Drip Dead (27 page)

Something was wrong with the proportions in my drawing. I twisted the page around, looking at it from different angles, trying to figure out where I messed up.

It wasn’t something wrong, it was something
missing
.

Just like the files on Mom’s laptop, there was a space with nothing in it.

It had to be the wine cellar.

I paced off the bedroom. The closet doors were on one long, windowless wall. But when I compared the inside of the closets they didn’t add up to the length of the wall.

I paced the wall again. Mom’s closet. Gregory’s closet. And a wide expanse of wall with no door.

What was on the other side of that wall?

I went back into Gregory’s closet, and flipped on the light to look at the wall next to the missing space. A rod spanned about half the wall, suits and sport coats carefully spaced along it to prevent wrinkling. Gregory was always impeccably dressed.

Below the rod was a chest with partitions sized to hold shoes. Several of the spaces were empty, as though Gregory didn’t have enough shoes to fill the chest.

But when I bent over to look more closely, I realized the empty spaces had recessed handles inside them. They were meant as handholds to move the chest.

I held my breath and reached for the right side handle. As soon as I gripped it, I felt a latch release, but the chest wouldn’t budge.

I tried releasing each side, but the minute I let go of a latch it snapped closed again. In order to move the chest I had to trip both latches at the same time.

I tried to use my left hand to hold the latch, but the pain in my wrist was too great and I lost my grip.

I bit down on my bottom lip and forced myself to try again. I ignored the pain, refusing to surrender to it. The fact that there were hidden latches meant there was something important to hide, and I had to find it.

I drew in a deep breath and braced for another wave of pain as I curled my fingers around the latches and pulled.

I nearly toppled over backward when the latches released and the chest slid easily away from the wall, revealing the bottom of a door.

The upper portion of the door was still covered by the wall behind the clothes rod. It took me a few more minutes to find the release, but then the entire section of the closet swung away, exposing a simple door with a deadbolt.

I took Mom’s keys out of my pocket and tried the front door key. To my surprise, it worked. All the locks in the house were keyed alike, even the hidden one.

Chalk one up for the efficiency of master keys.

I’d found Gregory’s wine cellar.

The room was a couple steps down from the rest of the house. I suspected it sat on a slab to take advantage of the natural cooling, rather than on a foundation like the rest of the house.

It was a big room, chilly but not cold. Wooden racks lined the walls on three sides. The fourth wall, where the door was, held a counter with several notebooks, each spine labeled with a variety of wine.

I picked up a book at random and flipped quickly through the pages. They were inventory books, listing the wine, its purchase date, cost, and cellar location.

Looking from the book to the racks, I was able to figure out the location key. Each rack had an alphabetical designation and the rows were numbered from top to bottom and left to right.

If I wanted the bottle listed at the top of the third page, it was in rack C, row five, bottle two.

To test my theory I carried the book over to rack C and compared the label with the entry. It was a match.

I could have spent several hours checking the contents of the cellar against the listing, but I didn’t want to leave the van parked in the driveway. I’d already been there longer than I wanted to be.

I did a quick count of the racks and bottles before I closed the door and returned the clothes rod and chest to their places.

I scribbled the estimate on the corner of my sketches and headed for the door. Time to get out.

I drove away from Gregory’s with a growing sense of excitement. I’d found the wine and I had the names of Gregory’s partners.

Now all I had to do was figure out how to use that information to get my mother out of jail.

Minor detail.

 

 

Back home after switching vehicles at Mom’s, I let the dogs out and considered my next move. The day’s activities had left my wrist throbbing and my stomach in knots.

I sat down with the computer to compare my notes with the information I already had, and found a discrepancy. The rough count I’d done in the wine cellar was several cases short of the totals shown on the spreadsheet.

Were those the cases that had been found with Gregory’s body? And were they the same cases that were listed in the Authentication Report?

And if they were, how did four cases of counterfeit wine end up under my mother’s house? With the dead body of her fiancé?

The situation was getting stranger by the minute.

I needed options, and I wasn’t seeing very many. I’d already decided against going to the sheriff. He would have to turn everything over to Vernon, a man I did not trust. I wasn’t sure how Dave Young would react to my search of Gregory’s house.

He might even have to tell the Deputy Prosecutor, and given Vernon’s pursuit of my mother I didn’t doubt he’d be happy to put me in an adjoining cell, even if he had to settle for a trespassing charge until he could think of something worse.

My brain was stuck in a rut, and I couldn’t seem to find my way out. I needed to make something happen, and I had a way to do just that.

I opened my e-mail program and copied the names and addresses from Gregory’s Veritas list. I had Phil Wilson, Taylor Parkson, and the mysterious
wineconsultantsoregon.net
.

If I e-mailed the three partners, maybe I could stir up some action. And maybe I could find the face hidden behind the anonymous address.

I wrote and rewrote the e-mail, trying to get the proper tone. I debated about a salutation, but couldn’t come up with anything I liked so I simply started with the message, told them I had the wine, and asked what they wanted to do with the hundreds of bottles that would soon be homeless.

It was an exaggeration, of course.

Gregory had changed his will several months earlier, when he started building his new house. Mom was his sole heir and when she got out of jail she would decide whether to continue storing the wine in Gregory’s cellar. In the meantime it was safe in the house as long as the climate-control system was active.

But it was the easiest way to get their attention.

I wasn’t sure what I would do when I heard from them, but it was a first step. And I still had the Authentication Report, which I hadn’t mentioned. I was saving that for later.

I had learned the hard way about facing off with suspects on my own. If I was going to meet with the Veritas partners, I didn’t want to go alone.

I knew I was pushing the limits of my own “go slow” edict. I weighed the potential risks involved. And then I called Wade.

I told him I had found Gregory’s wine cellar, and that there were a couple thousand bottles in the hidden room behind Gregory’s closet. I even described the location of the room.

Wade gave a low whistle. “Pretty fancy detective work, Georgie. Ever thought of joining the sheriff’s office?”

I wasn’t sure he was entirely joking. We’d had several discussions about the all-male force in Pine Ridge. From Wade’s seat on the City Council he’d had an inside look at the difficulties of recruiting a female deputy into a rookie position on a small-town force with few opportunities for advancement.

“I’d end up riding a desk and running a computer all day,” I answered. “No thanks.”

I went back to my original question. “Wade, I may have to go talk to these guys and I don’t want to go alone.” I swallowed hard. Asking for help was always difficult for me, and this time there were some relationship implications I didn’t want to think about too hard. “Will you go with me?”

There was silence at the other end of the phone connection, and I babbled on. “I know this is asking a lot. Even if I have the keys to the house, and even if it technically is my mother’s now because she’s Gregory’s heir, I know you don’t approve.

“But proving I know where the wine is might be the only way I can convince these guys to talk to me, and that’s the only way I can find out who killed Gregory—”

“Yes.” Wade’s single word answer stopped my dithering.

“Yes, you don’t approve? Or, yes, you’ll go with me?”

I held my breath and waited for his answer.

“Yes, I’ll go with you.” There was a deep sigh on Wade’s end of the conversation. “I have learned that there’s no way to stop you once you’ve decided to do something, and it’s clear you have, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So, with or without me, you’re going, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “I guess I am.”

“Then I can’t very well say no. It would just mean you’d go alone, and I think you could use some backup.

“So call me if you have to go out there, okay?”

I agreed, and Wade changed the subject. “How is your wrist? Is it healing at all?”

“Still hurts, but I think it’s getting better. I have an appointment in a couple days to have Dr. Cox check it.”

“How about the car? Have you heard anything?”

“Not yet. The insurance company is supposed to be sending an adjustor to assess the damage, but I don’t know if they’ve been out yet or not.

“You’re the one who knows everybody in town, Wade. What have you heard?”

“Nothing much,” he admitted. “But Louie Marks was making a lot of noise at Tiny’s about how he kept that car in perfect condition, and there’s no way it should have lost control like that, unless you were driving crazy.”

“I wasn’t!” I protested. “I was driving the way I usually do. Which, I admit, is a little fast. But nothing crazy.”

I remembered the sickening feeling as the brake pedal dropped to the floorboard. “I’m sure the brakes failed, Wade. One minute everything was fine and seconds later I was out of control and the brakes didn’t work.”

“Maybe the sheriff will find some explanation, or the insurance adjustor will.” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t have told you what Louie said. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He’s right. I had the car in there regularly, and he kept everything running right. We both took good care of the ’Vette, and he’s probably feeling almost as bad about it as I am.”

I shook off the melancholy that threatened to descend. I wasn’t ready to think about the ’Vette. As long as the sheriff and the insurance adjustor were continuing their investigations, I could delay making any decision.

I was good with that.

I reminded Wade he’d offered to drive me over to see Mom after work. He promised to pick me up, and offered to swing by Garibaldi’s while I talked to my mother.

Wade was definitely working his way into keeper territory.

Flush your drain-waste and vent systems regularly. Each time you get up on the roof to clean your downspouts and gutters, run a garden hose into each vent. A couple minutes of water at full flow should do the trick. If you’re not fond of going on the roof yourself, ask the people you hire to clean your downspouts and gutters (and you should do that at the end of every autumn) to do it for you.

 

—A Plumber’s Tip from Georgiana Neverall

My visit with Mom was as awkward as it had been the night before. She asked how I was, I told her I was getting better. She said she was innocent, and railed against the sheriff and the prosecutor.

When Carruthers knocked on the door and told us our time was up, I was relieved. Mom might need to see me, to be reminded she wasn’t alone, but seeing her in such distress took a toll.