Read Online The Chardonnay Charade by Ellen Crosby - Free Book Online Page A

mouth and stubbed the cigarette in the ashtray. “Will you lay off, for God’s sake? What business is it of yours what I do?”
    “You’re my sister.”
    She shoved her chair back and stood up. “When did that ever matter?”
    I had set that up perfectly. “I’m worried about you. You’re underage. If you get caught—” I sounded too defensive.
    “I can vote and join the army and get married. So I’m not legal to drink. Big goddam deal. I will be, in a few months.”
    Mia had been fourteen the day she went riding with our mother when Orion, Mom’s horse, threw her as they took a jump over one of the many dry-stacked stone walls that ringed the perimeter of the farm. Mercifully she didn’t suffer long, dying later that day of internal injuries. Mia never spoke about what happened, nor explained why my mother, good enough to qualify as an alternate to France’s Olympic equestrian team, had stumbled over a hurdle so low anyone could have stepped over it without breaking stride. I always wondered if they’d been quarreling and Mom was distracted when it happened. Even back then, Mia had been headstrong and temperamental.
    After Mom’s death it was as if something came unmoored inside my sister or she lost any compass she’d once possessed, because she seemed dead set on taking the swiftest passage down the road to hell, without the good intentions. She had always possessed the stunning good looks and the waiflike fragility of a runway model and, as a little girl, her gossamer hair and angelic features had turned heads. Sometime during her short life, though, she’d managed to acquire the sulky, jaded apathy of an old soul who has seen it all before. It was that bored vulnerability that attracted her to the wrong people, and vice versa. The guys she dated ran the bad boy gamut from A to Z. They always had cars that were hot and fast—and that about summed up the boyfriends, too.
    “You better be careful,” I said.
    “Butt out of my business.”
    The grooves of our arguments were so deeply etched over the years they had become ruts we could no longer climb out of, even if we wanted to. It would end as it always did, with her storming out of the room after we shouted at each other. If there was any way to reach her or change things, I no longer knew what it was.
    “Look,” I said, more quietly, “I did the same thing when I was your age, so it’s not that. But I’m worried about you. Don’t get into binge drinking. That’s really bad news. Plus if you get caught trying to buy stuff—”
    “I won’t get caught. Nobody else is underage. Abby’s twenty-one already, so it’s perfectly legal for her to buy booze.”
    “Abby?”
    “Lang.”
    “You’re hanging around drinking with Senator Lang’s daughter?”
    “Where’ve you been, Lucie? We’re in the same sorority. We live in the same house. Don’t you listen to anything I say?”
    “I do. I just forgot.”
    “I gotta go.” She dumped her coffee in the sink. “Abby’s coming for me.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “I don’t know. Brad and them are deciding.” She scooped up the pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. “We’ll figure it out.”
    I watched her slide the matches inside the plastic wrapping. “Who’s ‘Brad and them’?”
    She stood in front of me, her long tanned legs crossed over each other, arms folded, looking remote and unreachable as a stranger. “Abby’s boyfriend. And some friend of his.”
    “Promise me you’ll watch it. Don’t get drunk again.”
    “Lucie,” she said, “leave me alone. I know what I’m doing. I’ll see you sometime.”
    “Are you coming home tonight?”
    “I don’t know.” She fiddled with a strand of hair, twirling it around one finger. “I might sleep at Abby’s. I don’t like sleeping here ever since Georgia—” She didn’t finish the sentence.
    “Whoever killed Georgia probably knew her, Mia,” I said. “There’s not some killer on the loose stalking women in