Chapter 10: The Wine Cellar

Nobody at the table moved.

The car dealer sat back down.

The accountant uncapped her pen.

Rosemary turned her head slowly and looked at Kendrick, and for a second her face was perfectly blank.

Kendrick didn't sit.

"No," he said.

"No?" said the banker.

"No, I wouldn't like to explain it. It's my personal account. My own money. Not one cent of it came from this company."

"Two point six million dollars, Kendrick."

"My money," Kendrick said again. "Not the board's business."

"It becomes the board's business when the CEO moves that kind of money to a company nobody has heard of."

"Three months after his partner dies and leaves him everything."

"Is that an accusation?"

"It's a question."

"Then the answer is no."

The banker held his eyes for a long moment.

Then he wrote something on his legal pad, very neatly, and underlined it.

"I'd like it in the minutes that the CEO declined to answer," he said.

"Put it in the minutes," Kendrick said. "We're adjourned."

He walked out.

He didn't look at me.

He went out the library door and turned left, toward the back of the house, toward the cellar stairs.

I waited a moment.

Then I went after him.

The wine cellar runs under the whole east wing.

My father built it out when I was eleven.

Stone walls, cool air, racks of bottles going back into the dark, and one bare bulb on a chain at the bottom of the stairs.

When I was a kid, Chloe and I used to dare each other to go to the far end without a flashlight.

Kendrick was standing at the far end without a flashlight.

He had both hands flat on a rack of old Bordeaux, and his head was down.

He heard me on the stairs.

"Go back up, Genevieve."

"No."

"Please."

I'd never heard him say please to anyone.

I came down the last step and walked toward him through the dark between the racks.

"What is Harborline?"

He didn't turn around.

"You lied for me up there," I said. "In front of everybody. You said you gave me the key. Why would you do that?"