Free Nowhere to Hide by Nancy Bush

short of pushing her out of the way and making a run for it.”
    â€œPregnant . . .”
    â€œRuminate on that some more. Meanwhile, I’ve got some interviews to take care of.”
    â€œWhat interviews?”
    â€œI’ve got three homicides. You know the drill. There are always interviews.”
    â€œWho, specifically?”
    â€œGood-bye, Auggie.”
    â€œDamn it, Nine!”
    â€œI can’t hear you. I think my cell’s breaking up. . . .” She clicked off and took a deep breath.
    Jake Westerly.

Chapter 4
    Jake Westerly shaded his eyes against a blasting September sun and thought about grapes. Specifically Pinot Noir grapes. Fall was harvest time and this lingering heat was helping the sugar levels as long as the damn sun didn’t blister the hell out of them.
    Westerly Vale Vineyards grew and processed their own grapes, but the greater portion of the wine they produced was from grapes from other vineyards. That was the bulk of their business. His current personal favorite was a blend of three: Malbec, Pinot Noir, and Merlot.
    But then don’t ask him about wine. He could drink Three-Buck Chuck—Charles Shaw—and be happy as long as the company he was with was good. The true wine connoisseurs were his brother, Colin, and Colin’s wife, Neela, and they were the ones who sweated over the weather (this year’s cold and wet spring had put the growing season back a few weeks), the grape harvesting (handpicking was best so the grapes weren’t smushed but gently split, releasing more of the juice), and the running of their B&B, a rambling early 1900s farmhouse that they’d rehabbed and added to and was Neela’s pride and joy.
    Not that he would tell anyone that. He was in partnership with Colin—the financial end of the operation—and people in the business expected him to know something about wine. Saying he was the numbers guy didn’t cut any ice with those who worshiped the grape.
    The grape.
    Nigel had been a worshipper, too, though it had taken being summarily fired by that rat bastard, Braden Rafferty, for him to finally realize his own dream. His father sure knew the business, though, and he’d passed that knowledge on to Colin who’d sucked it up with the same fervency Jake had sucked up Three-Buck Chuck—which he’d heard was Two-Buck Chuck in California.
    Pricing . . . that’s what Jake knew. And loan mongering with skinflint bankers. And the cost of every aspect of wine-producing down to the cute little coasters and napkins and wine corks and glasses in the gift shop—another of Neela’s specialties, along with running the Westerly Vale Bed & Breakfast with Colin.
    What Jake didn’t know was how his brother could stand it out here. Sure, the scenery was gorgeous. But Oregon wine country was too bucolic and the pace was extraordinarily sssllloowww and whenever Jake came to the vineyard, a clock started in his head, counting down the minutes until he could race back to Portland and his downtown office and think in terms of stocks, and bonds, and accruing interest and maybe even a commercial real estate deal or two. Colin professed to like living here, but then, Jake thought, maybe it was marriage that had made his brother slightly mental. Jake lived in Laurelton, in a dumpy, 1950s two-bedroom rambler with mahogany-stained board and bat siding, a driveway that really needed to be rid of the tree whose roots were popping it up near the two-car garage—the right side of which had been added on sometime during the rambler’s life and now was about an inch below the edge of the drive—and a neighbor dog that liked to sleep on Jake’s front porch and bark at any bird that flew overhead, apparently designated a “no fly zone” according to his canine brain. The dog was a lab and every other breed mix, and had a habit of pulling its lips back in a smile and panting, even when the temperature