I almost heard voices laughing and shouting and cursing in Italian, a few notes of Verdi sung with gusto. Quinn leaned against a wooden pillar in the middle of the barn, hands in his jeans pockets, and watched me.
“What do you think?” His voice echoed off the rafters.
“I think it’s fantastic,” I said.
He smiled. “Me, too.”
“I wonder what it was like to make wine back then, before everything was mechanized. Maybe they didn’t even have electricity or refrigeration when they built this place.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “There’s another floor above us that was probably used for crushing and fermentation. They would have been able to take advantage of gravity to drain the wine off the skins into settling tanks down here. That huge door you saw on the upper level was possibly the way they got rid of the pumice. Just shoveled it out to the ground and carted it off.”
I pointed to the Christmas lights. “Someone still uses this place.”
“Tastings for special clients. My winemaker friend got married here. Stuff like that. Eventually they’d like to get it on the National Register of Historic Places.”
“It would be wonderful to get married here. I’ll bet it was really romantic.”
It slipped out, an easy response to his comment about his friend’s wedding. But Quinn’s reaction—stunned silence—was like a curtain slamming down between us. He realized it, just as I did.
“Yeah, they had a nice ceremony. Real pretty.” His voice was flat, deadpan.
“Oh, come on, Quinn. It was just a simple remark. I wasn’t implying anything.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Then why are you acting like I yelled ‘fire’ in a crowded room, and you’re looking for the nearest exit?”
“Now you’re the one reading into things.”
“I’m not.”
It ended right there in the old winery, the magic of the past two days. We were like guests who overstayed their welcome at a party, forgetting to leave while everyone was having a good time. A gust of wind blew through the open doorway, skittering a puddle of dry leaves across the floor. Quinn roused himself from his post.
“We should get going,” he said. “What time is Brooke expecting us?”
“When we get there,” I said. “Mick told me she was pretty laid-back about it. She gave him her cell number and said I should call before I wanted to come. She’d be there.”
“Then let’s grab lunch in Calistoga,” he said. “You can call her from there.”
We barely spoke on the drive back to Napa. But when he turned off Petrified Forest Road onto 29, I spotted a sign that said ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON STATE PARK, 9 MILES.
“What’s that?”
“Stevenson spent time near Calistoga back in the late 1800s,” he said. “I thought you knew the story. The park is on the site of an abandoned mine where he camped out one summer. Spent his honeymoon there, with a married woman he’d fallen in love with, after she got divorced, of course. He wrote a book about it.
“I didn’t realize this was the place,” I said. “And I’d forgotten it was his honeymoon.”
He gave me another look like I’d just lighted the fuse to a stick of dynamite.
“Maybe we should change the subject. Maybe I should call Brooke.” I got out my phone and thumbed through the contacts.
He pulled into a parking space on the main street of Calistoga in front of a restaurant called Café Sarafornia. “You did tell her I’m coming, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t tell her anything. I haven’t talked to her yet. Mick made the arrangements. I told you that.”
“So she has no clue?”
“No, she doesn’t. Why, is it going to be a problem? She might not sell me the wine if you’re involved?”
I shouldn’t have baited him like that, but he asked for it. He got out of the car and slammed the door.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t slam the door like that. And if you want to go with me, fine. If you don’t, I’ll get a cab and go myself.”
I picked up my cane as he opened my door.
“This isn’t the big city, sweetheart. You don’t just step out into the street and wait for a taxi to pull over.” His voice was curt.
“Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out, just like I always do,” I said. “If you’re going to walk out on me.”
I didn’t say “again,” but I might as well have done.
“That was low,” he said. “And if you don’t want me to come along, it’s no skin off my nose.”
“You know, I don’t care what you do anymore. You don’t want to commit to this, either, suit yourself.”
“What ‘either’?”
“You know damn well what ‘either.’ I’m talking about everything. Us. The vineyard. Virginia. All of it.” By now I was practically shouting at him.
An elderly couple passing by swiveled their heads and gave me reproachful looks like I’d been talking in the middle of the church sermon. I lowered my voice. “I’m done asking, okay? Do whatever you want, but just make up your damn mind and let me get on with my life.”
“What the—?”
“I’m calling Brooke.” I punched the button to my phone. “And telling her I’ll be there and maybe I’ll have someone else with me, or not.”
He clenched his jaw and I knew he was biting back something that would only throw more gasoline on the fire.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll come. But don’t blame me if this blows up when she sees me and shows us the door.”
“I thought she had a mad crush on you.”
He shot a look at me and something dark simmered behind his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “She did.”
Brooke Hennessey’s vineyard was easy to spot from the main road, even without the hand-painted sign. On either side of the gated entrance a pair of Don Juan rosebushes bloomed profusely, their espaliered masses of velvety red flowers brilliant against a white brick wall. Quinn turned down a drive lined with silvery-green olive trees that ended in a small, new-looking parking lot. A fresh coat of white paint gleamed on a post-and-board fence separating the parking lot from an orchard of apple and peach trees.
We hadn’t said more than ten words to each other during and after lunch, but Quinn could have warned me about the winery. It was hidden around a bend at the bottom of a hill, masked by a pathway lined with wrought-iron arches graced by pastel climbing roses twining through them. The building looked like a miniature castle that had been plucked from old Europe, or a fairy tale. The mottled stone façade with its mossy crenellated parapet, multiple turrets, and two gargoyles leering at us from weathered corbels startled me so much that I stopped walking and stared at it.
“A change from your classic California mission architecture, huh?” he said.
If we were going to get through this meeting, we at least needed to be speaking to each other even though the lunchtime tension still hung in the air between us, thick as fog.
“You’ve been here before?” I was polite, but we had clearly drawn boundary lines.
“Nope. I’ve heard about it. Everybody around here knows it. Built by an eccentric guy with a trust fund and a taste for the slightly weird and offbeat. I think his family owned railroads in Canada. He blew through all his money before he ever finished the main house—that place is a real doozy. Kind of Gaudí meets Disney. The stories went that it had doors on the upper levels that opened to absolutely nothing and staircases that ended in midair since the workers just stopped construction from one day to the next,” he said. “For years it was an abandoned ruin that kids used as a place to get high or have sex. Then about ten years ago someone from the Central Coast bought the property and planted vines. They must have sold to Fargo, who, in turn, sold to Brooke.”
“What happened to the house with the doors and stairs to nowhere? Was it ever finished?”
He shrugged and held the door. “I guess we’ll find out when you ask for the nickel tour, won’t we?”
I walked past him and said coolly over my shoulder, “Yes, I guess we will.”
Brooke Hennessey looked up from doing paperwork at a bar on the other side of the room when she heard us
