Belle walked out of the hot sun into the cool shade of the huge vat shed, a massive smile on her face. She couldn’t help it; the day had started great and could only get better. She blinked and squinted to see more clearly, the glare from outside momentarily blinding her.
The pungent scent of rotten eggs, intertwined with a pervading, completely unpleasant smell of stale stewed fruit, scrunched her nose up.
“Gah!”
Belle lifted her bent arm and breathed through the material. Her eyes had adjusted and she saw her father talking with her brother and Mac O’Brien, a local police officer. She went to wave hello when her father saw her, then stopped at the grim expression on his face.
Jack also turned towards her, just as the scene before her slowly registered.
Wine. So much wine, fanned out in an indecent spread of pale reddish-brown across the wide concrete floor, like a massive, diluted bloodstain.
Horror and shock flooded her. She looked to her brother.
“Yeah. That’s about where I’m at too, sis.”
“Dad?” she whispered.
This couldn’t be real. How much wine was there? And Jack was just watching it disappear down the central drain grate that ran the entire length of the vat shed?
Her father reached her as Mac caught her under her elbow, helping her stay standing. Her gaze flew to the vats they’d been standing in front of.
Puddles sat in front of two vats and led a wide line down to the drain. One of those vats held the entry wine Jack had been working on for the last couple of years.
“No.” She faced her father, fury coiling and burning her from the inside. “Why would you dump whole vats?”
She pulled her arm from Mac’s grip.
“What happened?”
Misery washed over her father’s face. He looked ten years older than he had the previous night.
“When Jack came in this morning, the lid was off the vat and the tap was dripping. He could smell something odd.” Her father looked at Jack.
She followed his gaze.
“Someone tainted the vats, Belle. They took the lids off so we’d see what happened, and to ruin it completely, as if it wasn’t anyway.”
Jack’s shoulders slumped. She’d never seen him so shaken. He waved at the vat. “They laced the two vats with sulphur. Kilos and kilos of it. The parts per million are off the charts, and the pH is too high. As if the oxygen wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even good for vinegar after that.”
Belle tried to speak. Nothing came out of her open mouth. Two vats. Nearly fifteen thousand litres of top-shelf wine. The financial loss alone was staggering, let alone the emotional cost.
She swallowed and tried again. “Who would do such a thing?”
She looked to Mac. He shook his head sadly. “I have no idea, Belle. We salvaged some of the wine to test, but, unless they were stupid enough to leave fingerprints, there might never be a way to find out.”
Heat pricked her eyes. She blinked rapidly, determined not to cry. Not when Jack and her father would be hurting far worse than she could be. The perpetrators had targeted the two vats Jack had singled out for the award entries. They’d known which ones to taint.
“The awards?”
Jack shrugged. “I have some bottles I ran off out of a barrel Dad filled earlier in the week, but they were only for testing and experimenting, not for entering.”
“How many?”
“Ah, maybe five?”
Belle nodded, trying hard to think through the molasses in her head. “Okay. You only need four. I know it’s not ideal, but could you salvage those? Is there any way possible you could use them?”
Jack held up his hands. Utter defeat had settled in lines around his mouth. “I honestly don’t know.”
A rising rush of anger flooded her, overcoming the shock and hurt. “Someone doesn’t want you entering the awards.” She grabbed his hands and looked around the small group. “Don’t tell anyone that there’s some left. Let whoever it was think they’ve won. Do what you have to—and enter those bottles.”
A gleam of hope entered her brother’s eyes. He nodded slowly. “I can do that.”
Mac looked up from his phone, which had just beeped. “The forensics team will be here within the hour. They’re headed over from Bialga. You guys go on up to the house and I’ll call on you when I need you.”
Belle, Jack, and her father all nodded, a pall of uncertainty and shock settling over them. It felt surreal.
Who would do this to her family? More importantly—why?