My cousin Dominique was the first to arrive for the wine tasting shortly after four o’clock. She walked through the front door of the villa holding a large flame-colored Dutch oven with a pair of yellow oven mitts, as if she were carrying the Holy Grail.
“Can I help with that?” I asked. “Or get something from your car?”
She expertly elbowed the door shut and stomped the snow from her feet on a braided oval rug in the entryway. “I met Eli in the parking lot, so he’s bringing in everything else,” she said. “You can get the kitchen door for me, though.”
After setting down the last two wineglasses at the long oak table we used for tastings when the bar was too crowded, I opened the door.
“It smells terrific,” I said.
“Thanks.” She placed the pot on the stove and turned the burner on low. “I brought potatoes, salad, a quatre-quarts for dessert, and those extra baguettes you asked me to bring to cut up for the tasting.”
Quatre-quarts was a French pound cake that our mothers and our grandmother had made. It required only four ingredients, which had to be weighed and used in exactly equal amounts: butter, flour, eggs, and sugar. Hence the name: four-fourths.
My cousin unwound a red-and-white pashmina shawl from around her neck and unbuttoned her coat. There were dark circles under her eyes.
“Thanks for the baguettes,” I said. “The real reason everyone’s coming for the tasting is your carbonnade, not my wine, you know.”
She smiled, but it was a tired one, and her mind was clearly somewhere else.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “You look exhausted.”
Her smile morphed into a grimace. “I quit smoking.” She dropped the coat and shawl on a chair. “Or at least I’m trying to quit.”
Dominique had smoked since she was twelve, filching cigarettes from her parents when she was growing up in France. This winter, a debilitating case of bronchitis and a hacking cough that lingered for weeks had taken a toll on her. I wondered if being so sick was what had finally motivated her to stop.
“I’m glad,” I said. “If I can do anything to keep you on the straight and narrow, let me know. It’s about time you quit.”
She pushed a spiky fringe of auburn bangs off her forehead with the back of her hand and reached into the pocket of her jeans.
“You sound like my doctor. Mon Dieu, it’s making me so stressed and irritable, I think half the staff at the Inn is ready to put tar on my feathers.” She pulled out a package of nicotine gum and shoved a piece in her mouth, chewing furiously.
When Dominique got excited or upset, her English generally went out the window. Idioms, especially, still seemed to baffle her.
“They love you,” I said. “I’m sure everyone understands. You’re like a family over there, all of you.”
She gave me an anguished look and took a wooden spoon from a stone jar filled with kitchen utensils that was sitting on the counter. “I know that.” She stirred the carbonnade with intense concentration.
“What is it?” I said. “There’s something else besides the smoking.”
She set the spoon down and turned to me. “I’ve been offered a job.”
I started to laugh, but her expression stopped me. “You already have a job. You own the Goose Creek Inn, one of the top restaurants in the Washington, D.C., area. You win heaps of awards every year. Your heart, your soul, your blood, sweat, and tears, your life, and your fortune are poured into that place. What other job in the world could—”
She was still watching me with that same fierce intensity, and all of a sudden the air seemed to go out of the room.
“It must be pretty spectacular,” I said in a calm voice, though my mind was leaping ahead to what could tempt her to leave, what it would mean to our family, the vineyard, the town. “Because I have a feeling you’re actually thinking about taking it.”
She nodded. “Executive chef,” she said. “At the White House.”
A moment ago, the idea of her giving up the Goose Creek Inn to take a position anywhere else seemed as unlikely as the moon spinning away from Earth to revolve around a different planet. Now it seemed not only likely but perhaps a fait accompli. I wondered whether she’d already accepted it and hadn’t wanted to break the news to me yet.
“Are you serious? When? How?”
From the other room, we could hear Eli singing “In the Bleak Midwinter” in a loud, hammy voice as the front door slammed shut.
“Don’t tell anyone.” She put a finger to her lips and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I haven’t met the First Lady yet, and that’s the last interview. I shouldn’t have told you. I was asked not to say anything, because they don’t want any press leaks.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t say a word,” I whispered back, crossing my heart with a finger, though it felt as if I were slicing it open with a knife. “Are you going to accept?”
“It would be such a feather in my nest.”
“Avoiding the question, Your Honor.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “There’s a state dinner for the Italian prime minister tomorrow night. Everything’s on hold until after that.”
I already knew about the state dinner. The kitchen door swung open and Eli came in carrying a cooler and a large plastic shopping bag.
“Snow on snooow on snoooow … in the bleeeeak…” He quit singing abruptly. “You two look guilty as hell. What’s going on? Everything’s on hold until after what?”
I glanced at my cousin. “Until—”
“After Valentine’s Day.” Dominique gave him a bright smile. “At the Inn, we have more reservations than you can shake a leg at, and there’s your party on Saturday, as well. Eli, mon ange, set the cooler and that bag on the counter. Lucie, the baguettes are in the carrier bag. You probably want to cut them up before everyone gets here.”
“Sure,” I said. “Eli, help me with that, will you?”
Later, when almost everyone had arrived, he walked by me on his way to add another log to the fire.
“Are you going to tell me what was really going on when I showed up in the kitchen?” he asked.
“She quit smoking.” I straightened a pencil next to one of the pads of paper Frankie had set out so people could make notes during the tasting. “She doesn’t want to make a big deal over it. Don’t say anything, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, looking doubtful. “Mum’s the word.”
From the other side of the room, Quinn said, “I’d like to get started, but we’re still waiting for Kit, right, Lucie?”
He gave me a meaningful look.
“She’s on her way and she’s bringing a reporter from the Trib who’s interested in helping us out on weekends,” I said.
The log Eli had just put on the fire hissed and popped, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. My brother leaned in so only I could hear what he said.
“You didn’t tell me Kit was coming. That woman will be late to her own funeral. Why should she keep everyone else waiting?”
Years ago, Kit and Eli had dated, and it had been serious. Then Eli met Brandi, now his ex-wife, and the breakup with Kit had been acrimonious and painful to watch. After that, Kit and Eli had never really gotten along, and it seemed that her recent marriage and his bruising divorce had only stirred up some of the old hostility.
I usually tried to ignore it. “She’ll be here any minute,” I said. “Cut her some slack, Eli. She’s visiting Faith, for Pete’s sake. You can’t avoid her forever, you know. Especially now that she married one of your old friends.”
The front door opened and Kit burst in with a plain-looking dark-haired girl who looked like she was about sixteen. They were laughing and breathless, as though they’d been running. A spotlight above the front door caught the two of them in a pool of light, so the snowflakes that clung to their coats and hair made them look like a pair of snow angels.
“Hey, everybody, sorry we’re late.” Kit shrugged out of her coat and dumped it on one of the sofas, gesturing for her friend to do the same. She riffled a hand through her short hair, bleached Marilyn Monroe blond, so it looked like a cloud of yellow frizz.
Kit and I had been on the cross-country team in high school, but she had given up running in college, and over the years the pounds had started to pile on. Now she was always on some crazy yo-yo diet that never worked. She’d also begun dressing with edgy flair, choosing clothes better suited to an overly thin runway model, like now. She had on clinging black leggings, a red-and-black-striped tunic, and stiletto ankle boots.
“No one,” she told me once, “misses me at a press conference when I raise my hand to ask a question.”
She sailed over to the table and indicated her companion. “This is Vivienne Baron, gang. She’s been working in the Loudoun bureau of the Trib since the beginning of the year, one of my rising stars.”
Vivienne Baron flushed pink, looking pleased and embarrassed as she fiddled with a long straight braid that fell over her shoulder. Kit swept her hand in a broad gesture that included all of us and added, “Viv, meet everybody. Everybody, Viv.”
She gave me an air kiss and Dominique and Frankie a quick hug while the introductions went on around the table. Then she looked over my brother like merchandise you wouldn’t buy even at a deep discount and said, “Hello, Eli. I didn’t know you were going to be here. Always such a pleasure.”
He gave her a tight-lipped smile. “Only for you, Katherine, darling.”
“All right, you two,” I said. “Play nice. Kit and Vivienne, why don’t you sit down here by me? Eli, I’m sure Quinn could use some help pouring, so maybe you could take the empty seat next to him.”
I got the we’ll-talk-about-this-later look from my brother, but he walked to the other end of the table and sat down beside Quinn.
“For the benefit of our newcomers, let me explain what we want you to do,” Quinn said. “We have eight wine samples—a combination of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in different proportions, from different parts of the vineyard, picked at different times—one of which we want to use to make sparkling wine. We won’t be calling it champagne, of course, because the only place in the world that can do that is the Champagne region of France.”
He was talking to Vivienne and Kit, who were nodding, since the rest of us worked here. Journalists that they were, both were taking notes.
“What we’re doing tonight is figuring out which sample you all like best,” he said. “After that’s sorted out, we’ll make that blend in larger quantities and put it in one of the tanks downstairs, where it will chill for a couple of weeks before we filter it and then bottle it. Once the wine is in the bottles, we begin the process of turning it into sparkling. Essentially, we’re making the wine twice—first the blend, then the fizz and bubbles. What we want to know from you tonight is which one is your favorite.”
He looked directly at Vivienne. “Whatever you do, spit, don’t swallow, or you’ll be drunk before we’re done. Drink water between each sample and eat a piece of bread. After the work is finished, you can drink when we have dinner.”
Vivienne blushed again and said in her quiet voice, “I understand.”
“Go with your instincts and don’t overthink it,” I said to her under my breath. “All we want to know is which one you like best. Unlike other wines, champagne—or sparkling, as we call it—is all about the blend, what combination of wines you put together to create it. It’s an art, not a science.”
She nodded as Eli and Quinn began moving along the table, pouring wine into our glasses.
Whether it was the steadily falling snow, which everyone could see through the French patio doors as it swirled like a kid’s snow globe in the wash of the outside lights, or just that it was the end of the day, so we were quiet and focused, the tasting took less than half an hour. There was an almost unanimous vote for the blend that had been our private favorite.
Quinn’s eyes met mine across the table. “I guess it’s settled. Thank you all,” he said. “Time to eat.”
Dominique and Frankie brought the food from the kitchen while the rest of us cleared the table of glasses, bread baskets, and everyone’s notes. Vivienne took her dinner plate and sat by herself on one of the sofas next to the fire.
I caught Kit’s eye. “I need to talk to you privately for a few minutes before you go, but we should probably join Vivienne so that she won’t feel left out.”
“Sure.” Kit bit into a piece of baguette. “Mom said you stopped by today. I have a feeling I know what you want to talk about.”
We exchanged looks. “That and something else.”
We sat down on either side of Vivienne and I asked if she’d enjoyed the tasting.
“I think what you do is fascinating,” she said. “Frankie asked if I was available on Saturday night to help with your party, which sounds like a lot of fun. She said if I drop by after work during the week, she’ll go over everything with me.”
I wondered how this quiet, sweet girl was going to manage a job that was all about being gregarious and social and interacting with people.
“That’s great,” I said. “We could really use the help.”
“I’ll ask my husband if he’s interested, as well. He’s coming to pick me up when we’re done here.”
“Vivienne doesn’t drive,” Kit said. “At least not in snow.”
Vivienne smiled. “I drive. But we never got snow in San Diego. Or ice.”
“It won’t be winter forever,” I said. “At least that’s what we’re hoping.”
“It’s hard on the folks at the Manor,” Kit said. “A lot of them like to go for walks, and it’s just too dangerous with the snow and ice.”
“Especially people like your mom who have to use walkers or canes,” Vivienne said to Kit.
“You know Faith?” I asked her.
“I met her when I interviewed Roxy Willoughby for a story on the first female pilots to fly during World War Two,” she said.
“You’re writing a story about Roxy?”
She nodded. “I’m trying to find as many local women from her squadron as I can before there’s no one left to tell their story. Fortunately, I finished interviewing her before she passed away.”
“We’re running the piece in the weekend magazine,” Kit said. “I’ll need your corrected version first thing in the morning, Viv.”
“You’ll have it. I just needed to check a few facts with Olivia Cohen.”
“Olivia Cohen?” I said. “Any relation to Skye Cohen?”
“Olivia is Skye’s grandmother,” Kit said.
“Skye was just in here this morning,” I said. “Picking up winter coats for Veronica House. I didn’t know her grandmother had been a pilot. She and Roxy must have been friends.”
Vivienne shook her head. “Apparently the friendship broke up years ago.”
“What happened?”
“I think it had something to do with Roxy’s getting pregnant when they were in England together,” she said. “Olivia mentioned it during the interview and then she looked like she wanted to bite her tongue out. She asked me to forget she’d brought it up. I didn’t exactly promise, but I did say I would be discreet.”
“I didn’t know Olivia told you about that,” Kit said. “Go on. You know we’re dying of curiosity.”
“Well, I asked Roxy about the baby. At first she was upset—actually, she was angry—but then it seemed as if she felt better telling someone after keeping it a secret for so long. And I did say I wouldn’t use any of it in the story, since it’s not really relevant.”
“You must be the only person besides Sam Constantine, Roxy’s lawyer, and maybe Father Niall O’Malley, if she confided in him, who knew before Roxy passed away that she’d had a daughter,” I told her. “No one else had a clue she had a family in England, not even Mac MacDonald, and he’s her nephew.”
“Roxy told me she’d never spoken about it to anyone,” Vivienne said. “And since the golden rule of journalism is ‘Never burn a source,’ I think she knew I would keep her secret, as well. It probably helped that I was a total stranger; plus, she said I was the same age as her granddaughter. She talked about her, too, how she wished she’d known her.”
“Uma Lawrence,” Kit said. “I saw her today as I was leaving Mom’s apartment.”
“Thelma said she was in town. What was she doing at the Manor?” I asked.
“Probably checking out her inheritance.” Kit made a face like she’d eaten something she wanted to spit out. “Roxy’s apartment is nearly cleaned out of all the furniture and it’s going to be up for rent soon. It won’t take more than a couple of days, you wait and see. There’s a huge demand for those places. I hope Mom gets another nice neighbor.”
“Did you talk to her?” I asked. “Uma, I mean.”
“Just condolences. She was a bit standoffish, I thought. Maybe it’s that English reserve.”
“What are you three talking about that’s so engrossing?” Frankie came over to us, holding a plate with a slice of quatre-quarts on it. “We’re serving dessert, which you seem to have missed. If you don’t hurry, the rest of the vultures will devour what’s left before you get a piece.”
Kit stood up. “Over my dead body. And we were just talking about Roxy Willoughby.”
“Her granddaughter’s in town,” Frankie said, passing the plate to Vivienne and sitting down with her. “She arrived today from England. I guess she’s here because of the will. The mailman told me when he brought the mail. He’d just come from the General Store.”
“Why do we even bother putting out a newspaper?” Kit said as I gave her a plate with an extra-generous slice of cake. “I swear, Thelma knows things even before they happen. Her ‘extrasensory psychotic perception,’ as she calls it.”
I laughed, and she said, “So, let me guess what you wanted to talk to me about. Mom’s been after you to find out who poisoned Roxy, hasn’t she?”
I nodded. “Is she all right? Did her doctor switch her meds or something?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. But she’s got this obsession that Roxy had an argument with someone right before she died and that person killed her. It’s crazy.”
“What does Bobby say?”
“He adores Mom—you know that—but he says there’s nothing to investigate. The medical examiner said Roxy died of natural causes. End of story. And there’s no one with a so-called motive, unless you count Mac. He’s the one who lost out when Roxy changed her will,” she said. “Do you really think Mac MacDonald murdered his beloved aunt?”
“God no,” I said. “And neither does your mom. I asked her the same thing.”
Kit shrugged and said through a mouthful of quatre-quarts, “Well, then. There’s your answer.”
“Maybe I’ll talk to Mac,” I said.
“And ask him if he’s a murderer?” Kit gave me an incredulous look. “Good luck with that.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to ask if he poisoned Roxy. But if I could find out who Faith overheard arguing with Roxy and what it was about, that might calm your mom down.”
“Better you than me. You’re the one who called him ‘Uncle Mac’ growing up. He might tell you something.” She scraped her plate with her fork and ate the few last crumbs. “What was the other thing you wanted to ask me about?”
“A favor,” I said. “Something from the Trib’s archives.”
Before dinner, I’d done an Internet search on Congressman Victor Ingrasso. He’d served for nineteen terms—from 1890 to 1928—retiring just before the stock market crashed. Quinn had been vague about when Angelica and Johnny had gotten married, but he thought it was in the mid-1920s. So if the Ingrasso family had taken Zara’s child, it would have happened in that same rough time frame. It seemed like a long shot to find some mention of the baby in the press, but it was a place to start, and we didn’t have much time. Gino had to deliver the money by Friday, and this was Monday night.
Kit set her plate on the table. “What is it?”
I told her, and, predictably, she said, “May I ask why?”
I’d thought this through. “His name came up while I was doing some research on Prohibition for the party on Friday. I’ve got a relative—named Lucy Montgomery—who lived around the same time. Just trying to figure out if there was a connection between the two of them.”
It was a bald-faced lie. Kit frowned. “Someone named Lucy Montgomery, the same as you? Are you talking about an affair?”
“Spelled with a y, not an ie, but yes, the same name. As for the affair, I’m not sure. What I’m looking for would be in the society pages, nothing to do with legislation he was involved with or anything like that,” I said. “Hopefully, that will narrow down the search.”
She was still giving me a suspicious look. “I’ve got a lot going on at work at the moment, but I could try to get to it next week.”
“I need it sooner than that.”
“How much sooner?”
“Tomorrow would be good.”
“‘Tomorrow would be good.’” She folded her arms across her chest. “You want to tell me what’s really going on?”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, brother,” she said. “I should have figured.”
“I’m sorry. Can’t you just trust me?”
She looked exasperated. “Don’t I always?”
“You’re an angel.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “What I am is a pushover. Though if you can calm Mom down after you talk to Mac, I suppose it will be an even exchange.”
“I’ll go see Mac tomorrow,” I said. “If we don’t get snowed in tonight.”
“And I’ll see what I can dig up about your Congressman Ingrasso,” she said, giving me a dark look. “Too bad I don’t know what I’m looking for. Because I have a feeling you do.”