want, I’ll call Knight’s in the morning and have your car towed for you.”
“Call who tonight?” Their halos were growing fuzzier. I could hardly make out the features on their faces anymore.
“
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Good.”
“Used to be Knight & Rust Auto Body. You remember, don’t you?” he said. “I still call it that ’cept now it’s Gas-o-Rama or some fool name, but they still got a halfway decent mechanic. Not as good as old Jimmy Knight, but then nobody’s as good as Jimmy, God rest his soul. Not even Rusty was that good. There wasn’t nothing he couldn’t fix if your car was acting up. Did great body work, too. He coulda fixed this car so it would look newer than the day you bought it.”
“Hollis,” Ellie warned. “There you go, running your mouth again. She’s gonna faint or something. Let’s get her out of here.”
Ellie was still fussing about the hospital, but when Hollis fished my cane out of the Volvo, I managed to walk reasonably steadily to their car, leaning on his arm. They agreed, reluctantly, to take me home.
As soon as they drove away I locked the front door. The lock groaned when I turned the key, nearly frozen from lack of use. I slid the deadbolt into place with some effort, then went into Leland’s study and knelt by his gun locker. His old .22-caliber handgun was where he’d always kept it and so was the ammunition. I loaded the gun and—with excruciating slowness—climbed the stairs to my bedroom. No more sleeping on the veranda.
I lay in bed, exhausted and aching, the thrumming noise of the old fan blowing barely cooled air over me acting like white noise, blocking out all thoughts.
Except one.
Someone tried to kill me tonight out on Mosby’s Highway.
Chapter 19
It was still dark when my alarm went off. I turned on the light and saw the gun. It took a moment before I remembered why I’d put it there and still longer before I remembered that the reason the alarm had gone off so early was because today was harvest. I sat up, moving like an arthritic marionette. The first thing I did was unload the bullets, putting them and the gun in the drawer of my nightstand. My head throbbed from the effort.
I took a shower that turned my skin the color of cooked lobster. It helped the stiffness but I needed drugs. I had forgotten about the bottle of postaccident painkillers that was still in the medicine cabinet. Past its sell-by date, but they’d still be potent. My hand hovered between that bottle and the ibuprofen next to it.
It had been pure hell weaning myself from the pain-free bliss of those drugs. Right now it would be so easy to start again.
I picked up the ibuprofen and took two with a glass of water. Then I shook out a half dozen bullet-shaped capsules and shoved them in my jeans pocket. I flushed the pain pills down the toilet.
Surprisingly after two cups of coffee and a toasted baguette, the ibuprofen kicked in and I felt somewhat human. Eli’s bicycle was in the carriage house, but I wasn’t sure I could navigate the pedals with my bad foot and my aching joints. There was nothing else with wheels or a motor that was going to get me to the winery. The darkness was slowly fading and the air was cool and still. I decided to walk.
Quinn was kneeling by a small pump on the crush pad, fiddling with a hose clamp when I finally got there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a goofy-looking straw hat instead of the customary fatigues and Hawaiian print.
He looked surprised to see me. “I didn’t hear your car.”
“I walked. The Volvo’s in the shop.”
“You should have called. Someone would have run you over.”
I knew what he meant, but it still sounded strange. “It’s okay. Have we got enough help?”
“Ten guys from the camp. We should be good.”
“Angela coming, too?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Check those hoses, will you, and make sure the clamps are fitted securely? I’m going out to the field to get the first lot of lugs.”
“Sure.”
Whatever he had or hadn’t done in California, right now I needed him. Before he took off in the Gator our eyes met. What happened from now on depended on his judgment and intuition and how much we didn’t screw up what the grapes had already done for us. We are, essentially, farmers, tied to the whims of nature however much we try to control our destiny and the fruits of our harvest. Despite his arrogant cockiness, I could tell he was wrestling with the nerve-wracking second-guessing that happens when there are no sure bets. By the end of the morning we’d have a pretty good idea whether he was right…or wrong.
He left for the fields, the flatbed trailer fishtailing in the red clay dust as he sped away. I walked over to the pump and slowly bent down to check the clamps on the hoses as he’d asked.
In the distance, the putt-putting of the Gator sounded like bees at their hive. Hector was probably riding on the trailer as it moved up and down the rows, jumping off to pick up the lugs where the men had left them under the cooler shade of the vines. Occasionally the workers called out to each other in Spanish. Though a mechanical harvester—which looked like an alien space creature on stilts—could bring in the grapes faster and cheaper, we still picked by hand as they’d been doing since the time of the Romans. Most vineyards, the good ones, at least, did it the same way.
By the time Quinn arrived back at the crush pad with a full load of lugs, the rest of the crew was waiting. Someone turned up the volume on a boombox. One by one the men stripped off their shirts, laughing and singing with the pulsating Spanish beat. Quinn jumped off the Gator and started handing the lugs piled with translucent green-gold grapes to workers who set them on the scales. After they were weighed someone tipped the contents into the destemmer, then hurled the empty container onto a growing mountain of yellow plastic bins on the ground nearby.
Quinn joined me, eating grapes he’d picked from a bunch off one of the lugs. “Here, try these. They’re good. Nearly everything’s ripe.” He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the racket of the destemmer as it spat barky stems into a barrel.
Even at this early stage it was possible to tell what the final product would be. I ate the grapes he’d handed me. He was right. They were good.
“All right,
The heavy-duty hose swayed like a snake being charmed as he flipped the switch on the pump. I held on though the jolting reactivated every ache and pain the ibuprofen had quelled. I gritted my teeth and watched the sludgy mass of grapes work its way from the destemmer toward the press. It would take a couple of trips from the field before the press, a large stainless-steel tank with an enormous drum, was filled. But after so much rushing to get the grapes in before the heat became oppressive, at this stage we had to slow things down. The process of gently squeezing the grapes to release the juice would take an hour or two, depending on how much Quinn wanted to extract. Pressing too hard would make the liquid harsh and bitter so it was his judgment call when to stop.
The hose continued to thrash about in my hands as the last of the grapes moved into the press. “I’m going back to the field,” Quinn said to me. “What’s wrong? You got a toothache or something? Why are you making that face?”
“I think I pulled a muscle last night. You go on back to the field.”
He shrugged and left as a voice behind me said, “Here. I got that.” Joe Dawson took the hose out of my hands. “You don’t look too good, sweetheart.”
I took two more ibuprofen out of my pocket. “I’m okay. Pulled muscle. Thanks for the help.” I took the pills with a cup of tepid water from one of the nearby coolers we left out for the crew.
