The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  Mock attacks with anthrax that had the devastating potential of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I shuddered. “How did you know what they were doing?”

  Noah gave me a long look that made me wish I hadn’t asked. “I worked as a researcher for the public health service. Our mandate was different. We were working to save lives from some of the worst, most wretched diseases in the world. Those guys were military. What they developed were new and creative ways to use bacteria, germs, chemicals, things in nature, or stuff they created in test tubes as weapons. It was a different mission.” He paused. “Of course we had our ethical lapses, too. Things we did in the name of research.”

  He pressed his lips together and fingered the leaves on a small pink dogwood. I wondered how much his old ghosts still haunted him, what his involvement had been in the experiments where people had been infected unknowingly or against their will.

  “The world’s such a scary place now,” I said. “You try not to think about it, but it’s always on the news or they ratchet up the terrorism level at the airport or someone puts a bomb in some clever new place. Why did we have to weaponize anthrax to begin with? Look at that sick person who sent it through the mail and killed those postal workers in Washington after 9/11. All it takes is some lunatic with a test tube and a grudge—”

  Noah scuffed a toe of his work boot, digging a small hole in the dirt. “Lucie, you can find anthrax bacteria living in the soil naturally—you don’t always need a test tube and a lab. Not everywhere, mind you. But it’s out there and it’s part of nature. And a smart scientist could replicate it without too much trouble.”

  “Please tell me you’re not serious.”

  “’Fraid so.” He finished the last of his coffee and crushed the cardboard cup with his big hands. “You use Bacillus thuringiensis on your grapes. I know you do since you buy it from me.”

  “We try. It doesn’t do much against some pests, so we resort to the more toxic sprays, unfortunately.”

  “You know Bt comes from the same family of bacteria that causes anthrax, don’t you?” he said.

  “That’s right, it does.” I stared at him. “Oh, come on, Noah! You’re not saying someone could take Bt and produce anthrax by making it … what’s the term … mutate?”

  “So far that’s never happened, either in a lab or in nature. But with modern technology and a bit of luck, you could take the toxinproducing genes from anthrax and transfer them into Bt. So you’d get a Bt that could cause anthrax.”

  “Surely that’s not very easy.”

  “Not for your average bear, no. But a scientist who knew what he was doing could find the necessary gene sequences on the Internet and reproduce them in the laboratory. It’s a fairly common way to study genes and it should work just as well with toxin genes. You use short segments of a strand of DNA called oligonucleotide primers to replicate the gene from a fragment.” He shrugged. “Order the primers online and do a PCR—sorry, polymerase chain reaction— meaning you make more of it. Then you clone those genes into a plasmid, put it in Bt, and voilà, you’ve got Bt that could be as lethal as anthrax.”

  “Maggie and the scientists she worked with were replicating anthrax bacteria?” I asked. “Making it multiply?”

  “Let’s just leave it that they understood the process.” He folded his arms across his chest to let me know that was all he planned to say.

  “All right, whatever they did or didn’t do, they needed animals or, better still, humans who were infected in order to test the vaccine. Or they themselves needed to infect rats or sheep or people since anthrax isn’t one of those diseases with a long survival rate where you can round up a test group.”

  “It’s true you need to do field tests to find out if something is effective or not.”

  Had Stephen Falcone died from coming in contact with anthrax because he’d agreed to be tested for the vaccine? How could he have understood what he’d agreed to do?

  “Isn’t that incredibly risky, if we’re talking about real people? Not to mention life-threatening for anyone who volunteers?”

  “Of course it’s risky, but the point is to administer the vaccine quickly enough for it to be effective.”

  “And how fast is ‘quickly enough’?” I asked. “Did they also experiment to see how long they could wait before it was too late?”

  Noah’s face darkened. “Sorry, Lucie, we really have reached the end of the line about what I can discuss.”

  We stared at each other.

  “What do they call that?” I said. “A nondenial denial?”

  “I’ll walk you back to the parking lot.” He wasn’t going to back down.

  I shrugged. “Okay. Thanks for your time.”

  “I’ve got one final question for you,” he said. “About Maggie. The newspapers reported exactly what you said Charles told you— the car she was driving went off a bridge into the water off Pontiac Island. She’d been drinking and she shouldn’t have been behind the wheel.”

  “That’s right.” We’d already discussed this.

  “It wasn’t her car. Couldn’t have been,” he said. “Didn’t Charles ever mention that Maggie didn’t drive, didn’t know how to, didn’t have a license because she grew up in Manhattan?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s your problem right there.” Noah made a clicking sound of disapproval with his tongue. “You ask me, someone else had to be in the car with her that night, even if the police never found any evidence to prove it—the car’d been underwater for hours, anyway. She didn’t drive off the bridge herself because she was too drunk. I think the driver managed to escape but left her there and she died. Either he or she was too scared to report what happened, too drunk, or it was deliberate. Jealousy can be a powerful motivator, my dear, enough to make someone take leave of his senses if he’d been drinking. Wouldn’t be the first time a person was pushed too far when there was a love triangle.” He broke a small dead branch off the dogwood.

  I felt like he’d knocked the wind out of me. “You think it was Charles?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she did get in that car and take off. We’re talking about a semiprivate island, not the streets of D.C. The police never charged Charles with anything, so I could be all wet. Or maybe I’m right and Charles Thiessman got away with that, too. I told you, Lucie. The guy is made of Teflon.”

  Chapter 22

  I headed through the now-busy parking lot and thought about what Noah had said—or implied. If Maggie’s death wasn’t an accident, Noah seemed to believe the love triangle among her, Theo, and Charles could be motive enough for murder. That implicated Charles and, just as a complete wild card, maybe Theo had returned to the island after storming out of the beach house, found Maggie behind the wheel, and they quarreled. Throw in Vivian, who apparently had been so jealous of Maggie she spied on her tryst with Charles and captured it on film, and the list of possible suspects was longer than the list of those who were innocent or, so far, uninvolved: Mel and Paul.

  Except Paul’s death seemed to be somehow tied in with the Mandrake Society—the wineglass deliberately placed next to his body—and the same glass had also been at the scene where Mel died, reportedly of a heart attack. One wineglass and one dead body is someone haunted by the past; two starts to sound like a creepy pattern, too unusual a coincidence not to be relevant to what happened to Stephen Falcone, who I now suspected died of exposure to anthrax.

  I had learned plenty from Noah about the research Charles’s group had been doing, and that explained why it had been so critical to keep Stephen’s death quiet. But Noah had also revealed the tantalizing fact that Maggie didn’t know how to drive a car—though she wouldn’t have been the first person in the world to get behind the wheel and drive drunk without a license, especially if she was upset enough. The police must have believed that latter theory or someone would have been arrested or charged with something. I wondered whose car she’d taken.

  I got into the Mini, opened my phone, and called
Kit. She answered midway through the second ring.

  “Do I know you? Who is this? Wait—don’t tell me. Lucie Something-or-other. You own that vineyard.”

  “I was only gone four days, not four years.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I am calling.”

  “I meant before.”

  “Before what? I got in Wednesday at midnight. It’s Friday morning. What’s going on? You sound like the eighth dwarf. Crabby.”

  “Sorry. I was here last night until midnight. And the night before. And the night before.”

  “You can’t go on like this.”

  “You’re telling me. If you divide my salary by the number of hours I live in my office, I’m practically paying them to let me work here.”

  “Maybe you should find another job.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m worried about that, too,” she said. “That one of these days I might be job hunting.”

  “You think they’ll fire you? Who else would work her heart out the way you do?”

  “Some child straight out of college who will toil for a third of my pay and be grateful.”

  “The child won’t have your experience.”

  “The bosses won’t care. It’s the bean counters who are driving this thing, Luce.”

  “Jeez, now I’m depressed.”

  “Yeah, well try being me.”

  I heard a deep sigh and then the sucking sound of a straw at the bottom of a glass. “Moving on,” she said. “What’s up? How was California? See Quinn?”

  “California was fine, I saw Quinn, and I need a favor,” I said. “Pretty please?”

  “Wow, that was fast. Thanks for dishing,” she said as her computer dinged that she had e-mail. “I know how this works, you know. You want me to say yes before you tell me what it is.”

  “You are so suspicious. It’s just an archive search of a couple of old news stories.”

  “Huh. That sounds harmless. Which old stories?”

  “A woman who died in a car accident forty years ago. Drunk driving. Maggie Hilliard, probably Margaret Hilliard. She drove off the bridge to Pontiac Island and drowned. It might have been fairly sensational. And second—this one I’m not sure about—can you find anything about an autistic man named Stephen Falcone who disappeared, say, six months or so before her accident? Might be less than six months. He might have lived locally. He had a sister, Elinor. She might have reported him to the police when he took off.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘mights.’ You’re only looking for the story about him going missing?” she asked. “Anybody find him?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maggie Hilliard, among other people. He died a few months later. You won’t find anything on that.”

  “All right, I’ll look. But you’re going to have to connect the dots between these two when I see you. You got me all curious.”

  “Me, too. That’s why I was wondering if there was anything in the press back then. The only person still alive who knew them might be lying about what happened to one or both of them.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Charles Thiessman.”

  “Are you kidding me? Ambassador Charles Thiessman?” I heard her chair creak and the click of computer keys.

  “Yup.”

  “What are you saying, Luce?”

  “Nothing yet. I could be completely wrong about this.”

  Kit’s computer keys continued clicking. Finally she said, “This is going to take some time. Can you be more specific on your dates or a time line?”

  “Try looking during the months of June, July, and August in 1970 for Maggie Hilliard. She was at a beach house party the night it happened. Sounds like summer to me.”

  More clicking. I finished the lukewarm water from my water bottle, set it back in the cup holder, and waited.

  “Nope, nothing.” Kit’s desk chair creaked and her e-mail bell went off again. I heard her mutter something and she said, “Look, my managing editor is about to go nuclear about something, so I gotta go. He has this thing about business hours being the time we ought to be doing work.”

  “Oh, gosh, I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “Don’t worry, I do that just fine all by myself. Look, if I find anything, I’ll bring it to the dinner tonight,” she said. “Thank God we digitized our archives so at least I don’t have to squint at microfilm.”

  “Tonight?”

  She must have heard the disappointment in my voice. “It happened forty years ago, Luce. Why so urgent all of a sudden? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. It’s way too long to go into now.”

  “I’ll do some poking around on my lunch hour, okay?” She sighed. “I never go out anymore. Just stuck at my desk all the time. I may as well do something interesting … aw, jeez, there’s my boss e-mailing again. I’d better go. I’ll call you later if I get any hits.”

  I stopped by the General Store on my way home from Seely’s to pick up a few items—milk, peanut butter, and bread, as well as whatever was left in Thelma’s baked goods case after the Romeos swept through like a plague of locusts for their daily fix of doughnuts, coffee, and gossip. Eli had an appetite that reminded me of a Hoover vacuum, and even Hope, a delicate little angel who looked as though she ate like a bird, inhaled food like there was a hole in the bottom of her shoe.

  Thelma liked to boast that she had more variety on her shelves than even the most upscale grocery store in the region, which happened to be true since none of those places carried ammunition, camping equipment, bloodworms, fireworks (in season), chain saw replacement parts, and two kinds of hoof polish. As for food, she stocked the emergency staples, or as she liked to say, the essential white stuff you needed to survive the white stuff of a blizzard: milk, bread, and toilet paper. But the currency that had kept her clients loyal for five decades was her single-handed talent for turning our little country store into a throbbing nerve center of information about every who, what, where, why, and when that went on in two counties. Over the years, she’d cultivated a far-flung network of sources—anyone who walked through her door—and refined her interviewing technique so that she’d either surprise out of you what she wanted to know, or scare you until you told her.

  The Christmas sleigh bells Thelma used as a low-tech security system jingled and a blast of frigid air-conditioning hit me as I walked inside. The parking lot had been empty, but it sounded like a party in the back room, which meant she was already engrossed in one of her beloved soap operas or a game show.

  She yelled, “I’m coming,” in her reedy voice and a moment later stood in the doorway, making an entrance with the dramatic timing of a venerable leading lady appearing on stage and the verve of a teenager who liked showing more skin than fabric. Her face lit up when she saw me and I knew that meant I was about to be squeezed for the details of my grandfather’s visit and—if she’d heard about it—how it had gone between Quinn and me in California.

  “Why, Lucille! Speak of the devil.” She adjusted her thick trifocals and smoothed wrinkles out of a brilliant canary yellow knit dress that looked like it had shrunk a size or two in the dryer. “I was just talking about you a little while ago.”

  It was too late to say that she was out of what I needed. She’d seen my hand, still on the doorknob, so she knew I hadn’t even set foot in the store. I could feel the wagons circling around me.

  “Really? Who were you talking to?”

  “One or two of the Romeos. Someone said you and Luc went out to California for a few days. Did you patch things up with Quinn? You did see him, of course? And come on in, child. You’re standing in that doorway like you grew roots.”

  “How did you …?” There was no point conning her. She knew. “I mean, well, yes, Quinn and I saw each other.”

  She clacked across the room in stiletto mules that matched her dress, a sly smile on her face. “Oh, I just put two and two together when I heard about you going to California. You know me, Luc
ille, and that special seventh sense I’ve got for knowing things before people tell me.” She tapped her forehead with a bony finger. “It’s called extraterrestrial perception.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Yes, indeedy.” She walked over to a table where three coffeepots were lined up in a tidy row and straightened the “Regular,” “Decaf,” and “Fancy” signs that hung above them. “How about a nice cup of java? We could talk a little.”

  “Thanks, but I just stopped by to get a few groceries and those three blueberry muffins you’ve got left.”

  “Deary me, I should have wrapped one of those muffins and put it away,” she said. “You can have two of’em. The other one’s for the Thiessmans’ gardener. He said he’d drop by this afternoon. The poor man looked falling-down tired when he showed up this morning. I felt so sorry that I opened up early, just for him.”

  She stood there, hands on hips, regarding me. Thelma had extraterrestrial perception, all right. I wondered how much she knew about Charles using Juliette’s gardener as a late-night chauffeur for guests at his lodge, and my own firsthand experience being driven home half sloshed with Pépé in the wee small hours of the morning. Maybe Thelma was baiting me—again.

  Who cared? I wanted to know what she knew.

  “Come to think of it, that coffee does smell good and I’m still tired from the trip. What’s today’s Fancy? I think I’ve got time for a quick cup.”

  “Course you do. And it’s Bean There, Done That. That’ll perk you up.” She reached for a Styrofoam cup. “Make yourself to home, Lucille.”

  I took the coffee after she fixed it and sat in a spindle-back rocker across from the one she always sat in.

  “Juliette Thiessman is selling Dominique a lot of produce from her garden for our dinner tonight. I guess that’s why her gardener’s working overtime.” I concentrated on stirring my coffee.