No one turned down Prescott Avery, even though he always managed to make it seem as if he were doing you a favor when, in reality, you’d find out later it was the other way around. He meant to charm and flirt with me—I already knew that—but in five years, he’d be a century old. This was the harmless seduction of a sweet old man with hearing aids and a cane.

We were at an after-Thanksgiving neighborhood party in his magnificent home, alone in an opulently furnished room filled with museum-worthy art and bookcases lined with leather-covered books, no doubt all rare volumes or first editions. A fire flickered in a fireplace surrounded by an elaborately carved mantel of cream-colored Italian marble. My brain was already buzzy with alcohol, two deliciously lethal Caipirinhas that I had drunk too quickly in the past few hours. If Prescott wanted to make some kind of deal with me, I wanted to be clear-headed and have my wits about me.

“I’d love to try your Malmsey,” I said. “Maybe I could come by one day next week. Now that harvest is over and we’ve finished most of our cellar work, things have finally quieted down at the vineyard.”

Prescott made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “Actually, my dear, I was thinking about right now.”

I didn’t want to do this now. “What about the party? We really shouldn’t leave…”

He gave me a coy wink, cutting off my protests. “Nonsense. It’s my party, isn’t it? Besides, we won’t be gone long.”

It wasn’t actually his party. Prescott Avery II, his grandson, whom the family called Scotty, and Scotty’s Brazilian wife, Bianca, were hosting their annual Saturday-after-Thanksgiving celebration, a traditional feijoada dinner for about a hundred friends and neighbors. Normally the get-together was Atoka’s laid-back antidote to leftover turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, with its Brazilian comfort food menu of black bean and pork stew, garlic rice, fried manioc, collard greens, and sliced oranges. It was served with caipirinhas, Brazil’s potent national drink of muddled lime and a sugarcane hard liquor called cachaça. This year Prescott had insisted the gathering be held at Hawthorne, his home—or “the Castle” as everyone called it—rather than at Scotty and Bianca’s magnificent horse farm just down the road. And this year the vibe was anything but laid back.