Chapter 5

The arbor detonated.

The brindle heeler came through the climbing roses like something thrown - fifty-five pounds of white muzzle and clouded blue eye and a limp that had vanished entirely - and hit Prescott's hip at full speed.

Prescott went sideways into the trellis. The wood cracked. He went down into the crushed roses on his back, and the silver clipboard went one way across the gravel and the enameled badge went the other, spinning, and the retractable lanyard whipped and snapped against his chest.

The dog slammed to a stop against Tommy's shins.

He did not bark. He pressed his muzzle into the old man's knee and whined, high and thin and continuous, and braced his front paws on the gravel like a dog standing on a boat, and would not move.

"Biscuit!" a bridesmaid shouted. "Biscuit, come!"

Nothing.

Rudy Tavares reached for the collar. The dog showed him his teeth - not a bite, just the fact of them - and Rudy took his hand back.

Prescott got up on one elbow. His dove-gray suit was gray-brown with dust and rose petals, and there was a scratch coming up red along his jaw, and his voice came out with a crack in it that everyone heard.

"Get this animal off me."

At the top of the aisle path, Marisol Vega had stopped walking. Her hand had gone up to her mouth and stayed there.

And the lawn did what lawns do.

"He's twenty-one," said a bridesmaid, laughing, wanting it to be funny. "He's senile. He does that to the gardener."

"He does it to everyone in boots," said another.

Prescott stood up, brushed himself off with two hard strokes, and found the explanation he needed in about four seconds, because he was good at this - it was, in fact, the only thing he was genuinely good at.

"That animal is deaf in one ear and blind in one eye," he said, loud enough for the arriving guests. "It would do that for anyone in a canvas jacket. It's a farm dog and it smells a farm."

And it worked, the way it always worked. Somebody said the man had probably read the engagement announcement in the St. Helena Star. Somebody else said the valley was full of men with a grievance about this estate. The bridesmaids who had laughed at the gate laughed again, and this time it was crueler, because now there was a story attached.

Ten feet away, Beto Vega-Ortiz stood with his hands at his sides and his face the color of the tablecloths, and did not say one word.

Everyone read it as a stranger's discomfort.

Tommy Reyes read it as what it was. He looked at his brother-in-law across twenty years and one lie and said nothing, and then he put his hand flat on the dog's head, which was the only thing he had left to say.

Nell Farraday, standing behind the gatehouse with her arms folded, was looking at the dog's collar.

The red collar had been re-punched twice. Where a name tag should have hung there was a bent brass vineyard row tag, worn smooth at the edges, stamped with two characters.

R-1.

And twenty yards behind her, on the lawn, a linen napkin was draped over a bronze plaque at the head of the oldest vine row on the property.

Marisol took one step off the stone path.

Her bare foot came down on the gravel. Then the other.

The bride was walking down the drive, and not one person on that lawn moved to stop her.