The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  Charles leaned his head against the back of his chair like he was contemplating what to say. “They needed to continue field testing,” he said finally. “On humans. So they advertised for volunteers. Offering money.”

  “You mean discreet ads in newspapers?” I asked. “Like they used to do before the Internet?”

  “Of course not.” He sounded annoyed. “It was easy enough to find people who needed spare cash if you knew where to look … people sleeping in the rough. Homeless individuals.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “They got people who were desperate for money to volunteer to be experimented on?”

  “It happens all the time. How else do you think they test new drugs? Don’t judge, Lucie.” Charles sat forward and shook his finger in my face. “They were protecting you. The people who volunteered were patriots. They wanted to help.”

  I kept my mouth shut. Drug testing was one thing. This was about creative ways to kill people.

  Charles sat back again. “There was, well, an unfortunate incident. One of the volunteers, a homeless man who said his name was Stephen Falcon, was also mildly disabled. Autistic, I guess, is how you’d describe him today. Unfortunately, he died during one of the experiments. It happened in the lab, very traumatic, upset the hell out of everyone.” He held out his hands palms up as though entreating us to understand the small setback. “There was nothing anyone could do to save him. A tragedy, obviously.”

  I couldn’t tell if he meant for the Mandrake Society or for Stephen Falcon. Neither Pépé nor I spoke. Pépé’s lips were pressed together and his face was the color of ashes.

  “Of course, we took care of his burial. Actually, he was cremated. We didn’t find a next of kin.” He looked rueful. “That was our undoing, where we went wrong. His real name was Stephen Falcone. He wasn’t homeless; he’d run away. At the time he was living with his sister in D.C., Elinor Falcone. She found out that he’d volunteered for our program from someone who knew Stephen and tracked us down. I went to see her.”

  He gave an elaborate shrug. “I told her that her brother had died serving his country and she should be proud of him. After all, he was autistic—what kind of future could he have? She was well compensated for her loss, spared his future medical expenses, what have you. In return, of course, she couldn’t talk about what happened to him.”

  Blood money. I blinked hard listening to Charles’s description of the “favor” he had done Elinor Falcone.

  “Did she keep her word?” Pépé asked.

  He waved a hand. “Oh, yes, she did, indeed. But it didn’t end there. Stephen’s death … I don’t know … it changed everything. The Mandrake Society got together one night at the cottage and, from what I heard, everyone got stinking drunk, really crazy out of their minds. Theo Graf, the head biochemist, said he was done with the group, the experiments, everything. He planned to quit, leave Fort Wilton and go somewhere else. Maggie was so upset that she said they ought to come clean about what really happened to Stephen. Aside from the fact that they were operating a program that shouldn’t even exist, there was the issue of what charges they might face—manslaughter, or worse. Everyone’s careers would be ruined. A tragedy when they all had such brilliant, promising futures.”

  “How many ‘others’ were there?” Pépé asked.

  Charles ticked them off on his fingers. “Besides Maggie and Theo there were three others,” he said. “Two men and a woman. Mel Racine, Vivian Kalman, and … Paul Noble.”

  “Paul Noble was a biochemist who worked for a secret weapons program at Fort Wilton forty years ago?” I should have seen it coming, but it still floored me. “That’s a long way from owning a multimillion-dollar business distributing wine.”

  Charles shook his head. “Not as far off as you think. When you consider it, there’s a lot of chemistry in wine.”

  “What happened at the cottage that night?” Pépé asked. “You didn’t finish the story.”

  Charles took a deep breath as if the memories still pained him. “I told you Theo left the place in a rage. Got in a car though he never should have been behind the wheel. Maggie went after him, although she was drunk, too. They were, ah, a couple, sleeping together on the quiet since fraternizing with colleagues was frowned on. Theo was crazy about her, so she figured she could talk some sense into him.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Maggie never made it off Pontiac Island and Theo didn’t know she had followed him. The car she was driving was found the next morning where she drove it off the bridge. Her body washed up on the beach.”

  The writhing figures kept dancing as the fire blazed with the same intensity as when Charles had flipped the switch … how long ago? It seemed like we’d been here all night.

  “Maggie’s death and the incident involving Stephen Falcone sent Theo off the deep end,” he said. “He was … I don’t know … wild, out of control. The day he came to my office for the last time—”

  Charles stopped speaking and pressed his lips together.

  “What happened?” Pépé asked finally.

  “He made some crazy accusations. Claimed her death wasn’t an accident, and that the others had done something to tamper with the car to keep her from talking about Stephen. It was preposterous, of course. He even accused me of being part of the conspiracy.” Charles’s voice rose and his face grew flushed. At first I thought it was shame, or maybe the cumulative result of enough alcohol to float an ocean liner, but as he went on, I realized he was outraged.

  “Theo swore that if he ever found a way to prove that Maggie had been murdered, he’d make sure everyone paid for it. I can still hear his voice that day,” he said. “Shouting over and over that he’d see to it each of us lost someone we loved as much as he loved Maggie. I told him he was absolutely cracked, out of his mind.”

  Charles took an unsteady breath. “At the time, I dismissed it as, well, you know, an idle threat, nothing he would really act on. Besides, what was he going to uncover about Maggie’s death except the truth? She was blind drunk and she drove off a bridge in the middle of the night and drowned.”

  He swirled his brandy and finished it with his eyes closed. When he opened them he said, “I disbanded the group after that. What choice did I have? They all left, went elsewhere, and it fell to me to clean up. Erase Stephen Falcone’s death. Erase the Mandrake Society altogether. So I did.” He reached over and picked up his empty wineglass. “But I did keep these as a reminder to myself. Not a day passes that it hasn’t haunted me.”

  “Did it haunt Paul Noble, too?” I set down my own glass and wished I hadn’t drunk from it. “You must have gotten together from time to time and it came up?”

  “Actually,” he said, “we avoided each other. It wasn’t hard to do.”

  He got up for more brandy, swaying slightly. Pépé and I exchanged glances.

  “I kept track of them all over the years,” he said. “Though we were never in direct contact again, you understand.”

  “What happened to everyone?” I asked.

  “Theo disappeared … just vanished. I heard that he was killed in a car accident while he was in Europe about twenty years ago. Even saw a copy of a grainy photo in an Austrian newspaper that looked like him.” He shook his head, remembering. “I can’t tell you how relieved I was. Then Vivian died. Heart attack last winter. She’d retired to France. That just left Mel and Paul.”

  He ticked off two fingers. “Mel was out in California, the Bay Area. Owned a couple of car dealerships … talk about a lifestyle change. He set up a wine club and rented out temperature-controlled storage to people who needed a place to keep their high-end collections. He bought an old bank building and converted the vault into a cellar. Paul, well, you know what happened to him. But a few years ago when I was out in Monte Rio at one of the Bohemian Grove’s summer campouts, someone brought a couple of cases of wine made by a new winemaker in Calistoga. Named Teddy Fargo. Turned out the guy also grew roses so he named the place Rose Hill Vineyard. Graf spelled backward i
s F-A-R-G. Theo’s middle initial was O for Octavius. I began to wonder if it could be Theo.”

  “That’s the vineyard you recommended to Mick Dunne,” I said. “Told him that he should buy wine from them. But I’m sure Mick said ‘she’ and not ‘he.’ ”

  “The new owner is a woman,” Charles said. “About six months ago Theo, or Fargo, sold the vineyard and vanished. A couple months later Mel Racine was found dead. It looked like a heart attack, same as Vivian. He’d been drinking, too. Guess which wineglass the police found in his office, next to his body?”

  He stared at both of us. No one said anything.

  “Then two days ago, Paul committed suicide. Something drove him to it—or someone,” he said. “I think Fargo is Theo. I think he decided to hunt down the remaining members of the Mandrake Society after all this time. I think he’s kind of flipped and he’s carrying out the threat he made forty years ago.”

  “Did Paul Noble know about Mel Racine’s death?” Pépé asked.

  “Not from me.” Charles’s morose mood seemed to deepen. “At first I thought it was just what it was. We’re all getting up there in years now … hell, Mel was probably in his mid- to late sixties. I just figured it was a heart attack. But when I heard about Paul and that wineglass, I called in some favors and learned that they found a Mandrake Society wineglass next to Mel, too.”

  “What about Vivian? Any wineglass there?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve checked with some old French contacts, but I’m still waiting to find out.”

  “You think Theo was responsible for their deaths?” I asked. “That he’s this Teddy Fargo person?”

  “I do. It would explain finding the wineglasses with Mel and Paul. Theo was a brilliant biochemist,” he said. “He could get away with murder, especially if no one was suspicious about the causes of two seemingly unrelated deaths. The police wouldn’t bother with a tox screen.”

  “Paul Noble’s death appeared to be suicide,” Pépé said.

  “I still think Theo was involved, though I’m not sure how. And maybe it wasn’t suicide.”

  “What does this have to do with Rose Hill Winery—and me?” I asked.

  “I need to know if it’s really Theo,” Charles said. “And I’m betting the clue that would confirm it can be found at his old winery. Somewhere on the property, there will be black roses.”

  “There’s no such thing as a black rose. They’re just very dark red roses,” I said. “It’s fiction.”

  “All the same, they were Theo’s passion. Obsession, really. They’ll be growing there somewhere. No one will wonder if you ask for a private tour of the winery,” Charles said. “Especially if you’re there to buy wine. Trust me, those roses will be in a garden where no one would see them if they were just visiting the tasting room.”

  “Why don’t you fly out to Calistoga and take a look? Why me?”

  He smiled. “And tip my hand? Not a chance. It’s equally possible I’m barking mad, still haunted by old ghosts. There are days when I wonder myself. Like I told you, I saw a photo of Theo in a newspaper. Supposedly he died two decades ago. To be honest, I feel a bit of a fool even telling you all this.”

  I glanced at my grandfather, but he remained mute. My choice. My decision.

  “All I’m asking is that you find out whether there is a garden with black roses at that vineyard. That’s it.” Charles’s tone was reasonable, but he was also pleading. “And the wine, I promise you, is first-rate. I’m not worried that you’ll advise Mick Dunne not to buy it. I have that much faith in it. So you see, it’s a win-win situation. You also get to accompany Luc to California, spend more time together.”

  Win-win for whom?

  “And then what?” I asked. “What if I find these roses?”

  Charles sucked in his breath. “Then, I guess, I’ll be one step closer to believing I’m right and that Theo could be alive.”

  “Then you’ll go to the police?” Pépé asked.

  “I … maybe not the police, but someone. Dragging up Stephen Falcone in this day and age could be like throwing gasoline onto that fire right there,” he said. “Can you imagine opening up the Pandora’s box of an off-the-radar project involving human testing gone wrong, having it show up in some newspaper next to a story on waterboarding or Guantánamo?”

  Charles shook his head, without waiting for an answer. “I told you Theo swore he’d hurt someone each of us loved as deeply as he loved Maggie.”

  The fiery figures rose up and became more menacing. The room grew hostile, unwelcoming. I resisted the urge to glance at the windows where a ghostly face from Charles’s past might be staring through the glass at the three of us.

  Pépé’s voice was hoarse. “Juliette.”

  Charles nodded. “Juliette. Who else?”

  Of all the mental and moral blackmail Charles could have brought to bear on me that night—and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything—he’d found the path to my heart. He knew Pépé would suffer if something happened to his wife and I’d refused to do one small favor that might change the outcome of this situation, save her somehow.

  I stole a look at my grandfather. His hands gripped the sides of his chair and he was staring into the fire, a bleak expression on his face. He wouldn’t ask me outright; it was my decision.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  Chapter 8

  Even now when I think back on that night in Charles’s lodge, the three of us sitting around an absurdly comforting fire in the middle of July during the hottest summer since they started keeping records, I have a hard time remembering what really happened and what I imagined had taken place. Charles’s tale of Theo Graf—a scientist he’d believed was dead for more than twenty years who suddenly popped up in California and decided to exact revenge for the accidental death of the young girl who’d been his lover almost half a century ago—sounded like the frayed memories of an old man with a guilt-ridden conscience. Or a narcissist who believed that a series of coincidences involving other people somehow revolved around himself.

  The tenuous thread that held Charles’s logic together was a set of wineglasses with the Mandrake Society’s “logo” on them found near the bodies of Mel Racine and Paul Noble, and a fearful belief that Graf might have faked his death, flipped his name around to Fargo, and, for no obvious reason, decided to make good on a decades-old threat.

  I have even hazier recollections of discussing this with Pépé when Charles finally called on a gardener who lived on the premises to drive us home that unnaturally cold night. The man’s placid, almost bovine, demeanor when he appeared at the door to the lodge, minutes after Charles phoned him, made me wonder if this were a regular occurrence, and whether it was a little secret to be kept from Juliette that one of her groundskeepers moonlighted as a chauffeur for her husband’s boozy get-togethers. I suspected he was well paid for keeping this extracurricular activity to himself.

  “Do you think it’s possible that Teddy Fargo is hunting down anyone who was associated with the Mandrake Society? And that he’s really Theo Graf?” I asked Pépé as the driver pulled out of the Thiessmans’ gravel driveway onto the two-lane country road.

  The moon had disappeared and, out here in the middle of farmland, no streetlights illuminated the hairpin turns and unspooling ribbon of hills that our driver navigated with the speed of someone who believed he was being chased. With the exception of two carriage lanterns at the entrance to a gated driveway that flashed by and the dimmed instruments on the dash, the night closed around us like a cocoon.

  My head rested on Pépé’s shoulder. I had finally gotten him to put his suit jacket back on. It felt comfortingly scratchy against my cheek, smelling of his cigarettes and old-fashioned aftershave with a mingled hint of my light floral perfume.

  “It does sound far-fetched, doesn’t it?” he said. “Who knows what tricks his mind is playing on him after so many years? He’s obsessed with Juliette not knowing a thing about this—and he’s had
no one else to discuss it with until tonight.”

  “I wish he’d told us the truth about those wineglasses before we started drinking,” I said. “It was sort of creepy once we knew their history.”

  “Charles always did have a flair for drama,” Pépé said. “And embellishment.”

  “Maybe that’s all this is,” I said.

  “You are going to check out this wine for Mick anyway, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Then look for these so-called black roses and that will be the end of it with Charles. At least it will bring him some peace.” He patted my hand. “And Juliette, as well.”

  His voice softened when he mentioned her name.

  “Okay, I will.”

  “And you will be with me for the trip out west,” he continued. “I’ll change the reservation at the hotel in San Francisco and you can stay with my friend Robert Sanábria when you go up to Napa. I’ll join you after my talk. He lives in Calistoga so you’ll be right where you need to be.” Another pat on the hand and he said, sounding happy, “It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone some good, eh, ma belle?”

  I showed up at Mick Dunne’s for tea on Saturday morning, Bastille Day, looking and feeling like something the cat dragged in. His housekeeper, a pretty, petite Hispanic girl with long, dark hair pulled into a loose bun, told me Mick was out by the pool and asked me to wait while she went to get him.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “He’s expecting me and I know where to go. I’ll find him myself.”

  She was new. He’d had another housekeeper when we were seeing each other and I slept here from time to time.

  “Of course.” She bobbed her head, courteous and respectful, but something about the heavy-lidded flicker of her eyes told me she’d heard that line before, and each time it had been a woman who’d said it.

  With a little twinge of jealousy, I wondered whom Mick was sleeping with now. Surely there was someone.

  I had to walk through his gardens to get to the pool. When Mick bought his home a few years ago, he discovered that the previous owner, who had studied botany as an avocation, had worked with a horticulturist to identify and label the many exotic species of trees, shrubs, and flowers that bloomed on the parklike grounds of his estate. Mick tracked down the horticulturist and persuaded him to take the job of full-time groundskeeper, giving him carte blanche to purchase whatever new or unusual specimen he wanted. The current passion was succulents, or so I’d heard. Desert plants and cacti that looked like modern sculpture and could wound like weapons weren’t my thing; my favorite was the lush, luxurious sunken rose garden with its pretty two-tiered fountain. Mick told me that coming upon the rioting tumble of roses—espaliered climbers, bushes, shrubs, floribunda, tea roses, hybrids—the first time he saw the house had brought back a flood of memories of his childhood in London and the days when his route walking to and from school had been through Regent’s Park and Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens. He’d bought the house on the spot.