Kit pulled back the napkin that covered the breadbasket and took a roll. “News to me.”
“Really?” I said. “Then just as we were leaving Mount Vernon, Valerie found me and said she knew something about the provenance of the wine Jack donated. But she had to come by and see it before she’d tell me what it was.”
“You mean that bottle Jefferson bought for Washington?”
“She asked how I’d managed to get hold of it—like I had to sleep with Jack or something.”
“Jeez, did she really?” Kit made a face. “That’s disgusting. Provenance, huh? Do you think she meant the bottle might have been stolen?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried she was going to tell me it was counterfeit.”
“Fake wine?”
“Sure. People do it all the time. Blend a couple of okay wines to taste like something world-class or put phony labels on mediocre wine—stuff like that. Collectors buy those bottles to lay down—if they ever drink it at all. So it’s years before they figure out they’ve been duped.”
Our dinners arrived—cassoulet for Kit, ragout of autumn vegetables with orzo for me. We’d ordered a bottle of Swedenburg Estate Cabernet to go with our meal. The waiter opened it and poured some for me to try. I nodded and he filled our glasses.
“How are you going to find out if it’s fake or not?” Kit asked.
“I don’t know. You know what else? I’m not even sure I ought to believe her. Ryan said she plagiarized parts of her book. So she wasn’t exactly honest.”
Kit set down her fork. “You mean she might have made the whole thing up?”
I sighed and stared into my wineglass. “I have no idea. Maybe she was just trying to stir up trouble.”
“She sure sounds like someone who knew how to do it. Could be that’s what got her killed.”
“Ryan couldn’t stand her.”
“Ryan has a temper and an ego,” she said, “but I don’t think he’d do anything that drastic. You’re talking about manslaughter.”
“An act of passion or extreme provocation,” I said. “You know what Bobby says. Under the right circumstances—or the wrong ones—anyone is capable of anything. Even something that seems out of character.”
“There’s your answer. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t.”
“Somebody did it.” I didn’t want to bring in Joe and the fact that he and Valerie were probably in flagrante delicto at the moment someone was outside her cottage tampering with her car. “Sorry I wasn’t much help with your story.”
“Forget it.”
It wasn’t like Kit to let me off the hook so easily. I looked at her plate. She’d hardly touched her food. “You feeling all right?”
“Yeah, fine.” She kept her eyes downcast.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you…wait a minute. Are you pregnant?”
Her cheeks turned scarlet. “Jee-sus, Lucie! Don’t be ridiculous. How could you even think such a thing?”
I waited.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s something, but not that. I’ve been offered a job in Moscow. Number-two correspondent in the bureau.”
“Moscow, Russia?”
“We don’t have a bureau in Moscow, Idaho.”
“Oh my God, you’re serious. You’re thinking about taking it?”
“Will you stop looking at me like I said they want to shoot me into outer space with a cannon? I was on the foreign desk before I got transferred to Loudoun, in case you forgot.”
“I remember. But it’s just so…far away. I thought you needed to stay here because of your mom.”
“My mom says I need a life and it shouldn’t be chained to hers.” She picked up a piece of roll and sopped up some of the sauce from her cassoulet. “I’ve never owned a passport in my life. First time I’d really get to see the world. All those places named Something-Stan.” She sounded wistful.
“You sure you’re ready for something that drastic?”
“It’s a honking big pay raise.”
“Because it’s a senior job?”
“Because it’s a hardship post and they don’t have people falling all over themselves to volunteer for it.”
“What does Bobby say?”
“I haven’t told him.”
“You sound like you’re ready to say yes.”
She shrugged. “I have to make up my mind by the end of the month. Language training starts after Christmas. I wouldn’t leave until June.”
“Just after the snow melts in Russia?”
“Ha, ha. You want dessert?”
I shook my head. “That chocolate mousse looks out of this world,” she said. “Maybe I’ll ask them to box up my cassoulet and take it and some dessert to go. I’ve got to get back to the office.”
She asked for the check and we drank the last of our wine.
“I’ll miss you if you take that job,” I said.
“I’ll miss you, too.” She signed the bill as the waiter set down a Styrofoam box. “I don’t know what to do. One minute I want to go, the next I don’t.”
When we got back to the lobby Dominique was still at the maître d’s stand, talking to some of her guests. Kit waved good night but I stayed and waited until she was free.
“How was your dinner?”
“Excellent. It’s always excellent. You know that,” I said.
She smiled but her eyes were grave. I didn’t want to keep up this façade any longer. “Joe told me, Dominique. I’m so sorry. Are you going to be okay?”
She put out her hand as if to physically ward off my words. “Of course I am. Anyway, I expected it. It’s not rocket surgery to understand why we decided to break up.”
When Dominique got upset, her English—especially the idioms—usually took a nosedive.
“Want to talk about it?”
“There’s nothing to say. And you don’t have to walk on kid gloves around me, either.”
I hugged her. Her bones felt brittle and hollow as a bird’s. She was already so thin she looked anorexic. “Call me if you change your mind.”
“I’ll be fine.”
I said good-bye and went outside. She was wrong. Once word got around about Joe spending the night with Valerie before she died, putting him at the cottage where the lug nut to her wheel had been found, there’d be plenty to say.
And none of it would be good.
Chapter 5
On weekends, especially when the weather is gorgeous, people flee Washington in droves to soak up the pleasures of country life. On a typical day we can have between two and four hundred visitors passing through the vineyard to taste and buy wine. Some rent limos or pick a designated driver so everyone in the party doesn’t have to watch their limit. If we’re the last stop on their wine tour and they’d had a few, it could get lively.
Quinn and I finally hired full-time help to work in the tasting room—Francesca Merchant and Gina Leon—who took over organizing events, booking groups, and supervising the tastings. We also compiled a list of waiters and waitresses from the Goose Creek Inn who would moonlight for us on their days off, especially weekends.
The buildings making up the winery had been planned by my mother, a talented artist with an eye for design. She’d wanted something that harmonized the neoclassical architecture she’d grown up with in France with the simpler colonial style of Highland House, built by my father’s pragmatic Scottish ancestors. The ivy-covered building that now housed a tasting room, small kitchen, wine library, and our offices looked more like a villa than a commercial structure and the name stuck. A European-style courtyard and porticoed loggia connected it with the barrel room and laboratory where we made and stored wine.
We held picnics, dinners, and concerts in the courtyard with its breathtaking view of the vines and mountains, and served wine and small meals on the villa’s cantilevered two-story deck. But most of our events took place at Mosby’s Ruins, the remains of an old tenant house near the winery. During the Civil War, it had been a hideout for the Gray Ghost, Colonel John Singleton Mosby, until Union soldiers burned it down trying to flush him out.
On Saturday, McNally’s Army, an Irish rock band from D.C., came to play for the afternoon. Guests brought picnic lunches and sat on blankets and deck chairs on the hill in front of the area we’d converted to a stage. We sold wine by the glass or bottle and light snacks. The Army always pulled in a big crowd. Their music, which I loved, blended Celtic and country and their female vocalist had a voice that could haunt like a lost lover.