I knew Angela Stetson had arrived as soon as the catcalls and wolf whistles began. Dressed in bottom- skimming blue jean cutoffs, she also wore a deep V-neck hot pink halter top with “Babe” written in silver sequins and stiltlike hot-pink sandals.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Who in the world is that?” Joe asked.
“Your eyes look like they’re bugging out of your head,” I said. “It’s Angela Stetson. Quinn’s girlfriend. I thought you knew her.”
“What’d she do? Have a whole body transplant? Didn’t she go to school with you? I don’t remember her looking like that.”
“She took a lot of vitamins. Reel your tongue back in and keep an eye on things, will you? I need to talk to her.”
Angela appeared to be reveling in the attention she was getting as the men continued to grin and wink at her. She’d come a long way from her Marian-the-librarian persona of our high school days.
“Okay,
“Can I talk to you?” I asked her. “Somewhere out of this heat?”
We walked together to the open hangar door to the barrel room.
Though it was only 9 A.M., the sun was already boiling. The air smelled of sweet wine mixed with the faintly unpleasant tinge of carbon dioxide as the grapes began fermenting. Black flies edged the outlines of the hangar door and yellow jackets swarmed anywhere we’d spilled the sweet, sticky grape juice. Quinn had turned the fans on earlier to clear out the CO2, but overnight it would build up in the airtight room to levels that could kill a person. We stepped inside. It was marginally cooler.
“I’ve never done this before.” Angela was chewing gum. “I think I’m overdressed.”
“Actually, you’re dressed too nicely. Those clothes are going to be filthy when you’re done.”
“I thought they stomped grapes in the nude.”
“Uh, some French vineyards still do it that way, but not us. It’s pretty boring but we use a nine-iron from Leland’s set of golf clubs and Eli’s old baseball bat.”
“That’s kind of special.” She arched an eyebrow. She’d worn full makeup, too. “Well, no big deal. I’m, like, totally washable. What did you want to ask me?”
“I was wondering if you knew whether Sara Rust is working at Mom’s Place tonight?”
“Nope. Not tonight or any other night. She quit yesterday. Gave Vinnie her notice and said she’s leaving town.”
“Why? Did something happen?”
“What do I look like, her mother? How should I know? We don’t talk a lot.” She blew a bubble and popped it. “But I heard from one of the other girls that she had enough and she wanted out.”
“Vinnie too hard on her?”
“Vinnie’s a pussycat. Nah, it was something else. Someone’s, like, stalking her. Some old guy was creeping her out, so she’s splitting. At least that’s what Desiree said.”
I thought of my pursuer last night in the black SUV. Whoever he was, he didn’t seem like an “old guy.” The car, the speed. Someone young. “Did she know who it was?”
“Nope.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you asking so many questions? What’s it to you?”
“Lucie!” Joe’s voice cut through a lull as someone turned the pump off. He was waving a mobile phone. “Dominique says she needs you right now down at the gazebo. Something about harvest lunch.”
“Tell her I’ll be right there.” I turned to Angela. “Sorry. I better go. Thanks for the information.”
“Yeah, sure.” She was looking past me to where Quinn had just pulled up on the crush pad. He jumped out of the Gator and she ran to him, hanging her arms around his neck and swinging on him. He grinned foolishly down at her and put his silly hat on her head. They were like a couple of love-struck teenagers.
I left without looking back.
Dominique seemed tense and unhappy when I found her standing in the gazebo in front of a Limoges vase of pink and white roses.
“Can you take over today and run harvest lunch for me?” she asked.
“Sure. Why? Are you okay?”
She set down the pair of gardening clippers she’d been using to even the lengths of the roses. “Bobby called. He wants to see me.” She began haphazardly sticking roses in the vase.
“Give me those. I’ll do that.” I took the clippers. “Well, go talk to him then. How bad can it be?”
Her cigarettes were next to the vase. She picked up the packet and extracted one. “I don’t have an alibi for the time of Fitz’s death. I was alone at the inn when he was killed.”
“You didn’t do it, Dominique. There must have been someone who saw you. Do you remember what time you got to Joe’s?”
“Sure I remember. Two o’clock. I was listening to Gregory’s radio program in the car. He was talking to someone who wanted to know if she should leave her husband after twenty-four years of marriage because she fell in love with her UPS guy.” She lit her cigarette.
“Oh, yuck. Don’t tell me what he told her.” I finished with the vase. “Bobby can check on that. He should be able to ask Greg. They must keep some kind of log or record of callers.”
“Maybe.” She dumped the barely smoked cigarette into a Styrofoam cup of water. “Can you believe he told me if I don’t show up on my own he will send someone for me with the cuff links?”
“I can’t believe he’d do something like that.”
“I’d better go.” She gave me the list of lunch guests and left, still looking grim.
After I finished at the gazebo I borrowed Hector’s blue pickup and drove back to the house to change. Leland’s folder with the information on the Blue Ridge Consortium was still on his bedside table next to the phone. I sat on the bed and called Sara Rust’s number.
Her answering machine kicked in again and this time I left a message. “Hello, Sara, this is Lucie Montgomery. I’m a friend of Angela Stetson’s and I was wondering if I could talk to you. Angela said you’re leaving town and…”
“Hello? Who is this?” Monitoring her calls.
“My name is Lucie Montgomery and I…”
“Mia’s sister. Yeah, I know. Is she okay?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised. “She’s fine. I was wondering if we might meet?”
“Why?”
Angela was right about her being scared. “I think we have something in common. We ought to talk.”
“I’m sure we don’t, but if you want talk it’ll cost you.” I heard a click, like a cigarette lighter, then an expelled breath. “Fifteen minutes. A hundred bucks.”
“A hundred…? Oh, come on!”
“Good-bye.”
“Wait! Okay. A hundred dollars.”
“A hundred and fifty.”
“You just said one hundred!”
“Those were old prices, from a minute ago. Yes or no?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But since I’m paying for this, we’ll meet when it’s convenient for me. Three o’clock. And I’ll pay you
“What do I care? Fifteen minutes, as long as it’s before six and you come to me.” She gave me directions to an address in Aldie, then disconnected.
I changed into a white eyelet skirt and white sleeveless blouse and drove back to the vineyard.
Harvest lunch was a tradition established by my mother and Fitz. Jacques continued it after her death, though he abandoned the practice of having guests each day during harvest since we were generally running flat out and couldn’t spare the time or the manpower to take guests around the vineyard. More important, my mother wasn’t there to hostess the event, which included chaperoning the guests to make sure no one got too near the equipment or decided to take one of the bung hole covers out of an oak barrel “just to see” what was inside. The one time that happened, we didn’t discover it for months and ended up with a couple hundred bucks worth of red wine vinegar instead of a few thousand dollars of Pinot Noir.
