Free The Sauvignon Secret by Ellen Crosby Page A

chère
Juliette.”
    “Thank you for dinner,” I said.
    Juliette gazed at me like she had no idea who I was. “Yes, yes, of course.”
    I followed my grandfather outside, where one of the valets had the Mini waiting in front of the entrance. We got in the car without speaking. I believe Juliette came to the door and watched us drive off, but I couldn’t be sure because I kept my eyes glued to the road so I didn’t have to see the utterly bereft look on Pépé’s face.
    The lights from the Thiessmans’ house glittered in my rearview mirror until I turned down the side road where Charles’s lodge was located and we were swallowed up in darkness.
    What Charles wanted to talk about and why we had to retreat to his private eyrie to talk about it was anybody’s guess. Now it wouldn’t be long before we found out. Hopefully by then my grandfather would have composed himself. Charles’s wife was in love with him. And after tonight, it seemed Pépé was at least a little bit in love with her, too.

CHAPTER 7

    My grandfather’s silence filled the car until I felt so claustrophobic I had to roll down my window. The night air rushed in, sharp and stinging, as though summer had evaporated in the past few hours. The unexpected smoky tang of autumn scented the breeze and whipped my hair in my eyes. I shivered and rolled up the window again, but at least now my alcohol-buzzed brain felt like it had been jolted out of its stupor.
    As soon as I drove beyond Juliette’s gardens and her greenhouse, the gravel road plunged into a thicket of woods that closed around the car. I put on the brakes because I had been speeding, and in the murky swirl of fog my headlights turned trees, underbrush, and impenetrable black holes an unnatural yellow-green. Overhead the canopy of trees wove together and blocked out the night sky so it felt like we were winding through a tunnel or a cave.
    “Are you sure this is the right way?” Pépé asked after a few minutes. “Maybe you should have turned left at that fork in the road beyond the house.”
    “I thought you told me Charles said right.”
    We rounded a corner and he said, “I think I see a light up ahead.”
    “I wonder what he wants to talk about. He said it was life or death.”
    “Juliette knows he’s upset about something,” my grandfather said.
    “She has no idea about what?”
    Pépé tilted his head, as though he were weighing his answer. I wondered if he was thinking about Juliette or me. “She says she does not.”
    “You don’t believe her?”
    “I think she has her suspicions,” he said. “She asked if I would do what I could for him.”
    “And you said yes.”
    “I said I would try. But Charles specifically asked for you to come this evening,
ma belle
, and you’re the one he asked for help.” He gave me a sideways glance. “I don’t know what, if any, role he has in mind for me.”
    “Mick Dunne got me to agree to fly out to California to sample some wine Charles talked him into buying,” I said. “Mick knew you had business out there, too, so he figured I could accompany you and, um, we’d … be together. And Charles was the one who set you up to talk to this Bohemian Grove group.”
    “How interesting. Obviously it’s no coincidence. I wonder what Charles has got up his sleeve.”
    I rounded another bend in the road and the light grew larger, winking like a wicked eye between the tree branches.
    “I guess we’re about to find out,” I said. “I hope that’s the lodge, or else we’re really lost.”
    I parked in front of a rustic cabin that sat in a clearing surrounded by Charles’s smallish vineyard. The cloudless blue-black sky was star filled and serene. A scuffed-silver half-moon hung high above the trees and brushed the tops of the vines so they looked frost rimed. The luminescent clock on my car dashboard showed ten minutes to midnight.
    “Should we wait for him?” I asked.
    “He said to make ourselves at home.” Pépé was already