Too Close to the Sun (26 page)

"He may not be available just at the moment,"
Mrs. Finchley said, which Gabby knew was a diplomatic way of saying
He's not up yet
.

She smiled, confident the housekeeper would
promptly march upstairs and rouse him. "I'll wait."

Mrs. Finchley set Gabby up in the living room
with a mug of coffee and a warm apricot scone, then sailed off.
Gabby settled in a cozy upholstered chair beside the white brick
fireplace and tried not to drop crumbs on the pristine hardwood
floor.

It was a lovely sunlit room, elegant but not
fussy, with art books and photographs on the few tables and
cheerful blue-and-yellow chairs and sofa. The only decoration was a
painting over the fireplace of a winter stream, but Gabby supposed
that the view through the French doors of garden, pool, pergola,
and vineyards provided plenty enough to look at.

She finished her scone, emptied her mug,
crossed her legs, and twitched her foot rhythmically in the air.
She knew exactly what she was going to say to Max and wanted to get
it over with, already. He'd surprised her Friday night. Well, now
it was Monday morning and time for
her
to surprise
him
.

When he finally appeared, he looked
surprised, all right. And wary.

You should be, you jackass
, she
thought as she rose to her feet.

He stepped a little farther into the room,
moving so tentatively she thought he might turn tail at any moment.
She could tell from his damp hair and soapy scent that he was
freshly showered. Fortunately he didn't reek of cigarettes and
alcohol like the last time she'd seen him.

"Good morning," he said.

She skipped the pleasantries, kept her voice
low, and edged closer. "I'll make this fast, Max. There are three
things you need to know. One, you don't have a single thing to say
about how my father and I handle harvest or any aspect of the
winemaking. You got that? Nothing." Out shot another finger.
"Number two. You tell Felix to rehire every single field worker you
made him fire. Today. And three, from now on our official story is
the truth. Yes, Suncrest did rebottle the sauvignon blanc, because
you decided to switch the bottles. Anyone who calls me and asks,
that's what I'm going to tell them. I suggest you do the same."

Max stood planted on the floor, mouth
agape.

It was precisely the reaction she wanted.

She was nearly out of the room before she
spun on her heels and fired her last salvo. "And if ever again you
so much as stand too close to either me or my sister, I will
personally see to it that your life becomes a living hell. Have a
nice day."

Her heart was pounding when she got outside.
It was nerves, partly, but also exultation. She could have gone to
the police, she knew, but didn't imagine she'd get much
satisfaction. All too easily she could imagine what they'd say, see
the dubiousness in their expressions, hear the incredulity in their
voices.
So you had a fight with your boyfriend? You were
drinking wine and wearing your negligee? And at ten o'clock on a
Friday night, you don't expect the guy to try something?

Gabby half jogged down the pebbled path that
sloped from the residence to the winery. She might go to the police
someday. But just at the moment she was much more in the mood for
private justice.

*

Three days later, Max's life hadn't
improved.

You know what?
he mumbled to himself,
lumbering downstairs from his father's office.
This isn't much
fun anymore
.

It was eleven o'clock on Thursday morning,
and the top item on his agenda was an appointment with Leo Gordon,
the manufacturer's rep for the company that made Suncrest's
automated bottling line. Max had spent the last two hours bent over
mind-numbing paperwork, and now all he had to look forward to was
schmoozing with a balding, middle-aged salesman.

And this counted as a good day. Nothing
catastrophic had happened yet. For example, none of the female
hired help had bitched at him about what he must and must not
do.

He hit the bottom of the stairs and loped
past the stainless-steel fermentation tanks, with their spouts and
knobs and temperature gauges, then pushed open the heavy oak winery
door and emerged into the late July sunshine. The air hit him like
a furnace blast. He blinked rapidly as his pupils adjusted to the
blinding white light. Out from his rear trouser pocket came his
cigarettes. He tamped one against the packet then lit it, tossing
the match onto the pebbled path.

He squinted west toward the Silverado Trail,
waiting for Gordon's truck to drive through Suncrest's bronze entry
gates. Vineyards rolled away from him in fruit-heavy majesty. They
were getting close to the big season now—Harvest with a capital H.
The white grapes would be brought in in a month, then the reds.
Everybody around him was getting excited, like crush was the Second
Coming.

Could this possibly be all there was for him?
Max wondered. Would he be standing here in twenty, thirty, forty
years waiting for Leo Gordon's kid to show up? With some woman
employee analyzing his every move? The thought felt like a noose
around his neck. He could be dragging around this cursed winery
until he was dead.

His eye caught the motion of Gordon's truck
as it pulled off the Trail and barreled up the drive. It was a
massive black flatbed with monstrous wheels, the sort of vehicle
that gave Max the willies every time he drove past one in his red
Mercedes two-seater. Usually the driver was some heavily sideburned
he-man who oozed attitude and testosterone. It was safe to say that
Leo Gordon broke the mold.

Gordon careened to a stop, dust billowing
behind him, then leaped from the cab and scurried toward Max, right
hand outstretched, thick-framed nerd glasses perched on his nose,
mouth pulled tight in his salesman's grin. "Max, good to see you,
good to see you." He pumped Max's hand vigorously.

Max concluded that Gordon must have a severe
perspiration problem, judging from the slickness of his palms and
the impressive stains in the armpits of his short-sleeved dress
shirt. Max slid his hand from Gordon's grasp and tried to be
nonchalant as he wiped it on his trouser leg. "Thanks for coming
by."

"My pleasure, my pleasure. So you thinking
about putting in a second line?"

"Thinking about it. Haven't made any
decisions yet."

"Expansion's always good, always good."

Max tossed his cigarette butt and led Gordon
inside the winery to the warehouselike space at the rear where the
bottling line was located. Gordon pranced around it at high speed,
examining, nodding, then finally halting in front of Max as if
ready to make a pronouncement.

"You got yourself a good line here. Standard
forty-eight feet. Solid, reliable equipment." He raised his right
arm and waved expansively, providing a wide and clear view of his
stained armpit. "Plenty of room to put in a second line. Always a
good idea."

"How much would that run me?"

"We could do it for half a million."

"What?" Max nearly choked. "I thought it'd be
a lot less than that."

Gordon slapped his back and laughed
uproariously. "It's a capital investment, my friend! You have to
spend money to make money."

Yeah, yeah, Max knew all about that. Problem
was he'd been doing lots of the spending lately but the making
wasn't happening nearly so fast. "I don't know," he told Gordon.
His enthusiasm for doing much of anything these days was pretty
shot. "I'm going to have to think about it."

Gordon went on as if he hadn't heard. "Young
man like you probably wants the newest thing. Is that right? Have I
got that right?"

"I'd say you do."

Gordon lay a hand on Max's shoulder. "Screw
cap, my friend."

"What?"

"Screw cap! Real cork is getting harder to
find, plus screw cap keeps the wine fresher. It's the new style!
And you"—he jabbed a finger into Max's chest—"you can be on the
cutting edge."

Max shrugged, unmoved. "It's an idea."

"It's a fantastic idea!" Gordon looked
astounded that Max wasn't convinced. He pushed his nerd glasses
higher on his nose and peered at Max as if at a specimen on a
slide. Then he shrugged. "You think about it. Let it stew. Young
man like you, you'll see the wisdom. After all these years in the
business, I know that much. No need to give you the hard sell." He
slapped Max on the back and started to walk away. "By the way,
sorry I didn't have that corker jaw you people needed July Fourth
weekend."

Max stilled. "Refresh my memory?"

"The corker jaw?" Gordon halted and looked
back at him. "Your guy told me it slowed you down by a few hours.
See?" He pointed at Max with an
I told you so
expression.
"You put in a screw-cap line, you won't have that problem. Anyway,
sorry I couldn't help. Can't get a corker jaw on a holiday." He
waved again then scuttled off.

Max remained standing next to the sleeping
bottling line, adding two and two together. His mind ground to one
inescapable conclusion: the rebottled sauvignon blanc had gone bad
because Gabby DeLuca let it sit for hours while she tried to find
some damn part. No wonder it got too much oxygen and went "past its
peak," as Joseph Wagner put it. If she hadn't screwed up, he told
himself, the rebottling would've worked.

Man
. Max shook his head, filled with
disgust. He couldn't be held responsible for that but yet he was,
because the buck stopped with him. The rebottling fails? His fault.
The field workers spray the wrong shit? His fault. Some
restaurateur's wife won't admit she got hot for a younger guy? His
fault again!

Thinking of Barbie McDougall made Max think
of Gabby DeLuca. He headed for the stairs, his lips curling in a
sneer. Self-satisfied slut! Acts all saintly with him but clearly
is putting out for Will Henley. What killed was that he had to be
supernice to her now, despite how bossy and arrogant she was. That
tirade she went off on?
Man!

Deep in the recesses of his mind, Max knew
that others might perceive a nasty pattern in his behavior: the
girl from two years ago whose father made those gnarly accusations,
then Barbie McDougall, then Gabby DeLuca ...

But the only pattern Max saw was women who
did one thing and said another and never once took responsibility
for their own actions. He was sick of it. Actually, he was sick of
a lot of things.

He opened the door to his father's office,
sat down at the big mahogany desk. He looked around him, at this
office he'd known all his life, had played in as a kid, with its
tartan sofas and cherrywood paneling and sports trophies from the
'40s and '50s. It hadn't changed one iota in the two years since
his dad had died.

It's still my father's office
. The
revelation hit Max as clearly as if the sky had opened and God
Spoke From Above.

This is my father's life. It's not
mine
.

The more he thought about it, the more
obvious it became. This life had been foisted on him. By his father
and by his mother. With its meaningless decisions about what grape
varieties to plant and how many worker bees to hire and fire and
whether to stop up the bottles with corks or screw caps. And now,
thanks to Gabby DeLuca, he was hamstrung in every way. He could
barely take a leak without consulting her first.

He sat at his father's desk and pondered.
What he needed was something new, something that would allow him to
pursue his own ideas. Suncrest sure didn't fit that definition. It
was a drag, and it would stay a drag for the rest of his life. If
he let it.

I need a way out. But I can't just quit. That
would be too embarrassing.

Max's mind clanked and groaned and eventually
came around to the conversation he'd had with Will Henley and his
mother when he'd just gotten home from France.
We could take
Suncrest entirely off your hands
, Henley had said.
Free you
up. Provide to you, in cash, the substantial value of your
holdings. Thirty million dollars.

Thirty million dollars. That was a nice chunk
of change. Max would need cash to launch his next venture, whatever
it might be. Thirty million would be enough to do something cutting
edge, as that bozo Gordon put it.

Maybe, just maybe, he should call Henley and
feel him out. Sure, it'd be weird. The last he'd seen him, Henley
had been spitting fire, all riled up because of Max's little
touchy-feely with his girlfriend. Max wasn't too keen on the guy,
that was for sure. He was a full-of-himself city slicker who had a
big job and thought he was smarter than God. But how smart could he
be if he wanted to buy Suncrest? The thing was cursed.

Yet Henley was so gung-ho, he already had an
offer on the table. He was hungry for the deal. Max bet he still
would be regardless of the to-do with his girlfriend.

Max chuckled. What a beautiful turnaround to
unload Suncrest on Henley. Max would be free, with money in his
pocket to do whatever he pleased, and Henley would be stuck holding
the bag.

Now
that
would be sweet.

Max decided he didn't have time to preview
all this with his mother. If it got serious, he'd just have to
bring her on board. Because he had to move fast. There was some
nasty shit floating around about Suncrest and he didn't want Will
Henley to hear any of it. At this very moment Gabby DeLuca could be
poisoning Henley's mind against him. Who knew what she was telling
him, what spin she would put on events?

Max reached for the phone.

*

Will sat at his GPG partner's desk with
telephone calls lined up like aircraft at San Francisco
International. On the active runway was Napa insider Jonathan
Crosby. And on deck? Will smiled as he glanced at the pink
telephone-message slip currently on top of the pile:
Max
Winsted
, his assistant Janine had printed in her careful hand.
Please call back ASAP
.