Quinn. Like a preview for the end of the world.” I glanced over at Chance. “I’m going over to look at the new fields with Chance. Looks like it probably passed through there.”
“The new fields?” His dismay was tinged with an extra measure of regret, more so, I thought, than if we’d lost some of our oldest—and most valuable—vines.
I knew why.
The vines in those fields were his, planted shortly after he signed on as our winemaker, the foundation of an ambitious expansion and gamble we hoped would catapult us from small boutique winery onto a national stage. Though Quinn would never admit it, those vines also represented his opportunity to emerge from the oversized shadow of Jacques Gilbert, his predecessor. Schooled in France in Old World ways of winemaking and production, Jacques’ stamp was still evident in our wines, our production, and in the field. Even now, we were still selling some of his wines.
The fact that I revered Jacques and my mother with near-to-saintly devotion had been at the root of most of the passionate debates between Quinn and me.
The loss of the new vines, though they were still a year away from their first harvest, meant it would take even longer before Quinn finally put his imprimatur on Montgomery Estate Vineyard.
“How bad is it?” he asked me now.
“I’ll call you as soon as I know.”
“Hang on, will you? I’m almost there.”
“Where are you?”
“Marshall. Almost to Maidstone Lane.”
“Marshall? Maidstone Lane? It’ll take you at least twenty, twenty-five minutes to get here.”
“No way. See you in ten.”
“Serve you right if you get a speeding ticket,” I said. “Nothing’s going to change if you get here faster.”
He groaned again and disconnected.
The tornado had mowed a sweeping path through the Syrah, Malbec, and the edge of the Seyval block. The devastation took my breath away. A few hours ago this had been a lush canopy of green, the vines aligned in neat rows like soldiers, representing promise and optimism and prosperity. Now there was nothing, nothing at all, just a tangled twisted mess of debris and ruin plowed back into the earth. The only thing missing was the salt.
I heard Chance suck in his breath next to me. “Wow.”
“We’ll have to get a Bobcat in here to clear this out.” My voice sounded like it was coming from inside a drum. “Start from scratch with new posts and trellises. New vines.”
“I’m sorry, Lucie.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” I’d never seen tornado damage up close like this, but it was true what they said: A few yards on either side of the path it had taken, the vines were comparatively unscathed, almost like nothing had happened. “At least we can tie up the vines that were blown down by the wind.” It still sounded as if someone else were talking.
“Sure. I’ll get the guys on it right away. Now let’s get you home since you’ve seen what you wanted to see. You don’t need to deal with it this minute—”
“No.” I cut him off. “I need to do something. Get the crew out here. I want to start cleaning up today. And get someone to tow the Gator. We need all the equipment we’ve got.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, “if that’s what you want. There’s a box of trellis ties on the backseat. My pruning shears are there, too.”
“Good.”
He made the calls as I began tying vines to their trellis wires. Most of the work at a vineyard is tedious and mind-numbingly boring. Anyone who says any different—that we live in some kind of Dionysian paradise, spending our days wandering among rows of vines sipping a glass of wine as we survey God’s handiwork—is out of his mind. Quinn downs ibuprofen like candy for his aches and pains, as do I when I’ve been working in the fields. Some days a song gets stuck in my head and plays over and over like a loop, just to pass the time. Right now I couldn’t get the lyrics to “What a Wonderful World” out of my mind. Talk about irony.
Quinn showed up in the other Mule—we owned two of them, one red and one green, like Christmas—about twenty minutes later. Benny, Jesús, and Javier, three of our regular crew, came with him. I didn’t understand the rapid-fire Spanish they spoke as they climbed out of their seats, but I didn’t need a translation to understand shock and grief.
The look on Quinn’s face probably mirrored mine, as if he showed up at a funeral for someone no one expected to die. He was still dressed for the winemakers’ roundtable, pressed khakis and one of his favorite Hawaiian print shirts—the silver one with dancing pink martini glasses on it. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck with a cross hanging from it, a stamped silver cuff that was a gift from a Navajo friend on one wrist, and something with leather and steel on the other. Lately he’d started wearing reading glasses and those, too, hung around his neck on a leather cord. He’d probably forgotten to take them off after the meeting.
Most men couldn’t pull off that shirt and the jewelry without looking like they were overly in touch with their feminine side. Quinn, as near as I could tell, not only didn’t have a feminine side, his masculine side generally ran on overdrive. He was a strictly macho guy with a disciplined toughness that could come across as sexist if you happened to be a woman and he worked for you. Since I was, and he did, I was in a good position to know.
He came straight over to me, worry lines making small canyons in his forehead, his eyes dark as obsidian.
“There’s not a traffic light working from Haymarket to Atoka. Flooding, roads closed. It’s a mess. The tornado completely missed Delaplane.” He stopped and assessed me. “Nobody told me you were out in this. I thought you were at the house or something. My God, you look like you just crawled out of a cave.”
“Thanks. It was a bridge.”
“Are you out of your mind? Outside in a tornado away from any kind of real shelter? What in the hell were you doing, anyway?”
“I went out to see the reenactment site. The Gator died on me. And I don’t need a lecture, okay?”
His eyes automatically went to Chance, who was tightening a trellis wire while Benny propped up the wooden post. Chance seemed to know Quinn was watching him because he raised his head and they stared at each other.
Quinn swung back to me. “Died? We just had it completely overhauled in the spring. Dammit, it
I’d lost count of how many nails were in the coffin Quinn was building for Chance, but right now I didn’t want to deal with it. I rubbed my forehead as a dull ache began to pulse between my eyes.
“We’ll find out what happened,” I said. “Tyler’s going to tow it back to the barn with the pickup.”
“Okay, but I’m going over it myself. Jesus, Lucie. You could have been killed out there because of someone’s carelessness.”
“Or maybe something just wore out.”
“Come on. I’ll drive you home. You should take it easy.” He saw the hesitant look on my face. “Don’t tell me you want to stick around here?”
“There’s something else.”
“You mean, besides the tornado?”
“Because of the tornado. It unearthed a grave near the stone bridge at the edge of the reenactment field,” I said. “I found a skull.”
He looked stunned. “What’s a grave doing in the middle of nowhere?”
“I don’t know. But Bruja found another bone a few feet away. Chance and I guessed it was human, too. We thought it might be part of an arm or a leg.”
His hand went to his cross and he fingered it. “The dog was chewing on a human bone?”
I nodded.
“That means whoever it is, the remains are scattered around.”
“Maybe.” I hesitated. “There’s another possibility.”
“What?” he asked.
“Maybe there’s more than one grave.”
