She snorted. “There were loads of guys who came to see me at work. You lose track, you know? And, to be honest, when I’m up on that stage dancing, I never focus on the faces. I wear contacts and I take them out when I dance so everyone is a blur. That way I never know who is out there. It’s better that way.”
That explained her tough as nails machismo. “What about the other entertaining you do? They’re not faceless,” I said. “Are they?”
“No.” She flushed. “But it’s over now. I’m out of here. I’m getting so lost in New York no one will ever find me.”
“What about Greg Knight?”
“What about him?”
“He was hanging around you a lot at Mom’s.”
She stared pointedly at my cane. “Don’t tell me you’re still carrying a torch for him. He made you the way you are now.”
My turn to flush. The way I was now. Just what, exactly, was that? “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So what do you want to know about him?”
“Were you sleeping with him?”
Her laugh made me think of long shards of broken glass. She squashed her cigarette in the ashtray and mashed it down hard.
“Then why was he hanging around you?” I persisted.
“Our fathers were business partners,” she said. “He was looking for a few things that belonged to his old man. Thought I might have them. Rusty took all the stuff from the garage after Jimmy died.”
“What things?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Papers. Records.” She gestured to the crates. “He came over once and looked through these.”
“Did he find what he wanted?”
“I guess. I don’t know,” she said again. “He was here by himself. It would have been simpler if he took the crates like I told him to. Save me getting rid of them.”
“How long ago did he look through the papers?” I asked.
She looked at the ceiling and frowned. “Two months ago. Maybe a little less.”
“Did he give you money to help you get out of town?”
“What of it?”
So maybe Greg had been telling the truth. Sara was like a kid sister to him and he was helping her out of a jam.
“So where’s yours?” she added. “The money.”
I took it out of my purse and handed it to her. “Can I keep those glasses?”
“I don’t want them.” She stuffed the bills inside her sports bra. “You still haven’t said why you’re asking me all this. You think the old guy might have been your father? Is that it?”
“No!” I said sharply. “These aren’t his glasses.”
“Your fifteen minutes are up.” She shrugged then. “Time to go.”
She held the door as I left and slammed it behind me. I heard the chain slide back in place before I got to the first step.
Most of the grass in her backyard was dead and the garden beds were bare spots and weeds. I walked slowly around the perimeter of the house and saw nothing. The same in the garage, except for two foul-smelling trash bins with flies buzzing around them. I turned my face away as I lifted the lids and then looked inside quickly.
Garbage.
I glanced at the house and saw a curtain move in a window. Sara Rust, spying on me. Unless it was someone else.
I had assumed she was home alone. Maybe I assumed wrong and she was still entertaining.
I had to return Hector’s pickup, so I drove directly to the winery after leaving Aldie. The crush pad had been cleaned and someone had closed the hangar doors to the barrel room. I let myself in through the steel-plated side door. The exhaust fans made their usual heavy thrumming sound as they moved the cooling air around, clearing out the buildup of carbon dioxide. A grapevine thermometer on the wall near the door read sixty-seven degrees. The room needed to be between fifty-five and sixty-five. Jacques had drummed it into me the first time I left the door ajar when I was about six years old that air and heat are the two greatest destroyers of wine.
I moved into the room and saw Quinn through the glass laboratory window. He poured something from a beaker into a row of test tubes, then looked up briefly and nodded at me before returning to his work. Joe and Hector were over by the row of stainless-steel tanks, on their knees straightening out hoses. I joined them, holding up the keys to Hector’s pickup.
“Your truck is in the parking lot. Thanks for the loan.”
“No problem.” Hector smiled, showing even white teeth against caffe latte skin, but he looked tired as he pocketed the keys.
“Where’s the Volvo?” Joe asked.
“Garage.”
“What happened?”
“It wouldn’t start this morning.”
“Tough break.” He leaned a ladder against the tank.
“I’ll do that, Joe,” Hector said as Joe put a foot on the bottom rung. “You take care of the hoses. You do a good job getting the seals tight. This tank and number five need to be racked into number seven.”
“I’ll get the clamps,” I said as Joe fitted the hoses between the smaller three-hundred-fifty-gallon tank, which had the ladder against it, and number seven, one of the large thousand-gallon tanks. I handed him the clamps and he fixed them so there was an airtight seal around the outlets.
Hector climbed the ladder as nimbly as a monkey and popped open the cover so the tank wouldn’t collapse as it emptied. We’d only forgotten to do that once and ended up with something that looked like a crumpled oversized soda can.
Joe turned on the pump. “How was harvest lunch?” he asked above the noise of gurgling wine moving through the hoses from the smaller to the larger tank.
“Okay. One of the guests was a congressman who brought his staff.”
“Great!”
“He was from California.”
“Oh. Hard sell, hunh?” He tapped his finger against the gauge on the side of the tank. “I think after we rack this and number five over and sugar them, Quinn wants to move everything into barrels. What’s left in the other tanks stays in stainless steel.”
The pump sounded like it was beginning to suck air. Joe switched it off, unclamping the hose and unlocking the large port-holelike panel on the front of the tank. “Hit that switch, will you?”
He opened the man-sized porthole door and disappeared inside the tank from the waist up, taking the hose with him. I switched on the pump again and heard him vacuuming the remaining wine out of the dish at the bottom. A minute later his voice reverberated eerily against the stainless steel. “Okay!”
I flipped the switch and he popped back out of the tank, like a life-sized jack-in-the-box. “Let’s get the other one. Number five.”
Hector moved the ladder and popped the top of the second tank. “Stop flirting with Lucie, Joe, and get the sugar and the yeast.”
Joe winked at me and left.
“You doing all right, Lucita?” Hector climbed down the ladder and reclamped the hose to the second tank. “Okay, you can turn the pump on.”
I obeyed. “I’m doing fine.”
“How come you didn’t tell Joe the truth about your car?” He saw the look on my face and added, “You’re lucky to be alive, you know?”
“How did you find out? Please don’t say it was Thelma. I won’t be able to go by the general store for a year.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Hollis Maddox dropped by. He said to tell you the Volvo’s at the Gas-o-Rama and the mechanic wants you to call him so he can tell you how much it’s gonna cost.” The pump was sucking air again so Hector switched it off. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I think someone tried to run me off the road last night.”
He vacuumed the rest of the wine from the dish. “I bet it was those kids. They get borracho—drunk—then they drag race along that flat stretch of Mosby’s Highway. Didn’t used to be like that when everyone knew everyone else around here. Now we got all those new subdivisions over in Leesburg and Sterling and parents too busy making money to spend time with their kids. So they get up to no good.”