Tangled Vines (2 page)

“But that's more than thirty-five thousand dollars.” Dougherty looked away, a watery brightness to his eyes, jaw clenched, hands trembling. “I can't get my hands on that much money before the end of October. I need more time.” The protest carried a familiar wheedling note. “It hasn't been easy for me since I lost my wife -”

“She died some twenty years ago.” Katherine had a voice like cut crystal, sharp enough to slice to the bone when she chose. She chose now. “You have sufficiently milked her death. Do not expect to gain any more from it.”

He reddened. The infusion of color briefly eliminated the unhealthy pallor of his skin. “You are a cold and heartless old bitch. No wonder your son Gil hates you.”

Pain. It struck swiftly and sharply. The kind of pain only a mother can know when she is hated by her child. A pain that hadn't diminished with the passing years, but rather deepened, just as Gilbert's hatred of her had deepened with time.

Unable to deny Dougherty's claim, Katherine stiffened, holding herself even straighter. “My relationship with Gilbert is not a subject I intend to discuss with you, Mr. Dougherty.”

Dougherty had scored, and he knew it. “It must gripe the hell out of you that his winery is every bit as successful as Rutledge Estate. Who knows – in a few years The Cloisters might even be bigger.”

A tan Jeep pulled into the yard and parked in the shade of the madrona trees. Out of the corner of her eye, Katherine saw her grandson Sam Rutledge climb out.

“I fail to see the relevance of your remarks, Mr. Dougherty.” With a lift of her cane, Katherine indicated the papers gripped in his hand. “You have been served with legal notice. Either you pay the full amount owed or you forfeit your vineyard. The choice is yours.”

“Damn you,” he cursed bitterly. “You think you got me beat, don't you? But you'll see. Before I let you get your hands on my place, I'll burn every inch of it.”

“Do that,” Sam said as he joined them. “It will save us from bringing in a bulldozer to clear it.” To Katherine, he said, “I flew over his place last Saturday when I took the Cub up.” The Cub was the antique, two-seat biplane Sam had restored to flying condition two years ago. “From the air, I could see he'd let the vineyard grow wild. It's nothing but a jungle of weeds, vines, and brush now.”

“I couldn't help it,” Dougherty protested quickly, and defensively. “My health hasn't been good lately.”

“Go,” Katherine ordered abruptly, treating Dougherty to an icy glare. “I am weary of your eternal grousing and I am too old to waste more of my precious time listening to you.” She turned to Sam. “Take me to the house, Jonathon.”

Inadvertently she called Sam by his father's name, and Sam didn't bother to correct her. He had been a boy of fourteen when his father died twenty-odd years ago. Ever since, Katherine would slip now and then and address him as Jonathon. Over the years, Sam had learned to ignore it.

He escorted Katherine to the Jeep and helped her into the passenger seat, then walked around to the driver's side. As he swung behind the wheel, he heard her sigh, a note of impatience in the sound.

“Thinking about Dougherty?” Sam ventured, throwing her a glance as he turned the wheel and steered the Jeep onto a tree-shaded drive. “I have the feeling he's going to cause some kind of trouble before this is over.”

“Dougherty does not concern me. He can do nothing.”

The crispness of her voice made it clear the subject was closed; there would be no further discussion. Her mind could shut doors like that, on things, feelings, or people. Just the way she'd shut his uncle Gilbert from her life, Sam recalled as the Jeep cruised up the narrow lane.

Sam had been away at boarding school at the time of the split. In the valley there had been a hundred versions of what happened, a hundred causes offered for it. Any of them could be true. His father had never discussed it with him, and Katherine certainly never spoke of it.

Through lawyers, she had bought out any interest that her son Gilbert had in the family business immediately following the breakup. Gil had used that money plus more from investors, bought some abandoned vineyard property not five miles from Rutledge Estate, built a monastic-style winery, dubbed it ‘The Cloisters,' and successfully launched a wine of the same name, going into direct and open competition with his mother.

More than once, Sam had observed chance meetings between them at some wine function. A stranger would never suspect they were mother and son, let alone that they were estranged. No hostility or animosity was exhibited. Katherine treated him as she would any other vintner with whom she had a nodding acquaintance when she deigned to acknowledge him at all. But the rivalry was there. It was a secret to no one.

“I spoke with Emile this morning,” Katherine said. Emile was, of course, Baron Emile Fougere, owner of Chateau Noir in France's famed Medoc region. “He will be attending the wine auction in New York next week. I have arranged to meet him there.”

Her fingers closed around the cane's carved handle. Its presence was a constant reminder of her own mortality, something Katherine had been forced to acknowledge last year after she had been immobilized for two weeks from a fall that left her with a severely bruised hip and thigh.

In the time she had left, Katherine was determined to ensure the future of Rutledge Estate. As painful as it was to admit, she doubted that it would be secure in the hands of her grandson.

She cast an assessing glance his way. Sam had his father's strong muscles, his height and build. There was a coolness to his light brown eyes and a hardness to his features. And yet, he had never shown any pride in the wines that bore the name Rutledge Estate. And without pride, there was no passion; without passion, the wine became merely a product.

Under such circumstances, she had no choice but to look outside the family. This past spring she had contacted the current baron of Chateau Noir and proposed a business arrangement that would link the two families in a venture to make one great wine at Rutledge Estate.

An agreement in principle would have been reached by now if Gil hadn't entered the picture, proposing a similar agreement to the baron. He had done it to thwart and irritate her, Katherine was sure.

“Naturally you will accompany me to New York,” she told Sam when he stopped the Jeep in front of the house.

“Naturally.” Sam came around to the passenger side and assisted her from the Jeep.

Katherine turned to the house and paused, her gaze running over it. An imposing structure, it had been built twenty years before the end of the century by her late husband's grandfather. Modeled after the great chateaux in France, it stood two-and-a-half stories tall. Creeper vines crawled over its walls of old rose brick, softening their severe lines. Chimneys punctuated the steep slope of the slate roof and the windows were mullioned long and narrow with leaded-glass panes. It spoke of old money and deep roots.

The entry door of heavy Honduran mahogany swung open and the ever-vigilant, housekeeper, Mrs. Vargas, stepped out. Dressed in a starched black uniform, she wore her gray hair scraped back in a chignon.

“That man Dougherty was here earlier, demanding to see you,” the housekeeper stated with a sniff, indicating what she thought of his demand. “He finally left after I informed him you weren't in.”

Katherine merely nodded in response as Sam walked her to the marbled steps of the front entrance. “Have Han Li fix some tea and serve it on the terrace,” she ordered, then glanced at Sam. “Will you be joining me?”

“No. I have some things to do.” Unlike Katherine, Sam wasn't so quick to dismiss Len Dougherty.

Sober, the man was harmless enough. But drunk, he was known to turn violent, and that violence could be unleashed on property or people. Sam intended to make sure it wasn't Rutledge.

Traffic clogged downtown St. Helena. Its postcard-perfect Main Street was lined with turn-of-the-century buildings of stone and brick, a collection of quaint shops and trendy restaurants. A Toyota with Oregon plates pulled out from its parking space, directly into the path of Len Dougherty's Buick. Cursing, he slammed on the brakes and the horn.

“Damned tourists are thick as fruit flies,” he muttered. “Think they own everything, just like the Rutledges.”

That thought had the panic coming back, bringing with it the tinny taste of fear to his mouth and the desperate need for a drink.

With relief Dougherty spotted the Miller Beer sign in the window of a crumbling brick building. The faded lettering above the door identified the establishment as Ye Olde Tavern, but the locals who frequented the bar called it Big Eddie's.

Leaving his car parked in an empty space in front of the bar, Dougherty went inside. The air smelled of stale tobacco smoke and spilled drinks.

Big Eddie was behind the bar. He looked up when Dougherty walked in, then turned back to the television set mounted on the wall. There was a game show on. Big Eddie loved game shows.

Dougherty claimed his usual perch, the stool at the end of the bar. “I'll have a whiskey.”

Big Eddie climbed off his stool, reached under the counter, and set a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey in front of Dougherty, then went back to his seat and the game show.

Dougherty bolted down the first shot in one swallow, feeling little of the burn. With a steadier hand, he filled the glass again. He gulped down half of it, then lowered the glass, the whiskey flowing down his throat like lava. The foreclosure notice he'd stuffed in his shirt pocket earlier poked him in the chest.

Thirty-five thousand dollars. It might as well be three hundred thousand for all the chance he had of getting his hands on that kind of money.

Damn her eyes, he thought, remembering Katherine Rutledge's steely gaze boring into him. He threw back the rest of his drink and topped the glass again, dragging it close to him.

He lost track of time sitting there, one hand clutching the bottle and the other around the glass. More of the regulars drifted in. Dougherty noticed his bottle was half empty about the same time he noticed the level of voices rising to compete with the television. Tom Brokaw's face was on the screen.

The legs of a barstool scraped the floor near him. He glanced over as a baggy-eyed, heavy-jowled Phipps, a reporter with the local paper, sat down beside him.

“Hey, Big Eddie,” a man called from one of the tables. “A couple more beers over here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Big Eddie grumbled.

Dougherty cast a sneering look over his shoulder at a garage mechanic in greasy coveralls, sitting with a painter in splotched whites. Common laborers all of them, he thought contemptuously. Punching time clocks, letting others tell them what to do. Not him. Nobody gave him orders; he was his own boss. Hell, he owned a vineyard.

He remembered the paper in his pocket and felt sick. He couldn't lose that land. It was all he had left. Without it, where would he live? What would he do?

He had to stop the Rutledges from stealing it. He had to find a way to get that money. But how? Where?

Nothing had gone right for him. Nothing. Not since Becky had died. His beautiful Rebecca. Everything had gone sour after he lost her.

Tasting that sourness again, Dougherty tossed back the whiskey in his glass. As he did, his glance fell on the television screen.

“In a scene reminiscent of the assassination attempt on President Reagan,” Tom Brokaw was saying, “New York State Senator Dan Melcher was wounded tonight and a policeman shot. Kelly Douglas has more on this late story from New York.”

A woman's image flashed on the screen. Night darkened the edges of the picture, held at bay by the full illumination of a hospital's emergency entrance in the background. She stood before it, a kind of restless energy about her strong and angular features that briefly pulled his attention.

He looked down when she started to speak. “Tom, State Senator Dan Melcher has been rushed into surgery suffering from at least one gunshot wound to the chest....”

That voice. His head came up fast. The low pitch of it, the smooth ring of authority in it. There could be no mistake. He knew it. He knew that voice as well as his own. It had to be her.

But that woman's face was no longer on the screen, its image replaced by that of a middle-aged man coming out of a black car flashing a smile and waving at the camera, ignoring the angry shouts from picketers outside. There was only her voice – that voice – talking over the images.

“Since his election to the state senate two years ago, Dan Melcher has been the center of controversy. His liberal stand on civil rights and pro-choice issues has created loud opposition. Tonight, that opposition took a violent turn.”

The voice stopped as a woman broke from the sign-carrying crowd. “Murderer!” she shouted and started firing.

The ensuing flurry of action was difficult to follow. An aide grabbed the slumping senator; a policeman fell; bystanders scattered amidst shouts and screams of panic; someone grabbed the woman, and another policeman wrestled her to the ground. The scene was followed by a close-up of the unconscious senator, blood spreading across the white of his dress shirt. Then it cut to a shot of him being loaded into the ambulance.

It was back to the woman. “We have just received late word that the patrolman who was also shot has died of his injuries. The police have the assailant in custody. Her identity has not been released. Charges are pending.” She paused a beat, then added, “Kelly Douglas, KNBC, New York.”

Dougherty frowned. She didn't look the same. The coloring was right – the auburn hair, the dark green eyes. And that voice, he knew he wasn't wrong about it. She had changed a lot in ten years. She had even changed her name, taken her mother's. But her voice hadn't changed. It was her. It had to be.

He stared at the television, blind to the patriotic commercial for Maxwell House coffee flickering across the screen. Beside him, Phipps groused to Big Eddie, “They call that journalism. You couldn't write lousy copy like that and get away with it in the newspaper business.”