Ellen Crosby - The Sauvignon Secret

“I explained to Luc where the lodge is located,” he said. “It’s only half a mile down our private road, easy enough to find. Make yourself at home and I’ll be along shortly.”

“Charles.” Juliette returned from the kitchen, lightly touching his sleeve. “Do you have the check to pay the caterers? I thought I had it, but I don’t.”

“It’s in the library,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

He disappeared, leaving the three of us alone. I waited, hoping the floor would open up so I could drop through, rather than witness the anguished looks that passed between Pépé and Juliette.

“When will I see you again?” Juliette held out her hands to my grandfather, who clasped them without taking his eyes off her face.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I leave for California on Sunday. After the trip, I’ll be returning to France.”

“Can’t you stay a day or two longer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please try. We could see each other again.”

Even now I don’t like to remember the look of loss and longing that passed between them. I cleared my throat and turned away, pretending to have a coughing fit. When I finished, Pépé was kissing both of Juliette’s hands.

She blinked rapidly. “Good night, Luc.”

“Good night, ma chère Juliette.”

“Thank you for dinner,” I said.

Juliette gazed at me like she had no idea who I was. “Yes, yes, of course.”

I followed my grandfather outside, where one of the valets had the Mini waiting in front of the entrance. We got in the car without speaking. I believe Juliette came to the door and watched us drive off, but I couldn’t be sure because I kept my eyes glued to the road so I didn’t have to see the utterly bereft look on Pépé’s face.

The lights from the Thiessmans’ house glittered in my rearview mirror until I turned down the side road where Charles’s lodge was located and we were swallowed up in darkness.

What Charles wanted to talk about and why we had to retreat to his private eyrie to talk about it was anybody’s guess. Now it wouldn’t be long before we found out. Hopefully by then my grandfather would have composed himself. Charles’s wife was in love with him. And after tonight, it seemed Pépé was at least a little bit in love with her, too.

My grandfather’s silence filled the car until I felt so claustrophobic I had to roll down my window. The night air rushed in, sharp and stinging, as though summer had evaporated in the past few hours. The unexpected smoky tang of autumn scented the breeze and whipped my hair in my eyes. I shivered and rolled up the window again, but at least now my alcohol-buzzed brain felt like it had been jolted out of its stupor.

As soon as I drove beyond Juliette’s gardens and her greenhouse, the gravel road plunged into a thicket of woods that closed around the car. I put on the brakes because I had been speeding, and in the murky swirl of fog my headlights turned trees, underbrush, and impenetrable black holes an unnatural yellow-green. Overhead the canopy of trees wove together and blocked out the night sky so it felt like we were winding through a tunnel or a cave.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Pépé asked after a few minutes. “Maybe you should have turned left at that fork in the road beyond the house.”

“I thought you told me Charles said right.”

We rounded a corner and he said, “I think I see a light up ahead.”

“I wonder what he wants to talk about. He said it was life or death.”

“Juliette knows he’s upset about something,” my grandfather said.

“She has no idea about what?”

Pépé tilted his head, as though he were weighing his answer. I wondered if he was thinking about Juliette or me. “She says she does not.”

“You don’t believe her?”

“I think she has her suspicions,” he said. “She asked if I would do what I could for him.”

“And you said yes.”

“I said I would try. But Charles specifically asked for you to come this evening, ma belle , and you’re the one he asked for help.” He gave me a sideways glance. “I don’t know what, if any, role he has in mind for me.”

“Mick Dunne got me to agree to fly out to California to sample some wine Charles talked him into buying,” I said. “Mick knew you had business out there, too, so he figured I could accompany you and, um, we’d … be together. And Charles was the one who set you up to talk to this Bohemian Grove group.”

“How interesting. Obviously it’s no coincidence. I wonder what Charles has got up his sleeve.”

I rounded another bend in the road and the light grew larger, winking like a wicked eye between the tree branches.

“I guess we’re about to find out,” I said. “I hope that’s the lodge, or else we’re really lost.”

I parked in front of a rustic cabin that sat in a clearing surrounded by Charles’s smallish vineyard. The cloudless blue-black sky was star filled and serene. A scuffed-silver half-moon hung high above the trees and brushed the tops of the vines so they looked frost rimed. The luminescent clock on my car dashboard showed ten minutes to midnight.

“Should we wait for him?” I asked.

“He said to make ourselves at home.” Pépé was already starting toward the front door. “And he left the place unlocked.”

The hinges creaked as he pushed open the door, and for an instant I expected the Big Bad Wolf or a wicked witch disguised as a kindly grandmother to appear and bid us to come inside. The room could have been the reading room in a gentlemen’s club, with a pair of black leather wing chairs and a matching sofa pulled up around a polished granite coffee table, all grouped in front of a large stone fireplace. The walls looked like old barn wood that had been beautifully refinished. The sconces and matching chandelier in the middle of the room were made of antlers. Tiny red shades over the candlesticks muted the light so it seemed almost viscous, except for the warm pool of spreading color that came from a Tiffany lamp hanging over the bar. A rug in the center of the room was a dead animal skin—a zebra. Something dark and furry I couldn’t identify lay in front of the fireplace.

“I didn’t know Charles was a hunter,” I said. “It’s cold in here.”

“He’s hunted for as long as I’ve known him. When he lived in France he used to go off to Scotland with a group of friends every year,” Pépé said. “Juliette loathes blood sports so I suspect that is why he has this place in the woods, so far from the house. Here, chérie , take my jacket.”

“I can’t. You’ll freeze.”

He draped his navy suit coat around my shoulders. “I’ll be fine.”

I walked around the room, examining the signed photographs that lined the walls. Pépé did the same from the other direction. Each one showed Charles, with practically every American president since Harry Truman or with sober-suited men I didn’t recognize, with the exception of Winston Churchill. All the pictures looked official; there were no candid snaps of him and Juliette on a vacation cruise, at Christmas, a special dinner somewhere. I wondered why there had been no children.

I scarcely recognized Charles in the early black-and-white pictures: smooth-faced and dashing, reed slim, clear-eyed, with a pompadour of wavy dark hair and a slight grave smile befitting the seriousness of the moment. What hadn’t changed was that cocky self-confidence in his eyes, the lack of self-doubt. No wonder Juliette had fallen for him after living with a troll who beat her.

One picture that had particular prominence showed Charles shaking hands with the then president of France, Georges Pompidou, on what looked like the day he presented his diplomatic credentials as ambassador to France. Juliette, ethereal and as lovely as she’d been in the portrait in their library, stood behind him looking radiant. It was the only picture in the room in which she appeared. Behind me a door opened and closed with a quiet click and I spun around.