Annie stretched her legs and tried not to panic. She reviewed the situation step by step, not wanting to jump to conclusions. The gray eelskin cowboy boots were too distinctive to belong to anyone but Galen Rockwell. They were the same ones she’d seen him wearing at the Wine Gala. Nevertheless, she couldn’t believe that Galen, himself, was responsible for the scheme that Steven Vick had uncovered.
She had to find a way out of the bam. Her eyes were a little more accustomed to the dark, but it was still hard to see. She couldn’t risk turning on the lights—Galen would surely see them and come back to investigate. She started with the front door, knowing it was probably futile. Sure enough, when she unlatched the deadbolt and tried to open the double doors, they wouldn’t budge more than an inch. A thick chain doubly wrapped around the handles held the two doors firmly together.
Feeling blind and vulnerable, Annie felt her way to the side door near the back of the barn. Again, she found it bolted and padlocked, this time from the inside. Annie thought about the private detectives she read about in novels who always happened to carry a set of lock-picking tools that a “friend” had given them. She’d never thought that was terribly realistic. Annie knew no one who owned such tools, nor anyone except a professional locksmith who would have any idea how to use them. Perhaps it was time to branch out and make new friends.
She started on the windows. As in many old barns, the large square-paned windows were tightly spaced along the length of the building to let in natural light. They were large enough to climb through, and not too far off the ground to jump. But again, she didn’t hold out much hope. She’d heard Galen fiddling with a window. He was probably making sure they were all secure. Systematically, she started at the back of the barn and tried each window in succession, feeling for loose or missing panes. The double hung windows had opened at one time, but now she found they were sealed tight with what seemed like several layers of dirt and paint. She pushed hard on each one, but none would budge so much as a millimeter.
It took about fifteen minutes to check one side of the barn. When she got to the end, Annie stopped to think. This wasn’t working. All of the windows were well-caulked and securely locked. Her hopes of finding an easy way out of the bam were dwindling fast. There was the trap door off the second-story loft, but that idea didn’t sound too encouraging. First, it was probably padlocked like the doors. And even if she could get it open, it was at least a thirty-foot drop to the ground. If it came to a choice between breaking a window and breaking her neck, Annie thought a broken window sounded a lot less risky.
She started checking the windows on the other side of the building. If she could get out on that side, she would be inside the fenced yard where the winemaking equipment was kept. The chain-link fence was about eight feet high, but she was pretty sure there was no barbed wire on top of it. It wouldn’t be fun to climb, but certainly not impossible.
Annie was so tired, and so resigned to having to break a window, that she almost didn’t test the latch on the fourth window from the end. She’d gotten into a rhythm—running her hands along the panes to look for cracks, then sliding her fingers over the caulking, then pushing on the frame from below to see if she could crack the paint. As she proceeded along the wall, her effort on each window diminished.
That’s why she almost missed it, that slight movement on the fourth to the last window, the one next to the table set up for gluing labels. She stopped and pushed again. The window was stiff, but it went up. Yes!
Annie suddenly remembered Celia telling her how all of the labels were glued on by hand. Of course, they would sit by an open window when working with glue. Annie chided herself for not thinking of it sooner.
She shoved hard, and the window slid up and stayed. She gladly breathed in a gulp of the cold night air, not realizing quite how claustrophobic she had started to become trapped inside the winery. She stuck her head out the window and saw that the drop into the fenced yard was only about seven feet.
Feeling exhilarated by her freedom, Annie climbed through the window, bracing one foot against the outside of the barn until she was sitting on the window frame, then pushed herself out, landing with a thud on both feet. She brushed the dirt from the windowsill off the seat of her pants and stood up to catch her breath.
In the shadows, she could barely see the barrel of Galen Rockwell’s shotgun pointed at her stomach.