Eli left for Sasha’s place after we turned off the news, promising to be back in time to kiss Hope good night, if I wouldn’t mind putting her to bed once she came home from Persia’s. I told him I wouldn’t mind at all. Quinn found a plate of Persia’s southern fried chicken left over from yesterday’s dinner, along with a head of Boston lettuce and some arugula in the refrigerator.
“I’ll make us a salad,” he said. “The heirloom tomatoes you bought the other day ought to be ripe.”
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Choose the dinner wine.”
Since he moved in with me in February, Quinn had gone to work taking an inventory of what was left of Leland’s old wine cellar in the basement and restocking it with new wines. As any winemaker knows, drink too much of your own stuff and you get what’s called a cellar palate. Eventually you start overlooking deficits in your own wine, your palate is no longer honed to notice the nuances in other varietals, and you become numb to the differences you would have noticed if you drank more widely. So by choice we almost never drank our own wines for dinner unless we were having friends over or hosting a party. And even then we still made a point to choose a variety of wines from around the world.
I found a German Kabinett-style Riesling that had a bit of sweetness in it in the wine refrigerator Quinn had installed. The day could do with some sweetness to counter everything bitter and ugly that had happened. Quinn nodded approval when he saw my choice and handed me the corkscrew as my cell phone rang. I looked at the display: Kit Noland.
Anyone can be a friend when times are good, but a true friend sticks around through the heartache and bad times, and still loves you even if you’ve just made a fool of yourself or done something you’re both going to regret. Kit Noland was that kind of friend. We met when we were five years old, and though we’d gone down different paths as we’d grown older, we’d never grown apart. She was still my best friend in the world.
Five years ago Kit moved back to Atoka to care for her mother, who had suffered a debilitating stroke, which meant leaving a job as assistant foreign editor for the Washington Tribune and an offer—a promotion, actually—to go to Russia as the Trib’s Moscow bureau chief. She swore she had no regrets about the arrow she’d shot into the upward trajectory of her career, and she meant it. Kit had that kind of tenacity and grit, even when she took over as bureau chief for the Tribune’s Loudoun County office, which was about as far from Russia as you could get geographically and psychologically. She also married the boy back home, Bobby Noland, a detective with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department.
It didn’t take a genius to know why she was calling now: Jamie Vaughn.
“It’s Kit,” I said to Quinn.
Maybe she had new information about Jamie that she’d picked up from Bobby, though it was just as likely she didn’t. “I sleep with the guy and he still makes me work my ass off for anything I get,” she always complained. “Actually, I probably work harder than anyone else so he can make sure it doesn’t look like he showed me any favoritism.”
“Take it,” he said. “It’s not like dinner’s going to get cold.”
I flashed him a grateful smile and answered her call.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Not really,” I said. “Who’s covering the story from the Trib?”
“National affairs and the guy who followed Jamie on the campaign trail are all over it. We, uh, sent a photographer out to the vineyard. The crash site looks pretty horrific.” She cleared her throat. “The Loudoun bureau is covering the local story, obviously, since he lived here … and died here.”
Her unasked question hung in the air between us. “And you want to interview me.”
“I thought maybe we could talk about that.” She sounded uncomfortable, which surprised me. Kit was fearless when it came to getting the story. “Are you by yourself?”
I looked over at Quinn, who was whisking olive oil and lemon juice for our salad.
“No.”
“Could you be?”
“Give me a minute.” I signaled to Quinn, pointing to the phone and the door to the veranda. I held up five fingers to let him know I wouldn’t be gone long.
He nodded. I stepped outside, pulling the kitchen door shut and immediately regretting not grabbing a sweater. The sky was still overcast so there was no spectacular sunset behind the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, just the leaden sky turning the even dirtier color of ashes. In the waning daylight the temperature had dropped, so it was sharply cooler.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s just me.”
She took a deep breath and said, “I saw him yesterday.”
“Saw who? Jamie? What do you mean, ‘saw him’?”
It was too early in the season to put out the cushions for the patio furniture, so there was no comfortable place to sit down. I paced the veranda and listened to Kit. The gardens had morphed into insubstantial shadows and the Blue Ridge Mountains were slowly fading into the sky, which was now the color of an old bruise.
“I mean I met him,” she said. “It was at my request. At our favorite off-the-grid drinking place.” She paused. “It didn’t go well.”
Our favorite off-the-grid drinking place was the old Goose Creek Bridge just outside Middleburg, the next town over from Atoka. It was built in 1802 during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, and at two hundred feet long, it was the longest arched stone bridge in Virginia. It was the site of the Battle of Upperville, involving Colonel J.E.B. Stuart’s soldiers, who hid out in ravines and behind old stone walls—and the bridge—hoping to delay Union troops who were desperate to find Lee’s army. Ten days later, they finally met. At Gettysburg. Five years ago, it landed on the National Register of Historic Places.
I stopped pacing. “Why did you meet Jamie Vaughn at the Goose Creek Bridge?”
“Because it’s private, hardly anybody goes there, and he figured it would be the last place anyone would see him talking to me.”
I wasn’t expecting that answer. “Oh.”
“I just left Mom’s apartment a few minutes ago. I had to run by to drop off some medicine and I’m still in her parking lot. Bobby’s working late tonight because of everything that happened today.” She sounded tentative, still not at all normal Kit. “I really need to talk to someone about all this.”
She was fifteen minutes away. All what? I had no idea what she meant.
“Quinn and I are about to have dinner. There’s enough for three. Leftovers, but it’s Persia’s fried chicken. Come on by.”
“I won’t turn down Persia’s fried chicken, but this conversation has to be between you and me.”
“Okay. We’ll talk after dinner, just the two of us,” I said. “See you soon.”
I disconnected and went inside. “Kit’s coming for dinner,” I said. “Then she wants to stick around to have girl talk, okay? Bobby’s working late tonight.”
“Sure.” He pulled me to him and ruffled my hair. “I’ll get lost. My feelings aren’t hurt.”
I rested my hands against his chest. “You can smoke one of your cigars on the veranda with a cognac and feel guilt-free since I’ll be occupied.”
I had one hard-and-fast rule: No cigars smelling up the house. He nodded. “I might just do that. You want to get an extra wineglass?”
I took one out of the cabinet and set a third place at the table. Kit had said her meeting with Jamie at the Goose Creek Bridge hadn’t gone well. The next day he was dead.
Earlier I had wondered if someone close to Jamie—perhaps Elena, one of the twins, or Garrett Bateman—knew who the mysterious Rick was. Now it occurred to me that maybe someone he didn’t know so well might have an answer to that.
Maybe Kit knew.
* * *
DINNER WAS SMALL TALK, anything but the subject that was really on everyone’s mind. Quinn was the one who finally brought up Jamie, though in a roundabout way.
“I wonder what’s going to happen to the Jefferson Dinner now,” he said.
“They’ll probably cancel it, don’t you think?” Kit asked.
The Jefferson Dinner was a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner that was officially an opportunity to taste several rare vintages from the celebrated eight-thousand-bottle wine cellar of Jamie Vaughn at a meal served on china and silverware that dated from the era of Thomas Jefferson. Unofficially it was a fund-raiser organized by Jamie’s friends to help pay off some of his staggering campaign debts.
The highlight of the evening would be a tasting of what, in our business, is known as a “unicorn wine”—a wine so rare and sought after that it is priceless. Jamie’s unicorn wine was an 1876 Norton’s Virginia that had been salvaged from a shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina a few years ago, made from a little-known native American grape discovered in Virginia in the early 1800s by Dr. Daniel Norton of Richmond. Twenty-five people who had paid another ten thousand dollars would get a taste of that wine at the dinner.
“Jamie’s campaign still has debts,” I said. “If they cancel they’ll have to return the money they took in. Although I’m sure that’s probably the last thing Elena and everyone else is thinking about now.”
“Maybe, but the dinner is Saturday and they made a big fuss about it being held on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday,” Kit said, covering the top of her wineglass with her hand and shaking her head as Quinn picked up the bottle of Riesling to refill it. “Are you two going?”
The dinner was being held at the Goose Creek Inn, a local restaurant owned by my cousin Dominique Gosselin. The Inn consistently won regional and national dining awards and regularly made the list of “most romantic places to dine” in the D.C. Metro area. If anyone could pull off a pricey fund-raiser involving a dinner replicating Thomas Jefferson’s favorite foods, plus handle the national buzz of attention the Norton wine tasting was getting, my cousin could.
“If we had forty thousand dollars to spare—or even twenty thousand—it would go for a new destemmer,” I said. “The price of the tickets was too steep for us.”
“Still, I’d give my right arm to try that 1876 Norton.” Quinn got up and started clearing away our plates. “I think I’ll go out on the veranda and smoke my after-dinner cigar,” he said, “if you two don’t mind.”
“We’ll miss you,” I said.
He grinned and dropped a kiss on the top of my head before he left the kitchen.
“Come on,” Kit said. “I’ll help you do the dishes. We can talk then.”
“There’s really nothing to do. I’ll clean up later. How about I make us some tea and we can sit and talk in the library?”
Kit still insisted on cleaning up while I made a pot of lavender, lemon, and sage tea, which she carried into the library. The room had once been Leland’s office, stamped with his larger-than-life personality, a place of gloomy shadows and dark corners that seldom saw daylight, something he said was necessary to protect his collection of rare first editions that used to line the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Light, he’d told me, not only destroys wine, it also destroys books.
A few weeks after he died, a fire burned much of the first floor of Highland House, especially the library. The exception had been my father’s hand-carved gun cabinet, which wasn’t even scorched. Eli had handled the renovation, staying true to the original architecture and rebuilding the bookshelves, but I’d painted the library walls a soft mint green and had the new furniture upholstered in soothing earth colors. The dark-green-and-cream-striped curtains were now drawn only in the evening.
Kit and I sat on opposite ends of a caramel-colored crushed velvet sofa with our feet propped up and mugs of tea, so we faced each other.
“Okay,” I said, “what’s going on?”
She tucked a bottle-green throw pillow behind her head and blew on her tea. I knew she was stalling.
“A couple of weeks ago the senior national editor asked me to put together a story about Jamie’s political campaign for the Sunday news magazine,” she said finally. “Ten thousand words, something in-depth. How he bypassed more experienced politicians to win primaries and the nomination, put together his organization starting from next to nothing, the whole megillah.”
“And?”
She gave a noisy, unhappy sigh. “You know the saying, ‘When you want to dig up dirt, go find a worm’?”
“Sure.”
“A worm found me. I have no idea who it is.” She looked uneasy. “I got an anonymous package from someone who claimed to have worked for the Vaughn campaign. According to this person, some of the donation money was used to pay Jamie’s personal expenses. Or, more accurately, expenses for his family and his business. Whoever it is included photocopies of checks made out to Elena Vaughn. I’m talking thousands of dollars, too. Not little stuff. There were other checks made out to his vineyard, supposedly expenses for campaign fund-raisers. It’s freaking me out.”
“I thought Jamie funded his campaign with his own money.”
She sipped her tea and shrugged. “According to my source, the Vaughn Real Estate Group is not in as good financial shape as he made it out to be. He’s got a couple of huge projects here and overseas that are completely stalled because the investment funding dried up. He’s having a hard time raising any more cash. I don’t know how much of his campaign financing really came from his own bank account.”
“Who knows about this?” I asked.
“Well, me. The national editor. Our managing editor, who told me the story had better be airtight before we run it. And now, you. The worm. And, as of yesterday morning, Jamie.”
“What did Jamie say?”
“He denied it and told me if the Trib printed a word of it, he’d sue my ass off. And take the Trib to court as well.”
“Did you believe him?”
“That he’d do it? You bet. As to whether I believe him that it’s not true, I don’t know anymore.” She set her mug on the coffee table and folded her arms across her chest. “You saw the crash, didn’t you? Bobby said there were no skid marks. Jamie obviously didn’t try to stop.”
The light from a hammered copper lamp on an end table behind Kit cast her face in shadow. I knew her as well as I knew myself. As a reporter she would do anything to get a story, but as a friend she would never betray a confidence, including what I was about to tell her.
“You can’t use this,” I said, “but I think he did it on purpose. He must have been going sixty on Atoka Road before he turned onto Sycamore Lane. I had to swerve to avoid him and ended up on the opposite shoulder. I almost took out the split-rail fence across the road. Before I could turn around, I heard him accelerating and then the crash.”
“You didn’t actually see it, but you still think it’s deliberate?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Because I talked to him before he passed out and before Mick Dunne showed up. He didn’t want me to help him get out of the car.”
“I heard he was pinned inside,” she said. “That he couldn’t have gotten out if he’d wanted to.”
“Maybe, but it still remains that he didn’t want to.”
“You’re sure?”
Through the closed library door I heard the sound of the front door being unlocked and a moment later the door opening and Persia’s singsong-accented English, as she spoke to Hope.
“Let’s go find Aunt Lucie, pet.”
“We’re in here,” I called. “The library.”
I swung my legs off the sofa as Hope opened the door and bounced into the room, her dark hair done up in two high pigtails tied with pink ribbons. She wore jean overalls and a pink turtleneck with lace on the cuffs. I held out my arms and she ran into them.
“How are you, sweet pea? I’ve missed you today.” I rested my chin on top of her head and mouthed “Thank you” to Persia, who stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb and watching us.
Hope gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “I missed you, too.”
“Hey,” Kit demanded. “What am I? Chopped liver? Don’t I get a kiss?”
Hope obliged and Kit fiddled with the ribbons of her pigtails. “You look adorable, princess.”
“I know.”
Persia and I said, automatically, “Thank you, Aunt Kit.”
Hope grinned and stuck her finger in her mouth. “Thank you, Aunt Kit.”
“Lucie, would you like me to put Miss Adorable to bed? It looks like you two are in the middle of something,” Persia gave me a concerned look over the top of Hope’s head, so I knew she’d figured out that we were talking about Jamie.
“Would that be okay, Hopie?” I asked. “Just for tonight? Daddy will be home soon and he’ll stop in and give you a good night kiss. I’ll kiss you when I come upstairs, too.”
Hope nodded and the pigtails bounced. “Persia, will you read me a story?”
“Of course, I will.” Persia held out her hand and Hope ran to her.
“Thanks, Persia,” I said. “And thanks for taking care of her this afternoon.”
“Hope, love, go ahead and start up the stairs. Persia will be along in a minute,” she said as Hope skipped out of the room. As soon as she was out of earshot, Persia said in her lilting accent, “I saw pictures of the accident on the evening news. That poor man, it must have been a terrible crash.”
I set my empty mug on the coffee table and nodded. “Hope didn’t see it, did she?”
Persia looked horrified. “Of course not. I would never let her see something so dreadful. She’d have nightmares for weeks.”
“I know.” I had nightmares for weeks after my accident, and I was already dreading that they might return for an encore tonight.
“Are you all right, Lucie?” she asked.
I heard Kit suck in her breath. Neither Kit, nor Eli, nor Quinn had referred to my accident so far, but Pippa O’Hara had made a point to tie what happened to me to Jamie’s accident today. Persia hadn’t been around ten years ago; she hadn’t even been in the country. She couldn’t know how hard it was to have my own history dragged up again, like scraping a scab off a wound that refused to heal.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
She gave me a clear-eyed look that said we both knew I’d lied. “I’m glad to hear that. Excuse me. I’d better go take care of Hope.”
After she pulled the door shut, I said to Kit, “If I ever meet Pippa O’Hara, I’ll strangle her.”
“Get in line.” Kit sat back down on the sofa, cross-legged with her hands folded in her lap. “What were you about to say before your sweet niece interrupted us?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Like hell, you don’t. You were about to tell me why Jamie Vaughn didn’t want to get out of his car.” She fixed her gaze on me. “Do you think it has something to do with what I told him yesterday?”
“You mean is it your fault?”
Her eyes were anguished. “Okay, yes. Was our conversation the last straw, the thing that pushed him over the edge?”
“Are you crazy? You were just doing your job. You can’t blame yourself for what he did.”
“What makes you so sure? I hit the tip of the iceberg with what I found out about his money problems. Jamie was trying to raise cash any way he could. I think his business empire had started caving in around him and he was desperate to stop it before anyone found out. What do you think the Jefferson Dinner is all about?”
I hadn’t seen Kit upset like this in years.
“Hold it,” I said. “Just wait a minute. There’s something you still don’t know.”
“What?”
“Before he died, Jamie told me that I had to find someone named Rick and tell him that he was sorry for something he’d done. He hoped Rick would forgive him.”
“Forgive him for what?” Her eyes grew wide. “And who’s Rick?”
“You don’t know?”
“Why would I?”
“You’re the one who has been poking around in his life. Any Ricks you’ve come across who work for one of his hotels or a building he owns? A staff person on his campaign? Maybe even your source?”
“No one sticks out, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t missed someone,” she said, looking thoughtful. “I’ll go through my files and notes and take another look.”
“Thanks. Let me know, okay?”
She nodded. “What do you think Jamie did that it’s so important to him that he needs to be forgiven? It almost sounds like a deathbed confession.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I guess I’m going to have to find out.”