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before bottling. How many people could he sicken or maybe even kill?”
    We’d finally reached the turnoff for Route 50, Mosby’s Highway. The homestretch. I put on my turn signal and we left Route 28 as I thought about what he’d just said.
    Maybe we weren’t so insulated from the kind of violence he was talking about. In France it was homegrown—a group of angry winemakers being driven out of business—not the threats of faceless foreigners. What would it take to push some of my fellow vineyard owners who had lost everything over the brink?
    Maybe Pépé was right.
    “I guess it wouldn’t be that hard to do after all,” I said. “Would it?”

CHAPTER 4

    Friday the thirteenth dawned bright and hot, promising to be another scorcher for the record books. I showered and dressed, tiptoeing past Pépé’s bedroom and avoiding the creaking treads on the grand spiral staircase. Halfway down the stairs I could still hear my grandfather snoring like a lumberjack from behind his door.
    I fixed breakfast—coffee, croissants, and fresh goat cheese from a nearby farm—and carried it out to the veranda, along with the
Washington Tribune
. The heat and humidity had already leached the color from the sky, leaving it a dingy white. A film of haze had settled over the Blue Ridge.
    Paul Noble’s death was billboarded at the bottom of page one of the
Trib
, though the story had been moved inside to Metro. I didn’t recognize the black-and-white thumbnail photo in the teaser; it looked like an old one taken years ago when Paul had more hair. Fortunately, the headline writers hadn’t come up with anything cute or sensational, so it simply read: “Loudoun Businessman Found Hanged.” The article was in the middle of the front page of Metro with a larger, more recent photo of Paul standing on the rooftop terrace of his luxurious Georgetown office building posing like a minor potentate. The Potomac and two backlit sculls whose rowers were perfectly in sync was the backdrop, probably a crew team from one of the D.C. universities. Thankfully the reporter wrote only that a “local woman” had discovered his body. No mention ofanything kinky involving his death, so perhaps autoerotic asphyxiation had been discounted or maybe Bobby decided to keep that lurid possibility out of the press for now. Alcohol had been found at the scene, leaving the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about factors contributing to the tragedy.
    A car door slammed in my driveway. I set down the paper and went inside. At this early hour it was probably Antonio. We’d been talking about whether we needed to do more spraying to deal with possible powdery mildew. But it was my brother, Eli, who let himself in the front door as I walked into the foyer. His red polo shirt had a stain like a Rorschach inkblot and his trousers looked like he’d slept in them. His dark brown hair, which he usually wore moussed or gelled in some gravity-defying style, fell naturally across his forehead as though he’d just stepped out of the shower. I liked it that way, glad he seemed to be shedding the manicured, pampered Ken doll persona his ex-wife had inflicted on him, even if he did trade it in for the rumpled, frazzled single-father-of-a-three-year-old look, which he was.
    “Hey, babe,” he said. “What’s up?”
    Calling me “babe” was still part of the Brandi hangover, though it was a lot better than some of the names he had for me when we were kids.
    “Coffee’s hot,” I said. “And I have croissants. Did you eat breakfast?”
    “I finished the milk and the soggy stuff at the bottom of Hope’s cereal bowl.” He glanced down at his shirt. “I dropped the bowl when I was cleaning up. I think it left a stain.”
    “You can’t really see it,” I said. “Is Hope at day care?”
    He nodded. “I feel like I’m abandoning her every time I drop her off. She won’t let go of my neck. It’s like I’m being strangled with love.”
    Brandi’s rich new