Death By the Glass #2 by Nadia Gordon

soldier on.
    She hit the flakes with a dose of creamy whole milk, dumped in a tablespoon of sugar, and turned on the TV. PBS was showing a rerun of the
Antiques Roadshow
that she’d seen twice already. She tweaked the rabbit ears. For weeks PBS seemed to be running nothing but
ARS,
or the BBC documentary about George Mallory’s final trip up Mount Everest. Sunny could watch the Everest show over and over. What
did
happen to Mallory and his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine? Did they make it to the top? What went wrong?
    For years she’d sworn off the glowing box. It was only a couple of months ago, when the neighbors upgraded the mini-set they kept in the bathroom and left their old one on top of the garbage cans, with rain clouds gathering, that she decided to alter her policy. Rather than let the little TV fill with water and take a one-way trip to landfill, she had carried it inside and plugged it in.
    Sunny added another spoonful of sugar to her cereal and, riveted, watched a mustached man, probably in his late forties, hand over an African spirit healer’s mask from the seventeen hundreds. The priceless mask was assessed to be a skillful reproduction of modest value. The owner tried to appear indifferent, but his cheeks flushed pink and his eyes darted left and right, searching for a safe place to rest. He said he had always liked the mask for its intrinsic virtues anyway, that he had always been fond of the looks of it, regardless of its material value or authenticity. Sunny didn’t believe him. It was quiteobvious that he had never liked the mask and couldn’t wait to get rid of it, and now hated it all the more for its falseness. People would lie spontaneously, almost involuntarily, to escape the most minor of embarrassments.
    Catelina Alvarez, the Portuguese grandmother who had lived across the street from Sunny throughout her childhood, had been a tireless hunter of lies. She loved to catch one and expose it.
    “A lie is the sound a hollow heart makes,” she would say, frowning and waggling her finger in warning. She would look at Sunny with eyes that made it clear that it was no use hiding or twisting words and say, “The truth is like water, Sonya. It might trickle away and hide, but it’s not gone. It’s just waiting until the right moment to bubble up. The truth is always there, waiting for a chance to get out, and there is nothing that makes it want to come out more than a lie. The more lies, the more the truth pushes and pushes toward the light.”
    At midnight, Sunny turned off the television. Lies. Who was telling lies? Where was the truth waiting to bubble up?
    She’d start with the wine.
In vino veritas.
Truth in wine. But if at least one bottle—maybe a case, maybe more—was a lie, the person behind the wine must be the one doing the lying. She decided it was time to talk to Remy Castels.
    She found his address online easily enough. With luck, it was the current one. Buoyed by relief earlier in the day—what now seemed like a far-off, happier time—she’d brought her laptop home to hunt for cheap airfares for a spring trip, possibly to southern Italy. Instead, she was doing exactly what she swore she would never do again, getting involved in trouble that was none of her business. Except that she was already involved and it had become her business the minute she met Andre Morales.
    Sunny rummaged in a cabinet for a decent bottle of wine and extracted a Green and Red Zinfandel from a few years back. Too good for a night like tonight, when a glass was all she wanted. Finally she settled on a newish bottle of Turnbull someone had brought to a dinner party.
    She opened the bottle and filled a glass with the inky red wine. So, she’d go to Remy’s house in the morning, unannounced. That ought to make him very friendly. And she would accuse him of wine fraud or imply as much, another great way to make a new friend. She needed to tread lightly and not alienate him with hasty accusations. She might