THE CASCADE DINNER Chapter 8
The Cellar
The wine cellar was not a place Leo visited often. He knew it existed, of course—he was the general manager, and the general manager of a luxury lodge knew every square inch of the property, even the ones that made him uncomfortable. But the wine cellar made him uncomfortable. It was too cold, too dark, too far from the warmth and light of the Great Room. It smelled of damp stone and old oak and something else, something Leo had never been able to identify, something that reminded him of churches and funerals and the particular stillness of places where people went to hide.
The staircase descended from the kitchen, narrow and steep, the steps worn smooth by decades of footsteps. Leo descended slowly, one hand on the stone wall for balance, the other holding a flashlight he had taken from the security desk. The flashlight was old—Otis’s, probably—its beam yellow and weak, but it was better than nothing. The basement had no windows, and the light fixtures had been broken for years.
At the bottom of the stairs, a heavy wooden door stood slightly ajar. The wine cellar. Leo pushed it open and stepped inside.
The cold hit him immediately—colder than the basement, colder than the walk-in refrigerator where Greta had hidden the cake. This was the cold of the earth itself, the cold that had been here long before the lodge was built and would remain long after the lodge was gone. Leo’s breath plumed in front of his face. His fingers, wrapped around the flashlight, had already begun to stiffen.
The wine cellar was a long, narrow room, its walls lined with wooden racks holding hundreds of bottles. Most of them were inexpensive—the house wines that Timberline served to guests who didn’t know the difference. But at the far end of the room, behind a wrought-iron gate, were the reserves: the Bordeaux, the Burgundies, the Barolos that had been aging for decades, waiting for the right occasion. Leo had the only key to that gate. It hung on a hook in his office, untouched for years.
The gate was open.
Leo stopped. The wrought-iron gate, which should have been locked, was standing wide. The padlock that normally secured it lay on the floor, its hasp sheared clean through. Not picked. Not cut with a key. Sheared. As if someone had taken a bolt cutter to it—or twisted it open with brute force.
He stepped through the gate.
The reserve section of the wine cellar was smaller than the main room, barely a closet, with racks on three walls and a single wooden crate in the center of the floor. The crate was old—stamped with the name of a vineyard that had gone out of business twenty years ago—and it was open. The lid lay beside it, the nails that had once secured it bent and rusted.
Leo shone the flashlight into the crate.
At first, he saw nothing. Just packing straw, yellowed with age, and the ghostly outlines of bottles that had been removed long ago. But then the light caught something else. Something that did not belong in a wine crate.
A box.
A small, wooden box, no larger than a shoebox, stained dark with something that might have been wine or might have been something else entirely. It was tied with a leather cord, knotted tightly, the ends frayed. On top of the box, written in the same elegant hand as the notes, were four words:
FOR LEO MAEDA. OPEN HERE.
Leo stared at the box. His name. The killer knew his name. Of course the killer knew his name—it was on his name tag, on his office door, on every piece of paperwork in the lodge. But seeing it here, in the dark, in the cold, written on a box that had been hidden in a crate in a locked section of a wine cellar that no guest had ever seen… that was different. That was personal.
He knelt beside the crate and lifted the box out. It was heavier than he expected. The wood was smooth, polished, expensive—mahogany, maybe, or rosewood. The leather cord was old but supple, the knot tight but not impossible. He worked at it with his cold-stiffened fingers, loosening strand by strand, until the cord fell away.
He lifted the lid.
Inside, nested in black velvet, were three things.
The first was a photograph. Old, creased, the colors fading to sepia. It showed a group of people standing in front of a building that Leo recognized immediately: Timberline Lodge. The building looked younger, newer, the trees around it smaller. The people were dressed in clothes from another era—the 1980s, maybe, or the early 1990s. There were eight of them, arranged in two rows, smiling at the camera. Leo studied their faces. He didn’t recognize any of them. But in the center of the front row, standing with his arm around a woman with dark hair and dark eyes, was a much younger Julian Cross.
The second thing was a letter. Handwritten, on the same cream-colored paper as the notes, but older—the ink had faded, the edges of the paper were soft with age. Leo unfolded it carefully and read.
My dearest Sonali,
If you are reading this, I am already gone. Not dead, perhaps, but gone from your life in the way that fathers often go—through cowardice, through fear, through the mistaken belief that absence is a form of protection.
You are my daughter. I have never told you this. I have never told anyone. Your mother and I agreed, when you were born, that the world would be safer for you if no one knew. She was right. She was always right. And I have regretted her decision every day of my life.
I am writing this letter to give you something I have never given anyone: the truth. The Cascade Accord was not a business agreement. It was a cover-up. Ten years ago, at the summit, something happened. Something terrible. And all of us—every single person in that room—agreed to pretend it never happened.
You were not there, Sonali. You were not part of it. But you became part of it later, when you started asking questions. When you started digging. When you got too close to the truth.
I am sorry. I am so sorry. I should have protected you. I should have told you everything. Instead, I hid. I ran. I let you face them alone.
If you are reading this, it means I have failed you again. It means you are gone. It means the people who killed you are still walking free.
But I will not let them walk free forever. I swear to you, Sonali. On your mother’s grave. On my own soul. I will find out what happened at that summit. I will find out who killed you. And I will make them pay.
Wait for me, my darling. I am coming.
— Your father
Leo folded the letter and set it down. His hands were shaking. Not from the cold.
The third thing in the box was a key.
Small, brass, unremarkable. It could have opened any door in the lodge. Or none of them. Leo picked it up and turned it over in his fingers. There was no label, no inscription, no clue to what it unlocked.
But he knew. Somehow, he knew.
This key was the reason the killer had sent him to the wine cellar. Not the photograph. Not the letter. The key. The killer wanted Leo to have this key. Wanted Leo to find whatever it opened.
The question was: what? And why?
Leo put the key in his pocket, next to the notes. He put the photograph and the letter back in the box, closed the lid, and tucked the box under his arm. Then he stood up and walked out of the wine cellar, through the gate, up the stairs, past the kitchen—where he could hear Elena’s voice, low and urgent, speaking to Greta—and into the hallway that led back to the dining room.
He did not re-enter immediately. Instead, he stood in the shadows, watching through the archway.
The guests had not moved. They were still seated around the table, still waiting, still trapped in their own private nightmares. But something had changed. The energy in the room had shifted. Fear had given way to something uglier. Suspicion. The kind of suspicion that curdles into paranoia, that makes people look at their neighbors and see enemies.
Harold Pender was whispering to Mira again, his face inches from her ear. Mira’s expression was stony, unreadable. Daniel Vance was watching them both, his pleasant mask firmly in place. Marcus Thorne had pulled his daughter close, his arm around her shoulders, his eyes scanning the room like a man expecting an ambush. Kaelen Wu had finally put his phone away. He was sitting with his hands flat on the table, his dark eyes fixed on Julian Cross with an intensity that bordered on obsession.
Priya Chandrasekhar was crying again. Silently. The tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto the tablecloth, leaving small dark spots. She made no move to wipe them away. She seemed to have forgotten that she was crying at all.
Reggie Foss had closed his eyes. His lips were moving again, forming silent words. A prayer. Or a confession. Or simply the desperate muttering of an old man who had outlived his usefulness and knew it.
And Julian Cross sat at the head of the table, watching them all, waiting for the hour to end.
Leo stepped out of the shadows and walked to his chair. He sat down. The box was hidden under his jacket, pressed against his ribs. The key was warm in his pocket.
“Mr. Cross,” he said.
Julian looked at him. “You found something.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Leo said. “I found something. But I’m not going to share it with the group. Not yet.”
“Fair enough.”
“But I do have a question. A question I should have asked you earlier.”
“Ask.”
Leo leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. The candle flames danced between them.
“Who else knew that Sonali was your daughter?”
Julian’s gray eyes flickered. “No one.”
“No one? Not even Sonali herself?”
“Not until the end. Not until she was already…” He stopped. Swallowed. “I told her in the letter. The letter I wrote but never sent. The letter I kept in a box, hidden in a place where I thought no one would find it. But someone did find it. Someone found it and put it in a wine crate in your cellar.”
Leo’s blood went cold. “You didn’t put the letter in the crate?”
“No. The letter was supposed to go to Sonali. After she died… I couldn’t bear to look at it. I buried it. In a different place. A place I thought was safe.”
“Where?”
Julian’s jaw tightened. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is that someone found it. Someone dug it up. Someone brought it here, to this lodge, to this dinner. Someone has been planning this for a long time.”
Leo thought of the notes. The cake. The photograph. The key. The box with his name on it.
“Someone wants me involved,” Leo said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Julian looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, quietly, “Because you’re the only person in this building who isn’t guilty. The only person who can see clearly. The only person who can judge.”
“I’m not a judge.”
“You are tonight.”
The grandfather clock began to chime.
Ten o’clock.
Thirty minutes until Julian’s deadline. Two hours until the next death, if the killer’s note was to be believed.
Leo looked around the table at the twelve faces. The guilty. The damned. The frightened.
Somewhere among them was a killer.
And somewhere among them was the person who had written the notes, baked the cake, murdered Otis, and dug up a dead man’s letter to his dead daughter.
Leo reached into his pocket and touched the key.
It was time to find out what it opened.