to Nico. “Do you have any idea who it could be?”
“No.” Nico shrugged. “Honestly, I thought it was Fairfield or one of his guys sneaking over. I hate to think it’s anyone I hired, but how much do you ever really know a person? I can’t think of anyone on our staff who’s having money problems or anything like that. Not that they’ve shared anyway.”
“And these were things that happened in the tank house?”
“There were a few different things. The tractor you know about.” Nico tapped his finger. “The next most serious thing was a fermentation tank that had been reset and would have spoiled if Henry hadn’t caught it. Even though Henry saved it, the added heat will affect the quality. I’d say that at best, it’ll be a blending wine,” Nico said. “So we did lose money on that one. Then there was the labor contractor someone called, pretending to be from the winery here, and canceled all our crews for a week. That put us way behind.”
“Damn,” Drew said. “That can mess you up, can’t it?”
“It can, but it’s not going to ruin us,” Nico said. “It would take something more than that to really run us out of business. It was, at best, a half-hearted attempt. We managed to fix everything.”
There was a tap at the door, and Baxter poked his head in. “Perhaps the goal wasn’t to run you out of business,” the professor said. “But rather to put enough pressure on you to sell some land.”
“Hey.” Nico waved them in. “It’s not out of the question. Not ideal, but not unheard of.”
“I highly suggest,” Baxter said, “that you do not sell this parcel.”
Baxter and Katherine walked in the office, and Katherine bent down to spread a large set of plans on the coffee table where Toni had propped her feet.
“It’s clear that Whit Fairfield had plans for your property.” Katherine looked up at Nico. “And we think we know what they were.”
“Looking at these” —Baxter spread his hands over the blueprints— “the reason he wanted the land becomes evident. It’s not what is on the land, but what is under it.”
Nico brought a chair over. “What is it? Oil? Natural gas? Some mineral or something?”
“Nothing like that. I admit, that’s what I expected at first, but my engineering friend Professor Njoku made it quite clear that because of the topography of the land, any valuable mineral or mining rights were unlikely to be the motive.”
“Okay.” Nico looked over the spread-out papers. “But you do know why he wanted it?”
Baxter continued, “When I finally pieced these plans together and Chimezie and I printed them out, we thought we were looking at a brand-new structure Whit Fairfield had commissioned from scratch.”
Toni looked at what appeared to be an Italianate facade with elaborate columns that almost looked like a temple. “What is this?”
“I believe it’s a facade for a portal site,” Baxter said. “It would be built into the hill overlooking the creek across from the current Fairfield winery. This portion is purely aesthetic.”
“A facade for what?” Nico asked.
“For an elaborate wine-cave complex dug into the hill.” Katherine flipped the top plan up to reveal a more detailed and technical one underneath. “See? The cave goes back into the hill, which is made from a soft volcanic rock that would be very good for tunneling. The ornate facade faces the Fairfield winery, but there are actually two portals. See? It’s like a stretched horseshoe shape. The second portal is very near the road that runs by Toni’s house.”
Nico sat back. “So Fairfield wanted to buy that land because it’d make a good wine cave?”
“It makes sense when you consider his own property situation,” Baxter said. “I took the liberty of looking up his holdings. His acreage isn’t consolidated. It’s spread out and scattered. In addition to that, looking at the topographic and geologic maps available publicly, it would be much more complicated to find as suitable a site that would also be accessible to his existing facilities.” Baxter tapped the spread blueprints. “But for this wine cave, all he would have had to do is build a pleasing facade on the front portal and a sturdy bridge across the creek.”
Nico snorted. “And a freaking wine cave. I mean, it’s a hell of a thing to have on your winery, but caves cost millions to dig.”
Baxter placed a hand on a corner of the plans. “They do indeed. Of course, if the wine cave had already been dug