The Viognier Vendetta wcm-5

by Ellen Crosby

  We trudged in silence to my car on Ohio Drive.

  Maybe Rebecca had tied me to Ian, but she’d also written each of us a quote from a poem by Alexander Pope, which, it seemed to me, warned us about what we were getting into: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Ian’s message.

  And especially for me: To err is human, to forgive divine.

  What mistake had she made?

  Exactly what was I supposed to forgive?

  Chapter 11

  I expected Ian to take me to a relatively secluded restaurant, someplace where we could talk quietly about Rebecca and what she’d dragged us into. Instead we went to the Tune Inn.

  The Tune is located a few blocks from the Capitol at the end of a strip of Pennsylvania Avenue populated by crowded bars and ethnic restaurants catering to the appetite and thirst of a young Hill crowd, along with Library of Congress researchers and Supreme Court clerks. As bars go, it’s in a class by itself: dark, earthy, noisy, a taxidermist’s paradise where dozens of stuffed animal heads—and one derriere—line paneled walls and look down on an eclectic clientele. Locals who claim their own seats at the bar, off-duty marines from the nearby barracks, and Hill staffers jammed like sardines in the scarred-up booths drinking pitchers of Miller as if the brewery was going out of business forever—these are the Tune’s habitués. The only music on the jukebox is break-your-heart country; the wide-screen televisions are all sports. A sign by the cash register says, IF YOU’RE DRINKING TO FORGET, PLEASE PAY IN ADVANCE. The place is as comfortable as a ratty old sweatshirt, as familiar as family.

  When we walked in, the bartender waved at Ian and said, “Hey, man, how’s it going?” Obviously, Ian was a regular. When he flirted with the waitress who showed us to a booth and called her by name, I knew for sure this was his hangout.

  I slid into a cracked leather banquette across from him. “I haven’t been here for years. This place never changes. What do you suppose that animal is above our booth?”

  “Dead,” he said. “If the place changed, people would riot. How about a pitcher and some fried pickles?”

  “I’ve got to drive home,” I said. “Maybe just a glass of white wine. I’m not much of a beer drinker.”

  He ordered the pitcher anyway, and my wine. When our ponytailed gum-chewing waitress brought our drinks, he poured himself a glass and clinked it against my wine.

  “Mud in your eye. Why did Rebecca send us each postcards with pithy quotes from Alexander Pope?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but she also planned to give me a book of Pope’s poetry,” I said. “She’d signed the flyleaf and left the book on the desk in our hotel suite in the Willard. Unfortunately, the police now have it.”

  I decided to leave out the part about the other dedication and that the book had originally been a gift from a previous lover.

  Ian leaned back against his seat and narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tell me you think she left another message to go with the postcards? What is this, a treasure hunt? I don’t get why she’s jerking our chains.”

  “I don’t know, either, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something we’re supposed to find in that book.”

  “Beautiful. A hidden message in a poem written by an English guy who died a couple centuries ago. And we don’t even have the goddamn book anymore.” He threw up his hands. “Did you see anything when you looked through it before the cops took it? A piece of paper? List of names, phone numbers, bank accounts—something?”

  “Come to think of it, I did. It was neon and had blinking lights.” I glared at him. “Don’t you think I would have told you already? No, I didn’t find anything—though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something to find.”

  “We’ve got to get hold of that book,” Ian said.

  “The police won’t let it go until they’re ready to,” I said.

  Our waitress was back. “You guys want anything to eat besides the pickles?”

  Ian looked at me. “Hungry?”

  I nodded. “I missed lunch. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

  Ian grinned. “I wouldn’t say that in this place or you may get the tail end of Trigger up there.”

  “Aren’t you the wise guy,” the waitress said.

  We ordered burgers and their famous basket of fries.

  “How are we going to find out what she meant without that book?” Ian said. “Maybe there’s something else. Maybe she told you something you didn’t realize at the time was important.”

  I sipped my wine. “I was only with her for about an hour. We met at the Lincoln Memorial, where she bought the postcards. Then we went to the Wall.”

  “Why did she pick the Lincoln Memorial to meet? That could be significant.” He looked hopeful. “Some kind of hidden symbolism.”

  “You mean, like people claiming the face of Robert E. Lee is secretly carved in the hair on the back of Lincoln’s head? I doubt it. It would have to be something tangible.”

  “Why’d you visit the Wall?”

  Our burgers arrived. Ian drowned his fries in ketchup and his sorrows in alcohol. He was halfway through his second beer. I’d drunk about half a glass of wine. Rebecca had asked me not to share with anyone why we’d visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but that was then. Now she was gone—dead? on the run?—and I’d already had my doubts about the veracity of her story about her “biological” father whose name I never found.

  “Rebecca wanted to leave a bouquet of flowers for a man she said was her real father. Told me her mother had an affair out of wedlock and then he died at the end of the war before they could marry. She claimed she only found out about him recently,” I said. “She left the flowers where the first and last tablets meet, and that was that. Didn’t look for him because she was in a rush to get to Georgetown. After she was gone, I checked the names.”

  “Let me guess. You couldn’t find him?”

  “At the time, I thought I’d just missed it somewhere.”

  Ian said, through a mouthful of fries, “What do you bet she made it all up? What’d she say the guy’s name was?”

  “Richard Boyle the Fourth.”

  He wiped his hands on a paper napkin and pulled out his phone. “Let’s see who he really is.”

  He poked at the screen for a few minutes and frowned. “Richard Boyle, fourth Earl of Shannon. British politician of the Whig party in the 1800s. Doesn’t sound like our guy.”

  “She left a message on a little card that was attached to the flowers,” I said. “I’m trying to remember it.”

  Ian looked up, disgusted. “You waited all this time to tell me she wrote something on a card she left for a bogus guy she claimed was her father?”

  “Something about ‘the absent.’ Forgiving them, I think. I’ll bet it was Pope.”

  Ian typed some more on his phone. “‘Never find fault with the absent’?”

  “That’s it.”

  He snorted. “That’s code, all right. ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ ‘Never find fault with the absent.’ Rebecca did something and she doesn’t want to be blamed for it.”

  “And the fools rushing in would be us,” I said.

  “Story of my life. I’m always rushing in to something I regret.”

  I smiled. “So what doesn’t she want to be blamed for? Betraying her boss by helping you? Her way of asking Tommy Asher to forgive her?”

  Ian set his phone on the carved-up table as a rambunctious group of soccer players in muddy uniforms piled into the semicircular booth opposite us. Our waitress showed up with a fistful of pitchers for them and the volume went up. I had to lean closer to Ian to hear above the din.

  “Maybe she was the fool rushing in,” he said. “She knew that what she was doing was dangerous.”

  “But who does she want to forgive her?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I think that should be sort of obvious. She wrote it to you, didn’t she? Bringing you back into her life after so many years.”

  He sat back and watc
hed me, letting the words sink in. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

  “I wondered why she called me out of the blue.”

  “My guess would be that she trusted you. Knew you’d see it through.”

  The noise receded and the room blurred. Rebecca had said just that: I’d stuck by her through the scandal of the affair with Connor and hadn’t judged her—the reason she wanted to see me was to thank me after all these years.

  What she’d left out was that she was about to ask me to do it all over again. This time in absentia. Good old loyal me. I didn’t know whether to mourn a friend who was killed while trying to right a wrong or to be furious with her for running away and hiding, leaving me to finish what she hadn’t.

  Ian covered my hand with his. “Let’s go back to my place.”

  I tried to extract it from his grip. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”

  He laughed and squeezed my fingers.

  “Give me a break, will you? I’d be much smoother if I was asking you to go to bed with me.” He threw some money down on the table and polished off the beer in his glass. “My eyes are crossing trying to type on my phone. I need to use a proper computer. And you and I still have work to do.”

  He waited for me to slide out of the booth before leading the way through the packed restaurant. On the jukebox, Toby Keith crooned about wishing he didn’t know now what he didn’t know then. Perfect exit music. When I met Rebecca last Saturday I had no clue about the tangled web she’d woven me into before she disappeared. Part of me wished I’d never gotten involved. The rest of me wanted to know where this was going.

  Ian stopped in the doorway and I stumbled against him. I heard him say, “Well, well, look who’s here.”

  We stepped outside to a small patio where a wrought-iron fence corralled half a dozen empty bistro tables with chairs around them.

  “Lucie, let me introduce you to Summer Lowe,” Ian said. “Summer, meet Lucie Montgomery. Didn’t think this was your kind of place, sweetheart.”

  We were blocking the entrance to the restaurant, forcing people to maneuver around us as Summer Lowe, a tall, slender woman with a tawny mane of hair like a lion and patrician features, regarded Ian with the grace and favor of something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe.

  Her eyes slid over me, before fixing on Ian. “You smell like beer. You’d better not show up hungover on Thursday, got that, hotshot?” She glanced around at the passersby on the street. “I can’t be seen with you.”

  “Lucie’s a friend of Rebecca Natale’s.” Ian’s tone made it clear he’d ignored everything she just said—probably deliberately to infuriate her. “We both think she might have been trying to help me with my testimony before she disappeared. You’ve been watching the news, haven’t you? See you Thursday.”

  He took my elbow and steered me through the open gate onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Summer called after him.

  He turned around and hollered back at her. “Thursday. You’ll find out then.”

  “What’s going on and who is Summer Lowe?” I asked as we walked to my car.

  “The staff director of the subcommittee I’m testifying before. She thinks this hearing is a load of crap and that I’m some disgruntled ex–fund manager with an axe to grind. My, uh, old man’s a good friend of Cameron Vaughn’s.” He reddened but shrugged like it was no big deal. “Summer thinks this is my way of settling scores with some people in New York.”

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “No.” He kept his voice level. “It’s not. If it was, we’d probably be having drinks with Rebecca tonight, wouldn’t we?”

  I let him open my car door for me without answering. Whatever I was getting into, there was no turning back anymore.

  Chapter 12

  Ian lived in a town house on North Carolina Avenue not far from the Tune Inn. He directed me to an alley paralleling the street and showed me where I could wedge the Mini into a gravel bay next to the high wooden fence surrounding his postage stamp backyard. The padlock on the back gate groaned when he unlocked it and pulled it open. Inside, a pretty garden looked like someone cared for it. Off a wooden deck on the back of the house a large covered hot tub had prominence under a vine-covered pergola.

  “An old classmate from Wharton owns the place,” Ian said. “She’s on sabbatical for a year, teaching at LSE. Some guy takes care of the yard for her.”

  “That’s generous. What’s LSE?”

  “London School of Economics.” He waved his thumbs. “Give me a plant, I’ll kill it within weeks. Two brown thumbs.”

  “Looks like you and that gardener are doing okay so far.”

  He opened the back door—double locked—and flipped on the lights. We were in a compact, attractive kitchen small enough that I could almost stretch out my arms and touch both walls. Mexican-tiled floor, glass-fronted maple cabinets, granite bar with bar stools for dining. Next to a cappuccino maker was the untidy exception to the neat-as-a-pin room—a large collection of bottles of booze.

  “Want a drink?”

  “I’m all set, thanks.”

  He reached for a half-empty bottle of Laphroaig and waved it at me. “You sure?”

  “Nothing hard. I’ll take some water, please.”

  He opened the refrigerator and shoved aside a six-pack, reaching for a bottle of Perrier. I didn’t see much food in there.

  “The hot tub’s nice at this time of night.” He took two glasses from a cabinet. “I could turn on the lights in the backyard and we could talk there, chill a little. It’s like fairyland.”

  “I don’t have a bathing suit and you said this was going to be about work.”

  “You don’t need a bathing suit and it could still be about work.”

  “Knock it off, please.”

  “Let me guess. You’ve got a boyfriend?”

  “Where’s your computer?”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Ian—” I gave him a warning look.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s in my bedroom.”

  “That’s it. I’m leaving.”

  He reached out and grabbed my arm. “No, don’t. Please.”

  “I shouldn’t be here—”

  “Yes, you should.” He took both my hands in his. “I’m sorry for acting like an ass. You don’t need to go, I mean it. I’ll get my laptop from the bedroom and bring it downstairs. Okay? Why don’t we sit in the living room? We need to figure this out. I don’t want to do it alone.”

  I nodded. “All right. I’ll stay for a while. Where’s the living room?”

  He looked relieved. “Upstairs.”

  The second-floor living room was as appealing as the kitchen. The centerpiece was the floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with books, art, and sculpture on either side of a Victorian fireplace. A modern sofa upholstered in tangerine canvas and two barrel armchairs in chocolate brown leather were pulled around a large piece of driftwood with a glass top that served as a coffee table. The art on the walls included Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein prints and a couple of modern oils.

  Mail lay fan-shaped on the floor by the front door where it had been pushed through the brass mail slot; the curtains had not been drawn in the bay window. I liked that about cities and towns where houses practically sat on the street—the chance for a quick glimpse through a lighted window while driving by, a flash of someone’s life, a vignette of family.

  Ian turned on a torchère next to the front door and two brass table lamps on either side of the sofa. He didn’t bother to pick up the mail.

  We sat next to each other, elbows touching, as he turned on his computer.

  “Why don’t we search for Richard Boyle and Alexander Pope?” I said.

  “That was my next idea.” He tapped the keyboard and whistled. “Bingo.”

  I caught my breath as I looked at his screen. “‘Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle’ by Alexander Pope. So it’s n
ot Richard Boyle ‘the Fourth.’ This has to be the right guy. I wonder who he was?”

  “Who cares? Let’s read the damn epistle. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  “It might be important to know.”

  “I doubt it. Hang on, here it is … thank God for the Internet … damn. Why couldn’t he have written a limerick? Five lines. This goes on for pages. I don’t suppose you were an English major.” He scrolled down through multiple screens.

  “French and history. Exactly what I need to run a vineyard.”

  He gave me a sideways grin. “So what does all this stuff mean? The beginning is in Latin. All I speak is pig.”

  “If he wrote, ‘Caesar divided Gaul into three parts,’ I can translate that, but otherwise forget it.” I took the computer from him and set it on my lap. “Let’s go through the English verse, line by line.”

  After half an hour he leaned back and stretched. “I give up. It’s about architecture … buildings. It’s like a letter in verse to this guy—Richard Boyle—admonishing him about gardens and nature and … stuff. If there’s a clue in this, I’m not getting it.”

  “Maybe the clue is who Richard Boyle was,” I said. “Like I suggested.”

  “If you’re right, you’re going to rub it in, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  I wasn’t right. After more searching all we knew was that Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington and fourth Earl of Cork, had been known as “the architect earl” because of his role in reviving Palladian architecture in England, making it the generally accepted style for country houses and public buildings. The poem itself was ostensibly about gardening, but it also poked fun at the vulgar and ostentatious estate of a rival.

  “Palladio,” Ian said. “Now we’re talking about a sixteenth-century Italian architect. We keep going further and further back in history, for God’s sake. Next we’ll find some link to the Stone Age.”

  I sat back and rubbed my temples. My head had started to throb.

  “I have no idea, except that Palladio’s ideas were grounded in classical Greek and Roman architecture,” I said. “And he in turn influenced the men who designed and built the city of Washington.”