“Because it
This time I did knock the wineglass over. It shattered into silvery slivers on the marble floor.
Murders don’t happen in Atoka, Virginia. People don’t even litter there. Thelma Johnson, who owns the general store, leaves the side window unlatched so the delivery boy from the bakery can climb through to leave his fresh-baked muffins and doughnuts if he gets there earlier than she does. The town is as wholesome and all- American as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
“What was that noise?” Eli asked.
“A glass…fell over. Eli, did somebody murder Leland?”
“No one murdered Leland. It was an accident, just like I told you.” He was no longer yelling, but he sounded tense and edgy.
I massaged my forehead, which was now throbbing not just from a mistral-induced headache, but from this surreal conversation. Eli’s story still didn’t sound right. He’d left something out. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I am not going into it over the phone. We’ll talk when you get here.”
“Eli!”
“I’ve got another call. I’ve got to go. Call me and let me know when your flight arrives. I’ll come get you. We’ll discuss the rest of it then.”
I said, “The rest of what?” to dead air.
I stood up and reached for my cane. In the dim light a large shard from the broken wineglass glimmered faintly. I bent to pick it up and saw the blood on my finger before I felt the knifelike edge slice my skin. It was a superficial cut, long and shallow, but the kind that bled like a geyser. By the time I made it from the kitchen to the bathroom in search of a bandage, a red Rorschach trail spattered the cream-colored marble of the stairs and the hallway.
I got to the toilet just before I threw up. Afterward, I sat in the dark on the cool floor of the enormous old bathroom and leaned my head against the wall, pressing on my finger to stop the bleeding. My head still ached.
Eli’s brusque, abbreviated account of Leland’s death was more disturbing than if he’d told me every detail. My imagination, left to run riot in the complete darkness of a lavender-scented night, conjured scenes from horror movies. Hector’s dogs yapping next to Leland’s blood-soaked body, lying there for hours in the blistering late- summer heat. Had he suffered? Had he known he was dying?
I stood up and found bandages in the medicine cabinet. Then I packed my bags.
Later I replayed in my mind that phone conversation with Eli. He’d been more than a little opaque about the details of Leland’s death. And he wanted to get the funeral over with as quickly as possible.
Odd that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me why over the phone.
Was my brother trying to cover up our father’s murder?
Chapter 2
I always ask for a window seat on an airplane so I can watch cities, mountains, forests, and rivers shrink to toylike size, distilled to their most intense colors and compact shapes. From the air, the sun-bleached city of Nice is sand and terra-cotta, its patina-worn limestone buildings with their bright orange roofs densely packed along the beaches at the Promenade des Anglais. The plane’s shadow moved like a bird across the tropical water of the Bay of Angels, which shifted from aquamarine to amethyst and finally to iridescent azure in the strong Mediterranean sunshine.
The last time I’d seen it like this was when I’d arrived, intending to stay for a month or two after I got out of the hospital. But the healing process—both physical and emotional—would not be hurried. I remained, as the months lengthened into seasons and finally, two years passed. Slowly I fell in love with the south of France.
Who wouldn’t? Life was endlessly pleasurable, even a bit hedonistic, on the sun-drenched, sensual Côte d’Azur. It moved slower here. It was uncomplicated. I’d found a job as an English language tour guide at the International Perfume Museum in Grasse. Pleasant and undemanding, it suited me fine. I moved slower, too, and I understood, finally, that it was going to be like that for the rest of my life.
When I left Virginia, Leland had given me the keys to the farmhouse we’d inherited from my mother’s family. He might have warned me that it was now a shambles, but of course he didn’t. One look at the place and I knew he’d stopped paying our caretaker, Jean-Luc, who used to keep the eighteenth-century
The first time I slept there during a rainstorm I discovered how badly the roof leaked. The plumbing dated back to Napoleon. The electrical wiring had a short somewhere, which meant that switching on a light or turning on the toaster could produce a life-threatening shock. I was forced to assert my ownership against the assaults of territorial and incontinent birds that dwelled in the eaves. In short, I inhabited a ruin.
I advertised for a handyman, offering somewhat steady work in return for room and board and that’s how Philippe came into my life. Before long, he moved into my bedroom. They say you get what you pay for and he came free of charge, but in those days I didn’t care. In the beginning, it was all bliss.
Before I left for the airport I’d written Philippe a note, which I taped to a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, explaining what had happened. It was one of the two places I knew he would look when he finally returned to France. I’d taken my wallet with me. Philippe would drift home when his money ran out.
As Eli predicted, I slept on the trip across the Atlantic. When I woke, we’d left the gray-blue ocean behind and the plane was starting its descent. We moved inland and the landscape unrolled in pale green and clay-red checkerboards anchored by farmhouses, barns, and silos with silver domes that flashed like lighthouses when the sun caught them. In the distance the hazy sweep of the low-slung Blue Ridge Mountains bracketed the view.
My family owned nearly five hundred acres near the small village of Atoka in the heart of Virginia’s affluent horse and hunt country. As the crow flies, it was about fifty miles from Washington, D.C. Our land had belonged to a member of the Montgomery family for more than two hundred years, a grant to my ancestor Hamish Montgomery for service to his country in the French and Indian War. He’d called it Highland Farm in honor of his regiment, the 77th Highlanders, whose exploits in that war were legendary.
The farm was located in an area that straddled Loudoun and Fauquier Counties, a part of the Old Dominion romantically famous not only for great scenic beauty but also as a history-haunted place of glory and tragedy. The streets of Middleburg, the town next door to Atoka, were named for the patriots who founded the country— Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, among others—a number of whom had lived locally. It was also the site of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, or as we preferred to call it, “The War Between the States.”
Twenty years ago my parents decided to try planting vines on a few acres—my mother’s passion, mostly. Before her death six years ago she had talked unceasingly about Virginia as the first place in the New World where anyone had tried to produce wine. She believed that what we were doing now was part of a historic continuum begun at the Jamestown settlements and spurred on by Thomas Jefferson, who had done much to foster a wine industry in the Commonwealth. I still remember her studying his vineyard notes from Monticello like some kind of Bible—Jefferson was considered the patron saint of Virginia vineyards—and that faraway look she’d get in her eyes.
Then she would take me out in the fields where she taught me about the cycle of
I hadn’t.
Eli was waiting for me, as promised, when I pushed my luggage cart through the double doors into the main
