Dying on the Vine Read Free Page B

on about rotary fermenters. Nico had stopped drumming his fingers long enough to pour himself another glass of wine.
    Pietro silenced the two older brothers with a weary wave. “Enough. Don’t order the damn thing; let it wait. It’s not the last whatever-you-call-it in the world.”
Let Luca win one for a change. What difference did it make now? “
Okay, I got to get going. Any minute, Nola, she gonna be here to drive me. So, if nobody got anything else—”
    The mere mention of Nola, Pietro’s second wife, was enough to cause a stiffening around the table. The prickly, uncomfortable relations between stepmother and stepsons were, if anything, worse than they’d been twenty-five years earlier when she’d made her first appearance in their lives. For a while Pietro had tried to smooth things between them, but patience was not his strong suit, and eventually he’d given up. And the truth was that by now he had plenty of smoldering grievances of his own against her. Grievances, doubts, suspicions . . . he hardly knew what she was thinking anymore. He hardly knew
her
.
    The shy, plump, young widow he had married back in Sardinia had been full of gratitude to him. She’d been a simple, dutiful wife, and for the first five hard years in Tuscany she had worked shoulder to shoulder with him, planting vines, building trellises, culling and harvesting grapes until their fingers bled. But things changed when a noted wine critic more or less accidentally visited Villa Antica in 2009 and tasted the 2001 Pio Pico, then raved about it in his blog: “elegant yet rustic, assertive yet balanced, subtle yet bold, this big-hearted wine . . .”
    What made it truly astounding was that what the famous critic was blathering about wasn’t one of Franco’s fancy, meticulously engineered varietals, but the simple, down-to-earth wine Pietro made primarily for their own everyday drinking, the same blend of Carignane and Nebbiolo that his father and grandfather had made back on the farm in Sardinia.
    Nevertheless, the review put them on the enological map; their fortunes took a sudden, huge jump; and things were never again the same with Villa Antica. Unfortunately they had never been the same with Nola either. Now that she was part of Tuscan royalty, she changed overnight from a Sardinian to an Italian: first the relinquishing of her kitchen duties to a newly hired housekeeper, then the driving lessons, the “diction” lessons, the fashion magazines, the hairdresser in Milan, the endless diet regimens, the flaunting of her middle-age body in shamefully revealing new clothes. At home and with the winery staff, she had become domineering; in public, vulgar and whorish—
    “I don’t have anything else,
babbo
,” Luca said.
    “I don’t have anything,
babbo
,” Nico said.
    Franco, sulking over the rotary fermenter, was silent.
    “All right, then,” Pietro said, getting up. “Don’t blow up the winery while I’m gone. Franco, you’re in charge.”
    Franco stood up to shake hands with his father. “We’ll take care of everything. I’ll see you at the end of the month.”
    “If God wills it,” Pietro grunted. “
Che sara sara
.”

TWO
     
    Eleven months later, August 22, 2011
     
RESPONDER: “One-one-two, emergency response. What is the nature of the problem, please?”
CALLER: “I don’t know if this is the number I should be calling. I—I—”
RESPONDER: “Just tell me the problem, signore. Speak slowly.”
CALLER: “Well, I just saw two dead bodies.”
RESPONDER: “Give me the address, please, signore.”
CALLER: “There is no address. I was hiking. I’m in the mountains, in the Casentino National Park near Mount Falterona. But I have a GPS. The coordinates are, ah, 43.87983 and, ah, 11 .758633. Yes, that’s right, 8633.”
RESPONDER: “And can you see these bodies right now?”
CALLER: “Not exactly. They’re on the other side of a big boulder, maybe five meters from me. I’m at the bottom of a cliff.