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  The Viognier Vendetta

  ( Wine Country Mystery - 5 )

  Ellen Crosby

  Virginia vintner Lucie Montgomery returns in her fifth mystery. This time she begins by visiting Washington, D.C., during cherry-blossom season. Lucie is excited and intrigued to meet up with an old friend, Rebecca Natale, who is working as an assistant to a philanthropist and investment counselor. But the next morning Lucie is asked to identify Rebecca’s clothes, found in a rowboat floating in the Potomac. Is her friend staging an elaborate disappearance, or could this be suicide, or even murder? Clues include messages to be found in the writings of Alexander Pope and in the history of the War of 1812. As Lucie travels back and forth between her Montgomery Estate Vineyard and various D.C. venues, the wine business and her relationship with winemaker Quinn Santori begin to take a backseat to solving the mystery of Rebecca’s disappearance. The meticulously researched historical background—always a hallmark in Crosby’s novels—is nicely balanced by an intriguing mystery.

  Ellen Crosby

  The Viognier Vendetta

  For Dominick Abel

  And wine can of their wits the wise beguile,

  Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.

  — Homer, Odyssey, translated by Alexander Pope

  When they ask me to become president of the United States,

  I’m going to say, “Except for Washington, D.C.”

  —Bernard Samson, character in Spy Hook by Len Deighton

  Chapter 1

  Ernest Hemingway once said you should always do sober what you said you’d do drunk because it would teach you to keep your mouth shut. It’s advice you remember the morning after when it’s too late and you’ve already given your word.

  Sometimes it’s a big deal, like the wine-fueled discussion between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over where to locate the capital city of the United States. In 1790, Jefferson dined with his nemesis Hamilton, plying him with so much Madeira that Hamilton fuzzily agreed to deliver enough Northern votes to pass a bill approving the Southern site President Washington had chosen along the Potomac River. In return, Jefferson promised that the federal government would assume all debts belonging to the thirteen states. If only it were that easy today.

  Sometimes it’s less significant, like my promise after drinking one too many glasses of my Virginia vineyard’s Viognier to get together with an old college friend in that same capital city. What I didn’t know at the time was that my decision to meet Rebecca Natale would be as life changing for me as the wine-soaked commitment to carve Washington, D.C., out of Maryland and Virginia was for the country.

  The New York City area code popped up on my phone while I was reading in front of a dying fire one late March evening. The number wasn’t familiar, but my kid sister, the family gypsy, lived in Manhattan, where she flitted from a lover’s apartment to a friend’s couch to someone’s house-sitting arrangement. I never knew whose phone she’d borrow to call next. But this time it wasn’t Mia on the other end of the line. It was Rebecca. The last time I’d spoken to her was twelve years ago at her college graduation. After that she left her old life—and her old school friends—behind.

  All she said was, “Hi, Lucie, it’s me.”

  Just like that. Not a word about all those years with no phone call, no e-mail, no nothing. I never understood why she had cut me off. For a while it hurt. Finally I moved on—or thought I had.

  I leaned back against the sofa and closed my eyes. Dammit, why now?

  In retrospect, that should have been my first question. Instead I decided to match her sangfroid. “So it is. Long time no see, Rebecca.”

  “I know, hasn’t it been? That’s why I’m calling. I’ll be in Washington the first weekend in April. I thought we could get together. Maybe you could come into town and stay with me?”

  If she could be blasé about the gaping hole in the time line of our friendship, then so could I.

  “A sightseeing trip for the cherry blossoms?”

  “Oh, gosh no.” Her nervous laughter trilled like a scale. Maybe she wasn’t so blasé after all. “I work for Tommy Asher now. You might have seen the stories in Vanity Fair and Vogue. You do know about the Asher Collection being donated to the Library of Congress, don’t you?”

  Actually I’d seen both articles—the fashion shoot in Vogue and the VF piece, “The Rise of Wall Street’s Recovery Whiz Kids.” Rebecca was the glamorous protégée of billionaire investor guru Sir Thomas Asher. Philanthropist, adventurer, and owner of a highly successful—and exclusive—New York investment firm, the eponymous Thomas Asher Investments. As for the library donation, you’d have to be living in a cave for the past few months not to know that he and Lady Asher were making one of the most significant gifts to the institution since Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library to replace what the British burned during the War of 1812. A collection of rare architectural drawings, maps, paintings, newspapers, and correspondence relating to the design and planning of Washington, D.C.

  Curiosity outweighed anger and wine washed away some of the old hurt, so I told Rebecca I’d meet her. I even agreed to be her guest Saturday evening at a black-tie gala honoring her boss’s philanthropy and patronage of the arts. When she said it was rumored the president would attend, I nearly asked “president of what?” until I realized whom she meant.

  The next morning I thought about calling back and explaining that something had come up.

  But I didn’t.

  Washington, D.C., shares a common bond with Brasília and Canberra, since all were invented to be the capital of a country. A peninsula formed by the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, and originally intended to be no more than a seasonal meeting place to conduct the nation’s business, it was referred to by Thomas Jefferson as “that Indian swamp in the wilderness.” Charles Dickens called the graceless, dirty backwater born of controversy, greed, and deceit the “City of Magnificent Intentions.” My late father, Leland Montgomery, said Washington was the place everyone who didn’t want to live in the United States went to live.

  My French mother didn’t agree with any of them. She was captivated by the classic elegance of a city designed by Pierre L’Enfant, a fellow countryman who envisioned broad Versailles-like diagonal avenues overlapping a grid of streets resembling spiderwebs and graced by wedding cake public buildings of columns, domes, pediments, and porticoes in homage to the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. When my brother, sister, and I were kids, she often made the one-hour drive into town so we could explore the museums, monuments, art galleries, parks, and theaters. After she died, I realized I’d become as seduced by Washington as she had been, but I also knew its dark, violent side away from the federal city, where drugs, crime, and poverty gave the place its other name: “Murder Capital of the United States.”

  Rebecca had booked a suite for us at the Willard hotel, two blocks from the White House and a stone’s throw from the National Mall. The Willard is an iconic landmark, a place of Old World elegance and luxury with its lobby of elaborate mosaic floors, coffered ceilings, marbled columns, and Federal-style furniture grouped in discreet seating areas throughout the room.

  Its nickname is “the residence of presidents” because every U.S. president since the hotel opened in 1850 has either visited or stayed there. Other luminaries on the guest list include Mark Twain, Houdini, Walt Whitman, Jenny Lind, and Mae West. Julia Ward Howe wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while staying there. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Willard.

  A valet held the door as I walked into the splendid lobby past an enormous vase of hyacinths that graced a table of inlaid wood and mother-of-pearl. The old-fashioned clock abov
e the mahogany and marble front desk said quarter to one. I gave my name to the clerk behind the desk and pulled out my credit card. He waved it away.

  “It’s taken care of.” He reached for something from a bank of pigeonhole mailboxes that lined the wall behind him. An envelope. He handed it to me along with the small folder containing my room key card.

  “Ms. Natale asked me to give you this when you arrived, Ms. Montgomery,” he said. “Welcome to the Willard.”

  I slid my finger under the heavy vellum flap and pulled out a sheet of paper embossed with the hotel’s logo.

  In a meeting with Tommy and Mandy all morning. Will be finished by 1. Meet me at the bottom of the steps to the Lincoln Memorial.

  I slipped some money to the bellhop who whisked away my overnight case and garment bag and gave a few more dollars to the valet who put me in a taxi a moment later. The cab zipped down Fourteenth Street to Constitution Avenue, where tour buses lined up near the Washington Monument and the south lawn of the White House. Across the scrubby expanse of the Mall, a ring of American flags surrounding the monument snapped in the wind.

  At home in Atoka, Virginia, some fifty miles west, the landscape was still painted in winter colors of straw and washed-out yellow green. The Blue Ridge Mountains, which for most of the year lived up to their name, were drab and dun colored. Here, though, the promise of spring already hung in the air. On my drive into town, white dogwood bloomed along the roadside, and the banks of Rock Creek Parkway were massed with daffodils and clumps of crocus. Pale pink buds covered the cherry trees near the Washington Monument like a lace curtain.

  The cab dropped me on the Ohio Drive side of the Lincoln Memorial at the far end of the Mall where more blooming trees graced the embankment by the Potomac River. I waited for the light on Independence and wondered why Rebecca had decided we should meet here rather than the hotel.

  I understood as soon as I saw her standing on the marble steps of the memorial regarding me like a Greek goddess at the entrance to her temple, a bouquet of yellow roses in her arms. I’d nearly forgotten how her sloe-eyed dusky beauty, inherited from a Vietnamese mother and Italian father, turned men’s—and women’s—heads. Even now she earned appreciative stares from passersby.

  She descended the stairs with the fluid grace I remembered from our days as running partners at school, but everything else about her had changed. Movie-star sunglasses held back her shoulder-length dark hair to reveal large teardrop diamond-and-sapphire earrings. A matching pendant hung around her neck. Somehow I knew the stones were real. She wore a well-cut persimmon wool blazer, cream silk blouse, and slim jeans that looked tailored. The fringe of an off-white silk shawl flung around her shoulders fluttered in the breeze. It didn’t look like she was buying her clothes in secondhand shops anymore.

  Rebecca knew about my accident, but she’d never seen me with the cane I now use. When her eyes fell on it, I caught the brief flicker of consternation and something else—I think it was shock. She recovered at once, though her laugh was too hearty, too forced, and her hug a little too fierce.

  “Oh, my God! I can’t believe it! Look at you, Lucie, you look fabulous.”

  I patted her on the back with one hand, leaning on my cane with the other. This was going to be harder than I expected.

  Seven years ago the hospital nurses had been sure the extravagant bouquet of peonies, calla lilies, and hydrangea had been sent by my boyfriend who’d been driving the car that smashed into a stone wall with me in the passenger seat. But I’d recognized Rebecca’s distinctive bold scrawl the moment I saw the card.

  Who shall decide when doctors disagree, and soundest casuists doubt, like you and me? Don’t listen to the docs and don’t doubt yourself. Chin up—you’ll pull through. R.

  So she’d also heard that my doctors didn’t think I’d walk again. Later I looked up the quote. Alexander Pope—I should have guessed. Rebecca had a fine mathematical mind, but she possessed a poet’s soul. She especially loved the Restoration poets for their interest in reason and logic and their desire to bring order to the natural world. As for the casuists, she shared their practical view of life: Deciding right or wrong on moral issues depended on the circumstances. No absolutes, a kind of shifting value system. Deceiving someone or lying was wrong—unless the consequences were worse if you didn’t.

  I wondered if she’d changed.

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” The exotic tilt to her eyes always made her look as though she’d just woken up to something that pleased her. Now a new shrewdness glittered in them.

  At least we were going to get right to it. Good. No more games.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why’d you come?”

  “Curiosity. Why’d you ask me?”

  The question seemed to surprise her. “It’s been too long. I wanted to see you.”

  Sure she did. “What do you want, Rebecca?”

  “Wow, you didn’t use to be so blunt.” She brushed back a strand of wind-whipped hair from her eyes and laughed uneasily. “I mean it. I wanted to see you. You stuck by me through tough times, Little. I haven’t forgotten.”

  In my freshman year of college, the bewitching and brainy Rebecca Natale had been assigned to be my “big sister” when I’d joined the cross-country team. Back then I called her “Big” since she was also a senior; she reciprocated with “Little.”

  Running was the only thing the two of us had in common. Rebecca grew up in the hardscrabble Dorchester section of Boston, the daughter of immigrants. She worked a couple of jobs to pay for what loans and a scholarship didn’t cover and lived on vending machine food because it was cheap. I grew up in the affluent heart of Virginia horse-and-hunt country, a picturesque region of rolling hills, charming villages, and fence-lined country lanes. My tuition was paid from a trust fund set up by my grandparents.

  Two things cemented our friendship—both tragedies in their own way. Rebecca’s affair that autumn with a married professor whose wife also taught at the university and the death of my mother in the spring. The sordid gossip that went around school about Rebecca and the handsome, straight-as-an-arrow chairman of the English department, their motel trysts and rough sex on his office desk, shocked everyone. I never asked her about it and she never discussed it—not one single time during the hours and hours we trained together. And when I returned to school, numb with grief after my mother’s funeral, it was Rebecca who came to my dorm room and wouldn’t leave until I laced up my running shoes and went out with her, day in and day out. Wouldn’t let me quit the team. Made sure I showed up for meets.

  I stared at her now and knew she was remembering those days, just as I was.

  “Are you in trouble?” I asked. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “Of course I’m not.” I might have believed her too-quick protest if she looked me in the eye, but she didn’t. “I’ve been doing some thinking, and I know I didn’t do right by our friendship after I left school. I wanted to see you …” She hesitated. “To ask if you’ll forgive me.”

  I hadn’t seen that one coming. And she’d phrased it like a yes-or-no question when it was so much more complicated.

  “Rebecca—”

  She cut me off. “I know what you’re going to say. Look, I didn’t plan to lay this on you thirty seconds after we see each other for the first time in, well … a long time.” She gestured to the top of the stairs where Lincoln sat in his splendid chamber. “I’ve got to buy a couple of postcards. You mind waiting while I dash up to the gift shop? Then maybe we could rewind, start over again.”

  Or maybe we could slow this oncoming freight train down a little.

  “I can climb stairs, Big.”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “Then stop acting like I’m not up to this, not strong enough mentally or physically.”

  She could figure out for herself whether I was talking about stair climbing or seeing each other again.

  “Oh, God, Lucie, that’s the l
ast thing I’d ever do. You’re stronger than anyone I know.” She placed her hand on my arm. “I mean it.”

  I turned toward the stairs and wondered what this reunion was all about.

  “It’s been years since I visited this place,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Sure.” She withdrew her hand. “After you.”

  Halfway up she said, “I guess ‘how’ve you been?’ is kind of a stupid question.”

  I looked up at the enormous contemplative statue of Lincoln, which had gradually come into view.

  “Why’d you wait so long to get in touch? Twelve years since you graduated, Big.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I had a lot of things to work out about myself and my life after everything with Connor …”

  I waited, but she didn’t finish the sentence.

  “You ever see him again?”

  “Nope. I heard he left teaching altogether. Moved to Wyoming and bought a ranch. His wife’s teaching at Georgetown now.” She added, “Ex-wife.”

  I nodded. Somehow I knew there would be more if I waited. There was. She seemed to be struggling with her emotions.

  “You never asked me about Connor, never said a word about what happened. Never judged me. I don’t know if you realized how much that meant to me, Lucie. Everyone else said I ruined his marriage, broke up his beautiful family.”

  “I had no right to judge you.” We reached the main chamber, clogged with tourists visiting for the cherry blossoms. “I had no idea what the circumstances were.”

  “The circumstances were so frickin’ complicated,” she said with heat. “I never told anyone the truth. Everyone was so concerned about Connor: his life, his career, his wife and kids. No one gave a damn about me.”

  After all these years she still carried that much anger and bitterness in her heart? Somehow I thought she would have moved on, put it behind her.