Chapter 7: What the Lab Said
Elena waited in the study for an hour and forty minutes, and prepared, quite thoroughly, to be dismissed.
She sat on the edge of the leather chair opposite Dominic's desk and did not touch anything. Through the closed door came the muffled sounds of a party determinedly continuing: music, glassware, laughter that rose and then remembered itself. Once, Ada Cole looked in, said, "He hasn't forgotten you, he's burying it under charm for the donors," and closed the door again, which was, in Ada's language, almost a kindness.
When Dominic finally came in, he had lost his jacket and his birthday glow. He looked his age, and then some.
"Well," he said. "You have given the internet a wonderful evening."
"I didn't mean—"
"I know what you meant." He lowered himself into his chair with a wince he would have hidden from the guests. "You meant to stop me drinking it. Possibly you did. Possibly you stopped me drinking a perfectly good bottle of my own wine while a columnist filmed it. Ben has the bottle locked away. The guests have gone home full of the other champagne and a story better than the auction. And you—" He studied her. "You still say it was different."
"Yes, sir."
"Then we will find out," he said, to her astonishment. "Not tonight. Tonight I am going to bed and dreaming of a quieter hobby, like being shot at in films, which was restful by comparison. If you're wrong, Elena, I won't need to sack you. You'll want to leave the country voluntarily."
He dismissed her with a flick of his hand, and she went up to her small room under the eaves and lay awake listening to the house settle, rehearsing other jobs, other towns, and the precise shade of a foil she could still see when she closed her eyes.
By morning, the rumours had outrun the facts. A young server had decided Elena was in love with Dominic and had staged the scene for attention. By noon, a cook was repeating that she had been caught drinking on duty. By the second day, someone in the village was sure she had been arrested, which Elena felt was optimistic, since she was at that moment folding Dominic's napkins.
Ada cut through most of it with a look. "In this house," she announced, "we will wait for evidence before we invent a character for Mrs. Vasquez."
But Elena still expected the summons that would end her employment. She kept her notebook in her apron pocket and her few belongings mentally packed. She was sorry for the scene. She was not sorry for the hand that had taken the glass.
Dominic spent those days in a temper so even that the staff found it more alarming than shouting. He cancelled two interviews. He refused Julian's suggestion of a cheerful public statement about a "tired member of staff" with an abruptness that surprised them both. And on the second morning, he telephoned Dr. Priya Nair.
Priya had been his physician for ten years. She knew his heart, his knees, and the precise tone he used when he was frightened and calling it irritation.
"You didn't drink any of it?" she asked.
"Not a drop. My maid staged a coup."
"Then be grateful, and be sensible," Priya said. "Don't taste it, don't let anyone taste it. Send it to a proper independent laboratory. Not the winery's people, not anyone connected to the estate. A laboratory that owes you nothing. If it's clean, you'll know. If it isn't—"
"If it isn't," Dominic said, "then my birthday gets considerably more interesting."
"Then," Priya said, "you call the police, and you stop joking, Dominic."
He did as she told him, which those who knew him understood as a measure of how rattled he truly was. Ben drove the sealed bottle and the taken glass himself, unannounced, to a laboratory two counties away that he chose from Priya's list. No estate letterhead was used. Julian, hearing of it afterwards, called it an extravagant overreaction and laughed, and Dominic, watching him laugh, found he did not join in.
The waiting lasted four days. They were, Elena thought later, the longest she had spent in that house. She polished silver that did not need polishing. She checked the cellar list twice. She wrote nothing in her notebook except times, and she recorded those anyway, out of habit: when Ben left, when he returned, when Dominic asked, for the third time, whether anyone had called.
On the fifth morning, Ada came to find her in the linen room. Her face gave nothing away, which in Ada meant a great deal was being held behind it.
"Mr. Stallone wants you," she said. "Study. Now. And Elena— stand up straight in there."
Dominic was not alone. Ben stood by the window, and Priya Nair was on the speakerphone, her voice small and clear. A single printed report lay in front of Dominic. He did not make her wait.
"The laboratory has finished," he said. "I am going to tell you exactly what they told me, because you, of all people, have earned the exact words."
Elena's hands tightened in front of her.
"The champagne in that bottle was not right," Dominic said slowly. "Something had been dissolved in it that should never have been there. Something that has no business in any bottle, from any vineyard, anywhere. The laboratory will put its findings in proper language for the police, and Priya will explain what it might have done to a man of my age if I had drunk a full glass and gone on smiling for the cameras. She has already used the word serious. She has not used the word harmless once."
The room tilted, very slightly, and then righted itself.
"You were right," Dominic said. The words clearly cost him, not because he begrudged her, Elena thought, but because of everything that came attached to them. "The foil, the scratch, all of it. You were right to take that glass out of my hand, and God help me, in front of two hundred people was apparently where it needed doing."
"I wish I had been wrong, sir," Elena said, and her voice broke, embarrassingly, on the last word.
"Yes," Dominic said, more gently. "So do I. Because if you had been wrong, I'd simply be an old man embarrassed at his own party." He looked down at the report, and when he looked up again his face had hardened into something older than anger. "Instead, somebody stood in my house, among my guests, and meant for me to drink that. Somebody meant it, Elena."
From the speakerphone, Priya said quietly, "Dominic, the police. Today."
"Today," he agreed.