The lights were on in the carriage house where my brother Eli had his architectural studio when Quinn and I pulled into the driveway after we finished helping Frankie carry the boxes of Christmas decorations into the tasting room.
“I swear they’re like mushrooms,” Quinn told me on the ride home. I was relieved we weren’t talking about Bobby, Prescott, or a murder. “They multiply in the dark in that storeroom. I’m sure there were more this year than last year.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, laughing. “Don’t be a Grinch. Frankie loves Christmas as much as I do. Maybe we get a bit carried away, but the house and the Villa look so beautiful and festive when they’re decorated, don’t you think? Especially if it’s a white Christmas.”
He grinned. “You’re talking to a California boy. I used to go surfing on Christmas Day. And Californians are mostly into lights. On everything. Buildings, palm trees, you name it, we light it up. It’s like fairyland. Or Disneyland.”
“Speaking of lights, Eli’s working. I thought I might drop by and have a quick chat with him,” I said as we climbed out of the Jeep.
“Does this have to do with what Prescott told you yesterday?” Quinn asked. “You want to ask him if he knows about the missing cases of Madeira?”
“Yes.”
He gave me a reflective look. “That was a yes, but. Yes, but what?”
Somehow he always knew when I was holding back. “I want to know if he knew about the second safe-deposit box Prescott said Leland had rented. The one where he kept his secrets from my mother.”
Quinn placed his hands on my shoulders and looked down into my eyes as if he could see clear through into my soul. “I’ll go see about dinner. Take all the time you need, sweetheart.”
There are days when I’m on my knees in gratitude for this man who understands me so well. I know with every fiber of my being that he will always be there when I need him. Even if I don’t ask. Like right now.
“Why don’t you come with me?” I reached for his hands and twined my fingers through his. “I don’t want us to have any secrets from each other. Whatever Leland did, whatever secrets he kept, I want you to know about it, too.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am.”
“Then let’s go talk to Eli.”
Eli yelled, “It’s open,” when I knocked on his studio door a moment later.
He was hunched over his drafting table, staring at a laptop that sat on top of a sheaf of drawings. Two coffee mugs were pushed into a corner. I TURN COFFEE INTO ARCHITECTURE and WORLD’S OKAYEST ARCHITECT. The coffeepot, which sat in a coffeemaker on a table behind him, was empty and the light switched off. His dark hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb recently and he was unshaven, wearing a faded Virginia Tech sweatshirt and old jeans.
As usual, a long, low table on one side of the room was piled with rolled drawings that looked like an incoming tide. The current architectural model he was building for a client—a beautiful, precise, miniature reproduction, as was his style—reminded me of Fallingwater. I could still smell the glue he’d used. Before the cold weather had set in, he’d bought an electric fireplace, plugged it into the wall, and designed and built bookcases on either side to match the mantel and surround so it looked as if it had always been there. Now the fireplace was turned on, taking the chill off the drafty room with its wall of windows where large doors had once been.
He looked up and stretched, swiveling in his chair so he was facing Quinn and me. “Hey,” he said, yawning, “what’s up?”
“We just finished talking to Bobby Noland,” I said. “Did you know Prescott Avery was murdered yesterday?”
When Eli was busy working on a project for a client, he could be oblivious to everything.
He didn’t know. “Jesus. Are you serious? Who did it?”
“If Bobby knew the answer to that, he wouldn’t have had to question us.”
Eli laced his hands behind his head and yawned again. “Don’t be a wise-ass, Luce. Let me rephrase. Does he think you know who did it?”
I avoided looking at Quinn. The answer to that was “maybe,” but I didn’t want to admit it to Eli. I’d pointed enough arrows at Victoria Barkley based on nothing more than the scent of her perfume.
I said, “No,” as Quinn said, “He wanted to know what we knew.”
“So which is it?” My brother looked from me to Quinn, reading both our expressions like open books. “Wait a minute, did this happen at the party? Somebody killed Prescott at his own party?”
Quinn nodded.
“We were there yesterday,” I said. “I was the last person he talked to before it happened. Well, next to last. And Quinn and I found him.”
“Jesus,” Eli said again and picked up a mug. He examined what was in it, took a sip, and set it down like the contents were radioactive. “I’m sorry Sasha and I didn’t make it, but we had a couple of friends lined up to move her furniture out of her place and bring it to the house. But considering a murderer was lurking around Hawthorne Castle, I think I’m glad we didn’t go. Someone really killed Prescott—a ninety-five-year-old guy? Who would do that?”
“Bobby is zeroing in on the family. Everyone seems to have a motive and it’s mostly related to money,” I said.
My brother’s eyes flashed and we stared at each other. “Sounds familiar,” he said.
“Let’s not go there. What’s past is past.”
“Someone hit him over the head in his wine cellar,” Quinn said. “We found him on the floor. Lucie forgot her phone down there so we went back to get it. By the time we arrived we were too late, so there was nothing we could do. He was already dead.”
“Prescott Avery. He was a multibillionaire. He had everything. And Hawthorne…” Eli shook his head in wonderment. “That place is incredible. Any architect would have killed to be on the team that designed it. Not literally, I mean.” He paused. “You guys want some coffee? I can make a fresh pot. Grab a seat. Pull up those stools over there.”
“We’ll pass on coffee,” I said. “But thanks, anyway.”
Quinn dragged two high-backed stools across the room so the three of us were sitting around Eli’s drafting table.
“I hope you won’t have to stay here too late,” I said.
“I have a deadline to show a client drawings first thing tomorrow. It will take as long as it takes,” he said. “So what brings you guys here? Something besides Prescott.”
“Two things,” I told him. “I don’t want to hold you up since you’re busy, but yesterday afternoon Prescott told me Leland had a safe-deposit box.”
“Which we cleaned out,” Eli said right away. “Car titles, will, marriage license, my selective service card, for some reason. His and Mom’s birth certificates. The usual stuff.”
“Not that one. Another safe-deposit box. Where he kept things he didn’t want Mom to know about.”
In the poignant silence that followed, I knew my brother was thinking the same thing that had gone through my mind. What more could our father have hidden that we never knew about?
But more important was this: did we want to find out after all this time? They say the heart can’t hurt if the head doesn’t know. Did we want to know?
My brother gave me a wary look. “Where is this safe-deposit box?”
“Apparently at Blue Ridge Federal.”
“You’d think Seth would have told us about it.”
I nodded. “You’d think.”
“You could just leave it alone,” Quinn said. “It’s been five years. Maybe it might be better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“I’m for leaving it alone. Let this dog keep lying, like Quinn said,” Eli said. “Besides, we never found a second key when we sorted through all his stuff.”
“Well, if the safe-deposit box was secret, then he would have hidden the key, wouldn’t he?” I said. “And he wouldn’t have told anyone about it.”
“Apparently no one in the family. But he did tell Prescott Avery, it seems.” Eli fiddled with his mechanical pencil, spinning it like a dial in a board game or the hands of a clock gone crazy. There was an acid edge to his voice. He wasn’t enjoying this conversation. Eli liked stability. Order. Predictability. Leland had popped up in our lives again like a jack-in-the-box at the end of the music when you were sure the spring was broken and nothing would happen.
“I know you, Luce. You’re the one who did the DNA test and found out about David,” he went on. “Now you want to find this key. And if you do, then you want to check out the safe-deposit box. Am I right?”
I shrugged. “Now that I know about it, I suppose I do. I don’t want any of Leland’s ghosts to haunt me. Or any of us. Besides, Prescott seems to think … seemed to think … Leland might have left be a clue about the old cases of Madeira in that safe-deposit box.”
Eli’s face went blank. “What old cases of Madeira?”
Quinn and I exchanged looks. “Sorry,” I said. “That was thing number two. I should have told you about the Madeira first.”
“Told me what?”
When I was finished, my brother shook his head. “Look, if there was any booze lying around the house, especially something that valuable, you know as well as I do that Leland either drank it or sold it. Besides, where would it be that we haven’t already looked?”
“If there is a safe-deposit box and Leland left something—a clue or a letter—about the Madeira, it’s still there and it’s not going anywhere,” Quinn said. “You don’t have to do anything about it right this minute, Lucie. No one’s putting a gun to your head to find out … especially if it’s too upsetting right now.”
He meant too upsetting to Eli. And because of other stressful things like Prescott’s murder and the busyness of the upcoming holidays.
I started to protest when what he said about putting a gun to my head made a missing puzzle piece slot into place with a neat click.
“I know where the key might be.” My mouth felt dry. “Quinn just said something that made me realize where it might be hidden. Where I believe it is hidden.”
“What did I just say?” Quinn said. “Where’s the key?”
“What was the one place that Leland made absolutely sure was off-limits to all of us?”
Eli’s eyes widened. “His gun cabinet.”
My father’s gun cabinet was a beautiful hand-carved piece of furniture, not a utilitarian box where he kept his weapons. He was a collector as well as a hunter and he had supervised every detail of the work done by the Amish cabinetmakers that built it. It sat in his former office—now the library—and, though I am neither a hunter nor a collector, I had left it where it was.
“You think the key’s there?” Quinn asked.
“Why not?” I said. “It could be behind something, attached to the top of a drawer or the back of the cabinet itself.”
“We never found a key there before now,” Eli said.
“Because we weren’t looking for one. Especially one that was probably deliberately hidden.”
“I suppose you want to check it out,” he said. “Like right now.”
“I do. You want to come?”
“You know I do. If you’re going to look for it, I’m not sitting here on my hands.”
I caught Quinn’s eye. There was a glint of excitement in his.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
THERE WAS NO SECRET about where Leland kept the key to the gun cabinet itself. On the top of the ledge of the door to the library. Too high for the fingers of a child—Eli, Mia, and me when we were little, and now Hope and Zach—to reach. As for the ammunition drawers, they could only be unlocked with a special code on a built-in dial. I had found the code with the original bill from the woodworking company. Fortunately Leland had never changed it.
Eli got the key to the gun cabinet. Quinn brought a bottle of red—a Pomerol—and three wineglasses from the dining room. Once the cabinet and the ammunition drawers were unlocked, the three of us started to examine every surface.
“Do you think it’s behind the gun rack?” Quinn said. “Do we need to take out all of the rifles and long guns?”
“If we do, Leland had to do it as well,” I said. “I don’t think he would make this hiding place so complicated or inaccessible.”
“If he hid it here,” Eli said. “And if he was still using that safe-deposit box when he died.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” I said. “Seek and ye shall find. Believe and it shall happen.”
“Shut. Up.”
“I found it.”
“You did not.”
“I did.” I held up a small envelope and opened the Velcro fastening, sliding out two keys with long notched shanks. The number 57 was stamped into them. “These are safe-deposit box keys, all right.”
“Where was the little envelope?” Quinn asked.
“Here.”
In a narrow drawer where Leland had kept a multi-tool and some cleaning rods, I’d discovered the envelope taped to the inside top of the drawer.
Eli shook his head in disgust. “Wonder if he kept anything else, more stuff he didn’t want us to know about?”
The bitterness in his voice told me he still hadn’t forgiven Leland. For a lot of things.
“Does it matter anymore?” I asked.
Eli picked up his wineglass and drank, his eyes clouded and his mood darker than it had been before we started this. He was Leland’s son and the eldest child. Leland, who had never wanted his children to call him Dad or Daddy or Papa, hadn’t done any of the father/son things with Eli that would have forged a bond between them, brought them close together, never taught him practical things like how to tie a tie properly or throw a football, never passed on knowledge that would have smoothed a rocky adolescence. Instead he let Eli fend for himself, tag along with other boys whose dads coached their Little League teams or were the Scoutmasters or took them to D.C. to watch the Nationals or the Capitals or the Wizards play.
Then a few months ago, my supposedly innocuous DNA test had led to the discovery of another son Leland had fathered. What we didn’t know and might never know, since David’s birth mother didn’t want to have anything to do with the child she gave up for adoption, was whether Leland had known about David. Eli said for David’s sake he hoped Leland never had a clue. Ignorance would be preferable to not caring, being abandoned.
“I suppose none of it matters now,” Eli said and my heart ached for him because I knew he was lying and it did matter.
I touched his arm. “Why don’t I call Seth Hannah tomorrow and make an appointment to stop by Blue Ridge Federal and see what this is all about? I’ll let you know what happens, okay?”
“Do you want me to come?”
“Nah, you’ve got clients and work to do. It’s quiet at the vineyard so I’ll go.”
“I’m still for letting sleeping dogs lie, Luce. But you and I are different that way. You’re more like Mom. You wear that same suit of armor she wore. She managed to put up with all of Leland’s crap and still be an amazing, loving mother. I don’t know how she did it. So go ahead and find out.”
I nodded because I couldn’t speak.
He gave me a one-armed brother hug and dropped a kiss on top of my head, something he almost never did.
“Good luck,” he said, his voice roughened with emotion. “But be careful. When Leland’s involved, you’re playing with fire. I’d just hate to see you get burned.” He turned to leave, then seemed to think better of it and turned around to face me. “Again.”
And then he was gone for good.