Dying on the Vine

realistic and asked them to hold his burrito until he returned.

She cut in now. “Can we forget about the who and stick with the why for a minute? I think . . .” She paused to order her thoughts. “I just wonder if it all might not go back to the will, the joint will.”

“For which Severo was the executor,” Marti said pointedly, still digesting the news about Quadrelli.

“No, forget about Severo too. I’m not thinking about Severo; I’m thinking about Pietro and Nola. Look, the will said whoever dies first, everything goes to the other one, isn’t that right? Pietro says: If I die first, everything goes to my wife. Nola says: If I die first, everything goes to my husband.”

There were nods around the table.

“But,” Julie continued, “Pietro also says: If she dies before I do, then I leave everything to Franco.”

“Right,” said John. “And she says: If he dies before I do, then I also leave everything to Franco.”

“Meaning, one way or another, in the end Franco winds up with it?” Gideon said, turning it into a question. He was trying to figure out where she was heading.

Yes, in the end!” Julie said excitedly. “But first it would necessarily have to go to one of the two—Pietro or Nola.”

All three of them were looking blankly at her.

“Don’t you see? Pietro dies first—Nola gets it. Nola dies first—Pietro gets it.”

“But they both died, so Franco gets it.” Marti said. “What difference does it make which one died first?”

Gideon’s order had arrived. The burrito turned out not to be beef, but tuna and bean, but he hardly noticed. He was beginning to get a glimmer of what Julie was driving at, and he liked it. She, however, was getting increasingly frustrated with her effort to explain.

“Julie,” he said to help her out, “why don’t you just try telling us exactly what it was that you think happened?”

“Okay. Good. Let’s assume that Pietro did die of that heart attack. But of course, nobody knows about it. Well, one of the brothers—make it Franco—shows up at the cabin to see him about something—”

“I thought Pietro didn’t want anybody coming up while he was there,” Marti said.

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean nobody ever did. Maybe it was a question about the winery, or something Pietro needed to know, or maybe it was just to check up on him—that bad heart, you know? Or to see if he needed anything? All it would have taken was a couple of hours’ drive. Anyway, he finds Pietro dead, and—”

“When would this be?” John asked. “Early, just after he died, or near the end of the month?”

“I don’t know that it would make any difference, John. It works either way. Anyway, he does some fast thinking, and what he thinks is: I’ve had it. Pietro’s dead; Nola’s still alive. She gets everything.”

Marti shook her head in confusion. “But doesn’t she eventually have to leave it to him, to Franco?”

“Eventually, but not now. Now she has full control of it all. Who knows how much will be left by the time she dies, or how long it’ll be before she gets around to dying? Who knows whether or not she’ll try and get that will changed so she can leave it all to Cesare?”

Now she got nods. It was starting to make sense.

“So he decides that Nola has to die too. And it has to look as if she died first—predeceased him—that’s the key part. He knows when she’s going to show up to pick up Pietro, so he goes back up there early that day, and he . . . well, he kills her.”

Marti was looking befuddled. “Okay, but I’m still not quite getting the weird thing with Pietro. Why throw him off the cliff too? Why shoot him? Why make it seem—”

“Because the whole idea, if I’m right, was to make it look like Pietro killed her and then committed suicide himself. See?” She paused expectantly, encouragingly, waiting for some sign that she’d gotten through to them.

“Yes,” Marti said, “but I still don’t quite—”

“There was one absolutely sure way to make it look as if he definitely outlived her, Marti, and that was to make everybody think he killed her. So he . . . I don’t know . . . he hides Pietro’s body somewhere, and then when Nola shows up, he gets her out on that path somehow and pushes her off the cliff and then goes and gets Pietro’s body, takes it up to the cliff, puts a bullet in his head, so it looks like he shot himself, and throws him off the cliff too. And then—I’m kind of making this part up as I go along—then he goes down below and arranges the bodies so it’s clear that Pietro came down after she did—”

“And probably sticks the gun in his jacket,” said Gideon.

“Probably.”

“But why did he shoot Nola then?” Marti asked after a moment. “She was already dead, wasn’t she? If he was going to shoot her, wouldn’t it have made more sense to shoot her up above?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I guess he just wanted to be positive she was dead.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Gideon said, “but now I’m thinking—and this seems more likely, given what you’ve been saying—that he needed for her to be shot with Pietro’s gun so that there was no question about what supposedly happened, but he didn’t have the nerve to do it up above, so he pushed her off and did it down below.”

That puzzled Marti even more. “What, it takes less nerve to push somebody off a cliff than to shoot them?”

“Sure,” John said. “Think about it. If you’re going to shoot somebody, especially with someone else’s gun—a seventy-year-old gun—you have to worry about what’ll happen if it jams, or if the charge is too weak, or if your hand shakes and you only wound them, or if they turn around just before you pull the trigger and you panic. But to push them off a cliff? A quick shove when they’re not looking—on the back, the shoulder—it doesn’t matter where —and over they go. It’s done. You can shoot them later.”

“I see,” Marti said. “Yes, that makes sense. But wasn’t he afraid that when the bodies were found, it’d be obvious that Pietro’d died a long time before her? I mean, changes in the corpse—well, you know more than I do about that, Gideon.”

“Yes, it would have been obvious for the first few months,” he agreed, “but not if the bodies were someplace where they wouldn’t be found for a year—which is probably why he pushed them off the cliff and into a difficult-to- find area in the first place, rather than just shooting them and leaving them where they were, up on the path. By that time, in that climate, the soft tissue would be gone. They’d both be nothing but beat-up, chewed-on skeletons—as they were. And I doubt very much that he’d think those bones would give away anything about who died first. Or when.”

“The bones and the jacket,” John pointed out. “The fact that Pietro’s body had been gnawed on under the jacket. That was also something he wouldn’t have thought of.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Julie said. “But what about the jacket? What was the point of putting it on him at all? That, I can’t figure out.”

“My guess,” Gideon said, “is that it’s something he didn’t think about when he first found Pietro. It would have been summertime, Pietro wouldn’t have been wearing a leather jacket. But when it came to doing the final deed, the weather would have gotten colder, and he realized it would have raised questions for Pietro to be out on a forest trail in his shirtsleeves—Nola was wearing a leather jacket, remember—so he slipped it on him then. After the animals had been at him.”

They looked at each other, trying to figure out if they’d covered all the bases. It was John who said, “I like it, I like it, except . . . how did he know the bodies would ever be found? Because if they weren’t . . . oh, wait, of course! He was the guy who called about them, who supposedly didn’t want to get involved, who just happened to have the exact coordinates on his GPS.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Gideon said.

Julie returned to her coffee. “So—you think I might be right? That that’s what happened?”

“I think you are right,” Gideon said. He’d finished his burrito now, and he too waved for a cup of coffee. “I have to say, nothing like that ever crossed my mind, but now that you’ve laid it out, it sure answers a lot of questions.”

“Sure didn’t cross mine,” John said. “Good job, kid!”

“Hey, she’s blushing!” Marti said delightedly.