The Sauvignon Secret (29 page)

“Excuse me, Lucie?”

We’d been so absorbed in our little drama I hadn’t seen Jasmine Nouri walk across the terrace until she was standing in front of us,
the friendly smile on her face fading as she seemed to realize she had stumbled into the middle of an angry private conversation.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I thought I was supposed to meet Dominique here with you. Forgive me for being late. I guess I missed the meeting. And I apologize for intruding.”

Pépé leaned forward resting an arm on the table so it covered the photographs. “No intrusion at all, my dear. We were just talking.”

“Don’t worry, it wasn’t a real meeting. We were just wrapping up some last-minute details for tomorrow,” I said.

“I see. I’ll, um, check with Dominique.” She took a step backward. “Can I bring anyone another drink?”

“I think we’re fine,” Pépé said. “Ambassador Thiessman needs to leave shortly.”

“Of course. Nice to see you all again.” She ducked her head goodbye and fled.

There was a moment of stunned silence before Pépé said, “She didn’t see anything.”

“Maybe she heard something.” Charles sounded irritable.

“If she did, out of context it means nothing,” my grandfather said.

“Juliette has no idea—” he began.

“No one is going to say anything to Juliette,” I said. “And you were about to tell us who sent you the photographs, Charles. And who else has copies—that you know of.”

He gave me a disgusted look. We both knew he hadn’t been about to say anything. “They came in the mail.”

“When?” Pépé asked.

“Around Christmas. The postmark was smeared. I have no idea where they were sent from.”

“Did Paul Noble get photos as well?”

He glared at me without speaking.

“Is that why he killed himself?” I said. “Because someone decided to bring up Maggie’s and Stephen’s deaths after all this time when he assumed they had been forgotten?”

“He didn’t confide in me,” Charles said, “before he put the rope around his neck.”

Pépé and I exchanged glances.

“But you did talk to him,” Pépé said. “Or else you wouldn’t have known he also got the photographs.”

He sat there, stone-faced.

I’d had it. “Oh, for God’s sake, Charles, don’t you have a party in D.C. that you’d like to get to before Labor Day? Can we quit playing twenty questions? Who sent the pictures? Theo?”

He said with some disdain, “That’s my guess.”

“So you sent me to California to check out Teddy Fargo.”

He waved a hand tiredly. “Yes, brilliant. You get a gold medal.”

I ignored that. “Where did Teddy, or Theo, get them, then? Why would he hang on to them for all this time and send them to you, Mel, and Paul all of a sudden?”

“I imagine Vivian took the photo,” he said. “So the picture would have originally been in her possession, don’t you think?”

“But she died of a heart attack last winter, didn’t she?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s right. Look, none of this matters now anyway. So why don’t we just forget it, all right?”

“What I don’t understand,” my grandfather said, “is why Vivian kept that photograph a secret for all these years.”

“I have no idea,” Charles said. “As I was saying, it no longer matters—”

“I know why,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Charles’s voice was cold.

“I know why Vivian never showed anyone that photograph. Obviously your affair with Maggie had to be kept secret because she was Theo’s girlfriend and you were married.”

“What of it?” He sounded dismissive, but he watched me warily.

“Once Maggie died, if Theo saw that photo he’d have one more reason to suspect that her death wasn’t an accident. Isn’t that why your first wife divorced you? Because of your affairs? You couldn’t afford to have this come out in the paper after Maggie drowned,” I said. “You were there the night she died, weren’t you?”

“No.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Vivian, Mel, and Paul knew what really happened that night, didn’t they? Did you leave with Maggie in her car? Maybe the others
helped you cover up Maggie’s death, stage it as an accident, in return for your promise that nothing would happen to them because of Stephen’s death?”

Charles stood up, towering over me, his face blotchy and mottled with rage. “This conversation is
over
. Everyone involved is
dead
. It’s finished, do you understand? Continue to pursue it—and that includes you, Luc, old friend—and I will see to it that you are very sorry indeed.”

His angry footfalls receded on the flagstone, followed by a car door slamming and the whine of an engine as he roared out of the parking lot.

Pépé picked up his wine and downed what was left in the glass in one gulp. “You certainly got him stirred up,
chérie
.”

“I’ll bet he knows what happened to Maggie,” I said. “And that her death was no accident.”

“As I said yesterday, there’s nothing you can do to prove it, Lucie,” Pépé said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” I said. “You know what they say: When you want to dig up dirt, go find a worm.”

“And where do you plan to find this worm?” he asked.

I don’t know why the idea hadn’t occurred to me until just now.

“Where else?” I said. “In a garden.”

Pépé was uncharacteristically irritable on the drive home from the Inn so I dropped the subject of Charles until later that evening when we were sitting outside on the veranda after dinner. The idea to visit Noah Seely, an old family friend and one of the Romeos, at his eponymous garden center had been rattling around in my head ever since yesterday when we got home from the airport. Indirectly, I had Quinn to thank for it. He’d left another message on the answering machine at home. I saw the flashing light the moment I walked through the front door.

“I need to talk to you. Call me or else.”

Two nights ago Quinn and I had been together. The next night he’d traded me for Brooke. I punched Delete harder than I needed to, knocking over the mail that had accumulated on the hall table while I was away.

Noah’s slick-looking brochure had landed on top of the pile of bills, catalogs, and credit card offers that skidded across the floor. It was chock-full of news about what he’d been doing on behalf of the good people in our part of the Commonwealth of Virginia as our newly elected state senator in Richmond. There was also a survey, because my opinion mattered to him. I’d set it on the table to fill out later, but that brochure jogged something in my memory this afternoon as we left the Inn after the meeting with Charles.

During World War II, Noah had worked as a government
researcher before joining the family business. He’d been in intelligence. It was a long shot, but maybe he knew Charles back then.

I brought it up with Pépé as we were finishing off another bottle of wine and watching the moonrise over the mountains.

I couldn’t recall ever seeing my grandfather drunk—he could hold his liquor better than anyone I knew—but tonight he’d set out to get good and stewed and I left him to it. Hope was upstairs asleep and Eli had gone out to the carriage house to finish some drawings for a client, so the two of us sat there, while the flickering candlelight from the hurricane lamps cast a viscous glow over us like a spell as Pépé smoked cigarette after cigarette, refilling his wineglass as soon as it was empty. Later he switched to cognac. I quit keeping pace with him long before then.

“Maybe Noah knew some of the members of the Mandrake Society,” I said. “He was also involved in the kind of hush-hush medical research they were.”

“Lucie, when you’re part of the intelligence community, the unbreakable rule you learn from day one is that everything is absolutely need to know,” he said. “Even if Noah had the same top-secret clearance Charles and the others did, you don’t discuss your latest project in the staff cafeteria over lunch. In English, it’s called SCI, sensitive compartmented information.”

“Fair enough, but I don’t care who you are and how many walled-off secrets you keep, who is sleeping with whom—especially if one of the people involved is married—is definitely fodder for gossip. And that does get discussed in the cafeteria or around the office coffeepot or in the bar after work.”

“It was a long time ago.” He stared into his wineglass. “And you can be sure Charles did his absolute best to keep it quiet. Even Theo didn’t know about him and Maggie.”

The wine was making him morose, melancholy.

“It’s worth asking Noah.”

“If you like.”

He was lost in his own thoughts, barely aware of my presence.

I dropped the subject and went to bed at midnight, planting a kiss on his head and telling him with as much tact as I could that I hoped he wouldn’t be up too late. At two I came back downstairs to
check on him. From the doorway I could see his elongated shadow in the diminished light of the guttering candles and the white curl of smoke from yet another Gauloise. A glass clinked against another glass and I knew he was probably pouring more cognac. I nearly went outside to try to coax him into calling it a night, but I wasn’t sure I could bear seeing him as anything less than my strong, resolute grandfather—not shattered and grieving as he was now. Not for Charles, for whom I think he now had nothing but angry contempt, but for Juliette whom he loved but couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell her what he knew about her husband.

Much later I heard the creaky treads on the spiral staircase—only Eli, Mia, and I knew how to avoid the noisy ones, a skill honed as teenagers sneaking in or out after our curfews—and the faint crack the walnut banister made when someone leaned too heavily on it, as he slowly climbed the stairs in the dark. I lifted my head off my pillow so I could see the clock on my bedside table: four fifteen. Then I heard the click of his bedroom door closing, and not even the thinnest blade of light shining through the cracks into the hall.

After that, silence.

I drove over to Seely’s Garden Center Friday morning first thing after breakfast, hoping to catch Noah in his rabbit-warren office in the alcove behind the customer service desk. Later he’d probably join up with the Romeos for lunch or happy hour at one of their many watering holes, and in between he’d drop by a senior citizens’ center or visit some local business in his post-retirement job as our state senator. But I needed to talk to him when he was alone, not knee-deep in Romeos or constituents.

Virginia is a state that invokes the death penalty, and I’m not going to go into the politics and morality of how and why my home state—the place I grew up in and love fiercer than anywhere on earth—got there; it just is what it is. Noah was staunchly against capital punishment; an integral part of his campaign platform had been his promise to work to get it revoked in the Commonwealth.

I didn’t find out the real reason behind his passion and commitment until a couple of the Romeos explained it one night in the
bar of the Goose Creek Inn. During the war, Noah’s research had involved testing the effectiveness of newly discovered antibiotics on human subjects. It later came out that some of the “volunteers”—prisoners and inmates in mental institutions—had been deliberately infected with awful diseases and, in the case of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, prostitutes had been used in the government’s service.

Noah finally couldn’t take it anymore—playing God and sacrificing one life to save others was wrong to him, whatever the noble motivation, so he left to take over the nursery from his father, a world of plants and trees and flowers that grew and flourished with the seasons, things that lived and brought beauty and pleasure. At Christmas, he dressed up as Santa Claus for as long as anyone could remember. Everyone under the age of fifty who lived in Atoka, Middleburg, and Leesburg, including Eli, Mia, me, and now Hope, had sat on his lap as a child, confiding our wished-for gifts, promising we’d been good all year.

Seely’s Garden Center is a sprawling, luxurious place located at the intersection of Sam Fred Road and the Snickersville Turnpike in Middleburg, not far from where Goose Creek continues its meandering path toward the Potomac River. Even at nine o’clock in the morning, it was alive and busy with a few early-bird customers and staff taking care of the ritual morning chores of watering and dead-heading bedding plants, weeding display gardens, and sweeping the flagstone patios and walkways.

The main building looked like a cross between a log cabin and a barn, a big airy place that smelled of the tang of fertilizer and the steamy, vaguely tropical odor of hundreds of hothouse plants in the large adjacent greenhouse. A young girl working at a cash register told me Noah was in his office doing paperwork. His door was ajar so I knocked.

“Come!”

He pushed up a pair of reading glasses so they rested on his tanned, bald head and sat back in his chair as I walked in. “Lucie, my dear, how nice to see you. It’s been awhile. What can I do for you?”

Noah and my mother had worked closely together many years ago when she set out to restore the blighted gardens at Highland
House, and later when she tackled more substantial landscaping projects at the vineyard and the Ruins. With the tens of thousands of dollars we’d spent at Seely’s over the years, anytime anyone in my family or a vineyard employee came by, we got VIP treatment. But asking Noah to talk about the painful subject of his involvement in carrying out gruesome lab experiments on prisoners, albeit in the name of medical advancement that would prevent future deaths and suffering, wasn’t the same as asking for advice on the color palette for the summer flowers in the courtyard.