Murders and Metaphors Page 2

  The house had gone through a number of remodels in the last two hundred years. The most significant of those was in the 1890s, when the modest home was transformed into a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian. It was my great-grandmother who turned the house into a bookshop, and when she did, the magic evolved just like the house itself. The spring water’s essence infused itself into the tree and by extension the books themselves, so that the essence of the water could communicate with the Caretaker of the tree and shop by sending her messages through the books. Yes, it was a lot to take in. I’d seen the evidence of the magic firsthand myself, several times, and I still wasn’t entirely sure seeing was believing.

  Ever since Rosalee’s time, care for the tree had passed directly down a line of women until it landed squarely on my shoulders. Grandma Daisy had been the Caretaker just before me, but I was now the Caretaker of this place, and to be honest, the flying and magical books took some getting used to. At first, all I’d wanted to do was hightail it back to Chicago, the city I had run away to when I fled Cascade Springs just after high school graduation.

  At the top of the staircase, I stepped into the fairy woodland–themed children’s room. The seats in the space were in the shape of toadstools and overturned logs. Painted fairies peeked out around the sides of bookshelves crafted to appear like limbs of trees. It was my very favorite place in the bookshop, and the place where I had spent most of my time as a child when my mother was so ill. The Caretaker duties should have passed to her, but when she died when I was thirteen, they had skipped a generation and fallen to me. Of course, I’d known nothing of this until I returned to Cascade Springs last summer after twelve years away. The only reason I had come back was because my grandmother claimed to be dying, which was a lie. Grandma Daisy usually got her way, honestly or otherwise. Even with her tricks, I knew her heart was in the right place, and she had known it was time to pass the mantle of being the Caretaker over to me. It didn’t matter if I was ready for it or not.

  I unlocked the door to my apartment with my key and stepped inside. I glanced around and didn’t see my cat Emerson anywhere. I really was starting to become suspicious. The feline was up to something; just what it was remained a mystery. I knew I wouldn’t be too happy about it when I found out.

  I needed to change before Grandma Daisy returned. The Mortons were fancy and their winery was fancy too. My jeans weren’t going to cut it. I settled on black pants, a wine-colored blouse, and a velvet jacket from the 1940s that Sadie had talked me into buying from her shop. It wasn’t really my style. Having been a graduate student most of my adult life, my clothing ranged from jeans to T-shirts, but the jacket seemed like the right thing to wear for an evening that would include both indoor and outdoor activities. I knew Sadie would much rather I wear one of the party dresses that she liked to foist on me, but at twenty below zero outside, it was far too cold for that.

  I got dressed and wove my long, strawberry-blonde hair into a loose braid that hung over my right shoulder. To complete the look, I added the black velvet beret that Sadie had also given me. I looked in the mirror feeling quite pleased with myself. The black of the hat and jacket made my eyes look even bluer. I thought Sadie would be pleased too. I just wished she had been going to be there to see my outfit.

  Sadie wasn’t going to the event at Morton Vineyards. She had recently broken off her engagement to the younger of the Morton sons, Grant, and had no intention of going to the vineyard ever again. Instead, she planned to drown her sorrows in Rocky Road ice cream and Nicholas Sparks movies all weekend.

  I envied her plan, although I would be more inclined to watch documentaries about nineteenth-century authors than movies based on Mr. Sparks’s novels, but the principle was the same. I’d had my own uncomfortable romantic entanglement with the Morton family that I would much rather forget. The eldest son in the family, Nathan, had been my high school sweetheart. There was a time I had thought we were so much in love that we were destined to be married and live happily ever after. That destiny fell apart when my best friend, Colleen, died our senior year, and to protect himself, Nathan implicated me in her death. Nothing kills a romance faster than accusing your love of murder. As it turned out, Colleen died in a sad accident that was no one’s fault, and I forgave Nathan for what he did. I knew his parents had pressured him into putting the blame on me. As you can guess, the elder Mortons weren’t my favorite people, and did I mention that Nathan was now the mayor of the village of Cascade Springs?

  Despite my personal discomfort, this was a case where business had to come before creature comforts. There would be over three hundred people at the Mortons’ party, and that translated into a lot of potential book sales that Charming Books couldn’t afford to lose.

  I hurried out of my apartment and down the spiral staircase that wrapped around the birch tree. I stopped short at the second step from the bottom. There was a book lying on the step. I knew that the book hadn’t been there when I’d gone up the stairs. I bent at the waist. It was a copy of Little Women. The quote Faulkner had said earlier came to mind. “Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow …” I turned to the crow. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

  “Try to be good,” was his only reply.

  I didn’t have much time, so I tucked the paperback of Little Women into my tote bag to take with me to the vineyard. From learned experience, I had a feeling the shop wanted me to take the book with me. I’d look it over when there was some downtime at the book signing. There must be a reason the shop’s essence wanted me to read it. I bit the inside of my lip. I just hoped that it had a good reason and not a much more ominous one.

  The ironic aspect of the book the shop was choosing to reveal to me was that I already knew it by heart. I was a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and was writing my dissertation on the transcendentalists, include Emerson, Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson. Louisa was strongly influenced in how she viewed the world by her eccentric father, so I’d read Little Women many times before. I suspected I knew the March sisters better than they could even have known themselves had they been real.

  Perhaps the shop’s magical essence was just reminding me to return to my dissertation edits. I could only hope that it was something as simple as that, but I had learned not to ignore the magical essence when it suggested I read something. I had ignored it in the past, and that had not ended well for me or the shop.

  There was a honk from outside Charming Books. Grandma Daisy was back from her scouting expedition to find the last-minute items on Belinda’s rider.

  I told Faulkner to behave and headed out the door with the first box of books. Faulkner cawed in return. As my grandmother and I loaded the car, I remained concerned that I hadn’t seen Emerson in the last few hours, but I didn’t have time to look for him now. We had to be at the vineyard in twenty minutes to start setting up for the signing. The Mortons would never forgive us if we were late.

  Emerson could take care of himself. That much I knew. He was a resourceful cat, whom I had adopted after his owner suddenly passed away. His previous owner had been my grandmother’s boyfriend Benedict Raisin. Benedict had been a village carriage driver and would take Emerson on all his rides. As a result, the tuxie hated to be cooped up in the bookshop. He was always sneaking away into the village. I guessed that’s where he was now, although I hated the thought of him being out on such a cold night.

  I climbed into the car through the passenger’s seat, which was no easy feat in my winter coat. I winced, expecting to hear a tear in my clothes, but somehow I made it into the driver’s seat in one piece. Grandma Daisy sat in the passenger’s seat after I was settled.

  “I think I got close enough to what she needed,” my grandmother said unconcernedly.

  I decided not to worry about what “close enough” meant. Sometimes being left in the dark was a blessing. “We’d better go. We have just enough time to get there before Mrs. Morton sends out a search party.”
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br />   My grandmother shook her head. “I strongly doubt that. The search party has already been sent.”

  On that cheerful note, I stuck my key in the ignition, just as I felt something cold press against the back of my neck. “Ahh!” I screamed and dropped the keys on the floor of the car.

  “Meow?” came the questioning response.

  “Emerson!” I cried.

  Grandma Daisy clicked her tongue. “I have been wondering where he’s been hiding all day. Surely not in the cold car all this time.”

  I placed a hand on my heart, hoping to keep it from beating out of my chest. “I think my life was shortened by two years there.”

  “Pish,” my grandmother said. “Maybe six months, but surely not two years.”

  The little tuxedo cat hopped over the car’s front seat into Grandma Daisy’s lap and cocked his head. The left side of his face was white, the right side black. I had always thought his coloring was meant to demonstrate the goodness and mischief sitting on his shoulders. Each side was whispering into his pointed ears. Nine times out of ten, mischief won.

  My hand was still on my chest. “Emerson, you can’t scare me like that. Do you want to give me a heart attack?”

  He meowed in return and then turned to look out the front window of the car. He was ready to go.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  I shook my finger at him. “No way. You’re not going to this event with us. It is completely out of the question.”

  He twitched his black ears, but that was it. He didn’t make any other effort to move.

  “Maybe we should just bring him with us,” Grandma Daisy said. “Clearly, he wants to go, and you know if we put him back in the shop, he will only find a way back into the car. I don’t know how he does it, but the cat always gets his way.”

  “Maybe because we are both pushovers.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Grandma Daisy said as if calling her a pushover was the greatest insult I could throw at her. “I’m not a pushover.” She stroked the cat’s black back as she said this, and he purred.

  Uh-huh, I thought, but wisely held my tongue. “Emerson can’t come to the winery. I’ll take him into the house.”

  I leaned over my grandmother to open the passenger side door, and the cat jumped into the back. When I tried to reach him in the back of the car, he jumped to the front.

  “Violet,” my grandmother said. “This is a waste of time. We’re going to be late. We can’t be late for this signing. There are a lot of book sales on the line.”

  I groaned, unsure what to do. I didn’t have time to take the cat back to the bookshop without being late to set up the signing, and I knew that the Mortons hated tardiness. And even if I took Emerson inside Charming Books, there would be no guarantee he’d stay there, but it was far too cold to leave him in my car while I was at the book signing. My only choice, it seemed, was to take him with me to the signing and hope he stayed out of sight.

  “Fine. We will take him.” I rubbed my head. “I can’t believe I agreed to this.” I shook my finger at the cat in Grandma Daisy’s lap. “Just keep a low profile at the vineyard. Find a place to hide or something. Don’t show yourself to Nathan’s mom, okay?”

  Emerson curled into a black-and-white ball with a slight smile on his face. I glanced at my grandmother, and she was smiling too. They’d got me, and they’d got me good. I scooped up the car keys and started the engine.

  Chapter Three

  Emerson was perfectly relaxed during the short drive out of the village proper and into the wine country that surrounded Cascade Springs. This part of the village had some of the most beautiful pieces of land, and even though it was well after sunset, the large full moon gave off enough light for us to see the snow- and ice-laced grapes growing on trellises on either side of the road.

  The winery had been in the family for five generations. When Nathan and I dated in high school, I had spent a good amount of time on the twenty-acre winery. It looked exactly the same. There was an expansive two-acre lawn that at the moment was covered with eight inches of snow. The lawn led up to the house, which was a large, white-frame affair built in the Georgian style. All the windows were lit, and the large home/business looked like a bright beacon on the cold, dark night.

  A line of cars crawled through the winery’s circular driveway into the parking lot on the east side of the house. The party and book signing were to begin in an hour, promptly at nine at night, and it seemed that everyone wanted to arrive early to make sure they had a chance for Belinda Perkins to sign their book. That was good for business. The fact that Grandma Daisy and I were late for the setup was not. Mrs. Morton would not be pleased, of that much I was sure.

  At midnight, the signing and the party would end and the cutting of the frozen grapes would begin. The grapes for ice wine were cut late in the night at the coldest hour to ensure the grapes were completely frozen when pressed. The frozen grapes gave off the sweetest juice, which was why ice wine was one of the sweetest dessert wines available.

  I knew all of this because I had so often heard Nathan’s father drone on and on about the wine-making business when I was a teenager. There had been a time when I could spout off all the facts about making ice wine as well as any of the Mortons, but that time was long past.

  I believed now that they had talked so much about it because it had always been their plan for the two boys to take over the family business. When we were young, it hadn’t seemed like either Nathan or Grant was interested in doing that, but since then, both sons had fallen in line with their parents’ wishes. Nathan had come to the wine business after being elected mayor of the village and Grant after a very public disgrace for committing fraud. If it hadn’t been for his family’s wealth and political connections, he would have been sitting in prison today instead of hosting this swanky party with his family.

  After what seemed like forever, we finally reached the parking lot. “I think we’re very late,” Grandma Daisy said with Emerson in her arms as I ungracefully climbed out of the passenger side of the car. I wondered if my grandmother would let me pay for the driver’s side door to be fixed. I doubted it. The only way to have it done would be in secret. I was seriously considering that as I tumbled out of the car.

  I yanked the dolly from the back seat. “Mrs. Morton is not going to be happy.” I rolled it to the trunk to stack books.

  “It’s not the only matter,” she said as she hoisted two grocery bags out of the back seat with her free hand. “I got most of the items mentioned on Ms. Perkins’ list and just wung it with the rest. It will be good enough.”

  Wung it, huh? I wasn’t so sure about that. The thought of my grandmother winging anything was downright scary; add in the Mortons’ involvement and I had a lot to be concerned about.

  “What should we do with him?” My grandmother nodded down at the cat.

  I wished she had thought about that before she talked me into bringing him with us.

  “We can’t leave him in the car,” Grandma Daisy said. “It’s far too cold. He’ll freeze.”

  I held open my giant tote bag. “Put him in here. We’ll get him inside and then figure out what to do. This is such a bad idea,” I muttered.

  My grandmother tucked the cat into my tote bag like he was a baby she was securing into a car seat. He didn’t fight her at all, and finally, when he was settled to her satisfaction, she stepped back.

  I loaded the last of the books on the dolly and followed Grandma Daisy up the walk toward the big house.

  Lights lined the walkway, and a giant ice sculpture of a wine glass and grapes stood just outside the front door. An ice sculptor was in the middle of the yard working on another piece. A number of onlookers stood around him in their winter coats, holding wine glasses in gloved hands. The buzzing of the chainsaw hurt my ears, sounding much louder in the still evening air than it normally would have.

  A man in a Morton Vineyards parka directed us toward the back of the house to what I assumed was the
help’s entrance. I paused in the middle of the walkway before we reached the back door.

  The view of the frozen vineyard took my breath away. White twinkle lights lined the edges of the large glass greenhouse and also wrapped around the trees and arboretum that led into the vineyard itself. Battery-powered lanterns dotted the vineyard to guide those helping with the harvest later that night.

  I bit the inside of my lip. I had loved helping with the midnight grape harvest. I had known Nathan my entire life, and we had been close friends since childhood. I had been a part of the harvest every year from the time my mother said I was old enough to stay up late to join the team collecting grapes. Nathan had been part of the event since he was able to talk.

  When we were thirteen, Nathan took my hand and led me to a dimly lit corner of the vineyard. That’s when he kissed me for the first time. It was a sweet and innocent kiss between two mere children, but I thought my feet would never hit the ground again. Two months later my mother died, and my world crashed to the ground. Nathan had been with me through that, my greatest heartache. I couldn’t dismiss that.

  My grandmother nudged me in the back. “Keep moving, Violet. Camille Morton must be ready to spit nails if we don’t have everything set up and ready to go yet.”

  I grimaced as I thought of how angry Mrs. Morton was sure to be. “Right, right.” I had to force myself to move forward. I wasn’t ready to face the Morton family. But I straightened my shoulders; this was something I had to do. For my business and for myself.

  A man in a dark suit opened the door for us, and he grinned from ear to ear. “Hello, beautiful ladies,” he said smoothly. “If you hadn’t arrived in the next ten seconds, I believe my mother was going to call your police chief, Violet, and ask him to arrest you for ruining her party.”

  Grant Morton, Nathan’s young brother by just one year, was as physically different from Nathan as he could be. While Nathan was tall, lean, and blond, Grant was short, with a squat muscular build and a thick mane of dark hair. Both brothers were handsome, but no one would have believed the two were related if they hadn’t been told they were.