by Ellen Crosby
“Ouch. Okay, sorry for nagging. I know I’m overdue to come to France,” I said. “It’s just always so busy here. And would you mind calling Charles, since you seem to be in touch with him? I think their number is unlisted now.”
“And you don’t have it?” He sounded surprised. “A shame, since your mother used to be so close to Juliette. She practically adopted Chantal when she moved to America after marrying your father.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Mom used to take me over to her house to visit. I remember Juliette talking about you all the time, the old days after the war when she first met you.”
Pépé cleared his throat. “She was very kind to me when your grandmother died. Back then she wasn’t married to Charles. I didn’t meet him until they returned to Paris after Nixon named him your ambassador to France. She always made sure I was invited to their parties and dinners at the embassy.” He paused to exhale a long breath of smoke and I knew he, too, was recalling old memories. “Frankly, I was surprised that Charles called me about this dinner on Friday, rather than Juliette … he especially asked for you.”
“Me? Why?”
“I believe he has planted a small vineyard now. Perhaps he wants to ask you for advice.”
“Pépé, he does have a vineyard and it’s strictly off-limits to everyone,” I said. “He makes his wine by himself, but he doesn’t sell it anywhere. No tasting room, nothing. The other winemakers call him the Lone Ranger because he doesn’t mix with any of us or show up at any of the wine festivals or competitions. It’s really odd.”
“Well, perhaps he wants to give you a private tour,” Pépé said.
“If he did, I’d be the envy of every winemaker in two counties,” I said. “I wonder what he really wants.”
“I would imagine we’ll find out on Friday.”
“I guess. I’m dying to know what he does in that ‘sanctum sanctorum’ all by himself. You never know, it could be alchemy.”
I heard Pépé’s quiet laughter before he said goodbye and hung up.
By the time I got to the international arrivals waiting area at Dulles Airport after leaving Paul Noble’s barn, the Air France passengers were already exiting customs, passing through double metal doors into the terminal. I scanned the crowd for my grandfather, hoping I hadn’t missed him and he’d decided to take a cab to the vineyard. The fare—probably in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars—wouldn’t faze him in the least. Finally the doors opened with a hiss, and a solitary figure emerged, gingerly pushing a luggage cart with a small brown-and-tan plaid suitcase and beat-up leather briefcase laying on it. The surprise was the cane, which he’d hooked over the cart handle.
At his age, and after that long transatlantic flight, it shouldn’t have upset me, but it did. I had a quick moment to study him before he spotted me outside the metal guardrail. For the first time, his skin seemed nearly transparent, taut against the bones of his face in a way that sharpened his features so they looked sunken and almost hawklike. He must have sensed me staring because he glanced up and waved his arm like an infielder waiting for a pop fly, a smile lighting his frail face. I smiled back and went to the exit to wait for his kiss and our usual wrangling over who would push his luggage cart. Pépé was old-school chivalrous, and no amount of women’s liberation or talk of equality between the sexes would ever persuade him that the small gallant courtesies a man performed for a woman—holding a door, helping her on with her coat—were passé.
Neither of us said a word about his new cane, but this time I put up only a faint protest over the luggage cart since I was going to lose the battle anyway. He patted my hand as he always did, and we walked down the ramp to glass doors leading to the shuttle buses and the hourly parking lot, which automatically slid open.
“I’m sorry,” I said, hearing his small ouf as we stepped outside and he absorbed the brutal temperature change. “I should have warned you. It’s over a hundred today. With the humidity it feels like one hundred and eight. Probably more. We’re setting new records with this heat wave.”
Across the street, rows of cars shimmered like a mirage. The asphalt felt squishy beneath my feet. Pépé pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his trousers and mopped his forehead.
“You forget how many summers I spent in Washington at the embassy after the war. In those days there was no air-conditioning.” He glanced sideways at me. “Is something wrong? You seem upset.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? I know it was a long trip for you—”
I shouldn’t have said it. He stopped the cart, looking exasperated.
“Now don’t you go treating me like an old man. Just because I’m a little tired and maybe a bit unsteady on my feet is no reason to act like I’ve got one foot in the grave,” he said. “That’s your cousin’s department. I can take one of you nagging me to take a nap or hovering over me like I’m in my dotage, but not both. Don’t you start, too.”
The reprimand had been delivered lightly, but he meant it and I’d hit a nerve. He pushed the cart over to the car without speaking and put his suitcase and satchel in the trunk when I opened it.
“Don’t be upset with me,” I said. “I just worry, that’s all. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
His face softened. “One does not like to admit that one is getting older. I’m sorry, chérie. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
We climbed into the stifling car and I blasted overheated air-conditioning through the vents.
“We’ll be seeing Dominique tomorrow, by the way,” I said. The refrigeration kicked in and I switched the blower to low so it didn’t sound like a jet engine before takeoff. “Juliette is using the Inn to cater her dinner. Dominique will be working, but she promised to take a break from supervising in the kitchen to see you. And she’s coming to the vineyard on Saturday for our party.”
Dominique’s mother and my mother had been sisters, two years apart in age but so alike they could have been twins. Ten years ago, after my mother died when her horse threw her jumping a fence, Dominique moved from France to help Leland take care of my wild-child kid sister, Mia. My capable cousin, who’d been studying to be a chef, managed to get Mia under her thumb while also landing a job at the Goose Creek Inn, a local restaurant with an award-winning reputation for its romantic setting and superb cuisine. Dominique took over the fledgling catering business, and before long it, too, was racking up accolades just like the Inn. When the owner, who had been my godfather, passed away a few years ago, he’d left her both businesses in his will.
“Ah, then Dominique will have plenty of opportunities to monitor my napping,” Pépé said to me.
We both grinned.
“She loves you. We all do.”
“And I love you all, too. Now please tell me why you’re so agitated, ma belle? That’s twice you’ve missed the turn for the exit out of the parking lot.”
I gave him a lopsided smile and pulled up to the tollbooth. After I paid the parking fee I told him about Paul Noble.
“The police believe he died while playing a sexual game?” Pépé asked.
“That’s one possibility. The other is that he deliberately hanged himself,” I said. “Except people commit suicide because they’re depressed or they feel hopeless. A couple of days ago Paul called me and bullied me to sell him my wine practically at cost. I wouldn’t have pegged him as either depressed or hopeless after he was done working me over. He was pretty ruthless. Talked about business plans for next year, too. Who does that if he’s thinking about ending it?”
“Nevertheless you don’t seem to believe that it was an accident?”
“If Paul was into erotic fantasies or extreme sexual games, then you’d think there would be rumors. There wasn’t so much as a peep about him.”
“You knew him well?”
“No, though I tried. I thought it would make dealing with him easier, but he was so … cold, I guess. All business, no social chitchat. After a while I gave up. Besides, he d
idn’t seem to care about working with the local vineyard owners like his older brother did. A lot of people were mad at him because he was heartless. Folks blamed him when two really good wineries went out of business last year. They couldn’t make a go of it anymore. Nice people. Lost everything.”
“Could one of the owners have been angry enough to kill him?”
I signaled to turn onto Route 28 and merged with the usual early evening rush-hour logjam.
“Oh, gosh no. At least I don’t think so. I mean, they weren’t like that.”
He gave me a don’t-be-naïve look.
“No, Pépé. Neither of them did it. I’m sure,” I said. “Believe it or not, for a while the deputy from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department who turned up on the scene thought I might have done it. There was an empty bottle of my Sauvignon Blanc and a wine-glass next to Paul’s body. Plus it was no secret I disliked him. The reason I drove over there was because I was mad at him.”
“The police suspect you?”
“Not really. Bobby Noland showed up later. He knows I didn’t do it.”
“Ah, Bobby. I have a couple of cigars for him,” he said. “Do you think someone wanted to cast suspicion on you by leaving your wine bottle there?”
I moved from one slow-moving lane of traffic to another that crawled along only slightly faster. “No, that’s too far-fetched. Besides, no one knew I was planning to drop by today.”
“You’d be surprised how angry people become when they believe they are being cheated, or their livelihood is being stolen,” he said. “It doesn’t take much to push them to the kind of violence we’ve had in France. You’ve heard of the CRAV, haven’t you? The Regional Committee of Viticulture Action, in English. A clandestine group of winemakers who, a couple of years ago, sent the president a video promising blood would flow if he didn’t stop importing cheap wine from Algeria and Spain, and didn’t do something about the overproduction driving down the price of French wine on the world market.”
“I read about those people. They sounded scary.”
“They were scary. They bombed government buildings, tanker trucks, supermarkets,” Pépé said. “They drained thousands of euros’ worth of wine from tanks at agricultural cooperatives and let it seep into the ground. Once someone tried to plant a bomb along the route of the Tour de France. Thank God he was caught in time. The press called it ‘wine terrorism.’ ”
“It isn’t like that here, Pépé. It’s nowhere near that bad,” I said. “Plenty of people were mad at Paul, but not enough to consider blowing up his warehouse. And I honestly don’t believe it was murder, after what the crime scene detective said about how hard it is to fake a suicide. I think Paul killed himself and we’ll probably find out why sooner or later.”
“It wouldn’t take much to tip the scale for that kind of anger and violence to take hold in America.” Pépé shook a warning finger at me. “It’s what I’ve been asked to talk about in California next week—the lessons your government can learn from what happened to us.”
“We had September eleventh,” I said. “That changed everything. We have the Department of Homeland Security now. They reclassified wine as a food so we have to report every part of the production process to the Food and Drug Administration under some bioterrorism law. It’s mind-boggling, all the paperwork we have to file. Records of everything we transport, everything we receive, what we add to the juice, batch lots, packaging materials … even each batch of grapes and the blend of each wine. It drives Antonio and me crazy. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother or if they ever do anything with all that information.”
“The first time something happens, you won’t wonder anymore.” My grandfather sounded ominous.
“Who’d do something to wine?”
He shrugged. “How hard would it be? A group of tourists drive by a picturesque view of vines planted alongside a country road, say your vineyard on Atoka Road, and get out of the car to take a photograph. At the same time one of them scatters something that the wind will take and blow through your fields. They drive off and disappear forever. Gradually all your vines wither and die. Or a disgruntled employee adds something to one of your five-thousand-gallon tanks of wine just before bottling. How many people could he sicken or maybe even kill?”
We’d finally reached the turnoff for Route 50, Mosby’s Highway. The homestretch. I put on my turn signal and we left Route 28 as I thought about what he’d just said.
Maybe we weren’t so insulated from the kind of violence he was talking about. In France it was homegrown—a group of angry winemakers being driven out of business—not the threats of faceless foreigners. What would it take to push some of my fellow vineyard owners who had lost everything over the brink?
Maybe Pépé was right.
“I guess it wouldn’t be that hard to do after all,” I said. “Would it?”
Chapter 4
Friday the thirteenth dawned bright and hot, promising to be another scorcher for the record books. I showered and dressed, tiptoeing past Pépé’s bedroom and avoiding the creaking treads on the grand spiral staircase. Halfway down the stairs I could still hear my grandfather snoring like a lumberjack from behind his door.
I fixed breakfast—coffee, croissants, and fresh goat cheese from a nearby farm—and carried it out to the veranda, along with the Washington Tribune. The heat and humidity had already leached the color from the sky, leaving it a dingy white. A film of haze had settled over the Blue Ridge.
Paul Noble’s death was billboarded at the bottom of page one of the Trib, though the story had been moved inside to Metro. I didn’t recognize the black-and-white thumbnail photo in the teaser; it looked like an old one taken years ago when Paul had more hair. Fortunately, the headline writers hadn’t come up with anything cute or sensational, so it simply read: “Loudoun Businessman Found Hanged.” The article was in the middle of the front page of Metro with a larger, more recent photo of Paul standing on the rooftop terrace of his luxurious Georgetown office building posing like a minor potentate. The Potomac and two backlit sculls whose rowers were perfectly in sync was the backdrop, probably a crew team from one of the D.C. universities. Thankfully the reporter wrote only that a “local woman” had discovered his body. No mention of anything kinky involving his death, so perhaps autoerotic asphyxiation had been discounted or maybe Bobby decided to keep that lurid possibility out of the press for now. Alcohol had been found at the scene, leaving the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about factors contributing to the tragedy.
A car door slammed in my driveway. I set down the paper and went inside. At this early hour it was probably Antonio. We’d been talking about whether we needed to do more spraying to deal with possible powdery mildew. But it was my brother, Eli, who let himself in the front door as I walked into the foyer. His red polo shirt had a stain like a Rorschach inkblot and his trousers looked like he’d slept in them. His dark brown hair, which he usually wore moussed or gelled in some gravity-defying style, fell naturally across his forehead as though he’d just stepped out of the shower. I liked it that way, glad he seemed to be shedding the manicured, pampered Ken doll persona his ex-wife had inflicted on him, even if he did trade it in for the rumpled, frazzled single-father-of-a-three-year-old look, which he was.
“Hey, babe,” he said. “What’s up?”
Calling me “babe” was still part of the Brandi hangover, though it was a lot better than some of the names he had for me when we were kids.
“Coffee’s hot,” I said. “And I have croissants. Did you eat breakfast?”
“I finished the milk and the soggy stuff at the bottom of Hope’s cereal bowl.” He glanced down at his shirt. “I dropped the bowl when I was cleaning up. I think it left a stain.”
“You can’t really see it,” I said. “Is Hope at day care?”
He nodded. “I feel like I’m abandoning her every time I drop her off. She won’t let go of my neck. It’s like I’m being strangled with love.”
; Brandi’s rich new boyfriend had made it clear he wanted someone who could travel with him on a whim and wouldn’t be tied down with a child, so Eli ended up with full custody of his daughter. It had taken my breath away how fast my ex-sister-in-law had shed herself of Eli and Hope, but truth be told, I was glad she was out of the picture.
He rubbed a spot by his ear and my heart ached for him. “You two are coming here this weekend, of course?” I asked.
“You bet. We might not make it through fireworks, though. One of us gets nightmares.”
“Maybe when she’s older.”
“I meant me.”
I grinned. “The family pyromaniac? Ha. You’re lucky I never told Leland who stole all those Roman candles he thought he’d stockpiled the first time he and Mom decided to have fireworks for July fourteenth.”
“He guessed.” He looked rueful. “Hence the nightmares.”
He followed me down the back staircase to the kitchen and sat in his old childhood place at the scarred-up table while I fixed his coffee and got out a jar of my homemade strawberry jam—his favorite—for his croissant.
“Pépé upstairs sleeping?” He traced a finger over marks we’d made as kids pressing too hard with our pencils when we did our homework at the soft pine table. I nodded. “Hope still calls him Beppy. She can’t wait to see him.”
“He’s flying to California on Sunday,” I said. “Quick trip. But at least you’ll get to spend Saturday evening with him.”
“Uh-huh.” He was still tracing curlicues and squiggles.
“We thought we’d make the party a clothing-optional event.”
“That’s good.”
“Eli, are you listening to me?”
He looked up. “Huh? Sure, I am.”
“What’d I just say?” I set a plate and coffee mug in front of him. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but aren’t you supposed to be in Leesburg? Say, maybe, at work?”
