So to punish me, to let me know there were others, she made sure I was her doctor of choice for all her female problems. At least I never had to help her with an abortion. Thank God she couldn’t have kids.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
“Couldn’t. She had the surgery so she’d never have to worry.”
“I had no idea.”
“Don’t repeat this, Lucie. Ever.”
“Of course not.”
He laid his hand heavily on my shoulder, like he was suddenly weary, and draped his shirt around him like a collar. “I have to live with myself for what I did,” he said. “So I figure I’ve been punished enough. Maybe now I’ll get some closure, now that she’s dead.”
“Sure,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
He turned away and headed toward the clinic without looking back. Closure, maybe. But didn’t that confession give Marty a motive for murder, too?
Chapter 12
I drove slowly back to the vineyard. Sometimes there’s nothing worse than being alone with your own thoughts. Marty’s secret hung around my neck like a noose.
I called Quinn from the car and asked if he needed me in the barrel room. He sounded surprised. “I thought we were gonna sort out the Chardonnay once and for all. You sound weird. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I’ll be there.” I disconnected before he had another chance to quiz me.
But Quinn, like me, also seemed distracted as we made the final decisions about yeast and sugar content. “There’s not going to be enough oak in the finish,” he said. “So I think we ought to hang the chips in the tanks for a while.”
My mother and Jacques had been purists. They produced our wine based on the grapes God gave us and the decisions they’d made in the barrel room ever since harvest. When it was time to finally bottle it, they believed you worked with what you had. So there was no excessive fiddling or changing the wine they’d ended up with. Hanging a bag of oak chips in one of the stainless-steel tanks was the speed-dial equivalent of making unoaked wine taste like it had just spent the past nine months gracefully aging in oak barrels—in about an hour. Jacques would have thought it was cheating. Quinn thought it was brilliant.
Today I didn’t feel like disagreeing with him. “Fine,” I said, “we’ll do it that way.”
“We’ll bottle Friday,” he said. “I’ve got to get the bottling equipment in tomorrow. Plus the rootstock is arriving.”
“If we’re done here I think I’ll head back to the house to change before everyone shows up later,” I said.
“Shows up?”
“Austin’s reception. You reminded me about it this morning.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.”
There is a French expression my mother often used when someone was behaving oddly or out of character.
I had no idea where we were.
I tore Ross’s envelope open as I walked through the front door of my house. A brochure from a company that made orthotics. He’d circled one of the models, a clunky affair that wrapped around the ankle and foot like a molded plastic boot. I stared at it. How did you wear shoes—normal shoes—with a contraption like that? I shoved the brochure back in the envelope. No way. If I wore one of those, I’d look crippled.
I started to slowly climb the stairs when Mia appeared at the top of the landing. Dressed in a short blue jean skirt, white camisole, and high-heeled beaded sandals, she looked pretty and fresh. She froze in midstep when she saw me.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I live here. Going somewhere?” I shouldn’t have let my anger over what Kit had told me about the police blotter show, but I was tired. This would be another showdown.
“Out.”
Might as well get right to it. “I heard about the misdemeanor charge for public drunkenness. Nice going.”
She stomped down the stairs until she stood a step above me. It gave her the psychological advantage of looking down on me. “Who told you?”
“Kit gave me a preview of tomorrow’s weekly police blotter.”
Her face grew pale. “Oh, crap. That’s just great. It’s going to be in the
“Yep.”
“It was just a stupid fine. I paid it already. So it’s not like I had to go to court or anything.”
“Yeah, but next time you
“No, I won’t.” She banged down the last few stairs in the high heels and then across the foyer, long-legged as a colt, ponytail bouncing like an angry exclamation mark.
“Hey!” I called. “Are you coming home tonight? Or are you still sleeping over at Abby Lang’s?”
She spun around. “I’m not sleeping at Abby’s, that’s for sure. Neither is she. I don’t know what we’re doing tonight.”
I stared at my sister. That last remark sounded more desperate than threatening. She meant it that she really didn’t know what she was doing. Kind of a leitmotif for her life right now. But it would probably be whatever came easiest in the heat of a what-the-hell night.
“Come home, Mimi,” I said gently. “Please?”
She seemed to waver. “I don’t know. I’ll see. Anyway, we’ve got plenty of places to stay.”
“Why isn’t Abby sleeping at her house anymore?”
She threw her hands up in the air. “Because her dad is so totally flipped out about the cops showing up and asking him about Georgia Greenwood. And he’s, like, going nuts because he wants to get nominated to be vice president. Abby’s going to the convention in San Francisco and she might take time off from school to campaign with him. She says it will be so cool.” She splayed her feet sideways like a young girl would do and it made her seem infinitely more vulnerable. “But this Georgia stuff could wreck everything if it gets out about him being with her the night she was murdered.”
“Are you saying Georgia was sleeping with Abby’s dad?”
Mia looked disgusted. “God, no. He didn’t even like her.”
“Then why did he support her campaign?”
“I dunno. Why don’t you ask him?” She pulled out her mobile phone from a tiny purse and looked at the display. “It’s five-thirty already. I gotta go. See you maybe tomorrow.”
“Please be careful with the drinking. The next time you get caught—”
“Lucie,” she said impatiently, “give it a rest. I have no intention of getting caught again. ’Bye.”
The door slammed and I heard her car engine start a moment later.
It wasn’t until I was standing in the shower with the water sluicing over me that I thought again about what she meant by that last remark. She wasn’t going to stop drinking.
She just wasn’t going to get caught when she did.
I was surprised to see Bonita setting wineglasses on the bar when I arrived at the villa. The college-kid outfit she had on this morning when I first saw her had been replaced by an elegant black and white knit top, cropped
