“And here we come along and create the biggest concentration of heritage breed animals the state has ever seen,” I said. “Talk about a target for whoever’s doing the stealing.”
“Yeah, but you also created the biggest concentration of heritage breed owners we’ve ever had in the state,” he said. “Got us talking, and talking made us realize we have a problem. And isn’t that the first step in dealing with it?”
With that he nodded, and strode off to help a ten- or twelve-year-old girl in a FFV t-shirt who was trying to steer a pig taller than she was into one of the pens in the barn.
Should I report what he’d said to the chief? As I headed back toward the llama booth, hoping to see the boys before they went down for their nap, I kept trying to decide. Then I spotted something: the morose man in the windbreaker—the one Mother had found so suspicious. He was once more standing by the bank of trash cans, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, staring.
I strolled up and confronted him.
“Is there a reason you’re always standing there, staring at the wine pavilion?” I asked.
He blinked and took a step back.
“Just wishing I was in there, showing my wines,” he said.
“You didn’t register in time to get a booth?”
“Didn’t try to get a booth.” He was looking down, apparently focused on his attempt to use the toe of one boot to knock dirt off the side of the other. “Lost my vineyard last year.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Of course, in a way, my vineyard’s in the pavilion, even if I’m not,” he said. “Genette Sedgewick bought it after I went bust.”
Oh, dear.
“Another member of the Genette fan club,” I said aloud.
“Ha, ha.” It wasn’t really a laugh. “I wouldn’t have minded so much if it hadn’t been her who sent me over the edge in the first place. We had a bad harvest last year, and a lot of us were scrambling to buy grapes so we could keep our production up.”
“You can do that?” I asked. “Sell wine made from grapes you didn’t grow?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Lots of vineyards do. As long as you don’t claim you grew them, you could have a winery without owning a single vine. Anyway, Genette was buying, too. She drove up the price for Virginia grapes so high that a lot of us couldn’t afford them. Some people found a way to absorb the hit. Or maybe they’re dying, too, just more slowly. I couldn’t make enough wine to pay the mortgage.”
“Couldn’t you buy grapes from someplace else?” I asked. “I hate to sound disloyal, but Virginia’s not the only state that grows grapes.”
“State law says you can’t have more than twenty-five percent out-of-state grapes and still call it a Virginia wine,” he said. “I bought as much out-of-state fruit as I could, made as much wine as I could, and sold it all for good prices. I have—had—a good reputation. But it wasn’t enough.”
I nodded. He went back to kicking mud off his boots.
“So if you don’t have a winery, why did you come to the fair?” I asked.
He looked up, frowning.
“I mean, why torture yourself?” I added.
He grimaced.
“I didn’t realize it would be this bad.” He shook his head. “I thought it would be a good chance to see people, maybe find out if anyone’s hiring. I’ve been mucking out cow barns at my brother-in-law’s dairy farm up in Pennsylvania for six months now. Be nice to come back home. Work with grapes, even if they’re not my grapes. But every time I try to work up my nerve to walk into that tent…”
He shook his head.
“I think I could do it if I didn’t know she was in there,” he muttered.
“She isn’t always,” I said. “Stay here and keep your eye on that door.” I pointed to the tent door farthest from Genette’s booth. “My mother’s in charge of the tent. I’ll have her step outside and flutter a scarf the next time Genette takes off. Would that help?”
He looked up, a hopeful expression on his face.
“Yeah,” he said. “That would help a lot. Thanks.”
“By the way, what’s your name?”
“Paul Morot. My vineyard was called Fickle Wind Winery.”
I nodded as if I recognized the name. Actually, it did sound familiar. If his winery had had a good reputation, odds were Mother had found his wine and served it. Even before we’d put her in charge of the wine pavilion, Mother had become an avid partisan of the Virginia wine industry—possibly because Dad had begun planting grapes and trying to make his own wine. So far Dad hadn’t produced any truly spectacular wine—in fact, these days Rose Noire did a rather brisk business turning his failures into exotic herbal vinegars and selling them. But Mother was already looking forward to the day when she could serve Langslow Reserve to dinner guests and remark, with studied casualness, “Oh, yes—James won a medal with this one at the fair.”