A Tainted Finish: A Sydney McGrath Mystery Read Free

his mouth with the back of his hand.
    “Nice suit,” he said, nodding to the tidy black bundle on the counter.
    She smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. Armani. Cost me nearly a month's pay.” She paused. “Thanks for folding it”. She just remembered that she had stepped out of it and left in on the lab floor.
    “Clarence told me that you were a gifted winemaker,” he said, crossing his long legs and leaning against the tank. His eyes fixed on his feet.
    “I'm not,” she said, aping his stance against the tank deliberately. “I’m a sommelier.”
    “But you have the instincts of a winemaker.”
    “Clarence never wanted me to be a winemaker. Doctor. Physicist. World chess champion. But not a winemaker.” She smiled wryly.
    “I would have never sorted that way. I would have never just dumped the grapes into the machine without a sorting table. I am used to having equipment and a full staff. But you were right, the fruit was perfect. If we had waited until we got our crew together we might have had some issues. It got warm today.” His accent reappeared in rolling r's, soft w's, and tongue-dampened t's.
    “We could have just called them back.” She shrugged, a little embarrassed now at her bull-headedness over getting the fruit processed immediately.
    “Maybe. Alejandro and the crew would have been drunk. They were pretty torn up last night. It could have sat for days. We would have had to find refrigeration, and the fruit might have soured.” He glanced down at her, checking her reaction. He was offering a flimsy argument, but she appreciated the gesture. She had been an ass by any standard. She grabbed the bourbon from him and took two more pulls surveying the tidy counter space in front of them.
    “This your handiwork?” she asked, waving at the organized shelves. The fraternal prodding of the whiskey was beginning to loosen her tongue.
    “Clarence is a genius, but I have no idea how he works this way.” He smiled at her, but his expression changed slowly as he realized his blunder. Her face blanched. A simple tense change could mean so much.
    Sydney looked down at her feet, suddenly feeling an immense gravitational pull on her chest. Her head whirled and her knees collapsed under her as she slid down the side of the tank onto the cool concrete floor. A violent Guh! escaped from her chest, and she began to weep loudly, heaving grotesquely. She curled into a ball and pressed her wet face against the concrete, surrendering to the grief that had stalked her all day.
    Olivier tried to wrestle her into some kind of comforting embrace, but she was taken in a wave of loss so violent that he knew she wasn’t aware of his presence. Instead he stroked her thick black hair and finished off the bourbon, eventually letting his own tears fall freely.

Chapter 2
    Syd jumped out of bed wearing only a sheet that she wrapped around herself in a blurred hurry. She cursed the quiet, persistent knocking on the kitchen door. She opened the door to see Jim Yesler in uniform, hat in hand and a bereft look on his face. She stepped forward instantly and hugged him, burying her face in his chest. Something about seeing a man like Jim Yesler overwrought with grief was heartbreaking. When she finally let go of him his choked sobbing had abated. She slowly realized by his growing embarrassment that she was hardly dressed.
    “I think I left my bag in the car. Up at the winery,” she explained, tugging on the sheet above her chest.
    He nodded without a word, turned on his heels, and made out of the door on a welcome errand.
    Syd rummaged around the kitchen for a french press and coffee beans, still holding onto the sheet with one hand. She lit the huge black enamel Ada stove and started the kettle. Next to the stove sat an expensive Italian espresso maker, her uncle's preferred mode of morning caffeine. The hundred-year-old farmhouse kitchen was equipped with modern conveniences, but she preferred the rusticity of her childhood. She moved