The Sauvignon Secret (21 page)

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.”

I knew those numbers, knew where we stood, but it still shocked me to hear him rattle them off like that. Until now I had never considered that his private tug-of-war between California and Virginia had been about leaving the Eden of American winemaking with its worldwide reputation to come to a place that many people still didn’t even know grew grapes, hot tourism destination notwithstanding.

So Virginia was “first in wine” because we made it two years after colonists arrived in Jamestown and discovered native grapes, big fat deal. California was the largest, as in ball-out-of-the-park-home-run size, and I wondered, though he’d never admitted it to me, if Quinn still equated that primacy and clout with being the best. And whether the glamorous cachet and storied history of California wine country, which to most of the world meant Napa and Sonoma, where he was from, were really what he missed after he moved to Virginia.

“Well, we may be small, but we’re damn good,” I said.

We were finally back in the city, catching red lights at almost every intersection. I saw signs for the San Francisco Zoo and then, abruptly, the ocean was directly in front of us as if we were going to drive straight into it. Quinn turned right at the edge of the beach and we followed the coast up a long, steep hill.

“Don’t be so defensive,” he said. “I wasn’t criticizing.”

“I’m not.”

But it was like what Mark Twain said about his wife and swearing: Quinn had the words right, but not the tune. He’d sounded halfhearted, and I wondered yet again if he’d been subtly signaling his intent to stay here and I’d been resolutely trying to ignore it.

He reached over and squeezed my hand. “We’re almost there. Enjoy the view. We can talk business another time.”

I saw the rooftop sign for the Cliff House before the long, low white building came into view. We rounded a corner and all of a sudden it was right there, sitting perilously close to where the traffic whizzed past, tucked into a sharp elbow curve as the road spiraled upward. Anything that came downhill in the opposite direction probably needed to slam on the brakes for that wicked turn or else end up in the dining room. A dozen or so cars were parked in front of the restaurant, jammed in at angles like bad teeth.

“Damn,” Quinn said. “I didn’t think it would be so crowded at this hour. We’ll find a spot up the hill.”

“Where are we?” I asked as we drove past a sprawling wooded park.

“A place called Land’s End.”

He did a neat job of parallel parking in a space that should have
required a shoehorn. We walked back down the steep sidewalk to the restaurant. A large stone ruin filled with water sat at the edge of the sea below us.

“It looks like an old swimming pool,” I said.

“That’s the Sutro Baths,” he said. “Dates back to the early days of the Cliff House. It was supposed to rival something a Roman emperor would have built. Now it has a reputation as a kind of mystical place, especially at the end of the day when you can see the setting sun and the lights from inside the restaurant reflected in the water. It makes the baths look like a cauldron of fire. You see photographers here all the time taking pictures of cloud formations or seagulls flying into the marine layer—the lighting’s pretty amazing.”

I stared at the dark, placid pool, the broken lines of stone, and the tumble of rocks to the shore, and imagined flaming water and wide-winged birds soaring in the mist over the Pacific Ocean.

“It must be beautiful. Are the baths off-limits, or can you go down there and explore?”

“Oh, you can check it out,” he said, “but there’s a sign in a bunch of languages warning that you could get thrown off the rocks and die if you’re in the wrong place when a wave comes crashing in.”

I shuddered, but he’d spoken in such a matter-of-fact way I knew it was firsthand information. “You know that because you’ve been there.”

He flashed a smug grin and held open the door to the restaurant. “Of course.”

A waitress dressed in black brought us to a corner bistro table on a balcony lounge overlooking a two-story restaurant in the new part of the building. Already the shades on the floor-to-ceiling windows had been lowered to screen the fierce late-afternoon sunlight, which glinted like polished mirror off the Pacific, and streamed into the all-white room with its vaulted ceiling and modern steal-beamed architecture.

Quinn ordered mojitos for us and asked for them to be made with rum rather than Mexican tequila. After the waitress left, I got my phone out of my purse and handed it to him. He pulled his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and turned his back to the window, squinting in the bright light as he stared at the little screen, flicking through each of the photographs.

“They seem to be good friends, real close,” he said. “Looks like these were taken at a summer beach get-together.”

“Charles said they spent weekends together at a cottage on Pontiac Island. That’s where Maggie came up with their name. The Mandrake Society. He made it sound like they did everything as a group, including socializing.”

“Well, with the super-top-secret clearances they must have had, at least they were hanging out with people who were involved in the same project,” he said. “At that level, it’s need to know only. You can’t even blab to your reflection in the mirror without worrying about a security breach.”

I took the phone and scrolled through the photos as he had done. “They genuinely liked each other,” I said. “Look at their body language and how comfortable everyone is with everyone else. I’ll bet they had some good times together.”

“Until it all fell apart,” Quinn said.

“Their breakup must have been spectacular if they scattered to the winds after Stephen Falcone died and Maggie was killed in that car crash.”

Our waitress set down our mojitos and a dish of salted nuts.

He touched his glass to mine. “I’m glad you came to San Francisco.”

“Me, too. Thanks for a fabulous tour.”

He dunked his mint leaves into his glass and squirted lime into his drink. I copied him.

“I didn’t know you liked mojitos,” I said. “I can’t remember the last time I had one.”

“I read somewhere it was Hemingway’s favorite drink in Key West. I also read he drank whatever was on the table until he was under it.” He shrugged. “It seems like a mojito kind of day.”

He sat back and watched me as though he were contemplating something, or perhaps waiting for an answer to one of the unspoken questions that hung in the air between us. I couldn’t go down that road right now. All the warning signs were there for this to come to grief if we pushed it.