The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  “So … well, I was thinking.” He seemed to be frowning at his feet. “How about if you checked out of the hotel now and spent the night on the houseboat with me? Sausalito’s already on the other side of the Bay, so we could beat all the city traffic and head straight up from there.”

  “It would save time, wouldn’t it?” My heart raced. “I guess it makes sense.”

  Was he asking me to spend the night with him in his bed, or was this really just about traffic and getting an early start?

  “I’m not sure what makes sense now.” His voice was quiet in my ear as he pulled me close, burying his face in my hair. “Especially about us.”

  I closed my eyes. “Me neither, Quinn. But I know what I want. I want you back in my life. What about you? What do you want?”

  If I pushed too hard, I knew I risked losing him. Quinn was like that, afraid to commit, afraid of getting tied down … but at least, at the very least, he owed me an honest answer to that question after everything we’d been through together.

  “What do I want?” He blew out a long, soft breath. “Tonight I want it to be like it was that first night.”

  I felt like he’d knocked me sideways. I wanted to say, “And tomorrow? What about tomorrow and the day after that and the next and the next …?” But I didn’t, because I couldn’t. There would be no talk of the future, no declaration of our feelings, no discussion about whether he would be coming back to Virginia for good.

  Tonight there would just be us and it would have to be enough, for now and maybe forever, until I could pick up the pieces of my life and move on, if that’s how we ended it.

  I leaned on my cane for support and kissed his cheek. “It won’t take me long to pack my things.”

  The drive to Sausalito, as lights winked on across San Francisco on a surprisingly clear summer evening, was intoxicating. What lay ahead once we got there thrummed between us, alternately thrilling and scaring me. I pushed Charles, and whatever dark secret the survivors of the Mandrake Society had harbored, to the farthest recesses of my mind as we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, its enormous red-orange piers rising up out of the night sky, majestic and imposing. In the distance, the Bay Bridge sparkled like a diamond necklace, and the city itself was a graceful, ethereal kingdom of glittering lights.

  The houseboat was located in a marina just beyond the town, off Bridgeway on Gate 5 ½ Road. I hadn’t known what to expect. I had pictured a large room, somewhat primitive and rustic, that served as the living, dining, and sleeping area with some clever rearranging of modular, vaguely uncomfortable wooden furniture with thin beach-type cushions. Instead, it was a luxurious little jewel, with the neat efficiency of a puzzle whose seams fit together so perfectly they disappeared.

  I don’t remember much about when we first got there, except a blurred recollection of scented roses blooming on a floating patio, the creak of wooden stairs under our footsteps, a lavender front door, water lapping against the sides of the gently rocking boat. Then we were inside, with soft light shining from a seashell-decorated lamp and Harmony’s strong, primitive paintings—something tribal, Tahiti, Bora Bora, the Amazon—hanging on pale yellow walls. Quinn led me down a narrow corridor lined with fitted doors, behind which I assumed she carefully stored clothes or linens. Neither of us spoke until we got to the master bedroom, with its king-sized platform bed and lights from the marina slatting into the darkness through the blinds of a large window. He jerked the cord shut with a quick move and then we tumbled onto the bed, sharp sighs and little cries as we undressed—I heard the rip of fabric—and devoured each other with dizzy, desperate fury.

  If this was going to be our last time, I knew that tonight—the way his hands moved over me, our bruised mouths, the pressure of his body on mine, how we fit so perfectly together—would be branded on my skin, our whispered words tattooed onto my heart and into my memory. In years to come I knew remembering this night would fill me with a breathless ache triggered by some small thing when I least expected it—a sea breeze light as a caress across my cheek, a boat rocking like a cradle in a sweet lullaby, faint shafts of moonlight making animal stripes on bare skin, a tangle of bed-sheets that smelled of musk and sweat and passion.

  When we were finally finished, he pulled me into his arms and we clung to each other for a long time, listening to the settling creaks and groans of the boat against the quiet sound of our breathing, our heartbeats finding a rhythm together, in the dark liquid stillness.

  After a while he murmured, “I’m starved. I think it’s past ten o’clock.”

  I turned on my side so I could see his profile. “Sex always does that to you.”

  “I’m also predictable.” I could feel him smiling in the dark.

  “Want me to cook? I presume this place has a kitchen. I can fix eggs and bacon or whatever you’ve got around. Though of course knowing you that would be a six-pack and a bag of chips.”

  I sat up and stretched lazily as he leaned across me to turn on a candlestick lamp on a bedside table. His tongue deliberately grazed my breasts and I shivered. In the golden shadows he looked tousled and content. For a long moment we stared at each other without speaking.

  Finally he brushed the tip of my nose with his finger and the moment passed. “On a boat it’s called a galley. Yeah, there is one and it’s pretty amazing. And I’ll ignore that remark about my culinary habits.”

  We were back on familiar territory. “So what is in your fridge?”

  “This and that.” He grinned. “How about ordering Chinese? I know this great place. I never did take you to Chinatown. In San Francisco that’s practically a sacrilege.”

  He pulled on a pair of jeans and rummaged through a built-in armoire for a shirt that had our vineyard logo on it. My heart did a slow flip-flop. I started to reach for my underwear when he said, “I’ve got something for you to wear.”

  At home I’d often worn his clothes after we made love. Usually it was one of his favorite Hawaiian shirts or an old sweatshirt that came down around my knees, something that wrapped me in his scent and the memory of being together. But now he was opening a different armoire, this one for hanging clothes. There was nothing in it except a long silk robe.

  “I, uh, saw this one day at one of those artisan street festivals we have here.” He held out the robe. “The, um, colors reminded me of you. I was going to give it to you when I came back to Virginia. I thought it would go nice with your hair.” By now he was stammering. “At least I hope it does.”

  Last year for Christmas he gave me a wine aerator—an expensive wine aerator, but a wine aerator nonetheless. We’d always kept our gifts minimal and somewhat impersonal. And as for noticing what colors I wore, the work we did was dirty and messy, so more often than not he saw me in old jeans and wine-spattered T-shirts or sweatshirts that looked like I’d been shot multiple times.

  The robe was lovely, intimate, sexy. I took it from him and held it against my body. It fell in graceful folds of peach, yellow, celadon, and cream, so soft it seemed to melt in my hands.

  “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep—”

  “Oh, Quinn, it’s beautiful. I love it!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes!” I threw my arms around him, crushing the robe between us. “Thank you!”

  I slipped into it and wound the sash around my waist, tying a bow and turning around to show off to him. “What do you think?”

  He smiled as I caught his arm for balance. “I think I have good taste.”

  There was a mirror inside the armoire door. I stood in front of it and admired myself. “I look gorgeous.”

  “Yeah, you do.” He laughed and caught my hand. “Come on, gorgeous, I’ll call for Chinese. There’s a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc chilling in the fridge.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “For us?”

  He ignored the astonished look on my face. He’d planned this evening, every last detail, ever since yesterday.

  “Unless you want to invite some o
f the neighbors in. They’re pretty cool, actually.”

  “Another time,” I said. “Tonight’s ours.”

  “I thought you might say that,” he said and led me down a narrow spiral staircase to the lower level.

  The galley kitchen had a sliding glass door that opened to the flower-filled patio, which I could now see ran the length of the boat. While Quinn found the phone number for the restaurant, I let myself outside and leaned on the railing to watch the dark silhouettes of low, boxy rows of houseboats while the little floating pier shifted gently with the current. From somewhere nearby I heard an explosion of laughter, the tinkle of china, the drone of television voices. The glow from San Francisco was a soft halo in the night sky below a fingernail-shaped moon. The only additional light came from the windows of the other boats, warm golden squares or porthole circles, as comforting and welcoming as old friends. In the kitchen, Quinn’s voice rose and fell on the phone.

  He joined me a moment later, holding two glasses of wine. “I was thinking,” he said. “Harmony’s got a great little office, real compact, hooked up with wireless and everything. She’s even got a photo printer, for her art.”

  “You want to print the photos of the Mandrake Society on my phone?” I said as he nodded. “What about a connector cable?”

  “She’s pretty geeky for an artist,” he said. “I bet she’s got one that works.”

  We took our wine with us to the living room where a small modular home office was tucked into a corner. I sat on a brushed suede sofa and admired more of Harmony’s artwork—Quinn said all the sculpture and the paintings in this room had been done by friends—while he did things to her computer and printer, producing a slightly blurry set of images of the photos.

  “You should have lifted the originals while you were at it,” he said later, as we sat on bar stools in the sleek polished-aluminum-and-black-granite kitchen, surrounded by cartons of kung pao chicken, moo shu pork, and beef with snow peas. “These are kind of out of focus.”

  He’d lined up the half dozen reproduced pictures of the Man-drake Society along the counter wall next to where we sat. By tacit mutual agreement, the school photo of Stephen Falcone and the shot of Maggie and Charles lay next to them facedown.

  “You know I already feel bad about the two I did pinch. As for the others, I was in a rush. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.” I pointed to the little photo gallery with my chopsticks. “At least we know what everyone looked like. I wonder if we’d recognize Theo Graf after all this time, if he really is alive.”

  “We could look on the Internet,” Quinn said. “We didn’t even think about that when we were printing the pictures. Come on. Bring your dinner and let’s see.”

  There was nothing. We searched for half an hour. While Fargo’s name popped up here and there on assorted wine blogs and community calendars in Calistoga or Napa Valley, no one had gotten a photo of him accepting an award for one of his wines, standing in a grinning lineup of winemakers at the county fair, or a random private photo that had been posted on some website.

  “Jeez,” Quinn said. “How’d he manage to stay undercover like that for so long?”

  “Practice. You know, we should have guessed that Charles would already have done this search,” I said. “And come up empty-handed, just like we did. If there were any photos, he’d probably know better than anybody if Fargo and Graf were the same person. He wouldn’t be sending me on this weird black rose mission.”

  We were back in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. Quinn poured the last of the Sauvignon Blanc into our glasses.

  “Not necessarily. What if Fargo had surgery? Maybe he was in a car accident in Austria just like Charles said, but the paper got it wrong and he survived. Now he looks totally different.”

  “Maybe.” It sounded far-fetched, but anything was possible, especially with this secretive group. “There’s just too much we don’t know.”

  “Yeah, and the only person who does know might be playing fast and loose with the truth. Charles could have made up a bunch of stuff and you’d never know,” he said. “I wonder what he’s hiding.”

  “His affair with Maggie, for one thing.”

  “You think he might have been embarrassed to admit that with your grandfather there?”

  “Pépé’s French. The French invented love and all its various nuances,” I said.

  “The Italians invented love,” he corrected me. “We know how to do passion, baby. The kinky stuff, meaning all the various nuances, came from you French.”

  “The Italians invented beautiful leather shoes and jackets and purses. And pizza,” I said, and he laughed. “Getting back to our conversation: Charles, who is neither French nor Italian, doesn’t seem like the embarrassed type. You know, the more I think of it, the more I think the affair was relevant to Maggie’s death.”

  “How?” Quinn folded his arms across his chest.

  “That’s what I can’t figure out. Maybe she broke it off or threatened to tell his wife because he kept pursuing her. Maybe he was a jilted lover with a badly bruised ego. Any of the above. But I’ll bet you if we ever find out what really happened, Charles Thiessman will have played some role in Maggie Hilliard’s death.”

  Quinn hooted. “I don’t see how that could be. The others were there that night at their booze party. If he did something, they’d know.”

  “Maybe they were covering up for him.”

  “Because he covered up for them about Stephen?”

  “Why not? A Faustian pact.”

  He thought about that a moment. “Or consider this: Maybe they were all in it together. Don’t forget, Maggie wanted to come clean about Stephen. That would give all of them a motive to keep their mouths shut.”

  “Oh, my God.” My eyes widened. “You mean like Agatha Christie? Murder on the Orient Express? They all did it?”

  He nodded. “If one hangs, they all hang together. Which would explain Charles knowing where in the world the others were living, what their new careers were. Shared culpability for manslaughter, maybe even murder. That’s what kept them in line.”

  “Everyone but Theo,” I said. “The now possibly undead Theo Graf.”

  “Something’s kind of funny about Theo,” Quinn said. “Changing his name—if that’s what he did. And going off the grid. I’m not sure he gets a free pass on this, either.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out more about him tomorrow when we meet Brooke,” I said. “The plan for Mick to buy her wine and us vetting the blend is still on.”

  “Maybe you should just do the wine deal and forget the rest,” he said. “Why get in the middle of it anymore, especially the way it’s turning out? Let Charles and Theo—if he’s still alive—sort out their own skeletons in the closet.”

  “I can’t.” I picked up Stephen Falcone’s photo and turned it over, setting it on the counter in front of him. “Charles talked about Stephen like he was a lab rat in an experiment. He was a person, Quinn, and his death troubled Maggie so much that she wanted to tell the truth about what happened, regardless of the consequences.”

  Quinn stared at Stephen’s photo, a muscle tightening in his jaw.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then do what you have to do.”

  He stood up and paced in the little kitchen. “God, I’d love a cigar right now. You’ve got me all stirred up, you know that? But if I light up, Harmony’d know and she’d kill me for stinking up the place.”

  I reached for my cane and stood, too. “Forget the cigar. I have a better idea for stirring you up.”

  He stopped pacing and stared at me, a slow smile lighting his eyes. “Is that a threat or a promise?”

  “You’ll just have to find out, Mr. Italian-Who-Thinks-He-Invented-Love.”

  He leaned my cane against the counter and took me in his arms. “You won’t be needing that, Ms. Kinky-Nuance. At least not for the rest of tonight. I’m expecting you to live up to your French reputation.”

  “Bet on it.”

&nb
sp; He led me upstairs to the bedroom. From somewhere on the boat, a clock with a lovely clear chime rang twice.

  “You look beautiful in this light.” He pulled on the bow to my robe, untying it. The soft silk slipped off my shoulders and the robe dropped to the floor in a puddle.

  I closed my eyes and let Quinn lay me back down on the bed, his hands moving over me sure and strong. But for the rest of the night, as our bodies rose and fell in the old, familiar rhythm, I knew—I could feel it—that the face of Stephen Falcone now haunted him as much as it haunted me.

  Stephen probably hadn’t asked for much in this world. Charles may have paid off his sister, but I suspected there had been a threat attached to that payoff, something he’d been able to hold over her head—a warning about violating national security or some super-secret hoo-ha she would be too scared to question—just as he’d done to the members of the Mandrake Society. Blood money wasn’t justice.

  Maybe it was time Stephen Falcone got justice.

  Chapter 17

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, Quinn was already awake, propped on an elbow watching me. He ran the back of his finger down my cheek.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” he said.

  “How long have you been up?”

  “Not long. I was just making sure you were still breathing. Last night was pretty intense. That Italian thing, you know.”

  I grinned and stretched, and he kissed me. “Could you remind me again?”

  This time it was gentle, unrushed … nostalgic. Afterward Harmony’s tiny shower was practically too small to fit two people, but we managed.

  As it turned out he did have bacon and eggs in the refrigerator— more advance planning—and I fixed it while he made his usual brand of coffee. If they were ever looking for a “green” fuel with enough kick to blast the space shuttle into orbit, someone from NASA needed to contact Quinn.

  I packed my small suitcase, carefully folding the silk robe, while he cleaned up and then we were back in the Porsche, driving through a pea-soup marine layer.