Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [54]
She glanced at me, her pretty, freckled face frowning slightly before turning around and going back into the tasting room. Her irritated walk spoke volumes about their relationship.
I raised my eyebrows in a silent, inquiring gesture.
He twirled the glass by its stem and tried to look chagrined. “She’s kinda possessive. Which is ironic considering how free she is with her favors.”
I wasn’t about to touch that remark. “Who is she?” I asked.
“Just one of the tasting room girls. Giles brought her on. When he was through with her, she and I dated a few times, had a few laughs, a roll or two in the hay—literally.” He gave a cynical laugh. “She thinks that constitutes some kind of relationship. But she’s a good worker and usually a pretty fun gal. Sure you don’t want any wine?”
“No, thanks.” I held up the brochure in my hand. “I think I’m going to take a stroll through the rose garden, then go look for Bliss again.”
“No problem. You come by any time.” He gave me a wet, lopsided smile and moved his face within inches of mine. His breath was sour and stale-smelling. “My casa is always your casa.”
I took a step backwards, inhaling a shallow breath. “Uh, thanks.”
As I watched him walk back up the steps into the tasting room, I added his information to what JJ had told me. I had been surprised to hear that Cappy interceded for the tasting room girl when she was caught with Giles. Usually it’s the weaker person in a relationship, invariably the woman, who ends up losing a job or reputation whenever there’s an illicit affair. But I knew Cappy was a fair woman and the least pretentious of the sisters. Maybe she was truly trying to be egalitarian about the situation—assigning blame to both sides where it should be.
Then again, I thought, following a group of khaki-clad wine tasters toward the rose garden, maybe Giles had had something really big on her . . . or the family, giving him the kind of power that would keep his ex-lover employed even under his spoiled wife’s aristocratic nose. Did Arcadia perhaps have some knowledge about what Giles had on the family? Why else would she put up with one of her husband’s lovers working so closely with him in the winery?
It took me about an hour to see the entire garden, which, according to the shiny brochure, contained ten acres of every type of rose imaginable. Many bushes were in full bloom because of the late summer weather. The sheer number of them was breathtaking. Reading the names of the roses—Apothecary’s Rose, Yankee Doodle, Bride’s Dream, Secret, Golden Wings, Don Juan, Magic Carrousel—reminded me of the names conceived for wines and quilts. In the center of the garden was a great old queenly rosebush thick with large, heady-smelling blooms—white with red tips. Surrounding it were seven slightly smaller bushes in shades of pink, yellow, and red-orange. The way the flowers were planted almost duplicated the actual Seven Sisters quilt pattern that I’d looked up this morning in my encyclopedia of quilt patterns. I wondered if whoever had planted them had known that. In the quilt pattern there was one star or “sister” in the middle and six surrounding it, similar to the constellation after which it was named.
I glanced at the literature and saw the roses were hybrids named for the seven Brown sisters and their mother. The rose in the center was, naturally, Rose Jewel, the others Capitola Jewel, Willowdeen Jewel, Etta Jewel, Daisy Jewel, Dahlia Jewel, Beulah Jewel, and Bethany Jewel. The last four were obviously the two sets of twins who had died. What took their lives? Back in the early part of the century, it could have been anything. Many of the cemeteries around San Celina had tiny gravestones erected because of an encounter with influenza or some infectious disease that was incurable before our current medical advances. I wondered if the grandmother, Rose Jewel, thought much about the babies she’d lost so long ago. I sat down on one of the stone benches and listened to the trickling of the four