“Tell them thanks,” I said. “And I’ll see how it goes.”
Mother nodded, and sailed out.
“Thank you,” I heard her say outside, presumably to someone who was holding the door for her.
The someone came in—Stanley Denton, our Caerphilly-based private investigator.
“Good morning, all,” he said. “I came to make my report.”
“Report?” I echoed.
“I assumed you were serious when you asked me to check up on Ms. Sedgewick.”
“I was,” I said. “But—”
“If you were investigating her in connection with the murder—” the chief began.
“I asked him to do it before the murder even took place,” I said.
“Day before yesterday, as a matter of fact,” Denton added.
“And it was about chicken thefts she was alleged to have committed before she came to Caerphilly,” I added. “In someone else’s county. I needed to know if she was a danger to the fair.”
“All right, all right,” the chief said. I was relieved to see that he seemed more amused than annoyed. He indicated one of the folding metal chairs.
Denton sat down and pulled out his notebook.
“Meg called me to ask if I could find out whether Ms. Sedgewick owned any property other than her winery,” he said. “Apparently some of the exhibitors suspected that she was stealing their valuable birds and stashing them someplace where no one would think to look for them.”
He paused there as if waiting for a reaction. Apparently the chief and I were both equally impatient.
“So, did you find anything?” we asked, almost in unison.
“I did indeed,” he said. “Ms. Sedgewick owns a farm outside of Ashville, North Carolina, under her maiden name of Janet Hickenlooper. We found livestock there. And a very disgruntled caretaker. People who have secrets to keep shouldn’t treat their staff like dirt.”
“Did he spill the beans about the stolen chickens?” I asked.
“The caretaker didn’t know anything about stolen chickens,” Denton said. “He doesn’t like chickens, so he resents that she keeps bringing new batches down to the farm and ordering him to build coops and pens for them. What he really had a lot to say about was Genette’s winemaking operations. Apparently she’s not doing too well at growing grapes on her farm.”
“I hear everyone had a bad year or two lately,” I said.
“She hasn’t had a good year since she bought her place,” Denton said. “She’s been regularly buying up grapes and tanks of grape juice from out of state and having them shipped to the Ashville farm. Then the caretaker has to paint over anything that would identify where they really came from and deliver them to her Virginia farm in the middle of the night. He says he’s pretty sure about ninety percent of the grapes she used to make her wine came from out of state. He also hints that her wine’s so bad when she wants to enter a contest, she fills up one of her bottles with somebody else’s wine.”
“We need to tell someone about this,” I said.
“I already did.” Denton smiled as if he’d enjoyed doing it. “The Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, whose rule about what kind of grapes you can use in a Virginia wine she seems to have completely ignored.”
“And that is not an agency you want to trifle with,” the chief said, with satisfaction.
“I also dropped by the wine pavilion here at the fair just now and had a few words with a couple of people who are active in the Virginia Winemakers Association. I figured they’d have a vested interest in notifying anyone who gave her a medal that it might not have been fairly won.”
“I suspect it won’t take them too long to do the notifying,” I said. “Even with pirated wines she hasn’t been doing too well in wine competitions.”
“So I gathered,” Denton said. “And she’s not too popular with her colleagues, is she? Before I’d even finished telling them the news, they all started popping corks, pouring me glasses of wine, and toasting me. And you, incidentally, for siccing me on the case.”
“Well, that solves one mystery,” I said.
“They were also toasting to the return of Fickle Wind—any idea what that is.”
“A winery Genette put out of business,” I said. “It’s coming back?”
“The other winemakers seem to have a plan for that,” Denton said. “As far as I could tell, it seems to involve several dozen of them agreeing not to sue her for millions if she sells the vineyard back to its rightful owner for peanuts.”
“Mother will be delighted.” And I made a silent promise that once Morot got on his feet again, I’d buy a case of Fickle Wind’s most expensive wine, as a silent apology for suspecting him. “But getting back to your mission—you didn’t find any sign of the stolen chickens?”