CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“You and Leeza were friends?” I asked as gently as

I could.

Aiden looked as if he wanted to arrest Aubrey that very moment, and he even made a move for the cuffs on his belt. I shook my head.

“How long had you known her?” I asked.

“Not very long, just as long as she worked here. A few months maybe? However, we were together every day. Both of us needed extra money for bills and things. We both were willing to pick up extra shifts if someone called off.”

I nodded.

“We had a lot in common. We worked hard and had big dreams.” She glanced at Cass. “I have already told you mine about wanting to move to New York, but Leeza had dreams of owning a business of her own, too. She said once that she wanted to show her family she’d turned out all right.”

I thought about RJ and wondered if he would even care if Leeza hit it big. I had a feeling as long as she continued to live the English life, he wouldn’t see much value in what she was doing.

“We became friends fast, and probably told each other things too soon. Things that you shouldn’t tell someone about yourself maybe ever. I didn’t know that she had a drinking problem for the first couple of months. She was fun, and she loved to teach people about wine. Unlike the rest of us, she never took any of the samples home. Most of us thought it was strange, because who wouldn’t want to take home a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine if the boss gave it to you? Leeza always turned it down. I asked once why she never went drinking after work or took any of the extra wine that the bosses offered us. She told me that she was a recovering alcoholic then. It was the first of her secrets.”

“Why would an alcoholic work at a winery?” Cass asked. “I mean, that’s like a diabetic working at a cookie shop. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

“It was intentional,” Aubrey said. “She said that she worked at the winery to test herself. She believed that she wasn’t truly sober unless she could be around alcohol and have the strength to say ‘no’ to it.”

“And you had a problem with her being an alcoholic?” I asked.

“No, of course not. She was sober, and I had seen her willpower and the choices she made every day to resist drinking. She was so strong.” Tears came to her eyes. “Much stronger than me. My problem with her was that I told her my secret, too, and she didn’t care.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She looked at her hands. “She knew how I felt about Gabe, but it didn’t matter to her. She started seeing him.”

“You told her and she immediately started dating him?”

“No.” Aubrey shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. I told her how I felt about him, and the moment Gabe saw her, he zeroed in on her. Leeza was beautiful and friendly and was always the person the male customers gravitated to. She was also the person Gabe wanted. I had worked with him for the last five years, and he always talked to me. We talked about everything. But it was all at work. He never showed any signs of caring for me the way I cared for him. Still, I thought it was just a matter of time. Someday, he would see what was right in front of him. He would see what he had been missing all this time and ask me out.”

Internally, I winced, thinking of my ex-boyfriend, whom I had left behind in New York. Even though my relationship with Eric had been different, I had been a lot like Aubrey. I thought—wrongly—that I could change him. That he could be the man I needed him to be if I just had the strength to wait for him to sow his wild oats. How stupid I had been, and how much time I had wasted in that relationship. The best—and worst—thing that had happened to me was finding out Eric was cheating on me. It was the wakeup call I needed to teach me I wasn’t going to change him. In fact, it taught me that I couldn’t and wouldn’t change anyone. I glanced at Aiden. Aiden was as close to perfect as I could imagine.

“What does Gabe do here?”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t work here. Not officially. The owners hire him from time to time to help with various tasks around the vineyard. He knows a lot about making wine. He’s here at least once a week doing one odd job or another.”

“Did Leeza initiate their relationship?” I asked.

Aubrey shook her head. “He told me how he felt about her, and that he was going to ask her on a date. I was crushed. I felt like my life was over. Before I could stop myself, I told him about her drinking. I said he might want to rethink how he felt because she was an alcoholic. She could fall off the wagon at any time. He didn’t want that kind of baggage.” She licked her lips. “I told Gabe she was a recovering alcoholic, but it backfired on me.” She shook her head. “He thought it was brave of her to work here, and he was impressed that she was able to stay sober in this environment.” She rubbed her forehead as if even thinking about it gave her a headache. “He said it made him want to get to know her even more.”

“Then what happened?” asked Cass, who was clearly enthralled by Aubrey’s story.

Aubrey crossed her arms. “I went to Leeza and told her about my conversation with Gabe. I didn’t tell her that I’d told him she was an alcoholic. I only said that he had a crush on her and wanted to ask her out. She knew how I felt about him and promised me up and down that she wouldn’t date him.” Her face darkened. “But then, weeks later, I learned she’d gone behind my back and was seeing him. I caught them together in the vineyard . . .”

Cass winced, and I felt I had the same face.

Aubrey let go of my arm and balled her fists at her sides. “She apologized, but she said that she and Gabe were meant to be together. She said they had a connection I couldn’t understand. Whatever happened to girl code? She was supposed to be my friend. Whatever connection she had with him should not have mattered as much as my friendship.” She stretched out her hands as if she realized that she had been squeezing them too tightly. “After that, I swore I would make her life miserable. I tried to make work hard for her. I gave her all the terrible customers, and when things went missing around the winery, I would tell the owners that she was the one who might have taken them.” She shook her head. “But it didn’t matter. She was still loved at the winery. She made the tough customers love her, and the owners never believed that Leeza was capable of stealing anything.”

Wow, that wasn’t very nice. Aubrey had revealed a level of spitefulness that I hadn’t anticipated. “Okay,” I said carefully, wanting to keep her talking. “But why do you feel responsible for her death?”

“Because I divulged another secret she told me.” She covered her face with her hands. “Of all the things I’d done to her, this was the one that was the very worst. I was blinded by jealousy. I have no other excuse for what I did.”

“What was it?” Aiden asked.

She shook her head back and forth and began crying in earnest.

I frowned. What could be worse than telling everyone that Leeza was a recovering alcoholic? Then, it hit me. “Did you tell someone that she grew up Amish?”

Aubrey looked up at me with tears in her eyes. “How did you know that?”

Before I could think of an answer, she said, “Leeza told me that she was kicked out of her Amish community because of her drinking, and she wanted to clean up her act so she could see her family again.”

“So you told Gabe?” Cass asked.

She shook her head. “No, I found her Amish family and told them she worked at a winery. Her brother was furious and told me never to come to his farm again or speak of her. He told me that he didn’t have a sister. I had hoped that he would come to the winery and make a scene that the owners couldn’t ignore. He didn’t. The next day, I told Leeza I’d gone to visit her family and told them where she worked. She said her brother hated alcohol in all forms and would not approve of her job. She was very upset and said I’d ruined her chances of making amends with them.” Aubrey shivered. “I told her that she’d ruined my chances of being with Gabe, so now we were even.”

I grimaced at her rationale.

“How did that lead to her death?” Aiden asked.

“She said that she would have to talk to her family to make things right.”

“She made contact with her family?” I asked. This was news—if it was true. And, given how forthright Aubrey had been about her ugly behavior, I was inclined to think she wasn’t straying from the truth now. Yet RJ had been adamant that no one, including himself, had seen or even thought about Leeza since she’d left the district eight years before.

“Did she go?” Aiden asked.

“I think so. She never told me. At that point, we were no longer close.”

That was an understatement.

“But a few days later, I caught her drinking in the cellar. She broke into one of the most expensive cases of wine and drank the whole bottle. She was fired on the spot.” She licked her lips. “She acted like she didn’t even care. She said that she had no reason to make anything of her life now.”

“What did she mean by that?” I asked.

Aubrey rubbed at her eyes and smeared black eyeliner and mascara across her cheeks. With her makeup smeared, she looked much younger than she had. When I’d first met her I’d thought she was my age or older, but now I saw that she was likely no more than twenty-two.

“She said that her family didn’t want her back, so there was no reason for her to stay sober.” She took a breath. “I was starting to feel bad at that point. I mean, before she and Gabe got together, we were good friends; best friends really. I was the one who’d told her about the counseling service at the community center when we first met.” She looked up at the three of us in turn. “So you see, I am responsible for her death. Gabe said her counselor was the one who killed her. I was the one who sent her to him.” She covered her face with her hands.