Chapter 3: Her Phone
“You used me.” I said it on his kitchen floor four hours later, in a house in Pacific Heights with more windows than walls. I don’t remember how I ended up sitting on the floor. “You married me so the wedding would still happen. So my father would get his forty million and relax.”
“Yes,” Julian said. He sat down on the floor across from me, overcoat and all. “I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
He told me everything.
Twenty-two years ago, a man named Thomas Kade put his family’s entire savings into a private fund for rare wines run by Richard Marlowe. Thousand-dollar bottles of Bordeaux, Burgundy, old Napa cult cabernets. Thomas’s son Julian was thirteen. The fund collapsed when an auction house in London discovered half the bottles were counterfeit. Refilled, relabeled, re-corked. Nobody could ever prove where they’d come from. Thomas Kade lost everything. He died four years later, still paying back his investors one at a time.
“Your father did it again,” Julian said. “Bigger. For the last eight years, the Marlowe Reserve library wines he sells to collectors in Hong Kong and Dubai have been fakes. Celeste found the ledger in his safe. The real one. Every bottle, every buyer, every label.”
“And the forty million?”
“Bait. He’ll move money now that he thinks he’s safe. The FBI’s been watching his accounts for two weeks.” He looked at me. “I didn’t know how else to get her out without him noticing. I’m sorry. I filed your name because I wasn’t going to marry a woman who wasn’t standing there. That was the one honest thing I could do.”
I should have walked out. I didn’t. Because there was one thing that didn’t fit.
“Where is she now?”
“A rented house in Mendocino. One of my security people is with her. She’s fine.”
“Then why is her phone off?”
“Because I told her to turn it off.”
I thought about that. Then I said, “Celeste never goes anywhere without her phone. Not the bathroom. Not the shower. Did you see her take it?”
He was quiet for a second too long.
“She said she’d thrown it in the bay,” he said slowly. “So nobody could track it. I believed her. She was very convincing.”
“Celeste is always very convincing,” I said. “Julian, she’s been lying for a living since she was nine. She lies to get out of things. She doesn’t lie to you. She’d have no reason to.”
Something changed in his face then. He stood up and reached for his phone.
Nobody looks at the spare. That’s the one useful thing about being one.
At ten that night, in a navy rain jacket, I let myself into my parents’ house through the kitchen door with the key I’ve had since I was twelve. My parents were at a dinner in Yountville. The housekeeper was gone. The dogs knew me.
My father’s study smelled like cedar and old cork. I knew the combination to his desk drawers, because I’m the one who does the books.
The bottom left drawer was locked with a key instead. I found the key taped under the drawer above it, exactly where he’d hidden the liquor-cabinet key when I was fourteen.
Inside lay a phone in a pale-pink case covered with tiny gold stars. Celeste’s. The battery was dead.
Under it was a folder. A life insurance policy, issued five weeks ago, on Celeste Marie Marlowe. Ten million dollars. Beneficiary: Richard J. Marlowe.
My hands went cold.
I called Julian. He picked up on the first ring.
“Call your guard,” I said. “Now.”
He put me on hold. When he came back, his voice was different.
“She left the Mendocino house two days ago,” he said. “My man says she got a call on the house phone. She said it was her father, that he’d found out and wasn’t angry, that he wanted to talk. She told my guard she’d be back by dinner.”
He took a breath.
“She went home, Tessa. Your father called her and she went home.”
