Chapter 5

At six o'clock, while Cora was pinning her hair back with the plain silver clip and her father's grape-leaf pin, Renata Shaw called.

"I'm doing a segment tonight before the auction," Renata said, bright as a struck glass. "I wanted to give you a chance to say something on the record."

"About what?"

"About the sale. People are going to ask how you feel about selling your father's land."

Cora looked at herself in the mirror. Gray-green eyes, strong jaw, faint freckles across the nose, an expression she had spent fifteen years sanding smooth.

"I'm not selling my father's land."

The pause on the other end lasted one beat too long.

"Well," Renata said. "That's not what Desmond says."

"What does Desmond say?"

"He says you signed the consent in March and never read it. He says the money was for a place in the city, and he says he's been managing you for years." Renata's voice had the eager, awful warmth of a woman repeating something she believes she was trusted with. "He told me the duplicate at the title company was just the executed copy. That's all it is, Cora. A filing error."

Cora set the pin down on the dressing table.

"When did he tell you this?"

"A month ago. At the Hannigans'."

"The Hannigans know?"

"The Hannigans, the Feldmans, that whole dinner. He wasn't hiding it." A pause. "He said you were fine with it. He said you'd been difficult but you'd come around."

Cora looked at the window. Below, cars were already turning up the drive, headlights sweeping the vines in long slow arcs. Three hundred people were coming to her house tonight to hear her husband tell them she was the villain.

And every one of them had already been told.

That was the part that took her breath. Not the forgery. Not the affair, which she had known about since April and had never once said out loud. It was that Desmond had spent a month walking through the valley, calmly, charmingly, seeding the ground - telling the Hannigans, the Feldmans, the auctioneer, the buyer's counsel, the title clerk, anyone who would carry it - that Cora Whitlock was the one selling the land.

He hadn't forged a document to hide what he was doing.

He had forged a document and then gone out and built witnesses for it.

"Cora?" Renata said. "Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"So can I say you'll comment tonight?"

"You can say I'll be in the room," Cora said, and hung up.