The Sauvignon Secret

inside a large urn. When she turned around, she was holding a revolver.

“My God,” Charles said. “Where’d you get that?”

She ignored him.

“Why did you have to come here now?” Her voice was full of sadness. It took a moment before I realized she was speaking to my grandfather. “I would have come to you.”

“Juliette!” Charles’s voice cracked like a whip. “Have you lost your mind? Give me that gun.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t do that.”

“Qu’est-ce que tu fais, ma chère?” Pépé asked. “Put the gun down, please. You don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Juliette closed her eyes like she was blinking back tears. “Luc, don’t. Please don’t make this any more difficult than you already have.”

She turned to Charles. “I know, Charles. I know everything. Jasmine told me. The only remaining mystery is what happened that night at the beach forty years ago. You’re the only one who knows because you were driving the car.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“You were,” Jasmine said. “Vivian said you were. Maggie left the cottage on foot and you went after her. Somehow you persuaded her to get in your car. Then what?”

Charles’s voice turned low and dangerous. “Viv told me when I saw her that someone had stirred up the past, brought it all back again. She let me believe it was Theo.”

“You went to see Vivian when we were in Paris in February,” Juliette said. “That’s when you killed her.”

“She died,” Charles said, “of a heart attack.”

“I wonder if she really did,” Jasmine said. “The Préfecture de Police may want to investigate.”

“What happened at the beach?” Juliette moved closer to Charles, the gun now trained on him. “What did you do?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pépé slowly lower his hands by his side. Juliette hadn’t noticed, nor, it seemed, had Jasmine.

Charles picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth as though he had all the time in the world. “All right,” he said like he was placating a child. “I’ll tell you.”

“Good.” His wife gave him a heavy-lidded look. “We’re all dying to know.”

Hope squirmed again and Jasmine shushed her. “It’s okay, angel. Just a few more minutes.”

“I want Aunt Woozy.”

“Soon,” she said. “Get on with it, Charles. You heard what Juliette said.”

He pushed his chair back, flashing a scornful look at the two of them as he crossed one leg over the other.

“What do all of you know? Nothing. You weren’t there.”

“If you don’t start talking, I’ll shoot you in the knee,” Juliette said. “Maybe that will jog your memory.”

Charles glared at her. “Don’t be such a drama queen, darling. It doesn’t suit you. You probably couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn, anyway.”

Juliette moved her finger over the trigger. “Would you like to find out?”

“All right.” He held up a hand. “Point that thing somewhere else before you hurt someone. I said, do it.”

She lowered her arm, a contemptuous look on her face. But Charles had won that small round.

“It was an accident,” he said. “It just happened. A dark night with no moon, heavy clouds. Pitch-black. We’d all been drinking. Maggie wanted to talk about Stephen and there was a huge fight among all of them. She left, said she was going for a walk on the beach, so I went after her. She could hardly walk a straight line. I found her, persuaded her to get in the car. I figured we’d get away from the cottage, find a motel for the night, and work it out. Theo had already taken off in a fit of rage. God, he could be so complicated sometimes.”

He shrugged. “To be honest, the next thing I remember was the car hitting the water. Obviously I drove off the bridge. In my condition …”

No one said a word. In another room, a clock chimed five.

“Somehow I got out. Got my door open and made it to the surface. Neither of us was wearing a seat belt. I figured Maggie got out, too; she was a good swimmer. But when I couldn’t find her—I kept shouting her name but it was so goddamned dark—I started diving. Six, seven times, ten, I don’t know. I knew it was too late.” Another shrug, but I noticed that he avoided looking at Jasmine. “So I walked back to the cottage and told the others. Everyone was scared out of their minds. I told them we all needed to stick to the same story or we’d hang together. Maggie took my car and drove it off the bridge. The cops knew she didn’t have a license and she was drunk. They couldn’t prove anything different, no evidence to the contrary. We were four witnesses who could all alibi each other.”

“In return you covered up Stephen’s death and protected their careers.”

“They were brilliant scientists,” he said. “Their country needed them, all that they could offer. Science is research and sometimes things go wrong. It happens.”

“ ‘Things go wrong’?” Juliette said. “My God, Charles. You’re inhuman.”

The tension in the room escalated with an almost audible click as she raised her arm again.

“Juliette,” I said, “please put the gun down. There’s a child—”

She gave me a scornful look. “That time has passed, Chantal.”

Pépé caught my eye. Don’t correct her.

“Before you shoot me, I have a question for Jasmine,” Charles said in a conversational tone. “Did Vivian give you the photo of Maggie and me? Then you mailed it to all of us, along with the photo of Stephen Falcone, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “I wanted you all to know that somebody still remembered. But I never thought you’d kill the others.” Her voice rose. “Except maybe for Paul. I think he must have been the one Maggie called Chicken Little in her diary. The timid one. He hanged himself rather than face what was coming.”

“What a bastard you are, Charles.” Juliette’s voice was cold. “I’ve never told you that, but you always have been. You let that innocent girl die, and you covered up the death of a disabled man who had no idea what he got into. Then you hunted down your former colleagues and killed them to finally silence everyone who knew what happened, to save your own skin.”

She aimed the gun.

“No!” I shouted. “Don’t!”

Jasmine’s hand cradled Hope’s head and as she turned my niece’s face so she couldn’t see what was happening.

“You will suffer,” Juliette screamed at Charles. “Just like that poor boy suffered.”

“You’re out of your mind. What are you talking about?” He threw up his hands like a shield, knocking his wedding ring against his wineglass.

I flinched at the sharp little clink as Juliette’s words jackhammered inside my head. Just like that poor boy suffered.

Stephen died of anthrax poisoning.

I stared at Charles’s wineglass and his dinner plate. He’d been eating a salad whose contents had probably come from Juliette’s garden and drinking a bottle of his own wine. A clever scientist, Noah had said, could change a harmless pesticide like Bt into something that had the genetic makeup of anthrax. Spray it over crops and who would know … until someone ate the deadly meal or drank the poisoned cup. Even then, the reaction wasn’t instantaneous.

Juliette had poisoned Charles. She didn’t need the gun.

“Which is it, Juliette, the wine or the salad? Or both?” I asked. “Where did you get anthrax-laced Bt?”

Charles turned pale. “My God, Juliette, what did you do? Are you insane?” He, too, stared at the remnants of his meal. “It couldn’t be the wine … but the salad—”

“You have no one to blame but yourself,” she said in a cool voice. “Because my gardener was so busy ferrying your little concubines home at night, he didn’t have time to tend to his duties. So I did my own spraying. With a new pesticide.”

“Christ Almighty, you brought Theo here? Right into my own home?” Charles’s voice rose to a screech. “When? How? He’s dead.”