The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  “Jesus,” he said, “isn’t this a hell of a mess?”

  Pépé stayed in town for Juliette’s funeral. The press had a field day with the story; it was sensational, all the necessary elements—a secret society, murder, lust, greed, corruption, sex, and steeped in decades of lies and deception—that made it perfect for the tabloids. The Fauquier County police came out in force to keep the scrum of reporters and photographers away from what had turned into a major national media event as Pépé and I joined the other mourners at the old Episcopal church near Upperville.

  The only person not in attendance was Charles, who was still in the hospital and expected to recover. Ironically, I heard from Kit that he was on a suicide watch. She had picked up the story for the Trib and kept me up-to-date on everything that happened in the weeks to come—that the police in Half Moon Bay were reinvestigating the death of Mel Racine, and in Maryland, the case involving Maggie Hilliard’s accidental death was being reopened. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department had also been in touch with French authorities concerning Vivian Kalman.

  The day after Juliette’s funeral, Kit interviewed Elinor Falcone and broke the story about Stephen, precipitating the national firestorm of moral outrage and shocked incredulity that Charles had predicted. She kept my name out of it and I was grateful.

  Jasmine Nouri turned up in a motel in Charlottesville. Bobby told me the charges against her, which included being an accessory to attempted murder, would probably be reduced. She might even get away with a suspended sentence by cooperating with the police in putting together their case against Charles.

  After the funeral, Mick Dunne cornered me and led me outside to the cloisters, where we stood as the rain poured down around us in the swirling gray mist. I told him then that it wasn’t going to work between us.

  “Because of Quinn?” he asked. “You got back together in California, didn’t you?”

  “No,” I said, “we didn’t. You were right, Mick. He’ll be back for harvest this year, but that’s it.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Lucie.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m over it.”

  Chapter 26

  I drove Pépé to the airport on a gray rainy morning, the day after the funeral. The depressing weather matched our moods.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself for what happened,” I said. We had driven most of the route in silence. In another ten minutes we’d be at Dulles Airport yet again. “You didn’t believe what Charles said, did you?”

  “I should have realized how depressed she was. Maybe I could have prevented her death.” He’d ignored the question.

  “No. You couldn’t.” I was adamant. “Look, she thought she was going to be able to commit murder and escape a husband she loathed. When she got caught, she couldn’t face the consequences, so she took her own life. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “I believe it does.” He sounded so melancholy that my heart ached for him.

  “I’m sure Jasmine had no idea the powder keg she set off when she sent Charles those pictures and that it would result in the deaths of three people. By the time she met Juliette and discovered she had a willing accomplice who wanted Charles killed off—plus she’d found Theo, who was also eager to go along—all the wheels were in motion for their little conspiracy. No one could have stopped anything,” I said. “It played out the way it had to—including bringing you and me into it.”

  The highway billboards listing which airlines were located at which concourse began flashing by. I put on my turn signal when I spotted Air France.

  “I’ll come to Paris to visit you,” I said. “This year when harvest is over, after you get back from Morocco. Maybe around the end of October?”

  “It’s about time. I’d like that.” He smiled and brushed my cheek with a finger. “Don’t park, chérie. Just drop me at the entrance near the Air France ticket counter. I have my boarding pass, so I can go straight to security after I check my bag.”

  I didn’t argue with him, but I did wait after he exited the car until I could no longer see him and he’d disappeared in a maze of glass and steel. Though I hoped he’d turn around to wave goodbye, he never did.

  I sat there, lost in my thoughts and worrying about him, until a security guard finally chased me away. Afterward, I drove slowly home in the rain, taking the long way on the back roads.

  By October when we saw each other again, we’d be okay. Pépé’d bounce back to his old self and I would have finished the last harvest with Quinn.

  Ready to move on, write the next chapter.

  The next day I told Frankie I planned to advertise for a new winemaker. She looked at me the way a mother looks at a child who is about to do something she’ll regret forever.

  “Quinn will be back for harvest in a few weeks,” she said. “Why can’t you wait and talk to him about this? Maybe he’ll change his mind and stay for good.”

  “We’ve done all the talking we need to do,” I said. “Look, I need to clear my head. I’m going over to the cemetery to tidy up the graves. That wind and rain yesterday probably brought down some leaves and branches.”

  “Give yourself a break. You don’t have to take care of that today.” She paused and studied my face. “Never mind. I shouldn’t be sticking my nose in your business, but I can’t bear to see you looking so sad.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I said. “The Montgomery women are tough. I’ll get through this.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  * * *

  When I was done cleaning what little debris there was among the headstones, I sat with my back against my mother’s marker until the sun became a fireball and began to slip behind the mountains. A vehicle—the engine sounded like the old Superman blue truck that Antonio used—came down Sycamore Lane while the flame-colored sky was at its fiercest and most intense. It stopped at the bottom of the hill near the mulberry trees and a door slammed. Frankie obviously told Antonio where to find me.

  He came through the gate, backlit by slanting gold light so he was completely in silhouette, but I knew right away it wasn’t Antonio.

  “How come you haven’t returned a single one of my calls?” Quinn asked. He sprinted across the cemetery, threading his way between the graves before I could answer, and pulled me to my feet. “I called you every day for a week until I finally wised up and got my news from Frankie.”

  “There wasn’t anything else to say,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Especially after you spent the night with Brooke right after we stayed together on the houseboat.”

  “What the hell—you think I did what?” He looked up and rolled his eyes. “That’s what this has been about? You think Brooke and I—”

  “What was I supposed to think when I called and you were right there while she was getting dressed?”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “Brooke is like a daughter to me. That’s it. There is nothing—and I mean that—going on between us. I slept on her couch so I wouldn’t have to drive back to Sausalito.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because you’re so damn stubborn, that’s why. We could have sorted this out sooner and a whole lot cheaper,” he said, “than a oneway plane ticket.”

  My heart skipped a few beats. “One-way?”

  “I heard you’re looking for a winemaker and I’d like to know why, when you’ve already got one.”

  “Do I?”

  He nodded. “Unless you’re firing me.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “Good. Glad that’s settled. Though I would like to make a few changes about the way we do things.”

  “Oh God, you want a raise. I should have figured.”

  “A raise would be good,” he said, “but I was thinking more along the lines of a change of accommodations. Maybe we could t
ry living together. You know, I could leave a few things at your place, see if it works. That is, if you’d be willing?”

  I felt suspended, breathless. “I suppose you could do that. Eli and Hope are living with me now, too.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’d be okay with me being part of your family?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I would.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “Because you’re part of mine.”

  I took a deep breath. “Then if we’re family, you need to move in completely. No half measures, Quinn. It has to be all the way.”

  He grinned and kissed me. “All right,” he said. “That’s how we’ll do it. All the way.”

  The Silverado Squatters

  “The wine is bottled poetry,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters, describing the Napa Valley wines the Scottish author and poet drank on his two-month honeymoon in an abandoned shack on Mount St. Helena in 1880. Today Robert Louis Stevenson State Park encompasses the region where Stevenson, his new wife, Fanny, and her son Lloyd Osbourne stayed in a three-story bunkhouse located in Silverado, a defunct mining town in the Mayacamas Mountains a few miles north of Calistoga. In August 2010, the California State Senate named a stretch of Route 29, the main north-south route through the Napa Valley, in honor of Stevenson, who wrote such well-known classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and, as a child, developed a series of medical problems from the damp Scottish weather that would plague him for the rest of his life. By the time he was an adult, he began traveling to warmer climates— particularly the south of France—for health reasons. On an 1876 canoe trip through Belgium and France, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American woman more than ten years his senior. Though there were apparently no sparks between them at this first meeting, the following year they became lovers in Paris where Fanny had moved with her children to study art and escape a philandering husband who resided in San Francisco.

  In 1878, Fanny left Europe and returned to California to settle matters with her husband; the following year Stevenson journeyed to America to join her. He took a second-class passage on a steamship that arrived in New York, and from there traveled by train to California, writing about his experience in The Amateur Emigrant. Penniless by the time he arrived in Monterey where Fanny was now staying with the children, the trip all but destroyed his fragile health. Later he moved to San Francisco where Fanny had gone to finalize her divorce, but poor health and great poverty continued to plague him.

  In April 1880, Stevenson got word from Scotland that his family, which had been set against his proposed marriage to an American divorcée, had relented and now planned to send him an annual allowance. In May, Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were finally married in San Francisco.

  Determined to get her new husband away from the damp and fog of that city, Fanny decided the family should travel to Napa to stay at the home of an old friend. When the plans fell through, they moved instead to a cottage on the grounds of the Hot Springs Hotel in Calistoga. Unable to afford the ten-dollars-a-week rent, a local storekeeper directed them to the abandoned, run-down house in Silverado. After cleaning and fixing up the somewhat open-air place, they spent an unconventional honeymoon two thousand feet above Calistoga, which commanded breathtaking views of the valley. There, in the fresh air and warm sunshine, a contented Stevenson recuperated and regained his health.

  During his stay in Silverado, he kept a meticulous diary, describing his adventures, mishaps, and encounters with the colorful local inhabitants; the memoir later became The Silverado Squatters, written in 1883 after he returned to England. Stevenson also used his notes about the beautiful and somewhat primitive scenery as the model for Spyglass Hill in Treasure Island.

  In addition to Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, where a trail leads to the place the poet and his family once camped—the site is marked by a memorial in the form of an open book—visitors can learn more about Stevenson’s life and works at the Silverado Museum located in the St. Helena Public Library.

  Acknowledgments

  I had bicoastal help with this book, and there are many people to thank. The usual rule applies: It’s not their fault if it’s wrong; that’s on me.

  In Virginia, thanks to Rick Tagg, winemaker at Barrel Oak Winery in Delaplane; Brian Roeder, owner of Barrel Oak Winery (and native Santa Cruzan); Christine Ilich of Heirloom Kitchen in Front Royal; Dr. Christopher Burns, associate professor of medical education, Department of Microbiology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Detective Jim Smith, Crime Scene Section, Fairfax County Police Department; and Terri Cofer Beirne, eastern counsel, the Wine Institute.

  In California, thanks to my family for their hospitality, support, endless driving, and patient fact-checking: especially Larry and Balen Crosby in Cupertino and Matt and Kristin de Nesnera in Santa Cruz. Annie Bones, state relations coordinator at the Wine Institute in San Francisco, answered questions and set up meetings for me in Napa. Thanks to my friend and fellow author Katherine Neville for introducing me to Michael and Jacque Martini of the legendary Louis M. Martini Winery. Jacque and Michael (he is the third generation of Martini winemakers) not only gave me the best insider tour of Napa Valley anyone could ask for but also graciously took in total strangers, offering me and my family their charming guest cottage as a place to stay. Thanks especially to Jacque (and Larkin), for the driving, the tea, the restaurants, and for introducing me to their good friends Ed Sbragia of Sbragia Family Vineyards in Geyserville (Ed was formerly head winemaker at Beringer Vineyards) and Laura Zahtila, owner of Zahtila Vineyards in Calistoga. My favorite part, of course, was drinking truly amazing wine made by some of Napa’s top winemakers; it isn’t every day you get to drink a vintage from the year you were born.

  Thanks for advice, comments, and reading drafts of the manuscript to Donna Andrews, Glen Gage, John Gilstrap, Catherine Reid Kennedy, John Lamb, André de Nesnera, Peter de Nesnera, Alan Orloff, and Art Taylor.

  At Scribner, thanks to my wonderful editor Anna deVries, as well as to Fiona Brown, Rex Bonomelli, Katie Rizzo, and everyone else who does so much behind the scenes. Thank you to Cynthia Merman for copyediting.

  Finally thanks and love to Dominick Abel, who makes it all happen.

  About The Author

  Ellen Crosby is the author of six books in the Virginia wine country mystery series and Moscow Nights, a stand-alone mystery published in the United Kingdom. She is a former freelance regional reporter for The Washington Post and was the Moscow correspondent for ABC News Radio during the waning years of the Soviet Union. Crosby lives in Virginia with her family.

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