keep a pharmacy in business. I recognized the drug Leland used to control his cholesterol and another to lower blood pressure, but it was the antidepressant that surprised me the most.
I closed the medicine cabinet and stared at my haunted reflection in his mirror. Alcohol and antidepressants. The worst combination in the world. How long had he been hiding the fact that he was depressed? Had Dominique known?
How could I have let him walk away from me last night?
I drove home and went directly to my parents’ bedroom and my mother’s dressing table. Her jewelry box, a family heirloom passed down through generations of Montgomery women, had originally belonged to Leland’s great-great-grandmother Iona. I found it where it had always been and wiped away the dust with the side of my fist. It was not locked and Fitz’s key didn’t fit the lock, either. I lifted the polished burled wood lid with its mother- of-pearl inlay surrounding the initials IEM.
Iona Esmé Montgomery’s velvet-lined jewelry box, which once held the Bessette family jewelry, was empty. Judging by that coat of dust, it had been that way for a long time.
I slept badly for a second night, despite the lingering effects of jet lag. When I woke the next morning I felt the same muddled lack of clarity I remembered from my days in the hospital, a nonrestful drug-induced slumber that, combined with the oppressive humidity, felt like someone had their foot on my chest. Downstairs a door slammed and I heard male voices.
I looked around the room, disoriented until memory clicked into place. I was home, not in France. I squinted at the alarm clock in the liquid gray light. Just after 5 A.M. Quinn said he was moving the winery operations over to the house today. He hadn’t wasted any time.
I got up and showered, changing into jeans and a black-and-white striped tank top. Quinn was in the dining room, pacing the floor, a mobile phone clamped to his ear, restless and seemingly impatient with whoever was on the other end of the line. Every time he passed the china cabinet, he picked up a different piece of my great- grandmother’s Limoges or her silver and studied it as he paced. He was still wearing the combat fatigues, but he’d swapped the Hawaiian shirt for a T-shirt with a Harley-Davidson logo on it. He hadn’t shaved, which made him look even scruffier than I remembered from yesterday. I went over and took a Sèvres bud vase out of his hand and set it back on the shelf. Then I went through to the kitchen.
I poured coffee and juice and made toast and slowly took everything out to the veranda on one of my mother’s hand-painted vintage Tole trays, my cane hooked over one arm. I sat on the stone wall at the edge of the veranda and looked out at the view.
Directly below me was a series of stepped-down terraces heavily planted with azaleas, rhododendrons, dogwood, and cherry trees. The vineyards were off to the north and south, where the terrain was gentler, and weren’t visible from here. Our property ended at a private gravel road that led to our neighbors’ stud farm. Their barns and the neat pastures outlined by split-rail fences, where a few horses grazed picturesquely, looked impeccable compared to the wilderness on our side of the road. Beyond their farm, the land rose gently again and became a forested ridge of deciduous trees that would turn flame-colored in autumn. Framing everything should have been the soft blue-gray layers of the Blue Ridge, but they had been whited out once again by the heat and humidity.
When people say “old as the hills” I’m sure they mean the Blue Ridge, which have existed since before the Himalayas came to be and were grandfather-old when the Alps erupted. Now they were worn to nubs, a smallish mountain range like a series of dowagers’ humps, just under five hundred miles long and not so wide you couldn’t hike across them in a day if you were determined.
The screen door banged behind me. Quinn sat down, coffee mug in hand, his legs dangling over the ledge. “I can borrow a few pieces of equipment from John Chappell over at Hogsback Mountain Winery.” He sipped his coffee. “When you see Eli, tell him I need to talk to him, will you? The motor on the destemmer’s broken. It’s going to cost eight hundred bucks, give or take, to get it fixed. I’ll need the money today.”
I was pretty sure Eli didn’t have that kind of spare cash lying around anywhere, after what Fitz had told me about the state of his finances. Nor had I realized the immediacy of our need for money.
“You mean…from Eli?”
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t care which one of you gives it to me, if that’s what you mean. I’ve been dealing with Eli for financial matters since…” He paused. “Since a few days ago. If you want to give it to me now that’s fine by me.”
“I’ll get it to you by the end of the day.”
His face was bland but his eyes were skeptical. “Fine, then. I’ll call Carlyle’s and order the part right now.”
The screen door banged shut as he left. I finished my coffee and followed him inside. Dominique, barefoot and wearing an oversized T-shirt from the prep school where Joe taught, was spooning fresh-ground coffee from the grinder into the coffeemaker. She looked up when she saw me and spilled coffee on the counter.
Her eyes looked like two bruises.
“I’ll take care of that.” I crossed the room and took the scoop out of her hands. “I like my coffee strong after two years in France but you’re making paint stripper.”
Her pale smile seemed more like a grimace. She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the counter and lit one with shaking hands.
“I thought you quit,” I said, wiping up the spilled coffee.
“I did.”
“You slept here last night?”
She exhaled a cloud of smoke through her nostrils. “I couldn’t stay at Joe’s. I wanted to come home. I tried not to wake you.”
“Are you all right?”
“Who would do this?” She chewed on a fingernail and her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t understand. Who would do such a thing?”
“Someone took the payroll money out of the safe in the lab. Bobby thinks Fitz might have surprised whoever it was.”
“I should have gone. I should have picked up those cases. He asked me to go for him and I…” She sucked hard on her cigarette. “It should have been me.”
I pushed the button on the coffeepot and after a second, it started to gurgle. “How long had he been depressed?” I asked. “How long had he been taking antidepressants?”
She looked stunned. “I don’t know. He was taking pills? How did you find that out?”
“I, uh, found them.”
“He’d stopped confiding in me. He was very angry with me.” She blew out another fierce stream of smoke. “The last time I spoke to him we argued. You can’t imagine how much I wish I could take it back and do it over again.” She froze. “
“It’s okay.” I picked up a dish and began washing it. “I’ve moved on.”
She looked at me shrewdly. “That’s a clean dish you’re washing.”
I set the dish on the counter and wiped my hands on the towel. “Okay, so I think about it.” I folded the dish towel, carefully aligning the edges and laid it on the counter. “I’m not Mother Teresa, but what’s the use? What’s done is done. I can’t think about ‘what if.’ That goes nowhere.”
She sucked hard on the cigarette again and eyed me up and down. “Then you are a saint. He walked away without a scratch on that beautiful face. If it was me, I’d want…I don’t know. I guess I’d want him to suffer, too.”
She squashed her cigarette in a saucer and sat down at the kitchen table, tracing a finger over a series of indentations in the soft pine. Eli’s math homework from about twenty years ago was memorialized when the numbers transferred through his paper to the table.
“It was an accident,” I said softly. “And I think we ought to change the subject.” I picked up the coffeepot. “Want some?”
She nodded as her mobile phone rang. “Hello…yes? Where? No, wait. Don’t do anything. I’ll be right over.” She disconnected and sighed, reaching for the coffee cup. “That was Joe. We’re still trying to figure out what to do
