Sour Puss by Rita Mae Brown, Michael Gellatly Read Free Book Online Page B

breathed the suggestion that perhaps he might be a bit more aggressive to encourage growth. He threw me off the place! I swore that would be the last time I’d try to help him. No one can work with him.” Hy held up his hand, the palm outward. “I remain dedicated to the revitalization of the Virginia wine industry, thanks to the brilliant effort started thirty some years ago by Felicia Rogan at Oakencroft Vinery, but I will not lift one finger, not even my pinky, to help that insufferable malcontent. If his grapes were infected with an anthracnose and I had the last ton of lime sulfur in the county, I wouldn’t sell it to him.”
    “Runs in the family. All the Pittmans are difficult people.” Harry accepted Toby but avoided him.
    “What’s an anthracnose?” Susan asked.
    “Bird’s eye,” Hy replied. “It’s a fungus on the leaves that looks like a bird’s eye. Tricky. The grapes seem okay, but the leaves wilt. Two or three years pass, everything seems okay. Eventually, though, the infection reaches the fruit and one gets misshapen grapes.”
    “Sure are a lot of things that attack grapes.”
    “There’s no foolproof crop.” He shrugged.
    “Weeds.” Susan cupped her head in her hand.
    Harry laughed. “When people talk about a natural garden, I figure they mean weeds.” She turned her attention back to Hy. “By the time I apply every remedy to my little vines, I won’t have a penny of profit.”
    He smiled. “You’re too smart for that.” Tapping his thick cup, he continued. “You only apply fertilizer or spray when it is needed or at the right time as a preventive. We’re lucky here, so far. We’ve managed to keep grapes healthy.”
    “Persistence.” She paused, then smiled slowly. “And ego.”
    “You need ego to do anything well.” He agreed. “Gargantuan ego. Pantagruel. Yes, the Pantagruel of ego. That’s Toby. I have an ego. Felicia has an ego. Patricia has an ego, but we also have sense. Toby has none.” He assumed both ladies knew their Rabelais, and being well educated, they did know the work of France’s greatest comic writer, who worked in the first half of the sixteenth century.
    “Can anyone be a vintner without a huge ego?” Susan marveled at the complexity of the task. One had to select the correct grape for the soil, nurture it, harvest it, then sell it or actually make the wine oneself.
    It remained a science and an art to create the right medley of sensation on a discriminating palate.
    Harry, a foxhunter, evidenced a bit of the slyness of the fox herself. “Hy, surely Toby didn’t threaten to knock you off the stool because of pruning grapes. What exposed nerve did you touch today?” She smiled flirtatiously, since Hy believed himself attractive to all females worldwide.
    “Ah, yes.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Vincent Forland. I said I thought both those men at the panel gave everyone a blueprint for bioterrorism. Irresponsible!”
    “Hy, I didn’t think of that at the time. It was so fascinating, but you know, you’ve got a point there,” Harry said.
    Hy shrugged a Gallic shrug, one imitated but never perfected by those not born to the greatness of France. “Mark my words, ladies. It will all come to a bad end.”
    “Why would that set off Toby?” Susan knew Toby had a short fuse, but he seemed extra agitated.
    “Ah, Toby, the morally superior Toby. When I suggested to him that Professor Forland and Dr. Jenkins might as well work for the terrorists given that they’d told us too much, he cursed me and swore that was ridiculous. I said, no, smart. The two experts appear to be warning us, but they’re scaring people. Plants as lethal agents, common enough plants, such things could be distilled by someone who knows less than Professor Forland.”
    “Toby seems to have a volatile relationship with Professor Forland,” Susan said.
    “Toby likes him, but I guess he’s never really gotten over not being hired by Tech,” commented Harry, who