The Senator’s Daughter Page 15

  He started toward the door and stopped. His desire for her had not subsided. If he knocked at her door, she’d think he was back for another try at seduction.

  With a sigh, Lyle decided his best option was a cold shower.

  Chapter 15

  Monday morning, Lyle presented himself to Luigi at the Villa Valetti gate. “I have an appointment.”

  “Yes, sir.” Though Luigi was polite, he wore a holstered Glock Lyle had failed to notice before. Of course, this was the man who had killed the giraffe mounted in Andre’s trophy room. “Mr. Valetti is in the Sangiovese, if you’d care to park and walk down.” He gestured at an empty gravel lot beyond his kiosk.

  Considering the volume of traffic up here, what did Luigi do all day? Read The Godfather? More to the point, why would a vintner need an armed guard? A simple sign telling the public Villa Valetti did not run a regular tasting schedule should be more than sufficient.

  Lyle pulled in beside a neat privet hedge and got out. He’d imagined his host would be waiting in his office, or at least in one of his “drawing rooms.” But it seemed to be a power play; Lyle should be the one to park at the estate boundary, to strike out on foot in a game of hide and seek.

  What if he hadn’t been paying attention the other day and didn’t recall where the vines from Italy were located?

  But he had, and he struck out downhill through the vines. From up here, the northern end of the Napa Valley stretched out below, fields planted in neat rows of grapes and hilly islands. Another thousand feet above, the lava cliffs known as the Palisades overlooked it all.

  When Lyle had gone down a few hundred feet, he spied Andre between the rows. The vintner wielded a pair of hand clippers, snipping off grape clusters, inspecting them with concentration, and bending to place the prize in a plastic basket at his feet.

  Lyle approached down the next row and let his feet crush some dry fallen leaves.

  Andre looked up. “Beautiful morning.”

  It was. One of October’s bright blue days, when the air was crystal and Mount Saint Helena’s forested splendor crowned the valley without its usual halo of morning fog. Reaching into his pants pocket, Andre tossed across another pair of clippers.

  Lyle caught them. “Don’t you machine harvest the grapes?”

  “Some of the larger wineries do. The world’s best wines are hand harvested; the human eye is needed to select the best grapes and leave the inferior ones.”

  Lyle stood with the clippers, feeling like the gardener. Something must have shown in his expression.

  “It is an honor to help me pick my Sangiovese.”

  Andre faced him across the vine row. “I will be selecting all the grapes for this year’s first small batch.” He reached through the leaves and selected a cluster of perfect frosted globes. “You snip here, as close to the grapes as possible.”

  He clipped and examined the bunch. “See, this is acceptable, except for the leaves.” Hanging his shears over the wire supporting the vines, he removed the bits of drying leaf. Then he frowned and pulled off several grapes that had been in contact with the leaves and threw them on the ground. “Moldy,” he said. “Now you.”

  Lyle made an effort not to bristle. Andre couldn’t possibly know he’d picked vegetables as a child. And if he wanted information, Lyle had better keep things pleasant.

  For a few minutes, the two men selected and harvested in silence.

  Finally, Lyle could stand it no longer. He hung his clipper over the wire and met Andre’s direct dark eyes. “I didn’t come here for a lesson in viniculture.”

  Andre held his stare while he clipped another bunch of Sangiovese. “Why have you come? Not on official business from David Dickerson.”

  How could he speak with such assurance? He couldn’t know Lyle was on a leave of absence.

  “You say this because …?” Lyle countered.

  “If Dickerson wants to talk to me, he’ll give me a call.”

  Lyle resisted the urge to swallow. If his boss and Andre were buddies …

  Andre set aside his clipper. “I phoned him to find out what you were doing here. He said you were probably poking around about Tony on an unauthorized basis.”

  The hardness of his tone made a creeping cold take hold of Lyle. “Don’t you care your brother has disappeared?” Either this man was without a heart … “Or you know where Tony is? And knowing explains why you don’t seemed frightened you’ll be next.”

  “If I knew, would I tell you?”

  Lyle took that as an admission that Andre did know. But before he allowed himself to be reassured about whether Tony wore cement overshoes, he had a few more questions. “The other day you said you wanted to expand and couldn’t get any acreage. But your brother recently bought a land package from the estate of Esther Quenton.”

  “So you’ve been snooping the courthouse records.”

  “They’re public domain,” Lyle bristled. “Why would he buy next to you and not let you in on it?”

  “I told you on Saturday. Tony and I are different.” His voice was cold.

  Registering bad blood between brothers, Lyle refitted Tony for the cement overshoes and continued his cross-examination of a man who might have killed his brother. Or had him killed. “I’ve heard rumors Tony was in bed with Lawrence Chatsworth. Did the Senator invest with him?”

  “As far as anyone in the public domain knows, the Senator has his investments in a blind trust,” Andre stonewalled.

  Lyle tried another tack. “Esther Quenton apparently had to die before the acreage became available.”

  “That’s right. If you read the newspapers, she vowed her ‘wilderness tracts,’” Andre sounded snide, “would be developed into vines or home sites over her dead body.”

  “Why didn’t she set up a trust or will the land to the Nature Conservancy?”

  “Why not arrange a séance and ask her? The land was bought by my brother through completely legal means, Mr. Assistant District Attorney.”

  “If you weren’t involved, how can you be sure?”

  With a gesture toward the road, Andre ordered, “This conversation is at an end.”

  Lyle left Villa Valetti and went straight to the Lava Springs Inn and his computer. Seated on the pleasant rear porch above the river, he went online and started asking some new questions. His first stop was Esther Quenton’s obituary.

  Esther Hadley Quenton, widow of Lester Gould Quenton, founder of the Pacific Conservation Society, passed into eternal rest…

  Etc., etc.

  Lyle skipped down to:

  After her husband’s death in 1998, Mrs. Quenton followed in his esteemed footsteps, to become chairwoman of the Society. Though she lived in San Francisco, Mrs. Quenton enjoyed visiting land she and Lester owned, including a stand of virgin redwood north of Calistoga. In recent years, one of her great regrets was that her health no longer permitted her to hike the backcountry or keep up with her charity work. Yet, her strong will led to her demise, a tragic fall from a seaside cliff south of the City.

  Mrs. Quenton was without survivors. Her former legal adviser, District Attorney David Dickerson …

  Whoa.

  …requests memorial contributions be made to the Pacific Conservation Society.

  With a low whistle, Lyle pushed back from his computer. No wonder Dickerson had acted strange when he saw evidence on Lyle’s computer of him probing into Esther Quenton’s affairs.

  Next stop, the tragic fall.

  Anytime a person was found dead at the base of a precipice, there was an investigation. Crime-scene tape, the six o’clock news, especially with someone as wealthy and prominent as Esther Quenton. Though Lyle couldn’t recall seeing anything on it.

  He starting combing the news archives.

  An hour later, Lyle pushed back from his laptop and rubbed the back of his neck. This was getting downright scary. How likely was it Esther Quenton had fallen off a cliff while out walking? If her health were poor, she should never have been out
alone on such rugged terrain.

  On the other hand, maybe she was one of those people who refused to accept the limitations of age.

  And why would her attorney, David Dickerson, notorious for being tough on criminals, fail to have the police pursue an investigation? Had he known something about her fall that caused him to be certain it was an accident? Had he believed she committed suicide due to depression or a terminal diagnosis?

  Sitting with one hand on the inn’s porch table, Lyle suddenly went on alert. Was a faint vibration passing through the furniture, through the boards beneath his shoes? He glanced at his coffee and saw a herringbone pattern of liquid in motion.

  There was no sound, thus no truck going by on the road to Villa Valetti.

  Lyle rose. Earth tremors were another of his hot buttons. He hadn’t cared for Andre’s careless observation that the local Old Faithful Geyser was predicting an impending event.

  This must be a quake, thankfully a small one, for the wrought-iron chandelier on a chain transcribed a three-inch arc.

  Deciding to get off the porch and out into the yard, Lyle started for the steps.

  Before he’d gone down more than three treads, he looked back to find his coffee smoothed and the light fixture settled back to vertical.

  Chapter 16

  In the inn’s laundry room, Sylvia folded the last of the sheets, fresh from the dryer. With the warm cloth clasped to her chest, she mounted the stairs from the basement. Through the foyer, up the next flight, and across the lobby, she headed for the room next to hers.

  She could see Lyle’s closed door at the end of the hall. It drew her like a magnet, seducing her to come up with some excuse to knock.

  But what a cheap trick. She wanted more than just to fall into bed with Lyle Thomas.

  Her mother said he was “poor white,” as they called it in Old Virginny. She said Sylvia should stay away from him. But Sylvia didn’t care about poor. She wanted to know what Lyle had meant about things going from wonderful to hell for him, the way it had happened for Mrs. Montague at the winery. She wanted to hear his story.

  She needed to tell him hers.

  The door to the room Sylvia was to clean was unlocked; she went in and left it ajar. The bedside clock radio indicated it was half an hour until she must set out wine for guests on the rear porch.

  Sylvia put the clean sheets on a chair, bent, and started to strip the used ones off the mattress. First one side, and she went to the other.

  When she straightened, she found Lyle watching her from the doorway. Dressed in well-fitting jeans and a soft-looking white cotton pullover, he leaned a shoulder against the jamb.

  Her hands crushed the balled sheets; her cheeks warmed.

  “There you are.” He advanced into the room and picked up the folded fitted sheet from the chair.

  Sylvia dropped the soiled ones on the floor and watched Lyle fan the expanse of cotton over the bed.

  “I’ve got this,” she insisted.

  He dragged the corner over the mattress, moving to work the opposite side. “If a senator’s daughter is going to make beds, the only thing that could make it more ridiculous is for an assistant DA to help.”

  They finished the bottom sheet, and Lyle moved to spread the top one.

  “How was your meeting with Andre?” She made conversation to hide her awareness of the bed between them.

  “Poor.”

  She tried again. “Are you sure you don’t need to head back to work?” Even though he’d told her he would stay, all day she’d been afraid he would head back without seeing her.

  His head stayed down while he smoothed the sheet into place and reached for the pillowcases. “I’ve got some time off.”

  She couldn’t help smiling. “I have to set up the guest reception, and then I’ll be free.”

  Lyle flashed a grin. “I’m starting to think about dinner.”

  She chuckled. “You’re always interested in eating.”

  He spread his hands. “I’m a big guy.”

  Their eyes met, and she resisted an obviously ribald retort. The twinkle in his eye suggested he’d thought of it, too.

  “I was thinking the other night on the porch was nice,” he said. “How about if I get some steaks and potatoes in town and fire up Buck’s grill?”

  Though Lyle could have joined the other guests for wine and cheese, he got out his laptop again. Something had been nagging at him ever since he’d learned the site of Esther Quenton’s death.

  He’d driven by that section of the coast, near Daly City, where real-estate developers continued to ignore the precarious geology. There, the San Andreas Fault cropped out in a cliff of twisted green and black rock and plunged out beneath the Pacific. The wound clearly showed the violent confluence of the earth’s plates.

  The land above the cliff was rough and rocky. Near the edge, only the hardy ice plant clung where ocean fog drifted.

  In the news coverage, he uncovered a photo of Esther, taken the month before her demise, at a party in honor of her ninetieth. With the stoop-shouldered look of advanced osteoporosis, Esther was using a walker.

  How had she gotten to the cliff? Did she still drive?

  A check indicated she’d turned in her license the year before.

  Among her house servants, was there one who drove for her?

  Again, how had she gotten to the precipice?

  After the other guests dispersed from the wine reception to find dinner in the valley, Lyle dragged the grill from outside the kitchen door around to the riverbank. About an hour ago, he had shut down his computer, forced his mind from Esther Quenton and her connection with David Dickerson and Tony Valetti, and gone to town for steaks and potatoes.

  Impatient for Sylvia to come back from changing her clothes, he was finally rewarded by the sight of her on the porch above … dressed in a soft-looking turquoise halter, New Delhi-style with little glass mirrors, over her black jeans.

  She made a pirouette, holding the silky material out from her waist like a tutu. “Another Wal-Mart special. How did I live shopping at those fancy little boutiques?”

  Lyle gave a low whistle. “You look just fine.”

  Sylvia came down the steps onto the grass and stood watching him pile charcoal into the grill and saturate it with starter fluid. He blinked at the pungent petroleum fumes.

  She passed him a matchbox with the Lava Springs Inn logo on it. “These might come in handy.”

  He struck one and held it aloft. “Bombs away.”

  The tossed match landed on the charcoal, sputtered, and went out. Both he and Sylvia laughed, making it funnier than it was. It felt good, their eyes meeting and holding.

  She looked so different than she had the night at Ice. Without polish, her natural nails suited Lyle’s taste better. No kohl rim around her eyes or beaded mascara; it let her eyes shine through. And her lips … though he’d been aroused by the bad girl look of her former scarlet, tonight she wore just a hint of something glossy.

  He had to drag himself away to light another match.

  This time, he touched the small flame with care to the corner of the mound. A little blue flare licked up and spread over the briquettes. “Guess there’s something to be said for the subtle approach.”

  “Sometimes.” Sylvia’s voice was soft. “Sometimes not.”

  His breath hitched. “You’re saying subtlety is situational?”

  She caught his arm. Her touch was anything but subtle, while they both focused on the rising fire. “I’m saying …” He felt her stall.

  “Don’t go subtle on me now.” He covered her hand with his.

  She raised her head. “Ever since you said it, I’ve been wondering what you meant about bad times in your life … you said that when we were talking about Mrs. Montague losing her husband.”

  His stomach clenched; he pulled his hand back.

  Sylvia kept her fingers on his bare forearm, reminding him now was not the time for subtlety, not when the intensity of her bla
ck gaze dealt a double blow to his midsection.

  “I could duck this by telling you the steaks need seasoning.” He drew in a breath. “But I won’t.”

  He thought how to begin. “I believe your mother warned you I was raised in different circumstances than you.”

  “She did mention it.”

  He should leave it there. Tell her he used to pick crops while the other boys were at football practice.

  But he wanted to be honest. “What you and your mother don’t know … what I don’t tell people … is that when I was ten years old, my mother disappeared.”

  Sylvia blanched.

  “One day I came home from school. It was during the onion harvest, and I was supposed to go to the fields.”

  He watched Sylvia’s fist go to her mouth.

  “You ever pick onions?”

  She shook her head.

  “You ever touch an onion plant in dirt in your entire life?”

  “Just the ones from the grocery store.” Her black hair fell over one of her eyes; she shoved it back.

  “Mom always left me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich before she went to work waitressing. That day, there was no sandwich. When it came time for her shift to end at eleven p.m., no Mom.” He drilled on, “She never came back. I never saw or heard from her again.”

  The charcoal fire flared; he turned toward it to hide his tears.

  An hour later, on the inn’s rear porch, Sylvia sliced into the prime steak Lyle had grilled. The baked potato alongside steamed, dripping butter and sour cream. A balloon of Mrs. Montague’s Cabernet rested beside her plate. A sampling characterized it as smoky, a good compliment to the charcoaled meat.

  Lyle had been right to postpone discussing what was likely to a painful topic.

  “What are the spices on the beef?” she asked.

  “Coarse sea salt, black pepper, fresh garlic.”

  Though she’d sampled cuisines on several continents, never had she enjoyed a meal so much as this simple, yet complex, offering from Lyle Thomas. Each time she discovered a new facet of him, she felt like a kid unwrapping a present.