Page 5 of A Winter of Discontent for Henry Milch
“It is not,” I said, though she might have been right.
I opened the glass door that led into the tasting room. On one side of the large room there were several banquet-sized tables,on the other a bar. The room was bright and sunny, large glass windows had been cut into the barn wall and looked out at the snow-covered vineyard. Most importantly, it was warm, very warm. There was a fireplace in one corner crackling away.
“Let’s sit at a table,” Opal said.
I ignored her and walked over to the bar, slipped off my puffer jacket and put it on the back of a stool. I was wearing a lime green sweater I’d found at a resale shop. I had to make some concession to the weather. And my grandfather’s clothes, though they fit and were usually well made, were mostly gray and brown.
Grumbling, Opal crawled onto the stool next to me and wiggled out of her faux fur coat.
“I wanted to sit by the fire.”
I shrugged.
There weren’t a lot of ‘tasters’ at that moment. An older couple at a table and three middle-aged women at the bar. Behind the bar was a thickset woman with broad shoulders and curly blond hair. Loitering nearby was a girl who looked young enough to make me wonder if she should legally be there.
The barmaid—winemaid?—gave us tasting menus.
“We also have mulled wine.”
“I’ll have that,” Opal said.
The woman looked at me. I shook my head. I couldn’t stand mulled wine. It was like drinking a cinnamon flavored puddle.
“I’ll go get that and let you look at the menu.”
At the top of the menu was a photograph of two men and a woman in their twenties, and the story of how they went to college at U of M and decided to open a winery together. There was more to it than that, but I was just skimming. I was pretty sure the woman in the photo was the winemaid who’d handed us the menu. She wasn’t aging especially well.
There were seven kinds of wine to try: three white, two reds, a rosé and a cherry wine. You could get a glass or you could get a flight, which was a taste of three different wines. I decided to get a flight and try all three of the white wines.
That prompted me to look around the large room again. There were no buckets that I could see. This wasn’t a tasting room where you spit the wine out. I suppose that made it more of a swallowing room.
“You’re paying for this, aren’t you?” Opal asked.
“It’s not like I have a lot of money.”
And I didn’t. I was sneaking this onto my grandmother’s credit card. Of course, she figured out I’d stolen it and then said I could keep it. Forhouseholdexpenses only. A definition I stretched when necessary; and it was often necessary.
“You don’t have an expense account?”
Honestly, I had no idea. I hadn’t asked.
The winemaid came back with Opal’s mulled wine and I ordered my flight. Before the woman left, I said, “I’m Henry Milch, I work?—”
“Emily Cole’s son?”
“Yes. That’s who I am. I’m?—”
“We buy cherries from your grandmother.”
“You do? But I thought her cherries were made into maraschinos?”
“She grows more than one kind.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “We buy her Ulsters for our cherry dessert wine.”
“Oh, okay.” Then I said, “Jasper Kaine does all that for my grandmother.” That way I didn’t sound like too much of an idiot. “I’m working for Hamlet Gilbody. Are you Melody Frasier?”
“I am. But it’s Melanie.”
“Sorry.” I’d written down the names of the people who worked at the winery on the back of coffee receipt and put in my pocket, where it still was. “Uh… Hamlet is the investigator foryour insurance company. He wanted me to look into the Roberta LaCross’… um, incident.”
