“Good morning, Dorothea. Sorry to bother you.”
Dorothea looked up from the ledgers for Caspian Winery. Everything in her business was computerized but she was still old school and preferred everything to be on paper. For a long time, she’d had her accountant make a computer copy and a handwritten copy. It had taken her a long time to trust that what went into an electronic device wasn’t going to get lost. Her staff had been annoyed and she knew the redundancy had been a waste of time but she hadn’t been ready to believe electronics were safe. She still wasn’t sure but she’d eased up a bit. She’d leave it for her successor to embrace the computer era... whoever that might be.
“Good morning, Tom. What can I do for you? Has something happened since our Monday meeting?”
The tall, slender man took off his hat and held it as he stood there. “No, well I mean yes. But it’s not about me. Although, I’m sure Oliver will try to convince you of that.”
Dorothea rested her elbows on her desk and clasped her hands firmly in front of her.
“Do you mind telling me what you’re talking about?” She really didn’t want to hear it and didn’t have time to play referee between the two again, but it looked as though she was going to be doing that anyway.
“Well, it appears that we have bad wine—”
Oliver came sailing through the door. “Dorothea, excuse me for barging—what are you doing here?”
“He was telling me something about some bad wine?”
“What did you do, stand outside my door eavesdropping? And then—”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I happened to be passing the office, when I heard you talking with someone about one of our bottles tasting like vinegar.”
Dorothea gasped. “What are you talking about?”
“So you heard part of the conversation and had to run to the boss with what you think you know.”
“Well, I’m not going to be blamed for it,” Tom said.
“Well neither am I, but I do think that new ice wine we started making was a mistake.”
“Of course you’d think that. You haven’t done anything different in fifteen years.”
“Gentlemen, can you please tell me what’s going on?” Dorothea got to her feet, placed her knuckles on her desk and leaned forward but neither man was paying her any attention. She stacked all the papers in front of her and slid them into the top drawer. All things breakable had long since been removed from her desk.
“This is not my responsibility.”
“Well it’s not mine either. I just grow the grapes.”
“Stop!” Dorothea knew he was talking about his suggestion a year before that Tom look into using Riesling grapes so they could make ice wines, which were becoming quite popular. They were always quibbling over something. Tom didn’t like Oliver and felt he was overpaid, prissy in his suit and ties and should keep his nose out of the growing end of the business and do his job which was to distribute the wine. Sadly, it was almost word for word what Geoff, her second-in-command had said. Some days, she felt like throwing both men into the sandbox and see what happened. Or maybe throw them in with five-year-olds so they could learn something. On that issue, she had sided with Oliver but had made it clear that he was to bring any ideas to her first and she’d share what she deemed was appropriate. She’d done the same with Tom, who had on many occasions made suggestions to Oliver on how he could improve shipping and distribution.
They were both territorial and thanks to her brother, Geoff, adversarial in their dealings with each other. He’d played them, like he’d played so many, convincing each of them the other was out to destroy them. And there had been incidents she’d thought were manager oversights only later to learn Geoff had orchestrated it all. Oliver seemed to have come around but Tom was still grumbling. She’d spent some time with each of them and thought she’d made headway but one little incident later and they were fighting like toddlers. As if she didn’t have enough to do with trying to save the business that her brother had darn near drove into the ground.
“How would you know? You’ve only been here for three.”
“Because you’re a typical guy in a business suit.”
Dorothea reached behind her and picked up her cane. She lifted it in front of her, only then realizing she’d picked up the one that her granddaughter Bailey and fiancé Guy had given her. It was beautifully crafted with intricate designs by a native elder. She felt very touched by it as she looked at it, and although it would never be used for its intended purpose—walking—she still enjoyed it. She set it back before lifting the one she’d meant to pick up. She barely looked at the polished ash wood but it did make her smile to think the doctor had recommended she get it to help her with walking. She, however, had found a much better and more effective use for it.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means—”
Lifting it high, she brought it down hard atop the shiny wood desk. Both men froze. They had been standing nose to nose, hands clenched and cheeks mottled with anger, but now they both slowly turned to face Dorothea.
“Glad I’ve got your attention. Sit down. I’ll ask the questions and tell you who is to answer. Got it?” She sank slowly back into her chair, feeling a bit drained. “Oliver, since you took the call, what is this about bad wine?”
“I got a call from Don Wilson. He’s the manager of the Sunrise Villa Resort on the outskirts of Toronto, with its twin resort in northern Ontario. Anyway, he called to say that one of the bottles from their last shipment was bad. Thankfully he called us, because he could have called the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), since they control wine distribution in this province. We could have had a disaster on our hands.”
“What do you mean bad?”
He closed his eyes briefly before meeting her gaze. “Vinegar. He said it tasted like vinegar. I haven’t gotten all of the information, except it was one of our new ice wines.” He turned to glare at Tom. “We send all our wine to LCBO’s warehouse and they ship it from there. To check the shipment, I’ll have to call them.”
“How many cases were bottled?”
“Thankfully, it’s one of our newer brands, so we only made two hundred cases.”
“Has anyone else complained?”
“No. But to check all of those—”
“Don’t. Do we have any left here?”
“Yes, almost half.”
“Okay. Run a quality check on one bottle from each of twenty to thirty random cases. Let me know the results immediately.”
Dorothea had learned the wine industry as a young girl, but it was her and Jonathon, her now-deceased husband, who had worked hard to make the winery what it was. But there was one thing she hated and that was waste. And to discover what had gone wrong there was going to be a lot of waste.
“What are you going to tell LCBO? They keep track of the number of bottles of wine made.”
“Internal quality control audit; it’s quite standard.” She wrote a couple of things on her notepad. “Get Mr. Wilson to open twenty—”
“He did. The rest are good but because he opened them to check them, I told him we’ll send out a new shipment tomorrow—only it’s supposed to go through LCBO.”
“Ship it and let me handle the LCBO. There’ll be hell to pay but let me deal with it. Add in an extra case of our Bordeaux for Mr. Wilson. Ask him to please keep this to himself but be discreet about how you say it. I want that bottle back. I hope he didn’t throw it out?” Oliver shook his head. “Actually all of them, the empty as well as the full ones. Today. “
“There is nothing wrong with that wine or the grapes. Besides, if something tastes bad it needs to be addressed with Martin, our winemaker.”
“Yeah but—”
“No. This stops now. I’m bringing in a mediator to sit down with you two. I’m not going to have this continue. You’ll learn to get along.” She didn’t have to threaten dismissal; she could tell by their expressions that they understood the implications. She shouldn’t be wasting her time on their squabbles, especially as busy as she’d been putting out all the other fires Geoff had lit. And she just didn’t have the energy to deal with it anymore.
Perhaps it was her knuckles rapping on the desk or her frown, but both excused themselves politely and left.
She was about to pick up the phone when her direct line rang. Frowning more deeply, she glanced at the caller identification. She sighed heavily; James Madsen wanted to talk to her... again. She’d already told him no, so she ignored it, letting it go to voice mail.
She made several calls. “Graham. Is Guy there? He’s not answering his cell.”
“No, he’s not. He should be back in about fifteen—”
“I need to meet with you both. I’ll be there in ninety minutes.” She hung up and called her driver. This was no small deal. In the almost hundred years Caspian Winery had been in business, not once had the wine tasted like vinegar. There had been some bad years that weren’t worthy of their award-winning wines but never had they ever shipped out anything but the best. Something didn’t feel right about this. She reminded herself that they’d managed to get through some other bad times. This, too, would pass.
A dull ache in her left shoulder grabbed her attention. She pressed her hand over the area. Hopefully this, too, would pass. She took a few deep, calming breaths. The pain reminded her that she had seriously considered stepping down. The problem was who would replace her as CEO. She couldn’t very well have resigned her position before then as she’d had to clean up all of Geoff’s messes. Someone else could have tracked all that he’d done—the embezzling, the fraud, the lies and the fake companies—but the embarrassment for her family had kept her in a central position. The media had already spread vicious rumors about her relatives, so she had done everything she could to stop the gossip.
The guilt was still front and center when she considered all her brother had done—killed several prostitutes, stolen from their own company, Caspian Winery, kidnapped her granddaughter as a baby and then tried to kill her as an adult. It was still so unbelievable what he’d pulled off. She’d forgiven him for a lot of what he’d done to her—the stabbing, the abuse—but not for what he’d done to her family nor to the business. It had taken two years to straighten out his mess—the fake vineyards they’d supposedly purchased, the excessive bank account under a fictitious name—though they’d found another one recently, so she wasn’t sure they were done looking at the misdirecting of funds. The list kept getting longer and longer. The only thing that made it slightly bearable was he had paid the ultimate price with his life. It made her sad, as she really did miss the boy she’d so adored, but not the man he’d become. She knew if he was still alive, he’d be doing something else to make her life hell. And for that, she could not forgive him.
The latest argument between the managers reminded her that she hadn’t succeeded in fixing everything Geoff had messed up. Her shoulders drooped more than usual as she felt years of exhaustion wearing her down. She’d had enough. The thought of dealing with this latest issue, which could literally shut their doors if it went public, made her shudder.
Now that Guy and Bailey were getting married, maybe she’d have a great-grandchild to spoil soon. She could only hope. But she knew if she kept up her current pace with this job, this company, it might just put her in the ground... and soon.
Her daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter and soon-to-be grandson-in-law had all made it clear they did not want to run Caspian Winery. And thanks to Geoff, she couldn’t even groom one of her managers for the position, as the others would leave in a heartbeat, having the proof they needed that she was treating them inequitably. It would cause an internal war and she couldn’t afford to lose any of her managers’ expertise. She didn’t have the strength or the desire to hire and train another one.
So who was there to take over for her? Yes, she could sell, the offer was there for her to take but that was more painful than the sword her brother had stabbed her with fifty years before. She reached for the phone and dialed a number from her distant memory. It was time to call in a long overdue favor.