The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  “I’ll ignore that.” I matched his bantering tone and changed the subject. “Tell me about the Cliff House. Is it another famous landmark?”

  “They call it ‘the place where San Francisco begins.’ It’s perched on a promontory cantilevered out over the Pacific. Not too far below the Golden Gate,” he said. “There’s been a restaurant there since the 1860s. It kept getting wiped out by fires, and one time an abandoned schooner full of dynamite blew up on the rocks underneath and just missed blasting the building into the ocean.”

  “Sounds like quite a place. You really are a good tour guide, you know that?”

  “Don’t look so surprised. Told you I was.”

  “Then tell me the real reason you left California for Virginia. They’re totally different and it’s so obvious you love it here.”

  He straightened his arms on the steering wheel and leaned back against the seat. It looked like he was flexing stiff muscles, but I knew he’d gone tense.

  “After what Allen did, I had to get out.”

  “California’s a big state,” I said. “As for making wine, you’ve got Oregon, Washington State, New York. All of them have more wineries than we do, and you could easily have stayed on the West Coast. Not to mention all the states that produce more wine than Virginia does.”

  “I wanted something different,” he said. “I liked the experimenting that was happening there, how much the industry was booming, thriving. The fact that Virginia is getting a reputation as a hot wine-tourism destination. It’s been kind of cool to be on the cutting edge of something like that.”

  “It’s a much smaller pond,” I said.

  “Actually, it’s minuscule in terms of total U.S. wine production. California accounts for ninety percent all by itself. Nine more percent—in other words, ninety-nine percent—comes from the three other states you just mentioned.” He held up fingers as he ticked off each one. “New York, Washington, and Oregon. Everyone else is fighting for a market share of the remaining one percent. That includes Virginia.”

  I knew those numbers, knew where we stood, but it still shocked me to hear him rattle them off like that. Until now I had never considered that his private tug-of-war between California and Virginia had been about leaving the Eden of American winemaking with its worldwide reputation to come to a place that many people still didn’t even know grew grapes, hot tourism destination notwithstanding.

  So Virginia was “first in wine” because we made it two years after colonists arrived in Jamestown and discovered native grapes, big fat deal. California was the largest, as in ball-out-of-the-park-home-run size, and I wondered, though he’d never admitted it to me, if Quinn still equated that primacy and clout with being the best. And whether the glamorous cachet and storied history of California wine country, which to most of the world meant Napa and Sonoma, where he was from, were really what he missed after he moved to Virginia.

  “Well, we may be small, but we’re damn good,” I said.

  We were finally back in the city, catching red lights at almost every intersection. I saw signs for the San Francisco Zoo and then, abruptly, the ocean was directly in front of us as if we were going to drive straight into it. Quinn turned right at the edge of the beach and we followed the coast up a long, steep hill.

  “Don’t be so defensive,” he said. “I wasn’t criticizing.”

  “I’m not.”

  But it was like what Mark Twain said about his wife and swearing: Quinn had the words right, but not the tune. He’d sounded halfhearted, and I wondered yet again if he’d been subtly signaling his intent to stay here and I’d been resolutely trying to ignore it.

  He reached over and squeezed my hand. “We’re almost there. Enjoy the view. We can talk business another time.”

  I saw the rooftop sign for the Cliff House before the long, low white building came into view. We rounded a corner and all of a sudden it was right there, sitting perilously close to where the traffic whizzed past, tucked into a sharp elbow curve as the road spiraled upward. Anything that came downhill in the opposite direction probably needed to slam on the brakes for that wicked turn or else end up in the dining room. A dozen or so cars were parked in front of the restaurant, jammed in at angles like bad teeth.

  “Damn,” Quinn said. “I didn’t think it would be so crowded at this hour. We’ll find a spot up the hill.”

  “Where are we?” I asked as we drove past a sprawling wooded park.

  “A place called Land’s End.”

  He did a neat job of parallel parking in a space that should have required a shoehorn. We walked back down the steep sidewalk to the restaurant. A large stone ruin filled with water sat at the edge of the sea below us.

  “It looks like an old swimming pool,” I said.

  “That’s the Sutro Baths,” he said. “Dates back to the early days of the Cliff House. It was supposed to rival something a Roman emperor would have built. Now it has a reputation as a kind of mystical place, especially at the end of the day when you can see the setting sun and the lights from inside the restaurant reflected in the water. It makes the baths look like a cauldron of fire. You see photographers here all the time taking pictures of cloud formations or seagulls flying into the marine layer—the lighting’s pretty amazing.”

  I stared at the dark, placid pool, the broken lines of stone, and the tumble of rocks to the shore, and imagined flaming water and wide-winged birds soaring in the mist over the Pacific Ocean.

  “It must be beautiful. Are the baths off-limits, or can you go down there and explore?”

  “Oh, you can check it out,” he said, “but there’s a sign in a bunch of languages warning that you could get thrown off the rocks and die if you’re in the wrong place when a wave comes crashing in.”

  I shuddered, but he’d spoken in such a matter-of-fact way I knew it was firsthand information. “You know that because you’ve been there.”

  He flashed a smug grin and held open the door to the restaurant. “Of course.”

  A waitress dressed in black brought us to a corner bistro table on a balcony lounge overlooking a two-story restaurant in the new part of the building. Already the shades on the floor-to-ceiling windows had been lowered to screen the fierce late-afternoon sunlight, which glinted like polished mirror off the Pacific, and streamed into the all-white room with its vaulted ceiling and modern steal-beamed architecture.

  Quinn ordered mojitos for us and asked for them to be made with rum rather than Mexican tequila. After the waitress left, I got my phone out of my purse and handed it to him. He pulled his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and turned his back to the window, squinting in the bright light as he stared at the little screen, flicking through each of the photographs.

  “They seem to be good friends, real close,” he said. “Looks like these were taken at a summer beach get-together.”

  “Charles said they spent weekends together at a cottage on Pontiac Island. That’s where Maggie came up with their name. The Mandrake Society. He made it sound like they did everything as a group, including socializing.”

  “Well, with the super-top-secret clearances they must have had, at least they were hanging out with people who were involved in the same project,” he said. “At that level, it’s need to know only. You can’t even blab to your reflection in the mirror without worrying about a security breach.”

  I took the phone and scrolled through the photos as he had done. “They genuinely liked each other,” I said. “Look at their body language and how comfortable everyone is with everyone else. I’ll bet they had some good times together.”

  “Until it all fell apart,” Quinn said.

  “Their breakup must have been spectacular if they scattered to the winds after Stephen Falcone died and Maggie was killed in that car crash.”

  Our waitress set down our mojitos and a dish of salted nuts.

  He touched his glass to mine. “I’m glad you came to San Francisco.”

  “Me, too. Thanks for a fabulous tour
.”

  He dunked his mint leaves into his glass and squirted lime into his drink. I copied him.

  “I didn’t know you liked mojitos,” I said. “I can’t remember the last time I had one.”

  “I read somewhere it was Hemingway’s favorite drink in Key West. I also read he drank whatever was on the table until he was under it.” He shrugged. “It seems like a mojito kind of day.”

  He sat back and watched me as though he were contemplating something, or perhaps waiting for an answer to one of the unspoken questions that hung in the air between us. I couldn’t go down that road right now. All the warning signs were there for this to come to grief if we pushed it.

  We’d come this far. Why ruin everything?

  “Back to the pictures,” I said.

  He sipped his drink. “You have the floor. We were talking about a breakup, I believe?”

  “Of the Mandrake Society.”

  He grinned and I went on. “After they split up, everyone went their own way. Maggie was dead and Theo thought the others conspired to tamper with her car and cause her accident. That meant Mel, Paul, Vivian. And Charles.”

  Quinn set his drink down and made circles on the table with it like he was trying to work this out. “Especially Charles. Based on everything you said, Theo held him more accountable than anyone else.”

  “I wonder if Theo knew about the affair? Or maybe he guessed,” I said.

  He stopped moving his glass around. “How long after Stephen died was Maggie killed?”

  “You mean like days or weeks?” I asked and he nodded. “I don’t know, and Charles didn’t specify. But after Stephen died, his sister—I think her name was Elinor—showed up. That’s what seemed to freak everyone out.”

  “What happened to Elinor?”

  “Charles paid her off and told her that Stephen was a patriot. Said he saved her from a lifetime of caring for her disabled brother, who wouldn’t amount to much anyway, not to mention all the bills she wouldn’t have for his medical expenses. Unquote.”

  I shrugged and drank my mojito. I still felt the same cold fury I’d felt that night in the lodge, remembering the matter-of-fact way Charles had tossed off that remark.

  “God, that’s sick,” Quinn said. “Except I suppose we need to remember that was forty years ago. Those were the days when you stuck people like that in closets and tried to forget about them.”

  “‘People like that.’ It breaks my heart.” I fished in my purse for the last two photos and pulled out the one of Stephen Falcone, setting it on the table for Quinn to see. “That’s Stephen. Look at him. He has such kind eyes. And a sweet smile. I bet he really trusted everyone. Never thought anyone would do anything to hurt him.”

  Quinn picked up the photo, his lips pressed together. “I’m sorry, Lucie,” he said.

  I took the final photo, the blackmail photo, and slid it in front of him. “And now here’s this.”

  Even Quinn reddened, staring at the raw sexuality of a man and woman utterly engrossed in making love when they believed no one was watching.

  He cleared his throat. “Wonder who took it.”

  “We can eliminate two people right off the bat,” I said. “These two. It must have been someone else among the Fearsome Fivesome.”

  “Sixsome.”

  “Huh?”

  “Charles was part of this group, too.” He tapped his finger on the edge of the photo. “There were six of them, counting Charles. What do you bet he took the photos on your phone?”

  “It could have been a timer,” I said. “And he said he wasn’t a member of the Mandrake Society. He was married, though not to Juliette back then. Said he didn’t like their drinking and disdained what he called their ‘sexual experimenting.’ ”

  “He doesn’t look too disdainful doing what he’s doing there.”

  My turn to blush. “Why would he lie about being part of the group? About”—I indicated the picture—“that.”

  “Maybe he had a rich-but-jealous wife and he didn’t want her finding out he was screwing a gorgeous twentysomething hot chick, in case she decided to divorce him and leave him penniless.”

  “That sounds like a plot from one of Thelma Johnson’s soap operas.”

  Unexpectedly, his eyes softened and he sounded wistful. “Good old Thelma. I miss getting coffee in the General Store in the morning with her and the Romeos. Finding out what’s going on in the world.”

  “That can be remedied.” I tried to keep my voice light.

  He sighed. “Yeah, I know. You’ve only dropped two million hints.” He slid the photo over to me. “Back to the matter at hand. What’s your explanation for this, since you don’t seem to like mine?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” I said. “But I wish I knew more about Maggie Hilliard. She’s the one who gave the group their name and then had those wineglasses made for everyone. So she’s into bonding, weekend parties at the beach. Kind of like a family.”

  “Then why would she betray her boyfriend by having sex with another member of the group? Especially the father figure.”

  “Ugh, that almost sounds like incest when you put it like that.”

  Our waitress stopped by. “Another round, folks?”

  Quinn glanced at me and we both shook our heads. “We’re fine with these,” he said. “Thanks.”

  She set down the bill and left.

  Quinn indicated the picture of Maggie and Charles. “ ‘Incest’ is a pretty strong word, if you ask me. Though Maggie doesn’t exactly come across as a wholesome all-American girl, into group hugs and singing ‘Kumbaya’ with the rest of the campers when she’s doing this with a married guy old enough to be her father.”

  I turned the photograph over.

  “Except she was the one—apparently the only one—who felt so much remorse about Stephen that she wanted to come clean about covering up his death.”

  “Returning to a distasteful subject, she had sexual relationships with two men she worked with at the same time. That can’t have done much for group dynamics,” he said.

  “Unless she was coerced,” I said. “What if Charles lusted after her and promised to protect the Mandrake Society if she cooperated? So being a good team player, she went to bed with him. Maybe she figured they’d be discreet since he was married and she was involved with Theo. Counted on the others never finding out about it.”

  “Yeah, well, throw that theory out the window because someone did find out,” Quinn said. “And decided to record them in flagrante delicto. Wonder who it was. And why.”

  “Two reasons: blackmail or jealousy.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Maybe both.”

  “That’s why. What about who?”

  “You don’t take a picture like this unless you intend to do something with it. Someone meant to use this photo to influence—or blackmail—either Maggie or Charles. Or hurt Theo. Again that leaves Mel, Paul, and Vivian.”

  “My money’s on Vivian,” Quinn said. “It seems like a female thing. What do you bet she was jealous of our girl Maggie who was having good-time sex with not one but two guys who worked together?”

  “Mel had the photograph,” I said.

  “Maybe Vivian made copies and put ’em in her Christmas cards to the rest of the gang.”

  “Now you’re being crude.”

  “I notice you didn’t dispute that I could be right.”

  “Okay, multiple copies,” I said. “But when did the others see this photo? At the time? After Maggie was dead, or long after they were disbanded?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it does. Charles implied that Theo believed—but couldn’t prove—that Maggie driving off that pier and drowning wasn’t an accident. So I’m betting Theo didn’t know about the affair, because if he did, you’d have to wonder about a lovers’ quarrel between him and Maggie.”

  “Meaning Theo might have tampered with her car in a jealous rage?”

  “Yes, except Charles said Theo accused him and
the others of doing something to shut Maggie up about Stephen. That’s when he threatened to make them all pay for her death. So I guess we can eliminate Theo.” I frowned. “Wonder what made him doubt the drunk-driving explanation?”

  “I don’t know, but it leaves us with the Usual Suspects. One or all of whom might have had a motive for murder.” Quinn tipped his glass and drank, rattling the ice cubes. “Vivian, Mel, and Paul. And we can’t discount Charles, either.”

  “Everybody’s dead,” I said. “Except Charles.”

  For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

  “What if Charles engineered Maggie’s accident?” I said finally. The thought had been flitting uneasily through my mind all afternoon, ever since I found that photograph. If Charles bore some responsibility for Maggie’s death, played some role, it changed everything.

  “How?” Quinn asked.

  “I don’t know. If he did, the police never figured it out.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m grasping at straws.”

  “If he did, that could explain why he wants to know if Theo is still alive. Maybe Charles is worried Theo finally learned something after all this time that can tie him to Maggie’s death.” He paused. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder, you know.”

  “No,” I said. “There isn’t, is there?”

  “You’d better watch it, Lucie. I know we’re just speculating, but if any of this is true, you’re dealing with a guy with no conscience.”

  “I know,” I said. “And if it’s true, then it would make Charles a murderer.”

  Chapter 16

  Quinn paid the bill and we walked up the hill to the Porsche. Low cumulus clouds piling up in great heaps like meringues scudded across the sky over the Pacific. Underlit by the sun, they were the color of an old bruise. Above they exploded in soft gold that faded to creamy yellow, like the skies on my French grandmother’s prayer cards portraying the Blessed Virgin ascending to heaven.

  “I have an idea,” Quinn said.

  “What?”

  “We ought to get an early start tomorrow. It could be a long day in Napa.”

  I glanced at him. “Yes, I suppose it could.”