Crimson Shore (Agent Pendergast, #15)(67)
Pendergast swirled, inhaled once, twice, swirled again, then took a sip. He drew a little air in, took another sip.
Constance did the same. It tasted to her like…wine, nothing more, nothing less. She colored, thinking how he was wasting it on her.
“Don’t worry, my dear Constance, if you don’t immediately taste what I taste, or enjoy it as deeply as I do. Wine is like many of the finer things in life, which take time and experience to extract their full pleasure and meaning.”
He described to her again how to swirl, and smell, and then sip, drawing in air.
“The vocabulary of wine drinking is rather recherché,” he said. “It’s an expression of the inadequacy of words to describe taste and smell.”
“So what does it taste like to you?”
“I would say this wine enters the palate like silk wrapped in a velvet texture. That is because of its age—almost all the fruit and tannins have been transformed.” He sipped again. “I note spice, cigar-box, truffles, faded flowers, autumn leaves, earth, and leather flavors.”
Constance sipped once again, but couldn’t even begin to find those tastes in the wine.
“This wine is austere, structured, with great finesse, and a long, lingering finish.”
“What, exactly, makes it so good?”
“Everything. Each sip brings out another flavor, another characteristic.” He sipped again. “It is just so marvelously complex, so balanced, with each flavor coming forward in its turn. Most important, it has that go?t de terroir, the special taste of the earth from which the grapes emerged. It contains the very soul of that famous and long-gone two-acre hillside, ruined by mustard gas during World War I.”
Pendergast poured them each a second glass and Constance tasted it carefully. It was softer than most wines she remembered drinking, and it had a perfumed delicacy to it that was pleasing. Perhaps she could learn to enjoy wine in the way Pendergast did. As she sipped, she was aware of the slightest numbness of her lips and a pleasant, tingling warmth that seemed to radiate from her very core. She thought she might be detecting notes of truffles and leather in the wine, after all.
Pendergast rose from his seat beside her on the bed and began to stroll about the room thoughtfully, glass in hand. Obtaining, and drinking, the exquisite wine had put him in rare spirits, and he was uncharacteristically voluble. “Even more than with most criminal investigations, Constance, this one is heavy with irony. We have the historian, McCool, arriving with knowledge of the jewels, but not the location of the Pembroke Castle’s destruction—while at the same time we have the Dunwoody brothers, knowing exactly where the ship ran aground but ignorant of the existence of the jewels. When the two came together, voilà! The crime was born. The brothers needed time to stage their sham wine theft, which explains the several weeks gap after the historian left. The brothers also knew there was a good chance the historian might return, and they wanted to be ready for him—hence Dana Dunwoody’s idea of looking up the Tybane symbols. After the killing, Joe, the bartender, was in an excellent position to spread rumors of the inscriptions carved into McCool’s body, and the implication that witches were involved—something that Exmouth natives, who had all grown up hearing such legends, would enthusiastically adopt. A perfect red herring, really.”
“But how did you know of the third brother? Your explanation to Lake this morning seemed intentionally vague.”
“It was. It was clear, from my investigations, that somebody was living in the marshlands. The missing food, the trails I had come across, the smell of a campfire, the sense I had of being shadowed in my excursions into the salt grass, pointed to only one thing. And they also suggested Joe Dunwoody as a suspect. The thread of cloth I found from Dana Dunwoody’s clothing, and his visit to the Salem library to look at the inscriptions, made the brotherly angle even more likely. But it was my visit to the medical examiner that clinched it. Dana’s killing was a sudden, unexpected act of rage—not like the premeditated murder of McCool.” He seated himself once again on the bed next to Constance. “And while Dunkan tried to cover his tracks by carving up his brother as he’d carved up the historian, he didn’t have much stomach for the task—hence the hesitant nature of the cuts.”
Constance took another sip of wine. The howl of the wind and drumming of rain was pleasant here in this cozy room, with its dim lighting and its crackling fire. She could feel the warmth of Pendergast’s body next to hers.
She noticed that Pendergast was looking at her. Was that look quizzical—or was it expectant?
“Yes, Constance?” he asked mildly. “I sense you have other questions about the case.”
“It’s just…” she began after a long moment, trying to marshal her distracted thoughts. “It’s just that something seems to be missing.” She said this more to fill an increasingly dangerous silence than anything else.
“How so?”
“Those tracts I read in the Salem library. About the ‘wandering place,’ the ‘dark pilgrimage to a southern shore.’ We proved that the witches did not die out, as everyone had thought, but that they had moved—to the south.”
“It’s a curious side story, without a doubt.” Pendergast took another sip of wine, then refilled both of their glasses. He once again sat down on the bed. The decanter was now almost empty.