Authors: Nadia Gordon
Lethal Vintage
ALSO BY NADIA GORDON:
Sharpshooter
Death by the Glass
Murder Alfresco
a sunny mccoskey napa valley mystery
Nadia Gordon
For my mom, with love. And for the Good Twin of Crooked River, may he prevail and prosper.
Strange to say those whom I treated well are those who do me the most injury now
—Sappho, Fragment #77,
translated by Mary Barnard
Heat dulled the morning air. No breeze, not a cloud; the early sun blazed in a thin blue sky. Sunny McCoskey thought, in the chaotic days that followed, that if only it hadn’t been so hot, perhaps none of it would have happened. She might have spent the afternoon pulling weeds in the back garden at Wildside, her little restaurant in St. Helena, as she had planned to do. Instead, when Anna Wilson, an old friend, called out of the blue with an invitation to have lunch and swim, Sunny had accepted without a second thought, no matter that they hadn’t spoken in years.
If it hadn’t been so hot that day, they might not have lingered so long by the pool or had so much to drink. Anna, the girl everyone always wanted or wanted to be, might have gone to bed early that night and woken up the next morning. She might have opened her eyes to the dawn light blazing on the vineyard and delighted in another day of a life most people would consider one long vacation. But it did happen and nothing could change that reality, no matter how Sunny tried to will it away later, returning again and again to the pointless hope that it might all be a dream or a mistake, that somehow the plain facts might shift and change and suddenly reveal themselves to mean something quite different from the obvious and undeniable, that her friend Anna was dead.
Skin tacky with sweat, Sunny stood in front of enormous double doors, their mahogany polished to an amber glow. She wondered what kind of person lived in a place that looked more like a resort than a home, and what Anna was doing staying there. She made eye contact with a tiny black bubble that she assumed was a camera, wiped the sweat from her face with both hands, and rang the bell. A smiling, blue-eyed woman answered the door in an apron and led the way through the house, her blond ponytail swaying as she walked and a string of friendly, Australian-accented chatter trailing behind her. The cold air inside the house revived Sunny pore by pore, and she looked hopefully toward a living room full of art and inviting places to sit.
“Everyone’s down by the pool,” said the woman, opening glass doors.
Sunny stepped back outside into the heavy heat to the low thump of house music. Down a terraced walk, a rectangle of blue water flicked bright needles of light. The view stretched across acres of vineyard, all the way down the Napa Valley to the Carneros and beyond. Light green squares of vineyard and dark green forested hills and finally fuzzy, distant blue stretches where the valley
flattened out to delta. On the slope next to the pool, grapevines baked in the midday sun.
From the patio, a swath of lawn extended to the right, so lush it made the air around it moist. A path stepped down to the pool. Young olive trees broke the view here and there, and sunlight filtered through an old live oak. A fieldstone wall held back the terraced hillside. There was an arbor with wisteria still heavily in bloom and a glass table and chairs, and a hot tub with a fieldstone fireplace rising up at one end. At the far end of the pool, under an ochre umbrella, lay Sunny’s friend Anna Wilson. She was wearing a white bikini and black sunglasses and holding back her long dark hair with one hand as she spoke to the busty girl sunbathing next to her. When she saw Sunny, she leaped up and came bounding over.
Same Anna as always, thought Sunny, embracing her with a kiss on each cheek. She was still as leggy and light on her feet as a half-grown housecat, and had the same playful tendency to saunter and pounce. Slightly more taut, perhaps, thinner and more muscular, as though the tendons had been tightened a quarter turn and the soft spots worn fractionally away. But still beautiful and radiant in that way she’d been famous for around San Francisco back when they used to run into each other at art openings. She and Sunny had known the same people and gone to the same parties and liked each other’s company in their early twenties. Then Anna went to Europe with her boyfriend and Sunny moved to Napa to open her restaurant. They’d hardly spoken or seen each other in the years since.
“Same Sunny!” exclaimed Anna, taking off her sunglasses. “Except the short hair. That’s new.”
Sunny put a hand to the line of bangs cut high across her forehead. Lately, she wore her auburn hair as short as a man’s, much to her mother’s dismay, and had it cut at the barbershop in St. Helena.
But it wasn’t ugly, she was sure of that, and it was easy, and cheap, and showed off her eyes, which she considered her best feature.
“I cut it off after I opened the restaurant,” said Sunny. “Four years ago. When was the last time we saw each other?”
“My twenty-eighth birthday party,” said Anna. “December four years ago. You cooked those enormous crabs and we all sat around cracking them open over newspaper. I’ll never forget it.”
“At your father’s studio,” said Sunny. “Does he still have that place?”
“Always. He’ll live there until he dies. It’s literally covered in his paintings, for one thing. We’ll have to tear it down to get them out.”
Anna’s father was the charismatic Czech painter David Novak, a man with green eyes like a prophet, who said he came to San Francisco because it was the only European city where no one had heard of him. As he himself had once told Sunny, he met, married, impregnated, and separated from Anna’s mother, an accomplished poet named Sylvia Wilson, all in less than a month. “It was the seventies,” he said gruffly with a shrug. She left their North Beach apartment for a farm in Marin County, changed her own and her daughter’s last names back to Wilson, and raised Anna around back-to-earth intellectuals, organic farmers, and artists. Anna was blessed with her father’s green eyes and her mother’s lavish mouth, a long and shapely affair—”like the flying lips in the Man Ray painting,” her father had said one night, holding her face between his hands—as well as the considerable talents of both parents, at least as far as Sunny could judge from the work she’d done in college and the years immediately after. Since then, despite having demonstrated talent and earned a number of accolades as both a writer and an artist, Anna had spent most of her time entertaining an A-list of wealthy and powerful men and skillfully evading their proposals.
She was still strikingly beautiful, though slightly dimmed, thought Sunny, and there was something about her eyes that gave the impression of disengagement. The natural brightness of her face with its wide smile and gemlike eyes could mask all but the most subtle indications of what was going on underneath, but the signs were there for those who knew her. She was troubled, and deeply so, if Sunny was not mistaken.
Anna held Sunny’s wrist as though taking her pulse and smiled. “I am so glad I was able to reach you. When I saw your name in the paper this morning, I laughed out loud. I knew it was a sign. The only time I’ve picked up the Napa Register in my entire life, I see your name. You were destined to be here today.”
Sunny’s name had been in the paper all too often lately, thanks to her role as a material witness in a sensational local murder trial. At least the publicity was good for business—her restaurant had been booked solid weeks in advance since the story hit—but it wasn’t exactly the sort of notoriety she wanted.
“Destiny or not, it’s great to see you,” said Sunny. “And in such an outrageous place. Does one person own all this?”
“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? It belongs to my boyfriend.”
“Who is he, some kind of royalty?”
“California royalty,” laughed Anna. “Oliver Seth. He used to be a VC. Made a fortune in the tech boom. Beyond millions. I think it might actually be a billion or two. Silly money from Sili Valley. It’s ridiculous. You can buy anything and not make a dent in it. You should see the place he has in London.”
“Did he retire?”
“Hardly. He’s got a hedge fund and a bunch of businesses. Software, finance, intellectual property. I can’t keep track.” Anna pulled a chaise closer for Sunny. “Come sit down. Do you want a drink? Wine? I’m having Campari orange and we have mojitos,
but we can make anything, whatever you want. And you have to meet Jordan.”
Sunny took the glass of wine Anna poured for her. Lying next to Anna, Jordan looked like the sexpots they put on promotional posters for dance parties. She lifted her sunglasses when Anna introduced them and offered a girlish hand, small and soft, nails painted hot pink with a gold star in the middle of each. She had narrow hips and buoyant, round breasts barely contained in a shiny gold bikini. It was hard to say if she was Asian, Latina, or possibly even Persian. She reminded Sunny of her sous chef, Rivka, who was half Guatemalan and half Eastern European Jew. They both had strong features, black hair, and golden skin. Rivka had her Mayan nose and almond eyes, whereas Jordan had the tilted dark eyes Sunny associated with veils and saris. Wherever her parents had come from, she looked like Hollywood now.
“Jordan is a great photographer,” said Anna. “Oliver has some of her work. Fantastic stuff. I’ll show you later. Right now you have to tell me about your life. What would you have been doing today if you hadn’t come here?”
“Today? I was going to go to the restaurant and pull weeds in the back garden. Not very glamorous.”
“It sounds perfect to me,” said Anna. “You don’t know how much I miss having a life. Fixing up a house. Working. I have my gallery bit, but you couldn’t call it a job. And I haven’t painted anything in months. We’ve just been bouncing around. I’ve seen everything, of course. It’s been amazing. We were in Egypt and Syria and all over Europe, but I haven’t done anything, you know what I mean?” She looked around as if momentarily lost in the familiar surroundings. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’ve always been so grounded, you know? I could use a little of the McCoskey common sense about now.”
“Grounded sounds like a nice word for dull,” said Sunny. “Like sensible.”
“Listen, there is nothing wrong with being sensible.” Anna stood over a side table and lit a cigarette. “I could use a little sensible about now.”
“What’s going on?” said Sunny, thinking she was right about Anna. There was something wrong.
“Oh, I don’t know. We can talk about it later. Jordan is probably tired of hearing me psychobabble. It’s the usual stuff. Boy meets girl. Girl makes chaos in her life to be with boy. Boy meets another girl or possibly girls.” She waved the cigarette. “I hope you don’t mind. We’ve been going out nonstop since we got to California and I’m back in the habit. That’s why we came up here. To get away from the city and just relax. And here I am, smoking more than ever.” She gave Sunny a dazzling smile that might have swept everything away a few years ago. Now it wasn’t entirely convincing. “Anyway, I guess it’s not technically a problem of monogamy, so to speak. I wish it was that simple.” She stared off for a moment, then snapped back, smile in place. “Enough of my little woes. Tell me about you. I need the vital stats. Married? Children?”
“Neither.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Sort of. Well, yes. I have a boyfriend. I guess what I’d say is that we’re still getting to know each other.”
“Warning lights,” said Jordan, flashing her fingers. “That doesn’t sound too promising.”
“He’s a great guy,” said Sunny. “Incredibly sexy. Extremely good looking. Great style. I love it when we’re together. But we have very different lifestyles. Sex and cooking are about all we have in common. I live like a nun. I like my work and my garden and that’s it. I go to bed early and get up early. He doesn’t sleep. He’s always
out and he can’t understand why I don’t want to go. And then I wonder the same thing. What’s wrong with me? Why am I so, you know, sensible.”
“Men never sleep,” said Anna. “Oliver doesn’t sleep. He thinks it’s a vice, like gluttony.”
Jordan remained expressionless behind her sunglasses.
“Why don’t you change into your swimsuit?” Anna said. “You’re making me feel hot.”
Anna lifted a bottle from an ice bucket (1997 Groth Chard, noted Sunny automatically), found it empty, and poured her a mojito from a pitcher on the table. Lolling in the heat, the sun hanging motionless in the sky, they waited, each on her teak chaise, three shiny bodies dotted with beads of water, unmoving. Bright sun, blue sky, sparkle of water. Sunny adjusted the fabric of her swimsuit and sighed. She watched the branches of an olive tree bounce gently on a breeze. When the water had dried and her skin was slick with sweat, she stood up and saw stars. The sudden cold of the water made her gasp. She swam silently, breaststroking through the still water, the only sound an endless track of club music from hidden speakers. Jordan dove into the deep end and swam back to the stairs, where she sat flicking water on Anna’s toes.
Anna swirled the pitcher of mojitos and called up to the house. “Cynthia?”
The woman in the white apron came out onto the patio. “More drinks?”
“And fresh glasses, please.”
Sunny pulled herself out of the pool and sat down on the cement. Next to her, Anna had lain back down. She had a Band-Aid on her knee. Things don’t change much, thought Sunny. Anna always had a
Band-Aid somewhere, or worse. One night when they were leaving a cocktail party at what was then the new SFMoMA, she missed the curb, fell off her spike heels, and sprained her ankle bad enough to need crutches. For weeks, all the best-looking guys in town took turns carrying her shoulder bag and opening doors for her.
Cynthia arrived with a fresh pitcher of mojitos. She put a Campari orange in front of Anna, who held up the drink to admire its layers of red, orange, and yellow. “Looks like the sunset we saw at the Dallas airport last week. Sunny McCoskey, this is Cynthia Meyers, Oliver’s personal chef. You two might have something in common. Sunny owns a restaurant in St. Helena.”
“Oh, really? Which one?” said Cynthia.
“Wildside,” said Sunny.
“You’re kidding! That’s my favorite secret spot for when people visit. I’ve eaten there a dozen times.”
“I thought you looked familiar.” From her station in the kitchen, Sunny could look over the zinc bar into the dining room. It had to be that way. She would never want to cook where she couldn’t see what was happening in the front of the house.
“We’ll have to talk shop later,” said Cynthia. “Meanwhile, are you girls ready for lunch?”
“Whenever you are,” said Anna. “Oliver should be home any minute. And we should have Troy and Franco as well.”
“Good. I’ll have everything ready in fifteen minutes.”
“Perfect.” Anna turned to Sunny. “You’re going to love Cynthia’s cooking. She’s amazing.”
Cynthia went back up to the house. Opportunities sometimes came along for Sunny to leave the restaurant business and become a private chef. There had been offers, and she’d occasionally been tempted. Watching Cynthia, she wondered what it was like, if she enjoyed it, if it was easier than restaurant life. No doubt. But how
did it feel to have Anna Wilson in her white bikini ordering up drinks from the pool? About the same as customers doing it at Wildside, thought Sunny.
“Does she work full time?”
“She lives here,” said Anna. “Oliver built her a place right next door. It’s not the most comfortable arrangement for me, but Oliver is extremely attached. And I think she’s in love with him, in a maternal way at least. She gives me dagger eyes every time I come here.” Anna looked over her glasses and winked at Sunny.
“Who cares if she’s in love with him,” said Jordan, face down. “The woman can cook. I’d sleep with her if that’s what it took to keep the oven on.”
“Speak of the devil,” said Anna.