A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2) by JM Harvey

he found?” Midge asked, staring unblinkingly at Blake.
    Blake shook his head. “He burned that one in the parking lot at work,” he said. “And then he buried it.” Blake shifted uncomfortable under Midge’s steady gaze. “I know it sounds crazy,” he added helplessly.
    “Samson is no witch,” I said.
    Blake said nothing; he just continued to stare at the hair and bone ladder until Midge set the ghastly thing back down on the tarp and resumed pawing through the must. Conversation over. But the damage had been done. One more finger had been pointed at Samson.
    I turned to Blake. “Let's get the wine loaded,” I said more tersely than was necessary. I headed for the cellar and he followed. I pointed out the wine he was to take. Blake nodded and his eyes drifted over to the tank Midge had just drained. Through the access port, I could see there was still a thick mat of must in the bottom of the tank. The deputies still had some work ahead of them.
    Blake’s gaze continued back into the dimness of the crowded wine cave. “You should really let me store more of this for you,” he said. “I have a larger cellar open. We could move your personal stock into it and you’d have plenty of room to store what you have bottle aging.”
    I wasn’t interested. I would hold onto the rest of my wine. Self-reliance is my byword. If you’re a woman with a runaway husband, you’ll understand. I was even feeling a little doubtful about letting him have the fifty cases I had agreed to auction off through Star Crossed. If Angela’s accusations about Star Crossed were accurate…
    I kept those thoughts to myself. “No, but thanks,” I told him as I headed for the stairs. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me. I retreated upstairs to the kitchen where Charlie and Jessica were still swooning and mooning. I left them to it and went into the tasting room to my computer. I needed to log the wine being taken by Blake and print the address labels for sixteen cases of the 2011 I was shipping to four different restaurants in San Francisco the following day.
    I hate paperwork, but that day it was an escape that made the drudgery almost worthwhile.
     
    By the time I had the shipping labels printed and the accounting spreadsheet updated, Charlie and Blake were gone and Jessica was out in the rows with Victor and the two laborers, trimming vines and cleaning up debris from the rushed harvest last week. The back yard had been cleared, the tent was down in an untidy pile and the battered chairs and tables were stacked together like a weary group of soldiers after a battle. I headed outside.
    The hose I had attached to the wine tank was still stretched across the yard, a sticky pile of debris the only remains of more than two hundred liters of wine. Midge's partners were gone, and she was stowing the tarp and the sieve in the trunk of her car. She looked up at me as I approached. Her gaze was flat and unfriendly, a look I’d had more than enough of. Midge and I had not been friends before the incidents of the previous year, but we had not been enemies either. It was time to confront the issue head on.
    I reached the sheriff’s car as she thumped the trunk lid closed.
    “We're done,” she said. She circled the car, popped the door open and started to duck inside.
    “I'm as sorry as you are about what happened last year,” I said abruptly, not bothering with any preliminaries. “But it wasn't my fault.”
    She stood with one foot in the car and glared at me for a moment. And then her expression softened. “No,” she said tiredly, “It was my fault. Mine and Hunter’s. If we had done our jobs better—”
    “It was his fault,” I said, and we both knew who I was talking about, and it wasn't Hunter. The words sounded harsh and bitter, but they were true.
    She nodded, but not like she was agreeing with me, more like she was considering the possibility. “Maybe it was all of our faults,” she said.
    I sighed and my shoulders