I told her and she picked up the phone.
Five minutes later I heard footsteps on the marble staircase around the corner from the front desk and Joe bounded into view. As I stood up from the sofa, my shawl slipped again. Joe’s eyes, like the receptionist’s, went straight to my shoulder.
“My God, Lucie! What happened? I’ve been trying to call you all day.” He moved quickly across the lobby and reached for my hands. At a school this posh, the staff was expected to look smart and dress appropriately. Joe had missed a spot shaving this morning, his tie had a stain on it, and there was eraser dust on the sleeve of his navy blazer. His eyes had dark circles under them. Hopefully the board of visitors wasn’t in town for a meeting.
“Can we talk some place private?” I asked.
“Sure, sure.” He turned to the receptionist. “Janice, anybody using the conference room?”
Janice looked like she wished we could stay right where we were as she was dying to know herself. “Uh, no. It’s free. Go right ahead.”
There were more paintings of dead headmistresses in the cool, airless room. All wore slight smiles of amused superiority and had eyes that seemed to follow wherever I moved. Joe flipped on the lights and pulled a mahogany chair with a burgundy leather seat away from the conference table.
“Sit down, cupcake.”
He was smiling but his eyes were grave. At least he’d used his favorite nickname for me. I sat gingerly and leaned the metal cane the hospital had given me after my car accident against the table.
Joe took the chair next to me and crossed his legs. His socks were mismatched, too—blue and brown.
“What happened to you? Can I get you something? Water?” he asked. “Where’s Valerie?”
“Nothing, thanks.” I shook my head and took one of his hands in both of mine. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but Valerie was in a car accident this morning. That’s why you didn’t hear from her.”
Joe’s baby-faced good looks and dimpled smile still got him carded when he tried to buy liquor even though he was in his mid-thirties. His face sagged and suddenly he looked a lot older. “She’s in the hospital?”
“No,” I said. “Her car went off the road at that hairpin turn between the Fox and Hound and my vineyard. One of the wheels came off somehow and she went into Goose Creek. She didn’t survive the accident. I thought I should tell you in person.”
He’d been nodding as I talked and he kept on nodding when I finished like he was still processing what I was saying and hadn’t gotten to the part about Valerie being dead.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
He quit nodding and the light went out of his eyes. “Is that how you got these bruises?”
“I pulled her out of her car. It was filling up with water. She was dead when I got there. No one could have saved her.”
“I see.” He removed his hand from mine and touched the edge of my shawl, rubbing his fingers over and over the fringed edge until I thought the dye would come off on his hand. “You’re pretty banged up. And you’re sitting funny. What did you do to yourself?”
“I fell when I was getting her out of the car. It’s nothing serious.”
He leaned over and his arms went around me. “How could a wheel come off her car?” His voice was thick with grief. “How could she be dead?”
“The sheriff’s trying to find out.” I didn’t tell him they also were looking into whether I had anything to do with her accident. “They’re going to reconstruct the crash.”
He buried his face in my hair. “I should have driven her here this morning. It never would have happened. She’d be fine.”
“Don’t.”
He dropped his arms and stood, staring at a portrait of a dark-haired headmistress dressed for foxhunting in breeches, boots, a white shirt and stock, and the red riding jacket worn by someone accorded the honor of Master of Foxhounds. I wondered if he was trying not to cry.
“She wasn’t just an old friend from school like you told me, was she?” I said. “I saw you together last night. You were in love with her. At least, that’s what it looked like.”
He shifted his eyes from the painting to me. His face hardened and I knew I’d crossed a line into territory where he felt I didn’t belong. “I cared about her. What of it?”
“What about Dominique?” I said. “Your fiancée?”
He looked as though I’d just slapped him. “Jesus, Lucie. What do you take me for? I guess she didn’t tell you. Probably too busy to mention it. We’re not engaged anymore. Or at least, it’s on hold. We both needed a little space.”
“I didn’t know that.” Though he certainly hadn’t wasted any time filling his share of that little space.
He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I’d better get back to the kids. And I appreciate you coming here to tell me about Valerie.”
He walked me to the main entrance and we both stepped out into the warmth of the balmy afternoon.
“Beautiful day, huh?” His voice was ironic. “Guess we ought to savor them when we can. Because you never know—”
“No,” I said. “You don’t.”
“I’ll call you some time, cupcake.”
The carved wooden door with its fancy iron scrollwork closed with a loud clunk behind him. There was no spring in his step this time as there had been when he had come down the stairs to meet me.
I wanted to feel sorry for him but I couldn’t. There was something odd about the rushed intensity of his relationship with Valerie. Something odd about her accident, too.
I drove home and wondered what she wanted to tell me about the Washington wine Jack Greenfield donated and why she’d been so sure I didn’t know about its provenance. Before the auction took place at the end of the month I needed to find out—even if it was nothing more than a wild goose chase.
Chapter 3
Quinn was in the lab just off the barrel room when I showed up at quarter past three. I’d changed into a baggy sweatshirt and loose pair of pants. He looked me over like yard sale merchandise the sellers ought to be paying you to take. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“If I was, I’d just lie there and think about how much it hurts. Anyway, I’m too restless, especially since we still have to bring in the Cab. Did you do the field tests yet?”
“I’m about to. Want to come along?”
“Sure.”
The only grapes left to harvest this year were Cabernet Sauvignon, the most celebrated red wine grape in the world. The best-known and most sought-after Cabs come from Bordeaux, a place God created on His best day, granting it a perfect climate, sun-drenched days, and the kind of rocky soil vines thrive on.
Unlike the French, Americans name wines by grape varietal rather than region, but a French Bordeaux, an American Cabernet Sauvignon, and what the English call “claret” are all the same wine. Most of these are blends of more than one grape—usually Merlot or Cabernet Franc, though sometimes a little Petit Verdot or Malbec is added as well. The trick, for a winemaker, is figuring out how much of which grape to add to get the perfect wine—though by law, the “other” grapes can’t be more than 25 percent of the blend, or it can’t be labeled Cabernet Sauvignon.
Quinn was a born fiddler and I knew he was already pondering our blend even though we hadn’t yet picked the grapes. We’d brought the Merlot in a few weeks ago, putting most of it in barrels, but keeping what we planned to blend with the Cab in stainless-steel tanks.
“Let’s buy some PV this year,” Quinn had said at the time. “A few tons. It’ll give the wine a nice garnet color.”
“We’re not buying someone else’s Petit Verdot. I don’t want a different terroir in our wine. You know we always use only our own grapes,” I’d said.
Terroir was the indefinable “X” factor in a wine—literally it meant “the taste of the land” and made each wine distinctive from the next. Changing the soil or the region meant changing the wine. Last spring we planted fifteen acres of new varietals, including a few acres of Petit Verdot—but it would be three years before we got a harvest from those grapes.