Tangled Vines Read online

  “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.”

  Big Eddie shrugged his lack of interest. “A picture’s worth a thousand words.”

  “Some picture,” Phipps scoffed. “A pretty face in front of a camera pretending to be a reporter. Take it from me, everyone in television news is overrated and overpaid.”

  Len Dougherty half listened to the exhange. He was confused, his thoughts jumbled. He started to lift his glass, then abruptly shoved it away and pushed off his stool. He needed to think.

  Chapter Two

  Kelly did the final standup live. She held her pose and position until the signal came that the network feed was complete. The lights were killed and she lowered the mike dropping her calm, slightly grave on-air demeanor, a glow of triumph lighting her eyes and bringing a satisfied curve to her lips.

  The producer, Brad Sommers, climbed out of the equipment-laden satellite van. Thirtyish, he was dressed in khakis and an L. L. Bean plaid shirt with short sleeves – New York country a concession to the sultry heat of an August night in the city. Kelly was still too pumped from the adrenaline rush of covering the story to feel the stickiness in the air.

  Brad gave a thumbs-up sign to Kelly and the crew. “We made network news on the West Coast.” A version that was always updated with late-breaking stories to compensate for the three-hour time difference.

  “We did it, guys.” Flushed with the feeling of success and eager to share it, Kelly grinned at her two cohorts. “Back in Iowa where I come from, this is what we call ‘walking in tall corn,’” she declared with a broad wink.

  “Yeah, too bad it couldn’t have been national, though.” A stocky, fortyish, and balding Rory Tubbs shifted the camera off his shoulder and set it down.

  “Yeah, that woman’s timing was inconvenient as hell,” the sound man, Larry Maklosky, mocked.

  Rory flushed, realizing his innocent remark had sounded hard and insensitive to the tragic event that had left one policeman dead and a senator seriously wounded. Emotional detachment was necessary for anyone in the news business. It was his job to record events as they occurred, not react to them. That could come later.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he grumbled in defense. “It’s just that I’ve never had any of my stuff on national news before.”

  “You could still make tomorrow night’s,” Larry said with a wicked grin, always quick to needle Rory about something. Now that he had him going, he didn’t let up. “All you have to do is pray the senator dies.”

  “Will you cut it out, for chrissake?” Rory glared the warning.

  “Speaking of the senator, I’ll see if there’s any word from surgery yet,” Kelly said, fully aware the story wasn’t over.

  Brad Sommers stopped her. “I’ll go. You take a breather. I need to call in anyway. We should have a name on the woman by now.”

  Kelly didn’t argue. Neither did she intend to completely let go of her high state of alertness. “Bring back some coffee. Black,” she called after him.

  “And a pizza,” Rory added, jokingly.

  Joining in, Larry cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted his order at the producer’s retreating back. “I’ll take a burger and fries and a chocolate shake!”

  Kelly’s stomach rumbled hungrily. She ignored it, something she had learned to do. In a business where the camera added ten pounds to anyone in front of it, dieting was a constant for all but a very few. Kelly wasn’t one of those very few.

  When she turned back, Larry shook a cigarette from his pack and offered it to her. She took it and bent close to the flame of his lighter. Tipping her head back, she blew out the smoke and lifted the heavy braid of auburn hair briefly off her neck.

  “You shot some powerful footage, Rory.” The warmth and admiration in her voice were genuine.

  He beamed a little, then shook his head. “Man, when I think about it, I still can’t believe how much I managed to get. I remember when Melcher came out, waving and grinning, I panned right to the pickets to catch their reaction. And this woman bursts out of nowhere -” Pausing, he frowned. “How did she get past the cops? Did either of you see?”

  “I didn’t,” Kelly said with a touch of regret. “Unfortunately, I was looking the other way.”

  “I think the cops were concentrating too much on the guy who looked like a wrestler with an attitude,” Larry offered, then glanced at the cameraman. “I saw some of the tape while they were editing it. Do you realize you even had the gun in the frame when she started shooting?”

  “I thought she was carrying something, but I figured it was going to be a rotten tomato or an egg.” Rory grinned. “I was excited thinking I might get a shot of a tomato splatting on Melcher’s puss. But a gun...” He shook his head again and sighed, his expression turning serious when he lifted his gaze to Kelly. “Do you know we almost didn’t get any of it? If you hadn’t wanted to swing by -“

  She cut in, countering, “If you hadn’t told me about the pickets.”


  “If park security hadn’t mentioned the pickets,” Larry chimed in, adding another in the string of ifs.

  “Face it,” Kelly stated wryly. “It was luck.”

  Rory gave her a long considering look, then smiled. “I don’t know...I think there was some pretty sound instincts involved. Yours.”

  That was high praise coming from him. Kelly smiled back, moved by it, yet made uncomfortable by it, too. “I’m immune to flattery, Rory. Let’s compromise and call it lucky instincts.”

  “You’re right, Tubbs,” Larry piped up. “It seems she has a nose for news. Guess that means we’ll have to stop calling her Legs and start calling her Nose.”

  Kelly winced at that and complained, “What is it with you guys? Why do you always pick out nicknames that refer to some part of the body? Here it’s Legs. In St. Louis, they took one look at my hair and started calling me Red.”

  “Very unimaginative,” Larry said to Rory. “But that’s St. Louis for you.”

  “And Legs is more imaginative, I suppose,” she mocked, enjoying the exchange and the camaraderie. It kept her sharp, yet relaxed her, too.

  “It’s sexier.” Rory grinned.

  “I’ll tell Donna you said that.” Kelly made the threat with a straight face and only the faintest gleam in her eyes.

  “Geez, don’t do that,” Rory protested, then started digging in his pocket. “I’d better call her while I got the chance. Rory Junior’s been dealing her fits. He’s cutting teeth.”

  He headed into the hospital. Kelly watched him dodge an arriving ambulance, and thought back to his compliment on her instincts. She wasn’t sure that’s what it had been. Getting some tape on the pickets had seemed merely logical.

  They were already at Central Park doing a remote for the “Live at Five” report. It was part of the station’s summer campaign to celebrate New York. Periodically the newscast was done partly from the studio and partly on location somewhere in New York. Previously they had used the Bronx Zoo and Shea Stadium in Queens. This time, the site had been Central Park, with Kelly and the weatherman on hand, and the remote had gone off without a single glitch.