Pluto.”
“Pardon?”
“Pluto. One minute it’s the ninth planet in the solar system, the next it’s bumped off the list and relegated to being a dwarf.”
“That’s what’s on your mind?” I didn’t smell alcohol on him. Why was he talking about that? “Pluto?”
“Despite the demotion it’s still the same ice ball it always was. Still takes 248 years to revolve around the sun because of its wonky orbit. Nothing’s changed except what people call it.”
“That’s too bad.” I watched him light his cigar. The flare of the match illuminated his face. He, too, looked the same as he always did, even though he sounded like he’d temporarily lost a marble or two.
“In its planet days, it was the planet that ruled Scorpio.”
“Really?” I read my horoscope for fun and believed it when it suited me.
“Nic’s a Scorpio. She’s really into all that voodoo junk.”
I waited.
“Did you know,” he said, “that Pluto’s moon—Charon—is bigger than it is and they orbit in a kind of dumbbell formation like they’re permanently locked in a power struggle to see which one can dominate?”
“I did not know that.”
“Kind of a metaphor for our marriage,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
He expelled a cloud of smoke. “Don’t be. It’s over. You know what else? It’s the goddamn planet of power and destruction and corruption. That is my beautiful ex-wife to a T. Almost makes you believe all that horseshit.”
“This is about what happened with Bobby today, isn’t it?”
“You know it is.” He was angry. “And you can stop pretending you’re not glad you were right about her.”
“I am
“Don’t go.” He wrapped his hand around my wrist like a vise. “Sit down and I’ll tell you. You don’t understand anything.”
I sat but his voice scared me.
“She was screwing Alan.” He sounded hoarse with anger, shame, and remembrance. “On top of everything else he did to me. She was in that whole scheme with him but I covered up for her so she could walk away free and clear without doing jail time. I left town with a goddamn cloud over my head because of the scandal and the trial. You have no idea what it was like—the way people looked at me.”
Alan Cantor was the winemaker at Le Coq Rouge. So Quinn’s old boss and his wife had had an affair, on top of the wine fraud and embezzlement, which finally forced the vineyard to close. I waited for Quinn to continue.
“When I left, I never wanted to see her again. Then she showed up here.” He expelled a long breath of smoke. “Shit, I just about died.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s been rough for you since she’s been here.”
His mock-laugh almost sounded like a sob. “Rough. Yeah. That’s one way of putting it.”
“Does Bobby think she has something to do with Valerie’s murder?”
He rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t surprise me if he did.”
“What did he ask you?”
Quinn looked at me. “I knew you wanted to know.”
At least in the darkness he couldn’t see my face burning. “Please tell me.”
“He asked about our relationship. When I was with her, whether I had any contact with her before she came to Atoka.”
I’d never thought of that. “And did you?”
“Jesus, Lucie. No.”
The wind had picked up. I shivered and pulled my legs up into the chair, wrapping my arms around them. “It’s cold out here. Come on. Why don’t we go inside and have a drink?”
“You go,” he said. “I’m not cold. I’d like to stay right here.”
“Then I’ll stay, too. I don’t mind.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather be by myself. No offense.”
I stood up and reached for my cane again. The chasm between us was beginning to narrow, but it was still there.
“See you in the morning,” I said.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said. “I’ll be in to check the Brix and make sure the cap’s punched down but otherwise I plan to get lost this weekend.”
“Oh. Well, sure. See you Monday, then.”
“Yep.”
I left him and walked back to the house. Nicole was ruled by the planet of death and destruction and corruption, he’d said.
And here we were, right in the middle of her maelstrom.
Chapter 16
I woke up early Saturday and went downstairs in my bathrobe to make coffee. On the way to the kitchen I looked through the parlor window to see if Quinn’s car was still in the driveway, though I doubted he’d spent the night in the summerhouse with the temperature dipping into the forties. The car was gone but a bright red trail of something led up the gravel driveway toward the house.
I opened the front door. If I hadn’t looked down, I would have stepped on the bloodied, gutted animal on the doorstep. I cried out and moved back. A dead fox.
Or meant to be. A stuffed animal. I’d seen him in a couple of shops in town—Freddie the Fox, bright-eyed, tail pointed straight as an arrow, feet positioned as though he were on the run, and a goofy, sly smile on his face.
Someone had ripped Freddie open and poured red paint on him, leaving his “entrails” for me to find. I listened at the bottom of the staircase in case my shriek had wakened Pépé but there was no sound from the second floor. Thank God, because I didn’t want him to see someone’s twisted idea of a prank.
I went back upstairs and got dressed. Freddie’s final resting place was a black plastic trash bag, which I left in the old carriage house we used as a garage. It seemed like a good idea to hang on to Freddie, at least for a while. A few minutes with the garden hose, the nozzle turned to a hard spray, washed away the paint until the pale pink rivulets disappeared into the border gardens and bushes.
That was the end of the fox, except for the image still in my mind. Somehow such a juvenile act didn’t seem like something Claudia and Stuart Orlando would pull to get their point across about foxhunting. But if not them, who else was angry that I planned to let the Goose Creek Hunt ride through my farm in three days? This afternoon Pépé and I planned to watch a couple of Mick’s maiden horses run in the GCH’s fall Point-to-Point. Whoever left Freddie on my doorstep probably expected me to be upset enough to react—maybe even call off the meet at Highland Farm.
I put away the hose and decided to keep my mouth shut.
From an oak-shaded ridge overlooking 112 acres of green velvet hills that tossed and rolled, spectators gathered to watch thoroughbreds gallop across the vast, sweeping panorama of Glenwood Park. On the far stretches of the four-mile course, the horses and riders would look like toys as they cleared fences of brush or timber. I liked coming here for the spring and fall races. For all the breathtaking beauty of Glenwood, the atmosphere was less formal and less pressured for the horses, owners, and jockeys than the big-purse races like
