lost today.”
I spun the worm with my index finger. “Okay.”
“Lucie, let it go. You can’t go on like this. The two of you are tearing each other apart.”
I slapped the corkscrew back on the bar. “Go on like what?”
“Do you act obtuse on purpose, or does it just come naturally? I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“Who’s being obtuse?”
“I give up. Make your delivery. Don’t worry about a thing around here, either. I got it covered. Don’t need you. Don’t even want you. Go away and do something nice for yourself after you drop that wine at the Jenningses’ place.”
I blew her a kiss on my way out the door.
But I did not do something nice after I brought the wine to the Jenningses’ place.
Chapter 25
Harlan and Alison Jennings lived at Longmeadow, a two-hundred-acre estate off Zulla Road that had been in Harlan’s family for generations. A working farm with outbuildings and tenant houses since the time Leven Powell founded Middleburg in 1787, it had a storied and colorful history. On New Year’s Eve in 1850, a fire of questionable origin destroyed the modest stone house that had been there since colonial days. In its place, Harlan’s great- grandfather, recently married to a tobacco heiress with a taste for lavish entertaining, built a Greek Revival mansion with a columned front porch and a grand pedimented gable that rivaled the James River plantations. Their parties, especially during Prohibition, were legendary.
Harlan’s BMW convertible was parked in the circular drive when I pulled up in front of the house. I got out of the Mini and walked up the flagstone path lined with masses of pink and white tulips and daffodils of every shade of yellow, white, and orange. Ivy twined around the two columns flanking the front door. Stone urns were filled with fragrant-smelling Easter lilies. It looked as if someone recently had been sitting outside despite the dull day, leaving a glass and an empty bottle on a wicker table next to a Windsor rocking chair. A jacket—Harlan’s by the look of it —hung over the back of the chair.
I rang the doorbell and heard the Westminster chime echo inside. While I waited I stole a look at the bottle. Tequila, nearly empty. A brand I didn’t recognize. Maybe Harlan had read the
A pretty Hispanic maid in a gray uniform opened the door. Her face was composed but she looked like she was in some distress.
“May I help you?”
“I’m Lucie Montgomery,” I said. “Dr. Jennings ordered a couple of cases of wine from my vineyard for her husband’s birthday party. I promised her I’d deliver them this morning. Is she around?”
She shook her head. “The señora went riding. Didn’t the senator tell you?”
“Harlan? No—I didn’t see him.”
She stepped out onto the porch and her eyes fell on the tequila bottle.
“All what?” I said. “You don’t mean he drank a whole bottle of tequila just now, do you?”
Good Lord, it would kill him.
“No, no. It was already open.” She gave me a reassuring smile that didn’t mask the lie. He’d drunk a lot and she knew it.
I picked up the bottle and held it up. “How much?”
She touched her heart with one hand like she was trying to catch her breath or compose herself. “It’s not for me to say anything about what my boss does, you know?”
“Maybe you ought to tell me your name. And it is for you to say if he drank as much as you seem to think he did. You’d better tell me what you know. He could be suffering from alcohol poisoning, meaning he needs medical help.”
The girl looked like a guilty child who’d been caught flat out in a lie. “My name is Dulcie. He drank half, maybe two-thirds.”
I groaned.
“Well, Dulcie, at least he didn’t get behind the wheel of his car,” I said. “Any idea where he is now, where he might have gone?”
“He might have gone back inside while I was upstairs,” she said.
I didn’t like the growing urgency in her voice, which now matched my own escalating anxiety. She still wasn’t telling me everything.
“What is it?” I asked. “Come on.”
The girl hesitated, too well trained to tell tales about her employers to strangers.
“Please,” I said. “I know about what’s going on, about the money problems. We need to find Senator Jennings.
“He and the señora had an argument. They were screaming so loud I covered my ears, but I could still hear. When you came, I was cleaning up in the bedroom.”
“Cleaning up?”
“A broken lamp. I think Señora Jennings threw it. Then she left. That’s when he must have gotten the tequila. To get
I knew that word. Drunk.
“You check the house,” I said. “I’ll look in the garden first. Then I’ll drive down to the stables.”
“He didn’t go to the stables,” she said. “That fight was pretty bad. She might … leave for a while.”
If Ali were contemplating walking out on Harlan, it must have been a fight for the record books.
“Okay,” I said, but Dulcie had already vanished.
I bumped into the rocking chair as I turned to leave the porch, knocking Harlan’s jacket to the ground. When I picked it up, something rolled out of one of the pockets.
A pill bottle. Alison’s prescription, her migraine medicine. At least it wasn’t empty. Tequila and pain pills. He wouldn’t be feeling a thing.
In fact, he might not even be breathing, wherever he was.
“Oh, God, Harlan,” I said. “Please don’t have done anything stupid.”
He’d be drunk and disoriented. I doubted he’d gotten far. The swimming pool in the backyard. It was heated and they kept it open year-round. One of Middleburg’s more eccentric traditions was the Jenningses’ annual impromptu pool party in honor of the first snowfall. No one admitted without a bathing suit—and you had to go swimming.
I stuck my head through the front door and yelled to the maid. “Call nine-one-one and tell them to send an ambulance. Tell them to hurry!”
He was facedown at the bottom of the deep end, fully dressed except for his shoes, socks, and a sweater that he’d taken the trouble to leave in a neat pile next to the diving board.
I dropped my cane, stripped off my jacket, and kicked off my own shoes. As I dove in, the image of Rebecca’s folded clothes on the dock last week flashed through my mind. Was I trying to rescue the man responsible for her disappearance? The water felt almost tropically warm. Thank God for small blessings. The air temperature was probably in the fifties. In an unheated pool with hypothermia brought on by the consumption of so much alcohol, he’d probably be dead within minutes. I touched the bottom, grabbing one of his arms with two hands and pulling on it. His body floated up enough for me to crook an arm around his neck and drag him with me.
Dulcie was on her knees by the steps in the shallow end when I surfaced with Harlan.
“We don’t know that. Come on, help me pull him out.” The contrast between the water and air temperatures felt like a slap across the face. “Hurry!”
We wrestled Harlan up the stairs and hauled him onto the deck of the pool. I rolled him onto his back. His lips and eyelids were blue and his skin looked waxy.
