Chapter 39
ALEXA
In the end, I called Priest, and Priest called Demelza, and Demelza called the cavalry.
The cavalry—aka the state police—showed up and found Margaret Leland still shrieking by the winery.
Roy had driven his buddy with the gun to the emergency room, where a medical team was busy removing an inch-wide piece of wood from his thigh.
It had come dangerously close to piercing his femoral artery.
The two women were sitting in the living room with Ari, Jez, and Marcel.
The blow-up bed turned out to have a puncture, so when we arrived, André had been snoring on the couch.
He’d taken one look at our unexpected guests, said, “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know,” picked up his sleep mask and earplugs and aromatherapy pillow, and claimed Marcel’s bed for the night.
I’d set up a camera so I could watch the discussion from the comfort of the library and multitask at the same time.
The contents of the Leland laptop had uploaded to the cloud, and I just had to hope it was Margaret’s.
Jez hadn’t seen another. Roy accessed his email from an iPad, and he seemed to be something of a technophobe.
Nolan was slumped on the couch, halfway through his third glass of wine.
“My life is out of control,” he mumbled.
“Don’t think of it that way. Things are ninety-nine percent under control, but the balance of the universe is shifting a little, that’s all.
The Lelands fucked around and found out.
Marielle played a stupid game and won a one-way ticket to hell.
Now you’re a competitor down, and we have André here, and André’s work is far superior to Marielle’s in every way. ”
“The cottage will have to wait until the insurance claim goes through, and that’s assuming the insurance company doesn’t find a way to wriggle out of paying.”
“What are you talking about? I’ll just write him a cheque, and I get a discount anyway.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not? Okay, so my handwriting isn’t the tidiest, but the bank seems cool with it.”
“Because I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Last week, you were talking about marriage, and this week, I’m not allowed to spend my hard-earned money on improvements to our home?”
“But—”
“You can pay me in orgasms. That thing with your tongue turned out better than I thought it would.”
Nolan brightened slightly, although his eyes were unfocused thanks to him being borderline wasted.
“You’ll stay? Here? With me?”
“There’s too much wanderlust in me to stay in one place forever, and I’ve never found anywhere I wanted to put down roots. But you changed everything, and now I think…I think I could spend a bit of time here. Still take some trips, but come back in between.”
He got clumsily to his feet and wobbled over to kiss me on the forehead. “I’ll miss you every moment you’re not with me. I love you. I’ve always loved you, even when I shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t get all sappy on me.” On-screen, Jez and Ari settled onto a couch opposite the two women. “Shhh, the show’s about to start.”
“?Hablas inglés?” Jez asked.
“Yes,” said the tallest of the pair. She’d stopped hyperventilating now, and she’d also drained the glass of water Marcel offered, although she hadn’t touched the plate of snacks. Neither of them had.
“Where are you from?”
She gave no answer other than wringing her hands in her lap.
“It’s okay, we’re not from ICE. We’re not going to arrest you.”
“From El Salvador,” she said hesitantly, the unofficial spokeswoman.
“What should we call you?”
Another pause, longer this time. “Mayra.” She nodded to her friend. “This is Rosario.”
“How long have you been here?” Ari asked, taking over the questioning, her manner gentler than Jez’s.
“In the prison room?”
“In the prison room and in the United States.”
“In the prison for one month, in the United States for six months. We only want to work.”
“In the vineyard? Is that how you met Roy and Margaret Leland?”
“Sí, sí.” Her face fell. “The man who brought us, he said we come to the United States for a good job. We picked the grapes all summer, and when there were no more grapes… They put us in the prison.”
“Just the two of you?”
She shook her head. “Twenty-three people. Now two.”
Rosario burst into tears. “They took Gabriela.”
“Her daughter,” Mayra explained. “The lady who looked after her while we were working got sick, so Mrs. Leland said, ‘Okay, Gabriela can come and pick the grapes too.’ Then… We were all in the prison.”
“So they put everyone in that room, and then each day, they took people away?”
“Not every day. Most days.”
“Was Gabriela the only child?”
A nod.
“The others were all women?”
Another nod.
“When did they take Gabriela?”
“Before yesterday.”
One of Ari’s strengths lay in her ability to ask questions sympathetically, even when the subjects began rambling or crying.
Jez wasn’t great at that, and I didn’t like speaking with people, period.
Over the next hour, we worked out that the Lelands were treating migrant workers as disposable—they’d take them on for the summer, mostly women, and when they were no longer needed at the vineyard, the Lelands would hand a bunch of them over to Bug Chapin, aka gun guy.
From there, the workers disappeared. The perfect plan, right?
Who cared about undocumented migrants? Well, we did, and Demelza did, and then it turned out that the folks on Point Team India—which everyone called the Circus—had some issues with Bug Chapin, so they offered to take him off our hands.
They’d also hunt for Gabriela and the other missing workers.
Helpfully, Margaret Leland had kept a spreadsheet on her laptop with names, dates, and dollar amounts.
A woman went for ten thousand bucks, a man five thousand.
And Gabriela? Fifteen thousand. There was a special place in hell reserved for child traffickers, and I sure hoped the Lelands would be heading there soon.
Of course, I’d do everything I could to help with their journey.
But back to the Nolan problem… In our quest to find the arsonist who’d set fire to Nolan’s cottage, we’d accidentally stumbled onto a much bigger issue.
And you know the worst part? Margaret Leland wasn’t even the arsonist. Mayra and Rosario were almost certain that Gabriela had been picked up the night before last—the prison room had a light that was turned off at night, which let the women count the number of days they were stuck there—and Margaret was there for the handover.
Assuming Bug had arrived at the same time on Tuesday as he had tonight, she couldn’t have been tossing a Molotov cocktail at Dionysus.
I glanced across at the list Ari had made. She’d also ruled out Donna Hayes, who’d been attending her first group therapy session at the time of the fire, and none of the other suspects screamed “guilty.”
Wyatt Hayes
Lisanne Fulton
Margaret Leland
Marielle Marten (the real one)
Donna Hayes
Antonella Cranston
We were back to square one, more or less.