Chapter 4

"There's a box," Tommy said. "It was on the step."

"It's been logged." Prescott stood with his arms folded, angled so the sun was behind him. "Unclaimed property goes to the estate office. You can collect it Monday between nine and noon."

"I need it now."

"You abandoned it."

"I set it down so my hands were free. I wasn't going anywhere."

"You were walking that way." Prescott nodded at the service road. "You were walking that way when I last looked."

Tommy's jaw worked. He did not raise his voice. He had not raised his voice once, and Nell Farraday, standing fifteen feet away with her hands in her pockets, noticed that the way you notice a door that isn't slamming.

"Sir," Tommy said, "I'm asking you for one thing. Not entry. Not a seat. The box."

"The box stays."

Rudy Tavares shifted his weight. Prescott looked at him, then at Tommy, and did the arithmetic out loud, because he wanted it heard.

"You're on private property after being directed off. That's trespass. Napa County Sheriff's Office is eight minutes out on Silverado Trail on a Saturday. You want to spend this afternoon in a holding cell in Napa, that's your business, but I'll tell you right now the paperwork is not going to go the way you think."

Tommy took his wallet out. He opened it and held it up - a green card, clean and current, issued in 2023, with his photograph on it and his name spelled correctly.

Prescott looked at it for exactly one second.

"That's not a guest list," he said, and turned away.

Rudy put a hand on Tommy's arm. Not hard. Just there.

And Tommy Reyes, who had not argued twice in his life, did not argue twice now. He looked at the gate. He looked at the arbor. Then he stepped back and lowered himself down against the gatepost and sat on the gravel with his back to the iron, his bad knee straight out in front of him.

"I'll wait here until four," he said. "That's all I'm asking."

Two cars came up the drive and stopped at the valet stand. A woman in a wide hat got out and looked at the man sitting on the gravel and then looked away, quickly, the way people do.

Prescott felt the afternoon turning in his hands.

"Rudy," he said. "Call it in."

Rudy took out his phone.

Behind Prescott, twenty feet away, in the rose arbor that had been climbing that trellis since before any of them were born, twenty-one years of arthritis let go at once.