“I don’t know,” he said. “Taking on a cagey old lion like Prescott wouldn’t be her best idea. Say Victoria did manage to get down to the wine cellar and back upstairs in time for you to see her in the dining room with Clay—she’s pretty fit. But as Clay’s future wife, Prescott’s decision to sell is going to affect her financially as well. I’ve heard that she thought she was marrying Daddy Warbucks.”

I smiled. “Well, by now she knows she’s not.”

We had reached Mosby’s Highway. Like the Averys’ private road, it, too, was dark and deserted. Over the next week or so, folks would decorate their homes for the holidays. There would be lights woven through bushes and trees and along rooflines, Christmas trees placed so they could be seen through living room windows, sweet tableaus of a happy, festive season, reindeer sparkling on front lawns, and an inflatable snowman or a Santa with spotlights on them to brighten the road.

We drove through the village of Upperville in silence. By the time Quinn turned onto Atoka Road, I was still going around in circles. He slowed for the turn onto Sycamore Lane at the entrance to the vineyard.

“If Victoria had been there when Prescott fell, I don’t think she would have left him, said nothing when she got back upstairs, and let him bleed to death,” I added.

“Unless,” he said with a shrug.

“Unless what?”

He didn’t reply until we reached the fork in Sycamore Lane where the two-hundred-year-old tree that had given the road its name was now cleaved in half after lightning had struck it a few years ago. Quinn’s headlights caught the ivy that had grown over the jagged trunk and some of the now-bare branches that still lived. He turned right toward the house.

“Unless she deliberately pushed him.”

“My God,” I said, “I hope you’re wrong. That’s murder.”

Murder. The word hung between us in the frigid November air as it if were encased in a frozen speech bubble.

WE WERE BOTH STUFFED too full of black beans, pork, and flan and buzzed from caipirinhas to have dinner or another drink, so Quinn made a fire in fireplace in the parlor and we ended up on opposite ends of the sofa with our feet up—Quinn reading The Wild Vine, about the discovery of the Norton grape, by Todd Kliman, until he dozed off, and me engrossed in an Ian Rutledge mystery by Charles Todd.

A couple of logs collapsed on each other, sending a noisy spray of sparks up the chimney. Quinn stirred and woke up.

“Welcome back,” I said.

“I wasn’t sleeping. Just resting my eyes.” He sat up and swung his feet onto the carpet. “Another log or should we let it die down?”