The sommelier frowned thoughtfully. “Mr. van der Hoeven’s instructions-” She caught herself, and Clare guessed that the news about Eugene van der Hoeven had already made the rounds at the Algonquin Waters. “His wishes,” she amended, “were that all the principals get a case as a gift and that the remainder be uncrated and uncorked for the dancing.” She tapped the side of her mouth with a white-gloved hand. “Yours will be awfully cold, but I suppose if we hold them back until the end of the evening… sure, go ahead. Bring them in. Do you need any help?”

“No. I’m right out front. My date and I will get them.” She turned back to her table, paused, then turned again. She crossed to where the slim woman in gray was seated, staring listlessly into nowhere. “Ms. van der Hoeven?”

The woman blinked and looked up at Clare. “Actually, it’s Tuchman. Well, no, I suppose it isn’t anymore. Maybe this time I’ll go back to being Louisa van der Hoeven. That sounds better than Louisa Tuchman, doesn’t it? Or Louisa de Parrada. I always thought that sounded like a flamenco dancer’s name. Who are you again?”

Eugene and Millie’s sister was apparently drowning her sorrows the old-fashioned way. “I’m Clare Fergusson,” she said. “I just wanted to say how very sorry I am about your brother.”

Louisa van der Hoeven de Parrada Tuchman blinked slowly. “I think Gene is one of those people about whom you can say, ‘His sufferings are over.’ ”

“Perhaps so.” Clare chose her words carefully. “I only knew him briefly, but he struck me in that time as a man who cared deeply about many things. Including your family and its history.” She waved a hand at the rough wooden crates framed by snowy linen. “I think it’s lovely that his last gesture will enable everyone to celebrate the van der Hoeven name with the van der Hoevens’ wine.”

Louisa looked down at the crates with a jaundiced eye. “No,” she said. “That’s just another example of how fake we are. Trying to impress everyone with money that was lost two generations ago.”

“I’m sorry?”

Louisa flopped one bony wrist over the edge of the table. “This is that stuff you buy in California and get stamped with whatever label you choose. The van der Hoevens don’t have a vineyard.”

Millie heard the door open. She hunched over her ankles, franticially jabbing the point of the door hinge into the stretched expanse of her duct-tape shackles. She had already punched ten, twelve, fifteen holes in the thing, but it still wouldn’t tear apart.

“Millie?” It was Randy, of course. “Still back there?”

“I told you I’d wait right here,” she called back, her voice as lighthearted and reassuring as she could make it. It wasn’t as if she could go anywhere else. Still, if she could just separate the tape before he walked back and discovered what she’d been doing while he was away… “Hey, when Shaun Reid brought me here, he said something about a box of wine near the door. Why don’t you find it, and we’ll have a drink? I don’t know about you, but I could use one.”

“Okay.” The thin beam of the flashlight appeared. It bounced around near the narrow door Randy had used to leave and enter. In the light’s backsplash, she could make out his silhouette. He had shoulders like a freaking gorilla. She thought of herself as a strong woman, but she didn’t have any illusions. He could do just about anything he wanted to her. If she didn’t get to him first. She redoubled her efforts, poking and tugging at the holes in the duct tape.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Try by the big door, the one that has the loading dock outside,” she called.

“Are you okay? You sound kind of winded.”

She took a deep breath. “Just feeling a little stressed. The wine will help.”

The flashlight beam tilted toward the front of the building. Millie poked another hole into the tape. She thrust her fingers through and pulled, her arms shaking, her thighs cramping from the strain of keeping her ankles as far apart as possible. She felt something yield. She pulled harder. There was a moment’s catch, and then a tearing sound, and her fetters fell into two pieces of tape, the ragged ends fluttering between her ankles.

She bit her lip to keep from howling. Then, for the first time all day, she stretched her legs wide, wide apart. The painful stretch was the most wonderful thing she had ever felt.

“Hey, I found it. Lemme see if I can get the lid off the box.”

Millie slowly rose from the floor. She straddled a crate, rolling her pelvis forward and back, cracking her spine and flexing her arms. From near the flashlight’s glow, she heard the distinctive sound of nails screeching out of wood.

“Phew! I hate to tell you, but this wine smells way bad. Like somebody stuffed old garage rags inside.”

“Nevermind, then.” Now she was free, she was anxious. She wanted to do what she had to do and get out. “Would you come back here, please? I’m feeling a little scared, all by myself in the dark.”

“You want me to find some water or something? I got a couple bottles in my backpack.”

“No. Please, I don’t want to sit here alone.”

“Okay.” His voice had the resigned tone of every man baffled by a woman’s changeable mind. “If that’s what you want.”

She wiped her palms against her pants. She wanted them to be hard and dry for this. “What did you and your wife decide to do?”

His voice, and the light, came closer. “Uh… she thinks you’d be better off coming home with us. In case Mr. Reid, you know, comes after you.”

She thinks we need to keep you under lock and key, Millie translated. She brought her ankles together and hunched over so that her hands, folded in her lap, weren’t visible.

The light played over her. “You okay? You look like you might be sick.”

She nodded her head. “I think I might.” She tightened her grip around the iron hinge pin. Its point, sharp and hard, pricked against her thigh. “Would you help me to the washroom?”

“Sure,” he said. He was close enough so she could smell him, gasoline and sweat and the strong, cheap detergent his clothes were washed in. He opened his arms to lift her, and she sprang forward, her thighs, her back, her arms all working together, and she drove the iron spike into his gut.

For a moment, they stood like lovers, his arms half embracing her, his face inches from hers, staring into each others eyes. Then, afraid she had only lightly wounded him, she shoved against his chest. He let out a noise like a chainsaw caught in a tree bole and fell to the floor.

The flashlight bounced off the uneven wooden boards at an angle and smashed against the metal footing of an ancient pulping machine. Instantly, the unrelenting darkness swallowed them.

“You… stabbed me.” Randy’s voice held more amazement than pain.

Millie was shaking so hard she could barely move. She backed away from the voice below her. She tried to think of something to say to him, something to justify what she had done, but in the end, her justification was that she was free to leave, whether he or his wife or Shaun Reid wanted her to or not. She backed away another step.

Randy groaned. “Holy crap.” He breathed shallowly, as if the movement of his lungs was painful. “Hurts.”

“I’ll call for help as soon as I’m away.” She skirted around him as best she could, bumping into crates and feeling her way past tarp covered machines.

“Lisa,” he moaned.

She moved toward the front of the building by touch and memory, fixing the location where she last saw Randy’s light when he had found the wine bottles. She caught a whiff of something, something that smelled like mildewed cloth and crankcase oil, and remembered Randy’s description of the case of wine. She must be getting close. “Don’t worry,” she called to the man in the darkness behind her. “We’re both going to get out of here alive.”