Vintage (56 page)

“You’ll meet other people, Odette. I don’t like that man. I hated the way he kept grabbing you by the ass. There’s something about him. Something violent. I saw it as soon as he walked in. Like Dad.”

“Dad never touched me,” Odette reminded her. The subtext was that she didn’t believe her father had ever touched Odile either. “But this isn’t even about him. You’re just jealous that I might have the chance of going up in the world.”

“Or getting fucked by an old man who won’t remember your name in the morning. Please don’t go.”

“Odile,” said Odette. “Sometimes your jealousy is a real bore. When I have my rich famous lover and my enormous apartment, I shall remind you that you told me not to go for it.”

“I’m
begging
you not to go for it,” Odile replied. “Not with him.”

Odette threw her coat around her shoulders.

“I’m on my way up.”

In reality, Odette was on her way out. Had they known it at the time, would they have parted differently, Odile wondered. Would she have told Odette she loved her, despite
the way they fought? Would Odette have returned the sentiment?

Her body was found four days later. The dress she had taken from Odile’s wardrobe without permission was tattered and torn. Odile identified Odette’s body in the hospital. Her beautiful face was ruined. Cut and bruised. Swollen from having been in the water for so long. From that moment on, whenever Odile thought of her sister, she thought of that Halloween mask. White and puffy as a maggot. She hated Odette’s murderer for that more than anything.

They couldn’t pin anything on Mathieu Randon. Sure, forensic evidence proved that he’d had sex with Odette in a hotel in Reims but he claimed it was consensual and she left straight afterward. The police took his word for it that Odette did leave. The guy on the hotel’s front desk said he had a stomach bug that night and spent quite a bit of time in the staff bathroom when he should have been on duty. The CCTV camera that watched the front door was on the fritz. There was footage of Odette walking into the hotel—skipping across the marble floor of the lobby in borrowed shoes—but nothing more after that.

The police concluded they had no reason to hold Randon, a successful businessman. It wasn’t even as though he was committing adultery. His wife had died six months earlier. Suicide.

Soon they started to suggest that Odette’s death was suicide too. The cuts and bruises were the result of being tumbled in the river after her death. Her stomach contained enough drugs to kill someone susceptible.

“But she had everything to live for!” Odile had protested.

The police psychologist explained that the family of a
suicide victim quite often had no real idea of their loved one’s state of mind.

It seemed so obvious to Odile. The hotel where Randon “entertained” her sister that night was owned by his company. Odile had seen the kind of henchmen who passed for staff at Domaine Randon. It wouldn’t have taken much to persuade men of that ilk to cover up for him.

But Mathieu Randon walked away with his reputation intact. Still Odile was certain she knew the truth and that one day she would confront him with it.

She knew her revenge would not come soon. She knew that she would have to wait. As far as Randon was concerned, the case was closed and Odile had given up. She left her job at the Bibliotek and moved to London. There she got a job in another restaurant and continued her rise as a sommelier. After that she moved to the buying team of a wine merchant. She got a column in a free newspaper, which was followed by a more prominent column in a regional paper and finally by her column in
Vinifera.

She changed her surname to her mother’s maiden name. There was nothing about her father that she wanted to be reminded of. After Odette’s death he acted as though he no longer had any daughters at all. Along with the name change, Odile gradually changed her image. She grew into her features a little. While she knew she would never be as beautiful as Odette, she became what might be called “handsome.” She dyed her dark brown hair jet-black. She dressed only in black or cream. She affected an air of mystery. She told no one about her background and didn’t correct them when they assumed she must have grand origins.

Five years after Odette’s death, Odile’s father was knocked down and killed by a car while weaving home from a bar. After that, Odile felt free to visit her mother
again. One afternoon, when Odile was walking through the square of her hometown, a good friend from school walked by without even acknowledging her.

“No way! Is it really you?” the friend asked when Odile caught her by the arm. “I wouldn’t have recognized you in a million years. You look … fantastic!”

At last, Odile felt confident that Mathieu Randon would not recognize her either.

“Tell me what you want, Odile.”

Randon’s eyes narrowed.

Odile looked up at the barrels of that year’s pinot noir, stacked ten high on the other side of the cellar, while she considered her opening sentence.

“You killed my sister,” she said at last.

“Ah yes,” Randon sneered. “The Dying Swan. Pity she didn’t know how to swim.”

Odile realized in that moment that Randon had known who she was all along.

“So maybe I was with your sister when she died. You’re an unstable woman, Odile. You drink too much. All you critics do. Who’s going to believe an alcoholic fantasist? And you’ve spent the last ten years as my lapdog. I’ve got plenty of dirt on you. But how are you going to make this accusation stick? Where’s
your
evidence?”

“I don’t want to see you in court, Randon.”

“Then what do you want? Money? Filthy cash for a clean conscience? That’s very nice, I must say. Pretending to be all concerned about your poor sister’s memory when all you really want is to buy more shoes. That’s what all women want, isn’t it? Even the likes of you.”

Odile fingered the blade in her pocket.

“You should ask for forgiveness,” she said.

“Of you?”

“Of God.”

“I didn’t know you were a Christian, Odile.”

“Not a good one,” she told him. “I’m about to break one of the commandments.”

Randon cocked his head to one side in bemusement. His biblical knowledge was sadly lacking. He was thinking about adultery when Odile plunged the knife into his chest.

But her aim was not as true as she would have liked. The shock that registered on Randon’s face quickly transmogrified into anger as he realized he wasn’t dying yet. The knife had been hindered by the thick brocade of the waistcoat he had thrown over his shirt, so that by the time it reached Randon’s flesh, it barely had the force to scratch him.

Odile reeled back with the knife in her hand, ready to attack again. With frightening speed, Randon snatched for her wrist and caught it. He twisted that wrist until Odile could not hold on to her weapon anymore.

The knife clattered to the ground. Odile bent to reach for it but Randon jerked her arm up and backwards, causing her to squeal in pain. He yanked her upright and continued to twist her arm. Odile was sure it was breaking. The pain was so bad. So intense.

“You thought you would kill me?” Randon said in faux disbelief. “Really, Odile. That isn’t very friendly. After all I’ve done for you.”

Still holding Odile’s arm up behind her back, Randon wrapped his other arm around her neck. He pulled her close to him and whispered in her ear, using the tone she imagined he had used with her sister. Soft, almost loving.

“I always liked you. I liked the way you didn’t seem to be controlled by your emotions like other women. You were always more like a man. Now I see that you’re just like the rest. So highly strung. So prone to outbursts of irrationality.
All those years wasted by holding a silly grudge.”

He squeezed tighter. Odile tried to keep him from crushing her windpipe with her free hand, but soon the blackness was starting to creep in at the corners of her sight. She knew that she was dying.

“Such a shame,” Randon cooed. “Such a shame.”

A
t three in the morning, the
Vinifera
party was still in full swing. Almost everyone was on the dance floor now. Someone had initiated a conga. Kelly and Hilarian joined in immediately. Guy, shy as he was, took a little persuading but at last even he was singing along and kicking up his heels with the rest of them. Soon the partygoers were spinning around the room like a runaway train, with the people at the end of the train suffering whiplash as they weaved in and out of the tables at high speed.

Eventually, Hilarian decided he could no longer keep up. He let go of Kelly’s waist and spun off in his own direction, ending up by sitting down rather heavily in Ronald Ginsburg’s lap.

“Get up, you ridiculous old drunk,” said Ronald, who had been sitting down precisely because he could no longer stand up himself.

“Pot calling kettle,” said Hilarian.

He lurched to his feet and tottered dramatically from side to side.

“Goodness,” he said. “Clearly I haven’t had enough to drink. I have the most terrible case of delirium tremens.”

Then the music stopped and so did the conga. Now that she was standing still Kelly also began to get the shakes.

“Whoah!” she said, leaning on a table for support. “I feel really weird.”

Weirder still was the fact that when she looked around the room, Kelly saw that several other people were suddenly finding it impossible to keep their balance. Kelly leaned against a wall, only to find that it too was shimmering and shifting. The floor was actually undulating. Like ripples in a pond. Tiny waves. Getting bigger.

“Oh man,” she said, half to herself as she sank down on to the floor. “What have I been drinking?”

“Kelly.” Guy grabbed her hand and yanked her up again. “It’s an earthquake.”

Soon the car park was full of bewildered-looking tourists. There was screaming. Car alarms set off by the quake rent the air. The hotel manager, who had run straight outside, kept shouting “Stay calm” though it was clear he had no idea what else to do. Few people had the sense or the nerve to follow official earthquake survival advice, which was to stay put indoors, beneath a door frame or under a table to better avoid falling debris. Guy and Kelly had practically carried Hilarian down twenty flights of stairs.

The evacuation of the Gloria Hotel started quite calmly, but as the earthquake continued to rock the building like a monstrous child trying to shake coins out of a piggy bank, the panicking began. Somebody unhelpfully shouted, “We’re all going to die!” which made everyone not yet outside the building quicken their step until some people were running and what had been an orderly walk soon became a stampede.

Christina Morgan’s status as a supermodel held no currency in a natural disaster. Pushed along by the sheer weight of people behind her, still in her Rupert Sanderson wedges, she stumbled and fell to the floor. As she fell, she was sure she actually heard her ankle snap. Whatever happened, she found she couldn’t get back up.

“Hey! Hey! Somebody help me!” she yelled as the people continued to surge past her, but another tremor shook the altruism right out of her fellow escapees and Christina was left on the floor.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!” Christina shouted as the building’s sprinkler system kicked in and simultaneously shorted the emergency lighting system, plunging the Gloria Hotel into darkness. “Somebody help!”

Madeleine was sitting at the desk in her room, about to see what was on the memory stick pushed under her door, when she felt the first tremor. She wasn’t sure what to do. Stay put? She had a vague recollection that you were supposed to stand in a doorway. Or perhaps you were supposed to get into the bath? As a result, she dithered. She was one of the last to leave her room and try to get outside. She was on the thirtieth floor when the lights went out, leaving her to feel her way downstairs in the dark.

“Help!”

She heard the weak call as she got to the seventeenth floor and almost kicked Christina Morgan in the side.

Madeleine crouched down.

“Are you hurt?” she asked the other woman.

“Do you think I’d be sitting here on the floor if I wasn’t?”

“Is that Christina Morgan?” Madeleine asked. “It’s Madeleine. Madeleine Arsenault.”

“Oh great. I suppose you’re going to leave me here now that you know it’s me.”

“Are you crazy?” said Madeleine. “Besides, I beat you in the competition. Give me your hand.”

Slowly, slowly, Madeleine helped Christina get to her feet.

“Lean on me,” she instructed. “I’m stronger than I look.”

Madeleine felt Christina put her weight onto her shoulder. Though she still couldn’t see her properly, Madeleine guessed that Christina must be three inches taller than she was and commensurately heavier too.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” said Christina. “You can’t hold my weight. You go on down and tell them I’m up here.”

Christina’s suggestion coincided with another roar from the earth which shook the Gloria Hotel like a baby’s rattle. A light fitting fell from the wall behind them.

“I’m not leaving you here,” said Madeleine.