The Sauvignon Secret

Chapter 23

I raced home to drop off the groceries, since I didn’t want to drive into Washington with a gallon of milk in my car on a sultry summer day. As I pulled into the circular driveway, Eli walked out the front door balancing a plate with a towering deli sandwich, a large bottle of Coke, and a bag of chips big enough to get lost in.

“What’s up?” he said. “You look kind of frazzled. I just took a break to make lunch.”

“I picked up some things at Thelma’s. Where’s Hope?”

“At the Ruins with Jasmine and Dominique. They’re getting ready for tonight.”

I got out of the car and grabbed the groceries. “I’ve got to get this stuff inside. See you later.”

“You’re running like you stole something, Luce. What’s going on? The girls have got things under control.”

“I’m sure they do … uh, actually I’ve got an errand in town. I might be a little late.”

He frowned. “I thought that’s where you just came from.”

“I mean D.C.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re driving all the way to D.C.? Why?”

“I need to see someone. Won’t take long.” I held up the bag. “Better get the milk in the fridge.”

He looked puzzled by the brush-off, but he didn’t push it. “Yeah, sure. See you later.”

It took me an hour and a half to get into Washington, thanks to a highway-paving project that funneled traffic to a single lane and slowed it to a crawl. By the time I crossed the Potomac over the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge and drove down Constitution Avenue toward the Capitol, the temperature gauge in my car read 105 degrees. In the hazy humidity and blinding sunlight, the Federal Reserve, the Commerce Department, and the Archives seemed to shimmer. Cars, tourists, and even the occasional crazy jogger along the Mall moved with slow motion torpor.

I didn’t know the Brookland area well, except that it was where Catholic University was located, off North Capitol Street and Michigan Avenue. There is an intrinsic logic to how Washington is laid out. A medallion under the crypt in the Capitol Rotunda is the geographic center of a city that originally was intended to be a perfect square—though it isn’t—and from there, four quadrants radiate away from it as northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. Within each quadrant, alphabet streets run east-west and numbered streets are north-south in a large grid. What throws off the simplicity are the state-named streets, which cut diagonally across this symmetry and the circles—Dupont, Logan, Thomas, et cetera—which can really screw you up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Still, it wasn’t too hard to figure out where Elinor Falcone lived. The alphabet streets had moved into two-syllable words by the time I drove past the bright blue mosaic-domed Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, so it was clear that Lawrence Street was between Kearney and Monroe and 13th Street was a block beyond 12th.

The university hadn’t overrun the local community, so there was a mixture of college bars and restaurants, and a corridor of thriving businesses on 12th Street. The surrounding neighborhood of wood, stucco, and brick bungalow homes looked like they dated back to the 1920s or thereabouts.

Elinor lived in the middle of the 1300 block of Lawrence Street in a well-looked-after tan stucco Craftsman-style home. Half a dozen steps led up to a wide front porch with heavy tapered columns, a white railing, and a low-pitched roof. I parked across the street and got out of my car. A frail, white-haired woman sitting in a wheelchair on the porch watched me as I made my way between two closely parked cars and started up her front walk.

“What do you want?” Her high-pitched voice was querulous. “No soliciting allowed here.”

“I’m not soliciting,” I said. “I’m looking for Elinor Falcone. Would that be you, ma’am?”

I saw her hands drop to the brakes of her wheelchair and she called over her shoulder. “Alice? Can you come here?”

The front screen door banged open and a graceful African-American woman in her fifties wearing a short pink apron over red shorts and a white sleeveless top came outside.

“You all right, Miss Elinor?” she asked. She gave me a wary look. “May I help you?”

“My name is Lucie Montgomery,” I said. “I was hoping to have a word with Elinor Falcone. I’ve just driven here from Atoka, Virginia.”

“Where’s that? Roanoke?”

I smiled. “Not that far. Just past Middleburg in western Loudoun County. I won’t take more than a couple of minutes, I promise.”

Alice’s hand strayed protectively to the back of the wheelchair. “And what do you want to talk to her about?” she asked. “That you’ve come all this way.”

“Her brother Stephen.”

Elinor gave a faint cry and Alice placed both hands on the old woman’s shoulders, bending down to murmur in her ear. When she stood up, her face was impassive.

“That won’t be possible. You should leave now.”

“Please.” I looked directly at Elinor. “Someone else might have died because of what happened to Stephen. I know it was a long time ago, and I don’t mean to upset you, Miss Elinor, but could I please ask you a couple of questions?”

Elinor’s eyes locked on mine as she sized me up. I held my breath. If she wouldn’t talk, there was no one else left to ask.

“Why do you want to know what happened? Are you kin to the other person who died?”

“No, ma’am, no relation. I think I know what happened to your brother and I just want you to tell me if I’m right or not.”

“Go on.”

“What I know is that he agreed to take money in return for participating in an experimental drug study for a new vaccine. But they had to infect him with the disease first and he died before they gave him the antidote.”

“So you know everything.” Her voice was harsh. “You’ve been talking to the other girl, haven’t you?”

I moved closer to the stairs. “What other girl?”

“Stay where you are.”

I held my ground. “I don’t know who you mean. And I haven’t been talking to anyone.”

“She showed up one day, just like you did. I don’t remember when it was. Last winter, I think. No, wait. It was Thanksgiving.”

Elinor glanced at Alice, who said, “You may as well come up here so we don’t have to be shouting to the whole neighborhood about it.”

I climbed the stairs, feeling their eyes on me.

“What happened to you?” Elinor asked when I stood across from her. “Awful young to be using a cane.”

Up close, her deep-set eyes looked haunted and her downturned mouth looked like she hadn’t known much happiness. I glanced at Alice, whose face revealed nothing, though she continued to watch me like a mother hovering over a delicate child.

“A car accident,” I said. “And you?”

“MS.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s terminal, as you probably know,” she said. “I have good days and bad, but now it’s come to this.” She lifted a hand and I wondered if “this” meant the wheelchair, or her life in general. “Before I tell you any more, I want to know why you’re here.”

“Because Stephen’s death shouldn’t have been covered up like he never existed.”

“It had to be that way,” she said in a flat, dull voice. “The man who talked to me told me I couldn’t say anything about it. He called himself Mr. Smith. John Smith. Believe that and I’ll sell you the Shrine for a good price. He said I had to tell people that Stephen ran away. He gave me money and, God help me, I took it.”

John Smith. Charles hadn’t been very creative. Maybe he didn’t care if Elinor knew it was a fake name.

“What about the girl who came to visit you? Who was she? How did she know how to find you?”

“Because of her aunt’s diaries,” she said. “That’s how she knew. Came across them in her mother’s house after her mother passed last year.”

“Was her aunt … autistic, like your brother?”

“Good Lord, no. Her aunt was one of the researchers. Turns out I knew her, too. I met her, by chance, when I went to the park in Adams Morgan where a lot of homeless people slept rough. It was one of the places where they recruited volunteers. Easy pickings when your home is a cardboard box. A friend of Stephen’s told me where to go.” I waited as Elinor rubbed her forehead with a hand, trying to recall details of a meeting forty years ago. “I had to find out what happened to him, you see. So this woman, a girl, actually, took my name and address and said she’d see what she could do. I could tell she was upset. The next thing I knew John Smith came to see me and offered me money. I presumed they worked together.” She looked up at Alice. “Molly, wasn’t it? Molly Harris?”

“No, dear,” Alice said. “Molly Harris is one of the church ladies who come to visit sometimes. Her name was Maggie.”

“Maggie Hilliard,” I said.

I’d figured it had to be Maggie or Vivian. What I hadn’t guessed was that Maggie had a niece who had tracked Elinor down. Recently.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why did Maggie Hilliard’s niece come to see you?”

“She had questions, same as you,” she said. “She told me her aunt wanted the human testing to stop until they did more research after what happened to Stephen. No one else at the laboratory wanted to do that, so she threatened to tell the truth. That’s why they killed her.”

Elinor said it in such a matter-of-fact manner that at first I didn’t think I’d heard right.

“That’s why who killed who?”

“Why, Maggie, of course. The others killed her. They covered up her death like they did with Stephen.”

“The others being the other researchers in the program?”

“That’s right.”

My head was spinning. “How do you know this?”

“I read it in her diary. Maggie’s niece brought it with her, thought I could explain some things. Maggie wrote that her boss threatened to do something if she talked,” Elinor said. “She was scared of him and he was … well, infatuated with her. So she played along, let him flirt with her. He told her that if she cooperated, he’d take care of her. He said what they were doing was important work and they needed to think of the greater good, not dwell on a minor setback.”

“I’m so sorry.” The “minor setback” had been Stephen. “Did Maggie mention any names—who these other people were?”

“Not in the diary. That’s what the niece was trying to find out. Except for Stephen—Maggie had a yearbook photo of him with his name on it and our address. Guess she wrote that down after she met me. The others she called by names of characters in fairy tales. Probably to protect their real identities.” Elinor lifted a weary shoulder. “What help could I be? The only one I knew was John Smith. Presumably the boss.”

“What did she call the boss in her diary?”

Her mouth twisted in an ironic smile. “The Pied Piper.”

That fit.

“So how did the niece figure out that the others killed her aunt? Maggie obviously couldn’t have written about it.”

“She found a letter with some other papers. From a woman who lived in Paris.”

My mouth felt dry. “Vivian Kalman.”

“You seem to know quite a lot, Miss Montgomery. It was an apology. Vague, but the gist of it was that Vivian claimed she had nothing to do with Maggie’s death, never wanted to go along with the cover-up. Said she’d been forced to do it. She asked for forgiveness.” Another small shrug. “Sounds like an admission of guilt to me.”

“Did Vivian say anything else in that letter? Anything about how Maggie died, for example?”

“Nothing. Only that ‘the others’ were still alive so she couldn’t talk about it.”

Elinor bent over in her wheelchair, seized by a coughing fit, something deep and rheumy. Alice reached in her apron pocket and pulled out a tissue.

“You’re exerting yourself too much, dear. Let me get your medicine. That bronchitis doesn’t sound good at all. I need to get you to the doctor.” She placed the tissue in Elinor’s shaking hand.

Elinor waved her away, still hacking. Finally the spasm passed. “I see too many doctors. They’re all quacks. Let me finish here.”

Alice flashed a warning look at me. “She shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I know, but please—?”

“Where was I?” Elinor was still wheezing.

“Vivian asking Maggie’s sister to forgive her.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Her voice grew stronger. “She wrote they’d been drinking, all six of them were stinking drunk. It didn’t excuse what they did, but no one was in their right mind. And she knew that they genuinely did try to save Maggie when they went back to the pier, but by then it was too late.”

“Six of them?”

“Yes, that’s right. Six.”

So Charles had been there that night after all.

Another coughing spasm shook Elinor.

“Miss Elinor, I’m taking you inside right now.” Alice unlocked the brakes on the wheelchair. To me, she said, “Please leave. It’s enough.”

“I … of course. Just two more questions. Please, do you know the niece’s name? What happened to her?”

Alice whispered something to Elinor, who nodded as she wiped under each eye with her finger.

“Wait a second,” Alice said. The screen door banged as she went inside the house. A moment later she was back holding a scrap of paper.

“Why don’t you talk to her yourself?” she said. “If you could find us, I’m sure you could find her. Unless she stayed in France.”

“Pardon?”

“She came through Washington on her way to Paris. Flew here from Oregon, just to see Miss Elinor. Told us she was leaving for Paris that night. She has family there. She also planned to look up Vivian, if she was still alive.”

Alice handed me the paper and I read the name and a Paris address—though I knew already who it was the moment she said the niece was from Oregon.

Maggie Hilliard’s niece was Jasmine Nouri.