Chapter 6

Pilar came up to the house at 7:10 with the ledger under one arm and a plastic bag in the other.

"I found it three weeks ago," she said, setting both on the kitchen island. "In the recycling bin in the estate office. Crumpled under a coffee filter."

She took the ledger out of its sleeve and opened it to page 118. The strip was there, taped back into the spine, the tear ragged along one edge, the paper soft and creased from being crushed into a ball and then smoothed flat by a sixty-three-year-old woman with no patience for sentiment and a great deal of patience for evidence.

Cora leaned over it.

Her own handwriting, twenty years old and rounder than it was now. Barrel numbers. Yeast. The percentage of Cabernet she had argued for and won. Her initials, C.W., in the margin.

And across the bottom, in her father's slanted, impatient script: C.W. blend. Do not change. Do not credit me.

"There," Pilar said. "That's the page. That's the whole thing."

Cora's phone rang. Delphine.

"Nadine Prosser," Delphine said. "The notary on the March fourth consent. I reached her daughter in Arizona. Nadine let her commission lapse on January thirty-first. She moved out of state in February. She hasn't notarized anything since December, and she hasn't been in Napa County since the second week of January."

Cora closed her eyes.

"So March fourth-"

"March fourth is notarized by a woman who was nine hundred miles away with no legal authority to notarize anything." Delphine let that sit. "I also pulled the locksmith invoice from September. The founder's cellar door. Signed D. Crane."

"I know."

"Cora. Do we take this to the district attorney tonight, or do we let him stand up in front of three hundred people first?"

Cora looked at the ledger. At her father's handwriting. At the dusty magnum she had already set on the counter beside her keys.

"He has to say it out loud first," she said. "If I stand up before he claims it, it's just a wife interrupting her husband. He has to say the words in front of the room. Then I answer."

Delphine was quiet for a second. "If he takes that microphone and says the land is sold, and then you stand up, there is no version of this where he walks out clean. You understand that."

"I understand it."

"June-"

"June is asleep upstairs, and by the time she's old enough to read about this, I want the record to say what her mother made." Cora picked up the magnum. "Bring the folder. Sit at table nine."

She went down through the service door into the founder's cellar, one hand on the cold stone, and lifted the last magnum of 2004 off the shelf. She wiped the dust with her sleeve - not all of it, just enough.

Then she climbed the stairs into the candlelight and the noise.