Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [52]
I drove past the museum, not feeling like facing either paperwork or the million and one questions and requests that always dogged me at work. Before I realized it, I found myself turning off on the road that led to the Seven Sisters ranch.
You’re not snooping, I told myself. You’re just going out to visit Bliss, see the horses, maybe tour the winetasting room that you missed the night of the engagement party.
It was almost three o’clock when I stopped at the stables where things were pretty quiet. A Mexican groom was preparing to wrap the legs of a bay mare with a swollen fetlock. Figaro, the masked barn cat, greeted me by weaving around my legs. I bent down and stroked the long black stripe on his back.
“Donde Senorita Bliss?” I asked the groom.
He shrugged his answer—I don’t know.
“Señora Cappy?”
He jerked a thumb up the road. “En la casa grande.”
In the big house. “Gracias.”
I wandered around, petting the horses, then decided to walk the quarter mile to the wine-tasting room and the rose garden, which was quite famous among San Celina’s flower set. It was a warm, pleasant afternoon, the temperature hovering around eighty. Walking through the garden might give me the time and solitude I needed to think about what I should do with this new information I’d acquired. The one person I was definitely going to avoid was Detective Hudson, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense when I was holding something back. I’d give this information to Gabe and let him talk to the sheriff’s detective.
It was a smart move leaving my car at the stable, because the parking lot was completely full and the winetasting bar as crowded as an airport at Christmas. Tourists were well into their wine weekend on this Saturday afternoon. There were two dark red limousines from Will’s Winetasting Tours parked in front of the rugged adobe tasting room. Chase, Etta, and two female employees were all pouring wine and chatting with customers. It appeared Emory was right. The murder had only caused business to pick up. Either that or a lot of these obviously out-of-town customers hadn’t heard about it yet. I left Scout comfortably situated under the shade of an ash tree with the command to stay and stepped inside the cool, spicy-scented tasting room.
Though the outside was adobe, the gift shop and winetasting room duplicated the Montana lodge theme of the big house. The gift items ran the gamut of pewter wine corks shaped like horse heads to glassware etched with the Seven Sisters logo to local salsas and hand-tinted postcards of the magnificent Brown house and rose gardens. I picked up a brochure that explained the history of the adobe structure and the rose gardens.
The long dark oak tasting bar with a brass foot rail and brown-and-white cowhide barstools must have set the family trust back a pretty penny. Hanging behind the bar, an original Donna Howell-Sickles watercolor of three cowgirls with strong thighs and sky-sized grins also told me no expense had been spared. A built-in fireplace was at one end with a dozen or so padded mission-style chairs surrounding it. Over the carved mantel was a professional portrait of the entire Brown family. I weaved my way through the chattering wine tasters and stared up at the photograph. Everyone’s smile was flawless and I couldn’t help but wonder how many shots it took the photographer to achieve this polished picture. I stepped closer. The smiles were perfect, but there wasn’t a genuine bit of emotion in one of them.
I stared a little longer at Giles’s face. What had he done that caused one of these people to murder him? Was it blackmail like his letter implied, or something else? Maybe Arcadia, as dramatic as her reaction had been that night, had, in reality, become fed up with his philandering. The switching of the guns did sound planned, as Detective Hudson said, but it could just as well have been a quick recovery by her grandmother and great-aunts