Ellen Crosby - The Sauvignon Secret

The robe was lovely, intimate, sexy. I took it from him and held it against my body. It fell in graceful folds of peach, yellow, celadon, and cream, so soft it seemed to melt in my hands.

“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep—”

“Oh, Quinn, it’s beautiful . I love it!”

“Really?”

“Yes!” I threw my arms around him, crushing the robe between us. “Thank you!”

I slipped into it and wound the sash around my waist, tying a bow and turning around to show off to him. “What do you think?”

He smiled as I caught his arm for balance. “I think I have good taste.”

There was a mirror inside the armoire door. I stood in front of it and admired myself. “I look gorgeous.”

“Yeah, you do.” He laughed and caught my hand. “Come on, gorgeous, I’ll call for Chinese. There’s a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc chilling in the fridge.”

I raised an eyebrow. “For us?”

He ignored the astonished look on my face. He’d planned this evening, every last detail, ever since yesterday.

“Unless you want to invite some of the neighbors in. They’re pretty cool, actually.”

“Another time,” I said. “Tonight’s ours.”

“I thought you might say that,” he said and led me down a narrow spiral staircase to the lower level.

The galley kitchen had a sliding glass door that opened to the flower-filled patio, which I could now see ran the length of the boat. While Quinn found the phone number for the restaurant, I let myself outside and leaned on the railing to watch the dark silhouettes of low, boxy rows of houseboats while the little floating pier shifted gently with the current. From somewhere nearby I heard an explosion of laughter, the tinkle of china, the drone of television voices. The glow from San Francisco was a soft halo in the night sky below a fingernail-shaped moon. The only additional light came from the windows of the other boats, warm golden squares or porthole circles, as comforting and welcoming as old friends. In the kitchen, Quinn’s voice rose and fell on the phone.

He joined me a moment later, holding two glasses of wine. “I was thinking,” he said. “Harmony’s got a great little office, real compact, hooked up with wireless and everything. She’s even got a photo printer, for her art.”

“You want to print the photos of the Mandrake Society on my phone?” I said as he nodded. “What about a connector cable?”

“She’s pretty geeky for an artist,” he said. “I bet she’s got one that works.”

We took our wine with us to the living room where a small modular home office was tucked into a corner. I sat on a brushed suede sofa and admired more of Harmony’s artwork—Quinn said all the sculpture and the paintings in this room had been done by friends—while he did things to her computer and printer, producing a slightly blurry set of images of the photos.

“You should have lifted the originals while you were at it,” he said later, as we sat on bar stools in the sleek polished-aluminum-and-black-granite kitchen, surrounded by cartons of kung pao chicken, moo shu pork, and beef with snow peas. “These are kind of out of focus.”

He’d lined up the half dozen reproduced pictures of the Man-drake Society along the counter wall next to where we sat. By tacit mutual agreement, the school photo of Stephen Falcone and the shot of Maggie and Charles lay next to them facedown.

“You know I already feel bad about the two I did pinch. As for the others, I was in a rush. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.” I pointed to the little photo gallery with my chopsticks. “At least we know what everyone looked like. I wonder if we’d recognize Theo Graf after all this time, if he really is alive.”

“We could look on the Internet,” Quinn said. “We didn’t even think about that when we were printing the pictures. Come on. Bring your dinner and let’s see.”

There was nothing. We searched for half an hour. While Fargo’s name popped up here and there on assorted wine blogs and community calendars in Calistoga or Napa Valley, no one had gotten a photo of him accepting an award for one of his wines, standing in a grinning lineup of winemakers at the county fair, or a random private photo that had been posted on some website.

“Jeez,” Quinn said. “How’d he manage to stay undercover like that for so long?”

“Practice. You know, we should have guessed that Charles would already have done this search,” I said. “And come up empty-handed, just like we did. If there were any photos, he’d probably know better than anybody if Fargo and Graf were the same person. He wouldn’t be sending me on this weird black rose mission.”

We were back in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. Quinn poured the last of the Sauvignon Blanc into our glasses.

“Not necessarily. What if Fargo had surgery? Maybe he was in a car accident in Austria just like Charles said, but the paper got it wrong and he survived. Now he looks totally different.”

“Maybe.” It sounded far-fetched, but anything was possible, especially with this secretive group. “There’s just too much we don’t know.”

“Yeah, and the only person who does know might be playing fast and loose with the truth. Charles could have made up a bunch of stuff and you’d never know,” he said. “I wonder what he’s hiding.”

“His affair with Maggie, for one thing.”

“You think he might have been embarrassed to admit that with your grandfather there?”

“Pépé’s French. The French invented love and all its various nuances,” I said.

“The Italians invented love,” he corrected me. “We know how to do passion, baby. The kinky stuff, meaning all the various nuances, came from you French.”

“The Italians invented beautiful leather shoes and jackets and purses. And pizza,” I said, and he laughed. “Getting back to our conversation: Charles, who is neither French nor Italian, doesn’t seem like the embarrassed type. You know, the more I think of it, the more I think the affair was relevant to Maggie’s death.”

“How?” Quinn folded his arms across his chest.

“That’s what I can’t figure out. Maybe she broke it off or threatened to tell his wife because he kept pursuing her. Maybe he was a jilted lover with a badly bruised ego. Any of the above. But I’ll bet you if we ever find out what really happened, Charles Thiessman will have played some role in Maggie Hilliard’s death.”

Quinn hooted. “I don’t see how that could be. The others were there that night at their booze party. If he did something, they’d know .”

“Maybe they were covering up for him.”

“Because he covered up for them about Stephen?”

“Why not? A Faustian pact.”

He thought about that a moment. “Or consider this: Maybe they were all in it together. Don’t forget, Maggie wanted to come clean about Stephen. That would give all of them a motive to keep their mouths shut.”

“Oh, my God.” My eyes widened. “You mean like Agatha Christie? Murder on the Orient Express ? They all did it?”

He nodded. “If one hangs, they all hang together. Which would explain Charles knowing where in the world the others were living, what their new careers were. Shared culpability for manslaughter, maybe even murder. That’s what kept them in line.”

“Everyone but Theo,” I said. “The now possibly undead Theo Graf.”

“Something’s kind of funny about Theo,” Quinn said. “Changing his name—if that’s what he did. And going off the grid. I’m not sure he gets a free pass on this, either.”

“Maybe we’ll find out more about him tomorrow when we meet Brooke,” I said. “The plan for Mick to buy her wine and us vetting the blend is still on.”