The Sauvignon Secret

Chapter 3

Bobby didn’t give me a lot of grief about my whereabouts and nobody being able to vouch for me, probably in part because he knew about my nonexistent social life, but mostly because we both knew I didn’t kill Paul. After that he said I was free to go, though he might have more questions for me down the road.

“How much longer will you be here?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “It’s two now. Probably another three to five hours. As long as it takes to process the crime scene.”

He got up from the step and held out a hand to me. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your car. I’ve got one more thing to say to you.”

I let him pull me to my feet. “What is it?”

He handed me my cane. “When you get home, pour yourself a good stiff drink, and before you go to bed watch something on television that’ll make you laugh. Works for me.”

He put an arm around my shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. It was so out of character, that little unexpected tenderness, that I couldn’t find the words to answer him. All this time I’d figured Bobby was so tough he deflected the horrors of his job the way bullets bounced off Superman’s chest. Now I found out he needed to numb himself with Scotch and reruns of Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond to chase away nightmares.

“You okay?” he asked after a moment. “Yeah, fine.” My voice sounded almost normal. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll probably have that drink later on, but right now my grandfather’s arriving on the afternoon flight from Paris. I’m just barely going to make it to Dulles in time.”

“You’ll get there,” he said. “No speeding, hotshot. I’m not fixing any ticket, okay?”

“I never speed.”

“Sure you don’t. How come I didn’t know Luc was coming for a visit? Last time he was here he promised on his next trip he’d bring a couple of Cuban cigars and we’d smoke ’em together. Kit should have told me he was going to be in town. Didn’t the two of you spend five hours a couple of nights ago yakking on the phone about what shade of white her dress should be?”

I started to laugh, glad to change the subject to something silly, and he grinned. My wedding gift to the two of them was hosting their ceremony and reception at the vineyard. Kit and I had been planning nonstop for the past few months.

“There’s a big difference between bone and blush, even if it’s lost on you, buddy,” I said, and his smile broadened. “And it was only three hours. I didn’t know Pépé was coming until the day before yesterday. You know how he is.”

“I hope he’s going to be at your July fourteenth shindig. Be nice to see him again and have man talk instead of listening to you and my fiancée discuss whether your nail polish needs to match your shoes,” he said.

“Oh, go ahead and elope. See if I care.” I opened the door of my red-and-white-striped Mini Cooper convertible and gave him a mock-glare of annoyance. “He’s coming to the party on Saturday, but then he’s leaving first thing Sunday morning. Flying on to San Francisco to give a talk to some business group on a retreat outside Sonoma.”

“California, huh? No wonder you can’t keep up with him flying all over the place. At least I’ll catch him on Saturday night.” He shut the car door.

“Me, too. And thanks, Bobby.”

“For what?”

The moment of good-natured teasing vanished as swiftly as a wispy cloud in the sharp blue sky above. The haunted look that aged him so much more than his thirty-three years flashed across his face.

“You know what,” I said.

“Don’t mention it. You better get going.”

He squared his shoulders and headed back to the barn. I drove away in the white-hot sunshine of a beautiful afternoon while he returned to the cold, dark studio with its tormented paintings. Later today he would cut Paul Noble’s body from the noose where it hovered over the room like the angel of death.

My grandfather, Luc Delaunay, had called at sunset the Tuesday of my phone conversation with Paul. I’d been out on the back veranda sitting in the glider and finishing a bottle of white as I watched the fireball sun slip behind the low-slung Blue Ridge Mountains to the west. That evening the sky had been the creamy orange and robin’s egg blue of a faded watercolor, and the ragged silhouette of the tree line at the edge of my land looked like dark lace against the light sky.

When the telephone rang inside the house I reached for my cane, but the machine kicked in before I could make it across the foyer. I knew it was Pépé the moment he cleared his throat like a rumbly bullfrog, as though preparing to deliver a speech to a filled auditorium.

“Eh, bien, ma chère Lucie, c’est moi. Désolé que tu ne sois pas là.”

I threw myself in my mother’s favorite Queen Anne chair next to the demilune phone table, picked up the receiver, and cut off the answering machine. My grandfather’s voice, which would almost certainly be filtered through the acrid smoke of a Gauloise and a snifter of Armagnac, sounded subdued as it echoed through the two-story foyer of the old house.

“I’m here, Pépé,” I said in French. “I was outside watching the sunset.”

Across the hall in the parlor, the mantel clock chimed eight. Two in the morning in Paris. It would be at least another hour before Pépé, a notorious night owl, would be ready to go to bed.

“Is everything all right?” I asked. “How was your trip to Vietnam?”

“Formidable. A couple of vieux potes decided to rent a junk and sail the Halong Bay in the north. Did you know the name means ‘where the dragon descends to the sea’?” As usual, he didn’t wait for my reply. “It was spectacular, ma chère, the sea the color of emeralds and hundreds of stone grottoes rising from the water like cathedral spires or the scales on a dragon’s back. Someday we’ll go back together. You must see it.”

I smiled. Pépé kept in touch with a far-flung network known as “the old chums” who were friends from his years in the French diplomatic service and, before that, in the Resistance during World War II. No ten-countries-in-ten-days senior citizen package tour for him. My eighty-four-year-old grandfather chased dragons in exotic lagoons.

“I’d like that,” I said, “but I’m glad you’re back in Paris, even if it’s only for a little while. When are you going to Morocco? Sometime in the fall, isn’t it?”

Like the song went, you couldn’t keep him down on the farm after he’d seen “Paree.” In fact, it was hard enough keeping him in “Paree.” Ever since he lost my grandmother almost forty years ago, he’d been a restless soul bereft without the love of his life. The wanderlust and the trips were how he coped with loneliness.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Morocco in September. A camel safari along the southern border, plus the usual cities … Fez, Rabat, Tangiers. But first I am coming to les États-Unis. I’m sorry to surprise you at the last minute, ma belle, but it just came up.”

I straightened up in my chair. “You’re coming here?”

I’d long ago stopped being astonished by my grandfather’s spur-of-the-moment trips, especially when he announced he was about to show up on my doorstep, but something in his voice said this time was different.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re already at the airport, aren’t you? On the plane?”

He chuckled and I heard him sip his drink.

“Not quite, but I am packing my valise. I arrive in Washington on Thursday afternoon. No need to put me up. I know how busy you are. I’ll stay in a hotel,” he said. “Though I would like you to come with me to a dinner party Friday night. Juliette and Charles Thiessman are having a few friends in to celebrate le quatorze juillet. Bastille Day. You know the Thiessmans, bien sûr?”

Old family friends, they were Pépé’s generation. I’d always found them hard to warm up to and the feeling seemed to be mutual. A dinner party at their home would be a very dull evening.

“Of course I do,” I said. “Though Charles has become quite a recluse in the past few years so I haven’t seen him for ages. Juliette pops into the shops in Middleburg every now and then. And you’re staying here, by the way, not in some hotel. We have this discussion every time you spring it on me that you’re arriving in the next few hours.”

“If you’re sure—”

“Pépé, you know I am. How long are you staying? Awhile, I hope?”

He sighed. “Not this time, chérie. I’m flying to San Francisco on Sunday to give a talk in a place called Monte Rio. It’s in Sonoma County, near the Russian River.”

I barely heard his description of the place. Another hit-and-run visit. Next time I’d tie him to a chair.

“Only three days? That’s all?”

“It looks that way.”

“Will you at least come to our Bastille Day party at the vineyard on Saturday night?”

“Of course. And I promise, the next visit I’ll stay longer.”

“You always say that.”

“You do know that airplanes also fly from Washington to Paris, n’est-ce pas? You remember flying? It’s very convenient, very quick,” he said. “Do you want to call Charles and tell him we’ll both be there on Friday?”

“Ouch. Okay, sorry for nagging. I know I’m overdue to come to France,” I said. “It’s just always so busy here. And would you mind calling Charles, since you seem to be in touch with him? I think their number is unlisted now.”

“And you don’t have it?” He sounded surprised. “A shame, since your mother used to be so close to Juliette. She practically adopted Chantal when she moved to America after marrying your father.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Mom used to take me over to her house to visit. I remember Juliette talking about you all the time, the old days after the war when she first met you.”

Pépé cleared his throat. “She was very kind to me when your grandmother died. Back then she wasn’t married to Charles. I didn’t meet him until they returned to Paris after Nixon named him your ambassador to France. She always made sure I was invited to their parties and dinners at the embassy.” He paused to exhale a long breath of smoke and I knew he, too, was recalling old memories. “Frankly, I was surprised that Charles called me about this dinner on Friday, rather than Juliette … he especially asked for you.”

“Me? Why?”

“I believe he has planted a small vineyard now. Perhaps he wants to ask you for advice.”

“Pépé, he does have a vineyard and it’s strictly off-limits to everyone,” I said. “He makes his wine by himself, but he doesn’t sell it anywhere. No tasting room, nothing. The other winemakers call him the Lone Ranger because he doesn’t mix with any of us or show up at any of the wine festivals or competitions. It’s really odd.”

“Well, perhaps he wants to give you a private tour,” Pépé said.

“If he did, I’d be the envy of every winemaker in two counties,” I said. “I wonder what he really wants.”

“I would imagine we’ll find out on Friday.”

“I guess. I’m dying to know what he does in that ‘sanctum sanctorum’ all by himself. You never know, it could be alchemy.”

I heard Pépé’s quiet laughter before he said goodbye and hung up.

By the time I got to the international arrivals waiting area at Dulles Airport after leaving Paul Noble’s barn, the Air France passengers were already exiting customs, passing through double metal doors into the terminal. I scanned the crowd for my grandfather, hoping I hadn’t missed him and he’d decided to take a cab to the vineyard. The fare—probably in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars—wouldn’t faze him in the least. Finally the doors opened with a hiss, and a solitary figure emerged, gingerly pushing a luggage cart with a small brown-and-tan plaid suitcase and beat-up leather briefcase laying on it. The surprise was the cane, which he’d hooked over the cart handle.

At his age, and after that long transatlantic flight, it shouldn’t have upset me, but it did. I had a quick moment to study him before he spotted me outside the metal guardrail. For the first time, his skin seemed nearly transparent, taut against the bones of his face in a way that sharpened his features so they looked sunken and almost hawklike. He must have sensed me staring because he glanced up and waved his arm like an infielder waiting for a pop fly, a smile lighting his frail face. I smiled back and went to the exit to wait for his kiss and our usual wrangling over who would push his luggage cart. Pépé was old-school chivalrous, and no amount of women’s liberation or talk of equality between the sexes would ever persuade him that the small gallant courtesies a man performed for a woman—holding a door, helping her on with her coat—were passé.

Neither of us said a word about his new cane, but this time I put up only a faint protest over the luggage cart since I was going to lose the battle anyway. He patted my hand as he always did, and we walked down the ramp to glass doors leading to the shuttle buses and the hourly parking lot, which automatically slid open.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hearing his small ouf as we stepped outside and he absorbed the brutal temperature change. “I should have warned you. It’s over a hundred today. With the humidity it feels like one hundred and eight. Probably more. We’re setting new records with this heat wave.”

Across the street, rows of cars shimmered like a mirage. The asphalt felt squishy beneath my feet. Pépé pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his trousers and mopped his forehead.

“You forget how many summers I spent in Washington at the embassy after the war. In those days there was no air-conditioning.” He glanced sideways at me. “Is something wrong? You seem upset.”

“Are you sure you’re all right? I know it was a long trip for you—”

I shouldn’t have said it. He stopped the cart, looking exasperated.

“Now don’t you go treating me like an old man. Just because I’m a little tired and maybe a bit unsteady on my feet is no reason to act like I’ve got one foot in the grave,” he said. “That’s your cousin’s department. I can take one of you nagging me to take a nap or hovering over me like I’m in my dotage, but not both. Don’t you start, too.”

The reprimand had been delivered lightly, but he meant it and I’d hit a nerve. He pushed the cart over to the car without speaking and put his suitcase and satchel in the trunk when I opened it.

“Don’t be upset with me,” I said. “I just worry, that’s all. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

His face softened. “One does not like to admit that one is getting older. I’m sorry, chérie. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

We climbed into the stifling car and I blasted overheated air-conditioning through the vents.

“We’ll be seeing Dominique tomorrow, by the way,” I said. The refrigeration kicked in and I switched the blower to low so it didn’t sound like a jet engine before takeoff. “Juliette is using the Inn to cater her dinner. Dominique will be working, but she promised to take a break from supervising in the kitchen to see you. And she’s coming to the vineyard on Saturday for our party.”

Dominique’s mother and my mother had been sisters, two years apart in age but so alike they could have been twins. Ten years ago, after my mother died when her horse threw her jumping a fence, Dominique moved from France to help Leland take care of my wild-child kid sister, Mia. My capable cousin, who’d been studying to be a chef, managed to get Mia under her thumb while also landing a job at the Goose Creek Inn, a local restaurant with an award-winning reputation for its romantic setting and superb cuisine. Dominique took over the fledgling catering business, and before long it, too, was racking up accolades just like the Inn. When the owner, who had been my godfather, passed away a few years ago, he’d left her both businesses in his will.

“Ah, then Dominique will have plenty of opportunities to monitor my napping,” Pépé said to me.

We both grinned.

“She loves you. We all do.”

“And I love you all, too. Now please tell me why you’re so agitated, ma belle? That’s twice you’ve missed the turn for the exit out of the parking lot.”

I gave him a lopsided smile and pulled up to the tollbooth. After I paid the parking fee I told him about Paul Noble.

“The police believe he died while playing a sexual game?” Pépé asked.

“That’s one possibility. The other is that he deliberately hanged himself,” I said. “Except people commit suicide because they’re depressed or they feel hopeless. A couple of days ago Paul called me and bullied me to sell him my wine practically at cost. I wouldn’t have pegged him as either depressed or hopeless after he was done working me over. He was pretty ruthless. Talked about business plans for next year, too. Who does that if he’s thinking about ending it?”

“Nevertheless you don’t seem to believe that it was an accident?”

“If Paul was into erotic fantasies or extreme sexual games, then you’d think there would be rumors. There wasn’t so much as a peep about him.”

“You knew him well?”

“No, though I tried. I thought it would make dealing with him easier, but he was so … cold, I guess. All business, no social chitchat. After a while I gave up. Besides, he didn’t seem to care about working with the local vineyard owners like his older brother did. A lot of people were mad at him because he was heartless. Folks blamed him when two really good wineries went out of business last year. They couldn’t make a go of it anymore. Nice people. Lost everything.”

“Could one of the owners have been angry enough to kill him?”

I signaled to turn onto Route 28 and merged with the usual early evening rush-hour logjam.

“Oh, gosh no. At least I don’t think so. I mean, they weren’t like that.”

He gave me a don’t-be-naïve look.

“No, Pépé. Neither of them did it. I’m sure,” I said. “Believe it or not, for a while the deputy from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department who turned up on the scene thought I might have done it. There was an empty bottle of my Sauvignon Blanc and a wine-glass next to Paul’s body. Plus it was no secret I disliked him. The reason I drove over there was because I was mad at him.”

“The police suspect you?”

“Not really. Bobby Noland showed up later. He knows I didn’t do it.”

“Ah, Bobby. I have a couple of cigars for him,” he said. “Do you think someone wanted to cast suspicion on you by leaving your wine bottle there?”

I moved from one slow-moving lane of traffic to another that crawled along only slightly faster. “No, that’s too far-fetched. Besides, no one knew I was planning to drop by today.”

“You’d be surprised how angry people become when they believe they are being cheated, or their livelihood is being stolen,” he said. “It doesn’t take much to push them to the kind of violence we’ve had in France. You’ve heard of the CRAV, haven’t you? The Regional Committee of Viticulture Action, in English. A clandestine group of winemakers who, a couple of years ago, sent the president a video promising blood would flow if he didn’t stop importing cheap wine from Algeria and Spain, and didn’t do something about the overproduction driving down the price of French wine on the world market.”

“I read about those people. They sounded scary.”

“They were scary. They bombed government buildings, tanker trucks, supermarkets,” Pépé said. “They drained thousands of euros’ worth of wine from tanks at agricultural cooperatives and let it seep into the ground. Once someone tried to plant a bomb along the route of the Tour de France. Thank God he was caught in time. The press called it ‘wine terrorism.’ ”

“It isn’t like that here, Pépé. It’s nowhere near that bad,” I said. “Plenty of people were mad at Paul, but not enough to consider blowing up his warehouse. And I honestly don’t believe it was murder, after what the crime scene detective said about how hard it is to fake a suicide. I think Paul killed himself and we’ll probably find out why sooner or later.”

“It wouldn’t take much to tip the scale for that kind of anger and violence to take hold in America.” Pépé shook a warning finger at me. “It’s what I’ve been asked to talk about in California next week—the lessons your government can learn from what happened to us.”

“We had September eleventh,” I said. “That changed everything. We have the Department of Homeland Security now. They reclassified wine as a food so we have to report every part of the production process to the Food and Drug Administration under some bioterrorism law. It’s mind-boggling, all the paperwork we have to file. Records of everything we transport, everything we receive, what we add to the juice, batch lots, packaging materials … even each batch of grapes and the blend of each wine. It drives Antonio and me crazy. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother or if they ever do anything with all that information.”

“The first time something happens, you won’t wonder anymore.” My grandfather sounded ominous.

“Who’d do something to wine?”

He shrugged. “How hard would it be? A group of tourists drive by a picturesque view of vines planted alongside a country road, say your vineyard on Atoka Road, and get out of the car to take a photograph. At the same time one of them scatters something that the wind will take and blow through your fields. They drive off and disappear forever. Gradually all your vines wither and die. Or a disgruntled employee adds something to one of your five-thousand-gallon tanks of wine just before bottling. How many people could he sicken or maybe even kill?”

We’d finally reached the turnoff for Route 50, Mosby’s Highway. The homestretch. I put on my turn signal and we left Route 28 as I thought about what he’d just said.

Maybe we weren’t so insulated from the kind of violence he was talking about. In France it was homegrown—a group of angry winemakers being driven out of business—not the threats of faceless foreigners. What would it take to push some of my fellow vineyard owners who had lost everything over the brink?

Maybe Pépé was right.

“I guess it wouldn’t be that hard to do after all,” I said. “Would it?”