Chapter 2

The bottle shouldn't have existed. Cora had known that at 7:40 p.m., an hour before her husband opened his mouth.

Lot 14 came out on a silver tray carried by two servers in black, and Renata Shaw worked the room the way she worked her streaming show - quick, bright, ruthless.

"Here's the one you all came for. A magnum of the 2004 Harlan's Reserve, hand-labeled, from the Crane family collection. We open at twelve thousand."

Paddles went up around the barrel room. Cora sat with her wine untouched and counted the things she knew about that bottle.

She knew the 2004 was the first wine she had ever blended alone. She knew she had made it in the old barn in the summer of 2004, at twenty-two, with Pilar Ocampo standing behind her saying nothing for four hours and then saying, "Again. More Cabernet. Less apology."

She knew Harlan Whitlock had put his own name on the label because he said the valley would buy a wine from a dead man's hand before it would buy one from his daughter's.

She knew it had scored ninety-eight points in the spring of 2005, and that by 2009 it was on every list in America, and that in 2009 her father had hired a salesman named Desmond Crane to carry it into restaurants Harlan could never get into himself.

She knew all of that the way she knew the shape of her own hands.

What she did not know was where this magnum had come from.

The last magnum of 2004 had left the estate in 2011. Cora had wrapped it in a linen towel herself and driven it to a hospital auction in San Francisco, and she remembered the woman who bought it - a retired surgeon with silver hair who said she was saving it for her fiftieth anniversary.

That bottle was in a house on the Sonoma coast. It was not on a silver tray in Napa County.

So this one had come out of the founder's cellar: the small locked room at the back of the cave where Harlan had kept one bottle of every vintage he ever made, plus the magnums he never let anyone drink.

Cora slipped out during the dessert course and found Pilar in the service corridor, unhooking her tastevin from its chain the way she did when she was finished with an evening.

"Lot fourteen," Cora said.

"I saw it."

"How many magnums of the 2004 were left on your inventory?"

Pilar didn't look at her. "Six."

"And now?"

"One."

Cora leaned against the stone. "When did you last count?"

"September. The door was standing open when I went down. Not broken. Open." Pilar finally turned. "And the ledger had been moved. The spine's cracked in a new place."

"Who else has a key to that room?"

Pilar looked at her for a long moment. "You and me. That's the whole list."

"Then somebody had one cut."

"Somebody signed for the locksmith in September." Pilar's jaw worked once. "The signature says Crane."