The Sauvignon Secret
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Published by: Scribner
Release Date: August 12, 2017
Pages: 272
ISBN13: 9781501188404
Synopsis
When Lucie Montgomery finds the body of prominent wine merchant Paul Noble hanging from a beam in his art studio not far from her Virginia vineyard, she is unwittingly dragged into Noble's murky past. Once a member of the secretive "Mandrake Society," Noble might have aided in a cover-up of the deaths forty-years ago of a disabled man and a beautiful young biochemist involved in classified government research.
A seemingly innocent favor for an old friend of her French grandfather's sends Lucie to California where she teams up with Quinn Santori, who walked out of Lucie's life months earlier. Soon Lucie and Quinn are embroiled in a deadly cat-and-mouse game that takes them from glittering San Francisco to the legendary vineyards of Napa and Sonoma, and back home to Virginia, as they try to discover whether a killer may be seeking vengeance for the long-ago deaths. As Lucie and Quinn struggle to uncover the mystery, they must also decide whether they have a future together, both professionally and romantically.
Praise
"Crosby imbues her work with a killer plot (and surprising conclusion), agreeable characters, polished prose and colorful detail. . . . Blended, they provide a superior yield."
—The Richmond Times-Dispatch
“To her string of Wine Country cases (The Viognier Vendetta, 2010, etc.), Crosby adds another well-conceived mystery and the latest dispatches concerning Lucie's troubled love life.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“. . . wine aficionados and those fond of the San Francisco Bay Area will be well rewarded.”
—Publishers Weekly
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Excerpt
We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
—Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist, novelist, writer
Chapter 1
I didn’t want to kill Paul Noble. Yes, I said it. Worse, I said it in a public place. In my defense, half a dozen people at that same meeting chimed in. “Get in line” or “join the club” or “you and me both.”
It was a figure of speech and everyone in the room—twenty-five northern Virginia winemakers like me—knew it. At least that’s what I thought at the time. So when I found Paul one blazing hot July afternoon a few weeks later in the two-hundred year old fieldstone barn he’d converted into an artist’s studio hanging from a beam, the first thing I thought was “Oh my God, someone really did it.”
My second thought was that I could see my breath because the room felt like I’d stepped inside a refrigerator. A blast of arctic air blew down my spine, bringing with it the faint but unmistakable sickening-sweet stench of death. How long had he been here? A few hours—maybe more—based on his mottled face, the slightly blackened tongue protruding from his mouth, and his bugged-out, vacant eyes. I put a hand over my own mouth, swallowing what had come up in my throat. At least the glacial temperature had slowed down decomposition.
A paint-spattered stool was overturned in a dark wet spot on the carpet underneath Paul. He’d soiled himself—his khakis were stained—but it wasn’t that. An empty bottle of wine lay on its side on the rug next to a broken wine glass. I didn’t need to lean in to see what he had been drinking. A bottle of my vineyard’s wine, Montgomery Estate Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc. We’d won a couple of awards for it.
It was still possible to make out something in faded gold silkscreen on the wine glass. Nothing I recognized. No logo, no fancy calligraphy of a vineyard’s name or a commemorative occasion; just a cartoonish figure of an empty-eyed man whose hands were clasped over stubs of ears, mouth open in the perfect round “O” of a scream.
My stomach churned again. I reached out to steady myself on the glass-topped table Paul used for his tubes of paint, palettes, and jars of brushes, pulling my hand back in the nick of time. The Loudoun County sheriff’s department would be all over this place as soon as someone—meaning me—phoned in a suspicious death and they’d check for fingerprints, fibers and whatever they could find that would tell them who Paul’s most recent visitors had been. No point contributing evidence I’d have to explain later.
I backed out of the barn into a wall of triple-digit heat. Though Paul had made many enemies with the way he did business, that kicked-over stool looked like suicide. Talk about an unlikely person to kill himself. Only two days ago I’d been on the phone with him and he’d been as ornery and mean-spirited as ever.
The only remaining brother of Noble Brothers Fine Wine Importers and Distributors, Paul Noble had the exclusive contract to distribute my wines to restaurants and stores, a monopoly he ran like a tin-pot dictator and the reason so many vineyard owners hated him. It worked like this: Paul told you what he’d pay for your wine if you wanted it sold anywhere outside your tasting room and you said yes, thanks. Tell him no or go to hell and no one would, or could, touch it. Hence the word “exclusive” and the reason he got away with rock-bottom offers that forced more than one small family-owned vineyard to throw in the towel after their profit margin flat-lined.
These were hard-working people—friends—not some faceless business venture. Paul was nothing more than a wholesaler middleman who pocketed a share of someone else’s blood, sweat, and toil. For that we could thank the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed Prohibition but kept a chokehold over the distribution of “demon alcohol” spawning the Paul Nobles of this world. It wasn’t fair, but it was the law.
Paul had called me last Tuesday. The minute I saw his name flash on my phone’s caller ID display I knew I was in for it. He didn’t waste time telling me he could no longer buy my Cabernet Sauvignon for the price we’d agreed on in the spring and if I wanted him to take it now, I had to throw in my Sauvignon Blanc, medals and all, for another fire sale price.
“We had a deal,” I said. “You promised.”
He’d caught me as I was walking through the courtyard that connected the barrel room where we made wine with the tasting room where we sold it. In the distance, the vineyard was summer-lush and green, framed by the soft-shouldered Blue Ridge Mountains. I loved this view, especially at sunset when the honey-colored light spread across the fields and gilded the vines like a scene out of a dream.
“Look, Lucie, it’s not my fault the economy’s in the toilet,” he said. “I can’t sell it if I buy it at that price now.”
I deadheaded a wine barrel planter filled with rioting petunias, snapping off wilted blossoms and thinking evil thoughts about Paul. He could keep our agreement and sell it at the old price, but it meant cutting his own profit.
“Paul,” I said. “Please.”
“Sorry, kiddo. No can do.”
“I can’t even cover my costs if I sell it to you for that price.”
“It’s just for now,” he said. “Things’ll improve and we’ll do better next year. We all have to tighten our belts, you know.”
Paul’s belt went around a waistline that was forty-plus inches. He flew to Europe regularly to negotiate deals on the wines he imported where he also bought his hand-made shirts on Jermyn Street and his bespoke tailored suits on Savile Row in London, his favorite tasseled loafers at Gucci’s in Rome, and his silk bow ties from haut-couture designers in Paris.
“Maybe we can talk about this,” I said.
“Sweetheart, come on. I’m trying to help you here,” he said. “You know as well as I do that unless you meet my price your wine will just sit in the warehouse. No one will touch it. They’ll buy something else.”
“That’s not true.” I rubbed a small spot between my eyes where my pulse had started to pound.
I knew this game. He muscled me to cut my profit and then he did the same thing to the retailer. Everybody bled but him.
“Look, I gotta go. Someone just walked in. Think it over. You’ve got two days.” He hung up before I could make a stunned reply.
One of the threadbare jokes about owning a vineyard is that it’s a sure-fire way to make a small fortune. All you have to do is start with a large one. I didn’t have a large fortune when I took over the family business four years ago thanks to Leland, my father, who never met an investment opportunity—or get-rich-quick scheme—that hadn’t called out to him and his wallet until he died in a hunting accident. After his death, an inheritance from my mother’s estate helped me get back on my feet, but that money was gone after fixing what Leland had let get run down and planting more vines. Throw in a rough spring earlier this year when my winemaker took a break to wrap up personal business in California and an unexpected hard frost in May that killed half our crop, and I was teetering on the precipice again. Paul’s phone call couldn’t have come at a worse time.
For the next forty-eight hours I’d stewed about that ultimatum and the unfairness of what he was trying to do to me until I decided to drive over to his home outside the pretty Quaker village of Waterford—rather than meet him in his Georgetown office—and tell him it would be a cold day in hell before I’d give in and let him have my wine for a steal. That was before I discovered him hanging from a rafter in his barn above a pool of my Sauvignon Blanc.
I shaded my eyes against the hard slant of the noontime sunshine and looked across Paul’s golf-course-perfect lawn to the fields and woods beyond. The main road was a half-mile away at the end of his long driveway—more like a private road. His graceful two-story Georgian house was secluded—isolated, even—on a large tract of land. A magnolia with a few remaining blossoms dominated the front yard and border gardens filled with impatiens and summer pansies lined the walk to the front door. Two red Adirondack chairs had been pulled together around a matching wooden table in the shade of a weeping cherry. The house looked closed up, almost like a vacation house shuttered at the end of the season. Paul lived alone, though I’d heard the gossip ranging from bitterly divorced decades ago to gay but kept quiet about it.
Had someone else been here earlier? What if he—or she, or they—killed Paul and then staged the hanging so a murder looked like suicide? They said suicide victims generally left notes. I hadn’t seen one, but then I hadn’t thought about checking.
A car could have come and gone easily without being noticed, certainly not by any neighbor since the nearest one was down the road apiece. The only vehicle I’d seen after driving through the tree-lined streets of Waterford had been a John Deere tractor on the outskirts of town. The farmer pulled over and waved so I could pass him near the cemetery entrance on Loyalty Road.
What about now? Was I still alone?
I took another long, slow look around his house and grounds. Except for the twittering of birds hidden in the trees and the faint buzz of the cicadas, the place was as hushed and silent as a cathedral.
I pulled my phone out of my purse and palmed it. Once I called the sheriff’s department, I’d be halfway down the slippery slope, letting myself in for a heap of trouble. First, I was the one who found Paul. Then there was that argument the last time we spoke and the fact that I recently said in public that I’d like to kill him—even if it was in jest. Throw in my wine bottle at the scene and the reason I’d come over here unannounced: to have a showdown with the deceased.
On the plus side, I didn’t murder Paul Noble.
I punched in 911 on my phone and made the call.
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