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Authors: Ellen Crosby
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their homes.”
“How can you be sure? How do you know it wasn’t, like, random or something?”
“The police don’t think it was. Look, call me and let me know what you’re doing later. Just so I know you’re all right.”
“Let’s just leave it that no news is good news, okay? I’ll call you if there’s a problem. Otherwise, you should figure that everything’s fine.”
She left the room and I sat down again at the pine table. At least this time we hadn’t ended the conversation shouting at each other, but everything was a long way from fine.
Siri Randstad phoned while I was fixing bacon and eggs. “Can I ask a favor, Lucie?”
“Anything.”
“I’m driving to Dulles this afternoon to pick up a friend of Ross’s who’s coming in for the…uh, for Georgia’s funeral. Could you come over and stay here while I’m at the airport?”
“Sure,” I said, surprised. “Are you worried about Ross being alone?”
“Good Lord! I don’t think he’s suicidal, if that’s what you mean. He’s just so bereft that I think it would be best if he had company.”
“I’ll come,” I said. “What time?”
“Mick’s plane gets in from Miami around four-thirty,” she said. “So I’ll probably leave here at three-thirty.”
“You’ll be stuck in rush-hour traffic on the way back. You won’t get to Middleburg until well past six. What if I pick up a few things and fix dinner for everyone?”
She sounded relieved. “That would be great. The past two nights we got Chinese takeout. I’m up to here with moo goo gai pan.”
“I’ll see you when you get back from the airport.”
Before I went to the grocery store, I stopped off at the winery to check in with Quinn. The design for the compound, which was based around an ivy-covered villa, had come from a sketch my mother had done. She’d hired an architect who added the semi-underground barrel room, connecting the two buildings by a horseshoe-shaped courtyard with a porticoed loggia and graceful arched stone entrance. A large tasting room and our offices were located in the villa; we made and stored wine in the barrel room. The place still looked much as it had when my mother was alive, except the trees and bushes she’d planted twenty years ago were now fully mature and the ivy that branched gracefully over the windows was full and thick. I parked my car in the gravel parking lot alongside Quinn’s El Camino.
Even after all these years, I still sensed my mother’s spirit every time I opened the front door to the villa. Across the room, late afternoon sunshine streamed in through four large sets of French doors that opened onto a cantilevered deck and a view of braided hills covered in vines. The sunlight made gold stripes on the tile floor and picked out some of the colored stones in the grapevine mosaic on the front of the bar so they glowed like jewels. Someone had left a pretty bouquet of red roses on the carved oak table we used for wine tastings. Sera, no doubt. She must have cut the flowers from her garden to keep them from freezing.
Quinn and I had our offices off a small wine library that adjoined the tasting room. The wrought-iron door that led to the library had been one of my mother’s treasured finds from an architectural salvage shop. The library itself had evolved from our previous winemaker’s interest in Virginia’s four-hundred-year effort to develop a wine industry, dating from the Jamestown settlement. At first Jacques left the books he’d read scattered throughout the villa so visitors could read or borrow them. But when the piles grew too high, my practical mother had bookshelves built in the alcove, adding two leather barrel chairs and a reading lamp on an old wine cask.
Beyond the library, a short photo-lined corridor led to the offices and a back door to a small kitchenette. I walked by the vineyard’s lone award—the Governor’s Cup, won twelve years ago by my mother and Jacques. If Quinn and I agreed on
“How can you be sure? How do you know it wasn’t, like, random or something?”
“The police don’t think it was. Look, call me and let me know what you’re doing later. Just so I know you’re all right.”
“Let’s just leave it that no news is good news, okay? I’ll call you if there’s a problem. Otherwise, you should figure that everything’s fine.”
She left the room and I sat down again at the pine table. At least this time we hadn’t ended the conversation shouting at each other, but everything was a long way from fine.
Siri Randstad phoned while I was fixing bacon and eggs. “Can I ask a favor, Lucie?”
“Anything.”
“I’m driving to Dulles this afternoon to pick up a friend of Ross’s who’s coming in for the…uh, for Georgia’s funeral. Could you come over and stay here while I’m at the airport?”
“Sure,” I said, surprised. “Are you worried about Ross being alone?”
“Good Lord! I don’t think he’s suicidal, if that’s what you mean. He’s just so bereft that I think it would be best if he had company.”
“I’ll come,” I said. “What time?”
“Mick’s plane gets in from Miami around four-thirty,” she said. “So I’ll probably leave here at three-thirty.”
“You’ll be stuck in rush-hour traffic on the way back. You won’t get to Middleburg until well past six. What if I pick up a few things and fix dinner for everyone?”
She sounded relieved. “That would be great. The past two nights we got Chinese takeout. I’m up to here with moo goo gai pan.”
“I’ll see you when you get back from the airport.”
Before I went to the grocery store, I stopped off at the winery to check in with Quinn. The design for the compound, which was based around an ivy-covered villa, had come from a sketch my mother had done. She’d hired an architect who added the semi-underground barrel room, connecting the two buildings by a horseshoe-shaped courtyard with a porticoed loggia and graceful arched stone entrance. A large tasting room and our offices were located in the villa; we made and stored wine in the barrel room. The place still looked much as it had when my mother was alive, except the trees and bushes she’d planted twenty years ago were now fully mature and the ivy that branched gracefully over the windows was full and thick. I parked my car in the gravel parking lot alongside Quinn’s El Camino.
Even after all these years, I still sensed my mother’s spirit every time I opened the front door to the villa. Across the room, late afternoon sunshine streamed in through four large sets of French doors that opened onto a cantilevered deck and a view of braided hills covered in vines. The sunlight made gold stripes on the tile floor and picked out some of the colored stones in the grapevine mosaic on the front of the bar so they glowed like jewels. Someone had left a pretty bouquet of red roses on the carved oak table we used for wine tastings. Sera, no doubt. She must have cut the flowers from her garden to keep them from freezing.
Quinn and I had our offices off a small wine library that adjoined the tasting room. The wrought-iron door that led to the library had been one of my mother’s treasured finds from an architectural salvage shop. The library itself had evolved from our previous winemaker’s interest in Virginia’s four-hundred-year effort to develop a wine industry, dating from the Jamestown settlement. At first Jacques left the books he’d read scattered throughout the villa so visitors could read or borrow them. But when the piles grew too high, my practical mother had bookshelves built in the alcove, adding two leather barrel chairs and a reading lamp on an old wine cask.
Beyond the library, a short photo-lined corridor led to the offices and a back door to a small kitchenette. I walked by the vineyard’s lone award—the Governor’s Cup, won twelve years ago by my mother and Jacques. If Quinn and I agreed on
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