Ellen Crosby - The Sauvignon Secret

Quinn’s easygoing baritone and O’Hara’s higher-pitched tenor floated up the stairs and I nearly dropped the photos. It sounded like they were wrapping up the tour. For a moment, I was tempted to shove the pictures back in the envelope and stick it in my purse. Who would know now, anyway? Instead I turned on my camera phone and quickly photographed them one by one. These were not my pictures. They were someone else’s sweet memories. Already I felt like a grave robber.

O’Hara slammed the vault door shut and I jumped. His voice and Quinn’s grew louder, along with the sound of quick footsteps on the stairs. I taped the envelope back where I’d found it and pulled my hand away. My fingertips brushed something glossy that seemed to have gotten stuck between the drawer and the desk. I tugged on it. More photos, two of them.

These hadn’t been with the others and they were completely different. A school yearbook picture of a young man dressed in a tuxedo. His features seemed somehow off-kilter, or unaligned, and he looked askance at the photographer. I turned the picture over, though I already knew it was Stephen Falcone. He had printed his name in irregular uphill letters and the date: September 1967.

The second picture was blackmail, pure and simple. Maggie Hilliard and Charles Thiessman making love outdoors somewhere. After seeing the photos in the hunting lodge the other night, I recognized Charles, even in profile. The two of them were lying on what looked like a daybed on a sunporch or balcony and obviously unaware of the photo being taken since they were in the middle of having sex. Maggie was half sitting, half lying against a couple of pillows with Charles on top of her, fondling her breasts. I turned the explicit picture over. My face felt hot, as though I’d been the one to catch them in the act.

So that’s what Charles had left out of his story. Maggie, who was supposedly Theo’s girlfriend, was also having an affair with Charles. Had Theo known? If he’d seen this picture, he did. I wondered who had taken it, but it was probably another member of the Mandrake Society.

Charles said he didn’t spend time with them at the Pontiac Island cottage, but the wicker furniture and the blurred background in that photo looked sort of beachy. Had Charles been there the night Maggie died, and lied about that, as well?

I heard Quinn’s muffled voice shout my name. “Where are you?”

“Here! I’m coming!”

If O’Hara caught me rifling through Mel Racine’s desk … I swept up the photos and put them in my purse, along with my phone, and joined Con O’Hara and Quinn.

There was no going back from here.

“What’d you find?” Quinn said after we’d decoupled from O’Hara and were back in the Porsche. “Obviously it’s something. You’ve gone quiet ever since we left the bank.”

“Photographs of the Mandrake Society,” I said. “I took pictures of the pictures. They’re on my phone.”

We were on the Pacific Coast Highway heading north, the sunlight now softer, filtered through a thin haze of clouds. From here I could no longer see the water. This time I hadn’t put on the Giants cap and Quinn hadn’t turned on the music. Whatever giddy sense of adventure we’d been caught up in earlier in the day had vanished, just like the ocean. We drove past fields and farmland baked by the summer sun and arid from months with no rain, the colors faded and dusty: subdued greens, golds, browns, and tans.

“What else?” he said. “You keep looking at your purse like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off inside.”

How did he know? “A picture of Stephen Falcone, the kid who died during the Man-drake Society’s field tests.”

“And? Something else is really bugging you.”

“Never take me to Vegas and let me play poker. I’ll lose everything.”

He laughed. “So what is it?”

“A picture of Charles Thiessman having sex with Maggie Hilliard. I’m sure they didn’t know anyone was taking that picture since they were sort of … busy.”

“Those pictures on your phone with the others?” He used that lazy, laconic tone of voice that meant we both knew he already knew the answer. It always put me on the defensive.

“There wasn’t time. You and O’Hara came up the stairs like someone was chasing the pair of you, so I nicked them. Now I wish I hadn’t. They weren’t mine to take. They were Mel Racine’s. He’d tucked them all the way in the back of his top desk drawer. Which he’d locked.”

Quinn gave a one-shoulder shrug of indifference.

“Well,” he said, “you figure if Racine had any family, they would have already cleaned out whatever they wanted. The vault was empty, so someone had been in there taking care of business. My guess is that whoever buys the building will trash all that stuff anyway. So it’s not exactly like you stole the pictures. You just helped with the cleanup.”

“I didn’t borrow them.” I twisted and untwisted the shoulder strap to my purse. “But you have a point. Whatever is still there is going straight into some Dumpster when someone finally buys the building.”

The ocean had slipped back into view. We were only about fifteen miles from San Francisco and Quinn was driving like he had a destination in mind.

“I thought we’d have a drink at the Cliff House,” he said. “We’ll be there in about twenty minutes. I wouldn’t mind looking at those photos, if that’s okay with you?”

“I dragged you into this, didn’t I? Of course it’s okay.”

“Story of you and me.” His voice was light, teasing. “You’re always dragging me into something.”

That was the nearest we’d come to bringing up what had been hanging over us since yesterday: whether or not I’d succeed in dragging him back into my life. Back to Virginia.

“I’ll ignore that.” I matched his bantering tone and changed the subject. “Tell me about the Cliff House. Is it another famous landmark?”

“They call it ‘the place where San Francisco begins.’ It’s perched on a promontory cantilevered out over the Pacific. Not too far below the Golden Gate,” he said. “There’s been a restaurant there since the 1860s. It kept getting wiped out by fires, and one time an abandoned schooner full of dynamite blew up on the rocks underneath and just missed blasting the building into the ocean.”

“Sounds like quite a place. You really are a good tour guide, you know that?”

“Don’t look so surprised. Told you I was.”

“Then tell me the real reason you left California for Virginia. They’re totally different and it’s so obvious you love it here.”

He straightened his arms on the steering wheel and leaned back against the seat. It looked like he was flexing stiff muscles, but I knew he’d gone tense.

“After what Allen did, I had to get out.”

“California’s a big state,” I said. “As for making wine, you’ve got Oregon, Washington State, New York. All of them have more wineries than we do, and you could easily have stayed on the West Coast. Not to mention all the states that produce more wine than Virginia does.”

“I wanted something different,” he said. “I liked the experimenting that was happening there, how much the industry was booming, thriving. The fact that Virginia is getting a reputation as a hot wine-tourism destination. It’s been kind of cool to be on the cutting edge of something like that.”

“It’s a much smaller pond,” I said.

“Actually, it’s minuscule in terms of total U.S. wine production. California accounts for ninety percent all by itself. Nine more percent—in other words, ninety-nine percent—comes from the three other states you just mentioned.” He held up fingers as he ticked off each one. “New York, Washington, and Oregon. Everyone else is fighting for a market share of the remaining one percent. That includes Virginia.”