Free The Chardonnay Charade by Ellen Crosby Page A

me. “I forgot how many new varietals you wanted to grow. Petit Verdot, Syrah, Malbec, Seyval, Viognier, Cabernet Franc, and Norton.” I glanced up. “You sure this isn’t too ambitious?”
    He threw the tennis ball up in the air and caught it. “I told you I’m going to put this place on the map. You gotta be bold, Lucie. Take a few risks.”
    “It might be too much—” I began.
    “Look,” he interrupted, “I did the soil samples and we talked about all this. Don’t get cold feet on me now.”
    “After what happened last night I’m wondering if we shouldn’t be more cautious. There’s not a single grape on this list that we’ve grown before. What if none of them take, despite the soil samples? Why couldn’t we put in more Pinot Noir? We know that does well. Or more Riesling?”
    “Look, if you’re going to second-guess me…”
    “I’m not ! You say that every time I have a different opinion from yours.”
    “Let me run this place, Lucie. I’m good. I know what I’m doing. If we stay with the safe wines you’ve always made, we’ll be stuck in a rut. I can’t work like that. I’m talking about wines with different labels, wines we market more aggressively. Wines that will win awards.”
    “You want to change our labels?”
    “Honey, I want to change everything.”
    “I can’t let you have carte blanche. We have to work together.”
    He pointed to the papers. “I want to order all of this. Yes or no?”
    I have never liked ultimatums and I can be stubborn, too. “I guess so,” I said stiffly. “I’m late. I’d better get going.”
    “Yeah, and I’m heading down to the lab.” He stood up and added sarcastically, “By the way, thanks for the vote of confidence.”
    I left without responding.
     
    With the June primary election only two weeks away, you couldn’t swing a cat in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties without whacking someone’s vote-for-me roadside campaign sign. Actually, you’d be more likely to take out a few dozen, since they were either clustered together in an ugly clump at intersections or else placed along the roadside so close they reminded me of dominoes ready to fall. I drove to Ross’s house after picking up groceries at the Middleburg Safeway and counted the number of signs for Georgia Greenwood that still littered Mosby’s Highway. Now that she was dead, I wondered who would have the task of removing them.
    Though Ross had settled in Virginia more than twenty years ago after a residency in Washington, D.C., he was still known around town as “the new doctor.” He had family money and didn’t need to work a day in his life if he didn’t want to, but he’d put in long hours at Catoctin General and also joined with two other doctors in a family practice until he took the low-paying job as senior physician at the free clinic.
    I once asked him why he put in such grueling hours when he could have taken life easier. After all, how many doctors still made house calls? His answer surprised me.
    “I suppose it’s because I see something that’s broken and I want to fix it.” He’d smiled ruefully. “Though you don’t have to look too far to figure out where that came from. I’m an only child. Grew up in boarding schools and on summer trips with other rich kids because my parents were too busy with their own lives to spend time with me. So I had no one and because I was small I got picked on a lot. I guess I’m what you call a ‘wounded healer.’”
    When he came to the region with his first wife, Ross had bought an old plantation house in Fauquier County that Stephanie kept as part of the divorce settlement. Georgia was already in the picture as “the other woman” so the split with Stephanie had been acrimonious. Shortly before they got married, Ross and Georgia bought a large estate in Middleburg. This one had an even richer provenance, since it had been built by a descendant of Rawleigh Chinn, the first settler on the land that later become the town