The Bordeaux Betrayal

Chapter 8

He was married.

How had he managed to keep that a secret? To keep her a secret?

“What’s she doing with Shane,” I asked, “if she’s married to you?”

“Ex-wife, I meant.” He was curt. “We’re divorced.”

I watched Shane and the brunette cross the street and saw recognition dawn in her eyes. Her step faltered and Shane, unaware of the lightning arcing between his girlfriend and my winemaker, slid his arm around her slim waist.

Quinn’s eyes never left her face.

When they joined us, he said, “Hello, Nicole. Long time no see.”

It was clear they hadn’t parted amicably. And that she still got to him. Hard to tell what was going through her mind other than the shock of seeing him again.

She wore a russet suit that set off her dark hair, brown-black eyes, and honey-colored skin. Short, fitted skirt and flared jacket. Silk blouse unbuttoned just low enough to tantalize. Lace bra showing through the sheer fabric. The suit was either Armani or Versace. Quite the contrast to the classic outfit I had on. Levi’s and the Gap. Torn, dirty, and stained.

“Quinn—” She spoke his name like a caress. “What a surprise. What are you doing here?”

“I live here. What about you, Nic?” His voice was like cold steel.

“You two know each other?” Shane’s eyes roved between Nicole and Quinn. Though Shane was always pleasant to me, I thought there was something a little too beautiful and preening about him that came across as what the French call m’as-tu vu?—“have you seen me?” I’d heard stories that he was a high school dropout who grew up in a rough part of Baltimore, but he’d shed his past—including the Bawlmer, Murlin, accent—so thoroughly that anyone who didn’t know better figured Daddy left him a nice trust fund after he’d graduated from an East Coast university. He certainly lived like he had a rich relative with the expensive cars, knockout women, and gambling trips to Vegas.

“We know each other,” Quinn said, “don’t we, Nicole?”

She blushed. I watched as she put her arm through Shane’s and twined her fingers with his. “Quinn is my…that is, we used to be married. A long time ago.”

Shane pulled Nicole closer and kissed her hair, his eyes on Quinn. “Then you’re divorced. Nikki and I met in Vegas a few months ago. We’ve been together ever since.” He still looked taken aback by the news.

“Good for you.” I recognized Quinn’s go-to-hell voice. It seemed like Nicole did too, judging by the way her expression turned cold. “See you ’round some time.”

Quinn laid his hand on my shoulder and started to propel me across the street.

“You’re not going to introduce me to your friend?” Nicole called after us. It sounded like a taunt.

Quinn stopped and we both turned around. “Lucie Montgomery meet Nicole…what name are you going by these days, sweetheart? It was hard to keep track for a while.”

“My maiden name.” Her eyes flashed. “Martin.” Then she looked at me, taking in the cane and my limp. “Where have I heard of you?”

“I have no idea.” The sooner we got out of here, the better. She kept staring, like she was trying to recall some forgotten piece of information. “I’m sure we’ve never met,” I said for emphasis.

“Let’s go.” Quinn walked me over to the El and opened my door, holding it while I got in. Across the street, I saw Shane whisper something in Nicole Martin’s perfect ear. She watched us, nodding. Guess he’d explained what was what. Or who.

Quinn revved his engine. “Do not hit that Porsche,” I said. “I don’t care how much you hate him for being with your ex-wife.”

“I don’t hate him,” he said. “He’s welcome to her.”

We drove back to the vineyard in silence that echoed. He looked at me just once—his face like granite, his eyes dark as obsidian. I knew then that seeing her again had opened a wound that had never healed. Now she was walking around in his mind.

He was grieving, hurt, angry. And still very much in love with his ex-wife.

When we got back to the vineyard he dropped me at my house and said, “I’m going out in the field for a while. And don’t worry about punching down the cap tonight. I got it covered.”

I nodded. “Okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

I knew better than to offer sympathy, let alone pity. He would have thrown it right back in my face. So I let him go, saying nothing, and tried not to think about the look in his eyes when he talked about going out into the field alone.

Around nine o’clock the phone rang. I was in the parlor, trying to plow through European Travels with Thomas Jefferson’s Ghost. The nearest telephone was in the foyer. I reached for my cane and half-ran to catch it, hoping it might be Quinn. By the time I picked up the receiver, the answering machine had kicked in.

“Lucie, ma chère.” The well-loved voice on the other end sounded slightly muffled—filtered, no doubt, through the smoke of a bad-smelling Boyard and a snifter of Armagnac, before being piped through my machine. It was 3 a.m. in Paris. My eighty-two-year-old grandfather would be an hour or so away from calling it a day and going to bed. “Desolé que tu n’est pas la—”

“I’m here, Pépé,” I said in French. “How are you? It’s so good to hear your voice.”

My end of the conversation reverberated like a bad echo through the two-story foyer and I regretted not getting to the phone sooner since now I’d have to hear the entire conversation in stereo.

“I’m well,” he said. “Very well. I just returned from China.”

I often hoped I’d lucked out and inherited most of my DNA from my mother’s family rather than any of the self-indulgent, weak-willed genes my father might have passed along. Pépé had sent a postcard from the Great Wall, writing that he and a few friends hiked part of it. They’d also traveled the Silk Road as far as Kyrgyzstan.

“I hope you’re going to take it easy after that trip. It sounded quite strenuous,” I said.

I heard the flare of a match. Probably relighting his cigarette. Boyards, banned years ago by the European Union because of their toxicity, were made of black tobacco and maize paper. The only cigarette I knew that constantly extinguished itself. Pépé allowed himself one or two a day from his dwindling hoard.

“I shall definitely be taking it easy. My next trip is to Washington.”

“Here? It is? When?”

He paused. “I am sorry to spring this on you at the last moment, mon ange, but I’m flying in tomorrow.” Another pause. “I have a hotel reservation at the Marriott near Dulles Airport but I hope we can see each other and you’ll let me take you to dinner at least once while I’m in town.”

Pépé had been a career diplomat. He was unfailingly polite. I knew better than to be hurt that he hadn’t asked if he could stay with me, because he’d worry he was imposing. He probably hadn’t even unpacked from China, much less gotten over jet lag. I thought about the refrain from a song Leland used to teasingly sing to my mother, lamenting how hard it was to keep ’em down on the farm after they’d seen Paree. You couldn’t even keep my grandfather in Paree.

“First of all, you can cancel your reservation at the Marriott,” I said. “You’re staying here with me. And second, what time does your flight get in? I’ll come get you.”

“Absolument pas,” he said. “I’m renting a car. Not to worry, I’ll drive myself to your place.”

I didn’t realize he was still driving. I adored Pépé but he drove like a Formula One racer hell-bent on breaking the record. Most of the rest of the family—in particular, Dominique—flat-out refused to get in a car with him any more.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said. “They’ve raised the penalties for traffic violations here in Virginia. A thousand dollars for reckless lane-changing. Some fines are even higher. I’ll drive you wherever you need to go.”

I didn’t mention the fines applied only to drivers with Virginia licenses. Or that our legislature had imposed the excessive penalties hoping they’d motivate the good citizens of the Commonwealth—some of whom also drove like bats out of hell—to behave better behind the wheel.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” he said. “Harvest is such a busy time of year for you. I’ve got meetings with les vieux amis—my old friends—and several dinners planned. It would be better if I have my own transportation.”

“Sure. You’ll get on the Beltway and think you’re on the Autoroute du Soleil,” I said. “It would be better to let Dominique or me drive than bail you out of jail.”

“I drive like every other Frenchman.” He sounded miffed.

“Exactly. So don’t rent the car. What time’s your flight?”

He told me and I wrote it down.

“Have you told Dominique you’re coming?” I asked.

He sighed. “Not yet. You know how she fusses over me and treats me like an old man. I am not as old as she would like me to be, you know.”

“You still need to call her. She should hear the news from you that you’re coming. You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you?”

“Mais non,” he said. “Of course not.”

“Then call her. And don’t worry. Everything will be fine once you get here. We’ll have a good time.”

“Mon trésor,” he said. “I forget how much I miss you until we speak. I cannot wait to see you.” Another sigh and the sound of a match being struck once again. “And your cousin.”

I hung up and a moment later, the answering machine beeped. Tomorrow was harvest and another early start, but I was too restless to go to bed. I hit the delete button and erased our conversation.

Maybe Quinn had gone back to the summerhouse. I put on a jacket and went outside. The Adirondack chairs were exactly where we’d left them last night.

Where was he? Maybe I should call him. We often spoke late at night, especially during harvest when there was work to do in the barrel room. But this wasn’t work and we’d never crossed the line this far into intimate territory. Tonight would be a bad night to start.

I went back inside, threw my jacket on the chair by the phone and walked into the library. It had been Leland’s book-lined office until a fire destroyed most of the room, along with much of the downstairs. As part of the renovation I’d had the cherry bookcases rebuilt as they’d been before. But the shelves, once jammed with double rows of Leland’s extensive collection of books by and about Thomas Jefferson, were nearly bare. It still startled me each time I saw the empty spaces.

A copy of Jefferson’s diary of his voyage through the European vineyards, reprinted on the bicentennial anniversary of his trip, was one of the few books to survive the fire. I’d been trying to read Valerie’s tome before Pépé called. The bad reviews were justified.

The odds weren’t good that Jefferson’s actual diary, written more than two centuries ago, would provide a clue to what Valerie had hinted at about the provenance of the Washington wine, but I pulled it off the shelf anyway. A slim volume, just over one hundred pages. I wiped dust off the cover. Thomas Jefferson’s European Travel Diaries. Jefferson’s Own Account of His Journeys Through the Countryside and Wine Regions of the Continent, 1787–1788.

I took it upstairs and began reading in bed.

When you are doubting whether a thing is worth the trouble of going to see, recollect that you will never again be so near it and that you may have to repent the not having seen it.

What had Valerie seen in Bordeaux? Whatever it was, now I was the one who repented “the not having seen it.” And what about Jack Greenfield? A matter of “the not having said it.” Claiming no knowledge of how such a fabled bottle had come into his family’s possession. It seemed implausible. I closed the book and turned out the light. In a few hours it would be daylight and the second day of harvesting the Cab.

In the morning, I’d see Quinn.

He showed up before the crew arrived, unsteady on his feet and dressed in the clothes he’d worn yesterday. Bloodshot eyes, wild hair, and unshaven, he looked like something somebody forgot to shoot. When he came closer I thought I detected a faint scent of perfume clinging to his shirt, more Rite-Aid than Lord & Taylor. Hard to tell since it blended in with his own body odor and the essences of booze and stale tobacco. God, what had he done last night? Where had he been and who had he been with?

I nearly asked if he’d cruised some bar and picked up somebody—anybody—to console himself after seeing Nicole with Shane, but it was none of my business. What was my business was that in twenty minutes the crew would be here and they’d see their boss looking like he’d single-handedly drunk Loudoun County dry in one night.

We worked around dangerous equipment. I couldn’t let him stay here in his state.

“Go home.” My voice was hoarse with anger and disappointment. “You’re drunk, you stink, and you look like hell. I don’t want anyone else seeing you right now. You have a goddamn nerve showing up like this. Especially today with what’s at stake for us.”

“Well, good morning to you, Susie Sunshine. Wake up on the wrong side of the bed of nails, did we, darlin’?” He still slurred his words. I wanted to strangle him.

“Get out of here! Go home and sleep it off. I don’t want to see you until you’re sober.”

He straightened up. “I’m fine.” His eyes looked crossed as he tried to focus on me and he swayed slightly.

“You are still drunk. You will not be here when the crew shows up.” My voice shook and so did my hands. “That’s in fifteen minutes. Just—go, will you? Please!”

“Who are you tellin’ to go?” He lurched closer.

For a moment I thought he might fall down at my feet. I wanted to move away from him and the messiness of this tawdry scene, but I gritted my teeth and said, “My employee.”

He looked like I’d just slapped him. I turned and half-walked, half-ran into the barrel room, leaning on my cane like an old woman. My legs felt like jelly as I slammed the door without looking to see if he’d followed. It took me so long to turn on the fans to dissipate the overnight buildup of CO₂ I began to feel light-headed from the gas.

I hoped he hadn’t noticed how badly I was trembling. Though in his state he probably wouldn’t have noticed if Manolo ran him over in the pickup. God help him if he was still there when the crew showed up. But when I went back outside ten minutes later, he was gone.

When Manolo arrived I told him Quinn was sick and, ignoring the surprise in his eyes, said the two of us were running the show. Manolo was young and good-looking and he knew the bars, too. If he’d run into Quinn, he wasn’t talking.

“Lucie,” Manolo said. “You all right? I just said something twice and you didn’t answer. You don’t look too good. Maybe what Queen has, you got, too?”

“I’m pretty certain what Quinn has isn’t contagious,” I said. “Sorry. I was distracted. Let’s get to work.”

The fact that we had one less person helping out—and it happened to be the one who usually ran the show—kept me focused, too busy to think about the kick-your-stupid-ass speech I planned to deliver once he’d sobered up enough to hear it. We had less to pick today, but we also had a delivery of Petit Verdot to deal with. Quinn had ordered it from a Culpeper vineyard that grew grapes but didn’t make wine. I’d nearly forgotten about it until the truck drove up to the crush pad.

The phone rang when I was in the lab running the final tests. Frankie, calling from the villa. “Sorry to bother you, Lucie. Someone’s here to see you.”

“Who is it?”

The deliberate silence on her end was the code we’d set up to identify someone who’d sampled a few too many wines and was getting out of hand.

“I’ll get Manolo to come with me,” I said.

“These guests have asked specifically for you.”

I wondered why she wanted me to come alone. “I’ll be right there. By myself.”

“Great.” She sounded grim.

I did not recognize the well-dressed man and woman sitting on one of the sofas around the stone fireplace in the center of the tasting room. Frankie was the only other person there, reading behind the bar.

She walked over to the couple when I entered. “Lucie, these are your new neighbors, Claudia and Stuart Orlando. Mr. and Mrs. Orlando, meet Lucie Montgomery.”

For Frankie not to like someone they had to break at least three of the Ten Commandments. She clearly didn’t like the Orlandos. She pivoted on her heel and went back to the bar to retrieve a gardening catalog.

“I’ll be outside on the deck. Call me if you need me,” she said to me.

Claudia Orlando was a pretty redhead with porcelain skin who looked like she could have stepped out of a painting by Titian. Stuart was big and beefy with a ruddy spider-veined face that said unhealthy lifestyle. Older than his wife by at least a decade, if not more. He colored his hair. It was too black.

I’d bet money they’d come to talk about the Goose Creek Hunt, but I figured I’d wait for them to bring it up. “What can I do for you, Mr. and Mrs. Orlando?” I sat down on an adjacent sofa and propped my cane next to me.

“It’s Claudia and Stuart, hon.” Her delicate beauty and the nasal Brooklyn accent were a total disconnect. She pronounced her name “Claw-dee-er.”

Stuart indicated my cane with a finger that looked like an overstuffed sausage. “Hunting accident?” he asked pleasantly, but I knew he was probing.

I smiled. “No.”

He waited for the rest of my explanation. When I remained silent, his eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “We’ll get right to the point, Lucie. Claudia and I, here, have decided that our land will be off limits to those fox hunters who claim that it’s part of their so-called territory. We believe strongly that what they do is inhumane. Not just what they do to the fox, but also to those poor dogs.”

“It’s cruel,” Claudia said. “They’re just so helpless.”

“Hounds,” I said.

“Pardon?” Stuart asked.

“They’re not called dogs. They’re called hounds.”

“Hounds, shmounds.” He waved a hand like he could care less. “We’re here to ask you to join us. We can shut them down, or at least curtail what they do, if both of us prohibit them from hunting on our land.” He smiled. “It’s a start. And then we can take it to the next level.”

“The next level?”

“Why, outlawing foxhunting.” Claudia tapped a finger on the glass coffee table and a wristful of wire-thin gold bracelets jingled like wind chimes. “Stuart is a lawyer. A smart lawyer. Orlando and Thomason. You must have heard of the firm. They represent most of the animal rights groups.”

I nodded. No point telling them I’d heard from the secretary of the Goose Creek Hunt. “I have.”

Stuart looked satisfied. “Are you with us, Lucie? I certainly hope so.”

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “The Goose Creek Hunt has been hunting on my family’s land for more than a century. They will always be welcome here, as long as I have something to say about it.”

“Why?” Claudia looked puzzled and distressed. “What they do is savage.”

“This isn’t England,” I said. “They rarely kill the fox and when they do it’s usually because the animal is old and diseased, or has rabies. It’s more like fox chasing. It’s not a blood sport in this country.”

“I do not understand how you can condone it.” Stuart had switched to what I assumed was the courtroom voice he used to eviscerate an unfriendly witness.

I flinched and he saw it. He pressed on.

“I don’t like making threats.” He smiled in a way that said he relished it. “But this could escalate into an unfortunate situation and I’m sure neither of us wants that to happen.”

Meaning I didn’t want it to happen. He looked smug, but Claudia still looked shocked. Maybe I had a chance if I tried explaining things to her.

“George Washington went foxhunting in this valley.” I looked her in the eyes and ignored Stuart. “So did Lord Fairfax. Foxhunting began right here in the earliest days of our country. We are, at heart, a farm community. Nature takes its course and hunting is part of it. I’m sure coming from Manhattan it must seem totally alien to you, but hunting and racing are an integral part of life and the culture of our region. You’ve only just moved in. Why don’t you spend some time learning about your neighbors before you judge and criticize us?”

Stuart reached for his wife’s hand and leaned over to whisper in her ear. I heard him anyway. “She’s hopeless, sugar pie. Forget it.”

I reached for my cane and stood up. Claudia looked upset but I’d just baited Stuart and the ugly expression on his face said he planned to come out swinging next round. They stood as well.

“For the record,” I said, “I don’t hunt.”

“You’re going to regret this, Mrs. Montgomery,” he said. “I promise you.”

We’d moved back to formal names. “I doubt that very much,” I said. “And it’s ‘Miss.’”

Claudia looked at me with pity. “That explains a lot,” she said. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

Frankie walked inside as the door to the villa slammed behind the Orlandos. My face burned. The spinster remark stung.

I swung around to Frankie. “You were eavesdropping.”

“You bet I was,” she said. “He’s despicable. Unfortunately, she’ll do whatever he tells her.”

“He threatened me,” I said. “I don’t like that.”

“I don’t think he threatened you,” Frankie said. “I think he just declared war.”