When I arrived at Mosby’s Ruins, Quinn Santori was helping Dominique set up for the dinner, along with Hector and the rest of the crew. The cast of
Quinn took the cash Mac had given me and stuffed it in his pocket without a word. It was hard to tell if he was surprised that I actually showed up with it, since he immediately turned his attention to two sweat-drenched Mexicans who were stoking the coals in the charcoal pit underneath the gently hissing, sizzling pig.
I joined Dominique, who was setting up buffet tables and covering another in aluminum foil to be used later as a carving station for the meat.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. We started laying ropes of ivy down the middle of the row of linen-covered picnic tables, twining them around the bases of the hurricane lamps she’d placed every few feet. “Did Fitz know about the problem with the equipment you ordered?”
“Are you asking if he knew about the money?” She nodded, smiling thinly, but I noticed she was strangling a piece of ivy. “He was as mad as a wet blanket.”
“Was that what you argued about the day before he died?”
“No.” One of the lamps teetered precariously as she jerked another piece of ivy and moved it into place. I caught the lamp before it tipped over. “
Ivy didn’t require this much angst. Changing the subject had been deliberate.
“So what did you argue about? Did you know you were overheard fighting in his office?”
She looked at me like I’d betrayed her. “We were arguing—discussing—whether his forgetfulness was the beginning of Alzheimer’s.” She reached into the pocket of her paisley Capri pants and fished out a smashed pack of cigarettes. “Don’t look so shocked. You weren’t the only one he kept in the dark. He managed to pull the rug over everyone’s eyes. Both his parents had it so he figured it was probably inevitable. His mother once attacked his father with a carving knife because she thought he was an intruder.”
“Oh my God.”
“It was an accident that I found out about his parents.” She bent and cupped her hand around her cigarette as she lit it. “I bet that’s why he was taking antidepressants.”
“Eli said he was drinking too much.”
“He was. I think it was all related.” A cloud of smoke floated through her words.
“So what was he forgetting?”
“The usual. Names. Faces. Where he left his glasses or keys.” She shrugged. “I did some reading about it and I talked to Dr. Greenwood. You know it’s fatal, don’t you?”
“No.” I tied a small strand of ivy into a knot. “I didn’t.”
“Well, by that time, the person is delusional, like his mother was, or has hallucinations. It’s a horrible, undignified death at the end. You lose control of…everything.”
“Do you think he might have been delusional the other night at the winery? Thought someone was after him or something?”
“Dr. Greenwood—Ross—told me it’s a gradual decline. I don’t think he was at that stage yet.” She sucked on her cigarette. “But what do I know?”
“Fitz thought Leland’s death wasn’t an accident.”
She nodded and exhaled out of the corner of her mouth.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Bobby says it was. I believe Bobby.”
“Did you tell Bobby any of this? About the Alzheimer’s, I mean? I assume he questioned you.”
My cousin looked at me assessingly, then let her cigarette drop to the ground. “Of course I told him. I am not stupid,
We finished arranging the last table in silence. Then she said, “I’m going back to the inn to take care of a few things. I want you to go home and change. Eli threw a fit about wearing Elizabethan costumes, so I decided to forget the whole idea. Be back here at five-thirty. Wear something pretty.”
“Of course.”
“And, Lucie?”
“What?”
“If you loved Fitz, you will say nothing about this. Bobby will keep it confidential, of course. And no one else needs to know. So promise me,
Another request for my silence. Dominique had as many secrets as Eli did. I shrugged. “Sure.”
By the time I got back to the house to shower and change, Randy had come and gone. The spaces where the furniture had been—particularly the clock—screamed mute reproach at what I’d done. Dust bunnies the size of small boulders rolled across the floor like tumbleweed in the prairie. Though it was cooler inside than outside, I was sweating as I walked from room to room. The house was eerily silent.
I was in the shower with cold water sluicing over me when I figured out what was wrong. I hadn’t heard the asthmatic hum of the air conditioner as it cycled on and off. When Highland House was built, there had been no heat, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They’d been added over the years as they became commonplace in most homes, generally in the late 1800s. Leland was the one who put in the air-conditioning. Unlike the heat and the electricity, which were added externally, the ductwork had to be tunneled throughout the house, which meant tearing into the lathe and plaster walls and making a colossal mess. My mother said afterward that Leland had handed over our money to the P. T. Barnum of the cooling business who knew a sucker when he saw one and promptly went bankrupt partway through the job. Leland found a retired plumber with dubious credentials who finished the work for a cut-rate price and, as we discovered later, installed a system that was left over from another construction project. It was too small for our house but by the time we figured out why the upper floors were always a lot warmer than the downstairs, it was too late to do anything.
I wrapped a bath towel around myself and wandered through the bedrooms, placing my hand in front of the vents to feel whether any air, cool or otherwise, was blowing through them and maybe I was mistaken.
I wasn’t.
We needed every penny of the money Mac had given me to get through harvest. I might even have to sell a few more pieces of furniture, though if I kept that up, I’d be sleeping on the floor before long. Fixing the air- conditioning was a luxury.
Anyway, it was nearly the end of August. From one day to the next, the light would change from the white- hot glare of summer to the slanting pale gold of autumn that would finish ripening the vines. The hammering heat would recede and the days would be pleasantly bearable for harvest.
I could sleep in the hammock on the veranda. Somewhere in the attic, there should be a few portable fans. I’d done without air-conditioning in France for two years and I could get along without it for a few more weeks.
The dinner at the Ruins went well, under the circumstances. Most of the guests were unfamiliar faces and there were a lot of D.C. and Maryland license plates in the parking lot, so at least there were some folks who weren’t scared off by our macabre news. At dusk, we lit the candles in the hurricane lamps, which made a pretty necklace of yellow lights down the middle of the road, supplemented by the dancing orange flickering of the fireflies and the fairy lights in the nearby trees. Later still, Hector lit citronella torches, which glowed serenely in the still night air along the pathway leading to the amphitheater in front of Mosby’s Ruins. The quiet clink of glasses and china and the indistinguishable murmuring of voices was peaceable and pleasant.
I glanced over at Eli, who had come straight from his office, shirtsleeves rolled up, as he helped Quinn open bottle after bottle of the Pinot Noir we were serving with the roast pork. Earlier he came to me and said quietly, “I’ve got Austin and Erica Kendall coming over to take a look at the house tomorrow. I’ll fill you in after dinner.”
Austin Kendall was another Romeo and the owner of the largest real estate agency in Loudoun and Fauquier
