industry was booming, thriving. The fact that Virginia is getting a reputation as a hot wine-tourism destination. It’s been kind of cool to be on the cutting edge of something like that.”
“It’s a much smaller pond,” I said.
“Actually, it’s minuscule in terms of total U.S. wine production. California accounts for ninety percent all by itself. Nine more percent—in other words, ninety-nine percent—comes from the three other states you just mentioned.” He held up fingers as he ticked off each one. “New York, Washington, and Oregon. Everyone else is fighting for a market share of the remaining one percent. That includes Virginia.”
I knew those numbers, knew where we stood, but it still shocked me to hear him rattle them off like that. Until now I had never considered that his private tug-of-war between California and Virginia had been about leaving the Eden of American winemaking with its worldwide reputation to come to a place that many people still didn’t even know grew grapes, hot tourism destination notwithstanding.
So Virginia was “first in wine” because we made it two years after colonists arrived in Jamestown and discovered native grapes, big fat deal. California was the largest, as in ball-out-of-the-park-home-run size, and I wondered, though he’d never admitted it to me, if Quinn still equated that primacy and clout with being the best. And whether the glamorous cachet and storied history of California wine country, which to most of the world meant Napa and Sonoma, where he was from, were really what he missed after he moved to Virginia.
“Well, we may be small, but we’re damn good,” I said.
We were finally back in the city, catching red lights at almost every intersection. I saw signs for the San Francisco Zoo and then, abruptly, the ocean was directly in front of us as if we were going to drive straight into it. Quinn turned right at the edge of the beach and we followed the coast up a long, steep hill.
“Don’t be so defensive,” he said. “I wasn’t criticizing.”
“I’m not.”
But it was like what Mark Twain said about his wife and swearing: Quinn had the words right, but not the tune. He’d sounded halfhearted, and I wondered yet again if he’d been subtly signaling his intent to stay here and I’d been resolutely trying to ignore it.
He reached over and squeezed my hand. “We’re almost there. Enjoy the view. We can talk business another time.”
I saw the rooftop sign for the Cliff House before the long, low white building came into view. We rounded a corner and all of a sudden it was right there, sitting perilously close to where the traffic whizzed past, tucked into a sharp elbow curve as the road spiraled upward. Anything that came downhill in the opposite direction probably needed to slam on the brakes for that wicked turn or else end up in the dining room. A dozen or so cars were parked in front of the restaurant, jammed in at angles like bad teeth.
“Damn,” Quinn said. “I didn’t think it would be so crowded at this hour. We’ll find a spot up the hill.”
“Where are we?” I asked as we drove past a sprawling wooded park.
“A place called Land’s End.”
He did a neat job of parallel parking in a space that should have required a shoehorn. We walked back down the steep sidewalk to the restaurant. A large stone ruin filled with water sat at the edge of the sea below us.
“It looks like an old swimming pool,” I said.
“That’s the Sutro Baths,” he said. “Dates back to the early days of the Cliff House. It was supposed to rival something a Roman emperor would have built. Now it has a reputation as a kind of mystical place, especially at the end of the day when you can see the setting sun and the lights from inside the restaurant reflected in the water. It makes the baths look like a cauldron of fire. You see photographers here all the time taking pictures of cloud formations or seagulls flying into the marine layer—the lighting’s pretty amazing.”
I stared at the dark, placid pool, the broken lines of stone, and the tumble of rocks to the shore, and imagined flaming water and wide-winged birds soaring in the mist over the Pacific Ocean.
“It must be beautiful. Are the baths off-limits, or can you go down there and explore?”
“Oh, you can check it out,” he said, “but there’s a sign in a bunch of languages warning that you could get thrown off the rocks and die if you’re in the wrong place when a wave comes crashing in.”
I shuddered, but he’d spoken in such a matter-of-fact way I knew it was firsthand information. “You know that because you’ve been there.”
He flashed a smug grin and held open the door to the restaurant. “Of course.”
A waitress dressed in black brought us to a corner bistro table on a balcony lounge overlooking a two-story restaurant in the new part of the building. Already the shades on the floor-to-ceiling windows had been lowered to screen the fierce late-afternoon sunlight, which glinted like polished mirror off the Pacific, and streamed into the all-white room with its vaulted ceiling and modern steal-beamed architecture.
Quinn ordered mojitos for us and asked for them to be made with rum rather than Mexican tequila. After the waitress left, I got my phone out of my purse and handed it to him. He pulled his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and turned his back to the window, squinting in the bright light as he stared at the little screen, flicking through each of the photographs.
“They seem to be good friends, real close,” he said. “Looks like these were taken at a summer beach get- together.”
“Charles said they spent weekends together at a cottage on Pontiac Island. That’s where Maggie came up with their name. The Mandrake Society. He made it sound like they did everything as a group, including socializing.”
“Well, with the super-top-secret clearances they must have had, at least they were hanging out with people who were involved in the same project,” he said. “At that level, it’s need to know only. You can’t even blab to your reflection in the mirror without worrying about a security breach.”
I took the phone and scrolled through the photos as he had done. “They genuinely liked each other,” I said. “Look at their body language and how comfortable everyone is with everyone else. I’ll bet they had some good times together.”
“Until it all fell apart,” Quinn said.
“Their breakup must have been spectacular if they scattered to the winds after Stephen Falcone died and Maggie was killed in that car crash.”
Our waitress set down our mojitos and a dish of salted nuts.
He touched his glass to mine. “I’m glad you came to San Francisco.”
“Me, too. Thanks for a fabulous tour.”
He dunked his mint leaves into his glass and squirted lime into his drink. I copied him.
“I didn’t know you liked mojitos,” I said. “I can’t remember the last time I had one.”
“I read somewhere it was Hemingway’s favorite drink in Key West. I also read he drank whatever was on the table until he was under it.” He shrugged. “It seems like a mojito kind of day.”
He sat back and watched me as though he were contemplating something, or perhaps waiting for an answer to one of the unspoken questions that hung in the air between us. I couldn’t go down that road right now. All the warning signs were there for this to come to grief if we pushed it.
We’d come this far. Why ruin everything?
“Back to the pictures,” I said.
He sipped his drink. “You have the floor. We were talking about a breakup, I believe?”
“Of the Mandrake Society.”
He grinned and I went on. “After they split up, everyone went their own way. Maggie was dead and Theo thought the others conspired to tamper with her car and cause her accident. That meant Mel, Paul, Vivian. And Charles.”
Quinn set his drink down and made circles on the table with it like he was trying to work this out. “Especially Charles. Based on everything you said, Theo held him more accountable than anyone else.”
“I wonder if Theo knew about the affair? Or maybe he guessed,” I said.
He stopped moving his glass around. “How long after Stephen died was Maggie killed?”
“You mean like days or weeks?” I asked and he nodded. “I don’t know, and Charles didn’t specify. But after Stephen died, his sister—I think her name was Elinor—showed up. That’s what seemed to freak everyone out.”
“What happened to Elinor?”
“Charles paid her off and told her that Stephen was a patriot. Said he saved her from a lifetime of caring for
