you bite my head off. How can you be so sure he didn’t do it?”

“Because of Mom. She would have known and she couldn’t have lived with it, that’s how.”

“Leland kept secrets.” He walked over to our parents’ graves and fixed Leland’s flag.

I joined him. “Not that secret. Not murder. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Yours,” he said. “Ours.”

“I hope so.”

He cleared his throat. “Hey, Luce?”

“What?”

“Got a little favor to ask you.”

I knew it. “What favor?”

I also knew the favor. Money.

“I’m a little tight this month and I was wondering if you could—”

I cut him off. “I can loan you three hundred, maybe four, but I want to know when you’re going to pay me back.”

“Three or four hundred?” He looked startled. “You can’t do more than that?”

“I can’t really do three or four hundred since I just took a hit
that’s going to set us back well over a hundred thousand dollars. How deep in debt are you, Eli?”

He ran his thumb along the edge of our mother’s marker. “It’s not too good. I’m on the verge of bankruptcy.”

He spoke lightly, but I saw his throat constrict. It was probably worse than “on the verge,” but he wasn’t saying. I knew him too well. Still, he’d caught me off guard.

“Bankruptcy? How could you let it get this far?” I stared at him. “You’ll lose everything.”

He cleared his throat again. “Right now I just need enough to cover my August mortgage payment since today’s the first and it’s due soon. That’s all. I don’t want to lose my home, Luce. Brandi loves that house.”

Of course she did. He’d designed it for her, giving her everything she wanted. Now they lived in a nouveau riche palazzo that combined the most garish extravagances of Versailles with the Disney Castle, including a multitiered fountain in the front yard that looked like he’d borrowed it from Trafalgar Square in London.

“How much is your mortgage?”

“We refinanced a few times to consolidate our debt.” He paused and said, without looking at me, “It’s just under eight thousand.”

“Eight thousand?”

He needed that just for his mortgage? What about everything else? Groceries, car loan—all of it? Could he cover those expenses, or were they down to eating the labels off cans?

“Why don’t you sell something?” I said. “That antique Sarouk carpet you just bought for the great room. The gold faucets in the master bath. Anything.”

He looked pained. “I haven’t got that kind of time. It’s not the first payment I’ve missed, so they’re already knocking on the door.” He laughed, but it was the self-mocking laugh of someone pushed to the edge. “We’re barely answering the phone because most of the calls are collection agencies. Besides, Brandi would just die if I started dismantling her dream house. You know I can’t do that to her.”

“Brandi needs to go to credit card rehab, and I’m not joking. Cut up her cards, take away the checkbook, and give her a cookie jar with
money in it. Tell her that’s it. You can’t go on like this. She’s as bad as Leland was, blowing money on junk she doesn’t even care about the next day,” I said. “That’s why you’re in so much debt.”

“You are being unfair.”

“I am being honest.”

“Aw, jeez. Give me a break. I come to you for help and what do I get? A lecture.” He started pacing in front of our parents’ graves. “You’re the one talking about family and being on the same side. You could help me out if you wanted to. I’m not asking for a handout. I’ll pay you back once I get on my feet. I just need some time.”

Sure. Like he’d paid his other creditors back. “You can’t repay me and you know it.”

He stopped pacing and looked at me with an odd glint in his eyes. “How can you turn your back on me when you’ve got a five-figure sum in the vineyard checking account right now?”

“How do you know that?” The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

“Aha! Knew I was right. You do, don’t you?”

I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. “It’s not my personal piggy bank, Eli. It’s a business account and that money is there to pay bills.”

He spread his hands apart, palms up. “I’m tapped out, babe. Are you going to help me or are you going to throw your brother to the wolves?”

It was a low blow, and he knew it. I wasn’t responsible for his problems. He was.

“Giving you more money without doing something about the way Brandi spends it isn’t going to help anyone. You can’t pay me back the eight grand any more than you can pay your creditors back. Take the four hundred as a gift, okay? You don’t need to repay that.”

He looked like I’d slapped him. “I don’t need your charity. Forget it. I’ll go elsewhere.”

“Eli, wait!”

But he was already moving toward the gate, raising his hand in a backward salute, dismissing me.

“I gotta go. I’m late for something.”

He slammed the gate, as I expected he would. I sank down by my mother’s gravestone.

“Now what?” I asked her. “How did he do that? Why am I the one feeling bad?”

Giving my brother money would be like giving alcohol to a drunk. He didn’t have his spending under control—and his wife was dragging him down to the depths I remembered from when Leland was alive. When we lurched from feast to famine, either flush with cash or nearly flat broke. Eli’s story was just a downward spiral.

I paused at Leland’s marker as I left the cemetery. Years ago my mother hid a fabulous diamond necklace given to one of her relatives by Marie Antoinette because she knew if my father got his hands on it he’d sell it, just like he’d sold all her other jewelry to fund his business ventures. I’d found the necklace two years ago, hidden in a barrel in the wine cellar. Eli got a third of the money from its sale and had blown his share. I used mine to pay for our expansion and putting in new vines.

Right after Leland died, a French live-in boyfriend had sweet-talked my bank in the south of France into letting him withdraw all my funds, claiming I needed the money because I was moving back to the States. As soon as I got home, I planned to call Blue Ridge Federal and check on my account.

Not that I thought Eli could pull off the same scam, but I knew he was desperate enough to try anything. Including cleaning me out.

CHAPTER 6

I called Seth Hannah, the president of Blue Ridge Federal and an old family friend, the moment I walked through the front door. Like Leland, Seth was one of the Romeos and he used to play poker and hunt with my father. I’d long suspected Seth had a crush on my mother, as did so many men who were captivated by her beauty and indefinable French sense of style and allure.

“What can I do for you, darlin’?” he asked.

“Just checking my balance. I wasn’t sure if something cleared or not.” Or got cleared out.

I heard some clicks of a computer keyboard and he quoted a figure that matched the one I had.

“Happy to oblige, but you can do all this online, you know.”

“I know, but I wanted to ask you about something and I can’t get that from a computer.” I wondered if he heard the relief in my voice that we still had funds to talk about.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I just want to make sure that no one besides me has access to that account,” I said.

“Well, that’s how it’s set up, Lucie. Why’re you asking about this?”

I hesitated and Seth waited.

After a moment he said, “This wouldn’t be about your brother, would it?”

“Please don’t say anything to anyone, Seth. He came to me for a loan just now and I turned him down. He knows I’ve got a lot of cash in that account.”

There was a long pause. “It’s no secret your brother’s in a pretty deep financial hole, honey. You thinking he might try to cash a check of yours or something?”

“When we were growing up and Eli got a bad report card or a note about detention, he used to forge my parents’ signatures. He could copy either one of them and you couldn’t tell they weren’t genuine.”

“I see.” Seth cleared his throat. “Counterfeiting a check’s a serious crime, you know.”

I was sitting in the foyer in one of my mother’s toile-covered Queen Anne chairs staring at Leland’s bust of Thomas Jefferson. I leaned back and pinched the bridge of my nose. The house was even warmer than it had been this morning. Although the windows were open, I felt like I was suffocating.

“I know.”

“I will tell you this. We get our share of forged checks and I can’t tell you how many times the forger was a relative or someone who had access to the individual’s financial information,” he said. “If you don’t trust Eli, you’d do well to put things under lock and key.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust him—”

“Honey, you don’t have to beat around the bush with me. I know Eli’s a good man.” Seth made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “But who said, ‘I can resist anything but temptation’?”

“Everyone?”

This time he did laugh. “Look, I’ll put a note here in your file that you’re the only person authorized to handle transactions with this account. Will that settle you?”

“I guess so. I feel awful about this, you know. Eli didn’t actually do anything.”

“Better safe than sorry, Lucie. I’ve seen more people feuding over money than you can shake a stick at. You have no idea the stuff we’ve got here in folks’ safe-deposit boxes because relatives couldn’t come to an agreement over something. Hell, we even got an urn with someone’s ashes in the vault.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, ma’am. Whoever locks up for the night wishes him sweet dreams. Been doin’ that for going on sixteen years. We’ve gotten kind of attached to him.”

“I hope that never happens to us. Feuding, I mean.”

“Then talk to your brother. Get it out in the open.”

“I couldn’t. He’s already mad at me because I wouldn’t loan him money for his mortgage payment.”

“You want my opinion, honey?” I was going to get it, even if I didn’t. “I’ve known you and Eli and Mia since you were born. Your pa wasn’t always a straight shooter and it pains me to say that, but your mother was as rare and precious as a hothouse flower. She had more integrity in her little finger than most folks got in their whole body. If she were alive today, she’d be telling you to be square and honest with your brother.”

The lump in my throat made it hard to talk. “I know. Thanks, Seth.”

“You’re welcome.” He paused and I thought he was going to say good-bye or something else in parting. “By the way, any word on that body you found on your land?”

I sat up straight. He knew as well as I did it was too soon to know anything official. This was fishing to see what I’d tell him.

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Well, I sure hope…” He left the sentence unfinished.

I waited as though I expected him to tell me what he sure hoped, which was that Leland had nothing to do with it.

“Thanks for the advice, Seth. I appreciate it.”

“You all right, darlin’?”

“Don’t you worry about me. I can handle this.”

“Of course you can.” He backed off. “Look, Lucie, I want you to know that I’m in your corner whatever happens. If you ever need to talk or you have any questions, all you need to do is pick up the phone. I owe that to you children and the memory of your mother.”

He hung up and I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned anything about what he owed to the memory of my father.

 

Bobby returned to the villa at the end of the day while I was in my office filling out the endless tax forms we sent the government so
they’d grant us the privilege of selling wine. Frankie showed up in the doorway and told me he was waiting in the tasting room.

She kept her voice low. “I have a feeling they’re done. The other cruisers and that crime scene van just left.”

“It only took them one day?”

“Guess so. Maybe you can ask him.”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

Bobby’s shirt was soaked with perspiration and his hair was plastered to his head like he’d gone swimming.

“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked. “We’ve got bottled water and a few sodas in a cooler. They’re still cold.”

“Thanks, but I got my own cooler in the car.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, revealing a triangle of white skin at his hairline that contrasted with the rest of his sunburned face.

“I came by to let you know that we’re finished,” he said. “The crime scene tape will stay up for a few more days and we’re coming back to clear out the underbrush that’s nearby in case we missed something there.”

“You’ve removed the remains?” I asked. “Completely?”

He nodded.

“Did you find anything else besides the skull and that bone Bruja dug up?”

His smile was weary. “Sorry. I can’t say.”

“Well, could you identify him from just the skull, if that’s all you got?”

“That’s Junie’s department.”

“You’re not going to tell me anything.”

“Right now there’s nothing to tell.”

I sighed and gave up. “You and Kit are coming this weekend for our twentieth?”

His face cracked into a small smile. “We’re counting on it.”

“I knew I’d get you to answer at least one question,” I said.

“You always were like a dog with a bone,” he said. “As long as I’ve known you.”

“You could have picked a different analogy than dogs and bones. Or answered a different question.”

He grinned. “I kind of liked that one. Be seeing you.” He had his hand on the doorknob when he paused and turned around.

“I will tell you this. It seems like we’re talking about only one person out there.”

After he left I made so many mistakes on the tax report that I finally threw down my pencil and went outside on the terrace. Frankie found me there, staring at the fields and vines. She handed me a glass of wine that I hadn’t asked for. Perfectly chilled Riesling.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I went over to the barrel room. Want to talk about it? Might make you feel better.”

I drank some wine as she sat down in one of the wicker chairs and pulled it closer.

“I know I should be focusing on the tornado damage, but I just keep thinking about that skull. Wondering who he is and how he got there. Bobby thinks the odds are good whoever killed him had ties to the farm.” I paused. “Even Eli wondered if Leland might be involved somehow.”

“And you don’t think he was?” Her voice was gentle, but there was a hint of reproach that I shouldn’t kid myself.

I chose my words with care. “My father was a complicated man who didn’t always show good judgment. He made lousy business decisions and he gambled. And he had his share of affairs, though through everything he loved my mother. Sometimes I think he didn’t believe he was worthy of her and that’s why he had the affairs.”

“I wish I’d known your mother,” Frankie said.

I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t wish you’d known Leland, huh?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“Never mind. I’m just giving you a hard time.” I sipped my wine and touched the chilled glass to my cheek. It felt good. “It probably seems odd that I’m defending my father, but I know he’s no murderer. He didn’t kill that man and then cover it up for the rest of his life. It would have consumed him if he did.”

Frankie put two fingers across her lips like she was thinking as her eyes roved over my face. I thought I saw pity in them.

“You don’t believe me?” I asked. “You think I can’t be objective.”

“Of course I believe you,” she said. “Maybe the best thing is to put this out of your mind until they identify the body. Then take it from there.” She stood up. “Let me get that bottle of wine.”

Plato said that wine fills the heart with courage. Frankie refilled my glass and poured a glass for herself.

My heart was not filled with courage as I drank. Instead it was filled with foreboding and a sickening feeling of apprehension. Until yesterday I thought all my family’s sins and secrets lay buried in our graveyard.

What if I was wrong?

 

B. J. Hunt called at the end of the day. I’d been expecting to hear from him once word got out about the discovery of the body on land he planned to use for the reenactment.

“Wondering if I could drop by and check things out,” he said. “Sounds like we might have to change our plans now that you got crime scene tape strung up in that field. I understand you had some tornado damage as well.”

“Bad news travels fast,” I said. “I suppose Thelma had her megaphone out this morning?”

“Word does get around, doesn’t it?” He chuckled. “Well, it’s not just me that’s interested in coming by. Ray Vitale is in town. He wants to see the site, too, especially since he hasn’t been here before.”

“Who is Ray Vitale?”

“The Union commander. The guy’s so hard-core he lives like it’s still the 1860s. All my communication with him has been by mail. That’s U.S. Postal Service mail, not e-mail. He’s such a stitch Nazi that he won’t do it any other way. Damn annoying at times.”

“What’s a ‘stitch Nazi’?”

“A guy who says everything has to be absolutely authentic right down to the number of stitches it takes to sew a buttonhole,” he said. “Me, I don’t care what a person’s wearing for Skivvies and I don’t think you need to piss on your uniform buttons to make them look old. Stinks like hell when you do. As long as no one shows up wearing Nikes and a wristwatch, and carrying a cell phone, it’s good enough for me.”

“Your friend sounds like a zealot,” I said, laughing.

“Nope. A zealot is someone altogether different. “The South shall rise again.” That’s a zealot. They haven’t forgiven the Union for winning. Some of them never stopped fighting the war. And a Yankee zealot still wants to punish us.”

“How’d you get involved with someone like Ray?”

“Oh, the usual. Business. He owns several assisted-living centers in Virginia and North Carolina. We’ve handled funerals for a number of his residents.”

“How about if you come by first thing tomorrow morning?” I asked. “I’ll take you over there myself.”

“How about right now? Say, half an hour? Ray’s heading back to Richmond this evening.”

B.J.’s event had been attracting considerable media attention and that meant publicity for the winery. We had no idea how many people would show up, but it was possible that as many as a thousand visitors could pass through the vineyard that weekend, including both reenactors and spectators. For us, it was a big crowd.

I’d been hoping to close up the villa and head home, but if B.J. wanted to come by tonight, we’d do this tonight.

“Of course,” I said. “Meet me in the parking lot at five thirty.”

“I appreciate this, Lucie,” he said. “Ray’s awful anxious about your goings-on over there so it’ll be good to calm him down.”

My goings-on. Bad news really did travel fast.

I locked up and called Quinn on my cell phone, which finally had service restored. He sounded tired.

“We made some progress cleaning up, but it’s slow,” he said. “I’ll probably rent a Bobcat in the next day or two once we finish pruning and tying up vines that can still be saved. And, uh, Benny took the chain saw over to where the sycamore came down. The road should be passable now if you’re heading home.”

He caught me off guard about the tree.

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