At five-thirty I fixed a tray with four wineglasses, four plates, a basket of crackers, and Dominique’s tapenade in the villa’s small kitchen. Quinn found me uncorking a bottle of wine at the bar.
“Bobby is gonna smell a setup a mile away.” He picked up the bottle and whistled. “Where’d you get a bottle of Angelus? I’ve never seen that. An eighty-dollar bottle of wine ought to buy you plenty of help.”
“Leland’s wine cellar,” I said. “And it’s not a setup. All of us can have drinks on the terrace. It’ll be easier to talk that way.”
“He’s gonna hate this.”
Bobby and Kit arrived at six sharp. I smiled and Bobby’s eyes grew wary as his eyes slid from Kit to me.
“Told you,” Quinn said under his breath.
“Hi,” said Kit brightly. “Here we are.”
“How about a drink? We can sit on the terrace,” I said. “Hey, Bobby. Thanks for coming.”
Quinn poured a small amount of wine into his glass, then filled the others before finally topping off his own. I passed the crackers and tapenade.
“What is this stuff?” Bobby asked.
“Tapenade,” I said.
Kit spread some liberally on a cracker and took a bite. “Kind of a fancy olive dip,” she said, licking a finger. “Try it. It’s good.”
We clinked glasses and drank, then Bobby said, “What gives, Lucie? You want to talk about Ross Greenwood, don’t you?”
I set my wineglass down. “What if we can prove Ross couldn’t have killed Georgia?”
“Then you would know more than the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department does.”
He spoke with such complete conviction that it rattled me. “What if we get Emilio and Marta to talk to you? And they say Ross was at their place all night delivering their twins?” I folded my hands in my lap and squeezed them tightly together like I was praying. And waited.
“Lucie,” Bobby said carefully, “we think we have a strong case or we wouldn’t have arrested him.”
“You could be wrong! How could he have killed her if he was with them?”
“Bring them to the station,” he said, “and we’ll talk.”
“They won’t go to the station,” Quinn said. “They’re scared they’ll be deported.”
“That won’t happen.”
“Marta’s son was involved in a gang fight recently. He managed to slope off before he got picked up,” Quinn said.
“I know,” Bobby said. “Kid’s only fourteen. Marta oughta pay more attention to what he’s up to or she’ll be visiting him in juvie before his next birthday.”
“What about meeting her and Emilio here at the vineyard?” I asked.
“Set it up and call me.”
“It is set up. Ten o’clock tomorrow night. Here in the parking lot.”
Bobby’s eyes held mine and his mouth twitched. “What a surprise.”
“Will you come?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll come. And now I got something to ask you.”
I sat up straight. “Yes?”
“I’ve had the day from hell. Your wine’s real good, but I’d give anything for a cold beer. You got anything like that around here?”
Our luck with the glorious weather—clear, sharp sunshine, azure sky, tufts of cottonball cumulus clouds— continued on Sunday, the day of our first annual “Memorial Day Weekend Run Through the Vineyard.” It had been my idea to raise money for the soup kitchen near Bluemont where we often donated leftover food from our events. As soon as we announced it, Blue Ridge Federal, the
About three hundred people signed up to run. The course started in front of the winery and, for the more serious runners, consisted of a ten-kilometer circuit through the south vineyard along the service road, then down Atoka Road to our main entrance and up Sycamore Lane. For the less intrepid, it was four and a half laps around Sycamore Lane, which was exactly five kilometers. There also was a 2k fun walk-run for anyone who just wanted to stretch their legs.
Quinn had thought we could pace off the course using the odometer in the El.
“Absolutely not,” I had said. “We’ll get Marty Gamble to come over with a measuring wheel and walk off an accurately measured course. He runs with the Downtown Athletic Club.”
“The place that used to give the Heisman Trophy? No fooling?” Quinn rubbed his chin with his thumb.
“No, no. This is a group of guys over in Leesburg. They meet at the Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“What’s the difference between the odometer and that wheel thing?” Quinn asked.
“If you’re a runner,” I explained, “you’re always trying for a personal best. If we’re sloppy and it’s really an almost-but-not-quite-ten-k, then just imagine what happens when some guy is high-fiving his buddy and whooping and hollering after he crosses the finish line because he’s sure he just shaved ten or twenty seconds off his best time. You want to be the one to tell him it’s fifty meters short?”
“Okay,” he’d said. “I get your point.”
So I was surprised when Quinn met me at the villa first thing in the morning wearing running shorts and a T- shirt. There is no time when I am more aware of the limitations of my disability than when it comes to sports. In high school, Kit and I had run cross-country and I’d been pretty competitive, but those days were gone forever. When I was in the hospital, my physical therapist had been an adorable ninety-nine-pound sprite who looked like she’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I found out soon enough that she’d trained with the Marines and their elite “tip of the spear” lead-the-pack aggressiveness had rubbed off on her but good. She ended every one of our sessions with a sweet smile and the promise that she would be back the next day to, as she said, “kick your butt from hell to breakfast.”
Besides Ross, she was the best thing that happened to me, accident-wise. Part of kicking my butt meant she never let me feel sorry for myself and, hard-ass that she was, she wasted no pity on me, either. “Listen to me, Lucie,” she’d said during one of our sessions, “your disability is a part of who you are now, but it isn’t all of who you are. It doesn’t define you. Don’t make it that way.”
I hadn’t. But days like this were still hard.
“I didn’t know you were going to run,” I said now to Quinn. “You never mentioned it.”
He looked embarrassed. “Bonita talked me into it.”
“Good for you. You doing the ten-k or the five-k?”
“My pride wants to do the ten-k like a hot dog, but my knees are telling me to do the five-k.” He grinned, still self-conscious.
I laughed. “Listen to your knees.”
Then he turned serious. “Manolo called. He’s gonna pick up Emilio tonight after he gets off work. He should be here by ten.”
“What about Marta and the babies? I got the money.”
“He didn’t say one way or the other,” Quinn said.
“I’m not sure Bobby will buy this without the children there,” I said.
“Then you’d better pray to whoever you pray to that they come.”
Almost all of our events at the vineyard—except for apple picking—are geared to adults since they revolve around wine, but the daytime charity race brought families with children. Some of the parents ran with their kids and a few pushed baby strollers as they walked and chatted during the laps around Sycamore Lane. Besides the local Girl Scout troop handing out bottled water along the way, we gave flavored Popsicles to the kids and before long every child had a brightly colored tongue.
Sera surprised us by showing up with Hector, who had just gotten out of the hospital the day before. “I didn’t want him to come,” she murmured. “But you know him. He insisted.”