thief.
How much worse could it get?
I confronted Eli that night when we were having drinks on the veranda before dinner.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “You actually think I’d steal Frankie’s credit card and buy clothes for Brandi?”
“Either you did it or she did it,” I said. “Neiman’s confirmed the shipping address was your house.”
“It must have been Brandi because it wasn’t me.”
“Frankie said you both were in my office yesterday. She keeps her purse in that closet because we figured it was safer than stashing it under the bar.”
“I used the john,” he said. “Maybe she did it then.”
“Brandi needs to apologize in return for Frankie not reporting this to the sheriff.”
He snorted. “She’ll probably deny she did it.”
“Then the sheriff can ask her about it.”
“I’ll call her,” he said.
He took a long drink from his glass and looked at me like he was about to eat his last meal before the execution. “I’m accusing my soon to be ex-wife of credit card theft. She’s gonna love that.”
He went inside and made the call out of my earshot. Ten minutes later he returned. I noticed he had made himself another gin and tonic while he was in the house. Light on the ice.
“Well, that went down just great.” He sat down in the glider. “She thinks I’m out of my fricking mind and that it’s the beginning of a campaign to prove she’s an unfit mother so I can get custody of Hope.”
“She said she didn’t do it?”
“Nope. Said it’s some sick trick of mine.”
“You didn’t do it, either?”
“I told you already. No.”
I reached for my wineglass. “This doesn’t make sense.”
He set his drink on the glass-topped coffee table and moved it around and around in overlapping circles.
“I love her,” he said. “Even now. But she really is flipped out about being broke and on the verge of bankruptcy. I’m sure she’s in denial about a lot of stuff.”
“You mean denying she stole the card and bought those things?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I guess it’s up to Frankie what she’s going to do about this,” I said.
“I thought you said she wasn’t going to report it to the sheriff’s office.”
“That was before nobody admitted responsibility. She’s mad, Eli.”
“I’ll call her,” he said. “Maybe I can persuade her to let this slide. It’s not like anything happened since she was able to cancel the order. No harm, no foul. Right?”
He stood up and unclipped his phone from his belt again.
It wasn’t right. But he’d already gone back inside to call Frankie. When he came back, he looked relieved as he waved a hand at me.
“All taken care of,” he said. “She’s cool with it.”
I got up to make dinner, but my stomach was churning. What had happened to Eli? He used to know the difference between right and wrong. Getting away with something didn’t make it right. It just meant he’d gotten away with it and Frankie was too decent to hold either of them accountable. So now the theft was compounded by lying. What was cool about that?
I didn’t recognize any of the workers who showed up with Chance when we picked the Riesling the next morning. Quinn left me on the crush pad to supervise getting the grapes weighed and moved to the refrigerator truck.
“I’m going out in the field with these guys. Wait until I get back before we put the grapes through the destemmer,” he said. “I don’t have a good feeling about this crew. Some of them look like they never set foot in a vineyard before. Watch ’em all cut themselves with their pruning shears first thing when they start picking. I hope no one takes off a finger.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “This is who we have. It’s them or nobody.”
“I told you yesterday what we should have done,” he said. “Savannah said she’d be here in an hour, so that’s one more person. But I bet we have to sort what these guys pick. Then we’re going to have to go back out there and pick anything they missed. What a goddamn mess.”
I rubbed my temples. “I hope we can pull this off before it rains.”
He glared at me. “The good news is that, since we finally decided to make ice wine, we’re not picking everything. Maybe we’ll make more than we planned if these rubes leave a lot of fruit on the vines.”
“Maybe,” I said.
But later in the day as we began sorting the grapes, it began to look like the ice wine project was in jeopardy, too. Quinn set up a sorting table and both of us, along with Benny, Javier, and Tyler, began checking the grapes before putting them in the destemmer.
We worked for about ten minutes and it grew quieter and quieter.
“I don’t believe this,” Quinn said finally. “They picked everything. Unripe, ripe, overripe. We’re screwed. There’ll be nothing left to pick in the fall.”
“Maybe it’s only this batch,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
But it wasn’t just one batch.
We worked outside through the afternoon as the sky grew darker and then the rains began. Benny and Javier moved everything under the overhang so we could keep going. Quinn had already started to press the first batch of grapes. We were barely speaking and I knew if he got his hands on Chance, who had driven the crew back to their camp, this time he’d kill him.
I saw Chance before Quinn did. Frankie called me when she was ready to lock up the villa for the evening and asked if I could drop by. Things had been awkward between us all day. I hoped she hadn’t decided to quit.
When I walked in she had two wineglasses set out.
“We need to talk,” she said. “Red or white?”
“Either.”
She gave me the choose-one look.
“How about white?” I said.
She poured from an opened bottle of Riesling.
“Brandi called me,” she said. “She wanted me to know she had nothing to do with those purchases. Says she’s pretty sure Eli must have done it because he’s so distraught at losing her. She thinks he thought maybe he could win her back that way.”
We touched glasses.
“Eli says he didn’t do it,” I said. “I know he’s my brother, but I believe him before I believe her.”
“She sounded pretty believable herself.”
We drank in silence. Frankie seemed to have made up her mind. I couldn’t blame her for believing Brandi. Either way, though, it was an ugly situation involving theft, fraud, and deceit. Tough to put a good spin on that and find anything to salvage.
“I’d like to reimburse you,” I said.
Frankie shook her head. “For what? The transaction was canceled. I wanted to tell you that I plan to put this behind me.”
I had no doubt she meant it, especially because she was watching me with her usual clear-eyed candor, waiting for me to accept her offer of a truce. But I still felt shamed, like a parent called into the principal’s office after some altercation involving a child had been dealt with and cleared up. Punishment and forgiveness had been dispensed, but what was lost—at least to me—were honor and integrity. There would be whispers and doubts the next time something like this happened, and Eli would always be a suspect.
“I’m still so embarrassed—”
She held up her hand. “Forget it. They’re both under a lot of strain. I don’t want this to come between us,
