The Sauvignon Secret

filmed. I have no idea what triggered it: Charles’s fifties-era attire, Juliette’s giddy coquettish airs befitting a much younger woman—and that portrait in the library—or the realization that all the other guests except me had probably come of age in the aftermath of World War II or earlier.

I caught a flash of white and gold across the pool, and then Juliette stood beside her husband, linking her arm through Charles’s and informing him in a low voice that the Hanovers were inside and dying to talk to him. I heard her quiet remark about an oxygen tank and not getting Mr. Hanover overly excited. He was in the library if Charles wouldn’t mind joining him there. Charles excused himself, and the other couple departed, leaving Juliette with Pépé and me. Something crackled in the air between her and my grandfather. For a split second, I felt like the child who accidentally stumbled into an intimate conversation between adults, overhearing a stray remark on a subject about which they felt vaguely ashamed.

“We’ve just had a greenhouse built behind the swimming pool.” Juliette seemed to be reaching for something innocuous to talk about. She waved a hand at a wrought-iron gate in the stucco wall and rambled on. “I’m so sorry Chantal isn’t here to see it. I miss her the most when I’m working in the gardens, especially among the roses. Would you like to have a tour?”

Of all the subjects she could have chosen, I wished she had brought up anything but my mother. I often thought Pépé grieved even more deeply than I did over her death, perhaps because he still hadn’t gotten over the devastation of losing his wife when he had to deal with the death of an adored daughter.

Juliette glanced at me as a courtesy, but I knew she’d been speaking to my grandfather.

“I’d love to see your greenhouse,” I said, “but if you’ll excuse me, I ought to find your powder room. You two go along. I’ll catch up later.”

Pépé shot me a martyred look as though he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions without a chaperone, but I gave him a bland see-no-evil look and smiled. He was a big boy; he could handle this.

The powder room off the foyer was occupied. As I waited, the noisy sounds of the kitchen staff preparing dinner floated down the hallway. My cousin would be there, cool and collected, calmly making sure everything was in order with her staff, the meal, her host and hostess.

I walked down the hall and pushed open the swinging door. Juliette’s enormous French country kitchen was warm and inviting, dominated by a collection of brass and copper pots suspended from a wrought-iron rack over a granite island and walls filled with colorful plates and oil paintings. Above all, the fragrant aroma of baking and the odors of garlic, onions, herbs, and spices mingled with meat and, I thought, fish, smelled wonderful.

Jasmine, the waitress who had filled my champagne glass and gotten Charles his martini, stood at the large Viking stove, whisking something in a copper saucepan.

“Can I help you?” she asked, mopping her forehead with the sleeve of a chef’s jacket she now wore. Her voice was low and pleasant, and in the brighter lighting of the kitchen, I noticed the tiny beauty mark by her upper lip, the quizzical tilt of her dark eyebrows, and intelligent eyes.

“Smells wonderful in here,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”

“Roast chicken with garlic and herbs, pan-seared trout with summer vegetables, new potato gratin … the menu’s à la française, of course, for Bastille Day. Crepes for dessert, fresh berry compote, and mousse au chocolat. All the herbs, vegetables, and fruit are from Mrs. Thiessman’s garden or her greenhouse. Even the olives. She cured them herself. The chicken is from the organic butcher in Middleburg and the fish from someone I found who catches it fresh.”

Her French accent sounded native and she obviously worked at the Goose Creek Inn as more than a waitress. I knew almost everyone on the staff, but I hadn’t met her.

“We haven’t been introduced,” I said. “Dominique told me she hired a new chef last month, so I guess that would be you. I’m Lucie Montgomery.”

“I figured you might be.” She looked up from her sauce again, a game expression on her face, eyes avoiding my cane. “You own the vineyard. I’m Jasmine Nouri. Your cousin did hire me as an assistant chef, but it looks like I’m probably going to be helping out more with the catering business. Tonight, though, she thought I was too new to solo and she needed to supervise.”

I wondered when Jasmine Nouri would find out that if Dominique had been around when God made heaven and earth, she’d feel the need to supervise Him before he went solo on this brand-new creation thing He was trying out.

She must have read my mind because she said, “Don’t worry. Everyone from the bookkeeper to the guy who takes care of valet parking has made sure to tell me she likes to keep her finger in every pot. Literally.”

“That’s because so far no one in the family has found her Off switch,” I said. “And now we’re all pretty sure she doesn’t have one.”

Jasmine smiled.

“Where did you work before you came here?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Everywhere. Most recently a restaurant in Portland, Oregon.”

“Virginia’s a long way from Oregon.”

“Umm.” She turned off the gas and set the saucepan on another burner. “I’d better get busy. Dominique will have my head if this evening isn’t perfect.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to distract you. I’ll just say hi, then disappear,” I said and slipped out the side door.

My cousin glanced up from grinding her cigarette butt under the heel of a black sandal. She looked like she did the time I caught her in the kitchen adding a can of broth to her made-from-scratch chicken stock.

“Merde, you scared me,” she said. “I thought it was Juliette. She believes cigarettes are the devil’s creation. They’re totally banned from the house.”

“Serves you right if it had been Juliette. When are you going to quit? You’ll get cancer.”

“Pépé smokes like a chimney. He’s eighty-four and he doesn’t have cancer. We’ve got good genes,” she said. “Where is he, by the way?”

“Visiting the greenhouse. Juliette is giving him a tour.”

“Just the two of them?”

I nodded and Dominique shot me an unreadable look that I didn’t like.

“Where’s Charles?” she asked. “She sent him to the library to talk to a guest who’s on oxygen. You know, I think I’m the only person here tonight except for your staff who is under sixty. Maybe even under seventy.”

My cousin didn’t smile. “Merde,” she said again. “I knew it.”

“What?” I asked.

“She’s still in love with him. After all these years.”

“What are you talking about? Pépé and Juliette?”

Dominique automatically slipped her pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her slim-cut black trousers and I glared at her.

“Oh, all right,” she said and shoved them back. “But it calms my nerves when I smoke.”

“Forget the cigarettes and tell me about Pépé and Juliette.”

“I forgot that you wouldn’t have known. It started after Grand-mama died. My mother told me the story one night when we stayed up really late and drank too much champagne. He was so lost on his own. Juliette … well, she lived in the same building on Boulevard Saint-Denis, so they all knew each other.” She bent and picked up her cigarette butt, holding it between her thumb and forefinger like it was some rare specimen that needed to be preserved. “She got in the habit of coming by to bring him dinner. She’d say she just cooked a little more than they needed and that he would waste away to nothing if he didn’t eat. Sometimes my mother and I would drop by his apartment and there’d be a pretty bouquet of flowers, or pastries from the boulangerie across the street. My mother said she always knew they were from her. Juliette was married at the time to a troll who beat her. She finally left him.”

“And?”

“Well, I think she was hoping … you know. ”

“That Pépé would ask her to marry him?”

She nodded.

“Were they, I mean did they … I mean …”

“Did they have sex? Is that what you mean?” Dominique rolled her eyes. “And who do you think was going to ask him that? You know Pépé. Mon Dieu, he’s so private. They could have