The Merlot Murders Read Online Free Page A

Thelma was up one side of me and down the other. I told her Bobby said it was an accident. She clucked around for a while then said, ‘Poor old Lee. I guess we just ought to leave him lay where Jesus flang him.’ I told her that’s just what we intended to do. So now I want you to tell me that you’re with us on this. Got it?”
    Too bad those Ray-Bans were opaque. I couldn’t see Eli’s eyes at all. Though probably if I could, all I’d see would be my own reflection. No window on the soul there. If he still had one.
    “Us,” I said. “You mean Mia agrees with you?”
    He said tersely, “She’ll do whatever I tell her.”
    That figured. Though she hadn’t always been so compliant.
     
    Mia had been fourteen when our mother was killed one fine spring day, six years ago. The two of them had gone riding together. The child had returned to the stables alone hours later, barely coherent, as she tried to describe where Mom’s horse had stumbled, for no apparent reason, while jumping one of the low Civil War–era dry-stacked stone walls that rimmed the perimeter of the farm.
    She never regained consciousness. A small mercy. She died that evening. The doctor in the emergency room said later that she might have lived if she’d gotten medical care sooner.
    No one told Mia about that conversation, but still she had been too unwell to attend the funeral. Afterward Leland, whose interest in fatherhood had been borderline nonexistent when Mom was alive, escaped home as often as possible. It didn’t take long for Mia, left to her own devices while Eli and I were away at our respective universities, to acquire a tattoo, a boyfriend with a slow wit and a fast car, and a pack-a-day habit. When Jacques caught her and her boyfriend soused to the gills in the woods by the winery, even Leland agreed it was time to do something.
    Surprisingly he was the one who thought of asking our cousin Dominique to come stay with Mia. The daughter of my mother’s sister, she was studying in Paris to be a chef. Leland persuaded Fitz to offer her a job at the Goose Creek Inn and promised free room and board in return for “keeping an eye” on Mia. He said it would be a great opportunity to perfect her English, along with the chance to work with a top American chef.
    Dominique told me later he’d described my sister as a sweet child with the morals of a Girl Scout who needed a “mother figure” to give her gentle guidance. It took less than twenty-four hours to figure out what he’d really meant was that she needed a Mother Superior-cum-parole-officer and a short leash. Mia hadn’t been overjoyed to report her comings and goings to her cousin after so much unsupervised hell-raising, but eventually she seemed to settle down and we were less worried about the road to perdition.
     
    “Well?” Eli said. “You didn’t answer me. We need to present a unified front on this. As a family.”
    The statement was freighted with so much latent irony that, for a moment, I thought he might be joking. But he was peering over the top of the Ray-Bans again. He was dead serious.
    I hadn’t had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours and my head still ached. Eli could be relentless when he wanted something, like a dog with a bone.
    “Okay, okay. I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. Can we change the subject now, please?”
    “Of course. Actually, there is something else we need to discuss before we get home.” He paused. “The bad news.”
    He waited while that sank in.
    “Well,” I said wearily, “glad we got the good news out of the way first.”
    “It has nothing to do with Leland.”
    He had turned west onto Route 50 and the scenery was all farmland now. The Indians made the path for this road three hundred years ago when they were following the trail for buffalo, which probably accounted for its gentle twists and turns. Here, at least, nothing had changed. Miles of low stone walls that were pre–Civil War lined the