The good feeling left over from the weekend was mostly gone by the time I got back to the car. I felt only marginally better, in fact, than I had on Friday afternoon. When you’re carrying a couple of loads like Eberhardt’s suicide and Ira Erskine’s murder, two-day getaways are in a class with the generally accepted falsehood about Chinese food: the appeasing effects just don’t last very long.
I consoled myself with the thought that in a few hours I would be free of the Erskine mess. One down, one to go.
19
There were half a dozen cars parked at Silver Creek Cellars this afternoon, a knot of visitors in front of the tasting room entrance, even a young couple having a fair-weather picnic at a bench under one of the old live oaks. I envied them. The weekend in Mendocino seemed long past now, a memory that was already starting to blur at the edges.
Uphill beyond the warehouse was the vineyard road Sondra Nelson had told me to take; I drove that way, leaving the good and easy life behind. The road was in decent repair, hardpan overlain with gravel, but it ran an irregular route over and around rises and down through little swales and I couldn’t make much time. The rows of grapevines were tall, their leaves a chlorophyll green color that had a fresh-scrubbed shine in the sunlight. I passed a trio of laborers working among the rows; they stopped to watch curiously as I clattered by. At three-tenths of a mile by the odometer, the road hooked right and blended into another, slightly wider one that climbed into low hills. Old farm road, this one. The shallow, brush-banked creek that paralleled it on the south was probably the same one that ran behind the winery buildings.
The road took me up a moderately steep hillside, at the top of which the vast acreage of vineyards ended, and then dropped me down into a shallow bowllike valley. The three or four acres of flatland looked as though they had once been cultivated — hay, alfalfa, maybe hops — but that had been many years ago; now they were coated in grass and weeds and an encroaching section of wild mustard. Ahead, as I descended, I could see an old wooden bridge spanning the creek, and close beyond that, along the bank and partially screened by willows and aspens, the remains of the farm buildings.
I turned onto the bridge, thumped over its warped boards. The farmhouse was a tumbledown stone shell so overgrown with grass, bushes, wild berry vines, and climbing primroses that it seemed to be sinking inexorably into the earth. To one side, at the rear, was a huge jumble of weathered boards and one leaning wall, all that remained of a barn. A dark blue Lexus was drawn up between the house and the former barn, in what had once been a garden of some sort. I couldn’t see the front half of it from my angle of approach, but Sondra Nelson was probably waiting inside. The only outward sign of life on the property were a couple of birds having a mating argument on what was left of the house’s roof.
I pulled up just across the bridge. And the first thing I noticed then was the line of the creek coming out of the trees to the west, the willows and aspens stark against the sky. It was this scene that had been the inspiration and model for Sondra Nelson’s Silver Creek Cellars label.
The view held my attention for a bit. When I turned my head again I had company: Sondra Nelson was coming my way from the Lexus, and she wasn’t alone. She’d brought Gail Kendall along for backup.
It didn’t have to mean anything one way or another, but when you’re meeting somebody in an out-of-the-way place like this and the prearrangements turn out to be altered, it makes you wary. A touch paranoid, too. I leaned over and flipped the spring catch that holds the .38 Colt Bodyguard I keep under the dash; slipped the weapon from its hooks and slid it inside my belt on the right side, under my jacket where it wouldn’t show. Better to give in to a little paranoia than to get caught unprotected.
The birds were still making a racket as I exited the car, lunging and screeching at each other in a flurry of wings. Rough sex in the animal kingdom. Nelson and Kendall slowed as I moved toward them, so that when the three of us met it was in front of the broken and half-hidden farmhouse porch. Nelson wore a lined windbreaker over an ankle-length skirt, the jacket zipped to the throat and her hands in the pockets and her shoulders hunched as if she were cold. Kendall was in Levi’s and a plaid Pendleton. Tension was like an adhesive in both their faces, binding them into unnaturally stiff expressions. Anger burned in the older pair of eyes; the younger pair was bleak, caught halfway between resignation and desperation.
I said to Sondra Nelson, “I thought this was supposed to be a two-person meeting.”
“Coming along was my idea,” Kendall said. “I didn’t want Sandy seeing you alone.”
“Afraid she’d say something she shouldn’t?”
“No.”
“United front?”
“That’s right. How much do you want?”
“...What?”
“You heard me. How much to quit investigating us, leave us alone once and for all?”
“Are you trying to buy me off?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” she said, “why else would you be doing this? Let’s just get it out into the open.”
“I’m not the one who asked for this meeting—”
“You would have sooner or later. How much?”
“I’m not for sale, Ms. Kendall.”
“Everybody’s for sale at the right price.”
“Not everybody.” My name isn’t Eberhardt, I thought. You can’t buy my soul for five hundred pieces of silver and two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. “I never had any intention of blackmailing either of you.”
Nelson said plaintively, “Then why are you persecuting us?”
“Persecuting, Ms. Nelson?”
“Investigating on your own when the county sheriff... They’re satisfied, why aren’t you?”
“Don’t be so sure Lieutenant Battle is satisfied.”
“He hasn’t bothered us again,” Kendall said. “But you... is it because you worked for Erskine?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me you sympathized with him. You think he had a right to come after Sandy, tear her life apart?”
“No. Nobody has that right.”
“Then why? What do you expect to get out of it?”
“How about a little justice?” I said.
“Justice! For a piece of shit like Ira Erskine?”
“He was a human being, no matter how miserable an excuse for one. And he was murdered in cold blood.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I?”
“You don’t know anything.”
Sondra Nelson said, “If we could only make you understand—”
“Understand what?”
“What a monster he was. How frightened I was.”
“You ran away from him once, changed your name, started over. You could’ve done it again.”
“No. No, I couldn’t.”
“Of course she couldn’t,” Kendall said. “The man she loves, everything she ever wanted is right here in this valley. How long do you think a person can go on living in terror of her life?”
“You lived that way for a lot of years, didn’t you?”