Hunter Hansen was half way down the stairs to the cellar before he realized he had forgotten to lock the front door. He quickly returned and secured it less a bothersome somebody entered unannounced. There was always someone who felt it was her duty to comfort the bereaved widower on the day of his wife's funeral. He needed to be undisturbed. He could not afford to have anyone see.
Hunter had built the wine rack in the cellar out of scraps he had scrounged off a handyman friend. Water seeped from the walls in a dark corner and it was always slightly chilled there. Perfect for cellaring wines.
Hunter removed the bottle gingerly from the rack and carried it upstairs. It was an heirloom, a treasure, not to be tossed about like a child's ball, but cradled and carried gently, undisturbed.
A late harvest German Riesling. Very late harvest. The grapes had been picked frozen, in a late autumn frost. Eiswein the Germans called it. Ice wine.
Hunter bought the bottle three years after he and Charlotte were married. His wife had been aghast at what he had paid for it.
"It's one of the world's great wines." he told her. "And it only gets better with age. Why, in twenty years, it will be worth one hundred times what I paid for it."
"So, it's an investment, is it?" she said in that scratchy, mother superior accent she affected whenever she detected Hunter was leading her on.
"No, it's not an investment. I won't sell this wine," he said. "The vintage is our wedding year and we will drink it on our fiftieth anniversary, together, you and I."
The romance of the sentiment bought Hunter peace of sorts. Charlotte never chided him about the cost after that, in fact she bragged about how romantic he was. The man who bought the wine, he became. The man who spent a half year's salary buying something that wouldn't be enjoyed for forty-some years. The man who expected to still be married to the same woman.
He was the romantic ideal to his wife's friends. Hunter had not succeeded of making much of himself - a mediocre job, an ordinary home, an unremarkable marriage - but he had succeeded in being an hero to his wife, and the envy of their friends, because he was the man who bought the wine.
The wine moved with them as they traversed through life. In their first apartment it laid in a cupboard next to the oatmeal boxes and bags of sugar. It stood in the bottom of a pantry in their first house until their daughter learned to open the pantry door, and then it was banished to the top shelf of the master bedroom closet. When they bought the converted farmhouse near where Charlotte had been born, it found its final resting place in the cellar wine rack.
Throughout it all it was the wine, the wine that proved that love transcended all bounds.
Hunter placed the bottle on the kitchen table and rinsed out a water glass from the previous night's dinner. As he wiped the glass dry he thought back to the day he had first read about how wines should be stored, that they should be kept at a constant 55 degrees and laid on their sides, lest they get too warm, their corks dry out and they grow prematurely old, vinegary, spoiled.
Hunter took a steak knife from the dirty dishes in the sink and cut around the foil, removing it, exposing the cork. He had spent numerous nights awake, listening to Charlotte's even breathing, calculating the chances that the wine was still good, that his careless handling had not destroyed it.
The cork slid easily out of the bottle. He had considered replacing the wine with a bottle from the identical vintage, had even sought out the wine surreptitiously. But the wine was not available, having disappeared into collectors' cellars, not available to ordinary consumers, at least not at a cost he could hide.
He poured the wine into the water glass. He had his story ready for whomever might ask him about the wine. He had poured it out rather than drink it without Charlotte. He couldn't face the wine without her. It was their special wine. It would remained unsullied, unspoiled.
The wine was a golden yellow. He should have chilled it down a dozen degrees, he knew, but he couldn't wait. He had to make sure.
He lifted the glass to his face and inhaled its aroma. His first impression was peach cobbler, or maybe apricot pie. And a hint of banana.
Hunter took a mouthful and chewed on it for a minute, making sure he took the full measure of the wine. He sucked in a little air to let the aromas escape.
It was like jelly in his mouth, full of raspberries and candied fruit, sweet and luscious, overlaid with spices and burnt paper and cemetery dust and freshly spaded soil and the ground up bones of a newly deceased corpse.
Hunter spat the wine back into the water glass. He felt a rush of blood to his head and stood still for a space, hand on the kitchen table, waiting for his senses to catch up with time.
He poured the wine down the sink, rinsed out the glass, wrapped the bottle in some newspaper and placed it in the trash.
Hunter would still be the man who bought the wine. He would still be the romantic ideal that woman would point to in awe. He would still be that man.
He wouldn't have been if anyone had known the wine was spoiled. Then he would have become the fool who wasted his money, horded a bottle of vinegar, failed at the only task that set him apart from everyone else.
But Hunter had ensured no one would ever know he was a fool when he poisoned Charlotte the week before their fiftieth anniversary. At least he had been a success at that.
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